A Making

In somewhat of an intersection between story and the job search, Amy Kimme Hea writes in Kairos (Fall 2004) of “A Making: The Job Search & Our Work as Computer Compositionists.” Kimme Hea is a faculty member in Rhetoric, Composition, and Teaching of English program at the University of Arizona. Her reference to herself and her field as one of “computer compositionists” was not one I was familiar with. She found herself frequently asked about the job market and job search for other faculty aspirants in her field. Kimme Hea writes:

Finding such productive and insightful ways to discuss that making, however, is profoundly difficult — linearity, imposition of the ends justifying the means, and other factors can all conspire to form the most purposeful, logical story about our work and our lives. [Donna] Haraway (1992) urges us to recall that “[l]ives are built; so we had best become good craftspeople with the other worldly actants in the story.”

The “making” refers to Haraway’s assertion that nature “is made through discourses and practices,” and Kimme Hea’s discovery that her job-market success was “about the making and unmaking of my life as an academic interested in composition, technology and critical theory.”

She has thus created a hypertext work that uses her own story as a backdrop to inform and guide others in the faculty job search.

Kimme Hea goes on to describe the sections to which the main page of this work links (I found the grad students section most informative, and while targeted at her own field, relevant to other teaching disciplines).

Kimme Hea writes:

… in the self-reflective section, our work, I juxtapose my own sense of the difference between the marketing for and holding of a computer composition position, addressing concerns about educating one’s colleagues about the work of a computer compositionist and thinking about tenure and promotion issues. In the grad students and faculty mentors sections, I pose framing questions for graduate students interested in computers and composition and offer suggestions to faculty mentors guiding these graduates. While not comprehensive, these sections are intended to be a initial points for graduate student and faculty consideration of computer composition work. The resources section provides links to prompt further exploration of the “making” of a career in computers and composition. These sections develop directly from my own first-year experiences as a new faculty member in the on-going process of making my academic life in computers and composition, one where I hope to contribute to a growing field that is always being made.