Spent most of this gloriously warm and breezy and sunny spring day sitting out on the deck, letting the girls sniff around in their little circumscribed patch of outside-ness (they’re not allowed to go down the steps, because the steps lead to real outside-ness, with a very busy road right out front), and finishing drafting my proposal for the UNH Conference. And, well, doing a couple hundred pages of Hardt and Negri, too, and paging idly through the new Harper’s that came in the mail today, and putting off looking at the latest College English, but I’ll just share the UNH proposal, for now (which, aside from some contextualizing, is basically Chapter 4 of the dissertation). Keep your fingers crossed for me?
The Diverse Economy and the Wired Writing Classroom: Rethinking Instrumental Perspectives on Computers and Class Mobility
Jeffrey Grabill and Charles Moran have both commented on the apparent reluctance of scholars in computers and composition to directly address issues of class: aside from work by Grabill, Moran, LeCourt, and Hawisher & Selfe, the twenty-year history of computers and composition offers very little on the topic. Furthermore, even in the broader field of composition, scholars’ references to the economic inequalities that produce and are sustained by class difference often assume that the roots and causes of those economic inequalities are perfectly understood, while seldom making reference to the work of economists. This presentation suggests that, in composition’s talk of class and economic inequality, recourse to economic experts is a useful place from which to begin.
Economist J.K. Gibson-Graham posits, as an alternative to conceptions of capitalism’s monolithic and all-consuming profit-seeking nature, a diverse economy, wherein market transactions hold equal status with gift, barter, and other forms of transaction. This presentation uses the materialist work of Bruce Horner on the use value and exchange value of student writing to contend that these diverse transactions are enacted as much in the writing classroom as they are in other cultural spaces; however, in the instrumental discourse of education — in which technology and literacy are both seen as instruments or tools, to be used for upward mobility — the economic components of these transactions are inadequately understood.
With the economic subtext of composition’s discourse on class mobility made explicit, scholars can more adequately understand how constructing our economy as diverse offers students greater possibilities for upward mobility — and for resisting domination and exploitation — through their writing. For Gibson-Graham, capitalism is fragmented and contradictory, stitched together as a patchwork of a million smaller interrelated economies and processes: the state economy of taxes and services interacts with the corporate economy of products and investments, which interacts with the cultural economy of ideas and fashions, which interacts with the social economy of relationships and communications, all of them and more subdividable into even smaller economies of exploitative and nonexploitative processes, commodities and noncommodities, goods and services and gifts and ideas. These small spaces, Gibson-Graham contends, are where societal change takes place. Students’ literate practices within such spaces can transcend their too-common construction as little more than knowledge workers in the information economy.
This presentation will conclude by examining ways in which teaching practices in the wired composition classroom can help to construct alternatives to the role of future knowledge workers for students, offering a pedagogy influenced both by contemporary interpretations of critical pedagogy and by the emerging values of the open source / open access movement associated with Lawrence Lessig and others. Such a pedagogy reconstructs composition’s role in higher education as extending far beyond the merely instrumental, and offers scholars in computers and composition a way to talk explicitly and directly about the intersection of technology with class and inequality.
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