Backstory

We are excited to introduce the inaugural issue of Backstory, a student-run, peer reviewed and open access undergraduate research journal showcasing students’ voices and stories. Backstory is a journal that not only centers students’ own backstories and those of others but also recognizes the different strategies and methodologies we might draw on to tell them. Bringing backstories to the foreground, our journal invites stories told in both essay form and across multimodal platforms and technologies, works that bring experimental approaches to research-based writing and interdisciplinary projects that challenge mainstream academic narratives.

Backstory responds to two core provocations: (1) How do we pull our communities, languages, and histories into our writing and research, and (2) how do we engage in cross-disciplinary, culturally grounded knowledge-making that challenges dominant narratives? 

This issue presents a range of submissions that address these questions, spanning research essays to multimodal alt-text projects. Together, they capture a tapestry of backstories that weave together overlapping threads, from language, identity formation and belonging, to historical sites and topographies. Backstory also acknowledges the emerging role of technology in shaping our stories, and our Alt-text section reflexively nods to the practice of web accessibility that codes visual information into text, highlighting both the challenges of visibility in all its valences as well as multimodal translation for diverse audiences.

Probing how language and identity co-constitute each other, contributors explore this relationship through a set of distinct viewpoints from racial code-switching in higher education (Garcia), neurodivergent non-verbal masking practices (Shen), to a poetic reclamation of dysfluency through captions (Hilal). Further complicating these language formations, gender is similarly considered through the Alt-text pieces, one exploring the impacts of moralized and gendered language (Muang) and another examining the intersection of multilingualism and non-binary identities (Nova). Students’ home language practices also come into focus, with an ethnography of the Rez accent across generations (Hofstetter) and a study of Appalachian dialect discrimination in higher education (Buckle). But backstories also emerge from places communities inhabit, as contributors excavate these layered histories from urban green spaces (Guiterrez), issues of gentrification and housing displacement (Abernethy), to the role of militourism in the Pacific (Apineru); they also consider how diasporic communities like second generation Cambodians can build new community spaces in higher ed (Pung). 

We would like to thank our journal’s advisors Dr. Jennifer Johnson, Dr. Lindsey Felt, and Dr. Harriett Jernigan, and Stanford University’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) for their guidance in each submission and dedication in the journal’s direction. Without their support, we would not have been able to produce this issue.

Please join us in celebrating the amazing authors that make up the essence of this first issue and we look forward to shaping our next issue with your (back)stories on display.

With gratitude,

Student Editors of Backstory Journal: Aya Hilal ’25, Alonzo Sexton ’27, and Catherine Wu ’28