2019 Coalition Awards
We are pleased to recognize the following feminist scholars for their outstanding work. We thank these scholars for the care, honestly, and commitment they show to feminists in history and present of our fields and professions. Thank you to the many many people who served on awards committees, and to Lisa Mastrangelo for leading the expanding and important awards committees. The following awards announcements were composed by Lisa Mastrangelo:
Nan Johnson Travel Award
The Nan Johnson Travel Award was one of the Coalition’s first named awards. It is meant to assist graduate students in their travel to the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, and provides both conference registration and a travel stipend. This year’s winners are:
Alex Hanson, Syracuse University
Nancy Henaku, Michigan Tech
Pritisha Shrestha, Syracuse University
Karen Trujillo, New Mexico State University
Elizabeth Tacke, University of Michigan
Lisa Ede Mentoring Award
We are thrilled to celebrate Adela Licona as the 2019 winner of the Lisa Ede Mentoring Award. The Lisa Ede Mentoring Award has only been presented three times before. The requirements ask for a nominee with a “career-record of mentorship, including formal and informal advising of students and colleagues; leadership in campus, professional, and/or local communities; and other activities that align with the overall mission and goals of the Coalition.”
Licona had a remarkable number of people speak on her behalf. They describe her as a scholar, mother, teacher, advisor, role model, friend, colleague, collaborator, activist, and mentor. Perhaps the highest praise is the comment that she is “the truest spirit of feminist praxis” and a “borderlands rhetorician.” Her colleagues and former students also describe her as fierce, strong, compassionate, honest, courageous, and powerful. They comment on her as a person who noticed their presence, and also the one who paid attention to their absence.
Students and colleagues also mentioned and celebrated her feminist work—so much work—with feminist action research, homelessness intervention, migrant detention advocacy, and youth health, sexuality, and rights.
Many of the letters celebrate this nominee’s work with students of color, first-generation students, queer students, and all nervous graduate students in order to create a feminist community. Several of them repeat the mantra they learned from her: “Find the joy in the work, and insist on it.”
Presidents Dissertation Award
The Presidents Dissertation Award was created in order to honor dissertation work that makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of feminist histories, theories, and pedagogies of rhetoric and composition. The award was first given in 2016.
The 2018 Presidents Dissertation Award is given to Liane Malinowski, for “Civic Domesticity: Rhetoric, Women, and Space at Hull House, 1889-1910.”
In Civic Domesticity: Rhetoric, Women, and Space at Hull House, 1889-1910, Malinowski uses an intersectional feminist lens to investigate the multimodal rhetorical practices among residents in Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr’s Hull House. Interrogating the relationship between rhetoric and space, Malinowski’s research illuminates how residents in the settlement house re-drew—physically and rhetorically—the boundaries of domestic and civic spaces at a time when women’s participation in public discourse was limited to the concerns of domestic life. Malinowksi dissociates the male/female, private/public, citizen/foreigner, and literate/illiterate binaries through her account of women’s active engagement in the neighborhood development, advocacy for city services and labor rights, and discourses of global citizenship. Altogether, Malinowksi offers an important critique of early 20thcentury white feminism’s tendencies toward cosmopolitanism.
The 2019 Presidents Dissertation Award winner is Sherita Roundtree, for “Pedagogies of Noise: Black Women’s Teaching Efficacy and Pedagogical Approaches in Composition Classrooms.”
In “Pedagogies of Noise,” Roundtree explores the ways that lived experiences inform the teaching experiences of Black women graduate teaching assistants. Given the ways in which black bodies have often been seen as disruptive, Roundtree thinks about the concept of “noise” as a challenge to mislabeling, silencing, and dehumanizing. Using feminist rhetorical scholars, literary scholars, and hip-hop scholars, Roundtree creates a multiplicitous and polyvocal understanding of the lived experience of Black women graduate TAs. She highlights “how and when Black women GTAs utilize intersectional instruction to retool their noise by relating their pedagogies to their epistemologies, pedagogical approaches, and networks of support inside and outside of their current home institutions.”
None of this work could happen without the tireless work of our many volunteers. Thank you to everyone who labored to enable the coalition to celebrate feminist mentoring and research.
Nan Johnson Award: Kate Navickas (chair), Hui Wu, Katie Manthey, Becky Rickley, and Liane Malinowski
Lisa Ede Award: Jane Greer, Chair, Cheri Lemieux Speigel, Gavin Johnson, Sherri Craig, and Katherine Fredlund
Presidents Dissertation Award, 2018: Cristy Beemer, Chair, Kate Adams, Patrick Thomas, and Carolyn Skinner
Presidents Dissertation Award, 2019: Mary Sheridan, Chair, Mudiwa Pettus, Cheryl Glenn, and Janine Morris
