Why I don't join groups like the M.L.A. (Modern Language Association)

In the latest Academic Questions (the National Association of Scholars' quarterly journal), Mel Livatino has an unintentionally (perhaps intentionally) hilarious article titled "In Quest of Fame at the 4Cs." The "4Cs" is the annual College Composition and Communications Conference. (You can find the descriptions of many of the courses Livatino discusses here, in .pdf format.) In it, he describes numerous lectures and seminars whose topics, unfortunately, are all too common in this day and age. Check out this sampling of lecture/seminar titles:

• "Race, Space and Place: Language, Identity and Students of Color in the Composition Classroom."
• "Teaching after the End: Rethinking Our Work in a Post-9/11, Post-Theory, Post-Discipline, Post-(Fill in the Blank) World."
• "Who Gave Y'all a Ghetto Pass?: Upper Middle Class White Male Appropriation of Black Language and Hip-Hop Culture."
• "The Penis, Terror-Talk, and First-Year Composition."
• "Writing from the Knuckles: Hybrid Social Class Positioning as Invocation in the Comp Class."
• "Black Keystrokes, Black Bodies: Race and Gender Construction in the Blogosphere."
• "Marginalized Voices, Disenfranchised Communities, and Pedagogies of Difference: Questioning Culture and Building Coaltions in the Classroom."
• "A Queer Community, Indeed: Revising Subjectivity, Building Coalitions, and Interrogating the Discourse of Cultural Values in a Rural, Two-Year College."
• "Working with Students with Intellectual Disabilities, the Emerging Civil Rights Issue of Academia: Composition Teachers Combine a Spirit of Advocacy with Accountability for LD Students in Our Writing Classrooms."
• "Inventing [DIS]topia: Rhetorics of Un[DIS]ciplined Agency."
• "Teaching about Whiteness in Predominately White Institutions."
• "Red Pedagogy: Education for Struggle in US Workers Schools."
• "Disturbing the Peace: Hip Hop as Theory, Politics, and Pedagogy."
• "Everyone of Us Is a Country and a Culture unto Each Other."

And, perhaps the best title of all:

• "Did He Just Say 'Pussy?": Using a Feminist Discourse to De-Silence the Composition Classroom."

For more "excitement," be sure to check out the 2007 "4Cs Preview." Included are these soon-to-be classics:

• "Representing Diseases, Representing Cultures."
• "My Teacher Is What?!?! Students' Construction, Resistance, and (Mis)Perception of Teacher Identities."
• "Dude, Where's My Voice? Language, Identity, and the Working-Class Writing Instructor."
• "Other Rhetorics: Tattoos, Cookbooks, Graffiti and Post-Rock."
• "(De)Composing Language Prejudice: Challenging Stigmatizers, Marginalizers, and Standardizers."
• "If I Could Take All My Parts with Me: Representing Black Queer Identities in Composition and Rhetoric."
• "How Queer Can Writing Program Administration Be? New Research from the Field."
• "Transnational Rhetoric: Queering Heteronormative Stated Identities."
• "A Couple of White Chicks Sitting Around Talking: Race and Gender Awareness Narratives in Teaching, Writing, and Teaching Writing."
• "Where the Bloody Hell Are We? Subverting and Resisting the Dominant Discourse through Hip-Hop, Oral Tradition, and Online Texts."

Posted by Hube at February 19, 2007 10:25 AM | TrackBack