This dissertation explores the ambiguities of professionalization for writing centers and presents an alternative way to approach what I believe is an inevitable process. Toward that end, my project is to examine how the discourse surrounding the professionalization of writing centers constructs scholars, tutors, teachers, and writing. In particular, the focus of my project is to compare how tutors' self-definitions of professionalism reflect/deflect how professionalism is defined in the scholarly literature and in arenas outside of academia. The conclusions I draw are based on my research of two local writing centers in two southwest universities as well as a survey of the intertwined histories of literature, composition studies, and writing centers, and my experience co-directing a writing center for two years. My final argument is that writing center workers ought to look outside of academia for organizational models more closely aligned to political activism such the civil rights movement and women's movement, and to capitalize on the interdisciplinary nature of writing center work to create a "participatory democracy," in which participants theorize from their experience and value the process over gaining expertise.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Communication and Culture, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Feb. 3, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-04, Section: A, page: 1266. Adviser: Robert L. Ivie.

Despite proponents' claims of its embodying and enabling democratic action, collaborative learning in the composition classroom often functions to reproduce the privileged discourses and knowledge of dominant cultures, effacing and denying differences in race, class, and gender. Moreover, such functions are masked by normalized structural and discursive conditions of education and routinized pedagogical practices that rarely face critical scrutiny---what this dissertation refers to as the techniques and technologies of collaborative learning. If teachers and students in composition studies can engage in what Pierre Bourdieu calls epistemic reflexivity (a critical effort to unmask the social and intellectual unconscious embedded in routinized procedures of knowledge production), the collaborative classroom can become a site for resisting and critiquing, rather than reproducing, the status quo.

This dissertation is a combination of three loosely connected projects: First it discusses the disciplinary history of genre traced back to literary, linguistic and rhetorical studies to argue that this diverse body of knowledge contains valuable elements of articulating knowledge about writing. This portion of the dissertation postulates that genre is both a metaphorical and a rhetorical concept, which implies that all genre concepts whether they are defined as classifications, strategies, or descriptions can only partially grasp the nature of discourse. Nevertheless, all genre concepts provide useful guidance for writers and readers about texts in so far as they are applied for a valuable purpose to highlight and articulate the rhetorical, linguistic, or discursive features of texts. Second, two chapters discuss the relationship between genres and disciplinary knowledge, arguing that this diffuse and wayward connection provides valuable insight into the nature of writing and knowledge making, and that genre is a concept that can help writers better grasp the nature of relevant discourse in their disciplinary areas. Finally, the dissertation illustrates the potential of genre analysis as a combination of linguistic, literary, and rhetorical analysis to highlight the discursive and epistemological preferences of disciplinary texts by analyzing two significant articles from the field of rhetoric and composition. The pedagogical implications of these explorations are stated in the first and last chapters of this work implying that the complex analysis of texts as socially embedded patterns of knowledge making can be an important component of writing instruction both on elementary and on advanced levels, and need not be seen as an outmoded alternative or a purely theoretical supplement to the currently dominant process model of composition pedagogy.

Composing Containment speaks to the paradigm shift in composition studies that has been codified in a number of ways, such as the post-process movement, social-epistemic rhetoric, and cultural rhetoric. Integrating concerns in reception theory, textual and cultural analysis, rhetorics of difference, queer theory, and critical composition pedagogy, each chapter includes an investigation of the rhetorical construction and ideological function of difference in a particular social site: the disciplinary practices in composition, the pop-culture program, Will & Grace, and the discourse advocating the legalization of same-sex marriage. Admittedly, these are substantially different sites of inquiry with their own distinct rhetorical, generic, and political expectations; each site deploys difference as it participates in the production of dominant social values, however. Moreover, as the critiques presented in this project reveal, these sites produce similar ideological effects that secure racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist ideology. Articulating this discursive resonance extends scholarship in rhetoric and composition in multiple ways. First, it engages the discourse of sexuality in order to further chart its rhetorical terrain. Second, while doing so, it identifies and critiques a dominant rhetorical strategy of this discourse, the rhetoric of incorporation. Third, it models a process of critique to demonstrate how this rhetoric works in contradictory ways. While it creates an image of progressive politics through its inclusion and apparent advocacy on behalf of the Other, for instance, the rhetoric of incorporation actually functions to contain the potentially disruptive power of difference---whether that difference is associated with queerness, basic writing, or liberatory pedagogy. Finally, this project suggests that the social prominence and efficacy of this rhetorical strategy can be countered only with methods of critique that link studies of rhetoric to theories of ideology and materiality.

Working Assets, a long-distance phone service company, often markets its services by telling customers that buying the company's products/services will contribute to social progress ("Help save rainforests, defend reproductive freedom and house the homeless while you save money on long distance calls"). This claim is based on the company's philanthropic and political practices, such as donating 1% of its long distance revenue to "progressive" nonprofit organizations, and alerting customers to current political, environmental, and social issues in its monthly mailings and through email. Working Assets' rhetorical representations of itself, its customers, and the act of consumption epitomize one moment in a dialectical process that is redefining economic, social, and political boundaries in the contemporary U.S. In this project, I term this process the "politicization of consumption" and define it as rhetorical practices that represent consumption as an exercise of social or political power. This project analyzes Working Assets' marketing rhetoric, as well as other samples of marketing texts that merge consumption with citizenship, for internal and external tensions that demonstrate ways that the politicization of consumption influences and is influenced by U.S. post-Fordist capitalism. Analyzing a variety of texts using Marxist dialectical inquiry as a theoretical framework and the concept of post-Fordism as a historical framework reveals the role of rhetoric in social and cultural production and reproduction and, more specifically, in redefining notions of "consumption" and "citizenship" in the contemporary U.S. This project concludes that, while the rhetoric of Working Assets and other companies that market "civic consumption" largely support capitalist structures, this rhetoric also cracks open the always already political nature of consumption, offering critical scholars opportunities for exposing the contradictions of capitalism.

Having worked on a major rhetoric and composition journal, I have found that in order to authorize an argument through publication, one has to make all the right moves. This notion of making all the right moves is what I refer to as gesturing. Gesturing is a critical tactic that "shifts interpretive authority out of the context of everyday human and social activity (our professional practices) and into a timeless, independent, already constituted and structured realm of subjects, works, ideas, and linguistic patterns" (Epstein 65). Scholars who desire to contribute to composition's marketplace of ideas must therefore deny their local epistemology, that is, the material sites of their activities that ground their professional practices: the classroom, department hallways, universities. Instead, they must gesture to an already established set of rules to authorize their argument. Based on Michel Foucault's theory of discourse, gesturing becomes a method for controlling the production of knowledge. Using Foucault as a framework, I illustrate how scholarly journals function as a means of restricting the discursive resources available to create new knowledge. Although Foucault would never assign agency to individuals, I argue that editors and peer referees formalize the gestures required of a writer. They restrict our discursive resources by maintaining the conditions under which discourse may be employed. The purpose of my project, therefore, is to consider how these gestures function as a discursive convention within rhetoric and composition studies. Although recent research has begun to look at and critique the publishing system, no one has addressed or challenged the boundaries of our discursive conventions that authorize editors' and peer referees' practices in the selection and dissemination of knowledge. My project fills this gap by (1) mapping the perimeters of our discourse, and (2) exploring what gestures might persuade reviewers and editors to recognize what and who authorizes their reviews, reviews that otherwise interpreted as standard scholarly criteria used in adjudicating an essay's merits.

In 1990, Linda Brodkey designed "Writing about Difference," a sophisticated first-year composition course at the University of Texas at Austin, where she served as director of lower-division English. The topic of the course was difference, and several of Brodkey's colleagues, inside and outside the English department, publicly criticized the course. Before long the local press and national publications, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, had picked up the story. The controversy was a defining moment for composition studies, characterized by a collision of competing discourses regarding the identity, authority, and ethos of composition studies and compositionists. This dissertation locates the controversy at the moment in the field's history when composition studies had achieved the status of a serious discipline, yet was increasingly vulnerable to media attacks. In analyzing the discourses associated with the controversy, this study argues that a pragmatic perspective might have empowered Brodkey to alter the dynamics of her situation. Moreover, it establishes that the discourses of the Writing about Difference moment resonate with the discourses circulating in composition studies today, suggesting that today's compositionists might similarly engage a pragmatic approach in order to create compromise and change when faced with seemingly irreconcilable discourses about their role and the nature of their work. Chapter I grounds the controversy historically by discussing the intellectual and cultural trends that led up to the Writing about Difference moment. Chapter II introduces pragmatism as an approach that can help composition studies to alleviate some of its problems with identity, authority, and ethos. Chapter III presents a narrative of the controversy, a description of Brodkey's syllabus, and an analysis of the ideological assumptions underpinning the discourse of her critics. Chapter IV examines Brodkey's response to the assault on her identity, authority, and ethos and explores how a response grounded in pragmatism might have altered the dynamics of the situation to produce more favorable outcomes. Chapter V explores how pragmatism can empower teachers of first-year composition to become activist intellectuals who honor their own desires for innovation while simultaneously honoring the expectations of the "others" who constitute their local contexts.

This dissertation examines a fundamental concern in rhetoric and composition and across academic disciplines---the notion of context. Theories of context create practical problems because the term refers to potentially everything around a text. This complexity manifests in four ways: (1) Context first appears in publications as unexplained evaluations of speech and writing. These assumed contexts are problematic because evaluation, or judgment, should follow invention, not proceed it. The term appears as a given, not as an invention. (2) Writers must reduce contexts to define the specific dimensions of particular cases and issues. Kenneth Burke details these reductions when defining contextual thinking as a paradoxical process, an "alchemic moment," one where "transformations" occur (Grammar 23-24). Other writers later refer to the 'transformative' power of context without acknowledging these paradoxes and reductions. (3) Many writers claim that contexts determine the meaning of words and the appropriateness of particular rhetorical strategies. If contexts determine meaning, what choices do rhetoricians have to determine meaning in contexts? (4) Anthropologists, linguists, and historians develop ideas of contexts that do not account for the rhetorical origins of the term. Composition scholars in turn borrow from disciplines other that rhetoric when explaining context. I explore these issues with an etymology of context in classical, professional, and curricular discourse. This etymology shows how compositionists use context to do three things for writing instruction: evaluate discourse; suggest situations; arrange details and intentions. I argue that these three categories of context can be better understood in terms of an active rhetorical style: Cicero and Quintilian offer style as decorum, perspicere, and ornare. Teachers rely on these styles to evaluate writing, to render situations clearly, and to configure details and intentions. This active sense of style mediates notions of context that emerge from the social sciences and provides rhetorical background for the important work that context does in composition and other disciplines. I end this dissertation by returning to Giambattista Vico's etymological work on classical rhetoricians. I identify from him a triangular invention: how memory, imagination, and perception combine with style to construct contexts.