Ann Shivers-McNair
Ann Shivers-McNair, a white woman with curly dark-brown hair, is framed in front of trees.
Dr. Ann Shivers-McNair is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona, on the lands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui Peoples. Her book, Beyond the Makerspace: Making and Relational Rhetorics, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press, and her work has appeared in journals such as Across the Disciplines; College English; Computers and Composition; enculturation; Kairos; Learning, Culture, and Social Interaction; Programmatic Perspectives; and Technical Communication; and in edited collections and conference proceedings. She is an associate editor of Technical Communication Quarterly and a co-organizer of UX@UA, a user experience community in Tucson, Arizona.
Title: Anti-Racist, Anti-Oppressive Design: Epistemologies, Coalitions, and Actions
Date: Friday, April 16, 2-3 PM EST
Description: This workshop follows Natasha Jones’ (2016, 2020) coalitional approach to narrative inquiry and Natasha Jones and Miriam Williams’ (2020) call for the just use of imagination to examine, (re)imagine, and (re)enact our uptakes of design frameworks and practices in rhetoric, composition, and technical communication. We will begin the workshop with a shared vocabulary for anti-racist, anti-oppressive design; then we will work through a three-part activity that participants can engage in on their own or in a shared document. Throughout the activity, we will attend to temporality, place, and sociality with a coalitional commitment to accounting for positionalities and redressing injustices (Jones 2020). In the first part of the activity, we will examine epistemologies and relations in our uptakes of design frameworks in our research, teaching, and/or community engagement. In the second part of the activity, we will employ our just use of imagination (Jones and Williams 2020) to imagine futures worth working toward in our design uptakes and practices. In the third part of the activity, we will enact our just use of imagination (Jones and Williams 2020) by identifying and committing to coalitional actions to implement anti-racist, anti-oppressive design.
Jones, N. N. (2016). Narrative Inquiry in Human-Centered Design: Examining Silence and Voice to Promote Social Justice Design Scenarios. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 46(4): 471-492.
Jones, N. N. (2020). Coalitional Learning in the Contact Zones: Inclusion and Narrative Inquiry in Technical Communication and Composition Studies. College English, 82(5): 515-526.
Jones, N. N., & Williams, M. F. (2020). The Just Use of Imagination: A Call to Action. Association of Teachers of Technical Writing List Serv. 10 June 2020.