Meet Allison Rivard and Cassandra Pay, authors of “Feminist Rhetoric by Another Name: Examination of its Quiet and Unacknowledged Presence Across Disciplines"
Surfacing Feminist Rhetorics Across Disciplines with Allison Rivard and Cassandra Pay
Blog post by Kelsey Hawkins
The research project which precipitated Allison Rivard and Cassandra Pay’s article, “Feminist Rhetoric by Another Name: Examination of its Quiet and Unacknowledged Presence Across Disciplines,” began with a feminist rhetorics course. Allison and Cassandra, both graduates of Roger Williams University’s legal studies program, were primarily interested in the ways that feminist rhetorics emerge across various and diverse disciplinary contexts. In particular, the authors aimed to “acknowledge and identify the presence of feminist rhetorical practices within different academic spheres.” The subsequent article, forthcoming in the 23rd issue of Young Scholars in Writing, examines these presences, highlighting the ways that feminist rhetorics materialize across an array of disciplines – predictable majors like political science, philosophy, education, and history, but less easily anticipated fields like psychology, forensics, finance, and criminal justice too.
When I interviewed Allison and Cassandra over the summer of 2025, I was especially interested in the connection they developed between feminist methodologies and the issue of academic access, both for students across disciplinary contexts and for researchers. As they were interviewing participants for their project, the coauthors worked to uncover the ways that “feminist rhetorics are applicable to everyone.” Put another way: every context produces the potentiality for feminist rhetorics’ emergence. In Allison and Cassandra’s project, it was the researchers’ job to tease them out. The results of their interviews reveal how the employment of feminist rhetorical practices allow students increased access to their disciplinary communities, discourses, and knowledges. For example, an interview with Lucas, a secondary education major, surfaced powerful findings about how the employment of Alexandra Hidalgo’s “strategic contemplation” provides developing teachers with a framework for enacting responsive and collaborative pedagogical practices. Similarly, American Sign Language major Xiorama leverages rhetorical listening, originally theorized by Krista Ratcliffe, in order to “mak[e] a conscientious effort to fully understand, respect, and remember the input of deaf people in future signing conversations.”
Just as feminist rhetorical strategies increase access for the emergent professionals they interviewed, feminist research methodologies expanded Allison and Cassandra’s access to scholarly research and, eventually, publication. In our interviews, each author credited the expansive conception of writing, rhetoric, and research presented in their feminist rhetorics course for allowing them to imagine the possibilities afforded by their research. Through a commitment to feminist methodologies and composing practices – evidenced by the collaborative nature of the initial project, the nontraditional form of their subsequent article, and an intentional emphasis on participants’ positionalities and identities – Allison and Cassandra found that “academic publication can be inclusive and accessible.”
As a feminist rhetorician and proponent of increased publishing opportunities for undergraduate students, Allison and Cassandra’s experiences publishing in Young Scholars in Writing offer generative insights for both mentors and editors. In interviewing the coauthors and reading their article, I encountered firsthand the significance of undergraduate scholars’ contributions to the field of writing studies. As current or future writing instructors, we should continue to privilege undergraduate voices and create opportunities for our students to undertake meaningful research projects. And editors who read Allison and Cassandra’s article will encounter a powerful reminder that the very methodologies and forms which strain our conception of “traditional” scholarship are often the same ones which stretch access to the mechanisms of knowledge production toward the margins of our field. For undergraduate scholars interested in publishing their research, Cassandra offers the following advice: “do something you find interesting and stand by the purpose of your project during the editing process.” Perhaps the findings in their article will offer you a fruitful entry-point into your own project.
Kelsey Hawkins is an Associate Instructor at Indiana University of Indianapolis. She received her MA in English at IUI where she also conducted her thesis research on post-carceral rhetorics and abolition pedagogies. She also chairs WPA-GO's Accessibility Committee, and her current research interests include accessible and inclusive writing assessment and the relationship between genAI technologies and abolition literacies. You can find her work in The Peer Review, ECWCA Journal, Xchanges, Peitho, and The Journal of Writing Assessment (forthcoming).
