Researcher Profile

Eileen’s Researcher Profile

My research interests go back to the particular place and locale of the family farm where I grew up—an apple and pear orchard in eastern Washington. I grew up in a household where business, economics, and labor issues were discussed over the dinner table and where the workplace was right outside the door and the business office was next to the kitchen. Labor problems were the core of many of our discussions at the family dinner table—how to get the work done and how to address the needs and concerns of those working for and with us to grow and harvest our crops. The weather and physical conditions were another big topic of discussion—how do we deal with forces that are beyond our control: rain or lack of it, hail that might destroy a crop in 30 seconds, frost that might come and kill the buds at bloom time, pests that my father had to deal with through increasingly noxious and environmentally damaging pesticides (we were regularly sent Christmas presents by pesticide companies!). And national and global markets were an abiding discussion. What would the price of apples or pears be at a given moment? I remember my Dad endlessly consulting a yellow newsletter he received from the Washington apple commission about crop prices. Where would the crop be sold—nationally or through export to Taiwan or Japan? How could we modernize the cooperative warehouse by father participated in so that we could compete with other warehouses and packing sheds? I grew up with questions like these echoing through my head—no wonder I became a dept administrator.

The workers/hired hands lived a stone’s throw from our house in housing that we maintained, and the boundaries between our family home, the workplace (the orchard), and the labor camp where many of the workers lived were permeable. Everything was intertwined, not as separate as it would be if one’s business were a commute into a city by bus or down the street. When people came from the city to visit, they were often startled by workers of varied shapes and sizes traipsing through our house to use the phone, bend my Mom’s ear about this or that problem in the housing units, and/or socialize with us and ask for help on varied needs. My mother was a social worker, in many respects. Many of the men that worked for us (and most were men) were vets of WWII, the Korean Conflict, and the War in Vietnam and their lives had been torn apart by military service, war, and often by the alcoholism that followed. Many had undiagnosed PTSD, and I remember the stories of their war-time service, which were often awful. Many had been drafted and sent off at 19 or 20 to fight and die. The war changed the way they saw the world and their lives, and they became part of the migrant waves of labor: picking CA vegetables, Florida oranges, WA apples. Many of these workers worked for my parents off and on for most of their adult lives.

I became interested in material conditions because material conditions were the stuff of day-to-day life: how do we hire enough people to harvest a crop, provide decent housing, deal with various needs, bail workers out of jail, and deal with broken lives. How do we get the work done in conditions that we couldn’t always-often-control.

We all contributed in the work of the family, but gender was a main way our labor was split between the farm and the house. I became interested in and resistant to the gendered labor of our family farm and my father’s sexism. And I watched my Mom, a college educated woman, who had given up a career as a teacher for her life as a farm wife and farm manager, deal, at times, with the anger and frustration of not having the public career she trained for and prepared for in college. My mom dealt with a lot of sexism in the farming community, especially after my Dad died and she was widowed at 51. She had to start driving tractors and bossing crews with my brother. Some of the men didn’t want to take a pay check from a woman or want to deal with a woman. She pushed my sister and I to be educated and independent and not rely on others for economic support and to fight against sexism.

Literacy was a big part of our family life. My parents read the Wall Street Journal and the local daily paper. They were inveterate readers—my Dad of political biography and my mother of psychological and spiritual texts. While they did physical labor for a living, they were constantly drawing on reading as solace, entertainment, and excitement. They liked books, writers, thinkers. They were political conservatives in the old sense (the party of Lincoln) and shared the agrarian sensibility of Thomas Jefferson.

All of this “experience” was buried in my head and in my body for years. I spent four years in college at University of Washington studying literary texts and criticism and leaving the farm behind (or so I though). In many ways, I WAS leaving the farm behind in choosing to attend the university in the biggest city in the state: Seattle. I deliberately avoided the agricultural-focused state university in eastern WA state—the place my parents, brother, sister, and whole extended family went to college. As a budding “literary critic” and an English major/writing minor, I did the usual work of close reading and analysis of themes and images in texts—New Criticism. I read the “canon” and then later was mad that I read so few women writers as an undergraduate; I felt that I had been cheated by a sexist education of great books by great men. I started reading Woolf when I was a junior and finished all of her novels in graduate school.

I started encountering feminist criticism in my senior year and just started to scratch the surface with it. When I started the master’s program I waded knee-deep into reading feminist literature--feminist literary analysis and the feminist theory canon at the time. I read French feminist theory, feminist literary criticism, and Anglo-American feminist theory. I took a couple of graduate seminars steeped in feminist theory and women writers. Rhetoric became an interest of mine in my final year of the master’s program, and I began to read bits and pieces of rhetorical theory and began to think more like a rhetorical critic than a literary critic. I wrote a thesis on surveillance and scopophilia, the two narrative frames in _Wuthering Heights_. I was interested in how stories were told in the novel through narrative framing—stories within stories. In retrospect, I can see I was trying to understand the concept of rhetorical framing.

I also started teaching a local community college as an adjunct after graduation. I learned about the world of freeway flyers, those who work at multiple colleges and piece together full-time appointments on multiple campuses without healthcare benefits or job security. These were women mostly eking out a living by teaching and many were fantastic writing teachers. I was just a novice learning from them and learning how to survive the day-to-day. While I sat in the office, graded papers, and engaged in shop talk about teaching and work, I was applying a sort of ethnographic perspective: what was this strange world of college teaching? Where was the pipe smoking professor of yore who hung around in a book lined office and talked about “lit-ra-ture.” Instead, we adjunct faculty sat around in tiny offices crammed with desks and comp textbooks, conferenced students cheek to jowl, and talked about what we were going to do in class the next day. Office mates confided in me about various things—teaching part-time for twenty years, enduring cervical cancer, memories of grad school in the Midwest. So many of those conversations are still deeply etched in my memory. I wondered: What was thing called teaching part-time? And why were there mostly women doing it?

I became interested in the gendered labor patterns in our field—the feminization of composition as Susan Miller and Sue Ellen Holbrook call it. I decided I wanted to write a dissertation about “feminization.” But where to begin?

At the time I began my research in the early nineties, there was not a wide array of work on feminist composition or feminist rhetorical studies that I could draw upon, although there was rich history of much earlier feminist communication scholarship. Elizabeth Flynn’s 1988 article “Composing as a Woman,” the first direct article in composition studies on feminism, had only appeared three years earlier. A book chapter and article by feminist scholars Susan Miller and Sue Ellen Holbook—and a handful of precursor articles on gender, pedagogy, and language (see Ritchie and Boardman 10-14)—referred to the idea that composition studies was a “feminized” field and explored gender, pedagogy, and the composing process.

Using those scholarly resources as a guide and inspiration, I worked across a range of disciplines to assemble an approach to my project on women’s labor as part-time teachers of writing that would be productive, poring over the literature on feminisms and labor studies, studies of sex discrimination in higher education by feminist scholars, studies of part-time labor from a variety of disciplines, Marxist and social feminist theories on class and labor, the rhetoric of inquiry, the sociology of the emotions, and institutional histories of writing and writing instruction. As I worked to assemble a research framework and discussed these approaches with my dissertation director (Lynn Worsham), I often felt like a bricoleur, cobbling together bits and pieces from a variety of fields and working hard to structure, synthesize, and assemble a coherent, if not complete, perspective on women’s work as part-time teachers of writing courses.

While my methods were often textually and rhetorically oriented, as I examined the common arguments and tropes about women’s work as teachers in documents, labor statements, and studies of part-time labor, I also extended my methods to include qualitative research: interviews with part-time women faculty about their responses and reactions to their working conditions and the ways that gender factored into their thinking about their work. Thus, my research was both multi-modal and interdisciplinary. It required that I be conversant in the work in my home discipline, but also conversant in the ways that other disciplines might pose the question of gender and part-time labor.

The process of doing this research was not seamless or familiar, but often radically defamiliarizing as I came to terms with other disciplines’—and my own’s-- research methods and methodologies. Having training in rhetorical theory was a benefit as it allowed me to analyze how different disciplines frame research questions, evaluate evidence, and make knowledge claims. As a feminist scholar trained to think about the politics of location (see Rich), I also thought about how disciplines frame their inquiries by defining specific power relations and worldviews. Undergoing this process of working across disciplines was often painful, intimidating, and overwhelming, but it gave me an appreciation for the challenges of interdisciplinary research, and it helped me to develop the habit of being accountable and self-reflexive about my choices as a researcher.

The struggle I underwent to launch my work was hardly unique; in fact, one could call it a feminist rite of passage; numerous accounts of feminist research tell a similar story of struggle, borrowing, invention, and adaptation. What seemed clear about my work as a feminist scholar—and that of my colleagues striving to do similar kinds of work—was that it required a mobility, flexibility, adaptability, and awareness of terms, concepts, and power relations—an awareness of the rhetorical nature of knowledge–that was both taxing and invigorating. The work I did as a feminist scholar also fed into my life as a feminist community member as I agitated for reproductive rights, for workplace equity, and for peace and social justice.

In a co-edited book that I'm publishing with K.J. Rawson, we discuss the idea of feminist rhetorical methods and methodologies as movement, as motion, and as action. I argue, as do others in the volume, that "[a]s feminist researchers, we are often in motion between our various standpoints and positions, between our disciplinary locations in the academy, and between the specific texts, contexts, places, spaces, communities and institutions we engage. Feminist rhetorical studies and interdisciplinary feminist studies as fields of inquiry are in constant motion as scholars debate and revise previously held notions of feminisms and rhetorics, introduce new subjects of research, new sites of inquiry, and engage methods, methodologies, and pedagogies in a variety of ways. Rhetorical studies is also in motion. As Ilene Crawford argues in the book, rhetoric is not only 'the study and practice of how language achieves its effects, i.e., persuasion,' but it can be a study and practice of our movement with/in rhetorics and with/in the world. Crawford asks us to consider our investments in our research methods and methodologies: 'What moves us through time and space? Physically? Emotionally? Intellectually? How are these three registers of movement connected and interdependent?' She reminds us that our work as researchers involves movement across time and space, but also across disciplines, communities and in, some cases, across the borders of the nation-state."