Below are the CCCC Convention sessions Kevin would like to attend.
| From Textile Mills to the Entrepreneurial University: Confronting the Political Economics of Writing | ||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||
| Session: A.21 on Mar 12, 2009 from 10:30 AM to 11:45 AM | Cluster: 112) Community, Civic & Public | |||||||||||||||
| Type: Concurrent Session (3 or more presenters) | Interest Emphasis: class | |||||||||||||||
| Level Emphasis: all | Focus: not applicable | |||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||
| The growing gap between rich and poor in the United States; the systemic political disenfranchisement of immigrant, low-income, and minority groups; a transnational economy that pits workers across borders against one another in an international "race to the bottom"; the neoliberal philosophy of deregulation, defunding, and privatization aiming to subject all social spheres, including education, to the logic and goals of a "free" market: Contemporary conditions make it as important as ever that class be conspicuous in public political discourse. Yet even our rhetorical theories and pedagogies emphasizing class do not proceed from a political-economic perspective. Instead, rhetoricians and critical pedagogues most often articulate class as a cultural identity isolated from material and political relations of production. While this may be an understandable legacy of rhetoric and composition's situatedness within English departments--where literary studies' concern with textual representation takes precedence over writing as action--the result is that even the most radical perspectives can wind up functioning as inert analytical tools. Writing might be used to explain the world, but not to change it. This panel joins rhetoricians such as Victor Villanueva who have argued that rhetorical study should refocus itself on the political economic in order to put analytic praxis--ongoing efforts to understand and act--back into progressive and radical rhetorical theory and critical pedagogy. "The role of rhetoric, according to Burke," writes Villanueva, "is the demystification of the ideological. The role of political economy is the demystification of relations tied to the economic. If we're to understand where we are and what is happening to us--and maybe even to affect it--we need the tools provided by both" (58). Each of these panelists will consider one site from her/his current research that shows the class understandings and class actions that are possible when we approach rhetoric, historically and today, as an active, wave-making element in critiquing and disrupting relations of production and the social institutions and mores that aim to reinforce and naturalize relations of exploitation and inequality. "Lintheads and Barons: Rhetorics of Power and Struggle in a Textile Mill Town" This presentation will draw on a multi-year study of the rhetoric that surrounds the Loray Mill strike of 1929. The strike was a defining moment in a North Carolina mill town and has significantly shaped its social relations in the generations that followed. In public speeches and newspaper articles, the "barons," the owners of the mills, carefully positioned themselves as the founders of the town and the assigned protectors of the workers from communism and unchristian ideals. This patriarchal position was reinforced in the sermons of mill-controlled churches, where workers ("lintheads") were encouraged to see obedience and genuflection to authority as cherished virtues. In songs, pamphlets, autobiographical narratives and the imaginative arts, many workers blamed the barons for low wages and poor working conditions. Though the mills are now closed, the deep social divisions created by the mill culture continue to define the town. This presentation will examine how genres employed by the warring sides in the struggle both maintained, and undermined established social institutions and bases of economic power. "Sleights of Hand: Rhetoric, Representation, and the 'Disappearing' of U.S. Workers" Speaker two will revisit a foundational text for compositionists who have sought to locate their teaching with or against the grain of contemporary capitalist relations and demands, James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull, and Paul Lankshear's 1996 The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism. Through a multimedia presentation drawing on the print, sound, and photographic archives of workers' struggles both within what Gee and his co-authors term the "old capitalism" and within what they define as "new" or "fast capitalism," this speaker will examine the explanatory power and rhetorical appeal that The New Work Order has had for our field. At the same time, by attending to the contradictions in the "fast capitalist" story that Gee, Hull, and Lankshear briefly acknowledge but largely suppress, this speaker will also argue that tales of the death of the "old capitalism" within U.S. borders have proved premature--while the rhetoric of "fast capitalism" has been all too successful in erasing from representations of the U.S. labor map those industries where workers, despite the precariousness of their jobs and immigration status, are aiming to exercise their collective voices, broadcast their grievances and demands, and exert their political power at the point of production. "Creating Critical Spaces for Writing in the 'Entrepreneurial University'" The University of North Carolina Board of Governors recently released a report that is having a profound effect on the state's seventeen universities. The report was compiled by a twenty-eight member board that consisted of academics and "community leaders." Academics were outnumbered on the board by nearly two to one, and the group of community leaders included no activists, no representative of organized labor, no one from any group that advocates for the interests of workers or the poor. Those who were tapped to represent the interests of "the community" were mainly business leaders with strong ties to state government: including executives from the accounting, banking, insurance, educational supplement and tourist industries. Not surprisingly, the report's vision for the future of the state's university system is a textbook example of what has been described as the "service" or "entrepreneurial" university. The entrepreneurial model transforms public universities into competitive moneymaking enterprises, rationalizes the work of faculty through curricular mandates and accountability measures, and constructs students as both consumers and service workers. What does the term "academic writing" mean in such a context? In this presentation, speaker three will critically examine the recommendations for writing offered by this report--especially as they relate to what John Alberti calls "second-tier" or "working-class" universities. The speaker, who teaches at a "working-class" university, will then offer a model for a dialectical approach to writing pedagogy that critiques the project of "academic writing" as it uses new media to envision and enact alternatives. Class emerges as an outcome of political economic processes and power, rather than exclusively as a social identifier, or a means of "understanding oneself" outside of the material and the social. The presentation will include examples of student work in various digital media. | ||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||