In this presentation we will revisit the past through narrated story—the many interwoven stories—of CRT’s founding and development through the people and interpersonal relationships that breathed life into this movement. While this is a history of the CRT movement within contemporary U.S. legal studies, it is also a chronicle of the human experiences, relationships, and interconnections that give the movement its spirit and resolve. Through this history, we see how CRT’s founders came together, what they created, and why. Much of what is already known about CRT from the movement’s own perspective is couched in academic discourse that boils CRT down to key figures, key dates, and theorized tenets. While this approach has provided important insights for scholarship, the academic style of much CRT writing has often presented more of a barrier than an invitation for other audiences who might benefit from accessing the rich insights of CRT. In this current moment of controversy and deliberate misunderstanding academic concepts have (often questionably) been weaponized to instill fear and disinformation. The intentional storytelling approach in this presentation humanizes CRT, a movement that has been flattened and demonized by opponents at every turn. Through this effort, we will gather the strands of people’s stories in order to weave the tapestry of CRT’s founding history.

Sponsored by the Mark and Lillian Shapiro Speaking Initiative, the Distinguished Visitors' Program, and the Writing Program. 

Aja Y. Martinez (she/her) is an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas and author of the multi-award-winning book  Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. Her scholarship engages with both public and academic audiences in a series of new projects that include several critical academic journal essays and book chapters, a CRT theoretical introductory chapter for a Routledge collection, a special College English double issue on CRT, CRT symposia in three academic journals, and four book-length projects. Two of the book projects, co-researched and -written with historian and Indigenous studies scholar Robert O. Smith, are under contract with New York University Press and University of California Press—kicking off Cal UP’s new series on CRT. Within these projects Martinez and Smith draw on mixed methods, ranging from archival, to ethnographic, to literary and rhetorical analysis. These books reframe the histories of CRT’s origins in legal studies while making provocative claims concerning CRT’s storytelling pedagogy, methodology, and theory. Additionally, Martinez is coeditor and cofounder, with Michele Eodice and Sandra Tarabochia (University of Oklahoma), of the transdisciplinary, digital open-access, and multimodal journal Writers: Craft and Context. Last, Martinez is coeditor, with Stacey Waite (University of Nebraska) of the University of Pittsburgh Press’s series Composition, Literacy, and Culture.