PhD, University at Albany
MA, Clarion University
BFA, York University
Extension: 47141
Email: fcondon@uwaterloo.ca
Website: https://uwaterloo.ca/scholar/fcondon
Biography
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 Past-Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the largest international organization of scholars of composition, rhetoric, and communication in the world. I served as Chair of CCCC during 2024, the organization’s 75th year. 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.
Selected Publications and Addresses
Books
The Re-Education of Dr. C: Contending with White Supremacy in the Anti-Racist Classroom. Utah State University Press, Under Contract.
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
“Come and See: Uncertainty, Inquiry, and the Work of Anti-Racist Pedagogy.” TYCA-PNW, Whatnot Community College. 26 October 2024.
“Love, Hope, and Radical Imagination." Conference on College Composition and Communication, April 2024.
“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.
Articles and Chapters
“Love, Hope, and Radical Imagination.” CCCCs Chair’s Address, 2024. CCC, Vol/ 76, Issue 2. December 2024.
“Editors’ Introduction.” Co-Authored with Aja Martinez. Frankie Condon and Aja Martinez, co-editors College English, Special Issue on Critical Race Theory. November 2024.
“A Mouthful of Ashes: Against Fast Anti-Racism.” College English. September 2024.
"The Heart Where I Have Roots.” Rhetor vol. 9, 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.
Fellowships & Awards
- Teaching Award: 2021 Faculty of Arts Excellence in Teaching Award Recipient, University of Waterloo
- Federation of Students Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award (Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance), 2017
- Outstanding Performance Award (excellence in teaching and scholarship) Recipient, University of Waterloo, May 2015
- I Hope I Join the Band selected for “Top 5 'Must-Reads' for 2013” by the Educators Award Committee of The Delta Kappa Gamma Society International, 2013
Grants
- SSHRC Insight 2025-2031: “The House of the Hangman: Memory, Remorse, Love.” $73,182
- UW SSHRC Explore 2024-2026: “The House of the Hangman: Memory, Remorse, Love.” $6164
- UW/SSHRC HSS Endowment Fund 2024: “The Road to Hell: A History of Colour-Blind Rhetoric and Working-Class Consciousness.” $2100
- Absolute Equality: The Radical Precedents of Post-Racial Rhetorics in the 21st Century. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Awarded for 2014 – 2017: $91,445.
- Grant-in-Aid, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Absolute Equality: Rhetorics of Race in the Industrial Workers Movement, 2011-2012
Current research
As I complete my book, “The Road to Hell,” one strand of my research continues to centre on the radical precedents of postracialism in American political and civic rhetoric. I am particularly focused on historical deployments of the metaphor of colourblindness for racial justice within and beyond the radical labour and Leftis political movements of North America during the 19th and 20th centuries.
In pedagogical theory and practice, I am at work completing “The Re-Education of Dr. C: Contending with White Supremacy in the Anti-Racist Classroom.” Here, I am turning the theoretical lenses of critical race theory (CRT) toward white teachers who claim anti-racism as a pedagogical commitment to examine where we fail and whether or how we learn to more fully possess what we profess.
For several years now I have been working as the Lead Editor (and now Co-Editor with Jennifer Mitchell) for Genocide Watch: an international NGO dedicated to predicting and preventing genocide around the world. Increasingly, my scholarship is turning toward genocide studies and the rhetoric of genocide, in particular. My 2025 SSHRC Insight Grant is funding a new project in this vein: “The House of the Hangman: Memory, Remorse, Love.”
Knowledge Mobilization
- 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.
Areas of graduate supervision
- 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