Dr. Joyce Rain Anderson

Joyce Rain Anderson (she/her/hers) is a Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English Department. She is the mother of two and grandmother of four. She is guided by Indigenous principles of relationality, respect, responsibility, reciprocity. Her focus is on decolonial pedagogies and embedding Indigenous ways of knowing into interdisciplinary frameworks. In addition to teaching first-year writing, cultural rhetorics, Indigenous rhetorics and a variety of other courses in Writing and Writing Studies, she coordinates Ethnic and Indigenous Studies and is the Faculty Associate for the Pine Ridge Partnership. She serves on the Advisory Committee for the Martin Richard Institute for Social Justice. She is also co-editor of the award-winning collection Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics (2015 Utah State Press). Her chapter "Walking with Relatives: Indigenous Bodies of Protest" was published in Unruly Rhetorics (2018 Pittsburgh Press). Her current projects include research on Walter Battice (Sauk and Fox) who attended Bridgewater in 1887 and a project titled “Still Speaking with Forked Tongues” which explores the ways in which academic language perpetuates western ideologies and thus is biased and exclusive. In the community, she serves on the board for the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center, the Education subcommittee for Plymouth 400, and works with Indigenous intellectuals and scholars to bring curricula change in teaching about Native peoples. She is one of the organizers of the Indigenous History Conference for 2020.

As an artisan, she is intrigued by the multiple forms that art and making can take. In addition to poetry, drawing and painting, she takes her camera everywhere. She does beadwork, wampum, finger weaving, wood carving, sewing, and design—using a variety of materials and techniques. Developing relationships with raw materials and creating something helps to ground her.