Jeanne Marie Rose (Pennsylvania State University Berks)
Language and literature scholars are well-versed in the power of storytelling for professional sustenance. As rhetoric scholar Diana George stated, “storytelling is necessary if we are to pass on more than theory and pedagogical or administrative tactics to those who come after us.” Works like Ballif, Davis, and Mountford’s Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition (2008) and Zepeda and Mayock’s Forging a Rewarding Career in the Humanities: Advice for Academics (2014) speak to George’s point. Storytelling has increasingly become a space for academic critique—a crucial source of knowledge-making—as in Martinez’s Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (2020) and Rosenberg’s “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher Education (2023).
Works like these point to storytelling’s significance for the humanities and, one might argue, for higher education in general. As colleges and universities face a declining birthrate and shrinking state funding, widespread public skepticism about the value of higher education, a FAFSA debacle that hinders access to financial aid, and politically-motivated legal challenges, language and literature professionals have internal and external work to do. Storytelling offers a productive frame for that work.
This roundtable therefore explores the functions and uses of storytelling in and about our discipline(s): What do we tell our students, their families, and our publics at this critical moment? What stories are told about us? What stories do we tell ourselves to keep going? Possible topics include, but aren’t limited to, the following:
· storytelling as a site of belonging, access, and inclusivity;
· storytelling as public relations strategy or recruitment tool;
· storytelling as memoir or retrospective;
· storytelling as pedagogy;
· storytelling as gossip and microagression;
· and/or storytelling as solidarity.