Ph.D. students Walker Smith and Caitlin Burns Allen co-edit special issue

Ph.D. candidates Walker Smith ('23) and Caitlin Burns Allen ('22) have co-edited a new double special issue of Across the Disciplines, along with Dr. Gesa Kirsch (Soka University of America) and Dr. Romeo Garcia (University of Utah). Across the Disciplines is a refereed journal devoted to language, learning, and academic writing published by WAC Clearinghouse. Their special issue is titled Unsettling the Archives and features fourteen articles by a wide range of scholars and two introductions by the editors.

The special issue came out of a graduate seminar taught at the University of Louisville by Watson Visiting Professor Gesa Kirsch in 2019. Dr. Romeo Garcia visited UofL that year as a visiting speaker, with support from the Thomas R. Watson Endowment. 

Unsettling the Archives explores "what it means to unsettle archival research across the disciplines; reflect on how to respond to and counteract and resist racist, colonial histories; and consider the prospect of traversing reciprocal, community-based, and/or decolonial archival practices. Contributors offer both critiques of archiving as a set of institutional practices, ideologies, and conventions, and introduce nuanced tactics of critical, communal, and digital archiving within and against systems of power. As such, this special double issue initiates an important cross-disciplinary conversation by bringing archivists, librarians, and information scientists into dialogue with rhetorical scholars doing archival work."

You can read the special issue here: https://wac.colostate.edu/atd/

For more information about Walker Smith, Caitlin Burns Allen, and our other Ph.D. students, go to https://louisville.edu/english/people/PhD-Students.