Tessa Brown, "What Else Do We Know?"

Brown, T. (2020). What else do we know? translingualism and the history of srtol as threshold concepts in our field. College Composition and Communication, 71(4), 591–619.

Brown retells a history of two emergent core texts of the writing studies movement: Writing About Writing and Naming What We Know. She calls out the exclusions of difference that shaped WAW and retells important forces from black scholars like Geneva Smitherman and Carmen Kynard. She is arguing for a more capacious sense of literacies in the field and writing a bit of her own history of joining it while seeing contradictions as members of the field search for a kind of disciplinary legitimacy. The larger argument is that there are marginalized voices who are sacrificed in a sanitized way of defining the field that is ignoring the dichotomies of otherness present in our pedagogies, and while WAW and threshold concepts are developments that center the research and grounding of the field, they are doing it in such a way that silences important scholarly voices--especially voices that resonate with a translingual approach.

“I argue that the writing studies movement’s narrow portrait of our field, our conception of writing, and our sense of those qualified to teach writing is shaped by color-blind discourses that attempt to appeal to the false ideological neutrality of the corporatizing university. This retrenchment in our field underserves all our students, those marginalized and those with privilege, because it offers them an impoverished understanding of writing itself” (593)

I loved this piece, especially the contributions from Min and the ways they helped tell a different version of the history of the field. Great blend of personal narrative throughout. Compelling argument about embracing the challenges presented in the double consciousness of the field: "experts" and others.