Abstract This article explores the creation and sustainment of a standing antiracist pedagogy group in a technical and professional communication program at a large, predominantly white Midwestern R1 university with a strong STEM culture. Reflecting on personal and collective experiences, group members discuss the evolution of the group, how the group fosters sustained engagement and ongoing development among its members, and its hopes (as well as challenges) for the future. Ultimately, the authors aim to provide a framework for the development of other kinds of support groups in universities and beyond.

While scholarship in rhetoric and composition has deliberated its disciplinary identity, we do not yet have a current account of how pluralistic approaches to curriculum at the doctoral level professionalize graduate students as teachers, researchers, and future faculty.

This paper considers some of the ways ethnography has been adopted in transdisciplinary rhetoric and also considers theoretical questions internal to rhetorical ethnography that can help transdisciplinary scholars navigate limitations and potential liabilities inherent in transdisciplinary work. I seek to more carefully consider transdisciplinary features of rhetoric though ethnographic study which, in its position as studying cultures both familiar and foreign to the researcher, mirror many of the disciplinary relations expressed in Marilyn Stember’s topology of disciplinarity. Noting that transdisciplinary rhetoricians engage with scholarship by experts in other fields, an ethnographic approach to transdisciplinary rhetoric recognizes that disciplinary experts might have expert knowledge that they struggle to communicate to non-experts, and rhetoricians should tread carefully in offering solutions to these communicative difficulties. I suggest rhetorical vulnerability and self-awareness expressed through standpoint as two strategies scholars of transdisciplinary rhetoric can use to adopt stances of transparent subjectivity rather than feigning scientific objectivity.

Institutional ethnography, a research methodology originally developed in sociology by Dorothy Smith, has entered writing studies with Michelle LaFrance’s Institutional Ethnography: A Theory of Pra...