Rhetoric and composition scholar Donna LeCourt combines theoretical inquiry, qualitative research, and rhetorical analysis to examine what it means to write for the “public” in an age when the distinctions between public and private have eroded. Public spaces are increasingly privatized, and individual subjectivities have been reconstructed according to market terms. Part critique and part road map, Social Mediations begins with a critical reading of digital public pedagogies, then turns to developing a new theory that can guide a more effective writing pedagogy. LeCourt offers a theory based in embodied relationality that uses information economies to develop public spheres. She highlights how information commodities generate value through circulation, orchestrate relationships among people, and support unequal power structures. By demonstrating how we can use information capital for social change rather than market expansion, writers and readers are encouraged to seek out encounters with cultural and political impact.
Blends memoir and scholarship to provide a moving and sometimes unsettling look at how academic discourse affects the cultural values and identities that students bring into the writing classroom.
In this edited collection of narrative-based, critically situated essays, each contributor explores how class has affected his/her personal and academic lives. The collection is divided into three sections: i) narratives that critique the meritocracy; ii) narratives that trace the effects of middle class cultural capital on relatively new academics from the working class, and; iii) narratives that explore the effects of class on longtime academics from the working class. The effect of the collection will be cumulative. By choosing contributors from multiple disciplines, including both established and emerging voices, the text articulates the pervasiveness of class bias in this country and fleshes out the mechanisms that mask how class and power work. Such a text is critically important, both inside and outside academia, because it demystifies the academic world for those who have been restricted by it, but also engages critically trained academics and academics-in-waiting to understand and respond to the experiences of working class students. Finally, the authors hope this text will encourage other working class students to consider an academic career as an option.
Rhetoric and composition scholar Donna LeCourt combines theoretical inquiry, qualitative research, and rhetorical analysis to examine what it means to write for the “public” in an age when the distinctions between public and private have eroded. Public spaces are increasingly privatized, and individual subjectivities have been reconstructed according to market terms. Part critique and part road map, Social Mediations begins with a critical reading of digital public pedagogies, then turns to developing a new theory that can guide a more effective writing pedagogy. LeCourt offers a theory based in embodied relationality that uses information economies to develop public spheres. She highlights how information commodities generate value through circulation, orchestrate relationships among people, and support unequal power structures. By demonstrating how we can use information capital for social change rather than market expansion, writers and readers are encouraged to seek out encounters with cultural and political impact.
Identity Matters explores the question that consistently plagues composition teachers: why do their pedagogies so often fail? Donna LeCourt suggests that the answer may lie with the very identities, values, and modes of expression higher education cultivates. In a book that does precisely what it theorizes, LeCourt analyzes student-written literacy autobiographies to examine how students interact with and challenge cultural theories of identity. This analysis demonstrates that writing instruction does, indeed, matter and has a significant influence on how students imagine their potential in both academic and cultural realms. LeCourt paints not only a compelling and vexing picture of how students interact with academic discourse as both mind and body, but also offers hope for a reconceived pedagogy of social-material writing practice.
Brings together international scholars across the social and behavioural sciences and education to address those ethical issues that arise in the theory and practice of research within the technologically advancing and culturally complex world in which we live.
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