Zosha Stuckey
I am a Professor at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland--a Baltimorean through & through--working in the areas of rhetorical theory and history, community engagement, social & racial justice, professional writing, and (in my not so distant past) disability studies. My book, A Rhetoric of Remnants: Idiots, Half-Wits, and Other State-Sponsored Inventions from SUNY Press can be found here: http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5911-a-rhetoric-of-remnants.aspx. I helped to create the Diversity Faculty Fellows Program at Towson and am also an active member and facilitator of Intergroup Dialogue. I founded and coordinate the GIVE (Grantwriting in Valued Environments) project where students write for and support community nonprofits in Baltimore City.
I can be contacted at [email protected]
G.I.V.E. (Grantwriting in Valued Environments): https://www.towson.edu/cla/departments/english/resources/grantwriting-valued-environments.html
Diversity Faculty Fellows: https://www.towson.edu/provost/initiatives/diversity/facultyfellow.html
Intergroup Dialogue: https://www.towson.edu/provost/initiatives/diversity/fellow.html
I can be contacted at [email protected]
G.I.V.E. (Grantwriting in Valued Environments): https://www.towson.edu/cla/departments/english/resources/grantwriting-valued-environments.html
Diversity Faculty Fellows: https://www.towson.edu/provost/initiatives/diversity/facultyfellow.html
Intergroup Dialogue: https://www.towson.edu/provost/initiatives/diversity/fellow.html
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Books by Zosha Stuckey
Examines the rhetoric in and around the New York State Asylum for Idiots in Syracuse from 1854 to 1884.
In the nineteenth century, language, rather than biology, created what we think of as disability. Much of the rhetorical nature of “idiocy,” and even intelligence itself, can be traced to the period when the New York State Asylum for Idiots in Syracuse first opened in 1854—memorialized today as the first public school for people considered “feeble-minded” or “idiotic.” The asylum-school pupil is a monumental example of how education attempts to mold and rehabilitate one’s being. Zosha Stuckey demonstrates how all education is in some way complicit in the urge to normalize.
The broad, unstable, and cross-cultural category of “people with disabilities” endures an interesting relationship with rhetoric, education, speaking, and writing. Stuckey demystifies some of that relationship which requires new modes of inquiry and new ways of thinking, and she calls into question many of the assumptions about embodied differences as they relate to pedagogy, history, and public participation.
“There is no other single work quite like this one. Stuckey makes an original contribution to rhetorical studies, to disability history, and to a history of special education.” — Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, coeditor of Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge
Papers by Zosha Stuckey
racial and reparative justice, and transformational WPA
leadership, I call for more writing teachers and writing
programs to take up grantwriting as a way to create much
needed infrastructure for small, struggling grassroots
nonprofits (NPOs). I detail G.I.V.E. (Grantwriting in
Valued Environments), a community writing project at
Towson University in the Baltimore metro area, where
students are a primary, if not the main, source of
research, grantwriting, and grants tracking for partner
organizations via classwork, paid internships, and part-time employment. I problematize and locate this work
within the nonprofit industrial complex and discuss the
structure and functioning of grassroots organizations and
how their particular milieu lends itself to projects like
G.I.V.E. The project views equity as way to “return stolen
resources” (Marcus and Munoz 2018), acknowledges the
legacies of injustice in our communities, places students
of color in leadership roles, and prioritizes work with
under-resourced organizations that are led by folks from
the community itself.
This article looks to the genre of letter-writing and to epistolary rhetoric in order to recover perspectives seemingly lost amongst the medicalized discourse of asylum histories. These hard-to-find letters written in the nineteenth century by pupils, family members, and teachers open us up to new perspectives not available in other archival documents. I give a brief introduction to the history and theory of epistolary rhetoric, delimit a disability epistolary, and then consider a group of letters in terms of the rhetorical action they perform. I conclude by emphasizing the significance of this cross-disciplinary work for both rhetoric and disability studies.
In this paper, published in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Literacy, and Culture, I show how two side show performers in the nineteenth century demonstrate a sense of rhetorical fitness. My interest in recovering the rhetorical histories of these women began here with the idea that women with disabilities have not been given the sort of historicity or rhetoricity they deserve. But for Leak and Warren, their fitness does not necessarily come in the form of a direct or uncomplicated self-fashioning or "speaking back;" rather, I find myself having to tap the rhetorical subjectivities of these women by disentangling traces of agency that are enmeshed within a complex web of textual accretions.
Examines the rhetoric in and around the New York State Asylum for Idiots in Syracuse from 1854 to 1884.
In the nineteenth century, language, rather than biology, created what we think of as disability. Much of the rhetorical nature of “idiocy,” and even intelligence itself, can be traced to the period when the New York State Asylum for Idiots in Syracuse first opened in 1854—memorialized today as the first public school for people considered “feeble-minded” or “idiotic.” The asylum-school pupil is a monumental example of how education attempts to mold and rehabilitate one’s being. Zosha Stuckey demonstrates how all education is in some way complicit in the urge to normalize.
The broad, unstable, and cross-cultural category of “people with disabilities” endures an interesting relationship with rhetoric, education, speaking, and writing. Stuckey demystifies some of that relationship which requires new modes of inquiry and new ways of thinking, and she calls into question many of the assumptions about embodied differences as they relate to pedagogy, history, and public participation.
“There is no other single work quite like this one. Stuckey makes an original contribution to rhetorical studies, to disability history, and to a history of special education.” — Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, coeditor of Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge
racial and reparative justice, and transformational WPA
leadership, I call for more writing teachers and writing
programs to take up grantwriting as a way to create much
needed infrastructure for small, struggling grassroots
nonprofits (NPOs). I detail G.I.V.E. (Grantwriting in
Valued Environments), a community writing project at
Towson University in the Baltimore metro area, where
students are a primary, if not the main, source of
research, grantwriting, and grants tracking for partner
organizations via classwork, paid internships, and part-time employment. I problematize and locate this work
within the nonprofit industrial complex and discuss the
structure and functioning of grassroots organizations and
how their particular milieu lends itself to projects like
G.I.V.E. The project views equity as way to “return stolen
resources” (Marcus and Munoz 2018), acknowledges the
legacies of injustice in our communities, places students
of color in leadership roles, and prioritizes work with
under-resourced organizations that are led by folks from
the community itself.
This article looks to the genre of letter-writing and to epistolary rhetoric in order to recover perspectives seemingly lost amongst the medicalized discourse of asylum histories. These hard-to-find letters written in the nineteenth century by pupils, family members, and teachers open us up to new perspectives not available in other archival documents. I give a brief introduction to the history and theory of epistolary rhetoric, delimit a disability epistolary, and then consider a group of letters in terms of the rhetorical action they perform. I conclude by emphasizing the significance of this cross-disciplinary work for both rhetoric and disability studies.
In this paper, published in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Literacy, and Culture, I show how two side show performers in the nineteenth century demonstrate a sense of rhetorical fitness. My interest in recovering the rhetorical histories of these women began here with the idea that women with disabilities have not been given the sort of historicity or rhetoricity they deserve. But for Leak and Warren, their fitness does not necessarily come in the form of a direct or uncomplicated self-fashioning or "speaking back;" rather, I find myself having to tap the rhetorical subjectivities of these women by disentangling traces of agency that are enmeshed within a complex web of textual accretions.
On April 23, 1951 at age 16, Johns delivered a sobering speech to the student body of Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia that catalyzed a walk-out and strike to protest the unequal conditions (overcrowding, disrepair of buildings, lack of resources, etc.) at their all-black high school. But that's not all. Once securing the support of the NAACP, the students at Moton went on to file Davis v. Prince Edward County which became the only student-led initiative consolidated into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision (Epps-Robertson 14-15; Green 37-56; Kanefield 19-38; Kluger 452-8).
It may come as no surprise that the walk-out speech which led to a school strike, that Johns' delivered to over 400 of her high school peers, was not recorded. A documentary film made in 2012 by New Millennium Studios and actor-director Tim Reid about the 1951 student protests became the source from which I could study the historic speech and walk-out as dramatizations ("Behind-the-Scenes"). Tim Reid, as it turns out, reached out to Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander, an accomplished and respected historian, to author (a form of ghostwriting) a version of the Johns' speech that was to be part of the film he produced which is now available for educational purposes.
But how does a writer go about composing such a re-creation? What are the ethical constraints? In the essay, I am less concerned with the rhetoric of the speech, though that is still important; rather, my focus is on 1) deciphering--via an interview with her--how Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander, historian and Dean of Liberal Arts at Norfolk State University, composed the text of Johns' speech in preparation for its re-enactment 2) how other writers have composed and can compose similar projects that involve critical imagination and reparative historiography via oral histories and assemblages 3) and finally, how one might go about using this method as a pedagogical assignment.