Threat Assessment: Women of Color Teaching Ideological Critique in the Neoliberal Classroom

Gena E. Chandler is associate professor and the director of the MA Program in English at Virginia Tech. She teaches African American literature, post-colonial literature, and critical literary theory. She has published articles on the work of Charles Johnson, including a piece in Texas Studies in Literature and Language and a piece in the edited collection Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher (2007). Her book The Wanderer in African American Literature is forthcoming in the spring of 2020. She has taught at the college level since 1998 and at Virginia Tech since 2004. She has earned the 2015 Virginia Tech Certificate of Teaching Excellence Award, the 2015 College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Carroll B. Shannon Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2007 Diggs Teaching Scholar Award.

Jennifer Sano-Franchini is associate professor and director of professional and technical writing at Virginia Tech, where she is also core faculty in the PhD program in rhetoric and writing. Her research and teaching interests are in the cultural politics of user experience design, Asian American rhetoric, and institutional rhetorics. She coedited Building a History, Having a Home: A History of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Asian/Asian American Caucus (2017). Her work has also appeared in College Composition and Communication, TechnicalCommunication, Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization, and Computers and Composition. She has taught writing at the college level since 2006 and at Virginia Tech since 2013. In 2015 she earned Virginia Tech’s XCaliber Award for exceptional contributions to technology-enriched teaching and learning.