Comments and criticisms greatly welcomed. This chapter structure sets out to prove the arguments I make (in very rough form) here and here. But it’s pretty dry stuff, and probably of little interest to anyone not on my committee.
Yes, I’m a big geek for doing this on a Friday night. But it’s been snowing for a while, and we’re supposed to get eight to ten inches — our first real New England snow of the year — and I rented the first Alien movie, which I’m fixin to go watch.
And I gotta say, I’ve lately preferred Profokiev or Sibelius for listening to while I put these entries together, but tonight, the Clash’s 3-disc Clash on Broadway is pretty dang excellent for doing academic work.
Chapter 1: Efficiency and equity in the discourses of computers and composition. Understanding how computers and composition thinks about what computers do and what computers are. Feenberg’s discussion of the instrumental view of technology. Literacy as a technology. Common construction of the cultural and economic contexts within which technologies operate as transcendent and beyond change. Instrumental use of technologies within those unchangeable structures for individual class mobility.
Chapter 2: Methodology for selection of texts. Situating context for discussion. Marxian versus sociological definitions of class. Overview of the different definitions and interpretations of class and class mobility, and the ways in which those definitions and interpretations act across overlapping and concentric contexts.
Chapter 3: The manifestations and elisions of class discourse in the discipline of composition and in the sub-discipline of computers and composition. How critical pedagogy, despite its Marxist history, has done away with class discourse.
Chapter 4: The manifestations and elisions of class discourse in discussions of higher education and the information economy. Analysis of the apparently inseparable connection of class to economic concerns. Diversity of classed contexts of higher education (community colleges, state schools, elite schools). Reproduction of class structure; class as relational within that structure, and within and across diverse contexts.
Chapter 5: Bourdieu on structural understandings of class systems and relational definitions of class. Overlapping determinants of class. Comparison of discourses of class in Chapters 3 and 4. Recap and elaborate upon overlapping and concentric contexts from Chapter 2. Problem of monolithically reproducible class structures with diverse and relational definitions of class. Cutural capital and commodification. Economic component of Bourdieu’s work.
Chapter 6: Diverse economies and overdetermination. Gibson-Graham’s anti-essentialist views of class and alternatives to capitalism. Williams on commodification. Porter on economic localization and anti-transcendent understandings of economy. Localization as relational. Computers as material artifacts of local culture; possibility of situating computers in non-instrumental and non-commodified relationships.
Chapter 7: Problems of economic value in commodification. Relation of commodified value to ownership. Horner on use value and exchange value; Trimbur on value and circulation of texts. Connection of class to ownership and commodification. Alternative constructions of ownership in the open-source/open-access movement and their connections to digital reproducibility and circulation. Cultural value in textual collaboration. Open-source economics. Dyer-Witheford on computers, capital, communication, and the disruption of class structures.
Chapter 8: Conclusions and directions for future research based on non-essentialist and overdetermined understandings of class. Necessity for economic understandings of the wired writing classroom. How such understandings can inform composition’s views of class and literacy. Possibilities for classroom research. How such research might change classroom practice.
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