On March 13, 2025, the CTRW hosted Stephanie Kerschbaum who shared her work about “Learning from Student Writing to Address Educational Injustice and Access.” Her recent research examines the ways that people navigate difference in everyday encounters, from small-group peer review in writing classes to mundane interactions around disability disclosure.
We asked Stephanie to share some thoughts about writing more broadly in their personal and professional lives.
What role does writing play in your life? This could be professionally, academically, personally, or all of the above! What does writing look like for you?
Stephanie: Writing is something that I’ve never stopped finding to be endlessly fascinating — right now, in part because I edit a book series and because I spend so much time supporting graduate student writers in navigating large-scale/long-term projects, I am spending a lot of time thinking about how people tap in to and learn more about their own relationships with writing. Recognizing the various ups and downs, the many affective relations, the different material and technological resources, and human interactions that shape any composition is such a powerful insight for writers thinking about their own process or how to support others’.
What do you hope your research contributes to the conversation on writing or the teaching of writing?
Stephanie: When I wrote Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference, I hoped people would consider how deeply personal, relational, and affective the work of writing and interacting with others around writing is. As I expanded my thinking with Signs of Disability, I wanted to consider how the process of marking difference that emerged in Toward was not limited to verbal or written utterances, but to the ways that our bodies are read and negotiated amidst others. If it has an impact in the field of writing studies, I hope it contributes to the way we recognize the embodied, affective, and personal dynamics that are always part of how a text is encountered in the world, read, and responded to
What do you want to know about writing?
Stephanie: The more I learn about writing, the more interested I get in learning how to approach and respond to texts in ethical, considered, meaningful ways, and I’ll also admit that it feels harder to know when and how to lean in to these deep relationships with texts and composers given the speed at which texts are often expected to be produced (and consumed, and responded to).
What values inform your writing? Your teaching of writing? How do you practice those values in your writing or teaching?
Stephanie: Writing is deeply personal, and engaging with others’ writing is often an act of incredible generosity and reciprocity. It matters who composes, it matters who reads and engages, and it matters how we build relationships with and around texts, composers, and technologies. I hope that I enact these values in the way I offer feedback and respond to student texts as well as in my editing work with SWR — I love talking with people about their writing and build in as many opportunities to do that as possible.
Stephanie Kerschbaum is Professor of English at the University of Washington, where she also directs the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and serves as core faculty in the Disability Studies Program. She is editor of the Studies in Writing and Rhetoric book series and author of Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference (NCTE, 2014), which won the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Advancement of Knowledge Award, and Signs of Disability (NYU, 2022), which is available in print and open-access. Since moving to Washington in 2021 she has discovered a love of hiking in the Cascade mountains and gazing upon large bodies of water.