Alec Fisher (he/they)

Alec currently teaches a variety of composition classes at the UW and Seattle Central College – with special attention to pre-college and developmental writing courses. Alec seeks to use literacy education to empower students with the communication tools necessary for self-expression as part of an ethos of holistic care for students as whole persons. In an attempt to challenge how social and linguistic difference has been historically misevaluated in English classrooms, Alec's teaching practice makes space for students to understand their individual lived experience and existing language assets as important resources for learning and inquiry. Through various collaborative projects, Alec has sought to bring students and community organizations into the process of creating this curriculum as direct stakeholders. Through building these relationships with students and local organizations, Alec hopes to teach college composition as a collaborator in transforming our larger Seattle community toward greater equity. To further this work, Alec recently received a teaching endorsement from the UW English Department in anti-racist and equity-oriented composition pedagogy and is currently working on a certificate in TESOL teaching methods.

Alongside this teaching, I have benefitted from collaborations with community-based organizations on public scholarship projects. In (Re)Imagining Home in the Crisis of the Prison Fix (2021), English Department graduate student Alexandra Meany and I collaborated with formerly/currently incarcerated and homeless UW alumni in order to use personal narrative to reimagine the mutually-informing crises of homelessness and incarceration in Seattle. Over the past two years, I have been fortunate to win the Abe Osheroff and Gunnel Clark Fellowship from the UW Center for Human Rights in order to support collaborative writing projects with incarcerated community organizers that intervene in public conversations on planned new prison construction in the Pacific Northwest. These projects connect the state of Washington's investment in carceral institutions to the struggle for incarcerated UW students to both learn and survive. In Spring 2022, I received a graduate research fellowship with the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies in order to co-write an article on histories of queer and trans prison organizing inside Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, WA. Opening the university to communities previously excluded from this institution inspires my research and scholarship.

My dissertation research focuses on the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the development of contemporary mass incarceration. I examine 20th and 21st-century U.S. prison autobiography in order to understand how prison organizing movements both abetted and contested new racializations of sexuality in prison.