On Multimodality in Media and Composition

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Reimagining the Social Turn
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Reimagining the Social Turn: New Work from the Field
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482 College English
composition studies are often the result of productive conversations across multiple
subfields within English studies, including increasing concern over the material
conditions in which we do our work and the increasing economic difficulties facing
many of our students. As students turn to us for “certification” in certain “skills,”
we should collectively revisit what such education means. And because training in
rhetoric and composition is often the first formal introduction college students have
to understanding the complexities of discourse communities, shifts in theoretical
orientations within composition studies have an impact on how students conceptual¬
ize writing—conceptualizations that go with them to other courses throughout their
college careers, and beyond. We understand the social turns within composition
studies to be relevant to all of us invested in the rhetorical and literacy educations
of our students.
Against this backdrop and claim for relevance across English studies, how might
we understand the original social turn and its subsequent permutations? As Kelly
Kinney, Thomas Girshin, and Barrett Bowlin write in a 2010 issue of Composition
Forum, the social turn might actually be seen as a series of three turns:
The first [...] emphasizes teaching writing and learning how to write as collaborative,
interactive processes. The second shift grows out of the first, but, rather than focus¬
ing primarily on instructional practice, as James Berlin writes in Rhetorics, Poetics, and
Cultures, it examines and critiques the signifying practices that shape subject forma¬
tion—and, by extension, the discipline—“within the framework of economic, social,
and political conditions” (83). While scholarship represented by the third social turn
does not ignore classroom pedagogy or critical theory, it also does something quite
more: it takes as its starting point embodied activism, (emphasis added)
This move toward embodied activism is a welcome one, for it signals a move away
from identity-politics-inflected critiques of subject formation to a more nuanced sense
of the personal and the political and how those fields intersect; more important, it
takes those intersections and propels them into action.
Whether Kinney and coauthors are correct in their specific characterization
of the shifting social turn, the important point here is that the social turn serves as
a powerful lens through which to see composition’s ongoing grappling with socio¬
economic and cultural disparities. Space limitations do not allow us to explicate fully
die various turns to the social that composition studies has taken in the last three
(almost four) decades. However, we might revisit briefly a flashpoint for the social
turn’s inception to see how fundamental insights generated by the social turn have
remained constant—and how they have changed.
Specifically, we’re thinking of the exchange of articles published in the field
in the early 1980s by coauthors Linda Flower and John Hayes and, in response, by
Patricia Bizzell—articles acknowledged as “foundational” texts in the formation of
contemporary composition studies. Flower and Hayes published two closely con-
Reimagining the Social Turn: New Work from the Field 483
nected articles—“The Cognition of Discovery” in 1980 and “A Cognitive Process

Theory of Writing” in 1981—that argued for the study of cognitive processes in
the development of strategies for teaching writing to an increasingly diverse student
population. In retrospect, these articles still seem fresh and useful, but it is hard to
read them without hearing the critiques that Bizzell launched in 1982, in “Cognition,
Convention, and Certainty.” Flower and Hayes describe the “rhetorical situation”
of student writing as “the name we assign to the givens with which a writer must
work, namely, the audience and assignment” (“Cognition of Discovery” 26). From
this basis, Flower and Hayes outline the processes of successful and unsuccessful
writers, concluding that “people only solve the problems they define for themselves”
(“Cognitive” 369). That is, we need to be attentive to how writers conceptualize what
they are being asked to do, and help them develop the strategies for grappling with
a range of rhetorical tasks.
Granting the power of this insight, however, Bizzell counters by arguing that
“[w]hat’s missing here is the connection to social context afforded by recognition of
the dialectical relationship between thought and language” (486). Or, as she puts it
in direct response to her interlocutors,
The Flower-Hayes model of writing [. . .] cannot alone give us a complete picture

of the process. We might say that if this model describes th& form of the compos¬
ing process, the process cannot go on without the content which is knowledge of the
conventions of discourse communities. (491)
For Bizzell, Flower and Hayes represent an inward-directed view of the writing
process, one focused on how the writer understands and works with the task at hand.
In contrast, Bizzell puts forth a more outward-directed view, one that is much more
conscious of the sociopolitical contexts in which people become literate. However,
Bizzell does more than just remind us of the importance of social and discursive
contexts. Her essay takes a markedly political turn toward its end:
The kind of pedagogy that would foster responsible inspection of the politically loaded
hidden curriculum in composition class is discursive analysis. The exercise of cultural
hegemony can be seen as the treatment of one community’s discourse conventions as
if they simply mirrored reality. To point out that discourse conventions exist would
be to politicize the classroom—or rather, to make everyone aware that it is already
politicized. World views would become more clearly a matter of conscious commit¬
ment, instead of unconscious conformity, if the ways in which they are constituted in
the discourse communities were analyzed. (496)
Flower and Hayes may have helped solidify the practice of teaching writing as a
process, but Bizzelks call to teach a critical consciousness shifted how many com-
positionists understood their work as teachers and scholars. Many compositionists
now see the teaching of writing as tied profoundly and intimately to inviting students
484 College English
to understand how naming is an ideological act; how narrating experience can both
reinforce and challenge the dominant order; how language use both buys into and
potentially exceeds normative understanding; and how learning to write can both
serve the existing order and help us reimagine it.
A much-needed attention to students’ diverse backgrounds has been one of the
key effects of this last turn to the social, what Kinney and coauthors might term the
“second shift.” Feminist compositionists provide necessary critiques of patriarchal
communication and debate practices, including deeply gendered assumptions about
language; compositionists studying race and ethnicity offer alternatives to classical
rhetorical tradition and promote the robust contributions of communities of color to
literate exchange and practice; queer compositionists alert us to the literacy needs and
challenges of those who work against heteronormativity; and, increasingly, compo¬
sitionists attuned to the vicissitudes of class bring to attention the needs of working-
class students learning to write—and survive—in an economically challenging time.
Moving beyond critique, such work has also pushed us toward pedagogies of
community engagement. But the field of composition studies—and by extension
English studies broadly—still has far to go. This last turn to the social may have
grounded the teaching of writing for many scholars in the very real sociopolitical
and cultural realities of lived experience; however, the economic challenges of our
time create pressures that might yet further turn our attention to the social, in all of
its vexed complexity. And yet, in a troubling turn, these economic challenges have
seemed to promote more attention to skills building and career preparation—cer¬
tainly understandable as an anxious citizenry tries to secure its future. Indeed, the
economic downturn has had a clear impact on the profession’s scholarly emphasis.
Responding to the assessment movement, many scholars in the field have turned
their attention to assessment projects, to the study of transfer of skills, strategies,
and habits of mind from one course context to another (and beyond), and to the
development of “standards” documents that, on one hand, attempt to forestall
outside assessment while, on the other hand, promote the goals of career readiness.
For example, the laudable Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing forwards
the teaching of “habits of mind” that links the “ability to write well” primarily and
explicitly to college preparation and career success: “Students who come to college
writing with these habits of mind and these experiences will be well positioned to
meet the writing challenges in the full spectrum of academic courses and later in their
careers” (2). Again, such goals meet the needs of a citizenry preparing its children
for a tough and uncertain economic future. However, the critique of that future, and
the development of an imagination to envision alternatives to it, which seem key
ingredients of Bizzell’s call to a critical pedagogy, are less and less explicitly a part
of the pedagogies articulated.
In this regard, composition finds itself in much the same space as the rest of
English studies, and, in fact, the rest of the academy—caught between very real
literacy challenges and our more “liberal” mission. Christopher Newfield, writing
in Ivy and Industry and Unmaking the Public University, traces the long-standing in¬
tertwining relationships among higher education, government, and business, noting
how, particularly in the humanities, higher educators have often been caught between
pressures to promote a project of liberal self-development while also training students
to work in the managerial and postmanagerial middle class. Newfield asks pointedly,
What of the public university’s traditional and distinctive mission of broad cultural
and human development? What about research on fundamental scientific questions
with no visible commercial potential? What about the pursuit of complex sociocultural
knowledge to help a polarized world? (Unmaking 10)
Now, unlike Newfield, we don’t believe that pedagogies that address, examine, and
promote “broad cultural and human development” need be counter to pedagogies
that prepare students for employability. However, like Newfield, we worry that the
latter impetus might overtake the former.
But still, we believe the social turn remains very much alive and capable of ad¬
dressing the systemic economic and material challenges that face our society, our
cultures, our ways of being and living with one another. Composition specifically
and English studies more broadly have done some of the work of inclusivity, of
recognizing that we come from diverse literate backgrounds, of engaging different
communities and recognizing the challenges of different discursive practices to how
we teach writing and communication in a complex pluralistic democracy. Those
challenges remain. However, if Flower and Hayes are still correct in asserting that
“people only solve the problems they define for themselves,” then the challenge
of this latest turn to the social is to invite and even insist on a reimagination of the
complexities of teaching writing right now, in this particularly vexed sociopolitical
and economic context. Identity markers and categories such as gender, race, eth¬
nicity, sexuality, and class are not discrete and dealt with simply through inclusion.
Shifting economies make material conditions very real factors to acknowledge and
contend with. Practicing social justice and equity matter now in ways that we can—
and must—understand intersectionally and economically. Most important, we must
nurture a view of social change that works toward justice by thinking beyond simple
job readiness and career preparation.
How does writing figure as critical to this new social turn? Contributors to this
special issue explore this question in a number of unique ways, bringing together
theoretical meditation and critical reflection on our field’s scholarly and pedagogical
practices. We begin with Laura Micciche, whose “Writing Material” calls for a new
materialism that “pivots away from the individual-community binary and toward writ-
486 College English
ing as a curatorial, distributed act” (494). Next, in “Sinners Welcome,” Steve Parks
offers a critique of Linda Flower’s work and a powerful set of examples that move
composition beyond disciplinarity to recognizing (and even recovering) lost political
roots and possibilities. Jonathan Alexander and Susan Jarratt use interviews with the
“Irvine 11” protesters of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren to explore the (disconnec¬
tions between education and activism in “Rhetorical Education and Student Activ¬
ism.” What might it mean for us, they ask, to look at how power and the political can
be analyzed within and without the classroom? Working from the force of embodied
experience as powerful counterknowledge, David Wallace’s “Unwelcome Stories”
offers us a deeply personal, intersectional take on these theoretical discussions, and
provides an example of critical engagement with the material realities implicated in
and by the social turn(s). Echoing and expanding Micciche’s call, Tony Scott and
Nancy Welch’s “One Train Can Hide Another” argues for a critical materialist
pedagogy that not only “enables defetishizing, rematerializing investigation” (573)
of texts, but also values “reinterpretive creativity” (576) in the service of embodied
political action. Finally, Morris Young reflects on these essays, noting their empha¬
sis on material rhetorics and imploring us to “be mindful” of consequence—“that
attention to what the social provides should not obscure what material conditions,
new relations, and actions may develop in a changing world” (585).
Taken together, these pieces offer a bracing view of this latest social turn that
foregrounds deeply contextualized action and radical possibility for English studies in
general and composition studies in particular. More needs to be done. We recognize
that the views offered here constitute only a beginning, a partial sense of what is
possible and necessary. Indeed, we urge in particular a renewed and reinvigorated
attention to gender in transnational and global contexts, as well as critiques that push
us to consider more thoroughly issues of race and class. Still, as we make this begin¬
ning, especially in the context of those systemic economic and material challenges
mentioned earlier, we are reminded ofjacqueline Jones Royster’s keynote address at
the 1997 Feminism(s) & Rhetoric(s) conference, in which she notes that rhetoric as
resistance grows from “critical moments of despair and impossibility".” As scholars,
she says, we must address that despair and impossibility through careful analysis, a
passionate attachment to our work, attention to ethical accuracy, and a commitment
to social responsibility and action. In short, we must be conscious of the momentum
we create. This special issue is one attempt to document such momentum.
Works Cited
Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. Urbana, IL: NCTE,
1996. Print.
Bizzell, Patricia. “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know About Writing.”
PRE/TEXT 3.3 (1982): 213-44. Rpt. in The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller.
New York: Norton, 2009. 479-501. Print.
Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, and National
Writing Project. Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. N.p.: CWPA, NCTE, and NWP,
2011. PDF file.
Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. “The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem.” CCC
31.1 (1980): 21-32. Print.
-. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” CCC 32.4 (1981): 365-87. Print.
Kinney, Kelly, Thomas Girshin, and Barrett Bowlin. “The Third Turn Toward the Social: Nancy Welch’s
Living Room, Tony Scott’s Dangerous Writing, and Rhetoric and Composition’s Turn toward Grass¬
roots Political Activism.” Composition Forum. 21. compositionfoi'um.com. 2010. Web. 12 Oct. 2013.
Newfield, Christopher. Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980.
Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Print.
-. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 2011. Print.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Keynote address. First biennial conference on Feminism(s) & Rhetoric(s).
Oregon State University, 1997.
Writing Material
Laura R. Micciche
But the social "world is veij real; there are bodies and matter and real consequences of this
materiality.
D —Susan Hekman, “Constructing the Ballast” (115-16)
f recent critical scholarship is any indication, the “social turn” has hardened
into repressive orthodoxy and failed to keep pace with a changing world. In
its policing of essentialism, refusal to engage nature or biology, and reliance
on culture and language as exclusive routes to meaningful analysis, the social
turn, at least dominant forms of it, seems to have plateaued. In current theoretical
discourse, complexity reigns, as do nonoppositional stances wearied by critique’s
taste for subtraction, which has failed to slow the commodification of identity and
culture, capitalism as an engine of social life in the United States, or abuses of domi¬
nant ideology. Primary tools of the social turn—textual and linguistic analysis as well
as ideology critique—have proven important but limited. More to the point of this
special issue, these tools have narrowed the scope of what counts as the social by
foregrounding the constructed nature of texts, objects, activities, and bodies with little
attention to how such constructions interact with natural systems, biology, animals,
and other forms of matter. Karen Barad, in “Posthumanist Performativity” (2003),
expresses representative disenchantment with the social turn as follows: “Language
matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which
the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter” (120).
Laura R. Micciche teaches writing, rhetorical theory, and writing pedagogy at the University of
Cincinnati. With Dale Jacobs, she edited A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies
(Heinemann, 2003), and she is the author of Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching (Heinemann,
2007). Her current research focuses on writing partnerships, the topic of a book in progress and die basis
for “Composing With,” a new section in the journal that she edits, Composition Studies (www.uc.edu/
journals/composition-studies).
College English, Volume 76, Number 6, July 2014

Writing Material 489
What’s at stake in reconfigurations of social theory is nothing less than the big
wide world that both includes and exceeds subjects, altering understandings of agency,
identity, subjectivity, and power along the way. What follows is a selective summary
of interdisciplinary efforts to make matter matter in theoretical conversations that
I m bundling under the category “new materialism,” a capacious enough naming to
account for various movements aimed at foregrounding a relational ontology: ecoso-
cial theories, material feminism, affect theory, complexity theory, digital humanities,
animal studies, and actor-network theory. This research has helped me recognize
writing as radically distributed across time and space, and as always entwined with a
whole range of others. These ideas have made inroads into composition studies, as
I’ll discuss in what follows, but the transfer to writing theory and practice remains
very much in progress. Thus, after overviewing new materialist efforts to draft a
robust concept of matter, I explore the value of this work for twenty-first-century
writing studies through the lens of acknowledgments, a genre wherein relational-
ity is dramatized. Because writing remains a central activity to the work of English
studies broadly, this exploration resonates beyond composition studies, connecting
to diverse contexts for writing practice and study.
On New Materialism
New materialism is a transdisciplinary effort to reshape materialist critiques in order

to acknowledge and reckon with a much-expanded notion of agency, one that includes
humans, nonhumans, and the environmental surround. Diana Coole and Samantha
Frost, editors of New Materialisms, argue that “any plausible account of coexistence
and its conditions in the twenty-first century” requires focus on a multidimensional
understanding of materiality, one that does not launch a de facto dismissal of nature
and biology on grounds that they are “naively representational or naturalistic” (3).
They find textual analysis, structural Marxism, and “radical constructivism,” for
example, incapable of describing complex material realities and resulting radical
agencies (2-3). Intersecting forms of matter frame our existence in large and small
ways; political and cultural theory cannot afford to ignore or belittle this insight, as
the following makes clear:
Our existence depends from one moment to the next on myriad micro-organisms and
diverse higher species, on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular reactions and
on pitiless cosmic motions, on the material artifacts and natural stuff that populate
our environment, as well as on socioeconomic structures that produce and reproduce
the conditions of our everyday lives. (1)
Coole and Frost identify the following issues as salient exigencies for new material¬
isms: climate change, global capital and shifting population flows, the “biotechno¬
logical engineering of genetically modified organisms,” eating practices, methods of
490 College English
procreation, and technology-drenched life activities (5-6). As they note, constructivist

paradigms, in which I would include the social turn, are not equipped to address many
of these issues because of their “allergy to ‘the real,’” particularly within hardcore
postmodern discursive versions (6).
Finding equipment elsewhere, new materialism is indebted to Rene Descartes’
view of matter as corporeal, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s assemblage concept,
Bruno Latour’s view of comingling human and nonhuman actants, and various
versions of chaos and complexity theory, all of which contribute to the guiding
belief that matter is active, monkey-wrenching explanations of agency that attribute
causality exclusively to human action. In short, humans and their intentions are
decentered in this model in which every thing pulsates with what Jane Bennett calls
“vibrant matter.” Though new materialists find the insights of social constructionism
valuable to political and cultural theory, they object to the automaticity that often
accompanies the social, aptly summarized in the well-worn idea that everything is
a social construction. On the whole, new materialists seek critical frameworks that
honor daily life experiences in coexistence with ordinary and complex matter, from
the life-supporting activity of worms to the web-like structure of geopolitical conflicts
(compare to Bennett).
For new materialists, human exceptionalism is a dangerous fiction that distorts
reality, identity, culture, and politics by giving little due to energies or actors that
coexist with humans. Bennett terms this partnership “confederate agency” composed
of “assemblages” (compare to Deleuze and Guattari), which she defines as
living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent pres¬
ence of energies that confound them from within. [...] Assemblages are not governed
by any central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence
to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group. The effects generated
by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to
make something happen (a newly inflected materialism, a blackout, a hurricane, a war
on terror) is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered
alone. (23-24)
The 2012 outbreak of fungal meningitis across the United States can be under¬
stood through this framework. Some of the actants involved in this potentially life-
threatening infection include the patients who sought treatment, the New England
Compounding Center’s failure to sterilize drugs at minimum levels and to clean
sterilizing tools, government deregulation of compounding facilities, the unchecked
practice of moving drugs in batches across the nation, the use of metals and other
tools to create and dispense medicine, the medicalization of back pain and high cost
of physical therapy, and so forth. Agency is distributed across things and people and
structures, resulting in a kind of Dewey-inspired collective public (compare to Ben¬
nett 100-104). For Dewey, as Bennett notes, publics form in response to problems:
Writing Material
“Problems come and go, and so, too, do publics: at any given moment, many different
publics are in the process of crystallizing and dissolving” (100).
New materialism reconfigures agency in relation to individuals, things, and
publics by delinking assumed relations between action and causality, generating
instead diffuse, unstable configurations of blame and responsibility that make for
less clear targets but for more robust accounting of the interstitial qualities of any
single problem.
The political dimensions of new materialism are most pronounced in feminist
work. Barad and Hekman argue that political discourses are not freestanding but
are deeply embedded in other swarms of activity. Barad’s analysis of fetal imaging
demonstrates how seeing the fetus as matter, made possible through sonograms, is
necessary in order to attach political significance to the fetus. As Hekman notes, the
fetus becomes a “political actor, and this fact has profound consequences for feminist
politics” (106). Embodiment and agency, for feminists, are notably not treated as de-
politicized effects of complexity or networked realities, as is the case in some versions
of new materialism circulating in composition studies, most notably, by postprocess
theorists (Dobrin; Dobrin, Rice, and Vastola; Kent, Post-Process). Within the current
wave of postprocess research is a longing for theory unfettered by the distraction
of pesky subjects and their unruly bodies. The aversion to diverse fleshiness is reaf¬
firmed by the overrepresentation of men among the sources that tend to drive this
research: Bruno Latour, Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Edmund Burke, Jacques Derrida,
Thomas Kent, Gilles Deleuze, and others (see Sandra Harding on Latour’s failure to
account for feminist contributions to science studies). Meanwhile, some advocates,
especially Sidney Dobrin in Postcomposition and a handful of contributors to Beyond
Postprocess (Dobrin et al.), substitute talk of bodies, identities, and differences with
the materiality of texts. In the grips of this approach, writing becomes an effect of
tools and technologies, an activity that is unteachable, a ghostly production, and the
province of theory and men (more on postprocess to follow).
Feminists, in contrast, have revised corporeality to acknowledge the mingling
together of human and nonhuman matter, setting the groundwork for understanding
identity as never entirely divorced from environment, medicine, science, toxins, and
so forth. This view creates a case for distributed agency and for intersections with
nature and environment, long a troubling pairing for feminism because of women’s
long-standing vexed relation to nature. One of the main points that emerges from
material feminist research is that all forms of matter, living and nonliving, are sig¬
nificant to sociocultural, political, as well as biological systems.
Affect is also an important partner for new materialism. An especially evocative
example, Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects, develops a poetics of everyday affective
experiences and cultural politics. Ordinary affects, she writes, are “a problem or ques¬
tion emergent in disparate scenes and incommensurate forms and registers; a tangle
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of potential connections” (4). To represent the woven texture of ordinary affects,

Stewart develops a series of vignettes and observations that illustrate affect’s coequal
relation with objects, places, things, time, and more. Echoing the work referenced
earlier, Stewart views agency—whether affective or otherwise—as incredibly diffuse,
codependent, and unstable. She writes that agency is
lived through a series of dilemmas: that action is always a reaction; that the potential
to act always includes the potential to be acted on, or to submit; that the move to
gather a self to act is also a move to lose the self; that one choice precludes others;
that actions can have unintended and disastrous consequences; and that all agency is
frustrated and unstable and attracted to the potential in things. (86)
There’s nothing comforting or familiar about this explanation for teachers, theorists,
or practitioners of writing. And yet, those of us who organize ourselves around writ¬
ing in one way or another have to reckon with a shifting critical consciousness and
the implications for writing after the heyday of the social turn.
Comp Matter
The social turn in composition studies widened contexts for theorizing writing,
shifting attention from the individual writer (the legacy of expressivist and cognitive
process models) to larger political, institutional, and cultural contexts of writing.
Along the way, process pedagogy got a makeover that is aptly represented by Bruce
McComiskey’s social-process model, first articulated by him in 1999. He advocates “a
cyclical model of the writing process, one that accounts for the composing strategies
of individual and collaborative writers as well as the socio-discursive lives of texts.”
Building on Marx’s materialist “cycle of cultural production, contextual distribution,
and critical consumption” (382), McComiskey uses magazine advertisements to il¬
lustrate this model in practice: students focus on the general purpose and slant of a
magazine, its distribution and circulation, and socially derived consumption practices.
The latter point is achieved in several ways, one of which is by asking students to
research how representatives from diverse cultural groups respond to particular ads.
“These different responses,” writes McComiskey, reveal “the polysemous character
of cultural values, and they foster a more inclusive ethic in students’ critical writ¬
ing” (395). The social is not monolithic in this account but shifts in accordance with
orientations and attachments.
McComiskey’s model, representative in its general approach of the pedagogi¬
cal imprint made by the social turn, prioritizes superstructural forces—institutions,
culture, politics—over minutia of producing and distributing writing, elements
that, in my view, have become heightened as writing practices have become more
ephemeral. Digital composing environments, the likes of which were in their infancy
when McComiskey and advocates of the social turn were writing, constitute the new
normal. The simultaneous increasing invisibility and hyper-pervasiveness of writing

activity, vividly detailed by Kathleen Blake Yancey in her 2004 CCCC chair’s ad¬
dress, illuminates why materialism has begun to find its way (back) into composition
scholarship (for earlier contributions, see Cooper, “Ecology”; Haas; Prior; Syverson).
That is, as delivery modes change, and as the very materials used to produce writing
undergo dramatic transformations, awareness of writing platforms, tools, habits, and
supports has intensified.
That awareness has translated into an uptick in research focused on what might
seem the mundaneness of writing practices, in effect widening social scenes of writing
(Geisler and Slattery; Rivers and Weber; Shipka, “This”). Kendall Leon and Stacey
Pigg’s study of graduate student writing practices serves as a case in point. For their
research participants, digital multitasking is normative. Writing is anything but
single-minded: “Filling out forms is juxtaposed against creating academic knowl¬
edge through writing acts; checking email and connecting with friends, family, and
acquaintances happens in the same moment as producing words that will eventually
become presentations or publications” (8). Writing isn’t a private activity, one that
happens only in classrooms, heads, a room of one’s own, or at kitchen tables, nor is
it a set of linear tasks or a unimodal endeavor. It is elliptical, immersive in diverse
environments, dispersed, ordinary (not rarified), mediated, ongoing, and coexistent
with other activities.
Of course, before digitality became a way of being, writing scholars paid at¬
tention to other seemingly mundane writing activities. Early contributions include
Janet Emig’s focus on hand, eye, brain activities during the composing process
(Web of Meaning)-, Sondra Perl’s exploration of the sensory experience of writing;
and Christina Haas’s work on writing as a technology, “for without the crayon or
the stylus or the Powerbook, writing simply is not writing” (x-xi). Working in a
similar vein, Margaret Syverson’s sustained study of writing as an ecological system
examines the interplay of writers, readers, texts, and environments large and small.
Syverson, influenced by complexity theory, foreshadows many new materialist prin¬
ciples, though she does not give as much attention to embodiment and nonhuman
participation as do scholars in that movement. Nonetheless, Syverson prepares us to
consider writing matter as at once encompassing and minute, complex and ordinary,
situated and distributed, individualistic and embedded in “co-evolving” environments
(xiv). For Syverson, “writers, readers and texts” make up
a larger system that includes environmental structures, such as pens, paper, computers,
books, telephones, fax machines, photocopiers, printing presses, and other natural and
human-centered features, as well as other complex systems operating at various levels
of scale, such as families, global economies, publishing systems, theoretical frames,
academic disciplines, and language itself. (5; see also Prior)
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Admittedly, Syverson’s ecosocial model seems to have been underread in composition

studies writ large. No doubt her book’s emergence in 1999, during the field’s political
turn, has something to do with this. Ecological approaches to writing studies have
not gained much traction for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the percep¬
tion that natural systems and political ones are oppositional, a perception no longer
sustainable in the face of changing realities and, especially, elevated risk—whether
environmental, nutritional, or otherwise—that is an ordinary and increasingly vis¬
ible part of everyday life (for example, Alaimo and Hekman; Parr; Pollan; Sagarin).
How then does writing and its companion terms change within the context
of a robust materialism? While the social turn in composition has taken various
practical and theoretical forms—collaborative writing and peer review, critical
analysis of cultural practices, heightened awareness of sociocultural differences and
their reproduction through dominant discourses—the emerging materialist focus in
composition studies is as yet inchoate. Next, I catalog some ongoing and possible
new directions for writing scholarship suggested by new materialism, and then take
a look at the genre of acknowledgments in academic books, where concepts such as
distributed agency and human-nonhuman partnerships are often explicidy articulated.
POSTPROCESS AND WRITING WlTH
The social turn configured writing as a mode of social action—a tool for enacting
agency and, quite often, change on a large and small scale. Writing also became a
tool for expressing cultural identities, developing awareness of experience as both
personal and collective, and joining a conversation that does not begin or end with a
single individual. In contrast to cognitive models, writing was theorized as a process
embedded in sociopolitical, familial contexts, complete with power inequities and
uneven access to literacy tools (see Heath). And academic writing was often viewed
as inseparable from the politics of discourse and the complexities of community
membership, belonging, and outsider status (see Bartholomae).
None of these configurations of writing is oppositional to new materialism, but
the latter pivots away from the individual-community binary and toward writing as
a curatorial, distributed act. Writing, through this lens, is not a repository for real
or invented identity or a discrete expression of authorship (a familiar postmodern
charge against modernism) but is a multimodal, nonlinear process of “collecting, as¬
sembling, sifting, structuring, and interpreting”—that is, curating materials to create
narrative, identity, community, or other significant meanings (UCLA 9). Geoffrey
Sire, in “Box-Logic,” advances this approach by extrapolating from Marcel Duchamp
and Joseph Cornell poetic collector practices valuable for an aesthetic of composition,
one that envisions students as “passionate designers” (Sire 117). Texts become part
of an exhibit, and students become “curators, mounting another show of the ever-
evolving permanent collection at their musees imaginaires” (188). The goal is not
coherence or linear argumentation; it’s developing “an aesthetic of the found object,
of interesting, quirky small-t truths one stumbles upon” (120). Everything matters
to writing; all matter is fair game. Like new materialists, Sire configures agency
and energy as emergent not from one site of meaning—that is, a text—but from a
conglomeration of source material linked in diverse, often unpredictable designs.
Postprocess theorists also emphasize writing’s “withness,” though from a dif¬
ferent point of view. Resistant to describing writing as a process or a product, Kent
describes writing from “the postprocess mind-set” as that which “never constitutes
a thing-in-itself such as a discrete process, system, or conventional act” (“Preface”
xix). If not a “thing-in-itself,” then writing would seem to be a “thing-with-others,”
albeit definitively not with subjects or subjectivity. Here’s Dobrin and coauthors
describing the logic of this position: “Because writing is nomadic and paralogic, the
ability to teach or learn it dissolves along with the impetus for disciplines that spe¬
cialize in the teaching of writing, demanding instead a greater focus on theorizing
writing qua writing sans subject” (17). The causal structure of this sentence, and by
extension, some versions of postprocess theory, eludes me. If writing is uncodifiable,
irreducible, contingent on use—following Kent’s definition of paralogy (.Paralogic
Rhetoric)—how do these features necessarily translate into an inability to learn and
teach writing? And why or how does this inability lead to the conclusion that we
must theorize writing apart from subjects? This anti-subject version of postprocess
is a response to the tyranny of “process” in the field’s vocabulary, vision, and sense
of self, but it’s unclear why the appropriate response is to install in its place what Sire
I think rightly calls “theory heaven, a spectral world into which one can hypothesize
what happens to the text when it encounters the equally unreal audience it conjures”
(“Salon” 215). Anti-subject postprocess theory suffers from mission ambivalence: we
know what the movement is against, but not what it’s for.
Other forms of postprocess, if a bit opaque, seem less inclined to embrace com¬
position unencumbered by the material reality of teaching, writing, and students.
Barbara Couture, for example, states that writing teachers “need to create occasions
for students to become more overtly aware of the link between writing and the way
they are in the world and to become more critically attuned to this dynamic” (26).
For Couture, writing, like being, is always in flux and requires that we attend to
shifting consequences that accompany states of change, calling to mind reflective
and rhetorical pedagogies (27-28). Taking relationality in a different direction, Joe
Hardin contends that postprocess pedagogy, which rejects authorial presence and a
universalized writing system, offers instruction in “processes of textual circulation,
exhibition, and collaboration,” resulting in a pedagogical cosmopolitanism (66). In
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a similar spirit, Byron Hawk contextualizes postprocess as an expression of post¬

humanism, which “includes humans but decenters them in relational models of as¬
semblage and expression” (77). In this construct, the world consists of always shifting
relational nodes that cross species and contexts; thus, writing too should be more
attuned to uncertainty and difference because these are key features of life’s rhythms.
An arm of research consistent with postprocess thinking, which does not
typically self-identify as “postprocess,” engages with materials and technologies of
writing often overlooked, in no small part because of print culture’s centuries-long
relative stability. Although a great deal of work in composition studies has shed light
on digital technologies in relation to writing practices, I’ll highlight here scholarly
work on low-fi, ubiquitous technologies like paper, which have received less attention
(see also Baron). This work is significant for the way it brings notice to production
and consumption practices tied to ordinary writing props that have long ceased to
be novel, and are mostly unrecognizable as technologies. In one such instance, Peter
Mortensen investigates the toxicity of paper production—the environmental, health,
and safety threats posed by papermaking. Linking material culture and literacy
rates, Mortensen argues that “literacy as a material practice [is] bound up in cycles
of production, consumption, and waste” and is “felt unevenly across regions in the
United States and increasingly, across regions worldwide” (398).
Following this trail, Catherine Prendergast and Roman Licko contrast paper
consumption in a US university and a Slovakian one, revealing how, at the former,
faculty expect paper to be widely available yet fail to realize how costly it is (Pren-
dergast’s department spent $11,424 on paper during 2007-08; 204). In Slovakia,
however, the scarcity of paper and minimal access to a photocopier make plainly
evident paper’s expense and identity as a central technology of writing. English
department faculty are allotted seventy copies per month of teaching, and those
copies are limited to exams. The audiors note that “Roman, with 60-75 students in
one course, is hard pressed to adhere to the 70-photocopies a month limit, even if
only for exams. In order to fit his exam into the limit, he narrows margins, chooses
small font sizes, and worries about the resulting legibility” (205).
A. Suresh Canagarajah’s research makes all too clear that rendering ordinary
writing tools invisible runs the risk of overlooking the material complexities of
composing in specific social and political environments. Canagarajah identifies as a
periphery scholar from Sri Lanka who has migrated to the center as his career has
taken him to the United States. Describing the conditions that framed academic re¬
search in the 1980s in his home country, he explains that paper was hard to come by,
so he and his colleagues used recycled pamphlets. Revision, in these circumstances,
“depended on the amount of paper one could find” (9). Because electronic and postal
communication was also severely limited, he and his peers frequently learned of
new developments in their fields, new books, or announcements of fellowships or
Writing Material
conferences after the fact, limiting their ability to participate in the conversations of
their contemporaries. In his own research on periphery scholars, Canagarajah faced
extreme circumstances, such as when an interview with a research participant was
cancelled because “of a bombing raid or some other emergency” (14). In another
example, he describes writing by kerosene-fueled lamps in the absence of electricity.
Shifting from environmental effects to ones of form, John Trimbur and Karen
Press focus on the page. Far from an empty site of inscription, a page is “active and
alive, with its own invisible understructures and semiotic potentialities” (95). A writ¬
ten page, they explain, consists of “material forms, such as the type and quality of
paper and ink in use; its own conventions, such as the rhetoric of transparency and
the grid as an underlying compositional matrix; and the labor of composing pages
through the available means of production, which change over time” (95-96). This
argument is consistent with I rimbur’s discussion of delivery as a neglected rhetorical
canon, which he believes “has led writing teachers to equate the activity of compos¬
ing with writing itself and to miss altogether the complex delivery systems through
which writing circulates” (189-90; see also Ridolfo and DeVoss). This work high¬
lights the materials of writing. In order to make something, we need materials that
are themselves endowed with energy and agency, contributing to the final product
in nontrivial ways. Without a page (screen, stone tablet, scroll, wall, and so on) as
a framing device, for example, what is writing? How would it present? The line of
thought developed here operates as a thinking partner for shifting attention onto
relational matters, in addition to tools and forms, as writing essentials.
Frameworks for understanding writing are no doubt a necessary part of this
discussion. Modern composition studies has largely relied on the rhetorical canon
and social construction as central explanatory systems of writing and communication.
Looking elsewhere illuminates the extent to which our orientations are stuck, not
adventurous enough to match the creative complexities of our time. For example,
depictions of collaboration in composition studies, largely informed by social con¬
struction and second-wave feminism, have not yet caught up with worldviews depicted
by scientists, animal advocates, and other contemporary thinkers. To cite just one
example of how collaboration is being rethought, marine ecologist Rafe Sagarin’s
Learning from the Octopus transfers knowledge of biological ecosystems and species
adaptability to national security systems. Sagarin exploits the co-materiality of hu¬
mans and nonhumans—both live in risk environments, both develop adaptation skills
for survival—to demonstrate that security is a biological issue as much as a political
one. This insight, helped in part by his study of octopus adaptation strategies, leads
Sagarin to argue for a new mindset about security, one based on distributed agency,
collaboration, and adaptation rather than on costly solutions that create “heavy”
responses to threat, ultimately not adaptable to evolving threats. Heavy-handed
security measures at US airports are a case in point. Rather than adapting to a flux
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environment composed of threats that are themselves flexible and highly adaptive to
changing environments, airport searches announce their intentions through intrusive
and expensive measures. These measures are so specific, so dependent on certain
kinds of threats, that they practically solicit inventive work-arounds.
Scholarship in the transdisciplinary digital humanities movement also offers
revised concepts of adaptation and collaboration. Collaborative authorship is a
mainstay in digital humanities, perhaps most clearly materialized in the open source
community. The authors of Digital_Humanities explain that open source is rooted
in software development initiatives and offers “a fresh way of thinking about how
robust, stable systems could be the product of multiple, autonomous hands rather than
of centralized, top-down, proprietary models of development” (Burdick, Drucker,
Lunenfeld, Presner, and Schnapp 78). Digital humanities projects transform the “sin¬
gularity of the ‘I-subject’” into the “collaborative authorship of a ‘we-subject’” (84).
These examples suggest a need to redefine collaboration as partnerships that
include and exceed intentional ones established between people. Such partner¬
ships might be described in terms of coexistence. To think of writing as a practice
of coexistence is to imagine a merging of various forms of matter—objects, pets,
sounds, tools, books, bodies, spaces, feelings, and so on—in an activity not solely
dependent on one’s control but made possible by elements that codetermine writ¬
ing’s possibility. As Collin Brooke and Thomas Rickert put it, “[T]he world and
its objects are essential to the ability to think, speak, write, make, and act” (168).
They seek a reconstitution of the social, one that acknowledges “our situations—as
constituted both by ourselves and by the ‘objects’ around us” (169). Likewise, Jody
Shipka frames the profoundly collaborative experience of composing as foundational
to communication: “when our practices do not ask students to consider the complex
and highly distributed processes associated with the production of texts (and lives
and people), we run the risk of overlooking the fundamentally multimodal aspects
of all communicative practice” (Toward 13).
Writing is more than something one is called to do, dependent on time and
energy, a linchpin to academic advancement; it is also codependent interaction with a
whole host of others—materials, power grids, people, animals, rituals, feelings, stuff,
and much else (see Cooper, “Being”). Widt such complexity in mind, what kinds
of theories and models can do a better job accounting for writing’s materiality? If,
as Barad asserts, “[ajgency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the
world” (135), then what are implications for writer and reader agency in collabora¬
tion with diverse forms of and partnerships with matter? In lieu of ready answers, I
put ideas about writing, collaboration, and agency into play in the final section by
focusing on the genre of written acknowledgments, a textual site where writers tip
their hats to active co-participants in writing processes seldom recognized by theo¬
ries of composing or models of practice. Right under our noses, writers reveal the
ordinary and extraordinary forces that make writing possible. The expected nature
of this mundane, overdetermined genre offers unexpected insights about writing.
Writ ING D EBTS
Acknowledgments in academic books have gotten longer and more personally re¬
vealing over the past twenty years or so (Caesar; Cronin; Hyland, “Dissertation”).
Despite the marginal status of acknowledgments, they are frequently read first and
with great interest, as I’m discovering in my research for a book on acknowledg¬
ments where these ideas get fuller treatment. Most of the acknowledgments I have
read average three to four pages; the majority conform to the following formula,
roughly organized in this order:
• Opening statement signaling that, like every other writing project, this one benefited
from insights, commentary, and advice from others
• Listing of those others and of institutional, personal, and emotional supports along the
way
• Listing, where relevant, of venues where earlier versions of the work were presented,
followed by thanks to groups who made those presentations possible and permissions
granted to publish chapters or excerpts of previously published works
• And, finally, thanks to close family and friends, without whom the project would not
have been possible
Despite the more-or-less general observance of genre conventions across acknowledg¬

ments, I have found that writers do more than reproduce cliches. They produce ges¬
tures of indebtedness that reveal writing’s economy of connectedness, often repressed
by the argument or exploration that follows. Thus, the genre shouldn’t be dismissed
as euphoric, mere formality, or rote expression. In addition, its value exceeds gift
giving, assertions of scholarly identity, and sycophantic dissertation conventions—
purposes that have been identified in existing literature about acknowledgments (for
example, “Gratitude”; Hyland, “Graduates’ Gratitude”; Thompson). Odd confessions
and occasionally maudlin expressions of gratitude aside, acknowledgments present
a unique view of writing practices and writers as enmeshed in varying partnerships
with others, organizations, animals, feelings, sound, and places. Partnerships that
constitute the very condition of writing itself.
*****
In the acknowledgments section of my dissertation, I thanked various people—my
mentor, committee members, family, friends—and then I wrote, “I also want to
express my deep appreciation for Peanut and Tiny, who taught me the importance
of wit, sound sleep, and playfulness. Peanut’s acrobatics have especially convinced
me of the importance of mobility and spunk” (Micciche vi-vii).
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I don’t think there’s anything particularly unusual about the mention of cats (or
other nonhuman creatures) as significant to writing projects. In fact, while research¬
ing for my larger project on this subject, I learned that I’m in pretty good company.
Here’s Donna Strickland’s acknowledgment in The Managerial Unconscious-. “On
the home front, a number of cats lent a great deal of warmth and a general sense of
well-being to the composing process, including the much missed Kitty and Clyde
and the current throng consisting of Casey, Gabe, Hansel, and Simon” (xiii). The
cats, as it happens, figure more prominently than her “dearest companion,” a human,
named in the next brief sentence. In another example, an author of GenAdmin moves
seamlessly between thanking her coauthors and animal friends: “To my coauthors
for making me think and laugh. To Cima and Eva for their furry friendship” (C.
Charlton, J. Charlton, Graban, Ryan, and Stolley v). The proximity of the sentences,
revealing proximity in thought and feeling, suggests that animals are not mere props
or background to the work of writing but are intimately intertwined in it.
This point is echoed by Patricia Donahue, who calls attention to dogs in her
acknowledgment of Local Histories, “The bichon frises, Lily and Isabelle, remained
steadfast in their devotion” (xiv). Her like-minded coeditor, Gretchen Flesher
Moon, also praises four-legged contributions to the collaboration, noting, “Brisk
early morning walks with Fritz and Jeb (dogs of no discernible breed, but of great
curiosity) made long days poring over the manuscript physically bearable” (xiv).
Editors of a scholarly collection credit the meals they made for their “cooperative
household of seven students and two dogs” as the beginning of their collaboration
(Freedman and Holmes xv).
Just recently, singer-songwriter Fiona Apple wrote an open letter to her fans in
South America, explaining that she was canceling her tour there to be with her dying
dog Janet. Listing the ways in which Janet has been faithful to her and important
to her well-being, Apple notes that Janet was “under the piano when I wrote songs,
barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in the studio with me, all
the time we recorded the last album” (Popova). The pervasive presence of animals in
scenes of composing like the one Apple describes is anecdotally apparent in Facebook
posts as well. I regularly see posts by friends and colleagues featuring photos of cats,
dogs, and, notably, lizards perched beside computers or slumbering on or near open
books or drafts. The accompanying text often suggests that animals are fully present
in composing scenes—and very often light-heartedly depicted as direct contributors
to composing. A friend recently posted a photo of herself reading in bed, flanked by
her dog, who she identified as a “research partner.”
Feeling, too, especially love, figures prominently in writer acknowledgments.
Victor Villanueva, writing of his wife’s importance to his work, confides that from her
he knows “of magic, of loving. And knowing love opens up possibilities, allows one to
be utopian in the midst of all that sometimes seems hopeless” (ix). Ann Cvetkovich,
Writing Material
author of Archive of Feelings, likewise writes in euphoric terms about the role her
partner has played in her life: “And then there’s Gretchen Phillips, who for over ten
years now has loved me passionately and extravagantly. In her perpetual insistence
that I follow my heart’s desire, she has helped me remember that writing can be a
labor of love, and she has given me a constant supply of reasons to love her back”
(xi). Frankie Condon links her book to her husband’s generous love: “The writing
of this book is but a small portion of what that love makes possible” (xii-xiii).
Also in the confines of the acknowledgments, writers frequently reveal locale,
environment, and place, rooting writing in particular scenes and temporal contexts.
Editors of The Affect Theory Reader, for example, insert readers into intimate scenes,
attaching tangible meaning to the environmental surround that made their work
possible. Melissa Gregg begins, “Partway through the introduction to this collec¬
tion, it will become clear why it was significant that I read Greg’s final draft while
I was cramped on the floor of a late train during a long and crowded commute. I
write these words from a new home, having embarked on an experiment to disrupt
some old habits and hopefully allow more time to register ‘the stretching’” (ix). Her
coeditor, Gregory Seigworth, adds that “While Melissa composed her acknowledg¬
ments in the cramped space of a late-night train from Sydney, I write mine within
another kind of cramped space, another kind of long, dark train—it is the end of
eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration here in the United States” (xi). Others
are less specific but no less grateful for the places where they encountered inspiring
or strengthening exchanges. For example, Megan Boler thanks “the strangers with
whom I’ve conversed at bus stops, in cabs, at academic conferences, and along the
wild path of life” (xxviii).
These selective examples begin to sketch a reality of writing perhaps more true
to lived experience than existing models of writing have yet recognized: writing is
part and parcel of the dwelt-in world. Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s description of
“ontology of dwelling” is relevant here. This concept signifies “taking the human
condition to be that of a being immersed from the start, like other creatures, in an
active, practical, and perceptual engagement with constituents of the dwelt-in world”
(34). Writing is codependent with things, places, people, and all sorts of others.
To write is to be part of the world, even when viewed as an ironic turn away to an
interior space of quiet and mystery.
Yet we often proceed as teachers and scholars as if writing can be plucked
from the everyday and treated as a stand-alone activity, one that reaches outcomes,
fills preexisting genres, serves as stable evidence of one kind or another. As critical
perspectives shift and writing studies continues to mature, we can seize this oppor¬
tunity to imagine writing as something more than fulfilling outcomes and satisfying
utilitarian purposes, both of which tend to dominate national conversations about
educational standards, moves toward making (noncreative) writing only as valid as the
502 College English
assessment tool devised to evaluate it, and writing as something to be waived and/or
administered. There’s a significant body of research in composition studies, as noted
earlier, already challenging static approaches to writing pedagogy by engaging the
whole material surround of writing, going beyond process-product binaries. But in
a highly professionalized field with a stubborn service identity, and an educational
climate that devalues the liberal arts, it’s tempting to forget that writing is an expres¬
sion of the human condition, a worldly activity.
For a shift in orientation, Donna Haraway is a reliable thinking partner. Writing
about how critical projects relate to nature, she offers a potential challenge to writ¬
ing studies made apparent when substituting “writing” for “nature” in the following
excerpt: “We must find another relationship to [writing] besides reification, posses¬
sion, appropriation, and nostalgia. No longer able to sustain the fictions of being
either subjects or objects, all the partners in the potent conversations that constitute
[writing] must find a new ground for making meanings together” (158). Haraway
offers a provocation for a renewed relationship to writing that migrates away from
the familiarity of “the social.” Writing involves everything you do, everything you
encounter, everything you are when making sense of the world through language.
Writing is contaminated, made possible by a mingling of forces and energies in
diverse, often distributed environments. Writing is defined, ultimately, by its radi¬
cal withness.
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Sinners Welcome: The Limits of
Rhetorical Agency
Steve Parks
Prophetic pragmatism purports to be not only an oppositional cultural criticism but also a mate¬
rial force for individuality and democracy. By “material force” I simply mean a practice that
B
has some potency and effect or makes a difference in the world. (232)
—Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy
want to argue that we have settled for a soft vision of progressive change,
a vision that at best produces a hesitant and halting trek across a neoliberal
landscape eager to validate our students and our own “protestations” as a sign
of rich democratic debate.
I want to argue that the root of this failure is a compromise between
the call of disciplinary identity and the need for collective politics, articulated as a
nuanced theory of antifoundationalist pragmatism but which is actually a sign of the
abandonment of a longer history of structurally transformative political strategies.
And I want to consider whether a different path is possible.
To make this argument, I explore one generative moment in which the re¬
lationship between composition’s disciplinary identity within English studies and
political action within the larger culture is both activated and distorted—the set of
theories and practices that occur under the framework of “community partnerships.”
Such partnerships often present themselves as articulating new strategies that can
alter the local landscape in politically progressive ways for the benefit of residents
Steve Parks is director of graduate studies for the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Doctoral
Program (CCR) at Syracuse University. His research focuses on how community literacy and community
publishing partnerships can be aligned with resident-led organizations to produce systemic change on
local issues. He is author of Gravyland: Writing beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love and
Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language. He is also founder of New
City Community Press (newcitycommunitypress.com). Currently, he is completing a book focused on
composition and democracy.

Sinners Welcome 507
and students alike (Goldblatt; Wilkey; Welch). Yet, in the effort to theorize the
political impact of such work, the need to actually change the systemic exploitation
of distressed communities has been elided—often justified by invoking a version of
Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism. In effect, we have turned to the social and
away from the political.
It is this finessing out of the need to engage structural power relations that marks
the current “grand” compromise English studies has taken toward its stated com¬
mitment to social and economic justice. In previous work, I have discussed the role
of community publishing within English studies to transform how our field might
relate to the community within our classrooms (Parks, “Strategic”). In this essay, I
hope to expand this conversation outward toward our political goals as a field, of¬
fering an alternative vision, but ultimately posing the question of whether collective
political action is even possible under a disciplinary rubric.
Foundations for Agency
Linda Flower has produced one of the most articulated theories on how community
partnerships can produce “social change” (16). Based on their work at the Com¬
munity Literacy Center, Flower and her collaborators have crafted courses, forums,
and publications that reframe public rhetoric away from “advocacy, authority, or
expressiveness” and toward “inquiry” and “dialogues across difference” within local
communities (6). Flower argues that these forms of rhetorical agency result in “teens,
tenants, mothers, low-wage workers, and college students of community literacy
tak[ing] rhetorical action not just by speaking up but by acts of engaged interpretation
and public dialogue carried out in the service of personal and societal transformation” (206;
emphasis in original).
Notably, Flower does not position her work as representing more than a par¬
ticular practice in response to a local moment. She specifically declines to imagine
her work as a national “model,” repeatedly speaking of it as a “working theory” with
immediate value in its local context (91). Yet, despite such efforts to contextualize
her work, Flower’s model has become an influential framework for understanding
the general role of community partnerships in producing social transformation, a term
Flower uses repeatedly (see Gilyard; Long; Deans). It is the very strength of Flower’s
community literacy model that makes it a useful starting point to explore the basis
for political action in our field.
In Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement, Flower argues that
community literacy work has removed rhetoric, replacing it with a version of English
studies critical and critical cultural theory that denies the power of the individual
rhetor and that fails to provide a positive social vision. Flower believes that many of
these theorists have fostered a pedagogy too focused on negative critique and too
508 College English
often linked to a less-than-nuanced view of community members. Relying on what

she terms “popular account(s)” and “simplified forms” (195), Flower writes that such
critical theory “enables us to relate to Others in an urban community as victims or
at best as comrades in arms—united in a theorized battle plan (that academic intel-
lectuals supposedly understand better than do the victims)” (115). She argues that
critical theory’s narrowing reliance on foundationalist categories—such as Marx¬
ism—further mitigate against informed and subtle solutions.
Flower imagines her work as having a larger purpose. She writes, “This aspira¬
tion to engagement lays down a challenge: How can teachers and students learn to
speak up and against something but also learn to speak with others (by which I mean
across differences) and/or something as a necessary part of literate education?” (81)
Comparing the complexity of cultural critique to the solutions offered, she contin¬
ues: “Where is the parallel and equally articulated statement of a better alternative?
Should we be satisfied with generalized assertions of social justice and democracy?
Such undeveloped arguments sound like a monosyllable hurled at the problem
when what we need is a complexly persuasive invitation to Martin Luther King Jr.’s
beloved community” (116). Putting aside the broad brushstrokes with which those
scholars engaged in critical theory are discussed, Flower’s primary point seems to be
that critical theory emerging from English studies has framed community literacy
incorrectly. Such work needs to be built on a different model, one more focused on
individual agency and positive “multisyllable” dialogues.
Flower argues that such a model should be premised on a social cognitive
rhetoric located within the needs of a community. Such an “intercultural rhetoric”
would provide “a space for embracing difference in acts of collaborative meaning
making” (99). To this end, Flower educates her students, who then work with the
community, in how to understand the complexity beneath a public statement, working
to build a rhetorical nuance that creates alliances among speakers at public events.
Indeed, “[t]he two-way street between the university and community and between
research and social action helped shape both a social cognitive theory of writing and
a working theory of personal and public performance within a local intercultural
public” (99). It is this rhetorical agency that Flower ultimately attempts to bring to
the local community.
It is worth noting that Flower spends very little time articulating where such
community dialogue might already occur. Instead, her book is full of statements
implying that such spaces do not exist in Pittsburgh, such as her characterization of
the “standard urban community meeting devoted to complaint and blame” (222).
Perhaps it is for this reason that Flower argues that her “rhetorical agency” provides
a community “a unique capacity to scaffold local public deliberation and to chal¬
lenge, even reinvent that public’s expectations” (220). Notably, Flower never records
if these events actually lead to a change in existing social, political, or economic
Sinners Welcome 509
policy. Instead, she argues that such an event (often with accompanying publications)
“changes the social script for dialogue” (225).
Flower does not see the lack of political change as indicating a lack of “com¬
munity” agency. Instead, she develops an argument based on the work of H. Richard
Niebuhr and Charles Taylor that agency can be defined as the ability to make decisions
in a deliberative fashion, endlessly assessing contextual factors within the framework of
personal or communal values. It is this deliberative capacity, the “outward indications
of an activated inner-life” (201), that her blending of cultural context and cognitive
rhetoric enables community members to achieve. Agency, then, is actualized in the
discussion, not in the production of systemic policy change.
But can such agency provide the necessary tools for the community to actually
create that social transformation, that social turn toward actual justice? If not, then
what does transformation mean?
The Limits of Rhetorical Agency
There is a troubling underside to how the field has taken up this form of rhetorical
agency: an underside best framed in terms of a think-tank session, coordinated by
Flower, in which residents, community elders, and business leaders discuss the dif¬
ficulties caused by the then-new welfare reform legislation—legislation that required
recipients to work as well as put a cap on lifetime benefits. Flower argues that the
session enabled the marginalized voices of welfare recipients to gain credibility and
ultimately shift the very terms of the discussion.
The welfare recipient has reframed the HR representation of workplace versus personal
problems (in which an individual needs counseling or family help) into a more inclusive
image of worklife problems. In her representation, the reality of inexperience, limited
resources, and low-wage jobs constitutes a joint problem. One could argue that sup¬
porting effective working lives is as essential to local economic development as it is to social
justice. (228; first and second emphasis in original; third emphasis added)
Flower concludes that the think tank “not only documents the hidden expertise and
the rhetorical agency of everyday and silenced people; it asserts the possibility of a
transformed understanding” (228).
What is not part of this transformed understanding, however, is a critique of a
neoliberal paradigm that is shrinking federal and state support for welfare programs,
instantiating private-public partnerships in its stead and moving unemployed indi¬
viduals into employment at low wages, displacing current workers and depressing
wages. This sense of a collective political commitment to economic justice does not fit
into a discussion focused on helping one individual navigate a business context. Nor
is it clear how individual agency can adequately respond to this context. The personal
510 College English
benevolence generated within human resources officers might alter an internal policy;
it does not alter the overarching political context in which that empathy occurs.
Further, this type of political interchange among individuals misses the central
attribute of power—power accedes nothing without a collective fight, a point un¬
derstood by Martin Luther King Jr. when he spoke of the aforementioned creation
of a “beloved community”:
The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or
boycotts, but noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely
means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and
reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community
while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.
Collective action that is designed to create an ethical and actual power-based popu¬
lar movement seems the first step to the creation of such a community—of a social
transformation.
Here is where West’s prophetic pragmatism enters to buttress the political vision
of community literacy. Flower notes that West’s pragmatism connects to issues of
global systemic oppression and focuses on the most oppressed by society. As argued
by David Wood, however, West’s conversion to prophetic pragmatism marks a step
away from his more class-based Marxist work and toward what might best be called
a neoliberal framework—a framework where West imagines an increased role of
business in public affairs, where the problems of capitalism are framed not in terms
of systemic exploitation, but in terms of management greed. As framed by Wood,
West defines the work of prophetic pragmatism as the protection and expansion
of the individual and individual rights—a move picked up on by Flower—where a
working life framed within a reformed welfare system to support a local economy is used
as a false metonym for social justice. Such think tanks, then, when generalized into a
common practice, become moments of transformative space only in the sense that
they attempt to ameliorate the disinvestment by the state in the public sphere; they
do not, however, attempt to organize a collective sustained response to such policies.
Within such logic, transformative is always a prophetic term (pointing toward an
unrealized idealized future), not a pragmatic verb detailing the current work needed
to produce systemic change. Individuals come together for sponsored forums, shar¬
ing insights and possible solutions, but then disperse back to their own individual
locations, with no collective actions planned, no sense of a new collective space of
action as a continual resource to tackle systemic problems. Consequently, invoking
Michel de Certeau, community literacy becomes embedded within the belief that
negotiating with power on issues of community rights is a tactical enterprise, an
attempt to claim a temporary space to make a rhetorical intervention as individuals
to elite power brokers. It is not a strategic enterprise designed to reclaim the ability
Sinners Welcome 511
of the community to actually have an independent, sustainable organizational space

from which to seek control of its political future.
Yet having made this critique, I understand why Flower’s local work might have
become a powerful national model within our discipline—why we tend to conclude
with discussion instead of moving onward to collective action. As Flower notes, rhetorical
agency draws on our disciplinary interests and situates us as providing avenues for
marginalized individuals to gain a “voice.” Such a model nicely intersects with the
current neoliberal paradigm, where calls for collective action to readjust economic
disparities are seen as old-fashioned (despite Occupy Wall Street) in the face of
government-business partnerships designed to “empower” the poor as individuals.
Having done significant work within Flower’s paradigm, however, I have now come
to see it as the “disciplinary compromise,” which allows us to invoke the political
rhetoric of a West without having to engage in traditional forms of political organiz¬
ing that his insights ultimately require.
Indeed, Keith Gilyard reminds us that West’s pragmatism—like much cultural
theory in English studies, from Raymond Williams to Edward Said to bell hooks—
should be “inextricably finked to oppositional analysis of class, race, and gender and
oppositional movements for creative democracy and freedom” (13; emphasis added).
Further, Gilyard argues that the recognition of the difficulty and possible failure
inherent in efforts to build such a collective base of activism should not block compo¬
sition scholars from taking on such work. Instead, he reinvigorates West’s concept of
tragicomic hope as a way to call us into the public sphere, to invest our time and labor
into such struggles, and to work within the prophetic belief of better times to come.
It is to one such effort that I now turn.
Collective Agency1
In Home, Syracuse’s Westside residents describe their community as one rich in fam¬
ily, where different generations live within blocks of each other. It is a community
with a deep work ethic, one initiated by Native American populations who were the
original inhabitants of the area, continued by European immigrants who worked in
many of the neighborhood’s now-defunct factories, and currently entrusted to the
recent immigrants from Latin America and Eastern Europe. Residents also 4escribe
a community facing high unemployment:. There is crime, a drug trade, and the sense
of a harassing police presence. Of course, police data might confirm the need for
such a presence, citing the number of shots fired in the neighborhood compared to
the rest of the city. Yet, the residents will tell you that such facts exist within a net¬
work of neighborhood history, social service organizations, and churches dedicated
to building off this collective heritage, pointing it toward a more economically and
512 College English
socially secure future. The residents, that is, would see their neighborhood as a rich
amalgam of contradictory narratives.
Through New City Community Press (NCCP), I had been working in the
Westside for approximately two years, partnering with residents and schools on a
series of community publishing projects whose goal was to create an extended com¬
munity dialogue about urban life, social justice, and economic rights. Our initial
theme had been “community,” sponsoring a discussion on how different genera¬
tions understood the neighborhood. This project resulted in Soul Talk by Kristiina
Montero. A second publication project, Freedom/, focused on this concept, framing
it within local and national, historical and current, contexts. Each event culminated
in a public reading and discussion of these books, as well as their circulation across
university and public school classrooms. These events had garnered strong support
from university and foundation leaders.
The community, however, responded differently. Residents shared a belief that
once a collective community-based position had been articulated, more was expected
than a single event, a temporary coalition. Indeed, there had been endless “voicing
projects” by faculty or community members that had produced very little change
on issues such as crime, housing, education, and unemployment. Consequently,
there was a desire for a space that might unite both types of efforts (university and
community), where such work could move beyond rhetorical agency toward a col¬
lective agent for change. The question became how to graft the emergent discursive
space of community publishing onto emergent actions in response to changes in the
neighborhood.
The concern about effective collective agency became particularly heightened
as an economic reform effort came to the Westside, for as the NCCP community
publications were appearing, the Near Westside Initiative (NWSI) had begun its
work. NWSI was a $54 million redevelopment effort focused on a one-square-mile
area of the neighborhood, the area “nearest” to downtown. As part of a general¬
ized effort to turn Syracuse University into an active partner in the city’s continued
revitalization, NWSI had initially been funded by New York State’s forgiving of a
loan to the university, with the condition that funds be used to seed such a project.
This redevelopment project worked in tandem with the university’s commit¬
ment to “scholarship-in-action,” a centerpiece of our chancellor’s efforts to reframe
scholarship as both an academic and a community enterprise. In addition to leveraging
funds to support economic revitalization, the university also supported faculty hires,
research projects, and service-learning activities across the university. For instance,
I had received significant funding to support community-based initiatives with local
labor unions and international writing groups, among others (see Parks, “Strategic”).
The university had created NWSI as a nonprofit organization, with community
resident, private foundation, local bank, and university representation providing
Sinners Welcome 513
oversight and direction. This led to a responsive attitude. After an initial survey of
residents highlighted the desire to restore the crumbling factory buildings in the
neighborhood, NWSI launched a campaign to turn these sites into both business
and residential opportunities. Simultaneously, in partnership with Home Headquar¬
ters, a project was created to provide low-interest loans for individuals to purchase
homes in the neighborhood. NWSI also sponsored a community organization, Near
Westside on the Move (NWSOM), that would provide leadership opportunities for
residents, eventually enabling them to take over NWSI—for the project’s stated goal
was to place NWSI under the control of the neighborhood residents and partnering
organizations.
Despite all of these efforts, however, some NWSI partners were concerned that
the community’s collective voice was not sufficiently connected to actual policy deci¬
sions. Residents who were not in existing organizations, had not been able to attend
NWSOM meetings, or felt generally disenfranchised from the community seemed
to have no space through which to express their opinions. This concern produced
a request for NCCP to create a project designed to support these residents’ voices.
Given NCCP’s track record of building collaborative partnerships with both Westside
and citywide organizations, efforts that resulted in publications and public forums,
part of this work would also be to create a platform for the voices to be heard.
Then it got complicated. For although NCCP had developed a Syracuse pres¬
ence, the history of the press went back to its roots in Philadelphia—where it had
been involved with communities attempting to unionize immigrant workers, fight for
disability rights, and broaden public school curriculum (see Parks, Gravyland). Even
in Syracuse, the press had been active with 1199 Service Employees International
Union Bread and Roses Cultural Project on a national campaign for labor rights.
And most recently, the press was part of the Undergraduate Community Research
Fellows Program (UCRFP), in which students were learning how to connect aca¬
demic research skills to activist campaigns.
Indeed, the Syracuse Alliance for a New Economy (SANE) had just approached
UCRFP. SANE represents an alliance of labor unions in the city. Its most recent
project focused on generating community benefit agreements (CBA) between de¬
velopers and affected residents in Syracuse. A CBA is a legal agreement articulating
how the developer will meet community concerns over the intended construction.
Such an agreement had recently been signed with the school district with little or no
rancor. Given that Westside residents were concerned about protecting the historical
legacy and current diversity of their community, a CBA seemed to be one instrument
to address those issues. For this reason, it was decided that with our resident allies,
our collective resources would sponsor a project to support unorganized residents
articulating their concerns and hopes for the neighborhood. Then, based on the
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residents’ collective insights, the partners would develop a plan to support their
stated goals, with the CBA being one possible vehicle.
As agreed with our NWSI-aligned partners, we would start by having UCRFP
conduct door-to-door interviews, accompanied by neighborhood residents who
were part of the project. The NWSI partner offered $5,000 to pay residents for
their labor. The interviews themselves occurred only after the UCRFP fellows had
spent approximately six weeks learning the history of the neighborhood, forming
partnerships with residents, studying the scholarship on community literacy, and
receiving extensive training in such work. Simultaneous with these interviews, the
project sponsored meetings concerning the nature and goals of a CBA.
Notably, although our NWSI partner had supported exploring a CBA as a
possible vehicle for the Westside, support for a CBA was hardly universal. In an
early meeting with NWSI to establish a collaborative relationship, the focus on a
CBA was seen as unnecessary. Because the goal of NWSI would be to hand over
the project to the community, the end result would be that the residents were, in
effect, the “developers.” As an NWSI representative stated, “You can’t really sign an
agreement with yourself, can you?” Our project was supported, however, because of
previous productive partnerships that had occurred. It was within this context that
the door-to-door interviews with residents occurred.
At the end of the three months, approximately sixty interviews had been con¬
ducted, and the results were presented at a community meeting with close to 100
residents in attendance, including representatives from neighborhood organizations
and NWSI. There was no “smoking gun” of discontent. Much of what was reported
did not surprise residents—satisfaction with friends, neighbors; concern over crime,
unemployment. At the end of the presentation, however, several residents asked,
“What happens now?” “How will these insights be supported into action?” “What
is the role of the ‘press’ in continuing this work?” There were calls, that is, for con¬
tinuing this new space where the residents and students acted together, but where the
resident voice was primary. As a collective, we decided to pursue this idea over the
summer, exploring different strategic models.
Unfortunately, this decision turned out to be deeply contentious.
Beyond Rhetorical Agency
Flower’s work models the value of time-specific spaces for community dialogue.
It is a tactical enterprise. The goals of the Westside residents were strategic. They
wanted a sustained and independent space from which to organize for systemic policy
changes. They wanted any organizing effort to build on the collective memory of
the community as agents of change, working within their own capacity to organize,
and building from their own interpretation of how the community should move
Sinners Welcome 515
forward. For that reason, community memory, not social cognitive rhetoric, was
the first building block of our organizing efforts.
Richard Couto argues that the stories a community shares in the face of op¬
pression or systemic change are a central asset to activist campaigns. These stories
keep alive a tradition of values and mitigation skills that allow individual acts of
resistance to be understood within a utopian vision of the community. Couto’s work
reminds us that communities already have a rich legacy of intercultural resources
and idealism that can be built upon to produce social transformations. For instance,
in our Westside meetings, there were individuals who spoke of how they acted as
unacknowledged community negotiators, trying to calm tensions between neighbors
and “authorities”; others related how being a tenant organization chair taught them
how to speak to power. Indeed, recognizing the neighborhood as already possessing
a history of such rhetorical resources enabled a different set of strategies to emerge.
Here the work of Marshall Ganz becomes useful. His research emerges from
the experience of being a community organizer with the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as well as the United Farm Workers (UFW).
Based on that experience, he argues that such personal and collective stories need
to be embedded within a strategic vision that builds from the values of participants,
within the possibilities of their resources, to produce actual change. Ganz’s mantra
is “Strategy is how we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want”
(8). Much of his work concerns how individuals can develop a common agenda out
of personal experiences, and then use existing skills to become part of a leadership
team that supports a community achieving its collective goals.
Ganz focuses on the early career of Cesar Chavez, one of the founding members
of UFW, as a central example. He cites the fact that the great majority of UFW lead¬
ership had emerged from the farmworker community. Indeed, the actual organizing
work began through visiting individual farmworker houses, listening to individual
stories, discovering a shared set of cultural values, and creating a collective process
that resulted in UFW, an organization that Chavez understood not just as a typical
union, but as a movement-. “A union is not simply getting enough workers to stage
a strike. A union is building a group with a spirit and existence all its own. [.. .] [A]
union must be built around the idea that people must do things themselves, in order
to help themselves” (Ganz 89). Chavez then linked the UFW rhetoric and sense of
narrative to larger cultural institutions, such as the Catholic Church. In fact, the
preamble to the UFW constitution invokes Pope Leo’s Rerum Novarum:
Rich men and masters should remember this—that to exercise pressure for the sake
of gain upon the indigent and destitute, and to make one’s profit out of the need of
another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine. To defraud anyone of wages that
are his due is a crime which cries to the avenging anger of heaven, (qtd. in Ganz 89)
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By infusing UFW’s work with such values, Chavez created a story that emerged
from the local experiences of farmworkers and moved outward to larger, culturally
significant narratives within the community. Ultimately, this story resulted in greater
economic rights for farmworkers.
Ganz’s research also provides an argument that particular moments give en¬
hanced power to existing community resources. He argues that the value of resources
depends on the political and economic environment in which they exist:
Opportunities arise not because we acquire more resources, but because resources
we have acquire more value. [. . .] Opportunities often occur at moments of unusual
structural fluidity, such as the beginning of a project or at times of “role transition” in
the lives of individuals or communities. At these moments—which combine uncertainty
with significance—we have a great deal of choice and our choices have a great deal
of consequences. [. . .] A simple victory, its occurrence may so alter the environment
that prior expectations are thrown up for grabs, creating an opportunity to reconfigure
the whole struggle. [. . .] One strategies to turn opportunities into outcomes. (9)
As the Westside underwent a profound “transition,” the question became whether

the inherent resources of previously unaffiliated or unorganized residents could be
marshaled in such a way as to “turn opportunities into outcomes.” How might the
creation of an independent space through which to share common stories produce
such a change?
Here Chavez was additionally instructive, for he was able to connect the values
and collective resources of farmworkers with an emerging opportunity to create
structural change. A case in point was the 1966 UFW “march” to Sacramento,
California, to highlight the group’s struggle for labor rights. UFW was engaged
in an action during the growing season to compel Schenley Industries to recognize
UFW and to sign a formal contract. When the growing season was over, UFW’s
immediate leverage (refusing to pick crops) was diminished. Looking for a strategy
to continue to apply pressure, UFW ultimately decided on a march to Sacramento,
using Governor Pat Brown’s need for their votes to leverage his support. Fhe march
was also framed as a pilgrimage to be completed on Easter Sunday, tying it into
Catholicism, with Catholic imagery embedded throughout the march. Clearly this
strategy worked, for as is well known, by the time UFW reached Sacramento, it had
won its battle, securing the first true union contract for farmworkers.
Fhe case of UFW, then, highlights the possibility of the local Westside resi¬
dents connecting their stories to their resources and using those resources to create
immediate opportunities that achieve a set of concrete goals. Fo Ganz, these are the
elements of successful strategy:
So in discussing effective strategy, I refer not a single tactic, but to a whole series of
tactics through which strategies may turn short-term opportunity into long-term gain.
And long-term gain is most securely won when one not only acquires more resources
Sinners Welcome 517
(higher wages, for instance), but also generates new institutional rules that govern
future conflicts in ways that privilege one’s interests. (10)
The work to be done, then, was not a workshop or a forum, but a community-based
strategy designed to concretely alter the rules of power. For UFW, this shift in in¬
stitutional rules was the union contract. In the Westside, we thought it might be a
CBA; as we would learn, however, for the Westside, it was something else entirely.
Agency Lost
Although our project had been born within a network of support, tensions began
to emerge when it became clear that there was movement toward supporting an
independent, resident-controlled organization. One reason for this interest was the
CBA. Early in the process, meetings were held to discuss the idea. When it became
clear that not enough groundwork had been established in the community to have
such a conversation, these meetings were put aside. In this sense, the CBA was off
the table. The sheer fact of the conversations, however, was perceived as a direct
challenge to the NWSI economic development model, appearing to position the
formation of any independent resident organization as against NWSI and NSWOM.
Nonprofit and for-profit interests became concerned that our real goal was to
“damage the NWSI” (personal communication). Several cited an article by one of
our partners who claimed to be bringing “democracy” to the Westside. Soon after,
several of our initial funders—who had ties to the university and redevelopment
effort—withdrew financing because the project was “too hot.” This constellation
of events frightened community members supported by NWSI who “did not want
to be in the middle.” They also stepped back from the project. In fact, just prior
to our first community organizing workshop, the sponsor of our original meeting
place withdrew support.
Stories also circulated within the university. People who had previously support¬
ed NCCP publishing projects were now using surrogates to learn what was “hap¬
pening on the ground.” Previous assessments that praised the work of our students
were now dismissed as we were asked to assure individuals that the project was
“pedagogically sound” and not “anti-Syracuse University.” In a very short time, the
status given to NCCP for previous work had been replaced with an aura of concern
and suspicion.
As Ganz might argue, such turmoil was predictable. The neighborhood was
undergoing a seismic shift in power relations. Traditional identities and alliances
were being restructured by the introduction of a large amount of capital into the
neighborhood. In the midst of this change, any movement to organize residents
acted as a further catalyst, calling into question the strength of the “new normal”
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as well as raising the question of who could legitimately be said to “represent” the
community. Given the real stakes involved—contracts, awards, job opportunities,
and so on—it is not surprising that a shift from achieving rhetorical agency to secur¬
ing collective agency would produce such a response. The question became how to
strategize collectively to move a plan forward. And it is within this context, then,
that what were informally called “Ganz” workshops occurred.
Ganz had developed a two-day workshop that facilitated community members
using their individual and communal experiences to develop a collective agenda for
action. The workshops were designed to draw out the values and resources in a com¬
munity, providing a space for developing a strategy for shifting institutional power in
favor of a community’s collective goals. Here it is important to note that compared
to Flower, Ganz positioned the community participant in a much different position.
Ganz’s method seems to operate on the belief that for social transformation to occur,
more is required than public forums. For change to occur and be maintained, an
independent, community-led organization is required. That is, any rhetorical agency
must be supported by the consistent application of pressure from the community.
(To view Ganz’s full project, see www.hks.harvard.edu/organizing.)
At the end of the workshops, then, residents proposed the development of a new
grassroots independent organization, the Westside Residents Coalition (WRC), a
name that spoke to an inclusive and traditional sense of the neighborhood. WRC
would also be democratically controlled by residents, but would work to foster dialogue
between nonaffiliated residents as well as among different nonprofit, economic
development, and religious organizations. The WRC mission statement speaks to
these goals:
The Westside Residents Coalition (WRC) is a culturally diverse, resident-based coali¬

tion of individuals and organizations that seeks to listen and give voice to, represent
and advocate for, residents who live in the area bounded primarily by West St., W.
Onondaga St., Bellevue Ave., W. Fayette St., and S. Geddes St. WRC will move
beyond this area as the coalition develops. We seek to do so inspired by the values
of love, mutual respect, integrity, inclusion, democratic decision-making, and shared
leadership. We expect that the WRC will work for the betterment of our neighbor¬
hood through coming together, outreach, coalition building and advocacy around
issues of interest to residents such as empowering and educating youth, improving
neighborhood environment, increasing safety, improving access to job training and
opportunities, achieving housing fairness, working towards economic justice, and
improving information about all these matters.
Finally, instead of a singular call for a CBA, WRC cited housing, crime, and jobs
as its areas of focus. The mission statement, then, claims a grassroots identity while
also reaching outward to different organizations and constituencies in the neighbor¬
hood. WRC was a coalition, not a vanguard party (to invoke Flower’s concern about
critical theory ideologues).
Sinners Welcome 519
The atmosphere surrounding WRC, however, was still stifling. Several members
aligned with previously existing groups soon stopped attending meetings. Others
expressed concerns that they needed to choose between WRC and NWSOM—a
position never endorsed or supported by the NWBI or NWSOM leadership, who
had remained engaged throughout the process. The fact that Syracuse University
and SANE were involved also led to concerns that WRC was not truly independent.
Instead of being seen as a grassroots organization dedicated to speaking for productive
change in the neighborhood, it was being portrayed as an obstacle to such progress.
WRC was wrapped in a set of narratives that it could not control.
At this moment, Ganz’s insight about resources becomes relevant—
“Opportunities arise not because we acquire more resources, but because resources
we have acquire more value” (9). For despite all the attempts to weaken the WRC,
one primary resource at its disposal remained untouched: WRC was run by residents,
individuals known in the community. This resource gained increased power at a
moment when the neighborhood was undergoing a profound transition by “outside
forces.” There was an opening for WRC to claim an authenticity in representing
and advocating for the neighborhood. With this in mind, WRC decided to hold a
picnic—a reiteration and revision of Flower’s public forums.
WRC recognized that the community wanted increased opportunities to come
together, share stories, and talk about neighborhood issues. WRC also recognized a
picnic as a chance to demonstrate how WRC was directed by residents. For this rea¬
son, all elements of the picnic were organized and decided on by the WRC members.
Given the organization’s lack of funding, many of the aspects of the picnic (food,
games, and so on) were donated by members or provided at discount by local orga¬
nizations. The sheer act of residents going to local sites to ask for support, cooking
much of the food that would be served, and appearing as lead figures throughout the
day demonstrated the grassroots nature of WRC. Moreover, the picnic featured an
open mic for residents to express their thoughts about the neighborhood. Community,
nonprofit, and political leaders were also invited to speak, with service organizations
also being given time to talk about their mission in the community.
This is not to say that NCCP, SANE, and Syracuse University students sud¬
denly absented themselves. The goal was to create a common collaborative space. For
this reason, SANE paid for the insurance required to host the picnic in a local park,
students worked different booths at the event, and NCCP helped to record resident
opinions. John Burdick and I also met with university and nonprofit leadership to
reframe the goals of the project—alleviating concerns and accepting responsibility
for any missteps along the way. Moving tables, chairs, food, barbeques, and other
heavy lifting was also part of the partnership work.
I suppose we became the comrade in arms about which Flower expresses such
concern, but with one key difference. As noncommunity partners, we did not broker
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relationships for WRC to make the picnic happen; we did not leverage our assets
to assure the event would occur. Instead, we were in the role of partner suggest¬
ing ideas, carrying tables, being part of the effort, but ultimately being led by the
WRC members. Notably, the picnic attracted over 200 residents. As a result of this
work, WRC was rebranded as “neighborhood based,” drawing in new members and
reestablishing old partnerships.
Agency Found
The newfound power of WRC became evident when the Syracuse Police Department
decided to use antiterrorist funds to put surveillance cameras into the neighborhood
to “deter crime.” The Westside residents were very divided about the cameras.
WRC chose not to take a stand, arguing instead that the real issue was community
policing. Cameras were not the only, or even necessarily the best, solution to rela¬
tions between the police and community. In this stance, WRC found itself aligned
with NWSI, which was concerned with how such cameras would be perceived by
the businesses and residents being recruited into the neighborhood. From different
positions, WRC, NWSI, and other organizations were able to come together to
advocate for better police practices.
The result of this alliance was not, however, the removal of the cameras. In a
meeting with the mayor, the “fact of the cameras” was not even discussed. Instead,
the alliance led to the creation of a police delegation, which meets monthly to discuss
the interactions between officers and residents. Consisting of WRC, NWSI, and
the deputy of police, the delegation discusses how to improve the policing as well as
specific incidents that have occurred. As a result, residents report improved police
behavior, less harassment, more cooperation, and greater access to police officials.
As noted earlier, Ganz contends that “long-term gain is most securely won when one
not only acquires more resources (higher wages, for instance), but also generates new
institutional rules that govern future conflicts in ways that privilege one’s interests.”
Such is the hoped-for future of the police delegation activities.
This story ultimately leads back to the community publishing efforts that ini¬
tiated working in the Westside years before. For it would be simplistic to portray
WRC as now completely accepted by all constituencies. Coalitions change constantly;
progressive change means constantly engaging with power, constantly retelling and
revising a collective vision for the neighborhood. Yet having experienced losing
control of its own narrative, its identity, WRC moved to create its own community
publishing house, Gifford Street Community Press (GSCP). Here the goal is to be
able to consistently represent community voices, on their own terms, ensuring a
consistent presence in public discussions about the neighborhood.
The press has already published two books, Home and I Witness, the latter
Sinners Welcome 521
edited by Ben Kuebrich.' A new book focused on an advocacy campaign against

absentee landlords has just been completed. In each case, these projects were part
of the continued effort to develop a mutually cooperative space between WRC and
the Syracuse Writing Program. Indeed, most recently, the university has agreed to
fund the publications of GSCP for five years. Community publishing, that is, has
become intertwined within a partnership focused on fostering systemic change. These
publications, which help to frame the goals and needs of the neighborhood, circulate
within an activist community and activist campaigns. Initially the site of controversy
and opposition, the residents who created WRC have “flipped the script,” generating
a collaborative space from which the collective neighborhood voice can be heard and
the rules of power can be altered in their favor.
Sinners Welcome in the Afterlife
In the heart of the Westside rests St. Lucy’s Church. Across its primary entrance
hangs a banner, “Sinners Welcome.” It was a banner that I thought about often in
the midst of the summer crisis and counterresponse. Yet through the difficult work
of building and then rebuilding alliances, confronting rumor with fact, and working
through division toward collaboration, the banner has taken on particular resonance
for me: it has come to symbolize a promise of working toward the “beloved commu¬
nity” invoked by King, an implicit understanding that any one moment of conflict,
of failure, needs to be understood within a larger utopian vision.
I am arguing for a utopian vision for our field, one that transgresses our cur¬
rently accepted compromises. It is a vision that moves beyond a sense of agency as
rhetorical, as something used to sponsor a circulation of dialogue, to a sense of agency
as change, as something that redistributes how power and resources are distributed.
And I want to argue that English studies should take on the work of such collec¬
tive political action—expanding the scope of Linda Adler-Kassner’s recent call for
an activist writing program administrator (WPA) to the idea of an activist English
department. I do this not only out of recognition of our field’s engagement with the
progressive social movements of the 1960s and 1970s (see Blackmon, Kirklighter, and
Parks), but also because if we take seriously our increasing adoption of “prophetic
pragmatism,” then such work must necessarily follow.
Prophetic pragmatism has been framed as the production of rhetorically savvy
individuals, negotiating with elite power brokers, within a narrowly defined political
set of goals. Some might differ on whether this set of goals is neoliberalism, but few
can deny that the actual work of creating wholesale systemic change for the benefit
of oppressed communities has failed to be at the forefront of conversation. Yet as
Gilyard reminds us, above all else, West is a philosopher activist, deeply concerned
not only with creating democratic conversations, but with economic democracy on
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a local and global scale. West asks us to “dream big,” recognizing that there is no
dignity lost and much honor to be gained in such continued efforts. It is, perhaps for
this reason, that he asks us to imagine a tragicomic aspiration for our work—a call
for endlessly moving and working to shift power, endlessly recovering and renewing
our effort at each sign of failure.
And to undertake this work, I would argue that we must move beyond a vol-
unteerist ethos, where individual students learn to understand the power of their
individual rhetorical agency in the context of temporary forums, and move toward
a collective voice, premised on coming to understand how community histories can
act as the foundational moment for strategic interventions in power networks. Rather
than seeing such work as outside of our disciplinary parameters, I would argue that
gaining this understanding draws on the very meaning of “community partnerships”
the belief that a collective appeal to common values is a primary way to understand
a neighborhood, a region, or a nation. It is this spirit, I believe, that West was trying
to call forth when speaking of a prophetic pragmatism—the attempt to overreach
current political boundaries within an understanding of the endless need to assess
and renew our efforts.
I recognize that such a focus takes us outside of our current disciplinary paradigm
toward what many might consider to be overtly political work. I also recognize that
Ganz’s rhetorical positioning of student and community members as advocates, as
members of a campaign, touches on deep issues of our role as teachers. But I would
also ask this: If we embed our work within a prophetic pragmatism without engaging
students in such collective politics, what are we teaching them about community? If
they never experience the direct struggle to build community agency, work within and
against power structures, and see the nuanced literacy that has to result, what have
they learned about the nature of power and language? If students are not involved
in a strategic understanding of community, what can we actually be said to be teach¬
ing about community literacy? About the goals of cultural theory? For these reasons,
perhaps a focus on how English studies can work within the grassroots activism for
community justice needs to become part of our curriculum. Perhaps we need to
move beyond the social and toward the political.3
I understand that such work does not characterize discussions of community
literacy and partnership at this time—that the field has taken a different direction in
its definition of the political. I want to end, then, with the hope that the Westside,
however problematic an example, is not an isolated incident—that as the decade
continues, we will embrace the need to move our field outward toward community
struggles and engage our students in the collective work of community building, of
working with neighborhoods to use their memories as a resource for building a vi¬
sion of a utopian future, working collaboratively to link existing resources with that
vision, and shifting the networks of power to ensure, at long last, that the playing
field is tilted in favor of the oppressed. This prophecy is one worthy of our ambitions.
Sinners Welcome 523
Notes
1. Given the large number of individuals involved in this project, there will clearly be differing
versions of the events described. Each will contain its own truth. I would like to thank the following
individuals, however, who were active in the projects here described: Victoria Arnold, Gary Bonaparte,
Daniel Bradley, Jeff Bellamy, Nancy Cantor, Sara Carasco, Yona Curran, Mother Earth, Susan Hamilton,
Marilyn Efiggins, Charise Hunter, Maarten Jacobson, Catherine Metha, Yabel Mendez, Esther Molineros,
Kristiina Montero, Obduilia Gil-Polledo, Rosalee Jenkins, Ben Kuebrich, Dave Meinhardt, Rita Paniagua,
Melissa M. Raimundo, Isaac Rothwell, Karaline Rothwell, Maya Rusten, Kathy Saunier, Eileen Schell,
Tiffany Steinwert, Marti Swords-Horrell, Richard Vallejo, Kim Wolfe, and Melanie Zilora. I also want
to thank each of the community writers cited in this article and featured in GSCP publications. A special
thanks to John Burdick, without whose insight and partnership the story would not have occurred.
2. For a detailed account of the production of 1 Witness as well as the implications of such work for
community partnership work, see “White Guys Who Send My Uncle to Prison,” by Ben Kuebrich, who
was a vital part of all the work described here.
3. In arguing for a “political turn,” I am invoking the emergent work of my colleagues, Shannon
Carter, Deborah Mutnick, and Ben Kuebrich.
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Rhetorical Education and Student
Activism
Jonathan Alexander and Susan C. Jarratt
n February 8, 2010, Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States,

stepped onto a stage at the University of California-Irvine (UCI) to deliver
a speech sponsored by the Department of Political Science and the School
of Law. A few minutes into the presentation, Oren was interrupted by an
audience member who stood and yelled, “Michael Oren, propagating murder
is not an expression of free speech.”1 The protestor, a member of the UCI Muslim
Student Union (MSU), then voluntarily left the meeting and was arrested by local
police. More disruptions followed, as MSU members and supporters stood and
loudly declaimed a mix of prepared and spontaneously composed sentences that
challenged Israel’s role in the occupation of Palestine and the legality of Oren’s
own participation in military actions. The protestors, labeled the “Irvine 11,” were
arrested, the organization was disciplined by the university, and months later, ten
of the group were prosecuted by the Orange County criminal court and convicted
of misdemeanor counts of conspiracy and disrupting a public meeting.2 The protest
generated passionate and widely varied responses, many concerned with appropri¬
ate modes of public engagement. What are we as teachers of rhetoric and writing
Jonathan Alexander is professor of English and chair of the Department of Women’s Studies
at the University of California-Irvine, where he also directs the Center for Excellence in Writing and
Communication. His research focuses on the use of technologies in the teaching of writing and in shifting
conceptions of what writing, composing, and authoring mean. He also works at the intersection of the fields
of writing studies and sexuality studies. He is a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Best Article Award
in the field of Computers and Composition Studies. In 2011, he was awarded the Charles Moran Award
for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Writing Studies. Susan C. Jarratt
is professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California-Irvine, where
she served as campus writing coordinator from 2001 to 2006. She is the author of Rereading the Sophists:
Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Southern Illinois UP, 1991) and editor, with Lynn Worsham, of Feminism and
Composition Studies: In Other Words (MLA, 1998). She has also written numerous articles and chapters on
ancient Greek rhetoric, historiography, and the teaching of writing. Her recent research includes a collab¬
orative longitudinal study of college writers and a rhetorical evaluation of Michel Foucault’s later lectures.

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to make of such an event? Which strands of scholarship since the “social turn” in
composition studies—the discipline in English studies perhaps most engaged with
questions of rhetorical training and public engagement—might help us make sense
of a completely self-sponsored public protest, organized by design to violate codes
of civility and place itself outside the conventional genres of the deliberative demo¬
cratic discourse that composition and rhetoric teachers most commonly theorize,
teach, and subscribe to?
The Social Turn: Inside the Classroom and Out
Along many lines of interpretation, the social turn demanded opening the classroom,
or at least repositioning it—placing the writing class, its grounding assumptions, aims,
and practices, within a larger world determined by economic and social forces. One
could argue that the field has been turned toward the social from its very inception,
with the creative response of Mina Shaughnessy and others to the influx of underpre¬
pared students into universities via open admissions policies of the 1960s. Even the
focus on students as thinkers and problem solvers grounding the cognitive process
theories of the 1970s and 1980s is arguably “social” in that it imagines a writing class
peopled by students with minds rather than dominated by a single authority deliver¬
ing the truth to no one in particular. But many associate the social turn with a surge
in scholarship sparked by challenges to cognitive process approaches (Bizzell 1982;
Berlin 1988) and then propelled by Marxist and feminist-influenced scholars in the
late 1980s and early 1990s. Power and the political became keywords for scholars such
as James Berlin, who in 1988 described “teaching writing as an inescapably political
act” (51). Just the year before, Ira Shor’s Freirian-influenced Critical Teaching and
Everyday Life came out with its incisive critique of the ideological forces shaping
working-class students. And when Richard Bullock and John Trimbur’s 1991 The
Politics of Writing Instruction won the CCCC Outstanding Book Award, the legitimacy
of the “turn” was confirmed. Catherine Hobbs Peaden’s^LdC review of Bullock and
Trimbur in fact marks 1991 as a significant year for “cultural-political” publications.
With these works and many others, the question for the field shifted from, is the
classroom a political space? to, how should power and the political be analyzed and
negotiated within the classroom? These are profound questions with which teachers
of writing, literature, and culture still grapple.
As convenient a shorthand as “social turn” has been for a complex disciplinary
change, we would not want the figure to produce a history like a map with a single
itinerary. The development of politically oriented approaches to rhetoric, literacy,
and the teaching of writing might be better understood genealogically with terms
such as descent and dispersal, referencing a field with multiple roots and sometimes
intersecting branches (Foucault). Pushing up alongside the power-and-politics-
Rhetorical Education and Student Activism 527
in-the-classroom work, we find another research strand, distinctive because of its

sighting of rhetorical and literate action outside the classroom. The ethnographies
of Shirley Brice Heath and Deborah Brandt, for example, explore the literacies of
people at many different stages of life and in varied situations, bringing analysis of
social and economic forces to bear in their interpretations.3 Ethnography took hold
as a methodology for the field, producing significant work in the 1990s for scholars
interested in engaging communities on the margins. Books such as Ellen Cushman’s
The Struggle and the Tools (1998) and Ralph Cintron’s Angel's Town (1998) shed light
on rhetorical tactics forged by people struggling with racism and poverty.
Branching off from these fruitful projects and thickening ethnographic ap¬
proaches within writing studies, community literacy studies gained remarkable force
in the last decade. This field moves the composition scholar outside the classroom by
design, although many of its adherents bring their students and classes with them in
various ways. Steven Parks and Eli Goldblatt, for example, contend that we should
seriously consider “writing beyond the curriculum,” and Elenore Long (following the
work of Linda Flower and others) adopts the language of “publics” to mark a space
of engagement between students/educators and communities. The subtitle of Paula
Mathieu’s 2005 Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition suggests the
new direction taken by committed activists who are also teachers of rhetoric and
writing. John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan argue in the introduction to their
2010 The Public Work of Rhetoric that insights gained from doing rhetoric “out there”
are vital to a renewal of the field and will require changes inside the academy—“a
different professional disposition, new participatory and analytic tools, and a more
grounded conception of public need” (1). We might consider activism itself one
such “public need.”
Seth Kahn and Jong Hwa Lee, editors of the 2011 Activism and Rhetoric, argue
for rethinking relations among activism, rhetoric, and democracy by going beyond
“explaining away the insufficiency of deliberative democracy” (xxii).4 Marking the
twenty-first century as an era with new rhetorical challenges, Kevin Mahoney in
that volume argues, “The current assault upon all forms of democratic participation
[. . .] makes it necessary to engage in a very different kind of project” (152). Cit¬
ing Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, Mahoney observes that “the most
intense and broad-based political movements/rebellions within Empire are ‘all but
incommunicable’” (154). Such work suggests the limits of sweedy reasonable rhetori¬
cal frameworks undergirding most classroom-based rhetorical education, including
classical models (from Aristotle, Isocrates, and Quintilian), Rogerian analysis, and
Stephen Toulmin’s approaches to argument, among others. Indeed, as we have turned
our attention to student activism, we have been struck by the variety of students’
rhetorical practices and their willingness to experiment. Of course, protest is itself a
rhetorical genre with its own history of disruptive practice, long associated with the
closed fist rather than the open hand of deliberation.5
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The MSU protest of Oren’s speech was a striking example of rhetorical ac¬
tion by students—one that transgressed the expectation for “civility” on a college
campus. The situation recalls a crisis in the history of speech communication and
composition, some of whose scholars in the 1960s and 1970s feared the disciplinary
implications of “entering the fray of public unrest” (Ackerman and Coogan 3; see
also Corbett). Ackerman and Coogan frame this anxiety as a question of proximity:
“How close do we get to political discourse when it [. . .] transcend[s] the limits of
scholarly discourse and criticism?” (3). We posed this question to ourselves as we
thought about selecting the Irvine 11 protest as an object of study. When student
activists protest on campus, “out there” and “in here” are superimposed. We decided
to move in close on this event through interviews with its participants, keeping in
mind the prospect of change or renewal of our field as a potential outcome.
How did those students—self-identified with a group not easily heard, under¬
stood, or tolerated in a post-9/11 world—decide to protest in the way they did? If their
paths into activism can be seen as a kind of rhetorical education, what can teachers
of rhetoric and writing learn from them by tracking that path, especially when the
students’ choices challenge the education we offer in our courses? We began our study
with the hypothesis that student participants in this event came to it with experience
in the history of protest, an understanding of—or even a lived experience with—the
geopolitics of the Middle East, and a strong interest in collective action. Our objec¬
tive was to learn how these elements, and students’ reflections on them, might have
informed their rhetorical educations, particularly what they learned outside the
classroom. We selected this event for analysis because it provides an opportunity
for us to make some observations about rhetorical education broadly conceived and
manifested in the public space of a twenty-first-century university several decades
down the road from the social turn. Moreover, although our analysis of student in¬
terviews is situated theoretically and methodologically within composition studies,
the interviews themselves call attention to the numerous ways that students encoun¬
ter texts, concepts, debates, and writing throughout their educational experiences,
including formal spaces such as high school literature classes and college courses in
film, media, and political science, as well as cocurricular spaces often designed by
students themselves through student and church groups. We offer our analysis as a
challenge to the field of English studies broadly to think more capaciously about the
many different spaces in which rhetorical education might take place.
Genealogies of Activism: The Interviews
The two of us conducted hour-long interviews in February and March 2013 with
five participants in what came to be called the Irvine 11 protest.6 Neither of us knew
any of the students, nor do we come from a similar ethnic, religious, or national
background. And yet we coexist in an academic space and share an interest in the
power of words to change the world. We wanted to find out how each student
activist came to the moment of this striking and consequential protest act. How
did each come to understand himself as an activist? How did family and religious
backgrounds come into play? How did students work together in the context of the
student organization? What rhetorical principles underlay their choice of particular
strategies." How did they understand the relationship between their activism and their
formal educationr Did any college classes in writing or speech play a role in their
rhetorical education? We were amazed at the responses: the complexities of their
life histories, their thoughtfulness about activism in general and the February 2010
protest in particular, and their representation of activism as an intellectual process.
There was considerable consistency across the interviews, perhaps because the group
was initially brought together by commonalities of experience and stance, but also
because, through the experience of disciplinary sanctions and the criminal trial, the
group had many opportunities to discuss and process the events together. In what
follows, we interweave responses from the five interviewees, highlighting students’
rhetorical choices and terminology.
Family histories of activism—often multigenerational—played a significant part
in the self-understanding of three of the five students. All their families emigrated
from the Middle East—Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan—and three students
reported that grandparents and parents participated actively in resistance to dictato¬
rial regimes and occupation. In two cases, family members suffered imprisonment
and torture. Most of the students came of age in local communities with common
immigrant experiences and shared cultural and religious backgrounds. As Osama put
it, “I grew up around a lot of stories [...] within the Muslim community primarily, so
[there were] a lot of Somalian refugees, around a lot of Bosnian, Kosovo, Chechnya,
and so that was always there.” Osama’s parents were born in Egypt, where his grand¬
father had endured twenty years as a political prisoner and experienced torture that
he never spoke about. As a surgeon who set up clinics in war-torn Muslim countries,
he served as an example to his grandson of those privileged enough to get an educa¬
tion “giving back.” The family sustained a strong sense of respect and admiration,
along with a sense of responsibility: “I thinking growing up around that, it made you
realize [. . .] there’s something wrong in the world.” Osama’s family traveled often
to Egypt, where “the poor are much more visible.” He contrasted this experience
with his larger life in the suburbs of San Diego, where lines of class division were
clearly drawn: it was assumed you didn’t go into certain areas—less affluent areas
were considered “another world” by high school friends outside his community.
Media contributed to the environment of political awareness and critique in
Osama’s boyhood, with Arabic Al-Jazeera often on the television, and an older
brother who listened to politically charged hip-hop: “an era of like Tupac, NWA,
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Chuck D, and other rap groups who would speak out against the system.” Like other
respondents, Osama read and reread The Autobiography of Malcolm X with great in¬
terest: “Malcolm X is a huge figure for Muslim youth [...] growing up as a Muslim
in America, there weren’t very many role models that we had in terms of American
Muslims.” Along with Muhammad Ali and Hakeem Olajuwan, Malcolm gave Osama
a sense of identity and also the idea of connecting struggles across race, ethnicity,
and national difference: “Malcolm X’s internationalism [helped to] really connect the
struggles of black and brown people in the United States and impoverished people
in the United States to third-world peoples across the country.” The book wasn’t
assigned in school but was passed along to Osama by his sister.
Like Osama, Asaad comes from a family with strong roots in the Middle East—
in his case, Libya. He described his father as an idealistic college student who was
imprisoned for pro-democracy activism at the University of Tripoli, under Gad¬
dafi. Though Asaad’s father got out of the country, friends remained in prison for
decades or were executed. Asaad’s maternal grandfather, a professor of religion, was
also imprisoned, tortured, and removed from his position. Asaad’s father earned a
scholarship to the University of Southern California and got a PhD in civil engi¬
neering, but he continued organizing, creating a formal opposition group against
Gaddafi’s regime and thus closing off the possibility of returning. Asaad remembers
participating in a range of protest activities growing up: antiwar, workers’ rights, and
community organizing. Touching on a theme that appears often in the interviews,
Asaad reported that his family’s support for activism is faith based but also inter¬
faith: “My family was fairly religious, so a lot of their organizing was done through
the mosque, but interfaith.” Through the decades of Gaddafi’s rule, Asaad’s family
(without his father) returned every two or three years to visit Libya. He speaks flu¬
ent Arabic and is comfortable in the region. In a dramatic turn of events soon after
the 2011 revolution, Asaad’s father was appointed chief of staff for the new prime
minister, and the family (without Asaad) has now returned. Like many other students
in our twenty-first-century universities, Asaad lives a thoroughly transnational life.
Taher grew up in Southern California within a family that highly values activism
and public engagement, especially with regard to the occupation of Palestine: “It’s
almost a second nature to us just because we’ve done it for so long.” Both Taher’s
parents are Palestinian; his father and grandfather were born in Gaza; his mother
was born in Jordan because of the 1948 Israeli occupation. Relatives still live in Gaza,
where Taher returns to visit periodically. The family moved around to different areas
in the region, but everywhere Taher found activist possibilities. He recalls becom¬
ing more involved during high school years at his local mosque in Corona, where
he could join a youth group interested in living out one of the axioms of Islam: to
enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong, “the social justice aspect to Islam,” as
he put it. All of our respondents made reference to this guiding principle, what Taher
described as the fuel of my ambition and my passion for activism.” Acknowledging

the potential threat to “Western interests” that could be read into this axiom, Taher
gave examples of parallels to be found in other religious and cultural contexts and
enacted through a wide range of rhetorical activities. An example of activism from
his high school years was a collaboratively created “parody-type” YouTube video
giving ten reasons that a mosque needed to be built in his neighborhood.
With somewhat different family histories, both Mohamed and Yousef grew up in
more assimilated contexts. Yousef s family emigrated from Afghanistan. Describing
himself as a “typical self-hating Muslim,” Yousef grew up in Florida in a middle-class
family without strong political beliefs: “more mixed, not so Islamic.” A high school
student on 9/11, Yousef tried to keep a low profile in the face of “teasing” (“Saddam’s
your uncle!”), but also started going to Friday prayer. Mohamed, too, experienced
9/11 as a troubling time—“there was a lot of fear in the Muslim community”—but
a time for rethinking a Muslim identity:
In terms of politicization, 9/11 definitely was the powder keg in that regard. I was a
freshman in high school and, of course, the 9/11 attacks happened and immediately
the focus was put on the Muslim community in America and what exactly we believe,
what exactly we stand for. And, of course, we went from being—well, at least as a
youth thinking that we were virtually unknown in the United States—to being very
much in the spotlight of the media and in, unfortunately, a very negative way. So,
that kind of—I think that really affected me and the community in general in terms
of just having to come to terms with this whole identity and who am I and what do
I represent and is it my religion that was the cause of 9/11 attacks and what implica¬
tions does that have on me? Did I do something wrong? Am I guilty by association?
Mohamed’s interest in activism didn’t kick in right away. He described being

a “dissenting voice” in high school class discussions about the US “war on terror”:
“It would be me and another Indian atheist kid in class [laughter] and [. ..] we’d get
the whole ‘Well, if you don’t like it then leave’ kind of diction and all that.” What
Mohamed and Yousef both found as new students at UCI was not a retreat, but
an inspiring energy for politics in the face of these post-9/11 challenges. As a new
first-year student, Yousef noticed the spring protest events and learned from “the
wall”—a public display of photos and information—about the opposition to the oc¬
cupation of Palestine. Experiences of fasting and breaking fast with other Muslim
students during Ramadan, and of the protest with the MSU, confirmed his passion
for political activism.
For all five students in our study, one extracurricular site played a major role in
their activist education. The MSU was “an organization that encouraged living our
beliefs, not just privately worshipping”: “from an activism perspective,” the group
enabled its members to “implement the ideas and principles that our faith teaches
us” (Mohamed). The students’ language suggests that the group bridged private
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and public spheres by both cultivating a “family” spirit (“a really strong sense of
brotherhood and sisterhood”—Mohamed) and fostering work on political causes.
Asaad spoke about gaining skills through his involvement in the MSU: “organizing
skills and leadership skills and friendship skills.” For Osama, the social bond was not
the draw; he was commuting, had his own friends, and didn’t need a fraternity-like
experience. In the MSU he found “people who care about the world”; “they’re willing
to discuss like different ideas and just concerns about the way the world is and how
can we change it to make it better.” For Taher, a student at UC-Riverside (UCR),
the MSU offered an “amazing group of people”: “highly motivated individuals,
very intelligent [. . .] most of them went on to become engineers, doctors, lawyers”
(like our interviewees). In Taher’s comments we found the blend of personal and
political: “I just felt this sense of camaraderie.” The students also emphasized the
MSU’s involvement in many social justice causes, not just Muslim-related causes.
For example, Asaad described a coalition of clubs on campus that organized a pro¬
test against tuition hikes in 2009: “We always use the flagpole [as a gathering place]
and then once we gather large enough number of people, we start marching around
campus and we go all the way around and around,” walking into lecture halls and
urging faculty and students to walk out in protest.
From the students’ comments about the MSU and the February 2010 protest,
we sought to extract definitions of activism: a sense of what motivates students to
act and an understanding of how rhetorical awareness and principles permeate
their approach to activism. Broadly, Taher proposed that “[a]ctivism is kind of
this general term for public engagement.” Others nuanced this general approach
by suggesting a continuum from personal belief to public engagement. Yousef, for
instance, eloquently linked the group’s activism to deeply held religious conviction
that necessitated, if not demanded, engagement: “There’s like a famous saying of the
Prophet Mohammad. He said that when you see an evil, change it with your hand.
If you can’t change it with your hand, speak out against it and if you can’t speak out
against it, hate it in your heart. And hating it in your heart’s the least you can do.”
Such an ethos, coupled with their family backgrounds, suggests that an orientation
toward activism is normative for this group, not exceptional.
From Refusal to Interruption
Understanding the influence of the MSU for these students and their motives for
activism as American-Muslim students in 2010 must be placed in the context of the
history of the Middle East in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—a history
with which they were all familiar. The decisions of the MSU, and of these students
as members of the organization and as young people with their own personal histo¬
ries, cannot be understood solely within generalized topoi of “university protest” or
student activism or “disruptive behavior” in the absence of a serious engagement

with the history of Palestine and Israel from 1948, when the nation of Israel was cre¬
ated and the people living on that territory were displaced, many to refugee camps
such as those in Jordan, Lebanon, and the West Bank. The sixty-five-year history of
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians comes into American political aware¬
ness through flash points such as the Six-Day War of 1967 and the 1982 invasion of
Lebanon, and hopeful points such as the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the 1995
Oslo Accords, occasions when US presidents made efforts to resolve a multidimen¬
sional geopolitical conflict.7 The new millennium has witnessed an intensification
of hostilities with the Palestinians’ Second Intifada and Israel’s construction of the
wall surrounding the West Bank, beginning in 2000, with barriers now separating
Gaza from Egypt and East and West Jerusalem. The undiminished flow of illegal
Israeli settlements into the occupied territories bespeaks Israel’s unresponsiveness
to international pressure, even from the United States with its extraordinary level
of financial and military support. US publics, including most UCI students, may be
less familiar with Israel’s recent military interventions: the 2006 invasion of Lebanon
and the 2009 intervention in Gaza, termed Operation Cast Lead, aimed at neutral¬
izing military resistance to the occupation. The shocking tactics used in Cast Lead,
resulting in many civihan deaths, provoked demonstrations across the United States
and were a strong motivating force for the MSU students: “We had friends whose
family members died in Gaza during that attack. So you can imagine what that was
already like; it was kind of boiling up inside of us” (Yousef).8
Students eloquently described the MSU’s growing attention not just to the
messages they wanted to deliver, but to various modes of rhetorical engagement
and platforms of delivery. Yousef narrated a series of events through which the
group experimented with different forms of response. In an early event, the MSU
engaged in a debate with the campus College Republicans about the publication in
Denmark of anti-Islamic cartoons, and found that conventional format productive.
When Alan Dershowitz spoke, however, and the MSU tried to engage the lawyer
in debate during Q&A about his pro-occupation stances, they found that tactic less
successful. According to Yousef, “With Alan Dershowitz, when people like would ask
him tough questions, he had the microphone. He would blatantly deny it. Blatandy,
he just went, ‘No, I never said that; you’re lying.’” From the students’ perspective,
Dershowitz simply refused to engage.
Subsequently, Daniel Pipes was invited to campus, and the MSU tried a dif¬
ferent strategy. Head of the Middle East Forum think tank, Pipes is the founder
of Campus Watch, a website encouraging students and faculty to expose radical or
militant Islamic activity in academic and activist sites on campuses. He is on record
as describing mosques as “breeding grounds for militants” (Stevenson). According
to Yousef, “We learned our lesson. We walked out. We put like some tape over our
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mouths and whatever, but we walked out to show him that, ‘Look. Nobody wants to
listen to you. You’re not important.”’ Seeing Pipes’s UCI appearance the next day on
Fox News taught a harsh lesson: the students had missed an opportunity to reach a
wide audience with their views. But later, when Anne Coulter and David Horowitz
were invited to campus, the group still decided not to show up, feeling stymied by
the prominence of very conservative voices on campus, the unwillingness of official
units to sponsor speakers they suggested, and the ineffectiveness of rhetorical options
on offer. Both global and local circumstances had intensified sufficiently that, by the
time of Oren’s speech, the group was ready to try a new approach. As Yousef put
it, “It was like a bag of popcorn in a microwave for like a long time. Like it just was
getting to the point where Michael Oren was like when the bag popped.”
We read the MSU’s move away from attending events with conservative speakers
as what John Schilb calls a “rhetorical refusal,” a pointed denial of their significance
by a refusal to engage, or an attempt to call attention, through silence, to what is
not represented (27). Such a strategy though, seemed increasingly unsatisfying,
particularly given the larger political context of Palestinians in Gaza in 2009. The
announcement of Oren’s impending visit seemed to galvanize the group, with some
members perceiving it as “a personal attack on us” (Yousef). Given Oren’s position
as ambassador, as well as his service in the Israel Defense Force in Beirut in 1982
and more recently as an officer in Gaza, the MSU felt it had to respond in some
significant way.
As we learned from the interviews and emails, the group made its decision
about the form of its protest through a process valued over centuries of rhetorical
education: imitation. Attentive to pro-Palestinian activism across the country in the
wake of Operation Cast Lead, the students took note of a protest carried out at the
University of Chicago in October 2009, excerpts of which are preserved on You¬
Tube (http://noliesradio.org/archives/7085; accessed 25 July 2013). Ehud Olmert,
prime minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009, delivered an address at the invitation of
the Harris School of Public Policy, which, like the UCI administration, sought to
prevent a rowdy response. The Harris School issued a statement in advance of the
talk dictating that, in order to “protect an atmosphere of free expression,” questions
at the end would be written on cards and presented to the speaker. Various audience
members didn’t wait for the Q&A period to respond. They stood and repeatedly
interrupted Olmert’s address. Although an article by Maureen Murphy on the event
claims that Olmert was “shouted down,” the YouTube video shows Olmert listening
to the thirty or more interruptions, sometimes responding, but completing his talk
(Murphy). Murphy notes, “These demonstrations are part of a wave of notched-up
dissent towards Israeli officials implicated in war crimes and racist policy.”
The MSU members discussed in their email exchange whether to stage a
“Chicago-style” event, and our interviewees’ comments on that precedent show
that they didn t casually adopt a model from elsewhere, but thought through the
rhetorical ramifications in light of their activist experiences. Osama, reflecting on
the publishing of the MSU emails in court documents, noted how “a lot of people
read the emails and were like, ‘Wow, these guys were actually really organized,’ and
I guess it’s pretty impressive.” The group considered a range of options, but, ac¬
cording to Yousef, the members kept in mind previous attempts to engage speakers:
Okay, this isn t the kind of protest that we’d try to grill him and like question-and-
answer. We’re going to fail because he’s just going to deny everything we say. So,
there goes that idea.” Indeed, this broader context of activist experience, as well as
the kairos of Oren s visit, prompted intense reflection on the kind of engagement
that the students wanted to stage.
Interestingly, the students focused more on the modality of the exchange
itself—the genre or structure of the event—and less on the message. Osama sum¬
marized the group’s view, including the dissatisfaction with previous forms of public
presentation on the topic:
It shouldn’t be one person [who] controls the conversation. [. . .] [A] dialogue would
have been having Michael Oren on the stage and someone representing an opposing
view on the stage. [. . .] And I think [in such a setting], there is absolutely no need for
a protest, because you have an opposing view that will have [. . .] an equal amount of
time to speak and respond to Michael Oren. [But] questions don’t allow you [. . .] to
do that, because you’re limited in the amount of time you have to speak, and then
you just ask your question and then you go and sit down. There’s no follow-up. [. . .]
[Y]ou can’t call out Michael Oren [for] not answering the question.
As Taher put it, “Q&A won’t work. This is not a tea party,” suggesting that both
the inequity in the speaking situation and the seriousness of the topic demanded a
different form of engagement. Indeed, the students described Oren as a “trained pro¬
pagandist” legitimated by university sponsorship. Put most simply by one interviewee,
“[H]e can speak.” They were impressed that the protestors at die Chicago Olmert
event “got their point across” (Taher), but they emphasized that Olmert continued
to speak. He knew “how to play the game,” as one student put it. Their plan for
the Oren event was not to “shut it down.” After previous forms of protest—debate,
marches, signs, chants, silent walk-outs—the “shout and leave” model seemed to
them a rhetorically reasonable next step.
From Audiences to Publics
Students’ developing understanding of the complexity of rhetorical situations—who

is allowed to speak, what is the effect of such speech, what styles of engagement are
imaginable, and what are the relationships among content, modality, and delivery—
came into play as they responded to our questions about the audiences or publics for
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their protest and its intended outcomes. We saw more differences within the group
in these responses, differences revealing the profoundly performative question at
rhetoric’s core: What happens when someone speaks? (IJsseling). In the interviews,
we used “audience” to refer to the participants at the event and “publics” to stand
for larger communicative spheres. As a way of organizing the responses, we start
with the immediate context and move outward. Mohamed articulated the local aims
clearly. Focusing the protest directly at Oren, he believed, was a way to make being
a representative of Israel “controversial.” For the sponsors of the event—the UCI
Department of Political Science and the School of Law—the protestors ask, what
does it mean to have invited Oren? Is it an endorsement of his acts, even tacitly? With
reference to the University of Chicago video, Taher also focused on the speaker as
primary audience: “You know, it was a very provocative and very effective way of
getting the message across, not to the audience members only, but to the speaker
himself.” For Taher and others, Oren is “the face of Israel.” As a paratrooper in the
Lebanon invasion and an actor in Cast Lead, these students “hold him responsible”
for war crimes. Osama’s aims were multiple, but addressing Oren was primary:
“The direct goal was to send a message to Michael Oren. And it was to be rude.” He
elaborated a strong critique of civility: “You have to be rude sometimes, especially
if you’re dealing with systems of injustice. [. . .] [Tjhere’s no room to be polite to
injustice. [. . .] [Y]ou can [be] polite—if you feel that somebody can be convinced
otherwise, then obviously you should take into consideration what is the best way to
approach this person. But I think this is not that type of a situation.” Osama’s search
here for an adequate rhetorical vocabulary reveals the limitations of a discourse of
middle-class behavioral norms—politeness versus rudeness—often employed in a
paternal way by university administrators faced with vigorous activism.9
This style of engagement also came into play where the local community was
concerned:
And then additionally we were also aware that most likely this was going to be an event
that would serve as a rallying point for the pro-Israeli, pro-Zionist Orange County
community. This was not really something that was geared towards students as much
as it was geared towards the surrounding community of Orange County. (Osama)
In Osama’s view, the protestors ultimately didn't go to educate this audience because
they believed that it was not capable of being persuaded. We can see this aim and
its anticipated result playing out on the Irvine 11 YouTube video as community
members shout, scold, and make obscene gestures toward the protestors. Other
interviewees mentioned longer-term effects within the campus context. A group
called Anteaters for Israel began in 2008 mounting I-Fest to celebrate the May 14
anniversary of the founding of the state, emphasizing culture, heritage, and lifestyle
in a fair-type atmosphere. The MSU protestors hoped to interrupt the normalizing
force of this happy, touristic view of Israel, in their view, a criminal state. In these
cases, we found the students operating from a theory of rhetoric outside the liberal
or deliberative frame.
At the same time, the protestors intended to bridge local, national, and inter¬
national publics through their acts. Taher said, “It’s a very dynamic thing for us to
think about. You know, we face challenges in defining what our core [public] is and
how we can approach them and how we can maintain support for our organization, to
maintain support for our work while engaging in public about the issues and the dif¬
ferent, you know, ideas and rhetoric and propaganda that they’ve dealt with and how
we can reverse that. So, it’s been very challenging.” He was speaking with reference
not only to UCI’s MSU, but also to a group called American Muslims for Palestine,
with which he now works as national student liaison. For Asaad, the national public
was clearly the most important. He felt that the protest was aimed at “the largest
public possible—other activists worldwide, as well as nationally.” He hoped that they
would “even push the envelope on pro-Palestinian activism or pro-justice activism.”
Given their diversity of aims, robust consideration of formats and genres, and
nuances of audience and public awareness, we marveled at the rhetorical abilities of
these students. Even when our interviewees offered conflicting views of their address¬
ees, they all showed their understanding that audiences and publics are varied, and
that effect or uptake is never in a rhetor’s control. Put another way, these students
seemed to challenge a simplistic framing of rhetoric as a simple, intentional stream
flowing from rhetor to audience to effect. Indeed, when we asked our participants
about the intended effects of their protest, they answered variously, underscoring
the complexity of the protest as an event that could—and would—be interpreted
in multiple ways by different publics. In the process, they problematized the ways
rhetoric and writing are often taught: as though a rhetor can identify an audience,
construct an argument within a context, and expect some sort of recognizable effect.
These students intuited the complexities of addressing publics, as opposed to think¬
ing in simplistic terms of audience. With such complexities in mind, we concluded
our discussion with questions about links between activism and formal education.
Reflections on Activism and Education
Just as the Irvine 11 protest is only one event in a longer temporal arc of the activist
life of a young Muslim, so too are undergraduate education and specific courses only
two points on the map. Hoping for a positive response, we asked our participants
how their formal education contributed to their activist and rhetorical educations.
Unhappily for us, all the students noted, cautiously and respectfully, that they did
not see much direct connection between the two. In fact, they were more likely
to cite experiences from K-12 than college classes as formative in their growth as
538 College English
rhetors and activists. For instance, Osama referenced a lOth-grade AP US history

class in which he read Howard Zinn’s A Peopled History of the United States: “I think
that book [. . .] was my—one of my first academic perspectives on all these issues,
because growing up, you know something was wrong.” For Osama, reading Zinn
helped him make connections between Native Americans and Palestinians, and
provided an “academic language” for expressing the “thoughts in the back of my
head,” helping him form his “natural inclinations” into coherent thoughts. As Taher
put it, reflecting on encounters with figures like Zinn and Malcolm X, this material
“helpjed] me intellectually wrap my mind around certain concepts, understand the
dynamic of US foreign policy in a way that I might not have understood before,
which also added to my passion for activism on the ground.”
We were hoping to hear that writing courses helped students develop their
abilities to become activists. But our participants either didn’t mention first-year
writing or remembered a negative experience. Yousef, for instance, complained that
“when I took the writing series, it was awful. It was awful. I don’t know what we were
writing about. Like they tried to put some politics in it by making us read—what was
that book about nickel-and-dime? But like that was still like a forced assignment.”
Yousef was recalling the second quarter of UCI’s first-year writing requirement.
In the research course, students were required to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nick¬
eled and Dimed and write a research paper on a topic related to the book. Yousef s
reflection on the course makes a sobering comment on the uptake for one student
of a curricular effort at politically informed pedagogy in first-year composition. In
contrast, another student praised a general education speech class at a neighboring
university, and a couple of informants commented on productive writing assignments
in upper-division writing classes. Yousef described the writing in such a course fo¬
cused on the work of Franz Fanon: “We could write whatever we wanted. It just had
to be like a minimum pages and that experience was great because like being able
to write, like studying Fanon and then, you know, talking about my own personal
life and able to like not be judged on an assignment.” Such comments invite further
reflection on the function and reception of first-year writing against the potential for
writing classes offered later in the college career. But another student seemed more
positive about the usefulness of more traditional writing practices: frequent essay
exams, and essays rewritten repeatedly until they were acceptable. For Osama, such
assignments, though tedious, left a positive impression because he saw improvement
through repeated practice.
Given the students’ tenuous sense of connection between their institutional
and activist educations, we were not surprised that their views of higher education
in general were not positive. Our participants offered sharply critical insights on the
disconnect between theory and contemporary life: “What are they teaching me in
these poli sci classes besides theory? [...] I read like, you know, Communist Manifesto
and things like that and like, Machiavelli and all these things that like they open your
mind and they get you questioning things and thinking, but as far as like making
me want to do something, no. The classes never made me want to do anything.”
Yousef voiced a classic opposition between thought and action: “I was like, ‘I can’t
keep talking about this and writing papers about it.’ I’m like if there’s a problem in
the world, just go fix it. It’s that simple. You don’t have to talk about it.” Yousefs
comments, echoed by others, point to a divide between theory and practice, but also
to a problem with programs defined by the dissemination of information through
large-enrollment courses. Such dissatisfaction leads to more probing questions: What
is an academy for? What does it do? Can it be politically engaged? Can one separate
out the world of ideas from the world of action?
Indeed, the disconnect between the world of ideas and the world of action ap¬
peared again and again in our interviews. Taher noted that, in general, the campus
didn’t encourage involvement in activist organizations. Even courses that might
be topically of interest, such as those in international studies or political science,
were not always memorable and, according to Osama, often did “not [have] a huge
impact.” Yousef bemoaned that he was increasingly “turned off by political science
theory,” and Osama noted, powerfully, “You can get a degree without taking a class
about what’s going on in the world.”
Students expressed such views at times through the “Disney motif,” as they
analogized their college experiences to spending time in the theme park located only a
few miles from the UCI campus. Taher, for instance, noted how the MSU and other
student activist organizations were definitely not the norm: “They’re viewed as the
fringe groups of students that are just, you know, ruining our Disneyland environment
here on campus that we want thousands of kids to enroll in and get the financial aid
[tuition] paid to our universities.” At the same time, Yousef spun the Disney motif
more positively: “I think college is like definitely, it’s an amazing experience because
you have so much free time. [. . .] [I]t’s literally like a few years out of your life that
you get to live in Disneyland. Like your whole world is Disneyland.” For Yousef,
college offered the opportunity not just for a fantasy break from the “real world”
but for the exploration of idealism; students, he argued, “have the obligation to be
idealistic. Why? Because the politicians of this country have made it an obligation
and made careers out of being pessimists and making the world stink.”
Other participants reflected this view strongly. Mohamed, for instance, argued
that most students’ college educations are “incomplete,” particularly as they do not
think of our “responsibility as human beings.” He wished non-Muslims were more
involved and spoke eloquently about using the college experience as an opportunity
to “try to get outside yourself,” to “be agitated,” to “be uncomfortable.” For Taher,
engaging the “opportunity to develop yourself intellectually” inevitably means “en¬
couraging students to challenge the status quo,” particularly because “administration,
540 College English
even many times the professors, they don’t really promote student activism or they
promote it in the way that’s kind of like what you see outside right now. You know,
kids selling stuff.”
Given these students’ view of higher education—the limited opportunities to
develop skills as activists—we were not surprised to learn that they often organized
self-sponsored instruction in activism. Mohamed reported that some mosques in the
United States are at a “turning point,” moving from the “basics” (offering spaces
for prayer and informing congregants of legal rulings affecting immigrants) to ad¬
dressing social ills, a move he associated particularly with the newer generation of
US Muslims. As an example, he pointed to the Irvine Mosque’s Friday Night Live, a
group that attempts to address “hot topic” issues, such as economic inequality, capital
punishment and the prison-industrial complex, racial segregation in the Muslim
community, and contemporary gender roles for Muslims. Alore locally, the MSU
offers workshops on topics of interest, such as Islamic history, as well as meetings
about how to protest and connect with other like-minded organizations. Yousef, for
instance, talked about his belief that it is important to reach out and address not just
your own issues, but rather become part of a collective, working across groups, “not
being selfish about what we care about.”
Ultimately, we were struck by how these students understood specific activist
projects and protest as part of a larger intellectual and moral project. Yousef talked
about the Irvine 11 event as “way to vent anger,” certainly, but several students also
conceived of their activism as an extension of the principles of Islam, which included
connecting with other groups, as well as hitting the books, becoming educated,
becoming enlightened, and enlightening yourself before enlightening others. For
these students, activism should be morally grounded, built on a sense of what’s right
and wrong, and informed by a constant engagement with the world; as Yousef put it,
students should “always ask why.” Asaad summed up well his reflection on participa¬
tion in the Irvine 11 protest and activism more generally:
Without hesitation [this was] the single most important thing I’ve done during my
college career and I don’t regret it at all. That’s part of who I want to be, that’s part
of how I want to be a doctor too. I want to be an activist and I want to be able to
advocate for patients. I think it’s strengthened my character, I think it’s strengthened
my skills as well.
Such a holistic view—seeing the use of particular skills in a larger context of con¬
victions and engagement—is perhaps the most striking characteristic of how these
young people conceptualize their educations. What’s surprising to us, as educators,
is how little of that education the students attributed to learning acquired or even
encountered in the classroom.
Rhetorical Education: A Longer View
As we prepared this study, we talked a good deal about its limitations and about how
we wanted to position ourselves within it. We didn’t seek to balance perspectives by
interviewing administrators or teachers involved in the Irvine 11 event. We didn’t
include other MSU members, notably women, who were involved but not partici¬
pants. Nor did we seek to represent the opposing point of view about the Palestinian
occupation and the conflicts on campus between Zionist students and the MSU in a
liberal pro-and-con approach. In part, our choices had to do with constraints of space
and the richness of the archive we discovered and created through these interviews.
We were also moved by the same critique of rhetorics of civility brought to light
by our informants: when the deck of public discourse and opinion is heavily stacked
in favor of one perspective, giving equal time is not ultimately equitable. The very
minimal scholarship about Muslim students, students who have emigrated from the
Middle East, and students engaged in activism in resistance to the occupation of
Palestine led us to attend as carefully and as fully as possible in an academic essay to
the voices of these five students—exceptional as they may be.
Indeed, oriented toward activism and reflection by virtue of their (transna¬
tional experiences and religion, and by contemporary world events, these students
may seem exceptional. But many students engage in activism at some point in their
college careers. As professors, we can become insulated from student experience.
Despite what the field has learned since the social turn about the complexities of
students’ lives, we were still surprised by these students’ disparaging comments
about their formal education. When readings mirror identities (.Malcolm X) and
when the structure of a class allows for discussion and freedom to explore (Fanon),
students remember classes positively and perhaps transfer learning and practice to
other contexts.10 Students here confirm what we already know about the humanities
generally and discussion-based, writing-intensive courses specifically.
At the same time, we note that lower-division writing courses, upon which the
field expends so much energy, are not well regarded by these students. The social
turn seems not to have affected our interviewees as we would have wished. As with
the exceptional students highlighted in the preliminary report from the Stanford
writing study (Fishman et al.), extracurricular, self-sponsored educational experi¬
ences stand out. Longitudinal studies of college writing help us put the first-year
class in a longer-term perspective. Individual courses are only moments in longer
trajectories—they are not unimportant, but perhaps we shouldn’t overestimate them
by assigning them most of the burden for students’ rhetorical educations. Indeed,
we might learn something about temporality and the long view from our students
themselves, who understood the protest of Oren’s visit as only one moment in a longer
activist project. Ackerman and Coogan argue, “If rhetoric occurs routinely in public
542 College English
life, as work, it is through routines that establish, in their aggregate, something like
a postmodern paideia” (8). These students, and our analysis of their genealogies of
activism, challenge all of us to consider ourselves as co-participants in such a paid¬
eia.n Future studies of rhetorical education should encompass the curricular and the
cocurricular, the formally sponsored and the self-sponsored, as mutually informing
resources if research in rhetoric and writing studies is to contribute vitally to a col¬
lective struggle for cultural understanding and peaceful coexistence.
Notes
1. An edited YouTube video of the event is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOKN-

OSuCGY. Accessed 20 July 2013.
2. “Irvine 11 Convicted.” algemeiner.com. 23 Sept. 2011. Web. Accessed 20 July 2013.
3. Heath’s long-awaited follow-up to the 1983 Ways "with Words tracks the families of Roadville and
Trackton, and their experiences with new technologies and the disastrous economic changes of recent
decades. Her title, Words at Work and Play, marks the domains of interest in her study.
4. Wendy Hesford offers an early study of student activism in her essay “‘Ye Are Witnesses.’” She
analyzes an event on the Oberlin campus—the defamation of a monument honoring Christian missionaries
in China—and the rhetoric used by students, faculty, and administrators at a number of highly emotional
meetings in response to the act.
5. A rich body of work from communications scholars addresses protest within social movements.
See Charles Morris and Stephen Browne for a comprehensive introduction. Analyses of the carnivalesque
aspects of protests from the 1998 World Trade Organization events forward offer interesting points of
intersection with our analysis here. In addition to Delucca and Peebles on this event, see Bruner.
6. The study received institutional review board (IRB) approval. Because these young activists are
known publicly and have ongoing commitments to public action, none requested the confidentiality. We
refer to them here by their first names. They were provided a draft of the essay in advance of publication
and invited to contribute comments and corrections. At the time of our interviews, all five had received
undergraduate degrees from UCI or UC-Riverside (UCR) in political science or international studies.
Osama was a first-year law student at Harvard. Taher was working as national student liaison for American
Muslims for Palestine. Yousef was preparing to apply for medical school. Asaad was in a graduate program
at UCI in molecular biology and applying for medical school. Mohamed had completed a master’s degree
in mechanical engineering and was working as an engineer, hoping to gain admission to law school.
7. Matthew Abraham has argued that the field of rhetoric and composition ignores the Israel-
Palestine conflict and is poorly informed about Israel’s violation of international law. He urges that we
should “explain and address the rhetorical difficulties diat attend” the conflict (116-17).
8. Another temporal sequence within which die Irvine 11 protest can be understood tracks the local
history of public events at UCI related to the global scene. For about five years, the MSU has mounted
a Palestine Awareness Week in the spring, constructing a wall on the Ring Road (UCI’s public space)
to bring to mind the walls surrounding the occupied territories and decorating it with photos, facts,
and arguments, as well as hosting related demonstrations and speaking events. Of course, groups and
individuals with opposing views typically confront the MSU students at the wall, and heated discussions
sometimes ensue. The UCI administration discourages heated confrontation and posts campus police
prominently at these sites. For the students we interviewed, a series of public events staged against this
background led up to their February 2010 intervention. Their testimonies present a compelling account
of increasingly frustrated moves and countermoves in response to a series of campus-sponsored appear¬
ances by nationally prominent conservative and pro-Zionist figures.
9. See Nedra Reynolds’s defense of interruption in a feminist context.

10. Susan Jarratt, Katherine Mack, Alexandra Sartor, and Shevaun Watson, in “Pedagogical
Memory,” reveal a similar sense of disappointment with older students’ failure to remember and use
first-year composition.
11. Jeffrey Grabill notes the importance of “stance” in community-based research and. the need to
think about our own positioning as scholars vis-a-vis those we study and those with whom we co-create
knowledge.
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545
Unwelcome Stories, Identity Matters,

and Strategies for Engaging in
Cross-Boundary Discourses
David Wallace
Academic writings in general avoid any suggestion that there ys a real human being addressing
the subject—sometimes even with (gasp!) passion.
—Lynn Bloom, “Voices” (271)
hy was it so hard for Lynn Bloom to tell her stories of part-time instruc¬
tor hell sitting on the floor with the kitty litter, of the “Gang of Four” who
sought to eliminate her writing program administrator position so that she
could not get tenure, and of telling her students that she ran naked into the
hall of a Stockholm hostel to escape rape? Because she is a woman? No, we
protest. Even in the early 1990s, English studies was beyond that kind of overt gender
discrimination. Because she told women’s stories? This explanation hits closer to
the mark. Bloom told stories that made her feminized status too real for us, stories
that exposed the ways that trailing spouses were nearly always women, stories in
which writing program directors were often also women managing the un-tenure-
worthy task of overseeing composition instructors, stories that hinted she had to
expose herself to us to stop English studies from doing figuratively to her and other
women what a masked man attempted to do to her in the women’s bathroom of a
Stockholm hostel.
We struggle to integrate these stories and their implications into our lives
because they expose the privileges of male gender and middle-class academic pro¬
fessorships. We don’t know how to respond when those who have been victimized
by the system get voice and use it to expose injustice. We fear those who are willing
to be vulnerable, claiming the voice that academic discourse practices work so hard
David Wallace is dean of the College of Liberal Arts at California State University-Long Beach. He
is author of Compelled to Write: Alternative Rhetoric in Theory and Practice (Utah State UP, 2011), coauthor
(with Helen Rothschild Ewald) of Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom (Southern Illinois
UP, 2000), and author of many articles and book chapters.

546 College English
to deny them: the right to tell their stories, claim relevance for them, and, in doing
so, challenge the notion that the privilege that we want to believe we earned by our
intelligence, talent, and hard work may be based—at least in part—in maleness,
whiteness, middle-class backgrounds, or other markers of privilege. Put another
way, although we have taken the social turn in composition studies and have begun
to address various kinds of identity issues, we struggle with the deeper implications
of that turn, both for ourselves and for the beloved profession we have worked so
hard to build.
My representation of Bloom’s story illustrates the complexities of taking the
social turn deeper. For example, the “we” voice I use is problematic. I choose it
because I want Bloom to know that I’ve heard her, that hers and other women’s
stories have helped me begin to understand my male privilege and to change the
way I interact with women, have prompted me to use the positions of authority that
I inhabit to get living wages and benefits for those who teach first-year composition,
and have motivated me to spend hot summer days hauling furniture into the offices
I had renovated so that new instructors I hired would have decent places to meet
with their students.
The “we” voice is also problematic because it divides; it makes me sound like
I might only be talking to other men, and it does not reflect the affinity I feel with
Bloom because I have also written unwelcome stories that were silenced until I
found editors who understood why such stories needed telling. In some sense I feel
trapped by the us/them nature of how I have cast the set of stories from Bloom’s
groundbreaking 1992 College English article. This us/themness was necessary in her
piece to bring women’s problematized status to the fore, but now we need more—we
need to see how die problem has morphed and how it intersects with other aspects
of identity, and if I’m completely honest, I want Bloom (and others) to think about
what it means for me to be a gay man in this discipline.
In the 2003 article “Voices,” in which she tells the backstory of the writing and
publishing of “Teaching College English as a Woman,” Bloom suggests that we
must break the convention of person-less academic writing; she argues that women’s
stories must be told by women. “Who will do it, if we don’t? The time has come to
attach our names to our actions” (274). Attaching names and faces to our actions
has not been easy for us as a discipline; the long-standing bias against the personal
in academic writing discourages us from this kind of ownership. As Debra Journet
notes, in composition research, narratives “are still being written against the grain
of academic discourse” (14). Given this history and the complexity of the task before
us, do we dare to take the next step in the social turn, and accept what it would mean
for us to do so?
At the heart of my argument is that rhetoric and composition, as well as English
studies more generally, needs unwelcome stories to progress along the trajectory set
Unwelcome Stories 547
up by the social turn. To be clear, I am not arguing that we need only unwelcome
stories to move forward, nor, as Journet argues, that all narratives need to be per¬
sonal to be valuable or that personal narratives are inherently more authentic than
other kinds of genres (16-17). Instead, I contend that unwelcome stories are crucial
because they can play an important role in exposing our individual and collective
complicity in the ongoing systems of oppression and discrimination that marginalize
many groups in our culture. Indeed, in arguing for the relevance and transformative
power of stories, Malea Powell describes the continuing bias against narrative in
general and personal narrative more specifically as the “biggest colonizing trick of
them all—erasing real bodies in real conflict in the real world by separating mind
from body, theory from practice to keep us toiling away in the service of a discourse
that disadvantages almost every one of us” (“Stories” 401).
We need stories that disturb us so that we can begin to shift the fields of intel¬
ligibility in which we operate. Some of these stories need to be us/them stories in
which a single difference issue is called out and brought into dramatic relief, and
other stories need to expose the interconnected nature of identity—that very few
of us are disenfranchised or privileged in all situations. And we need the means to
understand these stories, to learn what we can from them, but also to take both our
own and others’ stories seriously by scrutinizing them for what they omit. It is a
difficult and delicate task that I recommend, but there is real hope that we can do it
if we are willing to account for our own positioning within the discourses of power
and marginalization, and if we are willing to work together to develop new under¬
standings of what it means for us to do so individually and collectively.
In the body of this article, I seek to add to work that has engaged in the telling
and teaching of unwelcome stories, in two ways. First, I argue that identity matters
by telling an unwelcome story of my own. Then, I propose several strategies for
engaging in responsible cross-boundary discourse through a queer reading of three
important arguments made by African American scholars in our field: Jacqueline
Jones Royster’s CCCC chair’s address, “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not
Your Own”; Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Your Average Nigga”; and Vorris Nunley’s
Keepin ’ It Hushed.
Identity Matters
The incident that pushed me to be out as a gay man to my students occurred fifteen
years ago. I was sitting at my desk grading papers and read the following lines in a
student paper:
The first people I exclude from my circle [of humanity] are homosexuals. They have
no right to be able to do those sick and impure actions. Not even the dumbest animal
on earth performs these disgusting acts.
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In my comments to this student, I asked him to think about the likely impact of his
statement on any gay and lesbian readers of his paper, and I revealed to him that I
was one of those readers, challenging him in his next revision to think about how to
make a more nuanced argument. He chose not to accept my invitation for a more
substantive discussion and simply removed the passage from his draft. His was not
the only such paper I received that semester, so after a brave young lesbian outed
herself in the class, I did the same.
At the time, I understood all too clearly how this personal revelation made me
vulnerable to my students. As Susan Talburt observes, “For the gay or lesbian aca¬
demic, the personal becomes the sexual; sexual identity becomes the political,” and
“the rhetoric of identity politics and universities’ responses to it have had the social
and academic effect of conflating identity with minority affiliation” (56). I also came
to understand that my revelation to my student complicated his rhetorical situation.
Some might argue that my response limited my student’s freedom of speech. How¬
ever, I contend that his freedom of expression was limited by his own reluctance or
inability to take responsibility for the likely effects of his statements—to engage in
real dialogue with a real homosexual rather than to pronounce judgments on a class
of people he previously saw as dismissible.
Did I do enough for this student? At the time I thought so, but now I wonder
what it would have looked like if he had engaged in the hard task of taking respon¬
sibility for his statements, for his beliefs that people like me were sick and impure.
Could he really have undergone such a radical transformation in my class? Should
he have had to do so? Could I have designed the course to provide other means for
him to own up to the consequences of his bigotry? Should it be my responsibility
to do so? At the time, it really didn’t occur to me to think of this student as a bigot.
Although I was shocked and offended by his statements, my response to him was
guided primarily by the fact that he was my student, and it was my job to engage
him as a writer, to try to help him develop as a writer. Being a real live homosexual
with him seemed the best way to do that.
This young man continued to be engaged as a writer in my class, and he wrote
several other papers that showed real growth as a writer. However, if all he learned
from his paper that sought to exclude homosexuals from his circle of humanity is
that homosexuals are real people who sometimes have positions of power, and that
there may be consequences to taking potshots at such people, then that was not such
a bad lesson. Yet we ought to aspire to more with our use of the personal in our
teaching and research than just to shut down discourse that is homophobic, racist,
sexist, classist, ableist, and otherwise intolerant.
My point in this story is to illustrate how identity is often (if not always) at stake
in rhetoric and composition pedagogy, and that the attendant power issues may not
be as simple as traditional approaches to pedagogy and research methods assume.
Certainly as the student s teacher and as a scholar offering this story as part of our
larger disciplinary conversation, I exercise considerable power in both contexts.
However, that power is not absolute; in his paper, my student attempted to patholo-
gize me and people like me, tapping into a dominant cultural value that continues
to allow LGBT people to be socially, culturally, and legally marginalized. As I have
argued elsewhere (“Informed Dissent”), the usual assumptions about power and
responsibility gloss over the interactions of competing systems of power.1 Further,
such situations are not anomalies; though the vast majority of my interactions with
my students do not involve such dramatic identity negotiations, identity is always at
issue in ways that are multiple and not always easy to sort out.
My second premise in this article is that the same is true for the field of rhetoric
and composition: identity matters. We are always negotiating identity in our re¬
search, theory, and pedagogy, and to pretend that this is not the case is to exercise a
version of privilege similar to the one my student tried to exercise in his paper—an
unquestioning privilege that presumes the right to dismiss the experiences and per¬
spectives that are not part of the usual dominant cultural values and the discursive
practices that maintain them. However, how we understand and address identity also
matters: just as we must be careful not to accept dominant, white, male, Christian
values and discourse practices as natural, we must also not focus exclusively on the
difference issue or issues that mark us as different from the presumed norm. Let me
be clear about two things. I am proud to be part of a discipline that has learned much
about what it means to manage the discourses of power in our theory, research, and
pedagogy; however, there is a real danger in congratulating ourselves on what we
have achieved and failing to continually attend to our complicity in maintaining the
discourses of power.
The notion that identity matters is not new with me. I distill it from the work
of more scholars than I can cite here. Indeed, a body of work has enthusiastically
taken up the challenge of understanding what it means to reconceive of rhetoric
and composition theory, practice, and pedagogy as negotiating discourses. Two
aspects of this body of work are particularly important for my purposes: First, we
have come to understand composition students and other writers as active users of
language who bring varied home discourses to the project of engaging in what passes
as academic and professional discourse (see Shaughnessy; Gee). Second, we have
developed increasing sophisticated understandings of how the discourse practices of
dominant culture are problematic for women (for example, Kirsch, Maor, Massey,
Nickoson-Massey, and Sheridan-Rabideau; Jarratt and Worsham), have marginalized
the discourse practices of some people of color (LaBov; Smitherman; Royster), have
erased indigenous rhetorical traditions (Anzaldua; Bizzaro; Lyons; Nunley; Powell,
“Blood and Scholarship”), have been problematic for working-class people (Bloom,
“Freshman Composition”), have continued to erase or pathologize LGBT people
550 College English
and those seen as abled in other than the expected ways (Alexander and Wallace;
Brueggemann, Feldmeier White, Dunn, Heifferon, and Cheu; Mossman), have erased
religious beliefs in general (Goodburn; Rand), and have been hostile to spiritual prac¬
tices that do not mesh well with the dominant Judeo-Christian traditions (Anzaldua).
As I have argued elsewhere (“Shallow Literacy”), despite this laudable trajectory,
we have been slow to embrace the notion that both our personhoods—as compo¬
sition theorists, researchers, and teachers—and the identities of our students and
other interlocutors matter in ways that make us responsible to each other beyond our
conscious intentions. To explore what it means to take up the next challenge in the
social turn, I focus on developing strategies for engaging in what Royster has called
cross-boundaij discourses. My purpose is to identify some specific strategies that we
can use in our teaching, scholarship, and lives to get beyond the notion that identity
does not matter, so that we can account for and address the very real differences that
have the potential to divide us. However, I also want to illustrate what such efforts
look like, to expose the hard issues that doing such work will entail; so, with some
trepidation, I offer a queer reading of the work of three African American scholars
of rhetoric and composition to tease out means for moving forward.
Strategies for Engaging in Cross-Boundary Discourses
I have been compelled on too many occasions to count to sit as a well-mannered

Other, silently, in a state of tolerance that requires me to be as expressionless as I can
manage, while colleagues who occupy a place of entitlement different from my own
talk about the history and achievements of people from my ethnic group, or even
about their perceptions of our struggles. (Royster 30)
I was worried that Cam would see me as a faggot and an Chicle Tom because in the
ghetto where I grew up, school was construed as the ultimate site of middle class
whiteness, likely because the mandated language variety is a reified White English
Vernacular. (Young 699)
Blacks still speak differently in front of White folks and others in the public sphere:
Black folks still wear the mask. The mask does more than grin and lie. It domesti¬
cates, disciplines, and commodifies African American rhetorics and African American
subjectivities: die mask does not come free. (Nunley 1)
I begin my queer reading of the work of these three African American rhetoricians
with their own words because I want to exercise care in how I discuss rhetorical
theory based in experiences I have not lived. In Nunley’s terms, I am concerned
that my whiteness has the real potential to domesticate and commodify the “other,”
and in Royster’s terms I am keenly aware that I begin this discussion from a place
of racial entitlement that has the potential to intrude into the discourses and lived
experiences of those who are racialized as others in US society in problematic ways
that must be read as systematic oppression. Such acts, as Royster argues, “are not
random acts of unkindness” (31). In my queer reading of the work of these three
scholars, I want to show engaged respect for wisdom drawn from experiences with
marginalization that I have not lived; I want to seek out both what is common in
our experiences in speaking and writing from the margins as well as what is differ¬
ent. However, I also want to encourage us all to move beyond discourse that is so
centered in its own experience of marginalization that it does not pause to consider
how it might marginalize others.
I begin this reading in the most critical place for me: as a gay man, I must ask
Young what would have been so awful about his student thinking that Young might
be a faggot. I recognize that I pose this question from a place of racial privilege;
although claiming my queerness meant many difficult identity negotiations for me,
those difficulties were not particularly related to my whiteness and were likely miti¬
gated to some extent by my racial privilege.
In his article, Young makes the important point that race relations in American
education can trap African Americans, particularly African American men, in places
where they are not white enough for the educational establishment but also must
continually prove their blackness. He illustrates this problem by telling the story
of three jobs he lost because he was perceived either as too black because he taught
readings about race that made white students uncomfortable, or as not masculine
enough in an all-black school. So he tells his mother
that I had been fagged and sissied out, that the black female principal had said, “Some
of the students think you’re not masculine enough. You got to change that. You got
to act like a man,” it puzzled Momma that I didn’t just grin and bear it. (694)
After this, Young offers the story of his student Cam in a college composition course,
problematizing his own reading of Cam:
It wasn’t Cam who called me a nigger to neutralize our differences. I called him one
[not literally] to amplify them when he arrived to class on the first day about twenty
minutes late, on what Momma used to call CPT (short for Colored People’s Time)
[....] I profiled him as a ghetto black man, like the ones I had grown up with and
was trying to leave behind. That’s when I thought of him—I’m sorry to say—as a
nigger. (698-99)
On issues of race, I appreciate Young’s vulnerability and nuance—particularly his

laudable willingness to reveal how he used race to read Cam in a pejorative way.
Young’s example reminds me that having experienced prejudice and discrimination
because of a stigmatized identity does not inoculate one against participating in subde
forms of prejudice and discrimination toward others in one’s own identity group.
Given this insightful analysis of race in his interactions with Cam, what puzzles
me is that although Young is careful to apologize for labeling Cam a “nigger,” he
552 College English
does not pause to consider how—intentionally or not—the stories he tells pathologize

some forms of masculinity. As a gay reader of his article, I would like him to stop
for a moment to acknowledge that the choice between race and masculinity was a
false one, that it was based on a notion of masculinity that he now understands in
a larger light. But I get no such acknowledgment, so I am not going to sit quietly,
as a well-mannered other, while a colleague casually uses terms that have been spat
at me in derision, and without so much as a passing reference to the problematic
nature of those terms. Indeed, the casualness of Young’s references to being seen as
a “faggot” and being “fagged and sissied out” strike me as disrespectful to those of
us who are faggots and who embrace our gender-blending tendencies as central to
our identities and as valuable contributions not only to society at large but also to
our writing pedagogies.
I am acutely aware that Young’s stories are unwelcome to me, but not for the
reasons that he might imagine them to be. I welcome the opportunity to learn how
the conflict that I felt between my success in school and my masculinity was different
from the racialized effect that he experienced. I hear Young when he says, “But the
difference between black boys and white boys, however, is that black boys not only
feel coerced to give up their masculinity if they do well in school, but they also feel
forced to abandon their race—the ultimate impossibility” (700). Thus I choose to
temper my disappointment with Young’s casual treatment of homosexuality because
I hear Royster’s stories of white trespass into African American lived experience,
and, even though I am disturbed by the homophobia and heteronormativity I see
operating in his account, I must account for my whiteness as I read Young.
A second reason that I choose to temper my reading of the homophobia and
heteronormativity I see here is that I hear Nunley’s argument for the continued
importance of African American hush harbors (AAHH) as venues for escaping the
overwhelming press of the dominant white culture and the need for black people
to always screen and temper because of the ubiquitous presence of whiteness. Even
though CCC hardly qualifies as a hush harbor, the last thing I want Young to do is put
on a grinning mask for me when he writes in such venues. Yet I am also concerned
about giving Young a pass on his casual use of terms that continue to carry homopho¬
bic and heteronormative connotations in our society. Although I take seriously my
responsibility as a white person not to presume that my own perspectives or aesthetics
should be the automatic standard for judging the value of Young’s contribution to
our professional discourse, the analysis of the intersections of race and sexual identity
in the examples he provides are hardly the most substantive discussions I have read
about the complexities of these intersections. Young himself nods to Philip Brian
Harper’s more nuanced discussion of the challenges faced by gay men of color, and
the many gay men of color who have told me stories of isolation and double prejudice
leave me wondering how Young cannot pause in the important point he is making
to ensure that such people know that he does not mean to further pathologize queer
men of African American decent.
How then do we move forward? How do we speak our versions of truth while
respecting that others’ versions are grounded in lived experiences that may lead them
to other kinds of truths? I have written about this problem from an explicitly queer
perspective elsewhere (Compelled to Write). Here, I want to ground my answer in
a queer reading of raced rhetoric, using work by Royster and Nunley that puts an
edge on the widely accepted belief in our field that language and rhetoric are never
neutral, but instead are discursive in that identity is always at stake to greater or lesser
degrees. More specifically, I read Royster’s concept of cross-boundary discourse as
making explicit that identity negotiations are not done innocently among people
who inhabit the same kinds of subject positions. In one sense, I read Royster’s and
Nunley’s work as continuing the challenges to flat notions of identity, agency, and
language that our field has taken up in its use of postmodern theory in the last twenty
years (see Faigley; Berlin). However, I also want to make it clear that Royster and
Nunley, among other scholars, presume that identity matters in ways that are not
simply based on idiosyncratic differences among people who have largely the same
inherent positions of power in society. Instead, they challenge us to understand that
identity, agency, and language are negotiated across boundaries created by systems
of difference that have real consequences.
I read Nunley as one of a group of scholars in our field who press the postmod¬
ern problem of agency into new ground when he takes a slightly different tack in
regard to Henry Giroux’s notion of rationalities as terrains in and through which
subjectivities are constructed. Nunley argues that we need to see African American
hush harbor rhetoric (AAHHR), and more broadly blackness itself, “as a field of
intelligibility” (10). He further argues that we need not only to recognize whiteness
as a sphere of rationality that has the potential to marginalize others, but to also
acknowledge that AAHHR and other rationalities “resist the neoliberal tendency to
reduce Blackness to an easily consumable commodity” (15).
The seeming conundrum that Nunley’s view of blackness as a rationality poses
for me, as a white reader of Young’s piece, is that I must balance my need to critique
Young for failing to engage with a queer rationality while always being mindful that
he speaks and writes from a racialized rationality that I can never fully understand.
How then do we speak to each other across such differences? How do we find ways,
as Gloria Anzaldua so tellingly describes, to keep from shouting across the river at
each other? I ground my reading of Royster’s and Nunley’s answers to this ques¬
tion in feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler s notion of opacity. Butlei explains,
“If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to
us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as
beings who are formed in relations of dependency (20).
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As I read it, Butler’s point is that individual identity is formed by discourses

that an individual cannot control and, to some extent, can never fully understand.
Thus, we all must come to grips with the ends of our own understanding, with our
own opacity. In the context of cross-boundary discourse, Butler’s notion of opacity
has three important implications: (1) we have all been constructed by discourses
that we do not fully understand; (2) we have all participated in discourses that have
constructed others in ways that we do not fully understand; and (3) we are responsible
for the implications of our participation in those discourses even if we do not fully
understand them. Rather than see opacity as a reason to throw up one’s hands at the
impossibility of the task of engaging in perfectly responsible discourse, I see opac¬
ity in general, and my own opacity in specific, as a generative place to engage with
others, as a call to give up the false hope of the objective and embrace subjectivity,
not as a necessary evil, but as the only path to whatever wider understanding can be
achieved. To flesh out this principle, I turn to three concepts that I have extrapolated
from Royster’s speech, and I flesh them out with a bit of queer critique to illustrate
what can be gained from taking an explicitly intersectional perspective.
Concept 1: We are (nearly) always talking and, writing across boundaries.
At first, this concept seems to run directly against the grain of queer critiques of
identity-based notions of difference (see Kopelson) and even against my own argu¬
ment that such boundaries are almost always multiple: Young is not just speaking from
blackness to whiteness, but also from heteronormativity to homosexuality. However,
both Nunley and Royster make arguments about the existence of racially identified
places that have both physical presence and rhetorical consequences. For example, as
I have already noted, Nunley argues that blackness exists as a rationality supported
by real hush harbors that are more than just “background upon which people act
and upon which subjectivities and identities are performed; they are a significant
geography within a network of ontological terrains upon which Black subjectivity,
meaning, and existence are constructed” (38). He argues that such rationalities serve
as “lifeworlds” that provide the basis for meaningful actions and interactions: “Life-
worlds are the taken-for-granted bundles of beliefs, subjectivities, standpoints, and
the language use that ordinary people engage in to create meaning” (37).
Royster provides an important example of conflict between a dominant lifeworld
and a lifeworld that has been historically marginalized in American society when
she critiques white people who have told her she should think about her lifeworld,
proposing that such intrusions would be read as bad “home training”:
People in the neighborhood where I grew up would say, “Where is their home train¬
ing?” Imbedded in the question is the idea that when you visit other people’s “home
places,” especially when you have not been invited, you simply can not go tramping
around the house like you own die place, no matter how smart you are, or how much
imagination you can muster, or how much authority and entitlement outside diat home
you may be privileged to hold. And you certainly can not go around name calling,
saying things like, \ ou people are intellectually inferior and have a limited capacity
to achieve, without taking into account who the family is, what its living has been
like, and what its history and achievements have been about. (32)
What I draw from Nunley s and Royster’s work is that proposals that would sweep
across such boundaries and attempt to sweep them away can too easily engage in a
kind of cultural violence that erases what does not easily fit into dominant discourses
and values. As I argue in Concept 2 that follows, if we do not explicitly work to value
cultural experiences and rhetorical practices such as those in AAHH, then, as Nunley
argues, we risk losing valuable parts of our collective heritage.
I have a queer suspicion, though, of this talk about lifeworlds, home discourses,
and home training because it occurs to me that almost no one of my generation was
born into an openly queer lifeworld. I am wary of any hint that we should valorize
the lifeworlds into which we are born because I had to desconstruct the white,
working-class, evangelical Christian lifeworld into which I was born to construct a
queer understanding of my own identity. In this regard, I take seriously Royster’s call
for real reciprocity in discourse that crosses the boundaries that continue to define
us, and I applaud her warning against the dangers of myopia: “We need to get over
our tendencies to be too possessive and to resist locking ourselves into the tunnels of
our own vision and direct experience” (33). What I seek to add here are two things:
The first is an explicit recognition that such tunnel vision can occur not just across
lifeworlds but also within them. Even those of us who respond to clumsy intrusions
into a lifeworld by those who inhabit dominant lifeworlds must recognize that the very
lifeworlds we seek to protect and preserve may need to be resisted, even fractured,
because few lifeworlds are equally welcoming to all who inhabit them. In Nunley’s
terms, despite its often marginalized status, the rhetoric of hush harbors cannot be
seen as sacrosanct, but must be held responsible for the ways that it represents and
interacts with those who have experienced other versions of marginalization.
My second point is that some of the lifeworlds necessary for resisting systemic
oppression and ongoing marginalization in our society must be actively constructed
through resistance not only of dominant bourgeois culture but, at times, of lifeworlds
that are themselves resisting the domination of bourgeois culture. In short, having
experienced one form of systemic oppression does not automatically inoculate one
against participating in systemic oppression along another axis of difference, or, as
I noted earlier, from doing so even within an axis of difference.
Concept 2: Cross-boundary discourse must be reconceived as more than speaking from one
unitary home place to another.
Here I want to affirm Royster’s point that many of us need to follow Audre Lorde’s
lead and speak from positions that dominant culture would rather remain silent, be¬
cause, as Royster says, “[Djespite whatever frustration and vulnerability I might feel,
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despite my fear that no one is listening to me or is curious enough to try to understand

my voice, it is still better to speak” (36). Further, as Victor Villanueva reminds us,
race continues to matter; pretending that we have achieved a color-blind society
is treacherous as the ever-morphing tropes of racism become increasinglyvsubtle.
I also want to amend Royster’s point in two ways. First, as I have already argued,
we must understand that these home places are not unitary places free from participa¬
tion in forms of systemic marginization of others, nor are all such home places neces¬
sarily originary, inherited automatically from one’s early environment. Indeed, queer
people often have to seek out new home places and create second families because
openly claiming a queer identity often disrupts the presumed heteronormativity of a
variety of relationships. Second, the need for respect and for educating oneself about
the lived experiences of others is multiple. Royster, among others, has done our field
a great service by calling out the arrogance of the dominant in presuming that it is
normative and that it is the position from which all other lived experiences should
be understood and valued. However, we must all press beyond this basic dominant-
marginalized binary, and those of us who have experienced systemic marginalization
bear the same responsibility to understand the lived experiences of others who have
been othered as we demand of those who have othered us.
Nunley suggests one of the critical difficulties in taking up such a task: that the
dominant perspective can too easily hollow out rhetorical practices and discursive
traditions based in traditions that are seen as outside the mainstream. He says, “As
with queer, womanist, and other so-called ethnic or cultural rhetorics that are often
alluded to but rarely taken into account as theoretically substantive outside the
concerns with identity and cultural AAHHR is rendered almost irrelevant to the
production and manufacture of knowledge” (4). Nunley is specific that such an effect
occurs within our own field, challenging the tethering of rhetorical nomenclature
to neo-Aristotelian traditions to the exclusion of concepts and practices from other
traditions: “African American improvisation remains tethered to African American
culture with little or no migration into the general rhetorical nomenclature” (4).
My point here is that Nunley helps us to understand the need for substantive en¬
gagement with rhetorical traditions that have been seen as outside the mainstream,
and Royster warns us about the difficulties of engaging with those traditions. Real
differences exist, and our collective understandings of rhetorical theory and practice
suffer from not engaging in those differences. However, such engagement requires
dealing with lifeworlds or rationalities that are not easily accessible to those who do
not live within them, and we must be careful in such engagement not to simply ap¬
propriate what we do not fully understand. Yet, as Butler argues, we are responsible
for what lies beyond our own experiences, our own lifeworlds.
At this point, I can picture the good-hearted people of our field throwing up
their hands and exclaiming, “We’ve already done so much, how can we be expected
to do more? And we’re still so new, still so tenuous within the academy; how can we
give up the cache of the 2,500-year Western rhetorical tradition?” I can also picture
those who have fought so hard in our field to get a marginalized perspective onto the
agenda wanting respite from the struggle. Indeed, I’ve sat in those CCCC ballrooms
and listened to panels rightly celebrating all that has been achieved in regard to race
and gender in our field, and I have felt unwelcome and uneasy in those ballrooms—too
often hearing nothing that suggests those on the dais are pressing beyond their own
perspectives or stopping to consider that they also need to learn more about other
marginalized positions. It seems particularly unfair that those who have worked so
hard to get a voice should now be asked to do more, particularly when so many who
inhabit positions of privilege have not yet done so, but this is the road before us.
Concept 3: Engaging in responsible cross-boundary discourse requires reciprocal dialogue

in our personal, professional, and pedagogical discourse.
One of the most concrete things we can do in rhetorical studies to move toward
curriculum and pedagogy that engages in responsible cross-boundary discourse is
to explicitly accept that the basic activity is no longer informing, persuading, or
entertaining, but rather, as Royster argues, engaging in reciprocal dialogue (33).
What does this mean, and how do we do this? Royster provides a hint about how
to proceed on this front when she writes of feeling reduced by those occupying
positions of racial privilege to one voice, her supposedly “authentic voice” based in
what is perceived as African American rhetorical traditions (36). This is, of course,
a version of what Nunley describes as the tethering of so-called ethnic or cultural
rhetorics to issues of culture or identity rather than seeing them and the people
who use them as contributing to the larger body of what counts as rhetoric theory
and practice that is relevant to society more broadly. Yet how do we engage in such
discussions given that we can never completely know the other? How do we avoid
the kind of hollowing out and commodification that Nunley warns against? And how
do we build curricula and create pedagogies that train others to engage in the tricky
business of cross-boundary discourse?
As I have already suggested, each of us must engage in discourse knowing that
multiple aspects of identity are nearly always in play in rhetorical exchanges, and
recognizing the limits of our own understanding. However, such individual work,
though necessary for progress, is not the end of our responsibility. Here I turn briefly
to the work of indigenous scholars who have most directly challenged the presump¬
tion that rhetorical theory and practices should begin with the roots of the Western
tradition in ancient Greek culture. For example, Powell has argued:
I believe that scholarship in America can never be staked forth on neutral ground. I
believe that even as the marginalized and radical “anti-disciplinary” and/or “cross-
disciplinary” discipline, rhetoric takes for granted its originary relationship to Greece
College English
and Europe—its fundamental relationship to imperialism—and gives little critical

thought at all to the geographical space in which it now exists. (“Blood’ 11)
Powell and others raise the critical question of how we unpack such imperialism;
how can those of us who are, at least to some extent, born into lifeworlck that do
not immediately problematize these imperialist traditions substantively contribute
to changing this presumed originary relationship? Scott Lyons suggests one useful
starting place when he asks, “What do Indians want from writings” and answers it,
among other ways, with the concept of rhetorical sovereignty, which he defines as “the
inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs
and desire in this pursuit, to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and lan¬
guages of public discourse” (449-50). At first the concept of rhetorical sovereignty
seems contrary to the notion that we are all responsible for the consequences of our
interactions with those whose lifeworlds differ from our own. But as I have argued
in this piece, we must begin thinking about such interactions by acknowledging that
differences still exist and still have negative effects for many in our society. Obvi¬
ously, such sovereignty could never be absolute, but we simply must do better than
saying, After you master what we have historically found valuable, then you may add
some multicultural spice.
If we hope to successfully engage in reciprocal discourse in our curricula and
pedagogy, then we must imagine different goals and different means of achieving
those goals. Further, we must recognize that doing so will mean that we will all, to
some extent, be responsible for engaging in discourse that interacts with perspectives
and lived experiences that are opaque to us, that, no matter how hard we work, can
never be fully accessible to us. Rather than see this conundrum as the end of any
possible definition of responsible discourse, I see it as the beginning place not only
for responsible dialogue, but also for responsible curricula and pedagogy.
In practice, then, engaging in reciprocal discourse means that we should speak
for or from things beyond our own lived experience only with great care, and then
only with respect for those who know more and only after real attempts to educate
ourselves. I have felt the need to observe this principle in discussions I have had with
colleagues about building curriculum for an undergraduate major in writing studies.
I want to propose a course in indigenous rhetorics, yet I know that I haven’t learned
enough to teach such a course. Flere I feel caught between the need to respect those
who know more than I do—those whose personal lives and professional efforts give
them deep and nuanced understandings of rhetorical practices that still, at times,
puzzle me—and the need to do my part, to not accept my lack of knowledge and
experience as a reason to do nothing, to fall back on the Western rhetorical tradi¬
tions in which I was trained, in which I feel comfortable.
In addition to engaging with care with perspectives that fall outside our lived
experience, a second important concept for engaging in reciprocal discourse is under¬
standing that mastery should no longer be the presumed goal. Rather than presume
that we have reached or can ever reach complete understanding of responsible dis¬
course, we need to recognize that we are all on different journeys to understanding.
Although we can never fully understand another’s unique journey, it may be useful
to keep in mind that there are three basic types of trajectories for such journeys. One
trajectory is from positions of relative privilege toward acknowledging and under¬
standing the unearned advantages that such privileges provide. These journeys will
likely require a newfound humility and a concerted effort to understand the other
in substantive ways. Another trajectory is from positions of systematic marginaliza¬
tion and overt discrimination toward voices that decide how they will address those
who have marginalized and discriminated against them. Here a primary issue is
likely to be to what extent one chooses to assimilate to dominant cultural values and
discursive practices, and what costs and benefits accrue to those choices. A third
trajectory is from the problematic protection of closets toward identities that claim
aspects of self that society has sought to make invisible. These kinds of journeys will
likely entail negotiating changes in relationships when what was previously hidden
or unacknowledged is brought to light.
No matter our own trajectory, we need to understand all three as best we can
because we all have students, colleagues, friends, and family who move along these
trajectories. Also, we need to be prepared to risk sharing our own unwelcome stories
as well as considering what we have to learn from others’ stories. As Butler sug¬
gests, none of us will ever arrive at a perfect state of enlightenment, but we owe it
to ourselves and to others to explore and expand the limits of our own perspectives
and experiences.
Notes
1. Although I would prefer a more dialogic approach in using this story, allowing my former student
the opportunity to respond to my reading of the situation, I have to respect his decision not to engage
further with me about this issue.
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One Train Can Hide Another: Critical
Materialism for Public Composition
Tony Scott and Nancy Welch
The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness ofwhat one really is, and is “know¬
ing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of
traces, without leaving an inventory. It is important therefore to make an inventory.
—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory

Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. . . .
—Kenneth Koch, “One Train May Hide Another” (lines 55-57)
#StopKony
hen we first proposed this essay, a thirty-minute video promoting US military

intervention against a Ugandan warlord dominated newsfeeds and headlines.
In less than a week, some 100 million viewers had accessed Kony 2012, mak¬
ing it, in the estimation of the global video advocacy organization Witness,
“[tjhe most rapidly disseminated human rights video ever” (Gregory). The
video, by US-based charity Invisible Children, argues for the US military to assist the
Ugandan army in capturing Joseph Kony. Although Kony is now a peripheral figure
in northern Ugandan politics, Kony 2012 spotlights his atrocities in Uganda’s civil war
a decade earlier, and argues for his arrest lest he resurrect himself. Bookending this
Tony Scott is associate professor of writing and rhetoric and director of undergraduate studies at
Syracuse University. With Marc Bousquet and Leo Parascandola, he edited Tenured Bosses and Disposable
Teachers: Literacy Work in the Managed University (Southern Illinois UP, 2003), and he is the author of
Dangerous Writing: Understanding the Political Economy of Composition (Utah State UP, 2009). Nancy
Welch is professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is author of Getting Restless: Rethinking
Revision in Writing Instruction (Heinemann, 1997), The Road from Prosperity: Stories (Southern Methodist
UP, 2005), and Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World (Heinemann, 2008).

One Train Can Hide Another 563
argument is the further claim that thanks to social media, ordinary people—young
people in particular now wield policy-influencing power: the power to make Kony
famous, a household name (Invisible Children) and prod US lawmakers into action.
In March 2012, Facebook shares and Twitter feeds did indeed make Kony
famous. As dozens of A-list celebrities tweeted their support for the Stop Kony
campaign and students urged their teachers to incorporate the video into their lesson
plans, New I ork Times pundit Nicholas Kristof praised the filmmakers for “galvaniz-
ing young Americans to look up from their iPhones and seek to make a difference
for villagers in central Africa.”1 Such reception appeared testament to Kony 2012 s
claim that “Nothing is more powerful than an idea [.. .] whose time has come
[...] whose time is now’ (Invisible Children). The video also drew blame as scholars
took issue with its “white man’s burden” tropes and policy advocates pointed out
its gross factual distortions.2 Prominent among critics were a Nova Scotian college
student and a Ugandan-born teen whose Tumblr and YouTube rejoinders garnered
their own audience of millions (Oyston; Canadian Press; Kony 2012 Video Is Mislead¬
ing). Yet such criticism seemed to reinforce Kony 2012s secondary claim: a networked
world, where “the world can see each other,” fosters transparency and participation.
A “global networked public that can now talk back,” proclaimed new media scholar
Zeynep Tufekci, had turned Kony's “simplistic call” into a “multilayered discussion”
(“Value”; see also Tufekci, “#Kony 2012”).
With its emphasis on social media users who require no official sponsors to “[g]o
out and rock it” (Invisible Children), Kony 2012 does indeed appear to illustrate Kath¬
leen Blake Yancey’s claim of a digital writing public that produces “in an economy
driven by use value” and has “learned [...] to think together, to organize, and to act
[...] largely without our instruction” (301; original emphasis). When Yancey delivered
this 2004 CCCC chair’s address, college writing instruction appeared in danger of
becoming as anachronistic as the study of penmanship. Fast-forward a decade and
(a quick Google search of “Kony” and “rhetoric” shows) we find students blogging
about the video through Aristotle’s appeals, Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, and
Michael McGee’s ideographs—the relevance of rhetorical education reclaimed
through public-writing pedagogy.
Un Train Peut en Cacher un Autre
But as Kenneth Koch counsels in his classic poem “One Train May Hide Another,”
“When you come to something, stop to let it pass / So you can see what else is there”
(lines 53-54). In this essay we start with the Kony phenomenon not for its affirma¬
tion of composition’s digital and civic-engagement pedagogies, but to consider, on
a parallel and hidden track, its potential challenges, including these:
564 College English
• Although Kony was celebrated as an example of democracy in action, skeptics pointed

out the campaign’s tfrah-democratic aims—including propping up Uganda’s repressive
government—and obscured private interests—including not only such dubious funders
as the religious-right Discover Institute but also the escalating US corporate grab for
central Africa’s resource wealth (Curtis and McCarthy; Dixon; Keating; Rollins).
• Counter to the video’s depiction of central Africa as suffering from international neglect,
news outlets increasingly report the dramatic widening of the US military footprint in
Africa since 2008 (Ryan; Whitlock). Although terrorism and peacekeeping provide the
warrants for this buildup, policy analysts point to rivalry between China and the United
States over the region’s resources, including oil and (essential for cell phone and other
batteries) coltan (Schomerus, Allen, and Vlassenroot, “Obama”).
• Even as Invisible Children presents itself as steered by masses of young people moved
by a powerful social justice idea, the charity operates in an economy of exchange values,
from the well-heeled salaries and travel budgets of its principals to the commodification
of activism through sales of Stop Kony action kits (Dixon; Keating).
Through such an inventory, we move from celebrating Kony 2012’s apparently sui
generis virality to understanding it as part of a historical process among contending
powers. To support such understanding, the African Studies Association speedily as¬
sembled a comprehensive guide to African perspectives on Uganda’s civil war (Brown,
Metzler, Root, and Vinck). New media scholars and activists likewise expressed hope
that the video could spark more substantive engagement. The campaign, Tufekci
observed, could prove a “gateway moment” for young activists who “will keep look¬
ing, listening, and learning” (“#Kony2012”). Despite the video’s oversimplifications,
argued Sam Gregory ofWitness, at least “it’s enabling us now to have a conversation
on some of the bigger questions.”
Scant evidence exists, however, that inquiry into the “bigger questions” ever
took place. Instead, in public dissemination of the campaign, priority was given
to the new technological form of the video’s launch, the speed and mass reach of its
reception, and the idea that the metaphor of global discussion was being made real.
When an African policy analyst on PBS NewsHour raised the issue of the disastrous
2008 US military operation in Uganda that resulted in the deaths of 1,000 civilians,
the reporter turned to the segment’s second guest, a public relations digital strate¬
gist, for a comment. “I think what’s interesting,” she responded, “is that we’re seeing
that this criticism is leading to more interest in the video and in the organization”
(‘“Kony 2012’”). With this response, the strategist shifted attention from substance
to style. Similarly, Gregory’s blog entry for “Witness: Video for Change” blog entry
made only oblique reference to criticisms of Invisible Children’s “advocacy choices,”
and instead celebrated its successful “big-picture storytelling” and “audience-driven
approach” (Kony 2012). In these and other instances, the idea of public conversation
becomes the conversation. Rather than inquire into die video’s claims, most journalists,
scholars, and policy advocates marveled over how the video went viral. Rather than
debate the consequences of military escalation in central Africa, they wrestled over
the efficacy of clicktivism. The Kony phenomenon thus offers a textbook example
not only of how technological innovation “introduces into human affairs” a McLu-
hanesque enthrallment with the “change of scale or pace or pattern” (McLuhan 8),
but also of how that enthrallment effectively discourages critical engagement with
human affairs.
Of course, in the case of Kony 2012, the derailment of critical engagement might
seem of little consequence. After all, if the video’s purpose was to mobilize many
thousands of young people to set out on a designated date and “cover the night” with
Stop Kony stickers, this experiment in converting digital engagement to embodied
action flopped, easily dismissed as “a brief diversion, just a bit of internet chatter”
(Schomerus, Allen, and Vlssenroot, “KONY 2012”). Yet if one considers the larger
aim of creating a media event to convince Congress to step up US military aid to
the Ugandan army, this campaign was no bust. Scores of US senators responded to
the Kony clamor with their own YouTube video pledging an increase in US military
efforts to bring the warlord to justice and “promote American values” in the region
(Coons). Senators John Kerry and Patrick Leahy, chairs of the foreign relations and
judiciary committees, both put US efforts to capture Kony at the center of spring
2012 campus speeches (Kerry; Lindholm). Consider further that Congress had already
answered the video’s ostensible call to action—with President George Bush’s 2007
creation of the new US military command AFRICOM and with President Obama’s
2011 deployment of additional Green Berets to Uganda, bringing total forces on
the continent, not including private military contractors, to 3,000 at the time of the
video’s release (Escobar; Gettleman). Just this partial inventory counters the film’s
claim that the region is not on American policymakers’ “radar screen” (Invisible
Children). It also brings into view a new understanding of Kony 2012’% rhetorical
mission: to secure audience allegiance for policy already being pursued. Viewed from
this wider angle, Kony 2012 did not fail to foster in-the-streets activism because, all
along, more passive acceptance is what it sought.
For such a mass rhetorical phenomenon, we think an alternative metaphor to
“global conversation”is required: One train can hide another. This is the warning that
appears at railroad crossings throughout France; it is the warning Kenneth Koch
observed at a Kenyan railway crossing, prompting the meditations of his celebrated
poem. Just as one train can hide another, a text such as Kony 2012 obscures the social
relations advanced by its program. Just as one train can hide another, early conclu¬
sions that this video failed to galvanize a public into action mask its contribution to
a larger project of marshaling public acceptance of a military campaign already un¬
derway. Just as one train can hide another, when our conceptions of public rhetorical
practice prioritize discursive features and digitized form over—and to the exclusion
of—historical context and human consequences, we miss how texts may mobilize
meaning not to upend but to reinforce relations of power.
566 College English
Our concern in writing this essay is that no matter the field’s recent emphases
in composition and new media scholarship on embodied, affective, and unbounded
composing practices within diverse rhetorical ecologies, our pedagogies remain textu-
ally fixated and thus may miss both the extratextual interests that deploy avtext such
as Kony 2012 and the bodily impacts felt well beyond. Needed is the orientation of
historical or critical materialist communications which, Lee Artz explains, aims to
concretize practices and relations. Critical materialism allows one to acknowledge
that yes, “[c]lass power is diffuse” (the forces that shape and benefit from the Invis¬
ible Children campaign are not immediately visible) without losing sight of the fact
that the wielders of class power do have “names and addresses” (Artz 37). Of such
a text as Kony, this orientation would urge readers to look into those names and ad¬
dresses—to ask, “What is the relationship between this communication or cultural
practice and the rest of the social order?” and to consider that although this viral
video “has no fixed meaning,” it does have “actual material consequence” (Artz 37).
Near this essay’s end, we will follow the lead of communications scholars such
as Lee Artz and Dana Cloud, as well as political economist David McNally, and
turn toward a critical materialist orientation that stays mindful of how one train
hides another. A critical materialist pedagogy is one that, operating on the tracks of
both formal and sociohistorical analysis, aims to reconnect discursive and digitized
arguments to the extradiscursive interests they serve. More, by urging students and
teachers of public rhetoric to “think about language through the body” (McNally 10;
original emphasis), such a pedagogy can also make manifest the creative activity—
the bodies of genuine ffom-below resistance and liberatory struggle—that texts in
service to ruling interests would also hide from view. But before we can consider
what thinking about language through the body could mean for the public work of
composition, we need to take up a prior question: How in composition studies did
the body get left behind?
Banishing the Body
Our view that composition’s socially networked, publicly engaged pedagogies are
poised to become less, not more, attentive to human histories, relations, and experi¬
ence may seem surprising given how much attention compositionists have recently
paid to the materiality of digital production and circulation. Welcome trends include
the embrace of the writer as designer or producer, an important correction of both
the process era’s conception of the autonomous writer and the postprocess correction
that veered toward jettisoning attention to writing students and classrooms altogether.
But although restored attention to composing would seem likely to be accompanied
by restored attention to composing contexts and conditions, the tendency has been
in the opposite direction.
In fact, through its own version of “Nothing is more powerful than an idea,”
composition s historic tendency has long been toward the dematerializing belief that
knowledge, power, and agency are matters of discourse. From Quintilian’s “good man
speaking well to Jacques Lacan s world of things composed by a world of words,
composition s theoretical traditions favor the world as one's discourses would have it
over investigation into the world, including into extradiscursive realities, as it is. Take
civic rhetoric pedagogies that marry Aristotelian precepts to the public sphere ideals
of Jurgen Habermas. The Habermasian public sphere, even as it suggests eventful
engagement with a peopled world, turns away from an existing society of unequal
relations, hidden interests, and, at times, open class struggle. Rather than inventory
existing relations, observes McNally, Habermas “invest[s] emancipatory possibili¬
ties in [communication’s] formal properties” in a “noncoercive public sphere where
the best argument can prevail” (109; see also Lecercle 45-46). It is in this open and
democratic public sphere that Tufekci imagines teenaged social media users clicking
among contending positions on Ugandan problems and solutions. Presupposing a
transparent and noncoercive rhetorical situation, composition students likewise assess
the audience appeal and argumentative effectiveness of Kony 2012 as if no contextual
investigation is needed. In these classrooms, new critical just-the-text close readings
are making a comeback, repackaged as civic engagement.
The speaking subjects of postmodern theories are likewise idealized agents—
a re-presentation, argues McNally, of the familiar bourgeois construction of the
“sanitized, heroic male body” (5)—who have escaped the unwieldy, biologically and
historically marked body. Even as postmodernism abounds with desiring, perform¬
ing, policed, or technologized bodies, its “new idealism” represses regard for the
physical body that labors within the global economy: the body that “strains with the
sweat of coffee-picking,” “turns stiff from the routines of the assembly line,” “grows
chaffed and swollen with the labor of scrubbing and cleaning,” and “breaks down from
repetitive motion at the keyboard” (McNally 2). Favored instead is the “body as text
[...] free to invent itself’ as a “plaything of the imagination” (McNally 2; emphasis
added). The body is rendered nonhistorical, noncorporeal, independent of economic
structures that fatigue, stoop, scar, and kill. Being is presented as discursive—and if
Being is discursive, so too is agency, the act of discursive will.
Given composition’s empirical traditions and pragmatic focus on individual
writers, Raul Sanchez observes, this postmodern conception of authors as dematerial-
ized discursive subjects has actually remained elusive. Coming to the rescue, however,
enabling composition to more fully join literary and cultural studies in banishing
the body, are global networked communication technologies, which Sanchez credits
for creating a new “writing-subject.” In a kind of digital transubstantiation in which
the body is made text by new information technologies, Sanchez locates the writing
subject of contemporary composition “squarely within, rather than essentially apart
568 College English
from, textuality,” its rhetorical agency characterized by a “thoroughgoing textual-

ity.” What makes this networked identity “material,” then, available with something
“approaching transparency” (235) for empirical study, is its movement and mutation
through the technologies of digital textual production and the circuits of distribution
comprising the global information economy. Giving guidance for this hypertextual
empiricism is Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT). Although ANT promises
to reintroduce a complex materiality to composing, it does so by further isolating the
discursive field from extradiscursive social relations. In place of attention to social
relations, object-oriented rhetorics such as ANT instead invest the material of digital
production—in Latour, “nonhuman actors”—with independent agentive powers.
Mass rhetorical phenomena such as Kony 2012 certainly do appear to exercise an
agency of their own; they fuel a technological fetishism wherein the means and memes
of digital communication are endowed with a “phantom objectivity” (Marx 128) and
an “autonomy” that seems “rational and all-embracing” (Lukacs 83). But although
the Marxist understanding of the fetish serves as reminder to always look for what
else is there—for extradiscursive effects such as more military boots on the ground
in central Africa—the task of the Latourian critic is not to reattach the powers and
value of a smartphone or laptop to the human labor expended in its making, nor to
look into an ostensibly grassroots movement’s shadowy funders. Instead, ANT further
abstracts this stuff of global communication from global social relations. Investing the
products, means, and circulatory routes of digital production with a fully fetishized
autonomy, ANT goes beyond endowing objects with a phantom objectivity to as¬
signing them an independent subjectivity.3 Nonhuman and object-oriented rhetorics
such as ANT go well beyond Lev Vygotsky’s historical materialist view of humanity
as symbolic tool-making beings whose consciousness is also changed by the use of
these tools. Such contemporary rhetorics sever the tools from human agents and
turn them into commodity and technological fetishes.
Nonetheless, these rhetorics have commonsense appeal in the twenty-first-
century political economy. Just as Kony 2012 asserts its own narrative truth, seemingly
independent of the historic Joseph Kony and US designs, so too does New York
City’s complex power grid appear to turn on the lights all of its own accord while
just-in-time formulas move goods from warehouses to the shelves of Walmart. At
moments of disruption, one realizes the fiction at play: when Hurricane Sandy takes
out the lights of Manhattan, it is a human body that must slide into a manhole in
search of the saltwater-corroded circuit breaker; when thirty-six warehouse work¬
ers in a tiny Illinois town refuse to load trucks bound for Walmart, they bring into
view the necessity of human bodies for the production and movement of goods and
services. Global capitalism depends on the story that human bodies are ancillary to
and disposable within a system that can largely function without them. As a theory
of neoliberal political economy, Latour’s ANT arises from and helps sustain such a
story, promoting the same enthrallment with technological means, processes, and
styles that abstracted Kony 2012 from its contentious context and emptied it of hu¬
man content.
A Land without a People
The disappearing of human agents accompanying the neoliberal global economic

order has not been carried out via a compelling fiction alone. Rather, the powerful
fictions of self-propelling capital flows and border-crossing knowledge workers be¬
long to wider efforts to reorganize economic relations, manage laboring bodies, and
control political unrest. Such efforts are extradiscursive as well as discursive, heavily
involved in the remaking of physical as well as virtual space in what social geographer
David Harvey terms the “geographically articulated patterning of global capitalist
activities and relations” (Rebel Cities 101). Especially given global capitalism’s vast
disparities in wealth distribution not only between center and periphery countries
but within countries as well, urban engineering works to ensure that cosmopolitan
elites live carefully cordoned off from a city’s poor; in cities like Mumbai, Cairo,
Jakarta, and Sao Paolo, high-tech international businesses thrive in close proximity
to some of the world’s largest slums (see Davis 95-120).
In studying the contemporary geography of Managua, Dennis Rogers borrows
Anthony Giddens’s term disembededness to describe how urban infrastructure shields
elites from restive populations. Under the banner of progress and modernization,
Managua is rapidly reconstructing its infrastructure to include, for instance, round¬
abouts that are hostile to walking and enable vehicles to pass through intersections
without stopping, whisking them along in “well-maintained, well-lit, and fast moving
roads” from one “safe” area to another (120). Rogers describes how these fortified
networks help to establish separate Managuas that are adjacent but not intercon¬
nected, and this separation has profound consequences on the politics and social
fabric of the city. The new reconfigurations “erode notions of‘public space.’ Those
on the ‘inside’ feel little responsibility towards those on the ‘outside,’ and no longer
relate to notions of cohabitation and interaction but, rather, to an ideal of separ¬
ateness from those perceived as different” (114). Similarly, in a study of economic
segregation through gated communities in Cape Town, Charlotte Lemanski argues
that such communities “replace spatial apartheid with social apartheid as different
groups may live in spatial proximity but continue to operate in separate social and
functional spheres” (416).
The frequency with which the phrase “global information economy” appears in
composition scholarship suggests how much the field understands itself to be bound
up in global capitalism’s ideological promises, material patterns, and reconfigurations
of public space: Like the SUVs Rogers observes racing through Managua, Sanchez’s
570 College English
textualized “subjects” and “agents” of globalized networked technologies also “tra¬

verse large physical spaces in almost no time” (235). Awaiting acknowledgment,
however, is another correspondence—that between the protected enclaves and vast
inequalities this global economy has produced and the cordoned public imagination
and professional apartheid of composition studies. Claims about multiliterate discur¬
sive power elide the precarious terms of employment awaiting most of our students,
graduate and undergraduate alike. Depictions of a composition professional’s digital
mobility studiously ignore—or suggest a cosmopolitan class disembedded from—the
low-wage migrant labor through which undergraduate composition continues, ever
more deeply, to be delivered. The double body-banishing whammy of linguistic
idealism and technological fetishism further insulates writing research from contact
with the potentially mercurial body, locating theory in the sanitized corporate. Even
as public and digital rhetorical theories emphasize global connectivity and the cre¬
ation of “convergence cultures” (see Jenkins) that purport to be progressive portals
to the world, these theories take shape in corridors cleansed of globalization’s most
troubling material effects and evidence of struggle by its discontents. The result is a
pedagogy that “thingifies” (as Martin Luther King Jr. once put it) a peopled world
and can wind up marshaling composition’s support for unjust social orders.
In “Composition 2.0,” for instance, Steven Fraiberg depicts urbane digital
designers in a Tel Aviv that appears devoid of any struggle save that the “linguistic
borders in Israeli society” are “being infiltrated by English” (108). The enigmatic
graffitied message “know hope” (which Fraiberg observes in his opening account
of commuting to the high-tech company “sponsoring” his ethnography) and an
oblique mention of “the ambiguity and uncertainty of the political situation” (100)
are the only other indicators of an extralinguistic question—whether this country
will accommodate the region’s more than 5 million dispossessed and movement-
restricted Palestinians—that is quickly abandoned. Fraiberg’s depopulating point-
of-entry narrative clears the stage for celebrating linguistic multiplicity, multimodal
creativity, and textual freedom of movement: the “transcultural” and “global flows”
of discourse “crossing” geographic boundaries that he suggests have been made
anachronistic and moot by twenty-first-century literacy practices (103-4). To be
sure, “Composition 2.0” concludes with a compelling vision of a linguistically just
world—wherein teachers embrace an expansive conception of composing and writers
create convergence cultures, reworking global forces through local knowledge and
needs (117-18). Yet this linguistically just world is a discursive world from which
contending histories, claims, and an entire people have been rhetorically excised.
The essay’s central question—how the field of composition can develop “a perspec¬
tive capable of understanding the teaching of English writing within the context of
other languages and globalization” (101)—never bumps up against the urgent, but
unasked question of its setting: how the Israeli state as constituted can accommodate
the Palestinian people.
The failure of these two questions to converge, Fraiberg suggests, is owed to

Israel’s “tightly knit society that is based on close networks of people” (111). But also
sheltering Tel Aviv is a complex infrastructure—including some 540 roadblocks and
checkpoints (“West BankMovement” 4)—keeping a restive population mostly out of
sight. At one moment Fraiberg comes close to acknowledging this infrastructure: the
name of the software security company Check Point, he notes, “indexes the check¬
points set up all along Israel’s borders” (108). With that acknowledgment comes the
possibility of taking up the substantial, potentially instructive contradiction between
the idea of transcultural flows on which this essay’s vision depends and the actuality of
heavily fortified and policed national boundaries. There is the possibility of check¬
ing the claim of linguistically dexterous border crossers against the reality of Israel’s
checkpoints. The possibility for connecting language and theory to actual bodies
and lived practice, however, is not realized, as abstract idealism reasserts itself in the
next sentence: “The linguistic borders in Israeli society are also being infiltrated by
English” (108).4 Here, then, is an ecology of writing that reifies the narrowed world
of network-facilitated relations and the information economy as the world itself.
Yet such discursively constructed realities also contain the irrepressible traces of
bodies and relations that fetishizing discourses deny. They hold the hints of another
train on a hidden track, the possibility that, as Koch writes, “Jerusalem may hide
another Jerusalem” (line 52). For example, in addition to suggesting that checkpoints
are more than a linguistic marker, Fraiberg also points out that the “technorati” of
his study draw on the iconography of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commando
unit to represent themselves as “high-tech warriors” on the global economy’s front
lines. Although he claims that “the instruments of military power have been replaced
with the pencil, megaphone, and wrench,” an illustration included from “Networld’s”
website shows one tiny Lego-like soldier clutching a lethal-looking dagger between
her or his teeth (108). It is a small but telling disturbance in what otherwise appears
as a story of technological prowess replacing military might.
Similarly, an incongruous moment near the beginning of Kony 2012 disturbs
its sanitized version of US military power. While introducing us to his young son,
narrator Jason Russell tells us that “just like his dad,” Gavin enjoys everyday child¬
hood activities. In one shot, we see Gavin jumping on a trampoline; in another, he
makes snow angels. Then as Russell adds, “And just like his dad, he likes being in the
movies,” young Gavin runs from a sturdy-looking outdoor playhouse that is twice
his height. As Gavin shrieks, “Look out! Run! It’s a bomb!” the house, through his
father’s movie-making magic, is reduced by an incoming missile to burning rubble.
Next, in what appears to be a grocery store, we witness Gavin training his smartphone
on the back of a woman and, with a “Daddy, watch this!” giggle, appearing to blow
her up (Invisible Children). To appropriate a term from “Composition 2.0,” Gavin’s
play “indexes” how Western civilians remotely experience the violence of war—tele¬
scoped through digital feeds from distant aerial perches: a lasei finds the target, a
572 College English
sudden flash, and the “bad guys” are eliminated, seemingly without carnage or loss
of actual life. About these two brief moments—the disconcerting glimpse into the
high-tech militarized imagination of the American child; the dramatization of war
as gleefully destructive—Russell offers no explanation. Instead, with the transitional
phrase, “But he was born into a pretty complicated world,” the video turns to the
idea of suffering Ugandan children who, not withstanding the visual meaning of the
previous two scenes, can be saved by a benevolent exercise of US force.
To Have Waited at Least a Moment to

See What Was Already There
Gavin’s digitally assisted pyrotechnics and Fraiberg’s high-tech warriors are the
traces of historical processes and social relations. As such, they mark starting points
for undertaking a needed inventory that has rematerialization as its aim: the reat¬
tachment of discursive texts and digitized narratives to human agents, contexts, and
consequences, testing fetishized appearances against lived realities.5 Testing fetishized
appearances against lived realities was, of course, the project of Karl Marx, who begins
Capital with the appearances that surround the commodity, whether “the table, the
house, the piece of yarn, or any useful thing” (128). Through Capita Fs first volume,
Marx pursues a double strategy:
• He follows the commodity as, circulating in the marketplace, it acquires a “phantom-like

objectivity.” Tracing how the commodity’s “sensuous characteristics are extinguished”
as the useful thing becomes an exchange value, interchangeable with other values on the
market, he elucidates capitalism’s transformation of specific human labor into general
exchangeable quantities of value (128; see also McNally 52-53). As commodities are
alienated from the labor that created them, the relations of production and coopera¬
tion, of appropriation and exploitation, vanish from view; so it happens that fetishized
products, abstracted from the concrete conditions of their making and the specific terms
of their use, circulate seemingly by their own accord.
• Not satisfied only with naming this world of appearances, Marx also pursues the defe-
tishizing, rematerializing strategy of tracing the commodity back to production’s “hidden
abode” (279). There, one can glimpse how capitalism is not a relation between things
governed by unassailable laws but instead a relation between people, thus subject to
social mediation and struggle.
Significantly—and contra the caricature in composition scholarship of the critical

pedagogue who whisks away the veil of appearances for astounded and instantly
enlightened students (for example, Lynch 459, 469)—Marx did not take commodity
fetishism and, above all, the money fetish, as mere apparitions. “Fetishes,” McNally
points out, “are real for Marx [. . .] because human agents really are dominated by
the abstracted forms assumed by their social relations” (69). Instead, by toiling to
connect the “spirits, specters, and fetishes” to “practices of living bodies,” Marx both
dispels myths of self-birth”—a myth ANT reinforces by accepting the appearance

of nonhuman agents—and attends to those living bodies laboring to change their
societies (McNally 75).
A century and a half later, suggests McNally, Marx’s double or dialectical strat¬
egy is not less but more relevant. Critical materialism, McNally explains, enables an
investigation into the appearance that “speculative capital buzzes around the globe
[. . .] unhampered by the limits once set by nature, geography, transportation sys¬
tems, or rebellious laborers” (46). Central to critical materialism is defetishization:
“forcing the disembodied abstractions of idealism into contact with what has been
marginalized, repressed, and debased” (10), one carried out especially by learning
to “think about language through the body” In a practical demonstration of how
thinking through the body rematerializes networks of labor disappeared by global
commodity flows, Harvey asks his introductory geography students to inventory the
origins of the breakfasts they ate that morning. By attempting a full inventory of
what was needed to create, transport, and prepare “[t]he bread, the sugar, the cof¬
fee, the milk; the cups, knives and forks, toasters and plastic plates—to say nothing
of the machinery and equipment needed to produce all these things,” students start
to glimpse all that “link[s] them to millions of people laboring away all around the world,”
{Companion 40; emphasis added). The lesson here isn’t about consumption. After
all, a student concluding that she should somehow pursue a socially just breakfast
cereal choice would still be bound up in the neoliberal ideology of power through
individual consumer choice making; meanwhile all the human labor required to cre¬
ate, transport, and sell her new breakfast choice would slip back out of view. Instead,
Harvey’s breakfast inventory promotes understanding of human geography and
political economy along with mutual recognition among people otherwise unaware
of their ties to one another—a starting point for further investigation.
For a critical materialist method that enables defetishizing, rematerializing
investigation—whether of one’s breakfast, a text such as Kony 2012, or a setting like
“Composition 2.0”’s Tel Aviv start-up—we join Cloud in recommending mass media
sociologist John Thompson’s depth hermeneutics. Thompson’s tripartite approach,
developed from the work of Paul Ricoeur, does not deemphasize discursive power. Be¬
cause symbolic forms are “something more than contextualized social phenomena,
Thompson observes, any analysis should attend to how structural features organize,
express, and mobilize meaning (21, 284). For example, expressed and mobilized in
Kony 2012 when young Gavin “blows up” a woman in the grocery checkout is a
generalized contempt and disregard for bodies that are female, nonwhite, working
class, aged (McNally 12). For the practitioner of depth hermeneutics, it provides a
moment for examining the structures through which ruling ideas about disposable
bodies are mundanely inculcated. Similarly, close reading of Kony 2012 could yield
insights into what makes the idea of US military humanism so compelling or tease
574 College English
out the video’s many contradictions—for instance, notwithstanding its do-it-yourself

“go out and rock it” discourse, viewers are exhorted to purchase a prefab action kit.
At the same time, Thompson warns, formal analysis can fall prey to “internal-
ism,” becoming an “abstract exercise [. . .] oblivious to what is being expressed by
the symbolic forms whose structure it seeks to unveil” (22). Or, as Cloud explains,
when formal analysis is separated from the historical and social contexts in which
meanings matter, it can produce “neo-Aristotelian” and “text-centered readings”
more concerned with a text’s “effectiveness in reaching its target audience” than
with its veracity (“Materiality” 7). Hence, depth hermeneutics links formal analysis
with far-reaching social and historical investigation to reconstruct the “particular
circumstances” and the “relations of domination” in which a text is produced, de¬
ployed, or received (307). Assisting such an investigation into Kony 2012 could be
the guide prepared by the African Studies Association. The work of inventorying can
also travel beyond the region—finding, for instance, the unsettling echo of Gavin’s
glee in simulating the killing of a stranger in a US Marine general who told a public
audience, “It’s fun to shoot some people” (Hancock).
Finally, the method’s crucial third component, reinterpretation, works to counter
both the inertia of simply accepting a text “pre-interpreted” and also the common
fear that critical questioning of a public narrative or argument, especially one with
professed altruistic intent, will result in disillusionment and distrust of any mass
argument. As depth analysis opens up a social world’s doxa to “risky, conflict-laden
[...] dispute,” Thompson maintains, the “divergence between lay interpretation and
depth interpretation” creates a new “methodological space” and the possibility for
the “creative construction of possible meaning” (290, 22). Such space is what could
be created if, as an ethnographer, Fraiberg took the Israeli “ernic perspective (how
Israelis tell their own history)” and “traditional stories of Israeli history” (120, 108)
as partial and as naturalizing what has been a much more multifaceted and contested
(including by Israelis themselves) historical process. This is not to suggest that depth
hermeneutics disdains everyday understandings and meanings such as those in which
Fraiberg roots his study. On the contrary, Thompson writes, to stave off internalism
and idealism, interpretation should start with everyday life, with “an elucidation of
the ways in which symbolic forms are interpreted and understood by the individuals
who produce and receive them”—the “ethnographic moment [. . .] an indispens¬
able preliminary.” But to assess critically how a society’s story about itself has been
composed, to glimpse competing and excluded narratives, one must “also break with
interpretation of everyday life” (279).
Undeniably, more than a scholarly method is needed to disrupt imperial logic
and end an occupation. But although classroom instruction alone will not end the
new great games being played among rival powers around the globe, our pedagogies
can cultivate habits of response to the powerful ideological texts and ready-made
campaigns that, from STAND to Stop Kony to J Street U, hail students on today’s
college campuses. By learning to think about language through the body, compo¬
sition s public-writing classrooms can also learn to see and take inspiring lessons
from campaigns that really are do-it-yourself and student-led—for instance, the
movement of Quebec s college and university students that throughout spring and
summer 2012 joined social media networking to pots-and-pans-banging marches to
stave off a tuition hike, throw off a repressive anti-protest law, and bring down the
government that had pushed for both.
We need to end, however, with obstacles to enacting pedagogies that embrace
such public rhetorical work in full, embodied form. For starters, finding time to open
up that reinterpretive space is a materially challenging task given the urgency of social
and environmental conditions plus the speed, volume, and insistence of new media
texts vying for attention. A hyper-kairotic “Time is now” urgency is what the Kony
2012 filmmakers particularly exploited by declaring a fast-approaching “expiration
date” for the video even though much of the footage was already almost a decade old.
An urgent “We have a moment [...] This moment right now” insistence also repeats
through Yancey’s call for composition to join the new writing publics (297). Her “We
have a moment” refrain is a simultaneous call to action and warning that this call will
soon expire. Yet the fault line she also pointed to in this 2004 address—globaliza¬
tion promising “(newfound) cooperation and communication among peoples” while
producing “just-in-time jobs” and “just-in-time people” (301)—has only deepened.6
Consider further that even as we and our students appear to be awash in informa¬
tion and proliferating viewpoints, mass media consolidation has resulted in just a
handful of conglomerates controlling most of the globe’s information outlets. Such
media consolidation and information control work to swamp a public with urgent
imperatives: to march into wars against phantom weapons of mass destruction, to cut
Social Security and Medicare against the threat of a fiscal cliff, to “reform” public
higher education as a means of remedying decades of widening economic inequality.
In such circumstances, composition needs a public-writing pedagogy that can join
“We have a moment” with “We need to take a moment.”
Such a pedagogy would need to navigate the tension between the synchronic
and diachronic and, with it, the tension between the felt need to act immediately
and the concurrent need to be as informed as possible. Most often these tensions are
expressed as binaries: as, for instance, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed by a high school
teacher who urged Kony 2012 “naysayers” not to “squelch young activists” like her
students and sons (Strickler). In composition, Paul Lynch similarly subordinates
critical pedagogy, which he understands as chiefly concerned with “undermin[ing]
the realities around us,” to Latourian production (463): “A composition should no
longer be judged by how incisively it debunks,” Lynch argues, “but instead by how
expansively (and perhaps ‘sloppily’) it puts together” (470).
57 6 College English
Remedying this fear of the critical as naysaying and debunking are the creative
possibilities of what Thompson terms reinterpretation. That third component is essen¬
tial to critical materialist method for thinking about language through bodies that are
not only subjected to history but seeking to affect history’s course. With its valuing
of reinterpretive creativity, critical materialism does not preclude inventive in-the-
moment uptake, but fosters it—as when Palestinian activists appropriated the garb
and blue paint of the film Avatar’s oppressed Na’vi to protest Israel’s separation wall
(“Palestinians”). An excellent example of synchronic and diachronic analyses joined
rather than opposed can also be found in sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne’s
multimodal account of manifs casseroles (pot-banging popular protest). In that account
Sterne investigates such protests historically while also drawing readers into the streets
with him, his students, and his neighbors during the 2012 Quebec student uprising
(Sterne; see also Sterne and Davis). Sustained inquiry into Kony 2012, too, brings us
to the inspiring self-activity of Ugandans against their current US-backed regime,
including the mass 2011 walk-to-work protests and the unprecedented 2012 LGBT
Pride march. Such inquiry cultivates both critical space—powerful counters to the
video’s white-man’s-burden representations—and creative space, one in which young
activists might imagine a solidarity more powerful than ordering a $20 action kit.
Notes
1. For a roundup of initial news reports and mainstream media assessments of Kony 2012, see Good¬
man and Preston; Kristoff; Kron and Goodman; PBS NewsHour’s ‘“Kony 2012.”’
2. See, for instance, Cole; Dixon; Izarna.
3. Like the nineteenth-century liberal economists Marx depicts as enthralled by the circulation of
commodities in the marketplace and utterly ignorant of the “hidden abode of production” (279), Latour
imagines objects-as-agents with the extraordinary capacity to “make everything, including their own
frames, their own theories, their own contexts, their own metaphysics [. . .] even their own ontologies”
(147; also qtd. in Sanchez 239).
4. With the insertion of the word “also”—“The linguistic borders in Israeli society are also being
infiltrated by English” (108; emphasis added)—Fraiberg suggests that a prior claim—“The physical borders
of Israel are being infiltrated by the Palestinians”—does not need to be written and defended. The effect
is to render uncontroversial, already resolved, the historically vexed question of whether the Palestinian
people are trying to infiltrate Israel’s borders or exercise a right of return.
5. Our emphasis on Gramscian inventory taking is inspired by Edward Said’s classic “Zionism from
the Standpoint of Its Victims,” from which we took this essay’s epigraph.
6. Although it is beyond the scope of this article, we also think about the field’s response to digital
communication and globalization through literary critic Walter Mignolo’s critique of the “hubris of point
zero,” the self-assured and unilateral perspective of modernity that “constantly name[s] and celebratejs]
(progress, development, growth)” while also “silenc[ing] or nam[ing] as problems to be solved by the
former (poverty, misery, inequities, injustices, corruption, commodification, and dispensability of human
life)” (xviii). Here progress, development, and growth are rarely acknowledged as a cause of poverty,
misery, and injustice, but are often offered as the solution. The linguistic idealism of composition is built
on a similar unity and likewise carries its vexing contradictions, its erasures and silencing. As we pause in
the moment that Yancey suggests we have, we might consider that although our digital pedagogies and
theories make some claims of novelty and a progressive politics, they may be following a conservative
narrative that still moves predictably downstream from modernity’s “point zero.” In this familiar nar¬
rative, technology is joined with “free markets” and with one of a handful of Western European- and
US-sanctioned models of representative government in the spread of growth and progress.
7. As Cloud explains, ‘“debunking”’ systems of inequality are a vital part of the “pre-conditions
for a vital public sphere” in which social and economic injustices “can be democratically debated,” and
in which “[ojrdinary people” can discover themselves as “not only the objects of history” but also “its
makers” (“Rhetoric” 348-54).
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Sterne, Jonathan, and Natalie Zemon Davis. “Quebec’s manifs casseroles are a call for order.” Globe and
Mail. Globe and Mail, 31 May 2012. Web. 17 Dec. 2012.
Strickler, Mary. “Kony 2012 Blowback: Don’t Squelch Young Activists.” Los Angeles Times. LA Times,
16 Mar. 2012. Web. 17 Dec. 2012.
Thompson, John B. Ideology and Modem Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication.
Stanford: Stanford LTP, 1990. Print.
Tufekci, Zeynep. “#Kony2012, Understanding Networked Symbolic Action & Why Slacktivism Is
Conceptually Misleading.” Technosociology. Technosociology, 10 Mar. 2012. Web. 7 May 2012.
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7 May 2012.
“West Bank Movement Access Update: Special Focus Sept. 2012.” United Nations Office for the Co¬
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Whitlock, Craig. “U.S. Expands Secret Intelligence Operations in Africa.” Washington Post. Washington
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and Communication 56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.
Response:
Writing, Rhetoric, and
Composition in the Age of Obama
Morris Young
D n November 2008, just a couple of days after the election of Barack Obama
as the forty-fourth president of dre United States, my essay, “Literacies and
Identities,” was published as part of the CCCC blog series. Taking advan¬
tage of the historic nature of the presidential campaign, I asked a series of
questions to frame the expectations that might accompany what seemed to be at the
very least a moment of hope when the United States might move toward coming
to terms with its racial legacy, especially given the extraordinary speech, “A More
Perfect Union,” that Obama delivered earlier that spring to address the controversy
over his relationship to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Focusing on the discourse of diversity,
I wondered how our ideas and meanings about diversity might shift, what impact
this would have on English studies classrooms, and how we locate ourselves across
communities, whether these are constituted by culture, identity, language, or place.
When I reflect on that earlier essay and compose a response to this special issue,
“Reimagining the Social Turn,” I want to consider the work of writing, rhetoric,
and composition in the Age of Obama, and whether the theoretical framing that
has informed research and teaching in the field has undergone a paradigm shift as
reflected in changing material conditions, emerging technologies, and new social
relations that seem to characterize our world today.
I invoke the Age of Obama not to assign any transformative power to Obama,
or to suggest that what we might understand to be significant changes in die so¬
cial, political, and cultural landscape is bounded by his terms as president. Rather,
I use this expression as a way to capture what has been rapid change—sometimes
Morris Young is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His book, Minor Re/
Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship (Southern Illinois UP, 2 004) received
die 2004 W. Ross Winterowd Award and the 2006 CCCC Outstanding Book Award. With LuMing
Mao, he coedited Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric (Utah State UP, 2008), which received
an honorable mention for the 2009 Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize from MLA.

Response: Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition in the Age of Obama 581
ephemeral and at other times structural—in systems that affect many different areas
of our lives. For example, we have seen a potentially transformative social policy,
the Affordable Care Act, offer hope to the uninsured or cause fear for those who see
a threat to personal liberty. We have seen the rise of movements such as the Tea
Party or Occupy Wall Street challenge what have been stable structures that have
institutionalized power and wealth. And we have seen a move toward marriage equal¬
ity from very local sites to state government to federal policy and law that perhaps
embodies this sense of change in the most profound way where the social, political,
and material come together for consequential effects. In this sense, the social turn
in composition studies has existed and been experienced in similar ways as scholars
have developed innovations in methodology, have identified and expanded areas of
study, and continue to bring together theory and practice in order to understand
how language works and reflects these realities.
What has become apparent in current composition research and teaching is an
attention to the way various economic systems and conditions, ideological structures,
and institutional expectations and requirements inform the work and assessment of
writing. Whether it is the shift from viewing literacy as an individual development
to viewing literacy as an economic development, as described by Deborah Brandt
in Literacy in American Lives; examining how new media technologies facilitate com¬
munication across time and space (and allow researchers to trace this movement); or
situating the work of writing within economic models of production and consumption,
composition as a field has tried to deepen its understanding of the social by making
visible the systems in which writing takes place, broadening its scope of who writes
and for what purposes, and considering how writing is valued.
In this special issue of College English we are presented with work that helps
us begin to unpack the effect of the social turn in composition studies, to help us
understand what might persist, and to provide us a sense of what might be next.
While I organize my discussion of the essays included here by focusing on some key
terms that capture what seem to me to have been important moves in the field as an
enactment of or response to the social turn, I certainly do not want to suggest that
these essays are limited to addressing only these specific dimensions. In fact much of
this work reaches broadly across multiple dimensions that, as Jacqueline Rhodes and
lonathan Alexander write in their introduction, “foregrounds deeply contextualized
action and radical possibility for the field (486).
Making/Material
The attention to social experience as constitutive of language use was part of the
emergence of the social turn in the human sciences, a shift that foregrounded the
social construction of knowledge, situated individual subjectivity within broader
582 College English
social contexts and actions, and made identity a key dimension in understanding
composing practices (Trimbur). In this sense, the idea of making one’s activity vis¬
ible or material within a network of social relations and contexts shifted our views of
individual agency to one of collaboration and co-construction of knowledge. And yet
the materiality of such epistemological work often remains ephemeral and located
within human cognition and experience.
In her essay “Writing Material,” Laura Micciche argues for a new materialism
that recognizes “writing as radically distributed across time and space, and as always
entwined with a whole range of others” (489). As Micciche points out, the attention
to the social and the methodological tools that were developed (textual and linguistic
analysis; ideology critique) has “narrowed the scope of what counts as the social by
foregrounding the constructed nature of texts, objects, activities, and bodies with little
attention to how such constructions interact with natural systems, biology, animals,
and other forms of matter” (488). In particular, if we always locate writing in this
limited understanding of the social, we also elide the ways in which writers interact
with nonhuman agents or objects that may serve to “sponsor” their literate activity as
well as make assumptions about what those relationships are and how they function.
We also limit what we understand as the materiality of writing if it only exists as the
result of human activity. In examining the genre of “acknowledgments,” Micciche
suggests that in making their “debts” visible, writers start to document how their
writing practices are “enmeshed in varying partnerships with others, organizations,
animals, feelings, sound, and places” (499). Ultimately, what Micciche offers to the
field is a challenge to look at writing in unfamiliar ways, to identify its unfamiliar
relationships, and to see its “radical withness” (502).
Similarly, in their essay “One Train Can Hide Another,” Tony Scott and Nancy
Welch argue that rhetorical work that may seem to address what we imagine as public
engagement and activist work often obscures political and economic relationships
that raise questions about the purpose and investment of such work. In such cases,
further investigation into the various contexts or extratextual interests—for example,
the historical, political, social, and economic—beyond what seem to be apparent
ethical appeals is critical to understanding exactly whose purposes are being served.
Building on theories of critical materialism from communication studies, Scott and
Welch offer a “critical materialist pedagogy” that “operat[es] on the tracks of both
formal and sociohistorical analysis, aims to reconnect discursive and digitized ar¬
guments to the extradiscursive interests they serve,” to the bodily effects they can
engender (566). What concerns Scott and Welch is the decontextualizing and de-
materializing of the writing subject even as the field has embraced the public turn
in writing. That is, although the writing subject has been repositioned as an agent
within networks and digitized writing practices that have reached instantaneously
beyond what was once imagined and that seemingly engage ideas and issues that have
broad consequence, Scott and Welch worry that such practices have the profound
effect of “further isolating the discursive field from extradiscursive social relations”
(568). In response, Scott and Welch’s theory of critical materialist pedagogy works
to defetishize, rematerialize, and reinterpret texts through the body, a process that
attempts to make visible the various social relations that inform the work of a text
and to offer creative possibilities for moving toward ethical action rather than relying
on prepackaged and reified social meaning.
In the work of Micciche, and of Scott and Welch, we see a need for an attention
to the material dimensions and consequences of writing, rhetoric, and composition
in order to avoid similar theoretical faults that the social turn was meant to address.
That is, their invocation of a new or critical materialism is meant to challenge the
fetishizing of writing itself that has still occurred in spite of (or perhaps been re¬
inforced by) the social turn when we continue to valorize and assign value to work
because it functions as an expression of identity, does a certain kind of political
work, or seeks to maintain ideological positions that result in inequity. What these
authors show us is that the making of writing, while socially situated, is also mate¬
rial with consequences that rely on and affect a variety of actors, whether individual
human agents, institutions, or nonhuman material objects that function as part of
a network of action.
Agency, Identity, Action
With the election of Obama, commentators and critics began to speculate about
a post-racial era, when the marker of race (and by extension, other categories of
identity) would no longer be understood as a limit, might even be acknowledged
as agential, but should not figure as a determinant in social relations. However,
what became apparent was that a new racialized discourse began to insert itself in
the public sphere—from political officials to online commentary sites to town hall
meetings—and race as an identification served as a synecdoche for arguments against
a variety of policies and practices. The social turn in the humanities broadly, and
in rhetoric and composition specifically, provided a framework to understand the
activities of individuals within larger social networks; turned attention to communi¬
ties often marginalized because their work was not viewed as exemplary; and allowed
for narrative as a mode of analysis. However, it also helped to foreground identity
and agency as important categories of theoretical framing. Particularly in language
education, where deficit models often situated individuals and their communities
as objects of failure rather than subjects engaged in active language practices, this
reframing helped the field understand how writing and rhetoric functioned to achieve
specific purposes for these writers. To see students, as well as others who have been
perhaps seen as novices, as having agency and a sense of identity m their rhetorical
work and as acting within larger social systems was an important move.
584 College English
In their essay “Rhetorical Education and Student Activism,” Jonathan Alexander

and Susan Jarratt examine the rhetorical work of the Muslim Student Union (MSU)
on the campus of the University of California-Irvine as it sought to develop strategies
for more effective engagement to address social justice claims. Drawing on ethno¬
graphic methods and interviews, Alexander and Jarratt paint a complex portrait of
students whose rhetorical action was informed by their sense of identity as Muslim
and by the understanding that they had agency to act in response to policies and
practices that they viewed as unjust and injurious to a Palestinian community that is
subjected to Israeli state power. What Alexander and Jarratt unpack is an interesting
and important genealogy of rhetorical education, identifying what resources students
in the MSU drew upon in order to develop their rhetorical strategies. Although
students sometimes identified curricular sources of rhetorical education, what stands
out are the extracurricular sources that provided them with these strategies. In par¬
ticular, the students’ ability to analyze and theorize rhetorical action by viewing other
models of protest on sites such as YouTube reinforce the presence of new digital and
media technologies as both archives and modes for rhetorical education. Perhaps
most important was the students’ identification of the MSU as a site of rhetorical
education that served, in contrast to institutional university curriculum, as a place
where they could identify, deliberate, and act on their concerns as Muslims in the
United States. In this organization, identity and agency served as ethical resources
for these students, who could then develop modes of action.
David Wallace faces a similar concern as an instructor when he encounters
“unwelcome” student work that challenges his agency and identity not only as an
instructor but also as a gay male. In recounting his experience with a student who
wrote in an essay, “‘The first people I exclude from my circle [of humanity] are
homosexuals’” (547), Wallace provides a careful but powerful case for why identity
matters, not only in the context of a classroom, but also for the research, theory, and
administration we do in composition studies. Though Wallace turns to the work of
Vershawn Ashanti Young, Vorris Nunley, and Jacqueline Jones Royster—because
“they challenge us to understand that identity, agency, and language are negotiated
across boundaries created by systems of difference that have real consequences”
(553)—he offers three concepts that provide opportunities for intersectional action.
Concept 1: We are (nearly) always talking and writing across boundaries (554).
Concept 2: Cross-boundary discourse must be reconceived as more than speaking
from one unitary home place to another (555). Concept 3: Engaging in responsible
cross-boundary discourse requires reciprocal dialogue in our personal, professional,
and pedagogical discourse (557). Embedded in these concepts are the effects of the
social turn that have made change in the way we create and distribute knowledge a
possibility. However, as Wallace makes clear, change does not happen easily, and
although acts of vulnerability may invite conversation, these invitations do not nec¬
essarily result in ethical action.
In Sinners W elcome, Steve Parks provides us with an argument that perhaps

best illustrates the work of this special issue of College English in reimagining the
social turn. By examining the way rhetorical agency has been theorized in com¬
munity partnerships and offering a critique that urges us to return to the political,
Parks wants to make visible the structural and material relationships that are often
obscured by what we think of as social action. In a direct challenge to the field, Parks
asks “whether collective political action is even possible under a disciplinary rubric”
(507). Taking up Linda Flower’s theorization of rhetorical agency and what Parks
identifies as an underlying neoliberal discourse, he suggests that there are possibili¬
ties for collective action that do not rely on—and in fact can challenge—existing
orthodoxies in the field in order to move toward change and action that is indeed
generated by communities themselves, and that produce their own sense of agency
rather than simply being a partner.
Parks offers a provocative example of “collective agency” (512) in describing
and analyzing the Near Westside Initiative, a complex partnership of residents,
various governmental and community institutions, and private interests. Here we
see how and where agency is located, how it moves between partners, and whether
those members who are often seen as the beneficiaries of such community partner¬
ships can ever really participate and assert themselves within these existing systems.
Ultimately, it was only when the residents themselves could identify their purpose,
develop practices, and exert pressure on other partners—that is, to move toward
collective action—that a real sense of agency was found. In presenting this case,
Parks makes a parallel argument to the field, asking us to “move toward a collec¬
tive voice, premised on coming to understand how community histories can act as
the foundational moment for strategic interventions in power networks” (522). He
asserts that writing programs, composition instructors, and the students we teach
should not see such activism as outside the concerns of the field, but rather that we
move from simply locating the work of writing, rhetoric, and composition from the
social to the political.
In reimagining the social turn in rhetoric and composition, these scholars have
brought to the forefront concerns about the material, the political, and the ethical. I
think that while many of us in composition studies would recognize the significance
and transformative effect of the social turn in our research and teaching, we should
also be mindful that attention to what the social provides should not obscure what
material conditions, new relations, and actions may develop in a changing world. The
work included in this special issue puts a clear focus on the materiality of the social,
and reminds us that we cannot simply take for granted that social awareness itself
will describe and explain the work of writing. In fact, as these essays have shown,
our research and teaching must continually challenge the work of writing even when
we see important and innovative work taking place, are sympathetic to particular
positions, or question the efficacy of a specific practice. In the Age of Obama, we
586 College English
have seen how writing, rhetoric, and composition have worked to make the social
more visible, to construct and assert agency and identity, and to call for collective
action. However, these essays also implore us to not accept the premise and promise
of the social turn uncritically, to be aware that a celebration of the social can actu¬
ally mask deeper-seeded problems that only continue to injure those who we often
assume are provided with new opportunities for expression. If we are to reimagine
the social turn and to understand how it has informed the work we do, we must be
willing to engage in critical reflection that moves toward collective action, and to
accept that our work may be consequential but sometimes in only limited ways or
in ways that are unintended.
Works Cited
Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.
Obama, Barack. “A More Perfect Union.” National Constitution Center, Philadelphia. 18 Mar. 2008.
Speech.
Trimbur, John. “Taking the Social Turn: Teaching Writing Post-Process.” CCC 45.1 (1994): 108-18.
Print.
Young, Morris. “Literacies and Identities: Shifting the Discourse on Diversity.” cccc-blog.blogspot.com.
6 Nov. 2008. Web.
587
Announcements
and Calls for Papers
Call for Submissions: The CCCC James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation
Award Committee calls for submissions for its 2015 doctoral dissertation award in
composition studies. This award is given annually to a graduate whose dissertation
improves the educational process in composition studies or adds to the field’s body
of knowledge through research or scholarly inquiry. Applicants must submit to
CCCC the following items: 1) title page, 2) abstract, 3) summary of the disserta¬
tion (maximum length 10 pages; summary must be in manuscript form), and 4) an
unbound copy of the dissertation. To be eligible for the award, the dissertation must
have been accepted by the degree-granting institution, and the writer of the disser¬
tation must have received the degree between September 1, 2013, and August 31, 2014.
Submissions must be received by September 1, 2014. Send the materials to: CCCC
James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award Committee, NCTE, 1111
W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1010 or cccc@ncte.org. Emailed submissions
are accepted and encouraged.
Call for Exemplar Award Nominations: The CCCC Executive Committee announces a
call for nominations for its Exemplar Award. This award will be presented, as occa¬
sion demands, to a person whose years of service as an exemplar for our organiza¬
tion represent the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire
profession. The Exemplar Award seeks to recognize individuals whose record is
national and international in scope and who set the best examples for the CCCC
membership. Nominations should include a letter of nomination, four letters of
support, and a full curriculum vita. The nominating material should be sent to the
CCCC Exemplar Award Committee at cccc@ncte.org. Nominations must be received
by November 1, 2014.
Call for Nominations: The CCCC Stonewall Service Award is presented annually
and seeks to recognize members of CCCC/NCTE who have consistendy worked
to improve the experiences of sexual and gender minorities within the organization
and the profession. Nominations should include a letter of nomination, 3-5 letters
of recommendation, and a full curriculum vita. Please send nominations to cccc@

588 College English
ncte.org by November 1, 2014. Please visit http://www.ncte.org/cccc/awards/

stonewall for farther details.
Call for Submissions for the 2015 CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Commu¬
nication: Dissertations will be evaluated by the following five criteria—originality of
research, contribution the research makes to the field, methodological soundness of
the approach used, awareness of the existing research in the area studied, and overall
quality of the writing. The 2015 award is open to dissertations completed during
2013or2014.A dissertation may be nominated only once during its two-year period
of eligibility. Applicants must submit the following materials: 1) letter of nomination
from a dissertation committee member, preferably the chair, emphasizing the signifi¬
cance of the research for technical communication studies; 2) an extended abstract
(approximately 250 words); and 3) an unbound copy of the dissertation. Send materi¬
als by October 15, 2014, to CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical
Communication Selection Committee, NCTE, 1111 W. Kenyon Rd., Urbana, IL
61801-1010 or cccc@ncte.org. Email submissions are accepted and encouraged.
Call for Nominations for 2014-2015 Writing Program Certificate of Excellence Awards: CCCC
is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the 2014-2015 CCCC Writing
Program Certificate of Excellence awards. This award program, established in 2004,
honors up to 20 writing programs a year. As a term, “programs” is intended to be
capacious in its application and includes a first-year writing program or a coherent
configuration of first-year courses; a basic or developmental writing program; an
ESL writing program; a configuration of writing instruction within an intensive-
English program (this instruction might be integrated into courses rather than appear
in separate writing courses); a vertical sequence of courses (e.g., a concentration, a
certificate, a minor, a major); a WAC or WID program; a writing program within a
writing center; or a writing program designed for a special group. Applications are
due by August 31, 2014. For a full description of this award and the application
requirements, please visit http://www.ncte.org/cccc/awards/writingprogramcert or
contact the CCCC Administrative Liaison at cccc@ncte.org.
Search for New Editor of Teaching English in the Two-Year College: NCTE is seeking a new
editor of Teaching English in the Two-Year College, hi May 2016, die term of the present
editor, Jeff Sommers, will end. Interested persons should send a letter of application
to be received no later than December 15, 2014. Letters should include the appli¬
cant’s vision for the journal and be accompanied by the applicant’s vita, one sample
Announcements and Calls for Papers 589
of published writing (article or chapter), and two letters specifying financial support
from appropriate administrators at the applicant’s institution. Applicants are urged to
explore with their administrators the feasibility of assuming the responsibilities of a
journal editorship. Finalists will be interviewed at the CCCC Annual Convention
in Tampa, FL, in March 2015. The applicant appointed by the NCTE Executive
Committee will effect a transition, preparing for his or her first issue in September
2016. The appointment is for five years. Applications should be submitted via email
in PDF form to kaustin@ncte.org; please include “TETYC Editor Application” in
the subject line. Direct queries to Kurt Austin, NCTE Publications Director, at the
email address above or call 217-328-3870, extension 3619.
The Assembly of American Literature is accepting articles for the 2014 issue of Notes
on American Literature. The Editorial Board welcomes articles that emphasize the
importance of teaching American Literature to high school and college students.
Articles may range from 1,500 to 2,500 words using the recent MLA style guide.
The deadline for the next round of blind peer review process is July 31, 2014. If
you would like to submit an article describing your research on American authors
or their works and/or your ideas for teaching them, please send as an email attach¬
ment to mabeld.mk@gmail.com and tmhunt@eiu.edu. Notes on American Literature
is a peer-reviewed journal of the National Council of Teachers of English Assembly
on American Literature (http://www.ncte.org/assemblies).
CEE Research Initiative Call for Proposals 2014-2015: The Conference on English
Education (CEE) is pleased to announce the fifth year of the CEE Research Initia¬
tive. We invite proposals for research projects that will advance the mission of the
organization as articulated through our various position statements and sponsored
publications. (See www.ncte.org/cee.) Particular questions of interest include, but
are not limited to, the following:
• How are elements of effective English language arts education and teaching determined
in the current educational climate?
• How can English language arts education programs best address the demands and ex¬
pectations of various stakeholders?
• What are the relationships between research-supported English language arts education
pedagogies and effective secondary teaching?
• How can Enghsh language arts education better attend to questions of difference in
teaching and learning?
• How is the field of Enghsh language arts changing in the 21st century to respond to
new/evolving content and issues?
• How can Enghsh language arts education programs better attend to issues of engagement
in community, global and digital spaces?
590 College English
We hope that research supported by this program will contribute to CEE’s efforts
to communicate more effectively with many different audiences: state and federal
policy makers, accreditation agencies, school/department administrators, researchers,
teacher educators, practicing teachers, and other education leaders. We^welcome
proposals from applicants representing all levels of instruction (from K-12 to uni¬
versity) and all types of educational spaces (from teacher education classrooms to
community programs).
CEE plans to fund up to four proposals at a maximum of $2,500 each. The prin¬
cipal investigators of each proposal must be members of CEE. We invite proposals
employing a variety of methods, including qualitative or mixed-method research
designs, case studies, interview or survey-based projects, and teacher-research proj¬
ects. Proposals should state research questions, describe methods of gathering and
analyzing data, and explain how the evidence and its analysis will address both the
research questions and current educational policy issues of interest to CEE members.
Doctoral students, early career faculty members, and K-12-based teacher-
researchers are encouraged to apply. Please note: Previous CEE Research
Initiative recipients are eligible to apply only once within a five-year period.
Proposals are to be submitted no later than Monday, September 22, 2014,
as email attachments to the CEE Administrative Liaison at cee@ncte.org. Decisions
will be announced by October 17, 2014, and award winners will be recognized at the
annual CEE Business Meeting at the NCTE Annual Convention in Washington,
DC. Investigator(s) will be expected to present their research at the 2015 or 2016
NCTE Convention or at the 2015 CEE/IFTE Summer Conference.
Proposals should include the following:
• Cover page that contains the following:
• title of the proposal
• names of the investigator(s)
• full contact information of the investigator(s): institution, address, phone, email
• designation of a principal contact if multiple investigators are involved
• Narrative of not more than five pages that clearly explains the following:
• aims of the research
• question(s) to be addressed
• importance of the question(s) for CEE
• key related work in the research literature
• data to be gathered
• methods for its collection and analysis
• plans for dissemination of the findings
• Work plan with a timeline of key events and processes
• Detailed budget with rationale for all expenses
• NOTE: This grant may not be used to pay indirect costs and/or overhead and must
be used to fund specific research activities.
• Brief CVs for all investigators (one to two pages)
Announcements and Calls for Papers 591
2014-2015 CCCC Research Initiative Call for Proposals: CCCC is pleased to announce the
eleventh year of its Research Initiative. This year we invite proposals for research
that will advance the organization as articulated in the CCCC strategic governance
initiatives and in the CCCC mission statement.
Particular topics and areas of interest include but are not limited to:
• Formal and informal learning of writing
• Outcomes and assessments
• Multilingual writers
• Writing in organizations, communities, and/or cultures
• 'Working conditions and their influence on teaching and learning
• Disciplinarity
• Historiography
• Development of teachers or researchers
• Transfer of writing ability across contexts
• Technologies for writing and learning to write
• Literacies and the public good
• Coming to terms with first-year composition
• Engaging the basic writer
CCCC plans to fund proposals of up to $10,000 each. The principal investigators of

each proposal must be members of CCCC at the time of proposal submission. Proposals are
expected to last up to two years but can run for shorter periods of time. Propos¬
als are to be submitted no later than September 1, 2014, as email attachments to
the CCCC Administrative Liaison at cccc@ncte.org. Proposals are reviewed by a
joint committee comprised of the CCCC Officers and members selected from the
CCCC Research Committee. Decisions will be announced by January 30, 2015. A
mid-project report will be due by March 1,2016. (This will be the final report date
for projects lasting up to one year.) Projects should be completed and a final report
submitted by March 1,2017, for projects lasting two years. A summary version of the
final report will be hosted on the NCTE website. For a full description of the guidelines
and format requirements, go to http://www.ncte.org/cccc/azvards/researchinitiative.
592
Thanks to Our Referees
John Alberti Heidi Estrem LuMing Mao

Risa Applegarth Jenny Edbauer Rice Lisa Mastrangelo
Will Banks Christine Farris Paul Kei Matsuda
Jennifer Bay Lauren Fitzgerald Mark McBeth
Ann Blakeslee Kristie Fleckenstein Michael McCamley
Don Bialostosky David Fleming Jaime Mejia
John Bird Clinton R. Gardner Susan Miller-Cochran
Pat Bizzaro Bruce Gentry Christian Moraru
Suzanne Bordelon David Gold Peter Mortensen
Darsie Bowden Gerald Graff Rebecca Nowacek
Betsy Bowen Roger Graves Michael Palmquist
Deborah Brandt Jane Greer Atm M. Penrose
Bob Broad Juan Guerra Steven Petersheim
Beth Burmester Faye Halpern Brian Ray
Paul Butler Jim Hansen Nedra Reynolds
Suresh Canagarajah Debbie Hawhee J eff Rice
Shannon Carter Marguerite Helmers Thomas Rickert
Sara Biggs Chaney Doug Hesse Amy E. Robillard
Michael Joseph Day Haivan Hoang Scott Romine
Nancy C. Dejoy Patrick Hogan Duane Roen
Michael DePalma Charlotte Hogg Spencer Schaffner
Danielle Nicole DeVoss Bruce Horner Wendy Sharer
Rasha Diab Melissa Ianetta Mary Soliday
Bradley Dilger Jordynn Jack Nancy Sommers
Sid Dobrin Dale Jacobs Bill Thelin
Jay Dolmage Sandra Jamieson Jennifer Trainor
Christiane Donahue Seth Kahn Joonna Smitherman Trapp
Doug Downs Krista A. Kennedy Stephanie Vanderslice
John Duffy Karen Kopelson Victor Villanueva
Patricia Dunn Steve Lamos Andrew Walzer
Patricia Donahue Neal Lerner Karen Weyler
Dylan Dryer Melissa Littlefield Scott Andrew Wible
Scott Ellis Drew Loewe Laura Wilder
Michelle Eodice Nancy Mack Bronwyn T. Williams
Barb L’Eplattenier Rita Malenczyk Xiaoye You

593
Index to Volume 76
Adler-Kassner, Linda. Liberal Learning, Profes¬ Jim Ridolfo: November 136-151.

sional Training, and Disciplinarity in the Dyehouse, Jeremiah. Theory in the Archives: Fred
Age of Educational “Reform”: Remodeling Newton Scott and John Dewey on Writing
General Education: May 436-457. the Social Organism: January 248-268.
Alexander, Jonathan and Susan C. Jarratt. Rhe¬ Duffy, William. Collaboration (in) Theory: Re¬
torical Education and Student Activism: working the Social Turn’s Conversational
July 525-544. Imperative: May 416-435.
Brazeau, Alicia. Talking over the Fence: Writing East Texas Activism (1966-68): Locating the Lit¬
in Turn-of-the-Century Farm Journals: May eracy Scene through the Digital Humanities,
396-415. Shannon Carter and Kelly L. Dent. Novem¬
Carter, Shannon and Kelly L. Dent. East Texas ber 152-170.
Activism (1966-68): Locating the Literacy Engelson, Amber. The “Hands of God” at Work:
Scene through the Digital Humanities: Negotiating between Western and Religious
November 152-170. Sponsorship in Indonesia: March 292-314.
Closing Deals with Hamlet’s Help: Assessing the Enoch, Jessica and David Gold. Guest Editors’
Instrumental Value of an English Degree, Introduction: Seizing the Methodological
Sheryl I. Fontaine and Stephen J. Mexal: Moment: The Digital Humanities and His¬
March 357-378. toriography in Rhetoi'ic and Composition:
Collaboration (in) Theory: Reworking the Social November 105-114.
Turn’s Conversational Imperative, William Expanding Borders and Forging New Paths:
Duffy: May 416-43 5. Perspectives on Writing Research (Review),
Cushman, Ellen. Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Amy Dayton and Jennie Vaughn. September
Decolonizing the Digital Archive: November 84-89.
115-135. Fontaine, Sheryl I. and Stephen J. Mexal. Closing
The Daw and the Honeybee: Situating Metaphors Deals with Hamlet’s Help: Assessing the
for Originality and Authorial Labor in the Instrumental Value of an English Degree:
1728 Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, Krista Ken¬ March 357-378.
nedy: September 35-58. Fox, Catherine Olive-Marie. Toward a Queerly
Dayton, Amy and Jennie Vaughn. Expanding Bor¬ Classed Analysis of Shame: Attunement to
ders and Forging New Paths: Perspectives Bodies in English Studies: March 337-356.
on Writing Research (Review): September From Location(s) to Locatability: Mapping Femi¬
84-89. nist Recovery and Archival Activity through
Delivering Textual Diaspora: Building Digital Metadata, Tarez Samra Graban. November
Cultural Repositories as Rhetoric Research, 171-193.

594 College English
From the Editor, Kelly Ritter: January 205-207. Our Brilliant Career: Women in English, 1973—
2010, Susan Grubar: September 12-28.
From the Editor, Kelly Ritter: May 393-395.
Parks, Steve. Sinner’s Welcome: The Limits of
From the Editor, Kelly Ritter: March 289-291.
Rhetorical Agency: July 506-524.
From the Editor, Kelly Ritter: September 9-11.
The Problem That [Still?] Has No Name: Our
Gilbert, Sandra M. The Problem That [Still?] Has
Brilliant Careers in a World without Work,
No Name: Our Brilliant Careers in a World
Sandra M. Gilbert: September 29-34.
without Work: September 29-34.
Repositioning Curriculum Design: Broadening
Graban, Tarez Samra. From Location(s) to
the Who and How of Curricular Invention,
Locatability: Mapping Feminist Recovery
Matthew Heard: March 315-336.
and Archival Activity through Metadata:
“Revising the Menu to Fit the Budget”: Grocery
November 171-193.
Lists and Other Rhetorical Heirlooms, Jamie
Grubar, Susan. Our Brilliant Career: Women In
White-Farnham: January 208-226.
English, 1973-2010: September 12-28.
Rhetorical Education and Student Activism,
Guest Editors’ Introduction: Reimagining the
Jonathan Alexander and Susan C. Jarratt:
Social Turn: New Work from the Field,
July 525-544.
Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander:
July 481-487. Rhodes, Jacqueline and Jonathan Alexander.
Guest Editors’ Introduction: Reimagining
Guest Editors’ Introduction: Seizing the Method¬
the Social Turn: New Work from the Field:
ological Moment: The Digital Humanities
July 481-487.
and Historiography in Rhetoric and Com¬
position, Jessica Enoch and David Gold: Ridolfo,Jim. Delivering Textual Diaspora: Build¬
November 105-114. ing Digital Cultural Repositories as Rhetoric

Research: November 136-151.
The “Hands of God” at Work: Negotiating be¬
tween Western and Religious Sponsorship in Ritter, Kelly. From the Editor: January 205-207.
Indonesia, Amber Engelson: March 292-314. -. From the Editor: May 393-395.
Heard, Matthew. Repositioning Curriculum De¬ -. From the Editor: March 289-291.
sign: Broadening the Who and How of Cur¬ -. From the Editor: September 9-11.
ricular Invention: March 315-336.
Scott, Tony and Nancy Welch. One Train Can
Holdstein, Deborah H. Theory, Practice, and the Hide Another: Critical Materialism for
Disciplinary Cross-Narrative. May 458-467. Public Composition: July 562-579.
Kennedy, Krista. The Daw and the Honeybee: Sinner’s Welcome: The Limits of Rhetorical
Situating Metaphors for Originality and Agency, Steve Parks: July 506-524.
Authorial Labor in the 1728 Chambers’s
Stanciu, Cristina. Strangers in America: Yiddish
Cyclopaedia: September 35-58.
Poetry at the Turn of the Twentieth Cen¬
Leonard, Rebecca Lorimer. Multilingual Writing tury and the Demands of Americanization:
as Rhetorical Attunement: January 227-247. September 59-83.
Liberal Learning, Professional Training, and Strangers in America: Yiddish Poetry at the Turn
Disciplinarity in the Age of Educational of the Twentieth Century and the Demands
“Reform”: Remodeling General Education, of Americanization, Cristina Stanciu: Sep¬
Linda Adler-Kassner: May 436-457. tember 59-83.
Micciche, Laura R. Writing Material: July 488-505. Talking over the Fence: Writing in Turn-of-the-
Multilingual Writing as Rhetorical Attunement, Century Farm Journals, Alicia Brazeau: May
Rebecca Lorimer Leonard:January 227-247. 396-415.
Ohmann, Richard. What Is College English? Some Theory in the Archives: Fred Newton Scott and
Reflections: January 269-273. John Dewey on Writing the Social Organ¬
One Train Can Hide Another: Critical Material¬ ism, Jeremiah Dyehouse: January 248-268.
ism for Public Composition, Tony Scott and Theory, Practice, and the Disciplinary Cross Nar¬
Nancy Welch. July 562-579. rative, Deborah H. Holdstein: May 458-467.
Index 595
Toward a Queerly Classed Analysis of Shame: What Is College English? Some Reflections, Rich¬
Attunement to Bodies in English Studies, ard Ohmann: January 269-273.
Catherine Olive-Marie Fox: March 337-356. White-Farnham, Jamie. “Revising the Menu to
Unwelcome Stories, Identity Matters, and Strate¬ Fit the Budget”: Grocery Lists and Other
gies for Engaging in Cross-Boundary Dis¬ Rhetorical Heirlooms: January 208-226.
courses, David Wallace: July 545-561. Writing Material, Laura R.Micciche: July 488-505.
Wallace, David. Unwelcome Stories, Identity Mat¬ Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition in the Age
ters, and Strategies for Engaging in Cross- of Obama (Response), Morris Young: July
Boundary Discourses: July 545-561. 580-586.
Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Young, Morris. Writing, Rhetoric, and Composi¬
Digital Archive, Ellen Cushman: November tion in the Age of Obama (Response): July
115-135. 580-586.
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NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH

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nected articles—“The Cognition of Discovery” in 1980 and “A Cognitive Process

The Flower-Hayes model of writing [. . .] cannot alone give us a complete picture

D —Susan Hekman, “Constructing the Ballast” (115-16)

College English, Volume 76, Number 6, July 2014

New materialism is a transdisciplinary effort to reshape materialist critiques in order

procreation, and technology-drenched life activities (5-6). As they note, constructivist

of potential connections” (4). To represent the woven texture of ordinary affects,

normal. The simultaneous increasing invisibility and hyper-pervasiveness of writing

Admittedly, Syverson’s ecosocial model seems to have been underread in composition

POSTPROCESS AND WRITING WlTH

a similar spirit, Byron Hawk contextualizes postprocess as an expression of post¬

Writ ING D EBTS

Despite the more-or-less general observance of genre conventions across acknowledg¬

College English, Volume 76, Number 6, July 2014

Foundations for Agency

often linked to a less-than-nuanced view of community members. Relying on what

The Limits of Rhetorical Agency

of the community to actually have an independent, sustainable organizational space

Beyond Rhetorical Agency

As the Westside underwent a profound “transition,” the question became whether

The Westside Residents Coalition (WRC) is a culturally diverse, resident-based coali¬

edited by Ben Kuebrich.' A new book focused on an advocacy campaign against

Sinners Welcome in the Afterlife

Jonathan Alexander and Susan C. Jarratt

n February 8, 2010, Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States,

College English, Volume 76, Number 6, July 2014

The Social Turn: Inside the Classroom and Out

in-the-classroom work, we find another research strand, distinctive because of its

Genealogies of Activism: The Interviews

described as the fuel of my ambition and my passion for activism.” Acknowledging

Mohamed’s interest in activism didn’t kick in right away. He described being

From Refusal to Interruption

student activism or “disruptive behavior” in the absence of a serious engagement

From Audiences to Publics

Students’ developing understanding of the complexity of rhetorical situations—who

Reflections on Activism and Education

rhetors and activists. For instance, Osama referenced a lOth-grade AP US history

Rhetorical Education: A Longer View

1. An edited YouTube video of the event is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOKN-

9. See Nedra Reynolds’s defense of interruption in a feminist context.