Hello CompRhet Grad Students...

We hope those of you who were in New York for this year's CCCC conference had a good and/or useful time. I saw some good papers and felt relatively prepared for my own paper--way more so than last time. I also got to see some people I only do at Cs, so that was nice. And, about 75 or so of us who showed up in Sutton North on Saturday at 12:30 got to dialogue with Talib Kweli, which was one of the highlights of the conference for me.

A few of us met at the conference and thought that we should keep talking, writing, listening, and reading to one another even after the face-to-face conference ended, so here goes one attempt at that.

This grad student special interest group (SIG) grows somewhat out of a previous effort to come together via a SIG to network and to perhaps get some grad student voice in the larger conversations in the field of CompRhet. We hope this effort can be much more widespread and diverse than any previous efforts. As our field continues to professionalize and grow, some of us want ways to meet each other--to start or continue conversations online that we can also have in person, at Cs or other meeting places and conferences.

Ideally, the grad student SIG would be a place where the new generation of teachers and scholars could not only network as we apprentice to the field, but also think about how we might put our stamp on things in the future. For example, taken as a whole, the 300 graduate students who presented at CCCC this year in New York appear to be one of, if not the most, racially and ethnically diverse group at Cs. Perhaps we can help lead the field in better understanding and taking head-on issues of language and its intersections with race and ethnicity, among other things.

Logistically, an online presence for our SIG might help address the difficulty any SIG has in terms of getting people together in the midst of a busy conference. In terms of racial and ethnic diversity, again, SIGs face a difficult planning issue: nearly all SIGs take place on Thursday or Friday evenings, so a SIG will conflict with either, on Thursday, the Scholars for the Dream reception, or, on Friday, other SIGs that focus explicitly on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

As we move forward, perhaps we can think about how to be a group of graduate students that is open to all grad students in our field and also is useful for and responsive to a wide-range of us. Personally, I think it would be a bummer if a grad student SIG only reproduced some of the inequities and limited perspectives that our field has struggled with and still is to this day.

Perhaps this gradstudent sig online presence will soon move to a non-commercial webspace or will transform into another form that works better for us (wiki, message board, listserv, etc.), but for now, we hope this space can serve anyone and everyone who wants to connect with other graduate students in the field, for whatever reasons we all see as important. We're new to the weblog interface, so we'll do our best to make this site accessible to all. Anyone who can think of anyway to improve on our ways to communicate with one another, please feel free to suggest and even implement new ideas. We think anyone who wants should have the username and password to this site and our email address, but we'll hold off on offering those, just in case that would be a mistake to post publicly (like we might get a ton of spam email or people altering this site maliciously). Again, ideas for managing this all we welcome. We assume we'll develop a nice set of links here and perhaps serve some day as a fairly central resource for grad students and perspective students in the field.

Enough for now. Please feel free to forward this url--gradstudentsig.blogspot.com to your grad student colleagues and friends. By way of "norms" for posting here, we'd like this space to be primarily for grad students, so perhaps it's best folks use the honor code and only post if you're a grad student. But, like anything else, this policy is open for debate and, like writing, revision!