About the Significant Voices Colloquium (March 25th - 27th 2009)
The theme for the event is “Women on Equal Rights and Sexual Justice,” co-sponsored by Writing Across the Communities (WAC), Women Studies, and Africana Studies. Civil Rights Symposia held in 2007 and 2008 each drew more than 1,200 participants from the UNM campus and the greater Albuquerque community, including faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, local high-school students and teachers, professionals, community leaders and artists.
The Significant Voices event will continue conversations begun by these colloquia. We, as sponsors, seek to provide a space where all voices from the academic and local community can be heard; no single event can accomplish this, but a series of purpose-driven events will go a long way toward realizing this goal.
The Significant Voices Colloquium will foreground voices from the Native American, Asian, African American, Latina, and GBLT communities. A call for graduate student papers with particular emphasis on disability studies, aging studies, the LGBTQ community, all with a particular focus on women seeks to bring multiple perspectives to this event. Our keynote speakers will include visiting scholars Sarah Cortez (keynote address: “Latinas Write Their Lives”) and Elizabeth Archuleta (“Our Stories Are Our Theories: Kinship Relations and Indigenous Women's Intellectual Traditions"). UNM scholars and writers, Sonia Rankin Gipson (“Creating a Place of Our Own: Black Women and the Women’s Civil Rights Movement”) and Marissa Clark (“Teacher, Student, Character, Queer: On Being Out in the Classroom”) will be featured.
Mission Statement
Understanding the limits of any single event, the Spring 09 Significant Voices Colloquium seeks to continue the conversation begun by the 2007 and 2008 Civil Rights Symposia by creating a public space for the exchange of ideas on issues of sexual justice and equal rights during Women’s History Month.
Outcomes Statement
The principal outcomes for the Spring 2009 Significant Voices Colloquium will be to begin a video archive of the Civil rights colloquia series, to open up the campus dialogue on diversity to include sexual justice and gender equity, and to create a venue for the University’s graduate students to share and collaborate in their scholarship
Staff and Coordinators
Program Chair: Dr. Michelle Hall Kells, Department of English
Michelle Hall Kells is an associate professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of New Mexico. She holds a Ph.D. in Discourse Studies from the Texas A&M University. Her areas of research—civil rights rhetorics, sociolinguistics, and composition/literacy studies—coalesce around problems related to ethnolinguistic stratification and intercultural communication. Kells served as Program Chair for the 2005-2006 UNM Writing Across Communities Colloquia Series. She is coeditor of Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines (1999) and Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education (2004). Kells is the author of Héctor P. García: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights (2006). She is currently working on a new book, Vicente Ximenes and LBJ’s “Great Society”: The Rhetoric of Mexican American Civil Rights Reform.
WAC Events Coordinator: Dan Cryer
Dan Cryer is currently in the Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing program at UNM, where he serves as a Teaching Assistant, teaching Exposition 1 and 2 (English 101 and 102), and Technical and Professional Writing (English 219). On campus, he has also worked as a Graduate Assistant for the Anderson School of Management, and as a writing tutor for American Indian Student Services. In Summer 2008 he designed and presented a workshop—titled “College Writing: Finding Your Own Process”—for incoming freshman as part of the American Indian Summer Bridge Program.
Dan received his B.A. from Towson University, one of the many colleges and universities in the Baltimore metro area. At Towson, as a double major in English and Cultural Studies, he studied American literature, popular culture, and fiction writing. His undergraduate thesis was a collection of five short stories. While at Towson, Dan helped found Smartish Pace, an independent poetry journal published annually, with an accompanying interactive website (www.smartishpace.com). He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the journal, which, after ten years of continuous publishing, is still going strong.
In the years before earning his B.A., Dan worked as an advocate and support specialist for mentally handicapped adults at the Baltimore Association for Retarded Citizens. He also played drums for Jay Jay, a regionally successful ten-piece funk band.
Women Studies Event Coordinator: Stephanie Spong
Stephanie D. Spong is a first year Masters student at the University of New Mexico focusing on Fin de Siècle literature and feminist scholarship. She teaches both Exposition I and II and serves on the advisory board of the Writing Across Communities (WAC) Alliance. Before coming to New Mexico, Stephanie received her B.A. from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where she majored in English and Women’s Studies. She also spent a year teaching English to kindergarten, elementary school, junior high school, and adult students in rural Japan.
Contact:
Dr. Michelle Hall Kells
Department of English
mkells@unm.edu
Dan Cryer
WAC Events Coordinator
dcryer@unm.edu
Stephanie Spong
Women Studies Events Coordinator
sdspong@unm.edu
