Jon M. Wargo, a Ph.D. student in the Curriculum, Instruction and Teacher Education (CITE) program at Michigan State University, has won an award for his work exploring language and literacy practice of the LGBTQ youth community in Michigan.
Wargo is receiving the inaugural CCCC Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), which celebrates work that connects and forges new conversations at the nexus of queer theory, sexual and gender minority experiences and writing and rhetoric studies.
His winning paper, “Technoliteracy Sponsorscapes as Rhetorical Lamination(s); Or, Everything I Learned About ‘Writing’ Queer I Learned Online,” builds off his dissertation research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth navigating inequality and difference through writing. Wargo studied seven teenagers aged 16-19 from the Greater Michigan area and their uses of popular communication sites and mobile media apps, such as Tumblr and Snapchat, as well as how they communicated in more formal environments, such as the language arts classroom. He studied how these teens used their writing to push past the stigmas of their difference, and how the Internet came to play a key role in their “queer”-ness.
“For the young people that I work with, the paradoxical anonymity online renders them with a visibility and community they wouldn’t have otherwise,” Wargo explained. “The digital environments of Tumblr and the practices of multimodal composing allow young queer people to write the self into existence. They are providing different narratives for the LGBTQ youth community; it’s not just about being bullied. It’s also about having a voice and sharing that voice through writing counter-narratives.”
Among other criteria, applicants for the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award must be accepted to the CCCC Annual Convention Program and currently be enrolled in graduate school or first-time presenters at the convention.
For Wargo, this award is a culmination of his career working with the LGBTQ community. He has worked with a number of Gay Straight Alliance Network and queer-inclusive student groups, which helped originally build his interest in pursuing the topic for his dissertation.
The research was supported in 2013-14 by the Eastern Michigan University Equality Research Center when Wargo was a recipient of the Equality Knowledge Project Grant. Wargo also received a Summer Research Renewable Fellowship from the College of Education, which helped support data collection and writing time in the summer.
“Without these two forms of support,” Wargo said, “I am unsure if a longitudinal study such as mine could have been sustained.”
Wargo is one of three to receive the award—and one of two at MSU. Maria Novotny, a doctoral student in the Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures (WRAC) department in the College of Arts and Letters, was the other recipient.
For more on Wargo, visit his Academia profile.