Composition Forum 39, Summer 2018
http://compositionforum.com/issue/39/

Building Disability, Rhetoric, and Composition through Mentorship: An Interview with Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson

Amy Vidali

The field of disability, rhetoric, and composition wouldn’t exist without the scholarship and mentorship of Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Miami University of Ohio. This interview tracks the early days of the field, the importance of mentorship, and the work we have left to do. We opted for an informal conversation, conducted over Skype in late 2017. The interview is a testament to Cynthia’s brilliance and humility.

Amy: One of the main reasons I wanted to do this interview is because you’ve been a real mentor to me and to many others. As a first-generation disability studies scholar, I assume you didn’t have the support network you’ve given so many of us. Can you tell me about what it was like to be a first-generation disability rhetorician?

Cindy: When I got a tenure-line job, and this was before disability studies was emerging in the humanities, I knew that the one thing I wanted to do was mentor others. Both men and women students but it definitely started with a desire to mentor women.

My progress to my first job was helter skelter. I had a family; I took a long time to finish my dissertation because I had three kids, and [my son] Sam was always in and out of the hospital. I was teaching part-time, and it’s amazing that I finished! I was away from my home institution because we moved to Cincinnati where my husband took a tenure-line job. I worked part time, which was great, because I worked with Jim Berlin and Lucy Schultz; it was like a second PhD in composition theory. It was good, but my plate was incredibly full.

I didn’t have a dissertation director nearby, so I was basically on my own. I decided I really wanted to mentor. Also, a lot of the students I was teaching were first-generation college students, working class students. I really felt like they needed mentoring as well.

Amy: Your co-edited collection, Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture was a game-changing book. What was it like to put these fields in conversation?

Cindy: My husband and I really made an effort to bring disability studies and rhetoric and composition together—that was the impetus for the collection. By that time, I had tenure. I wasn’t trying to prove to anyone above me that this was legitimate work. It was actually a work of passion and interest in composition and rhetoric. Also, we had lived for so many years with our son with a disability. So when we first saw disability studies emerging as a field at MLA in the 1990s, we just said, “This is so relevant to our lives!” I’m thinking about your article Disabling Writing Program Administration, because it was like that, with disability so central to us, determining what conferences we could go to and how we could handle our work schedules. And yet disability was not mentioned; it was made invisible.

The conversations started with literature folks, but we knew it had to be part of composition and rhetoric, specifically because composition is the one course in the university that most students take. Such courses are certainly important for disabled students.

Amy: For me, having Embodied Rhetorics come out in 2001 was perfect timing. I remember almost walking around with it, showing my graduate school professors and peers.

Cindy: I’m so happy to hear that! I feel as though anything I write just goes “poof!” and disappears after I’m done with it.

Amy: Not at all! I remember I put the book on my PhD exam lists, and I was basically listing every chapter in the book separately because I was so excited about the collection. When I came to CU Denver, I used Embodied Rhetorics the first time I taught a disability rhetorics course. Can you tell me how you solicited for that collection and what kind of submissions you received, since disability rhetoric wasn’t yet a field?

Cindy: It’s interesting because there’s so much serendipity involved. I was on the executive board of the journal CCC at that time, from 1996 to 2000 or so. I was aware that you could put out a call for papers there. At first we just called the book “disability rhetoric,” but then we decided that was too broad. I put out a call in College English too. We got a good response and good pieces that seemed to fall into categories. There was luck!

Amy: It doesn’t sound like luck. It sounds like a lot of work!

Cindy: It was a lot of work but it was fun. I learned a lot about how to respond to writing while working under Joe Harris at CCC. He encouraged us to generously read and respond to colleagues’ writing, and I brought that experience to the book. It worked out well.

Amy: The field has grown so much. Disability studies has made a huge impact, with many universities having majors and minors.

Cindy: And so much publication! I can’t keep up with it all. I don’t think any one person can! I do sometimes worry that in academia people jump on bandwagons and ride them for a while, then they move off and do something else. I think some folks are doing that with disability studies. At the same time, there’s such fabulous work, and I’m still reading submissions for some journals. The volume and quality of the scholarship takes my breath away.

Amy: I agree - the scholarship is incredible. In doing editorial review for journals, I’ve also noticed that in some disability studies pieces there is less of an activist connection or social justice component. For me, this is the reason to do the work. Have you noticed this?

Cindy: Yes, in some cases I’m seeing close readings of characters or images without much social justice context. I’m always interested too, in work about people who don’t speak and people who are labelled severely disabled. There’s really good work on this, but I’ve seen less of it over the years.

Amy: I wanted to talk to you about that. In one of my courses, I showed the documentary Wretches and Jabberers. I talked about your concepts of mediated rhetoric, collaborative rhetoric, and rhetoric as potential, drawing from your Rethinking Rhetoric Through Mental Disabilities (from Rhetoric Review), which my students find so generative. I’m wondering where you feel the debate around facilitated communication is now?

Cindy: At this point, there are so many technologies that are similar to facilitated communication (FC). I had a young woman visit the last disability studies class I taught; she was 14 years old and a non-speaker, and she came with her mother. She had this communication device where she had programmed in answers to certain questions. She had various phrases and parts of sentences as well. This isn’t much different than facilitated communication; yet, FC still faces some critique.

Amy: Yes, it seems that there is still resistance to interdependent communication.

Cindy: I think interdependence is so important. And there’s something interesting about these problematic cases that involve facilitated communication and sexual assault. We have to engage with this further.

Amy: I’d like to ask a question about teaching. There is a lot of great work happening in terms of disability studies in writing classrooms. The collection you co-edited with Brenda Brueggemann, Disability and the Teaching of Writing, is so important for teachers and administrators. I’m wondering how we can get people to think more pedagogically about disability so they aren’t only teaching disability studies “content”?

Cindy: Yes, it’s not a specific curriculum as much as it’s about practice. It’s about turning students onto accessibility and having them critique the accessibility of their classrooms. To a degree, this kind of work was going on in composition studies before disability studies. I remember doing a conference with Kathi Yancey years ago, and it was organized around reflection, and my goal was to take reflection and turn it into reflexivity, because reflection is about the individual while reflexivity is about getting feedback and being interdependent. In a classroom, accessibility is not a checklist, which I wrote about with Tara Wood, Jay Dolmage, and Margaret Price [in Moving Beyond Disability 2.0 in Composition Studies]. It’s about engaging with the key concepts of disability and feeding that back into classroom practice.

Amy: I love that idea.

Cindy: My hope is that students will see our classroom practices, and when they plan events, they’ll think about who can access the space and who can’t. In terms of writing, they’ll also think about publishing options and who can access what they write.

Amy: I want to shift gears a bit. You’ve done such important work within CCCC. Could you talk a little bit about the work you’ve done with the Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition (CDICC)?

Cindy: The executive committee set up the CDICC in 2003 or 2004. Brenda Brueggemann was the chair but could not attend the meeting in San Antonio, so she asked me as co-chair to step in.. At that time, it was a very small committee and there were some folks who wandered in, including one woman I had met earlier and invited to join us. A lot of the meetings at CCCC are closed, but I immediately wanted to make it an open meeting so anyone could come. The reason I did this grew from an experience I had at MLA. In 2001, I gave a presentation, and after, Petra Kuppers invited me to another room for a meeting of the disability committee. We had a great meeting. But the next year, I tried to attend the disability meeting and was told it was a closed meeting. It was awkward, and I didn’t want anyone to have that experience at CCCC. The next year, the CDICC started writing A Policy on Disability for CCCC. There was a big turn-out for that meeting in 2005; you were there.

Amy: I was. CDICC is still doing great work.

Cindy: I’m particularly impressed with the work around conference accessibility.

Amy: So am I! I have one more question, and perhaps it’s my hardest one. Doing work in rhetoric and composition feels really different now (in late 2017) than it did a year ago. As disability rhetoricians, what should our priorities be in the current political moment?

Cindy: That’s hard. The political moment changes the stakes, especially with looming cuts to disability services. I really feel as though teaching public rhetoric and engaging students with disabilities in public rhetoric so they can be advocates is really important. How do we do that? I’m not sure. It would need to be multi-pronged so that it’s in the classroom, and we must also engage digital rhetorics to spread our stories and perspectives.

Amy: Absolutely. I’m finding it really hard to balance short- and long-term disability projects right now. And if it’s difficult for me, and I’ve been doing this for a while, I worry about what it’s like for those just coming into the field.

Cindy: Yes, it is a time for public intellectuals. Higher education is under assault. At the very moment when we’re working on making the academy more accessible and less ableist, the academy is becoming more inaccessible for more people because of changes to student loans, graduate education, tuition waivers, and more. So where to put our energy? It’s really hard. I don’t have an answer except the same old answer: teach our students to be public rhetoricians and not just good students who can write student papers.

Amy: That doesn’t seem like a small answer to me.

Cindy: There are people in our field who are working on this. One of the reasons I love composition and rhetoric is that it avoids over-specialization. But we have gotten more specialized and have to team up with people who know more than we do. We have to keep doing the work.

Amy: Yes, just this semester I went back to teaching composition because I felt concerned that people didn’t know fact from fiction and were being persuaded by fake news. I take that personally as understanding these principles is what composition is about.

Cindy: It’s such an important class and I love teaching composition. I adore it. It’s the most important class in the university.

Amy: I think you're right, and I’m not sure we can end on a better note than that. Thank you so much Cindy, for this interview and for all your support. I know I speak for many of us in disability, rhetoric, and composition when I say that I wouldn’t be in this field without you.

Cindy: Thank you.

Works Cited

A Policy on Disability in CCCC. Conference on College Composition and Communication, 6, April 2011, http://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/disabilitypolicy.

Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia. Rethinking Rhetoric through Mental Disabilities. Rhetoric Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2003, pp. 156-67.

Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, with Jay Dolmage, eds. Disability and the Teaching of Writing: A Critical Sourcebook. Bedford/St. Martin’s P, 2008.

Vidali, Amy. Disabling Writing Program Administration. Writing Program Administration, vol. 38, no. 2, 2015, pp. 32-55.

Wilson, James C., and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, eds. Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001.

Wood, Tara, Jay Dolmage, Margaret Price, and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. Moving Beyond Disability 2.0 in Composition Studies. Composition Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2014, pp. 147–150.