ATTW 2018 Conference Reflections Part 2

Got delayed through April. But I'm back.

​Continuing my reflections on my experience at the 2018 ATTW conference it seems like the broader context of the conference is also worth mentioning. Those in the orbit of both ATTW and CCCC know that the decision about where to hold the conferences this year (having already been decided upon well in advance) was especially fraught. That uncertainty carried in to both conferences in different ways.

The NAACP put out a travel warning for the state of Missouri in the wake of high profile police killings of unarmed black citizens, the protests in Ferguson, and the disproportionate police engagement with motorists and citizens of color. This threw into question, I suspect in an unprecedented way, whether either organization ought to hold the conference in Kansas City, MO in tandem with CCCC, per usual. The larger national and global political context certainly weighs heavily in an ongoing way and this conference was no exception. ​

2018 ATTW Conference Program Cover. Design by Christine Chen.

Given that the theme of the conference, set by chairs Natasha Jones and J. Blake Scott, was "Precarity and Possibility: Engaging Technical Communication’s Politics," thinking about this broader socio-political context was unavoidable. Indeed, for me, awareness of place--and the potential precarity of place--suffused the entire conference. Both the session panels and the experience of the conference's "place" (KS, KS and the neighborhood in which the Reardon Convention center was located) felt deeply and uniquely "present."

The CFP for the conference sent in early October declared:

"As a field—at this, the 45th anniversary of ATTW—we have increasingly foregrounded technical communication’s roles in the articulation of precarious conditions and institutional and public responses to them, including possibilities for amelioration and justice. Some have even signaled and/or enacted an emergent move from our earlier socio-cultural and civic political turns...to a social justice one...extending the professional politics around demarcating the boundaries of our field."

Drs. Jones and Blake Scott asserted that the fundamental assumption underlying the call was that:

"that technical and professional communication (TPC) is not and never has been impartial or apolitical"

Ultimately this call sought to have session presenters consider

"foreground the multiple ways technical communication participates--and has a long history of participating—in various levels (e.g., local, national, transnational) and contexts (e.g., community-based, civil, governmental, institutional) of political action, including within our field or profession."

As well as

"foreground the precarity and possibility of our ongoing and future political engagement, especially our advocacy of and with TPC’s most vulnerable stakeholders."

Interacting both with this call and the possibility of attending both ATTW and Cs was unexpectedly challenging. I should say that it was not until especially late in the year, perhaps not even until the beginning of the year, that it occurred to me if or whether I had some obligation to not attend. Some scholars expressed a desire not to attend because they felt genuinely anxious about the location. Others considered whether not to attend as a matter of protest.

Of course at no point did I ever feel "unsafe" in either Kansas or Missouri. When I tried to explain to someone (also white) outside my academic orbit the issues surrounding the conferences (namely the delay in determining where they would be), when I got to the part about the travel advisory, they rolled their eyes. As if the fear itself was ridiculous. But again, that was the point. I as a white man do not consider that there are places where I cannot go and feel largely safe and free of discrimination from agents of the state. My citizenship, in a very fundamental way, is never in question.

This disparate experience was further brought home to me when, on the evening after the first day of the conference, I met my fellow early career colleague, Dr. Consuelo Salas*, who had arrived for CCCC and was staying in MO. She took an Uber from KC in MO to the hotel in KS. One of the first thing she said was, "I just saw a man being arrested." Coming out of her hotel, she'd seen a black man on the ground with police holding him down, their knees on his back re-enacting a scene all too familiar to us nationally, a scene that has cost women and men their dignity, their mental well being, their wealth, their lives. A scene that looks less and less benign from a socio-political perspective--and indeed only ever looked like a "benign" exercise of state power to people for whom such exertion of force is benevolence. It "protects" (largely) white property and sense of order and safety. It maintains a sense of "law and order" which is seems always and everywhere to be disproportionately exercised on individuals and communities of color.

My colleague's distress was palpable. Not only because of the moment's intensity, but because as a person of color herself, she does not have the luxury of expecting her existence in predominantly white spaces to be accepted as normal or desirable. Presence, as we learn again and again, is itself a threat. The irrationality of this predominantly white fear cannot really see her. Once again I was reminded that I in my white maleness am having a profoundly different experience than much of the world. And my experience, shaped largely by a kind of tacit, experiential ignorance is an integral part of creating the fear and the threat.

This contrasted sharply with other, predominantly white, colleagues' comments on the "oddness" of the location of the Hilton. What became clear to me is that what made things "odd" for them (and if I am honest me) was that it was in a relatively poor area. Compared to other more classically "conference friendly" spaces like you might find in Orlando, for instance, with a bevy of hotels, restaurants, and loosely related "vacation" type amenities, this was in a relatively nondescript urban area. Clearly not as economically well off as other locations--or at least less interested in sweeping out "undesirable" elements beyond visitors' field of vision.

Having decided to stay in the KS Hilton for the duration of the week, shuttling back and forth for Cs, I ended up in a number of Ubers. Most had no problem picking me up or dropping me off at the location. But one driver, a white male in a moderately nice car, was palpably anxious about dropping me off at the location after 10pm saying that I was "staying in a rough part of town." He made a point to say he would drop me off, go off line, and log back in to pick up passengers once back in MO. Yet at no point did I feel any genuine sense that I was in any real danger due to my location.

Dr. Krista Ratcliffe in her work Rhetorical Listening helped me attend to these kinds of contrasts by suggesting as a matter of practice in discussions of race matters to "lay" these kinds of vignettes "alongside" one another in the interest of learning and framing our engagement.

But what strikes me most was the fact that I never really felt as if not attending was an option precisely because of the expectations of early-career scholars to develop my "research program"--one worthy of a nationally prominent research university. As I posted earlier, I felt like I had to "come out" as a new member of the field, to make--if not a "splash"--at least a mildly positive impression on my colleagues whose evaluation will be crucial to my full acceptance in to the field in the form of tenure. Here my general desire to act in solidarity, to pursue not only scholarly insight but justice in that pursuit and in the application of whatever insight I come upon runs up against the powerful material constraints the system of academia puts on us, itself embedded in the larger economy. This was profoundly discomforting. You see quickly how systemic forces compel even conscientious people to replicate, by inertia if nothing else, the microphysics of "precarity" even as we dispassionately pursue knowledge.

Yet my discomfort is nothing compared to my colleagues' who have the same (really greater) pressure to perform, to "make a splash," to prove, in ways I don't have to, that they "belong" there. All while having to also hold at bay the broader headwinds of white supremacy which challenge them outside the university. 

The precarity of people of color's situation as well as that of graduate students and early career scholars was much more visible to me on this trip than it ever has been before. Several have noted that academia should rethink its "reimbursement culture" which creates very real financial pressure around conferences on early career scholars, scholars from working class backgrounds, scholars whose minority status intersects with working class status, and graduate students across the board.

​I wonder too if we ought to re-think "conference culture" itself from the ground up. Beginning with the experience of the most precarious among us. 

This particular point only intensified for me as I attended Cs. But I'll reflect on that separately.

[*Consuelo was kind enough to read a draft of this post and gave permission to be named and for her story to be included.]