Michelle LaFrance
5 articles · 1 book-
Contradictions of an American Gàidhealteachd: The Curious Love Stories of Scottish Gaelic Learners in the U.S. ↗
Abstract
Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language, has attracted small pockets of learners in the U.S. This essay explores the complicated, contradictory, and affective reasons Scottish Gaelic learners in the US take up their learning practices, examining the love stories at the heart of learner’s accounts of learning activity. The author argues that cultural and community-based love stories have much to teach community literacy scholars as they help us to understand the deeply emotional bonds language learners build within the linguistic communities they seek to join. These stories traffic in the concept of the “New Gael” (Dunmore, 2025) a product of Gaelic diaspora, a figure that provides a road map for countering the effects of historical erasures in the U.S. as it foregrounds the post-vernacular and translingual realities of Indigenous language revitalization within global movements for cultural and linguistic sovereignty.
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Fingerprinting Feminist Methodologies/Methods: An Analysis of Empirical Research Trends in Four Composition Journals between 2007 and 2016* ↗
Abstract
This study surveyed and analyzed feminist methodologies in four composition journals across ten years. Our findings offer a number of important checks upon methodological and epistemological conversations in composition research, particularly how the methods we choose demonstrate our attention to social justice, the materialities of research practice, and the situatedness of knowledge claims.
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The Indianapolis Resolution: Responding to Twenty-First-Century Exigencies/Political Economies of Composition Labor ↗
Abstract
Since the adoption and subsequent fade of the Wyoming Resolution, we have seen the political economy of writing instruction change remarkably. Certainly, composition studies’ disciplinary viability seems more solid, but the proportion of contingent writing teachers has increased to almost 70 percent. The authors of this article attribute these trends to “neoliberal creep” and attempt to think through their effects on our work and our students.
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Institutional Ethnography as Materialist Framework for Writing Program Research and the Faculty-Staff Work Standpoints Project ↗
Abstract
Institutional ethnography seeks to uncover how things happen—how institutional discourse compels and shapes practice(s) and how norms of practice speak to, for, and overindividuals. The Faculty and Staff Standpoints project is shaped by this methodology, as it explores writing center staff and faculty relationships to their work.