For this academic year, WRD welcomes Professor Monica Reyes as an assistant professor, who has spent her personal and professional life in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, a transborder community with many international ports of entry. Dr.Reyes will instruct WRD 361: Topics in Alternative Rhetorics and WRD 240: Argumentative Writing. Her Alternative Rhetorics course focuses on femenist rhetorics, and Dr. Reyes says she is thinking about ways to incorporate service learning components into all her courses despite distancing.
She earned her PhD in English Studies remotely through Old Dominion University in Virginia and was able to focus her dissertation on her community work at an emergency shelter on the border where she volunteered in numerous ways, including language tutoring. Monica mentioned her experience as a remote PhD student as offering her some confidence regarding this quarter of remote teaching.
Research and Scholarship
As a cultural rhetorician, Dr. Reyes is curious about the role of rhetoric in conceiving practices and customs, often using Chicana feminism methodologies to help her trace rhetorical networks. While teaching at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, she worked with colleagues to employ the findings of her PhD research. She shared that the initial approach of the group was to begin collaborating on “writing consultations with clients based on need and language skills.”
Dr. Reyes said when it came time to apply for a PhD program, she was looking for a remote program that would allow her to continue working with those seeking asylum at the Texas-Mexico border. The remote nature of Reyes’ PhD allowed her to integrate the volunteer work she was doing with her academic research, resulting in a dissertation project that asked asylum seekers about what resources could be helpful for their application – a complicated process that is known to last several years. The National Immigration Forum states that the “length of asylum process may vary depending on…the particular facts of his or her asylum claim” (National Immigration Forum, 2019). During her PhD research, many of the respondents voiced a need for assistance navigating the asylum application.
Dr. Reyes also mentioned something strikingly beautiful about working in her transborder valley community, saying “the narratives may be used in [client’s] collaborations with legal assistance… I see this initiative as an effort primarily to support clients in storytelling on their own terms in a safe, nonjudgmental space.” Dr. Reyes’s’s work helped clients navigate rhetoric used by immigration officials throughout application paperwork and interviews, trying to invalidate asylum claims. But it also offered asylum-seekers a space to be honest, informed, and rhetorically equipped.
Dr. Reyes recently published “Accounts of Asylum: A Call Towards Transnational Literacies of Displacement,” in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, & Culture this past February. Dr. Reyes described this work as focusing on “the kinds of stories that people seeking asylum share in order to be considered credible,” and describes in more detail the sort of rhetorical red-tape asylum seekers are forced to navigate.
Reyes’ past participation in service learning projects made her a strong candidate for DePaul’s mission of community action. Despite remote learning conditions, Reyes shared that she is exploring options for virtually partnering her WRD students with organizations during the pandemic. No matter the focus or modality, Reyes assured students that each of her courses will interrogate the relationships between rhetoric and advocacy.
Interested in Dr. Reyes’ work? Visit her website and check out the course description for her winter quarter course WRD 506: Multicultural Rhetoric.