Michelle LaFrance (Ph.D., University of Washington, 2009) is a feminist critical ethnographer, who teaches courses on community writing, feminist methodologies, writing studies, and critical pedagogy. Michelle has published on institutional ethnography, the materialities of academic labor, e-portfolios, e-research, and writing center pedagogy. Her current work has her visiting historic cemeteries in the greater DMV, walking/interviewing and hosting story circles at Historic Congressional Cemetery, and treating the evolution of research practice and sensibilities in Writing Studies.
Below she discusses her work on the Historic Congressional Cemetery and the stories that cemeteries can tell.
1. What are you currently researching?
As a rhetorician, I study historic cemeteries (cemeteries that have been interring folks for at least 100 years) because they reveal how communities continually write themselves into (and out of) history. Far more than collections of gravestones, cemeteries are living rhetorical ecologies where memory emerges through monuments, landscapes, volunteer labor, public events, archival practices, and everyday acts of visitation.
· In summer 2026, I led a discovery project with Mason students exploring smaller, often overlooked historic cemeteries across Northern Virginia. Through interviews and site visits with preservationists, descendants, historians, volunteers, and community members, we examined the preservation challenges these sites face while considering how universities can become more meaningful partners in their stewardship.
· My book-in-progress, How to Read a Cemetery: A Rhetoric of Community, examines these questions through Historic Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., using walking interviews, story circles, and community collaboration to understand how diverse stakeholders negotiate belonging, public memory, and collective identity. Together, this work explores how historic cemeteries function not simply as places of remembrance, but as vibrant civic spaces where communities continually shape what (and whom) they choose to remember.
2. What got you interested in DC’s Historic Congressional Cemetery?
I have walked my dogs at HCC for the last 9 years and have attended many events at HCC, as well. One of my favorite events is Souls Strolls, which happens around October/Halloween each year. In Soul Strolls, ticket holders are guided by lantern light through the cemetery, so that we “meet” historic characters who are interred on the grounds. These “souls” tell their story (which is also a history lesson about the US, DC, and the world) and they show you their grave. It’s such a fun way to encounter “history” and to learn about the different eras of the cemetery. It’s become one of my favorite activities each fall.
As a member of the K-9 Corp for such a long time, I also couldn’t help but notice that the volunteer coordination was super well organized—as a community-engaged scholar, it seemed to me that these folks were doing really well at some of the things other sites have struggled to do, such as turning volunteers into “stakeholders” (or create a real sense of ownership for the cemetery’s mission to preserve history and gravesites.
3. What kinds of everyday activities, rituals, or encounters at Historic Congressional Cemetery do you think outsiders might overlook, even though they are central to what makes the place meaningful?
One of the most unique things about Historic Congressional Cemetery is that it opens itself almost every day as an off-leash dog park. If you visit the cemetery during Dog hours, you will inevitably have an encounter with a furry faced friend—the dogs will run up to say “hi” or to see if you have treats. There is a history here, of course!
In the late 70s, the cemetery had fallen into some disrepair. Neighbors talk about the weeds, being waist high, the fallen headstones, and the roads full of potholes. What turned all of that around was a group of determined neighbors who walked their dogs on the site because, behind its walls, the cemetery felt very much like a park. Those neighbors realized that if they worked together and created a paid membership structure for dog walkers, they could fund ongoing groundskeeping and other aspects of care/oversight.
Now almost 40 years later, the “K9 Corp” is a solid group of 600 humans and 800 canines. Members pay an annual fee and must agree to a rotation of volunteer hours and required trainings. New members must wait sometimes for three or more years in order to be able to join the Corp—and the cemetery is known as the coolest dog park in the Mid-Atlantic.
The K-9Corp also now funds almost a third of the cemetery’s operations and is one of the reasons HCC has been described as “America’s Hippest Cemetery.
4. If someone who had never visited Historic Congressional Cemetery asked you what kind of “story” the cemetery tells about the city and its people, what would you want them to understand?
Historic Congressional Cemetery tells us that national history is incomplete without an understanding of the everyday folks who also make the world turn – it’s not just about the most visible political figures or the most memorable actors on the world political stage. The grave of Lucy Bell, a famous abolitionist in DC, is in the center of an area with a number of unmarked graves, originally were placed outside the cemetery wall, where unnamed enslaved people were buried. There is an area where almost all the graves are of women and children who died during the pandemic of 1918. There is a monument to the 18 mostly poor Irish immigrant women who died during the Civil War ammunitions warehouse explosion. Suffragettes and labor activists and queer activists are interred not far from figures like Hoover, who was in charge of the FBI for many years, or Marion Barry, the former high-profile mayor of DC. When you walk the grounds, there’s a astounding sense of the richness and layering of history because of these juxtapositions.
Death is the great universal for us all. And the cemetery reminds us that ordinary folks and great folks alike ultimately walk the same path.
5. What advice would you give to someone interested in pursuing community writing?
Major in Writing and Rhetoric—or better yet, see if you already have some of the credits necessary for the Community Writing minor!
The Writing and Rhetoric programs have a terrific set of classes that will offer a strong foundation for students with many different career goals. Our minors complement many different concentrations across the University.
Community writing is about how we listen and learn across differences, a skill set that entails deep and attentive reading, the ability to ask and explore informed questions, to write with complexity (about the many answers we uncover), and the ability to respectfully discuss differences. These are skills that will never be supplanted by AI (because they are deeply human and nuanced) and can help us to work through the most intractable issues we face. They are also at the core of courses in the Writing and Rhetoric concentration.