stepping stones

<img style="float: right;" src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/stepping%20stones%20cover%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="200" length="200"> **s t e p p i n g** **s t o n e s** a project by graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin ___ [[enter]]

**o p e n i n g** *** Relationships do not merely shape reality, they are reality. -Shawn Wilson, “Research is Ceremony” It is easy to write joyfully about the practices that are easy and uncomplicated (are there practices that are easy and uncomplicated?), but what about the practices that scare us, challenge us, leave us with few answers or unarticulated meanings? -Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, “Developing a Relational Scholarly Practice: Snakes, Dreams, and Grandmothers” <%= showLink('Welcome! We’re glad you’re here.', 'enter 1') %>

**h a r m o n y** *** Stepping stones offer ways to navigate the “give-and-take” of our relationships with institutional departments, allowing for the cultivation of a healthy, collaborative, and sustainable sense of [[community]]. When, as James believes, “the footnote behind every piece of advice is ‘you have to figure it out on your own’,” creating space for trust and [[vulnerable dialogue->trust]] is difficult, as is literally knowing where and how to go next. When we are offered just enough to keep us afloat, and the rest is up to [[us as individuals or us as a collective->accountability]], tensions in departmental culture are constructed and felt. Kimber notes that “There's such a tension, right? Because you want to foster community in an academic environment… But I think it's been easy for the institution to take advantage of that [desire] and recognize that and be able to sell. Like ‘oh, we have such a harmonious department. Everyone gets along, everyone loves each other,’ but at the same time, they're like, ‘oh you guys take [[care]] of each other so we don’t have to’.” <audio controls autoplay> <source src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/e13c2f74cfc802bc8323bc668adc4880da10bbd1/stepping_stones_2.mp3?raw=true" type="audio/mp3" align="center"> </audio> Being able to lean on one another, [[to learn and grow together->longing]], is something we all agree motivates our relationships. But the “off-loading of labor onto individual relationships,” Sam, Autumn, Kimber, and Trent agree, can be “extremely stressful!” Stepping stones creates moments for us to be mindful of our individual and collective positions amidst confusing and problematic departmental flows. By pausing to reveal the [[vast ecologies of relation->vignette 2]] we’re working within, stepping stones affirm the potential for strategic and knowledgeable navigation, benefitting not only one but the whole. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**t r u s t** *** Autumn, Kimber, Sam, and Trent met at Austin Beerworks on Friday, March 31st—it was just after 5pm on a Friday. The bar was packed full of people drinking and their kids playing on the playground out back. Inside, Austin Beerworks is large and offers a lot of space, similar to a warehouse, and it’s very noisy, so we moved outdoors to a more quiet table. In March, it wasn’t too hot yet, so that wasn’t an issue. However, we didn’t have access to an outlet to plug in the recording device provided by the DWRL, so we used Sam’s phone to record the reflection. Near minute 35 of our reflection and over the many conversations, screaming kids, and barking dogs, an interesting interaction happened between the four of us: Autumn: “This is derailing real fast.” Sam: “No, no, no.” Trent: “There are no rails!” Autumn: “Okay. No rails! Team ‘No Rails’!” Sam: “Yeah, there are no rails.” Kimber: “We weren’t going anywhere to begin with!” Stepping stones asks us to create footholds which give meaning to collective beginnings and proceedings which happen without a final destination. In these moments of “derailing,” we purposefully engage in a process of asking what kinds of stepping stones might we encounter when cultivating trust in the process of [[dwelling->safety]]. Creating moments of unique resistance challenges our collective trajectories as graduate students and people, opening up rich avenues of possibility. We need to not only be an active member of team “No Rails,” a position which challenges us to be and create differently; as a collective, we must [[weave together relationships->harmony]] and interpretive opportunities which maintain trusting directions. What would our courses, our projects, our relationships with one another and the departments we’re located within look like if we could safely assume more flexible, more open, and more forgiving paths? If we moved confidently without–or with our own–rails? Stepping stones maintains a feasible path for imagining and acting on possibility by steadily situating us beyond the grip of boundaries. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**a c c o u n t a b i l i t y** *** Clarice, Trent, Sam, and Jade met at Moody’s Bar and Grill, a local spot near Hole in the Wall–across the street from UT’s Moody College of Communication–where Trent and Sam met with Ivan and James. Moody’s offers a retro poppy soundtrack and an outside patio with shade, which is perfect for meeting up outside in spite of the quickly-approaching hot summer months in central Texas. Organically, our conversation mostly regarded pedagogy, personal health, and our [[desires->longing]] as graduate students at UT. We all agreed that so often we are asked to sacrifice—sometimes without our knowledge or consent—our own hopes, values, and desires in and through the construction of professional identities. Jade describes the sense of frustration and guilt she experienced this year as she worked through the process of realizing “just how much shit [she] was taught” about how to relate to students, how to remain closed off as an educator, and how to “protect that ‘A’ paper.” Together, Jade and Clarice wondered aloud about how we get taught to “act like you know what you’re doing” and to “fake it ‘til you make it,” practices that explicitly divorce us from our selves and our students. <img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/ali%20jpeg.jpg?raw=true"/> Stepping stones encourages us to account for the multiplicity of our selves that we bring to learning experiences in a way that [[doesn’t sacrifice or harm any of them->safety]]. Creating moments of refuge at the boundaries of personal and professional spaces is essential to our own learning and teaching. [[Confronting->intention]] the systems which blur our recognition of [[safety]] is a matter of personal health. As Jade confides, “for me, I feel like I’m becoming unhealthy. And being in this program, I’ve seen my body deteriorate in ways that are scary.” Stepping stones creates spaces of refuge which prioritize learning with and from our bodies. Echoing Riley-Mukavetz, this relational space asks us to “learn how to listen to our bodies while we are making—while we are dwelling” (561). How we exist viscerally, affectively, and materially is created through the navigation of our own protection, a process afforded by stepping stones. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**r e l a t i o n s** *** Our relationship to ourselves, our research, the land we occupy, and multiple others requires forging connections which account for our entire ways of being, or, as Riley-Mukavetz offers, [[refusing separation->community]] of our personal and professional selves. Stepping stones develops accountability to the inseparability of our relations by disrupting normed routes of engagement that force us–as parts of myriad collectives–apart. In other words, stepping stones offer the opportunity to [[see anew->intention]] our relations which either aren’t afforded space in the academy, or are outright ignored. Being in these moments is a rhetorical response to the “false cuts” created by settler-colonial frames of temporality. By slowing down in constellation, stepping stones is an ethical approach to dwelling which exists in contrast to narratives of linear progress. <audio controls autoplay> <source src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/e13c2f74cfc802bc8323bc668adc4880da10bbd1/stepping_stones_1.mp3?raw=true" type="audio/mp3" align="center"> </audio> Speaking to moments of separability, Autumn says that “it’s hard to distance yourself from your work when your work is so close to you.” Jade, likewise, speaks to the difficulty of doing work in and with the [[communities->community]] we’re part of, and to Autumn’s fear of speaking for, misrepresenting, or offending communities she longs to honor. The in-betweens of the [[desires->longing]] we are taught to locate within and outside of our professional and scholarly bounds represent a liminal space in which relations are ambiguous and difficult to understand, locate, and cultivate. In Autumn and Jade’s comments, there is a longing for opportunities to connect with communities around our work and scholarship, but there is also a push to assimilate, to be “in community with” looming institutional and disciplinary cultures and conversations. Stepping stones enable us to see outside of these institutional ideologies and ways of knowing to engage fulfilling and healthy relationships, so to not separate ourselves from being in constellation but to foster chances for [[responsible engagement->care]] with multiple communities and collaborators. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**v o i c e** *** Trent, Sam, and Ivan met at 4:30pm on Friday, April 23rd, at [[Hole in the Wall->accountability]]—a bar directly off Guadalupe Street, which separates UT Austin’s campus from student housing in West Campus. At this point, we had already met with James at Hole the Friday prior, when the bar was quiet, dark, and comfortable. We already had a booth in mind–adjacent to the indoor stage featuring an outlet close enough to plug in the recording equipment. The battery in the DWRL’s recorder didn’t hold a charge, so we were dependent upon an outlet in each location–something we hadn’t expected, but that certainly oriented our attention toward the spaces we gathered in. Hole, this time with Ivan, was loud; we were situated next to a small group’s lively party, and a local musician cut our reflection short after an hour and a half. <img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/hole.jpg?raw=true"/> When we asked why he chose to meet us at Hole, Ivan explained “after that first class—disciplinary inquiries—the class all English majors have to take, AP and a couple other people suggested that we go here. And this was the first time I had a conversation with three other Latinx classmates, and the first time where I was like ‘oh shit, I don’t have to say a fucking word and the topic is Latinx!’ That was the first time I’ve ever experienced that.” <img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/1%20updated%20ivan.jpg?raw=true"/> The spaces we bring ourselves and others to–the spaces [[where we feel comfortable->safety]] enough to tell our stories and share our experiences–are where community happens. Conceiving of the landscape of our programs and work in terms of stepping stones enables us to more [[intentionally->intention]] cultivate times and spaces to speak and be heard and to be in [[community]], beyond what we have been conditioned to expect and accept. As Ivan makes clear, this type of community is created in spaces where we hear our own voice without having to speak, and it is also finding and creating spaces where we [[trust]] our voice to be heard. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**b i o g r a p h i e s** *** Trent Wintermeier (he/him) is doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include sound, noise, digital rhetorics, community, and the digital humanities. Sam Turner (she/her) is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Sam works with feminist and embodied rhetorics, queer(ed) theory, life writing and bedroom texts, and affect, mess, and viscerality. Clarice A. Blanco is a doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a Borders Rhetorician whose scholarship focuses on the rhetorical studies of physical and metaphysical borders, language, culture, identity, LatCrit, and Women of Color feminism. Kimberlyn Harrison is a doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing at UT Austin. Her areas of interest include Science and Technology Studies (STS), cybernetics, new media, and political theory. She employs archival, textual, and computational methods in her research. Autumn Reyes (she/they) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas, Austin. Their research interests include legal rhetoric, critical race theory, and algorithmic law. Their current work hopes to explore the intersection of racial identity, political institutions, and inequality. James Bezotte is a rhetoric scholar and dedicated learner. He centers relationality as his guiding praxis in all things and wishes to persistently find ways of cultivating and strengthening bonds of solidarity and love among all those who he reaches through his scholarship, teaching, and life. Ivan Martinez (he/him) is a second-year student in UT Austin’s literature PhD program. He is a Chicana teacher, and continuing to learn how to be both every day. His sprawling list of interests includes American, contemporary, and Gothic literature, as well as pop culture, film, and comics studies. He’s particularly fond of monsters, cyborgs, and anything else his 12th grade English teacher is likely to frown upon. Ali Gunnells (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include digital rhetorics, narrative, and archival theory. She is currently working on several projects that examine narrative techniques in aural storytelling formats such as podcasting. Jade Shiva Edward is a third year Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric and Writing Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include disability and feminist studies, space and temporality, explorations of care work and justice, and composition pedagogy. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %>

**a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s** *** The authors would like to thank Dr. V. Jo Hsu for their guidance and flexibility as we worked on a project with more questions than answers. We would also like to thank our peers in the Misfit Rhetorics seminar during Spring 2023 for their advice, participation, and support during the beginning stages of this project. Thank you to Will Burdette in UT Austin's Digital Writing and Research Lab for loaning and configuring the audio equipment and teaching us how to use it. And we are thankful for Hannah Hopkins' help with disseminating this project through the DWRL's April newsletter. We would like to acknowledge that this work was conducted on Indigenous land. Moreover, we would like to acknowledge and pay our respects to the Carrizo & Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Caddo, Tonkawa, Comanche, Lipan Apache, Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo, Tigua Pueblo, and all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories in Austin, Texas, here on Turtle Island. Andrea Riley-Mukavetz writes “When I learn from and with the land, I am presented with a teaching on the tangledness of knowledge making and relationships” (554). She uses her relationship to the land as a reminder of the ability to “reconstruct [oneself] as a whole being in the world” (555). We come to this work with a desire to honor the spaces and places that have enabled us to connect with ourselves and our co-authors, to “reconstruct” ourselves as whole beings through a relational scholarly practice. Forming “accountable and reciprocal relationships to and with the land” is a process, and requires reflecting on how the ways we “struggle to form relationships with the land” show up in our scholarship (Riley-Mukavetz 558). Through this project, we are taking a step, and seek to continue learning and orienting ourselves towards relationality and accountability across space, place, and time. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %>

**r e f e r e n c e s** *** Driskill, Qwo-Li. "Decolonial Skillshares: Indigenous Rhetorics as Radical Practice" Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics (2015): 57-78. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia, 26.3, 2011, pp. 591–609. JSTOR. Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “17th Floor: A pedagogical oracle from/with Audre Lorde.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, 21.4, 2017, pp. 375–390. hooks, bell. “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 4.1, 1991. Print. Hsu, V. Jo. Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics. The Ohio State University Press, 2022. Hsu, V. Jo. “Rhetoric as Intimate Practice.” Octalog IV: The Politics of Rhetorical Studies in, edited by Elise Verzosa Hurley, Rhetoric Review, 40.4, 2021, 326–329. Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Print. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa. This Bridge Called My Back, Fortieth Anniversary Edition : Writings by Radical Women of Color. SUNY Press, 2021. Print. Powell, Malea. “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing.” College Composition and Communication, 53.3, 2002, pp. 396–434. Web. Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Print. Riley-Mukavetz, Andrea. “Developing a relational scholarly practice: snakes, dreams, and grandmothers.” College Composition and Communication, 71.4, 2020, pp. 545–565. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “Disciplinary landscaping, or contemporary challenges in the history of rhetoric.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 36.2, 2003, pp. 148–167. University of Texas at Austin. “General information on campus carry.” 2023, https://www.utexas.edu/campus-carry Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. "R-words: Refusing research." Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities 223 (2014): 248. Tuck, Eve. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review 79.3, 2009, pp. 409–428. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %>

*** <img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%20pease%20park.jpg?raw=true"/> Shoal Creek, Austin, Texas. [[30.293322, -97.747513->harmony]] <audio controls autoplay> <source src="https://ia902701.us.archive.org/7/items/n-lamar-blvd/N%20Lamar%20Blvd.mp3" type="audio/mp3"> </audio> <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">')%> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

*** <img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/pease%20park%20stream.jpg?raw=true"/> Pease Park Trail, Austin, Texas. [[30.293687, -97.747718->intention]] <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">')%> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

*** For instance, imagine encountering a stream with the goal of seeking a way across. It’s too deep to walk through safely, and it’s flowing [[faster than feels comfortable->trust]]. Options are assessed before choosing a stone and stepping on to it. <%= showLink('Moving cautiously and strategically...', 'safety 2') %>

Moving cautiously and strategically, considering all possible next moves, another stone is chosen from a variety of potential paths with the hope that this choice will prevent falling into the chaos of the murky and [[quickly-flowing stream->harmony]] below. <%= showLink('It’s this process...', 'safety 3') %>

It’s this process of navigation that we understand as holding immense potential for intervention but, also, dangerous risks. [[How would you navigate the stones->intention]] and stream differently if you knew you could trust each stone's stability? If you knew the ground beneath you wasn’t going anywhere, but in fact was a stable opportunity for emancipation from the mistrust, fear, and hesitation which you approached and entered the stream with? What if each stone amplified the earnest excitement and anticipation of possibility that led you to the stream, and supported the [[connections->community]] that enable your safe passage? <img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/MIC%20EQUIPT.jpg?raw=true"/> <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**c o m m u n i t y** *** Practically speaking, stepping stones allow us to reimagine our work, connections, and futures according to [[knowledge landscapes->remembrance]] that aren’t immediately accessible within euro-centric educational and academic traditions. The temporal and rhetorical opportunities illuminated by stepping stones reorient us to the legitimacy of our feelings in spaces that demand a separation of scholarly and personal selves. Linking–temporally, affectively, literally–to [[where we come from->relations]] is an affordance of stepping stones; the disruption of our profession’s relentless forward march allows for the acknowledgement and [[honoring of community->community]] in different ways. Devoting time to really [[hearing one another->voice]]–finding and dwelling within a stepping stone–enables us to forge and remember our vital connections, and to reimagine how [[accountability]] to our relations informs our work. [[Motivated->intention]] by shared questions and felt tensions around graduate student culture, professional development, and institutional expectations, stepping stones intentionally and transparently reflects our [[relational->relations]] values and longing for authenticity. This [[longing]] is what guides us when we seek and create communities around us in spite of the impossibility of replicating the communities–and, for some, the safety, or for others, a sense of familiarity–we left behind to be here. Moving without blueprints for authentic engagement, we do what we can with what we have, but often wonder if what we’re doing is “right,” always also aware that both our standards and tools for measurement come from outside of us. The [[trust]], stability, and confidence afforded by stepping stones allows us to move contentedly through and towards authentic choices. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**r e m e m b r a n c e** *** Stepping stones creates opportunities to remember what we’re told to leave behind or forget. Developing a reimagination of how we come to know exceeds how PhD programs teach us to read, write, and learn in solitude, to forget our bodies, and to create meaning and worlds supremely concerned with individualism and achievement. Within this process of remembering, we are asked to work in direct opposition to the systems which perpetuate patterns of harm, the same systems which teach us how to merely “survive” in less-than-ideal circumstances. Stepping stones asks us to question our own personal and professional roles in these systems and [[create ways of knowing which foreground new possibilities->harmony]]. <audio controls autoplay> <source src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/e13c2f74cfc802bc8323bc668adc4880da10bbd1/stepping_stones_3.mp3?raw=true" type="audio/mp3" align="center"> </audio> We are often pushed towards degree requirements or “professionalizing” opportunities that are not representative of all that we have learned, or [[accountable->accountability]] to the relations that got us there. Of the experience of defending his MA thesis, James described a tense, vulnerable, and disembodied experience, but said: “I made it work because that’s what I’m doing with my life.” He continues “I could just imagine so many other ways of doing this—of creating, of collaborating.” Stepping stones creates spaces which represent how learning happens in the ontological in-betweens of our [[relations]], in ways that don’t require justification. Stepping stones in this way can be literal connectors, creating spaces which better reflect the deep learning that happens in the ontological in-betweens of our [[relations]]. Stepping stones elides the need for justifying or defending the “why” and “how” of our needs as collaborators, thinkers, learners, and people, instead [[making space for celebrating->intention]] our survival as individuals and a collective. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**c a r e** *** When Jade, Sam, Clarice, and Trent met at Moody’s Bar and Grill, while wrapping up the reflection, Clarice asked “why don’t we just do a check-in? A check-in that we don’t actually get.” Check-ins are simple; they are asking how each other is doing, what we’re doing, what we need, and how each other can help. We all agreed that a check-in is a great plan, and we added it to each of the following reflections conducted for this project. A check-in is a perfect way to disrupt normative conceptions of progress by reflecting on where we are now, in this moment, by being in relation to one another. Constant progress consistently obfuscates our ability to create these moments of caring for ourselves and one another, instead prioritizing destination-seeking and alike ways of being which we are told to assume. The problem is, check-ins are most often reserved for individualized relationships that miss the [[larger affective ecologies->vignette 1]] we move with and exist through. Clarice’s question reminds us of our original, un-scholarly, very human questions about what we’re all doing here. Stepping stones offers systematic intervention into what makes graduate students feel unwell by taking moments to “check in” as an ethic of [[accountability]] and relationality. And these systems are immediately necessary. <audio controls autoplay> <source src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/e13c2f74cfc802bc8323bc668adc4880da10bbd1/stepping_stones_4.mp3?raw=true" type="audio/mp3" align="center"> </audio> Reimagining what makes us feel “terribl[e]” and “shitty” requires intervening in the networks which don’t and can’t offer the time we need to [[speak in relation to each other->voice]]. Stepping stones emerge as an opportunity to create systems which ask us to care for each other’s well being, in spite of the demands of the profession that so often take precedence. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**i n t e n t i o n** *** James, Sam, and Trent met at Hole in the Wall on March 31st, only a week prior to meeting with Ivan at the same location. We met in the early afternoon because Sam, Trent, Kimber, and Autumn were meeting later that day at Austin Beerworks for another reflection. Nonetheless, at Hole, we were among the few people in the bar at around three in the afternoon; it was quiet, with just some music playing over the speaker above our booth. It was our first time meeting for a reflection at Hole, so we were looking for an outlet to plug in our recording equipment, and ended up finding one near the stage—missing the one directly at our table, covered in stickers, that we noticed about halfway through talking. Much of our time was spent [[reflecting->remembrance]] on James’ MA and PhD programs, and the systems which he constantly moves through while progressing in each degree. He asserts that the “commodification of time is so present in a PhD” and that it “is really powerful.” “I wish it didn’t have to be like that,” he says, “I think that’s part of the web we are all caught up in.” <img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/sam%20and%20james.jpg?raw=true"/> Stepping stones confronts narratives of fixed anguish which make up the “web” we constantly find ourselves stuck in. By disrupting systems of power which foreground commodification and the following feelings of inoperability and incongruence, new systems of knowledge emerge that reflect [[what we need to be well->safety]] and make sure our peers feel the same. Stepping stones asks us to envision [[care]] and change at levels that, right now, feel unclear, unnavigable, and unreachable. By creating footholds, as a rhetorical response to the swiftness and stickiness of these current, multiplicious webs, [[we strategically move in unique and idiosyncratic directions->harmony]]. This is what makes the metaphor of stepping stones so salient for us as graduate students; untangling the “web” James mentions mimics the moment of choosing which next stone will carry us through the [[stream->vignette 3]]. Cultivating spaces, projects, and [[relationships->community]] that ensure we won’t sink within these systems requires intentionally creating footholds for [[safe->safety]], supported movement, but it requires all of us to make it possible. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**s a f e t y** *** As graduate students, we frequently encounter moments where being open is too dangerous in the times and spaces we traverse. Or, if and when we allow ourselves to be open, we get hurt and risk our personal health. Navigating personal and scholarly boundaries means that we are often to occupy both closed and open positions at one—the former [[protecting ourselves->care]], the latter risking part of us. The resulting conditions are risky, precarious, and jeopardizing. This paradox echoes through stepping stones as a concept which foregrounds disruption and confrontation through [[a commitment to dwelling->trust]]. <%= showLink('For instance...', 'safety 1') %>

**l o n g i n g** *** Developing [[trusting->trust]] relationships to ourselves and our positions, as graduate students but also as people outside of academia, requires a deep engagement with the complexities of creating footholds which bridge the inbetweens of our realities. These experiences are caught up in and a product of larger narratives of knowing and being that don’t necessarily have clear beginnings or endings. This uncertainty or mistrust of our liminality feels like, for instance, [[Ivan’s experience->voice]] of moving through the world knowing that “every single aspect of yourself you have to rank on a hierarchy of most to least safe to assume that people will be cool about it.” Or, like James mentions in regard to his MA defense, “growing in spite of how shitty that process was!” For Jade, a lack of trust in the (infra)structural support of all parts of herself means that “[she’s] afraid to say these things, but [she] also feels them.” Clarice feels that “[she] should not be here, but [she] is here.” Ali wonders, too, “when and how do[es she] tell professors that the inside of [her body] feels like it’s being stabbed and [she] can’t get out of bed” to come to class? <img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/trent%20and%20sam.jpg?raw=true"/> Each one of these anecdotes illustrate a rhetorical moment of reckoning with liminality, or graduate students’ being in-between various systems and narratives of power. These systems ignore the meaningful resonances between our identities, positionalities, and knowledges as people and scholars. Being well, being authentic, and even being present in our profession shouldn’t feel precarious or in need of justification. With stepping stones, the possibilities, insights, and resonances enabled by experiences of in-betweeness become more accessible to us, while feelings of anguish, uncertainty, and unbelonging diminish. In other words, stepping stones illuminate the possibilities in these liminal places of longing and offer real moments for reflection so as to facilitate ethical, sustainable, and responsible engagement with mismatches in knowing. In collectively naming our affective responses–and engaging with not only the overlaps but also the differences in our experiences–we may begin to see, listen, support, and decide differently within spaces and times that no longer exist according to point A and point B. There is, quite literally, an [[ecology of relations->vignette 1]] which exist during such moments. Seeing our surroundings anew can be difficult, but [[trusting->trust]] in this process—and this possibility—as a collective is an[[ accountable->accountability]], hopeful, and affirmative [[start->stepping stones]]. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

*** <img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/pease%20park%20stones%20.jpg?raw=true"/> Pease Park Trail, Austin, Texas. [[30.293687, -97.747718->care]] <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">')%> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

*** This project is a story. Or, a series of stories, tumbled out and slurped up and stitched and stapled and woven together across sticky tables at the corner of Guadalupe and Dean Keeton, in Parlin Hall after class, in apartments and Discord groups and happenstance meetings at our favorite coffee shops (because this town is actually sort of small). This project is an attempt to locate ourselves and our stories in and through the theories and methods we’re learning as graduate students, and in relation to the broad and generous landscape of writers, thinkers, and communities that came before us. The problem–as we saw it, as students at UT Austin–was that we had trouble doing what the thinkers and writers we were reading illuminate, suggest, and make possible. In seminars, we were learning about relational accountability and scholarly praxis, but we were working on individual projects. We read about rhetorical listening and the violent marginalization of embodied knowledges within the academy, but felt most rewarded when we accommodated traditional genre expectations and ignored our bodies. We felt intimately the importance of a (un)learning community, but were becoming increasingly isolated as we sought conformity within institutional constraints. It is in these ways that we felt limited, but we know we are privileged in so, so many other ways. So we sought to use our time together to create opportunities that enable reflections on our experiences–together–and to see ourselves as world-builders and sense-makers in a sometimes-nonsensical setting: graduate school. Knowing we were embarking on a project–and an orientation towards scholarship–without a clear blueprint, we approached this project with enthusiasm, uncertainty, and humility. Motivated by shared questions and felt tensions around graduate student culture, professional development, and institutional expectations, we wondered if we could design a project that intentionally and transparently reflected our values of relationality and accountability, and our longing for authenticity. Identifying and mobilizing the affective dimensions of this work was relatively intuitive to us, but thinking through how to enact a relational scholarly practice while also theorizing one in our local context has been an imperfect, iterative, and highly reflexive process. This project is deeply indebted to much of what we read as first-year PhD students: the conversations across the Octalogs, especially Jo Hsu’s “Rhetoric as Intimate Practice;” Jacqueline Jones-Royster’s “Disciplinary Landscaping;” Mia Mingus’ work on access intimacy; Andrea Riley-Mukavetz’s “Developing a Relational Scholarly Praxis;” texts across fields by Karma Chávez, Lisa Flores, Sami Schalk, Malea Powell and MSU’s Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, bell hooks, GPat Patterson, Stephanie Kerschbaum, Rasha Diab, Alison Kafer, Sonia C. Arellano, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Krista Ratcliffe, Aja Y. Martinez, and many, many others. This project is also indebted to our colleagues and professors who offered their time, energy, and ideas big and small. We are so grateful for the community of thinkers and learners that we’ve found ourselves in touch with. In the pages of this webtext, you’ll find a series of stories, constellated across time, place, space, and experience, all contributing to the goal of world-making that prioritizes community, rhetorical sovereignty, and an orientation towards scholarship that demands relational accountability and local exigence. <center> [[sam's intro]] | [[trent's intro]] <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**s a m** *** Hi! Welcome to our webtext. I’m glad you’re here! In my mind, the story of this story is one that really has no beginning or end, nor a single apt metaphor or analog. I don’t mean this as a warning or a disclaimer, nor to appear mysterious or complicated. Rather, I want to level with you, to be as honest as I can in every part of my communication with you. The words to describe this project are ones I’m still looking and listening for, which is a process that embraces imperfection, seeks action in the now, says the quiet parts out loud, honors what we know, and leans in closer to what we don’t. The story of how I came to this project is embedded in webs of personal and relational histories, each stuffed full of and indebted to even more stories and relationships and communities and lives than I can ever be aware of. As such, this project feels like a bridge between worlds; a beautiful tapestry; a pile of well-worn clothes; a hug; a terrarium supporting countless species and lives. I’ll try my best to introduce you to my experience of this project, and myself. Thank you for being here. I see this project as one of sense-making and sense-feeling (and probably feeling-making and making-feeling), of connecting around the senses of reality that feel good to inhabit and imagine. However, sense-making, as a goal, requires an ability to suspend reality, and to imagine otherwise despite our material and ideological surroundings. “Willing suspension of disbelief” has long felt opaque for me. This is a feeling that has followed me throughout my life, perhaps most saliently captured in my early experiences of family movie night. Though I indulged my parents’ desire for their Gen Z children (I’m on the cusp) to be educated about the meaningful cultural artifacts of their childhoods, fictional media–namely the sci-fi and fantasy titles of the 80’s–always ignited in me a sort of compulsive unpacking of tedium and minutiae that I was more willing to endure than my siblings or parents. Whether it was Star Wars, Predator, or Alien, nestling into the sunken couches of our living room meant an opportunity to experience the beloved media of my parents’ youth, but it also meant that I was about to disappoint everyone with my one million questions and unwillingness to accept that the story world was like that just “because it is!” I hated plot holes, and the fact that sometimes vampires slept underground but sometimes in coffins made me itch. If I was going to suspend my disbelief and really commit myself to the storyworld, it needed to make sense, to feel stable, to play by consistent rules and value systems, even if they weren’t my own. I wasn’t an unimaginative child, or even a particularly devoted rule-follower. It’s just that the moment a story’s logic or internal consistency broke down, I became hyper-fixated on the “why” and “how” of the ways the world worked. I’d seek remedies to inconsistency, and invested in a story only if I expected a convincing return to the world’s sense of normalcy. This preoccupation with neat-and-tidy realities, logics, and storytelling absent of the messiness and unpredictability of real life didn’t feel bad; it felt liberating. There was something beautiful, mysterious, captivating about listening deeply for evidence of alternatives, spaces and places and times where the things that made sense to me were real, reliable, and accountable. Now that I’m older (and therapized, among other things), my need to follow a fiction’s threads of consistency and logical integrity has morphed into a perhaps healthier seeking of imaginative possibilities in the “real” world. I realize that the things that “make sense” to me are often nonsensical to the systems of power governing the realities we live in. Healthcare and homes and food for everyone. Freedom from the demands of disaster capitalism and warmongering and the fallout of climate catastrophe. Abundant infrastructure supportive of love, collaboration, community, health, and connection. Systems of healing and reparation, an ability to meaningfully account for harm. Honesty, vulnerability, intimacy, humanness. These are the things I can imagine when I set aside the logics of our current reality and embrace logics that make sense in my body and in my heart. I’m no longer alone in following these threads (I never was, of course). Where my one million annoying questions about other possibilities and sense-making went unanswered as a child, I now have a clearer sense of how many people have asked questions just like mine, lookeddreameddied for exactly these sense-making, world-building alternatives. How many families and thinkers and communities and ancestral lineages have been seeking, building, embodying, and enacting the liberatory goals that made sense to them long before I realized this power of imagination? “It seems each of us moves forward by what touches and stays with us; what agitates us into action” (Moraga xix). Making sense of worlds is part of what stays with me. Like others before me, I’m motivated to better understand, put words to, and act with the love, dreams, anger, confusion, longing, tension, potential that I feel. I’m agitated towards the words that make the worlds I see being possible–not only for me, but for all of us who see liberation being just out of reach. In her foreword to the 2021 re-print of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga put this goal beautifully: I am feeling for the “language that strives to express what is wholly known in the body” (pg. xviii). I learned I could honor this language and these questions (and get paid for it, however minimally) as a graduate student and maybe-someday academic, though it’s certainly not the only (or maybe even the best) way. In conversations with faculty, peers, students, and colleagues across institutions and programs, it’s clear that we know life can be different, feel different, and that our work can enable different futures. This knowledge guides our questions, commitments, and conversations. We mobilize this knowledge towards the language, actions, paths, and possibilities that support our living differently, even when it means pushing on institutional constraints. One site of where and how this work is happening is in community-engaged rhetorical scholarship, especially those projects that attempt to make sense of the discursive and relational possibilities in a given space/place. I see Stepping Stones–this project–as attempting exactly that. [[Trent->trent's intro]] and I and all the others looked each other straight in the face and wondered what it is that’s going on, here, and how we could make sense of it together. <center> [[navigation]] </center> <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**t r e n t** *** Hi! Thanks for being a part of this web– it’s confusing, but, hopefully, you will find where you hear your own voice in community with ours. For me, every time I come back to this project I am struck by how it feels to be in community with the brilliant people who have shared so much of their self, time, and energy to make this experience and project what it is. Everyone’s willingness to show up and share in this space is an incredible commitment, especially since we’ve been bothering them for so long after our initial reflections. Being a part of this community of diverse thinkers, all of whom are collectively passionate about creating different ways of knowing, sense-making, and imagining anew, is really a wonderful feeling. As I reflect on what we’ve created together, through these audio tapes and across these pages, I’m reminded of Jo Hsu’s advice that they gave us on an early version of this project, which was submitted as a final to their Misfit Rhetorics seminar in spring 2023. Jo wrote that “it’s worth complicating the position of the grad student here. Y’all aren’t a monolith and you don’t all experience institutions the same way”—this has stuck with me and become more evident through the stories and sentiments shared during the course of this project. Because it’s all too easy to collapse our feelings about this space and how we experience it. We know, feel, and see the impact of this collapse too often. But to tell these stories for the purpose of building together, to create imaginatively as a group that is curious about what making sense means and where this can happen, foregrounds our capacity to refuse monolith frames as a community of thinkers, scholars, and teachers. Where our stories converge, diverse, mesh, and break open among the shared messiness and confusion is where I, personally, hear the unification of my own and our collective voice. Too do I find meaningful aspects of my own experience and story in the moments of collaboration, laughter, confusion, conversation, and silence that has come along with our resistance to accept collapse and, instead, embrace the complex, quirky, and fundamental qualities of what it means to be in community with each other. The moments we’ve created in an old booth, a Texas-hot back porch, multiple coffee-shop tables, and brewery picnic table—with merely a duffel bag of recording equipment (that oftentimes didn’t work); drinks and/or coffee with side of tacos; Ivan’s folder of documents and Autumn’s journal—follows me and my feeling of community in these spaces across this city. Looking and listening back, the affirmation of unity that I feel is represented in our check-ins, as Sam mentions. Avoiding monolith frames happens in the moments and spaces we create for ourselves and others to see how we’re doing and what we’re doing, and how we can work collaboratively to help. I’m also reminded of this moment, which happens in a reflection between [[Sam->sam's intro]], Kimber, Autumn, and myself: Autumn: “This is derailing real fast.” Sam: “No, no, no.” Trent: “There are no rails!” Autumn: “Okay. No rails! Team ‘No Rails’!” Sam: “Yeah, there are no rails.” Kimber: “We weren’t going anywhere to begin with!” I’m struck by our openness and willingness to move in uncertain, unknown, and unsure directions together, leaving absolutely no one behind. Such a practice of community solidifies the use of our individual stories, goals, opportunities, and strategies to create the variegated imagination that we are constantly searching for. In these conversations between Sam, Clarice, Autumn, Kimber, Jade, Ali, James, Ivan, and myself, sustaining a safe yet generative sense of community is fundamental to how we engage with each other, support each other, and come together as a group of graduate students. But how does this sense of community continue to inform how we move through certain spaces which don’t afford the time or power necessary for action? How can we create more moments that resist preserving the monolithic frameworks which seize the stories, voices, and feelings that would otherwise emerge in constellation? I think these are some of the questions that underlie our collective goals as not only graduate students but scholarteacherpeople who have come together, here, to support ourselves and each other. These questions move from the foundations that scholars like Qwo-Li Driskill have advocated for, such as to be teachers who make space for “students to talk about their own experiences, to think critically about how their own histories and bodies are caught up in complex systems of power” (64). Or, as Andrea Riley-Mukavetz calls for, as people “we need to learn how to listen to our bodies while we are making—while we are dwelling” (561). And finally, as scholars, we must continue to engage forms of refusal (Hsu; Tuck and Yang) that oppose the colonial logics oftentimes centered in research methods and ways of knowing in academic spaces. As I see it, collectively inquiring into what our collective future can potentially be and how we can begin to design it is a critical practice of envisioning more holistic pedagogies, creating heard bodily attunements, and honoring epistemic legacies. In no way can this work be done alone or in just uniformity; sensing, embodying, and inhabiting these worlds requires a community equipped to bridge different ways of knowing and being—and I think that’s what we have started to do here. As you, reader, find parts of yourself here, I encourage you to expand and challenge the work we’ve done and the community we’ve built. While I see our sense of community to work in contrast to monolithic collapse, this work only goes as far and as deep as you allow it. Finding your voice in our stories should serve as an exigence for collaboration in and against the spaces that shape how you move, think, rethink, and remove in the world. Get together. Go to your nearest bar booth. Find a comfy coffee-shop table. Find the confusion, safety, laughter, care, friendship, support, vulnerability, and hope that comes with building community in moments rendered improbable or unfit for imaginary possibility. <center> [[navigation]] </center> <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**n a v i g a t i o n** *** Though we’ve put words-to-page in the way that writers sometimes do, we see great potential in the emergent meanings and experiences and senses that have yet to cross our minds/bodies/keyboards. You will create this webtext with us through the process of navigating it. In this way, we encourage you to traverse this space in ways that are meaningful to you. This is a non-linear and interactive story, so there is no “end”—this project moves down meandering and circuitous paths that resist paving, and your inactivity or exit is simply a moment of pause in the broader experience of this story. There is no right or wrong way to explore this webtext. When you click on any blue word, you will be taken to a new page. You’re invited to continue this process until you feel any reason why you shouldn’t. You may move in circles, see the same pages, or get altogether lost. Your expertise, knowledge, feelings, and senses are welcome as co-constructors of this experience. Thank you for being here! <center> [[theory]] </center> <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**t h e o r y** *** In thinking, talking, and feeling through our experiences as graduate students, we stumbled upon the idea of stepping stones as particularly intuitive analogs to the relief we’re seeking. As graduate students, we felt unmoored, awash in fast-moving waters, in need of a place of rest. This project is an exploration of and elaboration on that collective feeling: we wanted to see what we could do by feeling our ways towards the calm, stable respite offered by stepping stones. This project considers stepping stones to be overlooked places in a narrative of constant forwardness and destination-seeking. They exist in constant juxtaposition to the demands of unrelenting motion and productivity. Stepping stones are used, always in-pursuit, to “make it” from one side of a stream to another. Beyond normative mechanisms of neoliberal progress, stepping stones are not passing moments, but rather exist within ecologies of relation, offering interpretive opportunity and supporting immense biodiversity. As you explore this project, we invite you to consider what we might learn in reimagining the potential of stepping stones in our lives. The concept of stepping stones offers the creation of rhetorical footholds which foster unique methodological possibilities by resisting, disrupting, and confronting narratives of linear progress. In doing so, stepping stones represent an ethical and personal commitment to dwelling. To elucidate this definition, this interactive, nonlinear story has been designed for co-creation and collaborative exploration of space, ideas, relationships, and connectivity. This webtext enacts a space to dwell, wander, wade, and explore. <%= showLink('We see this project as...', 'Theory 2') %>

We see this project as developing orientations toward research, scholarship, and degree programs which disrupt normative flows of progress and invite us all to take stock of who and what surrounds us, supports us, and constellates us toward healthy, intentional, and more just practices within the academy. This webtext zooms in on the moments we’ve taken to pause with—to embody—stepping stones, and to honor their importance and vitality in the landscapes of our research, our degree programs, and our relationships with one another. Practically and ecologically speaking, stepping stones support immense biodiversity; we have a lot to learn from the interpretive, expressive, and rhetorical opportunities they provide. In other words, a research ecology informed by stepping stones enables us–as graduate students and as people–to re-orient ourselves to the demands and affordances of our networked realities. This “knowledge making through relational accountability” (Riley-Mukavetz 546) fosters knowing and being differently among our quickly-flowing streams. In developing this project, we were driven by questions which allow us to reimagine and revise not only our relations to one another, but our relations to our work. We–the graduate students who came together through this project–carry with us diverse life experiences and perspectives, but are unified in our longing for intentionality, authenticity, and wellness within our shared institutional context. In our coursework and graduate seminars, we found ourselves struggling to envision equitable, accountable, and liberatory futures–for ourselves and others–within the academy. In practicing a research ecology informed by stepping stones, we experimented with the form of the seminar project and continue to think with scholars in cultural, feminist, community-engaged, and Indigenous rhetorics who call our attention to relational accountability; the importance of time, space, and place; and the worlds and futures we can imagine together. In the spring and summer semesters of 2023, we took time to reflect together on the ways in which the times and spaces we find ourselves in are not made for alternative ways of being, and indeed obfuscate imaginary possibilities of what could be, as well as the practical changes we could implement in order to better serve ourselves and one another within our departmental and institutional contexts. With our colleagues across rhetoric coursework at UT Austin, we created spaces to pause, reflect, and share with one another. You’re invited to experience these moments with us. <center> [[footholds]] </center> <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**

**f o o t h o l d s** *** Footholds are defined as “a secure position from which further progress may be made” (OED). A term typically used in climbing, footholds are secure and steady; they offer moments of pause and respite amid a larger journey. Where footholds are usually perceived as in-between spaces, slowing down and zooming in to stay with a foothold requires shifting our sight from the pathway of “progress” and reorienting ourselves towards the current moment. This slowdown invites a host of communicative, expressive, and ontological opportunities that are often rendered invisible when we imagine our movements only in terms of forward motion, start and finish. Rhetorically speaking, footholds offer an opportunity to reflect on our movement and consider our paths through “progress” anew. The moments of pause, breath, relief, and contemplation that footholds enable are anything but passive; it’s in these moments that the potential for thoughtful action is made real. Opening ourselves to see and honor rhetorical footholds–listening to the affective, discursive, embodied, and imaginative possibilities of rest–then enables us to act more intentionally, disruptively, and [[relationally->relations]] in the face of normative and unrelenting narratives of progress. Rhetorical footholds are momentarily [[safe->safety]], slowed, positions that offer strategic opportunities to reflect on and respond to felt tensions and incongruence between who we are and who we are asked to be. As (emerging) scholars and educators, the need to stay with this incongruence feels especially relevant: so much of our work as students and teachers requires a close attendance to how we show up for ourselves, those around us, and the [[communities->community]] our work is accountable to, but finding the time to understand these vital relations can feel like the last item on an endless to-do list that seems to demand individualism, isolation, and competition. Rhetorical footholds offer a felt framework for how we approach these relationships and ourselves, and how we might approach processes and projects in ways that are more oriented towards and accountable to our communities. This attunement towards community is an act that requires the kind of pause(s) that footholds invite. However, it’s also often overlooked, sped through, or perfunctorily required in academic spaces. Rhetorical footholds exist as healthy alternatives within hegemonic notions of productivity, resisting forward motion despite the unrelenting pressures of our jobs. In higher education spaces, an example of a rhetorical foothold might be a genuine, patient, and honest reflective check-in; these are not random “icebreakers” or small talk for the sake of politeness, but rather slow, invitational moments of pause. Rhetorical footholds ask us to [[account->accountability]] for ourselves and our bodies holistically, and to do so with others in spaces and relationships that don’t always acknowledge or affirm this need. Bringing our whole selves–including our (in)expertises and our vulnerabilities–to a professionalized and professionalizing space requires us to use rhetorical and communicative strategies that we often reserve for other areas of our lives, lending a unique rhetorical potential to these “foothold” moments. Importantly, these foothold moments are already happening: they’re collectively felt. They’re electric, constallated maps of relationships, need fulfillment, and shared desires, but they’re only sometimes acknowledged on a scale larger than one-to-one. Another example that rhetorical footholds help us unpack is the moments of identification that alter our perceptions of where and how we move through space and conceive of “progress” in relation to our surroundings. For example, in our reflection with Ivan, he discussed the first time he took part in a conversation with multiple other Latinx students, and was delighted to find he “didn’t have to say a fucking work and the topic [was] Latinx!” This moment–a conversation with peers in a bar–altered Ivan’s understanding of himself and the space around him; for the first time, he heard his own [[voice]] without having to speak. Conceiving of our degree programs, classroom spaces, and even relationships with one another as always already containing footholds like this one changes how we navigate, decide, and dream, and enables us to more intentionally cultivate opportunities to be in and with community. <%= backLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%201%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> <%= forwardLink('<img src="https://github.com/trentwintermeier/steppingstones/blob/main/rock%202%20best.jpg?raw=true" width="50" length="50">') %> *** **[[biographies]] | [[acknowledgements]] | [[references]]**