Frankie Condon

I completed my BFA at York University in Theatre (Performing Arts, Honours), my MA at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and my PhD at the University at Albany (State University of New York).

My primary areas of interest lie in the fields of Composition, Rhetoric, Communication, and Writing Centre Studies. More specifically, I am interested in the intersections between critical race, labor, and rhetoric studies; in braided narrative as method and genre; and in critical pedagogy.  In October 2023, my co-edited collection, CounterStories from the Writing Center (with Wonderful Faison), received the International Writing Centers Association’s Outstanding Book Award.

Currently, I serve as the Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the largest international organization of scholars of composition, rhetoric, and communication in the world. In 2023, I served as Program Chair for the 2023 Annual CCCC Convention in held in Chicago, IL – our first face-to-face gathering since the onset of the COVID epidemic.

At both the undergraduate and graduate levels, I teach with the aim of challenging students to notice, wonder at, and engage critically the power not only of language itself, but of particular rhetorical modes and strategies for creating, sustaining, and transforming our relations with and for one another. I believe, in other words, that the study of composition, rhetoric, and communication is also necessarily the study of how human relations are forged in and through language—shaped, enabled, and constrained through our representations of ourselves, of others, and of that which constitutes knowledge within particular contexts or communities. The study of composition, rhetoric, and communication should, I think, engage all of us in the study not only of what is said and how, but also toward what ends and for whose benefit. I hope students leave my courses with an expanded sense of their intellectual and rhetorical antecedents as well as with a much greater sense of their own contingency: their interdependence and the mutuality of their needs and interests across disparate visible and invisible identities and social and lived subjectivities. Furthermore, I hope that students leave my courses with a greatly enlarged sense of their own agency and their responsibility as scholars, rhetoricians and writers—as citizens of the world—to those with whom we share the world as well as those who will come after.

Books

The Problem from Hell: The History of Colour-Blind Rhetoric and Working-Class Consciousness. Pennsylvania State University Press, Under Contract.

Counterstories from the Writing Center. Co-edited with Wonderful Faison. Utah State University Press and the University of Colorado Press, 2021; 2023 Outstanding Book Award, International Writing Centers Assocation.

Performing Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing and Communication. Co-edited with Vershawn Ashanti Young. WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado, 2016.

I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric. Utah State University Press, March 2012; 2013 Top Five "Must Reads", Educators Award Committee of the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International.

The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Coauthored with Michele Eodice, Elizabeth Boquet, Anne Ellen Geller and Margaret Carroll. Utah State University Press, January 2007

Recent Keynote Addresses

Love, Hope, and Radical Imagination. Conference on College Composition and Communication, April 2024. Forthcoming, College English, December 2023

“Failing Sofia.” Two Year Colleges Association – Pacific Northwest. Yakima Valley College, Yakima WA, 21 October, 2023.

“Teaching to Redress: Using the Myth of Canadian Exceptionalism to Pursue Anti-Racist Writing Instruction in Rhetoric and Composition.” Co-authored and performed with Vershawn Ashanti Young. Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing (CASDW), June 2021.

“Anti-Racism and the Teaching of Writing.” Keynote Address. Co-authored and performed with Neisha Anne Green. Writing Across the Curriculum Conference, Auburn University, 2018.

“Performing Agency, Authority, Authenticity, and Antiracism in Writing Center Work.” Keynote Address. Co-authored and performed with Vershawn Ashanti Young. Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association Conference, Rowan University, 2018.

“The Languages We May Be.” Keynote Address: Canadian Writing Centres Association. Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto. 2017.

“A Season for Change: Imagining Transformative Writing Centre Labour.” Keynote Address: Northeast Writing Centers Association, Pace University, Westchester, New York. 2017.

“Creating Relations.” Survive and Thrive Annual Conference of the Medical Humanities, 2014.

“Troubled Home: Writing Centers and the Work of the Writing Commons.” East Central Writing Centers Association, 2013.

Recent Plenary Addresses

“From Reflection to Affiliation to Anti-Racist Pedagogy.” University of Virginia, May 2021.

“And the World Won’t End: Rewriting the Racial Imaginary in the Writing Centre and Classroom”. Plenary address (and workshop): Rhetoric & Writing Across Borders series, De Paul University, 2019.

“And the World Won’t End: Rewriting the Racial Imaginary in the Writing Centre and Classroom”. Plenary address (and workshop), University of Utah, 2019.

“A Conversation with Tutors”. Brief address and dialogue: Writing Center Speakers Series, Nevada State College, 2019.

“Anti-racist Pedagogy in First-Year Composition and Beyond.” Co-authored and performed with Vershawn Ashanti Young. University of Houston, 2018.

“Between What Is and What Ought To Be: (Re)Claiming the Writing Commons.” Washington State University, 2014.

“The Racecraft of Islamophobia.” Renison University College, Studies in Islam, 2015.

“Dog-Whistle Pedagogy: The Hidden Politics of White Supremacy in Teaching and Learning to Write.” University of Washington-Tacoma, 2015.

“Let’s Talk about Race.” Invited Workshops: “Faculty and the Work of Antiracism;” “Writing Centres and the Work of Antiracism.” Salt Lake City Community College, 2014

Articles and Chapters

“A Mouthful of Ashes: Against Fast Anti-Racism.” College English. Forthcoming, November 2024.

“Counterstory as research method and genre: Bean and the epic workshop fail.” SKRIB: Critical Studies in Writing Programs and Pedagogy, 1(1), 1-25. 2023.

“Cornerstone”. Co-authored with Neisha Anne Green. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1, 2022.

“A Bridge Across Our Fears: Excerpts from the Annals of Bean.” Writers: Craft and Context, V1, August 2020.

“Letters on Moving from Ally to Accomplice: Anti-racism and the Teaching of Writing” Co-authored with Neisha Anne Green. L.E. Bartlett, S. L. Tarabochia, A. R. Olinger, and M. Marshall, eds. Diverse Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and Writing Across the Curriculum: IWAC at 25. WAC Clearinghouse, 2020.

“Critical Race Theory and the Work of Writing Centers.” Co-authored with Neisha Anne Green and Wonderful Faison. In Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies. Co-edited by Jo Mackiewicz and Rebecca Babcock. Routledge, 2019.

“The Languages We May Be: Affiliative Relations and the Work of the Canadian Writing Centre.” Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, Vol. 28, 2018. http://journals.sfu.ca/cjsdw

“C’est Impossible/impossible n’est pas francais.” Review Essay. Writing Center Journal, 1 January 2017, vol 36(1), pp 217-234.

"Translingualism in Composition Studies and Second Language Writing: An Uneasy Alliance" Second author with Julia Williams (first author). TESL Canada, vol 33, issue 2, Fall 2016.

“Building a House for Linguistic Diversity: Writing Centers, English Language Teaching and Learning, and Social Justice.” Co-Authored with Bobbi Olson. Ben Rafoth and Shanti Bruce, eds. Utah State University Press. Utah State University Press, 2016.

“Stories to Live and Die By: In Memorium.” Survive and Thrive: A Journal of the Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine, Fall 2014.

”A Place Where There Isn’t Any Trouble.” Young and Martinez, eds. Code Meshing as World English: Policy, Pedagogy, Performance. NCTE, 2011.

“Bold: The Everyday Writing Center and the Production of New Knowledge in Anti-Racist Theory and Practice.” Co-Authored with Anne Ellen Geller and Meg Carroll. Rowan and Greenfield, eds. Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change. Utah State University Press. 2011.

My current research centers on the radical precedents of postracialism in American political and civic rhetoric. I am particularly interested in appeals for and fault-lines within calls for transracial solidarity made to white workers and workers of colour by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), as well as by socialist and communist organizers and activists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the U.S. and Canada. My current focus is on the historical deployments of the metaphor of colourblindness for racial justice within and beyond the radical labour and Leftist political movements of North America during the 19^th and 20^th century.

I am also at work on a book on anti-racist pedagogy: an extended counterstory tentatively titled, The Re-education of Dr. C: Anti-Racist Pedagogy and the Bean Chronicles.

• Founding member: The Aptly Outspoken! Collective: committed to anti-racist education, anti-racist pedagogy and anti-racist activism focused on naming, addressing, and dismantling the ongoing fatal racial dynamics, racism, and white supremacy in Canada and the US. The Aptly Outspoken! Collective organized in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. You can learn more about our work at: https://sites.google.com/view/aptlyoutspoken/home?authuser=0
• Recent speaking engagements include the Two Year College Association – Pacific Northwest Regional (2023 and scheduled again for 2024), Fordham University, Middlebury College, Cornell College, and Purdue University.

• Cross-cultural and antiracist rhetorics
• Critical race theory and counterstory
• Public rhetorics and social change
• Composition, rhetoric, communication, and writing centre theory, practice, and pedagogy