Chimee Adịọha, Soyeon Lee, Hem Lal Pandey, María Perez-Piza, and David Tver

Introduction

Honoring discussions on anti-racist graduate writing pedagogy and administration (Arzu-Carmichael et al.; Dayley; Gupta and Miller-Cochran; Santana and Hoang), this article proposes a framework for justice-centered graduate writing teaching or what we [1] call a framework of “plural productivities.” In recent years, injustices in higher education (Jones et al.) and graduate education (Godbee; Harris and González) have been examined. Institutional racial domination has been treated as a mere passive condition (Kynard 2). Through counterstories, Oscar Garcia Santana and Haivan V. Hoang emphasize “redirect[ing] our attention from individuals to social institutions” (104). Drawing on Black feminist and womanist (Baker-Bell; Shaw et al.) and social justice-oriented storytelling (Jones and Walton; Vealey and Gerding), we present our lived experiences of graduate writing (Harris and González; Lerma et al.).

Through lived experiences (Madden), this article argues for a framework of plural productivities for graduate writing development, which reconceptualizes the notions of risk/failure through “writing abundance” (Sano-Franchini, par. 3). While writing and productivity of faculty writers have been examined (Owens and Ittersum; Tulley), those of graduate writers have been underexplored. We reflect on graduate writing practices that rarely appear in published works. Here, we use a slash between “risk” and “failure” to indicate that although they are often situated on opposite sides, both rest on a shared foundation that may unintentionally exclude marginalized graduate writers. Five autobiographical vignettes–by four graduate student writers and one former graduate student writer and early-career faculty–affirm diverse students’ productivities (Fredericksen and Mangelsdorf).

Inspired by Jennifer Sano-Franchini’s CCCC 2024 Call for Proposals, particularly by the notion of “writing abundance,” we attempt to “critically interrogate how capitalist logics of scarcity… influence our working conditions, research, and pedagogical praxis” (par. 3). From our stories, we build a theoretical framework in response to graduate writing pedagogy that often assumes graduate writer deficits (Harris and González). We draw from Miranda Fricker’s concepts of “credibility deficit” (28) and “hermeneutical inequality” (152), which we elaborate on in the following section.

This article is supported by “storytelling” as theorized in technical communication and Black feminist scholarship. We chose this strand of storytelling, considering it as an avenue for justice (Baker-Bell; Jones and Walton; Shaw et al.; Vealey and Gerding). Storytelling serves us as a conduit for revealing experiences of the most uneasy moments in our writing practices and as a form of “restorying”–a way of generating new meanings from the past experiences (Shaw et al. 57; Thomas and Stornaiuolo). We first present five stories about graduate writing, situate these stories in conversations on risk/failure, epistemic (in)justice, and graduate writing pedagogy, and describe the concept of plural productivities as a justice-centered framework. Then, we conclude with strategies to implement this framework for graduate writing development [2].

Graduate Writing Stories

Soyeon’s Story: Plural Productivities are Material: Mobilizing Disciplinary Productivities

In my graduate program years, it was painful to see sentence-centric written comments on “a/an” and “the” that often appeared in my papers and receive desk rejections that had comments about lack of sentence-level refinement in my manuscripts. Although I, as a Korean-English multilingual scholar, had knowledge of prescriptive rules, I was unable to and resistant to make a clear decision among no articles, definite articles, and indefinite articles; my writings and epistemologies would not discern the world through (un)countability.

Recalling these feelings, I often question what writing at the graduate level is and whether it exists. Often imbricated in white supremacy in higher education (Madden 7), writing at the graduate level is a constructed norm, in a similar way in which academic writing discourse is maintained through “Whiteness” (Howell et al. par. 2; Inoue 5). “Whiteness” is operated via white language supremacist systems without manifesting racism, and similarly, graduate writing injustice is operated via the white standard of graduate writing without revealing discriminatory systems. Individual graduate writings are not measurable as they are “contingent on our [writers’] unique experiences” (Muñoz 289), and the level of graduate writing is a discourse that is designed to be always misaligned with graduate writers’ experiences, which puts graduate writers, particularly those whose experiences are not validated by norms, in marginalization (Horner and Lu). In this sense, the level of graduate writing does not exist in substance within the academy. Rather, graduate writing is more abundantly done in life contexts outside the academy. My graduate writing required writing across contexts including bureaucratic literacy (Lorimer Leonard; Vieira) for managing my status and livelihood (e.g., writings for applications, driver’s license, and insurance offices) in the United States, which made my graduate writing possible and was graduate writing by itself.

In retrospect, when one of my classmates and friends reviewed my research proposal, I was able to address those writing pains. I felt justice when her written comments on my proposal pointed out a systemic chasm: “As I try to imagine a place for your research in our field, I am slightly disheartened because I see the system you are going against (or speaking back to)…The problem is that I’ve heard little about bridging that gap between their [international students’] instinctive notions of writing and our ‘English Academic Scholarly style’” [3]. I realized that my feelings were more associated with knowledge production systems or actors who operate these systems rather than my own products.

Transitioning from a graduate writer to an instructor who works with graduate writers, I attempted to inquire about academic publication systems themselves with graduate writers. For example, I often adopt disciplinary pluralities in graduate course readings. Drawing on Karen Barad’s notion of “intra-action,” Laura Gonzales et al. discuss that boundaries between composition studies and technical and professional writing are not preexisting but emerging in the process and “diffraction-based relations” (434). I adopt these “intra-active” (434) relations as disciplinary pluralities and as intra-activist approaches in graduate writing instruction. For example, I integrate readings for writing practices across disciplines including language/literacy education (Casanave and Vandrick) and second language writing studies (Matsuda et al.). I further integrate coalitional documents related to scholarly production practices such as “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices” and CCCC’s statements (Position; Statement), which discuss the publishing and distributing of scholarly work as products of power-laden systems and as rhetorical work that can move the fields toward justice. This disciplinary plurality can highlight graduate writing as products and processes both.

To some extent, my graduate writing was developed not because my writing became more refined at the sentence level but because the epistemological purview of writing studies slowly changed. The practices of “passporting” governed by writing studies as a knowledge domain, to borrow Mahmoud Keshavarz’s term, which are “in constant change and are contingent articulations of power” (75), came to enable me to move borders to be in academic spheres. Graduate writing education can help writers first learn how to recognize systemic inequalities in white language-centered graduate writing and affirm their writings as products or productivities from the very beginning.

Hem’s Story: Plural Productivities are Collective: Negotiating Challenges through Connections and Collaborations

As an international Ph.D. student in the United States, my academic journey was marked by a sense of anxiety and uncertainty. During the early days of writing classrooms, both as a student and as an assistant instructor, I often feared whether I could meet the expectations tacitly established and (un)consciously enacted in the discourse community of the administration, mentors, colleagues, and students—both in terms of discipline and context. Experiencing fear was natural for me because my major was English literature, and the dominant mode of instruction was lecturing. Also, writing was not central to my undergraduate classrooms. This academic background made me grapple with hesitations, especially in classroom conversations, writing across various genre conventions, conference participation, and others.

Language was my major barrier. As a non-native English speaker, failure anxiety with my written and oral communication consistently troubled me. Additionally, the assigned readings were mostly foreign to me because they were rooted in context-specific scholarly conversations, histories, ideologies, and disciplinary conventions. The rhetoric and writing studies community had its own disciplinary domain, understanding of which meant not just reading and conceptualizing but entering an ongoing conversation, making sense of them, adapting and immersing into—all of which required not just academic labor and hard work but also commitment and assimilation. Equally challenging was navigating the vast array of academic writing genres practiced in the discipline—discussion board posts, reading responses, context briefs, synthesis papers, issue papers, mid-term and final papers, and presentation and participation. Each genre introduced into the classroom had a unique rhetorical situation and set of requirements. In many ways, my academic journey became a process of what David Bartholomae named “inventing the university.” His assertion that students are required to “speak of their experience in our [the institution’s] terms,” using specialized vocabulary, presentation styles, and interpretive schemes (608), helped me specify and name my struggle. The journey also brought a sense of failure and risk, for which I had no alternative but to navigate and negotiate. Such struggles were individualized and disembodied from the communal sharing and grappling, resulting in solitude, trial, error, and endurance.

Reflecting on this journey, I recognize that I developed my scholarship from those very bedrocks of struggles. My academic voice was not simply taught; it evolved from a process of academic-cultural translation, disciplinary negotiation, and personal resilience. This experience has deepened my commitment to be an accommodative and responsive instructor to the needs of students coming from diverse learning contexts and positions. The commitment has enhanced my empathetic sensibility in creating learning environments where students from all backgrounds can feel at home in every classroom to speak, write, and thrive.

Over time, I have expanded my networks. These connections show that fear, frustration, and struggle are not solely individual-specific experiences, but are institutionalized; they are everywhere, shared by many, yet too often unspoken or unheard. That realization gave me hope and strengthened me to transform my frustrations into motivation, challenges into growth, and scarcity into abundance. Navigating and finding this shared and common experience of failure and risk boosted my hope and enhanced my resilience.

Amidst the fear of failure and risk, I also sought to explore through deliberate enactment of various roles in each course I took. I sought opportunities to position myself beyond the role of a student and discovered and learned through the ideas of what it means to be a writer, reviewer, facilitator, storyteller, moderator, and collaborator. Through those performative roles, I created a space to express my personal feeling of risk/failure, aptitudes, challenges, and strategic explorations. By utilizing opportune moments of various roles, I found ways to externalize and work through my anxiety-laden dispositions. Through this strategy, I was able to channelize, understand, and experience what it means to perform the various roles that a graduate writer is required in the transitioning moments of a student to instructor and writer. In the process, I could be reassured that: writing as a habit is personal; it takes time to become a confident writer; everyone can write; belonging to a scholarly community is not a yardstick of becoming a writer; rejection from conferences and publications are common, and they evolve out of certain value systems; and, most importantly, writing is only a means and opportunity of learning, growing, voicing, and exercising our agency.

Participating in collaborative writing and moments of “writing together” sessions was an additional layer of support for me to grow as a writer, reinforcing the importance of community in the writing process. In the end, I came to realize that overcoming fear and failure is essential to combat the conventionalized and institutionalized practices of various types of activities under the scholarship of rhetoric and writing and they require more than mastering established academic norms. It calls for experimental, ad-hoc, specific, inclusive, and responsive pedagogies that allow storytelling, emotional sharing, and collaborative learning. I realized that listening to and telling stories—especially within diverse writing communities—can be powerful tools for struggling writers for their motivation, empowerment, and growth. They have allowed me to transition myself from the status of less-experienced position to more-experienced, voiceless to the voiced, silenced to speaking, fear of failure to the hope of success, entrenched in risk to ensconced in safety.

David’s Story: Plural Productivities are Kairotic: Paths, Possibilities, and Reigniting after Burning Out

My original plan was simple enough. After undergrad, I would attend a university for Rhetoric and Composition and from there go on to teach. The risk didn’t seem that great and failure was not something I was that familiar with. But, as the relationship with my now wife (then girlfriend) was growing and graduation was on the horizon, I had a choice to make, a risk to take, and take it I did as I found myself going to a different city, enrolling in a different program, and completely changing my relationship with risk and failure along the way.

When starting my Technical Communication master’s program in 2016, the full-time job of being a student and the part-time jobs to support that journey were rough. This risk I had taken seemed to be failing as the accruing debt, the developing white hairs of stress, and the ephemeral nature of time were backdrops to the foregrounded interviews for internships, the emails for starting position employment, and networking that all seemed to go nowhere. This pivot I made from a plan of teaching to discovering the ins and outs of industry gave me what at the time seemed to be a pretty clear understanding of risk and failure. You start with risk and then two paths form, one of success and one of failure. These paths were one way, had no turnarounds, and the feelings of achievement or catastrophe compounded as you found yourself traveling down them.

As an attempt to go off road and get back to success, at the time of graduation in 2019, I applied to Ph.D. programs in Rhetoric and Composition to dust off that map which led to a future in education. Not doing so well on the GRE and being denied admission to the local university was crushing as this risk to pivot back to my original plan seemed to fail. However, I did hear back from another application. When I was accepted to a state university’s writing program, the risk of moving across the state was outweighed by the feeling of finally returning to that path of success; the feeling of finally not being a failure anymore.

As my time in the program progressed, however, I began to feel the residual effects of this constant academic journey. As reading loads increased and writing demands swelled, I felt myself burning out. I felt that I could not reasonably read, evaluate, and then acquire what instructors were asking of me along with balancing teaching, tutoring, or outside obligations. I found myself veering back onto that path of failure, feeling like I could not keep up and that inability to keep up was a sign that I was not cut out for this work in the first place. I was a failure once more.

My final semester of coursework helped me overcome my burnout. For example, a graduate seminar in a workshop format was alive with practices that Dana Lynn Driscoll et al. argue graduate writing programs should adopt when attending to their students’ wellbeing. Our readings and discussions centered on a variety of graduate student voices, talking about the challenges we face, how we cope with those challenges, the larger systemic forces at play with those challenges, all leading to real moments of solidarity and reflection (474). The agency I felt returned to me was palpable. The work was presented as curated options in the form of proposals, writing products, and cover letters that worked to lay out what we wanted to write, gave the context of what was in our writing, the audience we were going for, the end goal we had for it, and what we would like them to focus on or look for in our writing.

I was able to rediscover my own ways of being productive that were stripped from me or lost along the way and reclaim my desire for writing and reacquaint myself with all the ways I find to be productive. That understanding of plural productivities means for me that there is not a standard or singular way for me to research, to write, or to teach. This understanding invites risk as an ever-present ally, one that is necessary to discover your methods of being productive.

María’s Story: Plural Productivities are Cultural and Equal: Building a Critical Academic Writing Identity

As a doctoral student in education with a bachelor’s and master’s in science and engineering, my belief about the act of writing was that writing in English is to follow a formula, and I just needed to learn the “formula to write academic papers.” That’s all.

As a second language learner student, I am immersed in many challenges. One of them is to write academically. I came to understand that my experience of writing was influenced by “literacy trauma” (Carvajal Regidor 10), the capitalist idea of production (Giroux, Writing 293), and through the experience of reading other scholars of color or women scholars that demystify the process of writing helps develop awareness of writing in the abundance of knowledge. I realized that my idea of the act of writing was modeled by my previous experiences before, which were misunderstanding, failure, and hopelessness. I wasn’t always conscious of these emotions and of how these feelings appeared when I told myself, “I need to write.” Then, these feelings fed the “Imposter Phenomenon” (Clance and Imes 241; Crusan 99), and my hopelessness was intense just because I had to write. I was telling myself, “I just had to follow the rules that exist in the readings.” We must not separate this activity from the social impact and experience (Crusan 104) to mitigate the Imposter Phenomenon (IPh). Deborah Crusan explores IPh in academia from the point of view of gender and the exhausting emotions that produce this phenomenon (92). The analysis of IPh and the identification of the oppressed voice of this internalized voice is still in there. However, the imposter posture is part of the internalization of being a woman in a man’s world (the engineering and academic fields) and a doctoral student who requires papers as a product, too.

Henry Giroux suggests that writing and critical thinking are a dialectic relationship (Writing 291). In developing a writing identity, I found in restorying as a qualitative methodology of research (Creswell and Poth 141; Ravitch and Carl 24; Shaw et al. 52) the possibility of re-meaning the trauma, and I took fails/risks as inspirations that keep me writing and identifying the emotions that were building my mental blocks (Crusan 104). For me as an old woman, I could not take the risk without feeling that I will lose something important at the end of the event. Because in my country, México, we don’t have a support system, I tried to mitigate the feeling of a catastrophic end by following the instructions, the rules, or the formula in writing. I needed something that provided me with certainty to avoid failure.

According to Giroux, American universities are immersed in the neoliberal idea of production (Bare). It is not a mistake that I was only thinking of applying a formula because academia focuses on the production of articles, which dictates the ranking of universities within the American university system. This phenomenon not only produces knowledge but also produces “political, social, ethical, and spiritual consequences” (Giroux, Bare 186) for students. Critical theories have established that the control of society occurs not only through the media of production (Myers 52), but also through the school system; that is, the manners in which teachers manage the curriculum, the way the administration establishes their rules, and its culture of control over teachers and students (Freire 58; Giroux, Bare 185; Giroux, Rethinking 715). Then, if the teachers have been trained to control the way students think, then the teachers can also develop critical thinkers to develop critical writing (Giroux, Writing 295) and identity (Gee 83). Surprisingly, when I learned that writing is also an activity of social justice (McLaren and Giroux 19), I was able to maintain my goal of writing and add the goal of social justice: I become an agent of social justice which connects to the idea of critical pedagogy (Freire 48; Janks 132). Thus, I found my motivation to keep going in my writing practice because I would be able to generate dialogues and critical writing as a praxis of social justice (Janks 132) through my papers.

I was then able to design my identity as a writer or, better, my identity as a critical writer. Now, for me, writing a paper has several goals; one of them is the social goal of generating a dialogue in community (Freire 14; Giroux, Writing 298) and reflection between the writer and the reader. Consequently, the only way to develop my identity as a critical writer is by keeping writing (Gee 83).

Chimee’s Story: Plural Productivities are Mobile: From Collectivity to the Multiplicity of Production

I share how my graduate writing experience interacted with my first-year writing pedagogy, where I was teaching students who were mostly bilinguals and on the US-México border and where I experienced firsthand how linguistic justice could come face to face with the act and art of composition. Through a writing class that focused on social and linguistic justice, I explored how teaching writing contributes to how I build my own academic writing confidence. I am sharing two points to facilitate my ideas around collaboration, linguistic justice and graduate writing experience. They are the experiences I encounter through finding myself linguistically, through transferring from one location to another, as well as adopting new writing practices and noticing methodologies that were unknown to me.

To go through this maze of learning and exchanging with different groups of subjects—the professors, the students, the graduate classes that generated collaborative writing—is to acknowledge the force that a collaborative attitude invites, the plural needs to create and build knowledge, and the risks that are attached to this collectivity. My questions continued to focus on the relevance and meaningfulness of my writing and how my audience could decide to read their own meaning into it.

Prior to moving to the United States from Nigeria for graduate school, my idea about the teaching of writing wasn’t as broad and encompassing as it has become now. Crossing into a new system that saw writing differently was a process. There was a necessity to establish a transfer as a graduate student, while learning the conventions and styles of writing and writing practice that is prominent in the United States. This is not to neglect the writing practice during my undergraduate days in my home country, although what it offered was not exceptionally enough to prepare me for graduate writing, but it has helped me in comparative situations to notice what wasn’t there to what needs to be there. These situations do nothing more than to give me an idea of how to do it better, how to imagine and speculate what should be the best in the case of writing for a purpose. What I found myself doing most of the time was to throw myself into a fantastical future of what I wish it would be like. From that same lens of acknowledging the differences between here and there (my home country), I therefore use that opportunity to provide a template that my students can work with.

In 1974, the CCCC adopted the Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution, which preached the need to allow students the liberty to exercise with different forms and varieties of language. It was necessary that I extended a hand to my students, also having to teach in a writing program that considered linguistic justice paramount. It was easy to preach my own version of language freedom, allowing my students to write in the language that they understand, to be intentional in the way that they think about and write in their other languages, be it spanglish or koreanglish or nigerianglish, this collective comingling of language. This gives us some confidence in our composition capabilities, that we could express ourselves in our “inside tongues,” not the “standard” that has been forced onto us. Through these, we all, as educators, as graduate students, have all the opportunity to fill in the gaps where our writing practices lack. Working with my students as companions to learning and filling my own graduate writing gaps through transnationalism and linguistic justice was a new outlook towards collective production and knowledge building.

I joined this collaborative writing project, not just to support my writing practice but to establish this plurality that allows one to create in community. It is through this production that I am offered an avenue to reestablish a writing standpoint in communion. In this collaborative writing setting, there is an opportunity for plural productions across. To combat the burden of our writing insecurities, creating a community could also be a major cure for our insecurities and uncertainties towards writing.

Graduate Writing on the Life Continuum

In these stories, we emphasize the value of graduate writers’ knowledge, labor, and livelihood, often invisible behind academic products. Graduate writing has been discussed at a program level (Khost et al.; Micciche and Carr) and across disciplinary and student needs (Brooks-Gillies et al.), through lenses such as “enculturation” (Fredrick et al.), transnationalism and translingualism (Horner), and global geopolitical knowledge inequalities (Thesen and Cooper). Graduate writing education has adopted activist frameworks through coalitional graduate student stories as “panoramic” ethos-building (Lerma et al.) and sites as “healing” (Mendoza et al.; Schwaller). These approaches promote antiracist work among BIPOC graduate students and faculty (Ore et al.), collaboration (Tham et al.), and racial equity in graduate technical writing programs (Alexander; Popham). Scholars such as Meaghan Brewer and Zakery R. Muñoz call attention to graduate student writers’ dynamic literacies and livelihoods. Acknowledging that graduate students “live with fear and insecurity” (Donelson and Cox 192) and with feelings of “precarity” (Banville et al.), we suggest that justice-centered approaches can enact plural productivities in graduate writing development, and in turn, plural productivities can support social justice by affirming diverse students’ writing on the life continuum.

Being pertinent to reframing the notion of risk, scholars have complicated the dominant narratives of failure (Carr and Micciche; Donelson and Cox; Teagarden et al., Counterpoint; Teagarden et al., Intellectual). Failure has been differently framed as a concept that challenges “bootstraps ideologies pervasive within American progressive narratives” (Carr and Micciche 1). Alexis Teagarden et al. promote a “rhetorical approach” to “intellectual risk-taking” to “create conditions that build students’ critical awareness of risk-taking as an aspect of their learning” (Teagarden et al., Intellectual 129). Kelly Myers warns that without “critical engagement” (50), failure discourse can reinforce whiteness. Extending these conversations through our stories, we propose plural productivities as an alternative framework for graduate writing pedagogy within and beyond academia that complicates the risk/failure dyad.

Defining Plural Productivities

Failures bring material consequences, which disproportionately affect the lives of marginalized graduate writers. These consequences are often irreversible, as the consequences are engendered structurally, which makes it hard to discern who conceptualizes and decides risk/ failure. As Nancy G. Barrón and Sibbylle Gruber note, risk is “not an individual risk” (88). Rather, it is more associated with “[t]he education system” and “the people who benefit from it” and “[see] us [marginalized graduate writers] as not fitting in because we [marginalized graduate writers] did not match the system’s normative knowledge” (90). To be specific, graduate writing education systems often force or “shame” graduate writers through writing itself as a “disciplinary technology” (Schaffner 43; 92) to fit dominant linguistic, cultural, and racial norms, which involves consequences, such as rejections in publications, delays in graduation, and hardship in sustaining statuses and emotional wellbeing. Even when graduate writers are becoming academically successful, graduate writers may still be invisible (Barrón and Gruber 93).

Graduate writers often face what Fricker referred to as “epistemic injustice,” whose mechanism can be explained into two types: “testimonial injustice” and “hermeneutical injustice” (1). According to Fricker, testimonial injustice involves an “identity-prejudicial credibility deficit” (28) of a speaker to a hearer (1). Hermeneutical injustice occurs due to “structural prejudice in the economy of collective interpretive resources” (1) when “some significant area of one’s social experience [is] obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization” (153). Alida Liberman further points out that “epistemic harms” can lead to “material harms” (160), including what she calls “ignorance bolstering” that “encourages people to persist in their willful hermeneutical ignorance” (163). Beth Godbee extends Fricker’s work to address injustice and affirm graduate writers’ “epistemic rights,” that is, “rights to knowledge, experience, or earned expertise” in graduate education (36).

Turning outward from individual risk/failure to systemic injustice or from speakers to hearers in knowledge and experience exchange contexts, we describe plural productivities as system-conscious yet productivity-oriented graduate writing practices that can do epistemic justice in material contexts. We pluralize the term plural productivities to reflect its evolving meaning. By “plural,” we affirm dynamic literate practices. In doing this, we are helped by H. Samy Alim and Django Paris’ work that urges us to turn “our gaze inward on our own communities and cultural practices” (9) to “sustain–linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling” (1). By “productivities,” we foreground the material aspects of productions of knowledge-making practices as processes and products both in graduate writing.

Toward Graduate Writing Justice

From our stories, we described how productivities unfold in life contexts in varied ways. Soyeon reflected on epistemic pains and a strategy for justice work through disciplinary pluralities and productivities. Soyeon’s story demonstrates that recognizing the system’s failure is an example of plural productivities practices. This recognition is important when even risk-taking and failure discourse is critically engaged. While a newly engaged notion of failure can help the risk-taking of graduate writers, their epistemic pains cannot be legitimized in pursuit of learning. Learning as a goal or as a process cannot justify epistemic pains and harms. A plural productivities framework can better mobilize justice-oriented approaches to the teaching of writing not through epistemic pains but through disciplinary abundance. Hem drew on Bartholomae’s work to depart from graduate writing challenges, indicating plural productivities are collective. Hem’s story suggests that graduate writers’ learning experience within the university context relies on shared material conditions, and most pedagogical nuance shapes and is shaped by those context-specific exigent material circumstances. For María, graduate writing is a dialectic process that helps writers to be an agent of epistemic justice. To be specific, as an international student, María’s experience related to risk/failure has a strong component of internalization of oppressed education in México that these traditional conceptualizations come from very old oppression. This story demonstrates that graduate writers can gain the motivation to keep communicating by writing through their own understanding that writing can be an agent of social change, rather than through their risk-taking dispositions, often historically imbricated in education systems and institutions. David explained how temporal interventions are vital to graduate writing experience while Chimee illustrated how mobilities across contexts can impact writing practices. These two graduate writers’ experiences can be more richly interpreted when viewed not as a risk-taking and failure discourse but as a dynamic, temporal, and spatial move of the subject toward abundant writing environments.

Formulating Plural Productivities in Graduate Writing

While each story has differentially resituated and countered risk/failure discourses, the stories above commonly reveal that the notion of risk/failure still upholds institutional system’s ignorance that presumes that the consequence of risk-taking evenly affects individual writers. Systems often fail in recognizing a graduate writer’s epistemic difference, divergent education systems, kairotic needs, and internalized feelings. Risk/failure discourses may remedially detain marginalized graduate writers at a failure discourse through the very process of writing and more problematically through the transposition of failure from systems to individuals. In these five stories, the significant components of plural productivities are questions surrounding the system as a “credibility economy” (Fricker 30) of how products and productivities occur. This notion of plural productivities is not an encoded term of failure discourses, which can only be legitimized when it leads to individuals’ learning. On the contrary, we recognize plural productivities wherever institutional systems fail. Rather than individuals’ risk-taking, a framework of plural productivities can help graduate writers collectively recognize institutional systems’ failure that excludes marginalized writers from the “practice that originally generates the very idea of a knower” (Fricker 145) and work as a knower without delay in their writing economies. As Sano-Franchini notes, “writing abundance” indicates “a way of understanding both what we do and who we are as an organization and as a discipline” as well as “a theory and method for taking stock of the work that we do, for reassessing the material flow of resources” (par. 2). In a sense, plural productivities can be inadvertently operationalized as a co-optation tool that first promotes fear, drives anxiety around products and individual productivity, and only serves to sustain systems which selectively justify marginalized writers’ epistemological systems based on products’ or productivities’ numerical values. Being wary of these pitfalls, we suggest two ways of epistemic justice practices that follow Fricker’s work on the two types of notion of “epistemic injustice”: “testimonial” practices and “hermeneutical” practices for graduate writing justice.

Testimonial Practice for Graduate Writing Justice

We answer the following critical question for testimonial practice: How can plural graduate writers’ stories and knowledge-making processes be validated to reduce testimonial injustices?

Graduate writers should have opportunities to notice injustice first in academic writing settings, that is, the “experience of being epistemically undermined” (Fricker 51) that often delegitimize graduate writers’ identities and stories. To be specific, for graduate writing instructors, we propose that course or program design should understand where graduate student scholars are, where they come from, and how they tend to conceptualize risk/failure. Similarly, administrators and instructors should pluralize their understanding of graduate writer identities and experiences. Program leadership can further create programs where graduate students can validate student stories and needs, calling for institutional practices that recognize the epistemic credibility of marginalized graduate students.

Hermeneutical Practice for Graduate Writing Justice

For hermeneutical practice, we answer the following critical question: How can we promote hermeneutically just environments and better materialize productions and productivities of graduate writers?

We can rethink our own stories and term them as “sources” or what Kristie Dotson refers to as “epistemic resources” (131) and build “collective hermeneutical resource” (Fricker 155). While we have created an avenue for collaboration and plural productions, it is further needed to center the outcomes of this collectivity as a hermeneutical source. Our stories suggest that reducing hermeneutical injustice requires creating institutional structures that enable graduate writers’ academic, professional, and life experiences within shared interpretive frameworks to be intelligible.

• On a pedagogical level, this plural productivities framework has the goal of integrating pluralities within writing studies itself and of collaborative learning about their writing products through peer groups, through which graduate writers socialize their understanding of being writers and establish plural “writing abundance” spaces.
• Through activist approaches, we can mobilize writing classrooms with plural productivities as a space where we critically envision graduate writing instruction. Creating classroom space as itself a resource for student voices will help them manifest their inherent, authentic, critical and creative writing potentials.
• On a programmatic and administrative level, the idea of plural productivities calls for establishing sustained institutional mechanisms to listen, understand, and care for the challenges of the graduate writers which can serve as a conduit to recognize and resist the failure-inducing rhetorical situations. For this, the role of the institutions can be instrumental to turn the institutions to be sensitive and proactive for the graduate writers’ concerns. The plural productivities framework suggests administration to reconsider the limited framing of productivity in graduate education. Encompassing graduate writers’ life contexts, this approach also urges to value diverse career paths of the graduate writers such as public service, nonprofits, industries, and community-based initiatives. This approach helps productivity be defined, achieved, and materialized in collective, relational, and networked modes.

To do so, it is crucial to de-normalize “ignorance bolstering” of “dominant knowers” (Liberman 163). Hermeneutical injustice does not exist in a silo. Rather, it is surrounded by certain programmatic actions and policies. It should not end in the theorizing of these harms but should transition into possibilities that promote difference, collect demands, as well as find relevant solutions to those demands.

Acknowledgements

We thank the audience of our CCCC 2024 session, who listened to the presentation of this article’s earlier version. We are also grateful to guest editors Alexis Teagarden and Justin Mando and the anonymous reviewers who shared invaluable feedback.

Notes

[1] Hem Lal Pandey at Tribhuvan University is the corresponding author (hemlal.pandey@cden.tu.edu.np). All the authors contributed equally to this article.

[2] We use the term “development” in multiple senses. We align our approach with a perspective that views writing as “many processes involved in producing different kinds of writing” (Britton et al. 21) and underscore labor and time involved in writing as a product.

[3] Permission to quote was obtained.