This thesis focuses on my navigation of academia, that is, the rhetorical choices I made as a Master's student of the Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures program at Michigan State University to build community and survive. I do this by sharing stories, reflections, and invoking the complex webs of relations that make up my realities. Actively building community and theorizing this practice along the way taught me the importance of the stories that make up a place and the labor of carrying and continuing these stories. My graduate experience was an opportunity to practice listening to people and land for the place stories practice into space (Powell 2012). Through this listening to place, I came to respect the unknowability of all the stories and I adopted an ethos that pushed me to be responsible for the ones I did know. I share these choices with future graduate students in the hopes of offering a roadmap of possibilities and in hopes of sharing in this accountability to the stories we come to know as academics in specific places.
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