It is my solemn task, but also my honour, to offer some all too brief words about Dr. Rachel Nash’s contributions to our university and our community. The news of Rachel's death on Easter Sunday saddened our community. She was a great friend and an inspiration to so many of us. She had been fighting cancer for the last four years, all the while maintaining an ongoing commitment to research and her students—and to her family, husband Dr. Cameron Reid (also a colleague, teaching with both English and Modern Languages and Journalism, Communication, and New Media) and her son Dash (age 6).
At last week’s memorial service, the three speakers, Ron Yamauchi (her brother-in-law), Inga Thomson Hilton (her close friend), and Ashok Mathur (her colleague) encapsulated in very personal terms—in language and emotion appropriate for a eulogy—Rachel’s life and impact on others. Ron rehearsed the voices of family members giving testimony to her gregarious nature and thoughtful, caring ways; Inga spoke of Rachel’s cancer and its return, how it devastated her friends, yet how she was able to assert an ongoing exuberance for life and inspire others in the face of her own impending death; and Ashok shared his memories of a colleague “charismatic, enigmatic, energetic, and so magnetic,” one who drew others to her to collaborate in both practice and in spirit.
This afternoon’s address to Senate, requested by the Vice-President and Provost, is offered not as a eulogy but as a further tribute to Dr. Nash’s work and to her impact as a scholar and teacher.
Rachel graduated from the University of Waterloo with a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition; she began her full-time employment at the university in January, 1999, joining the English and Modern Languages Department as an Assistant Professor specializing in classical rhetoric and contemporary composition theory. She quickly distinguished herself as one of our outstanding young scholars and as a lively, engaging, highly respected teacher.
Among her academic accomplishments, she was co-applicant for two major SSHRC grants, she edited two books, wrote numerous articles and chapters, coordinated an international symposium on artists and interdisciplinarity, and collaborated as curator for an exhibition exploring the nature of artistic inquiry. Her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2003, focused on "The Discourse of Canadian Multiculturalism," an area she explored further in a keynote conference presentation in 2009, and a journal publication later that year. An expert in discourse analysis and social semiotics, she examined in her early work the idea of multiculturalism, “its journey from obscurity to considerable prominence and popularity within Canada and, increasingly, within the international community.” She noted how a strategy of what she called “reduced representation” enables the government “to appear to address many of the pressing issues associated with multiculturalism while actually offering a poorly developed discourse for real exchange on contentious issues”; and she concluded convincingly that “multiculturalism discourse has become limited and conservative through its habitual and predictable use of linguistic, rhetorical, and semiotic resources, but that critical awareness of these patterns may be a first step toward restoring vitality to both the discourse and the ideals represented.”
As part of another research collective, she explored further the rhetoric of place and community self-representation—looking at how communities like Kamloops represent themselves symbolically, through word and image. Smaller cities have, she found, “a relatively limited range of representational resources on which to draw. . . . The exciting modernity and possibility associated with large cities, and the rural charm ideally associated with small towns are both inappropriate to the small city. Instead, the small city actively needs to invent itself, and, indeed, it has the opportunity to do so, turning its representational paucity into an opportunity to forge a unique identity for itself and for small cities in general.” Her work on patterns of community change and resistance has helped define an emerging field of study.
More recently, she employed her skills as a discourse analyst to unpack notions of creativity and practice-led inquiry as components of interdisciplinary research, especially interdisciplinary teams involving artists. Basing her study in part on a survey of over 4000 art schools and visual arts programs across North America, Rachel was beginning to work out and share the pedagogical implications of mainstreaming artistic inquiry and visual argument as key components of academic literacy. Much has been said and written about the convergence of technologies and the changing nature of academic writing. As a discourse specialist and teacher she wrote of the “importance of respecting the integrity of modes of communication, both the visual and the verbal, their irreducibility as well as their complementarity, as we acknowledge too that the verbal is not replaceable by the visual.” “The modes,” she found, “can speak with and to, but not for each other.”
I’d like to conclude on a personal note, for Rachel and I worked closely on a number of shared projects. We worked wonderfully well together, publishing two co-edited books, numerous articles and presentations, and holding three SSHRC grants together. More important, our temperaments balanced one another so well, forming that rare kind of collaboration rooted in friendship and what I always regarded as a shared passion for intellectual discovery. I presented a paper earlier this month at an international conference at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a paper based on our collaborative work completed shortly before Christmas: after the presentation, which focused on the impact of artists on interdisciplinary teams, one of the conference participants remarked that “this was just the kind of research we've been waiting for.” Rachel would have liked that: she was, at root, a small town girl from Powell River, the self-described “adult child of hippies”—she was also a brilliant but unassuming academic, someone whose work informed and inspired those close by and reached out to others both nationally and internationally.
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