In 2012 I received an award of
which I am enormously proud, the Vicente Ximenes Scholarship in
Public Rhetoric and Civic Literacy. I received it largely for work I
had done over the previous four years in UNM’s Writing Across
Communities initiative, and I saw it both as a validation and a spur
to work harder and more seriously towards my goal of being a citizen
scholar. I felt this way because Dr. Ximenes was such an accomplished
citizen scholar himself, and if my name was to associated with his I
had much to live up to. That was only two years ago, so I am still a
long way from my goal, but I am working at it. With Writing Across
Communities I led two Civil Rights Symposia and served as secretary
of UNM’s Core Curriculum Task Force, which led to an appointment as
senior writing fellow for the Dean of Arts & Science’s Writing
Intensive Learning Communities Pilot Project. Beyond these endeavors
I served for one year as a writing tutor for American Indian Student
Services, and for two years as Assistant Director of Core Writing in
UNM’s English department. I am a recipient of the Office of
Graduate Studies’ Future Faculty Award, the Susan Deese-Roberts
Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, and a year-long fellowship from
the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Foundation, under which I am
currently completing a dissertation on the environmental activist
Aldo Leopold, which I will defend this Fall.
For me,
Dr. Ximenes’s accomplishments provide a kind of model – not in
precisely what he did, because I know we all have our own
contributions to make, but in how he lived out his principles. He
dedicated himself to helping people at the economic fringes of
society speak for themselves and live with dignity. He understood
that civic action requires an understanding of people’s daily lives
and how they are affected by their relationships with their
government, their jobs, and their families. I try to remain mindful
of these principles in the way I conduct myself as a scholar,
teacher, and colleague. In my dissertation, I argue that Aldo
Leopold’s life and work are most useful to us when viewed through
the lens of what I am calling “citizen ecology.” A citizen
ecology represents the full range of activities an individual brings
to bear on living conscientiously within a polity. Drawing on green
citizenship, publics theory, ecofeminism, theories of rhetorical
silencing, and genre theory, my dissertation explores Leopold’s
large archive to show how citizenship is enacted at the intersection
of the public and private spheres; how Leopold’s activism in the
Southwest tragically exploited and silenced Apache, Navajo, and
Pueblo peoples; and how he used different genres to speak for
non-human nature in the democratic process. The dissertation
concludes by arguing that both citizenship and environmental rhetoric
are most useful to scholars and activists when understood as forms of
practical judgment that shape and respond to complex problems.
Dr. Ximenes’s living out of
his principles also informs my teaching. In Writing Across
Communities we talk about teaching three kinds of literacy to our
students: civic, academic, and professional. With these fluencies
students will be well positioned to move purposefully in the world in
and beyond our classrooms, and to see the connections between their
political lives, their academic lives, and their professional lives,
as Dr. Ximenes did so clearly. We also talk about honoring the
fluencies students bring to our classrooms, and about making clear to
students that their new literacies are additions to rather
than replacements of the ones they developed before we met
them. Dr. Ximenes used his position to amplify the voices of people
who might otherwise not have been heard. In similar if more modest
ways, I try to help students amplify their own voices with new
fluencies, new literacies, while honoring the ones they bring from
their homes and adopted communities. Dr. Ximenes will continue to
effect positive change while being greatly missed.
c/o Professor Michelle Kells, Associate Professor, Rhetoric & Writing, University of New Mexico
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