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Reimagining the Social Turn: New Work from the Field 481 Reimagining the Social Turn: New Work from the Field Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander he impetus for this special issue of College English stems from our sense that T the initial assumptions and theoretical bases upon which the social turn in composition studies emerged have shifted again. An influx of new scholars and teachers, new theoretical models, and new reflections on practice has worked steadily to interrogate notions of identity-based politics and ask instead how writing might move beyond the articulation of difference to address questions of social inequity and social justice from more systemic and intersectional standpoints. Informed by work from feminist compositionists (Micciche; Rhodes), an increased critical reflection on service learning (Goldblatt; Parks), and a desire to think more intersectionally about identity (Middleton; Pough; Wallace), we turn again to reimagine how writing and how our understanding of what writing is and does can intervene in critical conversations about cultural, political, and socioeconomic conditions that shape the theoretical and material realities of our work. Such intervention is of import not just for composition studies but for the larger field of English studies as well, for a number of reasons. Such theoretical shifts within Jacqueline Rhodes is professor of English at California State University San Bernardino. Her scholarly work focuses on intersections of rhetoric, materiality, and technology, and has been published in a variety of venues, including CCC, JAC, Computers and Composition, Enculturation, and Rhetoric Review. She is the author of Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency: From Manifesto to Modem (SUNY, 2005) and, with Jonathan Alexander, On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies (NCTE, 2014). Grounded in her past professional life as a graphic designer and typesetter, she also focuses her energies on creative work, including multimedia installations, movies, and websites. 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. College English, Volume 76, Number 6, July 2014
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 conceptualize 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 focusing primarily on instructional practice, as James Berlin writes in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, it examines and critiques the signifying practices that shape subject formation 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 socioeconomic and cultural disparities. Space limitations do not allow us to explicate fully the 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 the form of the composing 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 commitment, 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 Bizzell s call to teach a critical consciousness shifted how many compositionists 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, compositionists attuned to the vicissitudes of class bring to attention the needs of workingclass 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 certainly 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.
Reimagining the Social Turn: New Work from the Field 485 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 intertwining 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 addressing 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, ethnicity, 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 (dis)connections between education and activism in Rhetorical Education and Student Activism. 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 emphasis 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 beginning, especially in the context of those systemic economic and material challenges mentioned earlier, we are reminded of Jacqueline 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. W o r k s C i t e d Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1996. Print.
Reimagining the Social Turn: New Work from the Field 487 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 Grassroots Political Activism. Composition Forum 21. compositionforum.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.