This week, we had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Dr. Stephanie Jones! Dr. Jones is our Associate Director of Composition, and teaches within the Composition and Rhetoric Department here at OkState. Make sure you check out her bio on our site!
There, you can view her recent publications and scholarly interests, and read below to find out what Dr. Jones is currently working on, why FYC is so important, what she's currently reading, and so much more!
On what projects/areas of interest greatly inform her current work:
I’m working with Dr. Samantha Blackmon and Not Your Mama’s Gamer. My work centers around Black women’s writing practices, in storytelling and also gaming, specifically video gaming. So, this special issue we’re working on is called Areas of Effect, and we’re looking at really anyone’s engagement with MMOs (massively multiplayer online games), or also multi-platform video games, and how gaming practices changed during covid, or if you’ve never played one before, and we’re hoping to make it a larger series and explore different kinds of games. We want to examine anyone’s orientation towards gaming and their experiences with gaming, and what that has to do with writing and rhetoric. I was really fortunate to meet Dr. Blackmon during a twitch stream, and we developed a relationship from there.
On Gaming Studies:
At Syracuse I was working with Collin Brooke, and he did a lot of tabletop RPG—that’s where I started my exploration. But it’s not where my heart is. I’ve played a lot more video games than DnD, not that I don’t like DnD or anything, but it’s just that I’ve started playing Pokémon, and I think my very first RPG was The Legend of Dragoon, and I’ve played a lot of the Assassin’s Creed games. I think that one of the things that I liked about grad school is that I came in with an open mind and wasn’t really sure what my project was going to be, and as I talked about things people were like, “there’s a theme to your hobbies and what you’re writing about.” All of these things kind of converged together, and then Black Panther came out, and then everything kind of crystallized from there.
Why First-Year Composition?
I took a break between my Master’s degree and my PhD work, and was a community college teacher. And so, I got to teach a lot of developmental students, working students, people who only had time between childcare and everything else to maybe take my classes on their lunchbreak. Or people who had retired were just coming back to college to pursue their passions, who had worked blue collar jobs their whole life and could now afford to go to college….so I think that, being able to teach across disciplines, and also with people from so many different walks of life, made FYC the place I felt the most comfortable. And so, going to grad school, and talking about those experiences in the classroom, people said “I think you’d be good at this,” and I applied for it [Assistant Director of TA Education for Syracuse University]…I also loved teacher training, that was my very favorite part of grad school. Helping people find their identity in the classroom, and how they want to teach…because I got to do that in such a rich environment…brings me joy.
On her favorite teaching activities/assignments she has implemented into her curriculum:
When I was doing my Master’s degree at Cal State Northridge, everything was broken up into three different units and there was a project called “Project Space.” It was mainly ethnography, and there were untrained freshman students going out in to the community…some [instructors] were better at scaffolding this project than others, but sometimes you would get these projects where students would go out and, not on purpose, but say horrible racist, maligned things about the people that they were observing because [the project] wasn’t scaffolded properly. And so I’ve spent my whole career taking pieces of “Project Space” and cultivating an ethical relationship to it. Now I do a unit where (it’s kind of like a scavenger hunt) I’ll have everybody in the class go out on campus and draw anything. And then they describe that drawing without using words. So, if there’s a famous statue on campus, they would draw that, and then write a sentence in which they can’t use the word “statue,” or maybe “cowboy,” those kind of descriptive words that would give it away. And then [back in the classroom] we would guess what it is, or if nobody guesses, then that student wins a cup of coffee or a Starbucks gift card…for example, I’ve had like architecture students draw extremely intricate, beautiful spaces…they go out on campus and see things you would’ve never seen before…and so I think it’s a wonderful way to introduce yourself to a space but also think about word choice, and why we’re using the words we are to describe things, and if those words are even communicating things to people. For example, there’s charged words, like the way Black people are described, or other people of color, that would maybe “help someone” figure out that’s what they look like, but that’s not who they are, and this lesson is a great way to pull on and examine those tensions.
On what she wants to see/implement in the OkState FYC department:
Part of the excitement of coming to Oklahoma was that I’m always thinking about responses to place and purpose. So, coming to a big agricultural state, where many students have ties to both agriculture and the land, I’m looking forward to developing curriculum in FYC in particular (because we get to see everyone) that has students write responsively to the space that they’re in and to Oklahoma as an agricultural center. I’m really interested in food ways and how we consume people’s culture without consciously thinking about it. So maybe course shells responsive to climate change, but also maybe take students out to the Botanical Gardens, which are super beautiful. I got to see those, and my gears were turning, about how we could have responsive essay assignments there, writing about place and purpose, thinking about ways [students] are trying to grow in the same soil as all of the plants and vegetation. It could be really exciting, and it’s a beautiful place to be.
On her upcoming Spring 2023 course, ENGL 5560: African American Rhetoric:
One of the magical things about African American Rhetoric is that it’s so future focused, and that there are a lot of different ways to approach futurism, but I think Afrofuturism in particular really hones in on that idea that we’re making the future today. The choices we make now are what sustains and cultivates the future. It’s not as if the future is space we can’t connect with. And so, what I’m really looking forward to most is introducing students to scholarship and scholars, but also artists, activists, video game designers, all kinds of different people that can show us that if we can see ourselves in them that we can see the future in each other. I think that, as you develop larger projects, being able to recognize yourself and other people in your scholarship in different ways, is sometimes that spark you need to get you through. Or to think about the rhetoric, literature, whatever you’re looking at in your coursework to sort of help you develop your projects and make a deep and meaningful connection to those projects, because your dissertation work is going to follow you for the rest of your career. I’m all about making that a positive relationship that’s sustainable for you for years to come. And I think that African American Rhetoric is an excellent foundation for that.
On her current projects:
I have some creative pieces coming out, hopefully soon. I also have looking at ways that African American Rhetoric can complicate and extend the framework we currently have for digital rhetoric, and examines who is left out in that space. That piece should be out sometime next year, academic publishing takes a long time.
On what she’s reading right now:
Right now, I’m really interested in all of these adaptations–if someone is authentically jumping into the sci-fi/fantasy genre, or if it’s just because it’s identified as a cash cow [genre]. So, I’m going back and looking at some of the really popular fiction writers and reading them, as they’ve tossed their hat into the ring. There’s Anne Rice, who we think of as a vampire author, but she also wrote all of these books about witches in New Orleans. So, I’m going back and exploring that, because I’m not super into vampires, but I’m really into witch stuff, as far as that goes. I have family from New Orleans, my mother was born near there and I’ve talked a lot about that in my work. The method I developed for my dissertation work was called Rhetorical Root Working, so it’s all about root work and working with land and cultivation and things like that. There’s a wonderful, absolutely wonderful magic school series with a young Black girl at the center called Amari and the Night Brothers. The second one just came out, and it’s something I can read over and over again. If you’re looking for someone who is not transphobic, as we’ve lost Harry Potter, Amari is your answer. I think the writing is better, the character’s relationship to people and differences is much more representative. Her best friend is Hispanic, and the book includes other, different Black characters, and all the creatures are fully developed people and aren’t just there as plot devices. Like, there won’t be a basilisk that’s just going to hurt a young white girl, and then we’re all going to go and try to save her. It totally opens your eyes to what we were missing with Harry Potter. It’s so good, and I recommend it to everybody.
We are incredibly fortunate to have Dr. Jones as a member of our FYC community! Reach out to say hello, visit her faculty page to read her amazing work, and if you haven't already, sign up for her graduate course next semester!
The above dialogue has been automatically transcribed, and has been slightly altered by both the transcription and the interviewer.