and more explore such questions as, Who do we think we are?, How do we conduct our work?, and What difference can that make? Because those discussions involved tracking our movement between past, present, and future locations and our positioning in those locations, each chapter in this book represents one of these locations or positionings, even as it articulates how a GenAdmin philosophy repositions us.
In organizing the book, we found no perfect ordering to the chapters, as each chapter is a bit of a microcosm of what was, is, and can/should be. Even so, the order of our chapters is best described as a movement from past to future in terms of how GenAdmin relates to the domain of writing program administration. In Chapter 2, we illustrate the ways in which GenAdmin both inherit and challenge the conventional history of WPAs and their work by problematizing the perception of WPAs who take the job before tenure through a historical re-interpretation of WPA beliefs. We respond to and reframe the negative victim narratives that have shaped the field of WPA studies so consistently. We discuss how history and disciplinary memory influence writing program identities and work, for all program participants and stakeholders, and we begin to address the question of why this philosophical practice is sustainable day to day.
In Chapter 3, we consider how GenAdmin is prepared for its work, focusing specifically on what WPA education looks like now and what it might look like in the future. We discuss the fear of professionalization grounded in a limiting suspicion of managerial specialization, the processes by which we studied or trained to become WPAs, and a possible future for disciplinary professionalization. We also consider what it means to be marked by multiplicinarity and the possibilities that WPA education affords our various roles.
In Chapter 4, we discuss various iterations and implications of seeing ourselves as people in the process of becoming WPAs, and how withholding fixed identification affects theorizing, collaboration, training, and the value of expertise. This chapter performs a detotalizing of certain binaries, especially labels like s/j/gWPA, which we eschew for their association with tasks and preset identifiers. In disrupting staid and hierarchical notions of expertise, we better realize that the contexts in which those hierarchical relationships first emerged have changed and are changing. The same structures aren’t in place to support this kind of master/learner relationship; thus the relationships are being reconfigured.
In Chapter 5, we consider another turn in WPA theorizing by presenting GenAdmin discourse as inherently rhetorical and pragmatic (which we in turn understand as temporal, contextual, and shifting). This chapter explicates what we have come to understand as the arts of discursive participation, focusing on redefinitions of pragmatic activism, civic discourse, and communicative ideology as essential components of how we further our work. GenAdmin discourse occurs at the intersection of three areas: feminist rereadings of classical American pragmatism, rhetorical theory, and discourse studies. At this intersection, we find new models for enacting a discursive power—rather than settling between the dichotomous models of centered/managerial power and decentered/shared power—in order to participate in ideological conversations where our institutions might see or feel them the most quickly and urgently.
We end the book with a chapter that helps us consider GenAdmin philosophies for retheorizing other aspects of the university and profession. In Chapter 6, we offer a concomitant ethics for GenAdmin that relies on hope as a collective and critical endeavor. Part of theorizing a GenAdmin identity for WPAs means replacing stories of reluctance, disappointment, default, or defeat with those of eudaimonia, or flourishing. A GenAdmin identity helps the five of us to construct and enact an ethics that recognizes our potential as change agents and reflects our desires to have a productive impact on our worlds. This ethics is characterized by agency and by a reconsideration of responsibility as more than a set of tasks attached to a job description but rather as part of a scholarly, administrative ethic. While we respond to the daily challenges or practical demands of the job (and try to come up with ways to solve them), it is not this practicality that drives us as much as it is a desire to do the job humanely, creatively, reflectively, and critically.
Conversations and Interludes
Because this is in every way a collaboratively written book, we do not present a singular perspective about the philosophy or practice of WPA. In fact, the five of us are a small model of dissensus in action. We agreed to write together, to work through ideological differences and to challenge each other’s definitions, in order to try to arrive at something after understanding. One dimension of our interactions that a coherent theoretical text cannot replicate is the dimension of anecdotal dialogues or the power of narrative. As five friends, colleagues, and collaborators working on a book project, we have talked at length through email, extended conference meetings, and document creation and revision activities using interfaces like Google Docs. The consequence of these dialogic sessions is the interstitial philosophy and explication that is the book—one voice derived from many. But we do not want to lose the flavor of our differences and dialogues and how individual anecdotes lead to ingenious connectivity and invention, especially since these dialogues are a major force in keeping our ideas in oscillation rather than stagnation.
One way we juxtapose the necessary univocality of our book with dialogue is to include shorter extended illuminations or interludes between the major chapters where we have noted fault lines in our theorizing. These interludes are culled from a range of texts to (1) serve as interesting and thought-provoking bridges between chapters and their main ideas and (2) illuminate the way that GenAdmin enjoy thinking and rethinking about the daily issues we face. In the development of this book, we noted particular hotspots or contact zones regarding the complexities of choice, expertise, and empathy; the definitions and ways of strategizing in WPA work; and the practice of productive advocacy in the administration of higher education. In contrast to the rest of the book, each interlude is singly voiced and individually written (or compiled in the case of the first interlude “On Choice”) to represent how one of us has navigated a contact zone by theorizing individual experiences. We have left the authors of the singly voiced interludes unidentified to keep the emphasis on the individual experience while demonstrating the near arbitrariness of the narrative “I.”
While working on this book, we also began circulating Flip Ultra HD video cameras to WPAs and those with WPA interests around the country in order to collect responses to the questions driving our book in a kind of unscripted and aggregating conversation. We have created a supplemental website (www.sites.google.com/site/assemblageproject) where we have been and will continue to collect and index these clips. We call it The Assemblage Project to connote any number of texts, objects, or pieces gathered into a single set and context. This site will allow us to illuminate the book’s text with particular videos or sets of videos that extend conversation on an idea or topic. As a public site, other contributors will also be able to create original assemblages for any number of projects. Our purpose, other than experimenting with new ways of collecting and connecting knowledge, is to put our questions and ideas into play with a larger set of voices by creating an archive of interaction, providing either a quick entrance to the conversation or a more extensive source for research by our colleagues. Such a dialogical practice is commensurate with our understanding that GenAdmin, both as a working identity and a philosophical practice, never rests. As we live out the theorizing of GenAdmin, it remains explicitly under construction, allowing for the connections, inventions, and unforeseens we thrive on.
Interlude
On Choice
Jonnika: I live with the desire to both fit in and be different. I left my home and parents to go back to graduate school, picked up and moved with Colin and our then-two-year-old son Ian over eight hundred miles away to a place that, compared to where I had spent the last twenty-six years of my life, was cold, gray, and huge. It was an extremely difficult choice to make, one I agonized over for the first few years of school, but one I knew would make a significant change in the trajectory of my professional life. But it was the reason I was leaving almost everything I knew and it was breaking my parents’ hearts, so I clung to a vision of myself as a WPA as a way to justify my choice to move.
