Various Anxieties

My dissertation’s first chapter is close to done. With two different drafts on understanding student writing as economic activity to be put together for Chapter 5, I’ve got a solid start there. Chapter 2, my overview of the various ways rhetoric and composition talks about class, is about halfway done. But I’m stuck in my thinking about Chapter 3, which was originally intended to connect Bourdieu’s relational multiplicity of classes to Gibson-Graham’s diverse model of capitalism: it feels like the logic just isn’t working, and it feels like it strays too far from the context of the writing classroom. I’d originally thought that I could simply shift the chapter’s focus a bit to a look at how the concept of class functions within the new distributed economy (i.e., distributed production and consumption rather than mass production and consumption) and connect that to what I see as James Berlin’s somewhat superannuated Marxian understanding of the connections between composition and economics, but that still feels like it’s too far from the writing classroom. I mean, I’m doing a dissertation within the field of rhetoric and composition, but so much of my focus on the new distributed economy as context seems so tough to connect to actually teaching writing, and so I’m feeling like I’ve wandered out into the wilderness here.

Other stuff on my plate: working on CCCC proposals, and I’m applying for a university dissertation fellowship, for which I need to draft a brief personal statement, which is — in terms of genre — kind of a weird document. As best as I can understand it, the statement should a (very) little bit about me and my background, and a lot more about why I’m doing this research and where it’s going. So I’ll bring up my experience as an enlisted soldier in the Army who used the G.I. Bill to fund my education, and my undergrad experience moving from a very expensive private university to a community college to a public state university, as my initial experiences of the intersection of class and economic issues with higher education and part of my motivation for undertaking this dissertation project. But then the rest of it is me saying why this dissertation project is valuable and important, what it’ll contribute to my discipline and to the academic community, what might follow it — so, yeah, right now I’m feeling a little anxious about essentially having to justify my academic existence. And part of me (with the sudden paranoid worry that somebody who’s on the fellowship committee might read this) asks, “But I really like teaching, too, so am I really sure I even want this fellowship?” Well, yeah, sure I do, and one hopes that ambivalence is no great crime: ultimately, I’ll be happy if I get it, but happy as well if someone else is more deserving.

All right: enough whining. To work, to work.