Download PDFHow We Come to This Work
Currently, both of us are PhD students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), though our experiences beforehand have been drastically different. Matthew (Matt) is a mixed-race (Asian/Cantonese and Pacific Islander/CHamoru) person who grew up in California. His education spans across California with his K-12 education being in the San Francisco Bay Area; his undergraduate work being at the University of California, Merced (UCM); and his master’s work being at San Diego State University (SDSU). Across his education in California, Matt was consistently situated in spaces where he had peers and mentors of color which served as a support system. In addition, he also was supporting students of color during his time in higher education as both UCM and SDSU are Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). The combination of a support system and working with students who had similar experiences to him has brought him to the field of rhetoric and composition. It also shaped his interests within the field as he focuses on anti-racist writing assessment and pedagogy inspired by the work of scholars like Baker-Bell (2020), Young (2010), and Inoue (2019). Now in his second year at UW-Madison, which is the first Primarily White Institution (PWI) he has been at, Matt still feels like he has a support system, finding mentors and peers of color alongside allies who do justice-oriented work.
Sujash is a Bangladeshi international student turned immigrant who became a citizen of the United States last year. He went through a Bangla medium education system in Bangladesh where he attended Ideal School in Dhaka. He briefly (for a few months) attended Dhaka University, until he received a scholarship to pursue his BA in English at a small liberal arts college (Truman State University) in Missouri. He later went on to pursue a master’s degree in the same institution to teach high school English in rural Missouri. While teaching K-12 was not his original plan, he had no other choice but to work as part of a restrictive work permit extension of his student visa in order to stay in the US. A year later, he left teaching high school to pursue further graduate work at Missouri State University where he first taught first-year college writing and basic writing. There, he came across composition studies as a field. Now in his third year in the PhD program in Composition and Rhetoric at UW-Madison, Sujash is simultaneously teaching an intermediate composition course and working as an instructor at the UW-Madison Writing Center. His immigration experience has led him to pursuing his research interests in immigration rhetoric and institutional and affective violence in literacy.
Since we grew up in spaces where people looked like us, the shift to PWI spaces amplified our interest in discussions of race and its role in our graduate education. This interest would allow us to articulate our experiences better to those who might not come from the same backgrounds as us.