J. W. Hammond

Contact

jwhammon@mtu.edu
Walker 320

Assistant Professor, Rhetoric and Composition

Ph.D., English and Education, University of Michigan

Biography

My research and teaching center on writing studies, social justice, and science and technology studies, paying particular attention to the cultural histories and afterlives of sociotechnical systems for evaluating writing. My approach to historical scholarship, which I call “social justice historiography,” weaves together composition history and critical theories of race and disability to investigate how assessments configure “writing” as a proxy for identity, ability, and worth. In this vein, I’m currently at work on a book project that remaps the early history of writing education in the United States through the coordinates of race, (dis)ability, and biopolitics, documenting how writing assessment technologies shaped and were shaped by eugenic rhetoric—and by resistance to it. More broadly, my publications center on issues of design and (in)justice, excavating hidden meanings, histories, and uses of ostensibly ordinary sociotechnical systems related to teaching (e.g., automated assessment algorithms) and research (e.g., knowledge infrastructures for synthesizing and circulating scholarship). Through my collaborations with scientists and science educators, I also investigate the rhetoric of science, focusing on ethical aims and claims in science education. My work can be found in College Composition and Communication, Review of Research in Education, Assessing Writing, the Journal of Writing Assessment, Ecology and Evolution, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, and Scientific American, as well as in edited collections such as Rhetorical Machines, (Re)Considering What We Know, and Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity.

Links of Interest

Google Scholar Page

Specialties

Writing Assessment
Rhetoric & Composition History
Social Justice & Education
Critical Theories of Race & Disability
Science, Technology, & Society Studies
Knowledge Commons & Infrastructures

Recent Publications

Hammond, J. W., Brownell, S., Byrd, W. C., Cheng, S. J., McKay, T. A., & Tarchinski, N. A. (2022). Infrastructuring to scale multi-institutional equity and inclusion innovations. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 54(4), 37-43.

Gere, A. R., Curzan, A., Hammond, J. W., Hughes, S., Li, R., Smith, K., Van Zanen, K., Wheeler, K., & Zanders, C. (2021). Communal justicing: Writing assessment, disciplinary infrastructure, and the case for critical language awareness. College Composition and Communication, 72(3), 384-412.

Hammond, J. W., Brownell, S. E., Kedharnath, N. A., Cheng, S. J., & Byrd, W. C. (2021, Sept. 23). Why the term ‘JEDI’ is problematic for describing programs that promote justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. Scientific American.

Lawlor, J., Hammond, J. W., Lagoze, C., M. Huynh, & Moss, P. A. (2021). Platformed knowledge brokerage in education: Power and possibilities. In M. Weber & I. Yanovitzky (Eds.), Networks, knowledge brokers, & the public policymaking process (pp. 315-350). Palgrave Macmillan.

Gold, D., & Hammond, J. W. (2020). Writing instruction in US colleges and schools: The twentieth century and the new millennium. In J. J. Murphy & C. Thaiss (Eds.), A short history of writing instruction: From ancient Greece to today’s United States (4^th ed.) (pp. 272-316). New York, NY: Routledge.

Hammond, J. W., Moss, P. A., Huynh, M. Q., & Lagoze, C. (2020). Research synthesis infrastructures: Shaping knowledge in education. Review of Research in Education, 44(1), 1-35.

Wardle, E., Adler-Kassner, L., Alexander J., Elliot, N., Hammond, J. W., Poe, M., Rhodes, J., & Womack, A.-M. (2019). Recognizing the limits of threshold concept theory. In L. Adler-Kassner & E. Wardle (Eds.), (Re)considering what we know: Learning thresholds in writing, composition, rhetoric, and literacy (pp. 15-35). UP Colorado.

Hammond, J. W. (2019). Making our invisible racial agendas visible: Race talk in Assessing Writing, 1994-2018. Assessing Writing, 42, 1-19.

Duffy, M., Hammond, J. W., & Cheng, S. J. (2019). Preaching to the choir or composing new verses? Toward a writerly climate literacy in undergraduate biology. Ecology and Evolution, 9(22), 12360-12373.

Hammond, J. W. (2019). Definitive programs: Rhetoric, computing technologies, and the (pre)history of controversy over automated essay scoring, 1941-1965. In L. Hirsu & J. Jones (Eds.), Rhetorical machines: Past, present, and future conversations in rhetoric and computation (pp. 48-68). Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.

Hammond, J. W. (2018). Toward a social historiography for writing assessment. M. Poe, A. B. Inoue, & N. Elliot (Eds.), Writing assessment, social justice, and the advancement of opportunity (pp. 41-70). UP Colorado.

Banks, W. P., Burns, M. S., Caswell, N. I., Cream, R., Dougherty, T. R., Elliot, N., Gomes, M., Hammond, J. W., Harms, K. L., Inoue, A. B., Lederman, J., Molloy, S., Moreland, C., Nulton, K. S., Peckham, I., Poe, M., Sassi, K. J., Toth, C., & Warwick, N. (2018). The braid of writing assessment, social justice, and the advancement of opportunity: Eighteen assertions on writing assessment with commentary. In M. Poe, A. B. Inoue, & N. Elliot (Eds.), Writing assessment, social justice, and the advancement of opportunity (pp. 379-425). UP Colorado.

Hammond, J. W., & Garcia, M. (2017). The micropolitics of pathways: Teacher education, writing assessment, and the common core. Journal of Writing Assessment, 10(1).

Hammond, J. W. & Moss, P. A. (2017). Validity theory in measurement. In M. A. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory (pp. 2308-2312). Springer.

Garcia, M., & Hammond, J. W. (2016). Investigating the ‘teacher savior’: Veronica Mars and the mysteries of education. In M. Readman (Ed.), Teaching and learning on screen: Mediated pedagogies (pp. 45-62).