Kathleen Ethel Welch Article Award Winners
The Kathleen Ethel Welch Outstanding Article Award was created in honor of the Coalition’s first president and co-founder, Kathleen E. Welch, whose immeasurable impact on the organization continues today. The award is presented biennially in odd years for refereed work published in Peitho journal to recognize outstanding scholarship and research in the areas of feminist pedagogy, practice, history, and theory. This year’s judges had the honor of reading and rating excellent articles from seven issues of the journal—volumes 21.2 through 23.1. These articles presented diverse approaches to feminist and historical scholarship, pushing the boundaries of both field and discipline, and many of them reflected collaborative authorship.
While we would normally confer awards at our Action Hour event on the Wednesday evening prior to CCCC, this year we rely on virtual conferral and social media. Thus, on behalf of the 2021 Kathleen Ethel Welch Outstanding Article Award Committee, I am pleased to announce this year’s award recipients and honorable mentions: Ana Milena Ribero and Sonia C. Arellano (award recipients); Patricia Fancher, Gesa Kirsch, and Alison Williams (honorable mention); and GPat Patterson and Leland Spencer (honorable mention).
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Ana Milena Ribero, recipient of the 2021 Kathleen Ethel Welch Outstanding Article Award for “Advocating Comadrismo: A Feminist Mentoring Approach for Latinas in Rhetoric and Composition,” Volume 21.2. Dr. Ribero is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Oregon State University.
Sonia C. Arellano, recipient of the 2021 Kathleen Ethel Welch Outstanding Article Award for “Advocating Comadrismo: A Feminist Mentoring Approach for Latinas in Rhetoric and Composition,” Volume 21.2. Dr. Arellano is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida.
This year’s Article Award committee felt that Ribero and Arellano’s call to rethink the whole discourse around mentoring is salient. Their article absolutely fulfills one of the Coalition’s principal missions: to attend to the education and mentoring of feminist faculty and graduate students in scholarship, research methods, praxis, and the politics of the profession. One judge wrote the following of this winning piece:
This article gives timely attention to the discipline and to the important, understudied area of feminist Latina rhetorical strategies of mentorship.
Another judge concurred:
In offering comadrismo as a mentoring model, Ribero and Arellano successfully elide the dichotomy between assimilationist and resistant approaches to professionalization. They elegantly describe how comadrismo can speak back to the white hegemonic norms that have underscored many mentoring practices while also transforming the structured mentoring relationship into a site for institutional critique. Furthermore, the dialogic nature of their article demonstrates comadrismo as an embodied practice.
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Patricia Fancher, honorable mention for “Feminist Practices in Digital Humanities Research: Visualizing Women Physician’s Networks of Solidarity, Struggle, and Exclusion,” Volume 22.2. Dr. Fancher is Faculty in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Gesa Kirsch, honorable mention for “Feminist Practices in Digital Humanities Research: Visualizing Women Physician’s Networks of Solidarity, Struggle, and Exclusion,” Volume 22.2. Dr. Kirsch is Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and Director of the Writing Center at Soka University.
Alison Williams, honorable mention for “Feminist Practices in Digital Humanities Research: Visualizing Women Physician’s Networks of Solidarity, Struggle, and Exclusion,” Volume 22.2. Professor Williams is Faculty in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
While this article did not win the 2021 award, this year’s judges appreciated the authors’ creative approach to historiographic recovery of women physicians through the visualization of solidarity networks and citational politics. Judges particularly admired the care with which the authors demonstrate “naming” as a simultaneous inclusive and exclusive practice. Their article absolutely fulfills one of the Coalition’s principal missions: the advancement of feminist research and pedagogy across histories, locales, identities, materialities, and media. One judge wrote the following:
This article demonstrates an excellent research design and thoughtful consideration of the idea of feminist community. Furthermore, it has broad implications for future research.
Another judge concurred:
Not only is this article sophisticated in argument and clear in scope, it also reflects several approaches to feminist scholarship that readers of Peitho have come to value: it reflects the historical, the digital, and the critical—particularly in revealing with honest sensitivity the egregious limits of certain kinds of feminist solidarity movements.
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GPat Patterson, honorable mention for “Toward Trans Rhetorical Agency: A Critical Analysis of Trans Topics in Rhetoric and Composition and Communication Scholarship,” Volume 22.4. Dr. Patterson is Assistant Professor of English and LGBT Studies Coordinator at Kent State University Tuscarawas.
Leland G. Spencer, honorable mention for “Toward Trans Rhetorical Agency: A Critical Analysis of Trans Topics in Rhetoric and Composition and Communication Scholarship,” Volume 22.4. Dr. Spencer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Communication Studies, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Miami University.
While this article did not win the 2021 award, this year’s judges felt that Patterson and Spencer made several critical pathways more visible for conducting research on trans subjects and/or into trans topics. One judge wrote the following:
This extensively well-researched article prompted generative discussion and prompted considerations of how the literature review is in itself a feminist genre, one that demonstrates tireless labor and acts as a welcome to future scholars and a gift to current researchers. This article will no doubt chart the course of future research in Trans Rhetorical work and in the field, broadly construed.
Another judge concurred:
Patterson and Spencer actively reconsider how different forms of materiality—literature, visual media, genre, reviews (like itself), etc., as well as pedagogy—can help contribute to a reconfiguring of trans* agency beyond simply undoing and replacing. They propose methods that can help us regenerate conversations around representations rooted in time—contemporary and not—and explain why/how these require evaluations that do more than switching out paradigms. Ultimately, they help us question how to reconfigure the way we understand and support spaces for trans* realities, voices, and representation that are relevant in shaping current and future scholarship.
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Please join us in congratulating these scholars and teachers on their work. We look forward to your nominations and applications for the several awards still upcoming this year!
Tarez Samra Graban
Immediate Past-President
Awards Chair 2020–2022
and members of the 2021 Kathleen Ethel Welch Outstanding Article Award Committee
Rachel Jurasevich
Kimberly R. Lacey
Jolivette Mecenas
Nancy Myers
Kate Pantelides
Rebecca Dingo is Associate Professor of English in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts. She is a recognized national and international scholar who has pushed transnational work into the forefront of feminist rhetorical studies. She is the author of Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing, which won the W. Ross Winterowd Award in 2012. Additionally, with J. Blake Scott, she has edited the book The Megarhetorics of Global Development. Her work has been well-cited not only in rhetoric, composition, and communication studies, but also across other disciplines and sub-disciplines including feminist international political studies, global education studies, women’s studies, literacy studies, and disability studies. She has been invited to give workshops, seminars, and lectures in the US, South Africa, Lebanon, and Belgium on transnational and feminist approaches in rhetoric and writing, and she was invited by the United Kingdom Parliament of International Development Committee to offer a policy memo that comments on how their disability programs might be more inclusive. Having recently completed her responsibilities as Writing Program Director at UMass, she is currently working with Dr. Rachel Riedner on a monograph, tentatively titled Beyond Recovery: Reckoning with Race, Nation, Imperialism, and Exceptionalism in Feminist Rhetorical Theory, and has been developing courses in contemporary rhetorical theory and writing human rights.
Clancy Ratliff is Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research interests are in feminist rhetorics, authorship, copyright, plagiarism, intellectual property, and writing program administration. She has published articles in Pedagogy (including an article selected for reprint in Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition, Parlor Press), Peitho, TETYC, Composition Forum, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Kairos, and other journals and edited collections. She has served on the NCTE College Section Steering Committee, the NCTE Executive Committee, the CCCC Nominating Committee, and several CCCC Task Forces. She has taught writing for 22 years, including teaching writing in the Ronald McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, first-year writing, technical writing, speech, senior-level capstone seminars, pedagogy seminars for graduate teaching assistants, and graduate seminars in rhetoric and composition studies. Ratliff has directed seven dissertations and three MA theses and is directing others in progress. She has served in a variety of administrative positions, including Director of First-Year Writing, Director of Graduate Studies, and currently Assistant Department Head. She is the faculty adviser for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette College Democrats, and she volunteers with Second Harvest South Louisiana, United Way, the Acadiana Regional Coalition on Homelessness and Housing, and other community organizations. Ratliff is currently at work on projects in environmental rhetoric and local rhetorical campaigns to remove Confederate monuments in Lafayette, Louisiana and Florence, Alabama.
As cofounder of the online publication agnès films: supporting women and feminist filmmakers and author of Cámara Retórica, Alexandra Hidalgo has spent over a decade theorizing feminist filmmaking as a methodology and activist tool.
