Who is here.

This is the thread we will be using to introduce ourselves to each other. Post a short blurb about yourself.

I'll start:

I'm Don Dudding. I'm co director of this summer's writing institute. I teach high school English, speech, drama, journalism, and computer literacy at Southern High School in Racine, OH. I'm working on finishing my first draft of my dissertation this summer before I go back to teaching in August so that I can finish my revisions by November and finally wrap up the PhD I've been working on for about the last 7 years.

My interests include writing and playing folk music on guitar and banjo, photoshopping on a website called "FARK," hiking while "geocaching," and sneaking in naps when I'm not working on the dissertation. My dissertation is a hybrid philosophical/historical/theoretical study of the mostly unexamined notions that support perceptions of authority. Although it's complicated, what I'm trying to argue in my dissertation is that good authority (which I call "pro-agentic") respects agency within rhetorical contexts and bad authority (which I refer to as "pythonic") relies upon coercive tactics or an implicit domination to get others to submit to its way of thinking.

Okay, enough about me. Now it's your turn. Who are you?