Positionality Statements

Sunayani

As a cisgendered woman of colour from India, I occupy a variety of positions, some affording me privilege, while others less so. Growing up all over the world, including Seychelles and India, allowed me to experience reading and writing as acts that occur not only in different languages–English, Bengali, Hindi, French, and Seselwa Creole–but in different registers. English has always been my first language, and thanks to India’s colonial history, Bengali has always been my mother tongue but second language. I carry these political and aesthetic perceptions of language into my reading and writing acts. When I speak, I code-switch, depending on who I am speaking to and where I am located, and often my sense of self is tied to how my tongue pronounces words.

My relationship to language, particularly English, is a complicated one. It has always been the language of power, one whose mastery opens doors, culturally and economically. Now, as a mother of a young child who is growing up predominantly Anglophone, I find myself asking even more urgently–how do I teach someone to live comfortably in multiple languages? How do I tell them that knowing the same word in different tongues is the cultural capital that I am passing on to them? These are the questions that I bring to the classroom, to my students, and to every linguistic act that my body performs, consciously and unconsciously, explicitly and implicitly.

Gina

I am a white, cisgender, straight, Jewish, able-bodied woman. I was raised by college-educated parents in a wealthy, mostly white, suburban town in California that was lauded for its public schools. All of this meant I was raised with the assumption that I would go to college, and once I got there, I felt well-prepared to write in the grammar and genres that my professors expected.

I always thought I was a “good writer,” because I got good grades and positive feedback from my teachers. However, my ADHD (which went undiagnosed until I was 40) meant writing took me much longer than my peers, but I was a chronic procrastinator who often churned out my essays the night before they were due. And while I fluently mimicked the vocabulary and structure of academic writing, I struggled greatly with creative writing. It was only once I became a magazine writer and editor (before I became a librarian) that I realized I had much more work to do to develop an original voice and point of view in my writing.

Furthermore, that small town that prepared me for academic “success” also instilled in me many unconscious biases about race, ethnicity, class, and achievement that I’ve had to unlearn through reading, listening, and lived experience. I’ve also had to let go of an obsession with correctness and conformity in favor of valuing multiple ways of knowing and communicating. As a librarian, this means I have had to develop a more nuanced and critical understanding of power and authority in source-based writing.

Now that I’m in my 40s, I struggle to keep up with the platforms and strategies many of our students use to search for, consume, and share information. The bright side of this humbling experience is that it gives me the opportunity to learn from my students. As someone who grew up alongside the Internet, I hope that the critical perspectives and context for search engines and social media I have added to this book, as well as how to understand the academic research practices that are expected in college, can help students think deeply about their own research habits and how their sources can help inform their own ideas and unique voices as writers.

Meghan

As a white, cisgendered, hetero woman, I move fairly easily through the world. I am not able-bodied, but my disabilities are invisible and do not affect me often. My family has a deep history with the military, with a father, uncles, and grandfathers serving as officers and fighting all the major American wars. This upbringing meant I spent my childhood living on naval bases and in naval housing in Hawaii, Rhode Island, Virginia, and California all before the age of 5. I attended three different kindergartens in three different states within one year. Growing up with so much movement early on created a formative, personal literacy crisis. When I moved to my second kindergarten, which I would attend for 3 months in Virginia, the teachers grew concerned that I could not read, even though my previous kindergarten teachers in Rhode Island had no concerns. My mom realized I had to learn to read during the three-day move across the country to San Diego, California, where I would finish kindergarten. So I did.

I can still feel that cross-country move in my body. It included a manic stop at Mardi Gras and an itchy case of chickenpox. This embodied experience affects my research today. Inspired by this formative literacy crisis, I now use my cultural capital as a professor to research literacy development among students on the fringes of the university and to use qualitative methods to give a voice to the voiceless, to disempowered groups who have been silenced by higher education systems.

Yin

I am a Chinese cisgender heterosexual woman who was born in China, grew up in Singapore, and immigrated to the US for college. I first learned to speak English at five years old when my family moved to Singapore, and for many years, even after I appeared to be conversant in English, I thought in Mandarin Chinese and then internally translated my “Chinese” thoughts into English words. When I came to the US in college, I grew adept at codeswitching, switching out my Singaporean accent for an American-sounding one. In the classroom, my racialized body and non-native tongue have sometimes estranged me from other classmates, and early on in my career as a professor, these inflections have also undermined my ability to project authority, as students doubted my expertise due to how I presented as a young, non-white person.

These experiences have acutely shaped my sense of language–not just how we write but also how we think and how we speak–as the codification of particular ways of inhabiting the world. Now, as a professor, I have access to cultural capital and authority that gives me privilege. I would like to use this privilege to help make room for and empower diverse ways of languaging that attend to and celebrate our different ways of inhabiting the world.