Emily Rónay Johnston

Grit Is Not It: Reckoning with Resilience in "Post"-Pandemic First-Year Composition

Emily Rónay Johnston is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Writing Studies at the University of California, Merced. She brings to this project a wide range of professional and personal expertise on resilience. Emily’s social work experience in domestic violence shelters and an addiction recovery center for women hast aught her that resilience is agency—the capacity to exercise choice in the face of adversity—and that it is a basic human right. Through her twenty years of experience teaching first-year composition and eight years of experience administering writing programs, Emily has explored how writing can, at once, facilitate and inhibit agency. Through this exploration, Emily has come to understand that resilience is cultivated at the intersections of telling our stories and thinking and feeling in community with others. Emily’s own lived experiences as a White bisexual ciswoman with clinical anxiety and post-traumatic stress constantly remind her that resilience is structural—that it is possible only when our material needs are met and the institutions with which we interface are conspiring to support our agency. Emily has published articles on the relationship between writing and adversity, as well as the restorative promises of writing pedagogy in the face of adversity, inCollege Composition and Communication (2023), Writers: Craft & Context (2022), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (2020), and elsewhere, and in the edited collections Systems Shift: Creating and Navigating Change in Rhetoric and Composition Administration (2023) and Composing Feminist Interventions: Activism, Engagement, Praxis (2018) published by University Press of Colorado.