Teacher, Researcher, & Administrator
Research Philosophy & Goals
Nick presenting at East Central Writing Center Association in 2019. Photo by Trixie Smith.
I’m an interdisciplinary writing and rhetoric scholar who seeks to transform inequitable institutional processes, pedagogies, and policies toward liberatory, antiracist futures. Through coalition, un/learning, and infrastructure building, my work seeks to redress inequities, including cultures of whiteness, ableism, and homophobia, that are structurally reproduced by higher education. As a white queer man with commitments to racial justice, I foundationally honor the contributions of Black feminists who call white people to labor deliberately in coalitional with multiply marginalized communities to unseat the ideological power of whiteness. My professional work specifically engages issues of access, equity, and institutional transformation in the contexts of teacher development, program design, and community partnerships. Given the legacies of anti-Blackness, anti-ableism, and anti-queerness embedded in the foundations of the discipline, I deliberately frame writing and rhetoric studies as key sites of intervention to redress a history of normativity that has historically been maintained through institutionally-sponsored constructs of writing. To advance justice-centered futures of teaching, writing, and learning across campus and community, my research engages fields such as critical whiteness studies, community literacies, antiracist and queer writing pedagogies and rhetorics, language justice, literacy studies, critical race English education, writing center/writing program/WAC/WID administration, and transformative learning studies.
I employ critical qualitative methods to name and challenge the reproduction of white onto epistemologies and seek to design spaces for consciousness-raising that ultimately shifts institutional habit toward justice. By reckoning with histories of white supremacy in the discipline of writing and rhetoric studies, my work unsettles methodological, pedagogical, and administrative commonplaces in order to reimagine the work of the discipline as unapologetically anchored in justice. I frame un/learning whiteness as a wicked rhetorical problem that must be accountably and ethically engaged across and beyond the discipline.
In doing so, my research considers such questions as:
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What are key milestones and reflections of coalitional white antiracist consciousness development? How do community organizers, teachers, students, and tutors work to accountably and coalitionally un/learn and divest white supremacy culture? How do these experiences inform their daily coalitional, pedagogical, community, and/or administrative work?
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How do organizations and institutions build and maintain infrastructures for un/learning that unseat the political and ideological power of whiteness? What are the implications for administration, program development, faculty development, assessment, pedagogy, and policy?
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What are the impacts of equity-centered institutional interventions to cultures of research methods, course design, community engagement, digital engagement, and writing and rhetoric studies writ large?
Notably, I am oriented to research as necessarily transformative that works “to eradicate a system that blocks the chances of creating the impossible” (Johnson, 2019, p. 499) and “do[es] for and toward the future" (Muñoz, 2009, p. 1). My ultimate goal is to empower members of our communities, both within and beyond the academy, as active, meaningful change agents, or -- more accurately-- as scyborgs, those who build a new world through the scraps of the current one (la paperson, 2017). Invariably, my research engages community-campus partnerships, teacher training and education, and program administration as sites of intervention toward justice-centered futures.