English Faculty | The Ethel Walker School
Social justice educator at an independent, boarding, all girls+ college preparatory institution in Simsbury, CT
Teaching Associate
Teaches courses:
College Writing (FYW)
Honors College Writing
Writing, Identity, & Power
Writing Human Rights
Graduate Writing Tutor
Facilitates writing development and guidance with students from a range of backgrounds and disciplines
Works with students from a variety of linguistic backgrounds
Participates in regular professional development workshops
Research Associate
Develops an openly-accessible curriculum on the language surrounding driving in the U.S. with a team of researchers through a community partnership with the International Language Institute
Facilitates that curriculum through weekly tutoring sessions with a student at a community language school, the International Language Institute of Northampton, MA
Composes public documents that call for a wider adaptation of this curriculum, both to legislators and further community partners
Community Language Tutor
Guides students in english language learning in an individual setting
Collaborates with students to discuss language conventions in critical ways
Guides students in preparing for TOEFL exam, driving exam, and other logistical tasks involving language
Teaching Associate
Teaches courses:
College Writing (FYW)
Honors College Writing
Writing, Identity, & Power
Writing Human Rights
Writing Program Assistant Director/ Resource Center Mentor
Leads training sessions among group of incoming Teaching Associates
Guides new instructors through the first year of teaching through weekly professional development sessions
Observes new instructors teaching and support and feedback
I am a transnational feminist and community-oriented researcher, educator, and writer. I am from Appalachia and currently living and working in New England.
My work focuses on the activist rhetorical practices of working-class Appalachian women within neoliberal contexts. I partner with a literacy non-profit based in Appalachia that provides community-based education to working-class women in this project.
Research Projects
Community Literacies on the Move
In this project, I codesigned a driving curriculum with a team of research at UMass Amherst and community members at the International Languaeg Institute. Click here to learn more: https://ili.edu/ili-news/how-to-get-your-drivers-license/
Silently Speaking Bodies
In "Silently Speaking Bodies," I theorize affective rhetorical resistance, a view of rhetoric resistance that is performed both through words as well as physical bodies, through two instances of bodily protest: 1) a 2013 protest in which womxn, which I use as a term to be more inclusive of gender, in West Virginia shaved their heads to protest loss of land and economic security due to mountaintop removal for coal mining in the region, and 2) a 2015 protest in the Apaa district of Uganda in which a group of elderly womxn stripped naked, chanting, “Lobowa, Lobowa”—"our land” in a local Luo dialect, to resist their loss of their land and other violence as a result of conflicts of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). As just two examples in a broader trend of bodily protest, these cases call feminist rhetorical scholars and activists to question certain assumptions about rhetoric: namely, that if one makes use of traditional and appropriate means of persuasion, intended audiences will listen. For these protesters, this is not the case: both had previously spoken to stakeholders and government officials about their causes, but were not listened to through words alone. Driven to use their bodies to form collectives and make the destructive forces of global economic and political transformation visible to broader audiences, these protests call us to consider the ways embodied rhetorical action responds to neoliberalism, which cultural theorists and rhetorical scholars have theorized as a configuration of the global economy that upwardly redistributes wealth, circulates the market-based logics of individualism and competition, and authorizes destructive forces of capitalist expansion (Asen, Chaput, Dingo, Duggan, LeCourt, among others). By employing an affective rhetorical analysis, rhetoricians can continue to see rhetoric where it perhaps is not heard, activists can adopt these successful protest strategies, and stakeholders can listen and look to protests in these moments of activism
Affect and Hope
Tracing and Subverting a Neoliberal Rhetoric of Personal Responsibility
I grew up in a small town in the Appalachian mountains. My parents are both working-class: a nurse and a carpenter, born from generations of working-class men and women who grew up in the same town. Growing up, my parents always told me that I could accomplish anything, as long as I worked hard. They told me that the way that they got to where they are- my father, a business owner, my mother, a charge nurse, was solely by their own will and effort. Later in life, they would tell me that they work the jobs they do because of their lack of hard work: stopping their education early, not moving from this town, etc.
My parents embody the exigence for the work that follows: the way that neoliberal subjects take up a rhetoric of individual responsibility, which I go on to define.
Cell Culture
Building upon work done by a former lab colleague, I have developed a powerful tool for use in the identification and characterization of the processes in my model system. A major advantage of this development is its improved sensitivity, which allows it to detect subtle dynamic property changes in response to my experimental setup.
Published Work
Years of Research
“Silently Speaking Bodies: Affective Rhetorical Resistance in Transnational Feminist Rhetoric”
Under review with Peitho: Journal of Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition.
"Only Myself: Affective Negotiation in a Community Language School" co-authored with Stacie Klinowski
Under review with Literacy in Composition Studies
“Review of Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ehtics in Love and Illness by Jessica Restiano.”
Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition, 2020. https://www.umass.edu/english/news/ashley-canter-phd-student-publishes-book-review-peitho
“Shooting the “Gifts” of the Archives: A Convoluted Pedagogy” by Christian Smith in The Archives as Classroom edited by Kathryn Comer, Michael Harker, and Ben McCorkle
Contributor. Computers and Compositions Digital Press, (2019): https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/archive-as-classroom/narrative3.html
“Review of Writing for Love and Money: How Migration Drives Literacy Learning in Transnational Families.”
Literacy in Composition Studies, forthcoming.
Skills
Project Management
Qualitative and Quantitative Research
Written & Verbal Communication
Digital Design, Google, & Microsoft Office Suite
Contact Me
Awards
Walker Gibson Award Recipient for “Affect and Hope: Tracing and Subverting a Neoliberal Rhetoric of Personal Responsibility.”
Moran Herrington Fellowship Recipient
Outstanding Student Award in English- Coastal Carolina University
