UPDATE: This event has been rescheduled for Monday, October 25 at 4:30–6:00pm.
This quarter we are welcoming Dr. Aja Y. Martinez as a part of our Writing & Rhetoric Across Borders speaker series. Her talk will be focusing around her research article entitled “Counterstory in Education: Critical Race Theory’s Pedagogy for Social Transformation.”
WRD will be hosting Dr. Martinez on Monday, October 25th at 4:30–6:00pm in McGowan South 107 (as well as on Zoom for those who cannot attend in person).
Dr. Martinez is an Assistant Professor of English at University of North Texas, whose book Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory, was named one of the 20 best New Rhetoric reads in 2021 by BookAuthority and is also nominated for the 2021 Teaching Literature Book Award. When not working on CRT and counterstories, Dr. Martinez contributes to the discourse on code-meshing.
Dr. Martinez’ works are used in various WRD courses, but widely in WRD 506 Multicultural Rhetorics with Dr. Monica Reyes. In addition to learning about CRT (the intersection of race, law, and justice as well as what racial justice looks like), students in the class worked with individuals to construct counterstory from a facet of their lived experience. CRT has been made controversial as of late, and Dr. Martinez uses it as a framework for constructing counterstory and using it as a methodology in rhetoric and writing studies. Counterstories provide agency to marginalized people and ideals. For example, the counterstory I worked on described my partner’s relationship with a traditional school environment as a person of color, and how her identities as female and multicultural led her to the edge of a space that is supposed to help and nurture her.
Dr. Martinez emphasizes that counterstories (taught and understood through a CRT lens) are just as valuable as dominant (Western) ideals, and are a useful pedagogical tool for the beginning or advanced classroom. They allow for uncommon ideas, experiences, and stories to be shared so that their messages can be incorporated into pictures of human experiences. Each person who worked on a counterstory in WRD 506 now has a better understanding of CRT and what it means to be a part of the minority voice/experience and how to still find agency within it. Counterstories are rooted in creative non-fiction and its historical off-shoots (like oral tradition and slave narratives), and are melded to fit into modern contexts based on the author or topic.
Dr. Martinez uses racial and feminist criticisms in addition to CRT to support her thoughts on the importance of counterstory. She shows that “CRT theories and methods can inform teaching, research, and writing/publishing of counterstory.” And her “work argues specifically that counterstory provides method and methodology for other(ed) perspectives to contribute to conversations about narrative, dominant ideology, and their intersecting influence on curricular standards and institutional practices”. Dr. Martinez’s body of scholarship provides an interdisciplinary understanding of how counterstory functions, while accomplishing a further goal of establishing counterstory as a pedagogically employable method in writing classrooms, as seen in the projects from WRD 506 linked above.
Her presentation can be attended in person (McGowan South 107) or watched live on Zoom. If you would like to join via Zoom, please register for the event here.