Jessica Restaino
Jessica Restaino, a white woman with dark brown eyes and hair, listens to headphones while surrounded by people at a museum. She appears to be happily caught by surprise by the photographer
Dr. Jessica Restaino is Professor of Writing Studies and Director of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Montclair State University. She is the author of First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground (SWR 2012); co-editor (with Laurie Cella) of Unsustainable: Re-imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service-Learning, and the University (Lexington 2012); and author of Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness (2019). Surrender is the recipient of the 2020 CCCC Outstanding Book Award (monograph category) and a runner-up for the 2020 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award.
Title: Doing the Work that Undoes Us
Date: Wednesday, April 14, 5:00-6:30pm
Description: Sharing as a model my own struggles to navigate personal, ethical, and methodological challenges in developing my book Surrender, this workshop will invite participants to think through and against their own most challenging, most ambitious collaborations. This workshop is about “doing the work that undoes us,” which means understanding how to approach—and why to approach (and perhaps even sometimes why not to)—the sorts of projects that may intimidate, frighten, even overwhelm us. Together we will work to ask the sorts of questions that build the foundations for doing challenging work, which include assessing the goals, standpoints, and limitations from all sides of the collaborative research relationship. Ultimately we will work to craft the sort of focus that can make such collaborations positive, inventive, and mutually sustaining. I will bookend the workshop with some reflection on my current project, a collaboration that reaches across significant differences in expertise and identities. Participants at all stages of project development are welcome. This workshop is capped at 25 participants.
Note: Dr. Restaino is offering an individual mentoring session for up to five workshop participants (draft feedback/conference on project idea); email her a short description of the project and mentoring needs (restainoj@montclair.edu). She will schedule these separately.