Mary Queen

Experimentation, creativity, and curiosity has led me to explore different ways to emphasize to students that writing and reading are essential aspects of their everyday lives. I focus on writing as rhetorical, meaning that readers and writers determine if writing is “good” based on its effectiveness and that any composing act considers not only the purpose, audience, and context but also the effects that rhetorical choices have on audiences. I provide students opportunities to compose in a variety of genres to develop their “rhetorical flexibility,” emphasizing a more complex and fluid understanding of the interactions among multiple audiences, purposes, and contexts. I also incorporate various in-class activities that engage students in team collaboration throughout the semester, challenging them to develop their ability to communicate and collaborate more effectively with diverse individuals. I encourage curiosity, experimentation, and creativity because, for me, these are foundational qualities for any individual to develop what I would call a “writerly” identity or perspective.

At CMUQ, I teach the first- and second-semester writing courses: "Reading and Writing in an Academic Context" (76-100) and "Interpretation and Argument (76-101).

With the 76-100 students at CMUQ, the focus on “Identity and Language” engages these bilingual and multilingual students in in-depth analysis of how scholars in various fields approach issues of identity and language, opening these students’ to diverse perspectives, and challenging them to critically examine their own often “received” notions of stable and pure identities and language. The focus on research conducted in the Gulf region energizes these students’ discussions and challenges them to reflect on the daily interactions they have with the “superdiverse” cultures within Qatar. I often share my own positionality and perspectives to model a critical approach to recognize and analyze the ways in which we are all subject to and traffic in implicit and explicit ideologies that shape our understanding of and interactions with the diverse people we encounter daily. The goal of discussion responses and annotating readings, weekly activities required for each reading, is to help students value writing as a mode of thinking, as composing mindfully, transforming electrical impulses in our brain into ideas.

In my most recent 76-101 course (Spring 2026), I constructed the course around the theme of AI, using Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale, 2021), as the foundational text for investigating the material, social, political, and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. Through readings, discussions, and case studies, we will explore Crawford’s topographic approach, a “humble geography” (p. 13) that maps the interconnected systems of power underlying AI’s “neutrality” and its reshaping of our material, social, political, and economic landscapes.

Since joining CMUQ, I have been experimenting in more depth with using AI in the first-year writing classroom. The English faculty have spent significant time discussing whether and how to allow or encourage students' use of AI in various classroom activities and/or in writing and revising, clearly indicating that we need much more knowledge of and experience in using various AI tools in the classroom. For writing faculty, the “dangers” of AI use are well understood: it’s too easy for students who are developing their critical thinking, reading, and writing to unintentionally or intentionally enable/allow AI to take “authorial control” of their thinking and writing processes, thus short-circuiting their own learning to read and write critically and effectively. However, because of my research interest in how technologies intersect/interact/interpret/(re)produce/(re)circulate language and, consequently, relations of power, AI opens myriad possibilities and fundamental questions that I want to explore WITH students in the first-year writing courses. Some of the questions I begin with include: with the emergence of GenA as one more technology added to the millenia-long development of writing technologies, we need to revisit the question: What is an author? What does it mean to “author” a text? In what ways is AI an “author” (or not)? In what ways do first-year students in a writing class think of themselves as “authors”? What do first-year students DO when they use GenAI in writing classes? What do they consider when deciding whether to use it or not? What impacts their choices? How specifically do they use it? What kinds of tasks, activities, assignments seem most amenable to students’ using GenAI? What specifically do they understand that GenAI does in terms of writing? What specifically do they want from GenAI tools? What specific groups of students use GenAI tools for writing? In other words, how do varying and intersecting linguistic abilities and social identity categories impact how these students both perceive and use these tools?