Composition Theory

CCCC07: IP Caucus

preterite Composition Theory, Conference Notes, Openness, Writing

I’m in New York, where the 2007 meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication got underway today. I’d meant to finish up Cadet Casey’s story before the conference started, but time got away from me, so I’ll see if I can make the time to do so tomorrow before serious conference-blogging gets underway.

The Intellectual Property caucus was engaging and productive. From what I understand, a lot of what went on will be summarized at the CCCCIP site in days to come, and it’s late with an early day for me tomorrow, so I’ll be brief in my notes here. Karen Lunsford started the meeting, and while she made a number of important points and exhortations, what I found most interesting was her description of the University of Kansas’s March 10, 2005 University Council resolution, which declared the importance of access to scholarly information and called on all faculty members to ask publishers for permission “to permit the deposition of a digital copy of every article accepted by a peer-reviewed journal into [an open access] repository.” According to other people at the meeting, the University of California system is working toward a similar initiative. Such a move would have profound implications for scholars and the circulation of knowledge, and one can only hope more institutions follow suit. Charlie Lowe followed Karen, talking some about Creative Commons and the IP Caucus Open Source Software resolution, encouraging schools and faculty to explore the possibilities offered by OSS in their work and their students’ work. John Logie then spoke for a while about the relationship between the CCCC IP Committee and the CCCC IP Caucus: the caucus is essentially a task force, he said, while the committee has “administrative teeth.” While the Committee is the formal arm, he suggested, the Caucus is more of a grassroots space where radical, powerful ideas take shape. He talked about the annual “Top IP Stories” he’s working on, where people discuss the most important news stories involving intellectual property in the past year, such as the 2006 US Appeals Court decision in Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley wherein the Court ruled that the remixed re-publication of Grateful Dead concert posters qualified as fair use under Section 107 of U.S. copyright law.

After Logie spoke, the caucus broke into work groups. I was in a group dedicated to unpacking IP issues in the classroom: as Carol Havilland put it, we as composition scholars have a habit of engaging intellectual property concerns in complex conceptual ways, but then turn around and teach our students simple rules without helping them explore the rationales behind them. We wound up talking about what it would look like to teach an “ethics of citation” and what such an ethics would do and how it would work. Brian Ballentine was the one taking notes, and I’m sure he’ll recap the session with more grace and facility than mine at ccccip.org. Our small group session closed with Havilland offering an interesting proposal: it might be useful, she suggested, to look for cases to share with our colleagues where the rules we express to our students come into conflict with other rules, with institutional principles, or with what we see as ethical behavior.

Enough for tonight. Tomorrow, I present, and I’ll be attending more than a few sessions and meetings — I’ll see how well my note-taking holds up.

Update: Bradley’s blogged it, as well.

Outsider’s Hubris

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

At the moment, I’m trying to get a handle on Sraffian economics and I’m recognizing the deep poverty of my economic self-education. I’m struggling with stuff that’s beyond me, and feeling quite foolish. For a while, I’ve carried the outsider’s hubris of telling myself how smart I am for trying to import into my discipline concerns I see as hitherto ignored. I told myself I’d take a graduate course in heterodox economics, with a couple semesters of independent study as an introduction and a graduate directed study as a follow-up, and I’d be OK.

Well, not so much.

I can read some of the articles in the economics collections and journals, especially the ones that apply cultural studies or rhetorical perspectives to economic problems, like Timothy Mitchell’s excellent “The Object of Development: America’s Egypt” or Duncan Ironmonger’s “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product.” But I’m not so good with the equations, even the simple ones, until I read back through a couple times and see what’s being parsed, and even then I don’t often get it, and have to read further for context. Case in point: I’ve got Stiglitz’s 1974 review article on the Cambridge capital controversy in front of me, and it’s killing me. I know what it’s about, and I recognize the assertions, but I can’t parse the proofs. Even some of the recent evaluations of Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, which I want to use to help me get beyond the notion of marginality that neoclassical economics poses as an alternative to the labor theory of value, are giving me a hard time.

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Half Right

preterite Composition Theory, Economics

According to Shapiro and Varian’s Information Rules, “Technology changes. Economic laws do not” (2).

Well, they’re half right.

The “laws” are not laws. They’re observations about how people act. And as Shapiro and Varian’s text itself demonstrates, people act differently under different circumstances. Shapiro and Varian’s assertion about unchanging economic laws is a foolish and mistaken attempt to bluster out an assertive and authoritative ethos in the face of the fact that economies and cultures change. It strikes me as something akin to Covey’s claims about the Seven Habits: a rhetorical system composed not so much for the way it might produce knowledge as for the way it might sell books.

In fact, economic “laws” — or, more properly, observations about the ways economies work — change. In a culture driven by the engine of slave labor, understandings of scarcity, competition, and social welfare shape economic activity in ways profoundly different from the ways in which our contemporary understandings of the same phenomena — scarcity, competition, social welfare — shape economic activity.

And Shapiro and Varian’s suggestion of a constancy of economic principles is interesting in a volume that seeks to engage and understand the ways that economic change influences the way we produce, distribute, and use information. For example: they make the point that “production costs of an information good involves high fixed costs but low marginal costs. The cost of producing the first copy of an information good may be substantial, but the cost of producing (or reproducing) additional copies is negligible” (3). Sure; yes, we know this. But according to Shapiro and Varian, the capitalist must therefore “price your information goods according to consumer value, not according to your production cost” (3). OK: so when we produce an information good — a text — its value is reckoned out there in the world, and in terms of what it does for other people. And we know that information goods, especially as essays, carry higher value when they proliferate; when they’re non-scarce. In that sense, textual value is, to a degree, social and affective: when a hundred people read a personal essay, whether it’s poorly written or a polished piece, the value of that personal essay — because of the affective connection those readers are making to what the author’s saying — increases.

This understanding of textual value as social and affective might offer interesting ways for us to think about Lester Faigley’s worries in “Judging Writing, Judging Selves” that as writing teachers, we tend to like (value) the personal essay perhaps too much and for inappropriate reasons. (Yes, I admit that’s a crude and reductive summary of Faigley’s point.) But it should also point us toward the ways Amy Robillard uses Julie Lindquist’s College English essay on “Class Affects, Classroom Affectations” to re-think the affective value of student’s written labor/work, and remind us that student work is part of that immense below-the-waterline portion of the diverse economic iceberg described by J. K. Gibson-Graham following Duncan Ironmonger’s time-use studies demonstrating that less than half of gross domestic product consists of cash-commodified market transactions. It might even help to counter the arguments of those who see Peter Elbow’s points in “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking” as somehow frivolous, uncritical, or silly, given that the behaviors Peter describes are, in fact, elements of the construction of one form of economic value as aspects of consumer choice — although, again, we should understand that that form of economic value is not the only one.

And this goes back to the concern Faigley raises and Robillard elaborates: it’s easy to see and acknowledge the affective value of the personal essay, but we’re not often inclined to admit the affective value of other genres, the affective value of other forms of intellectual labor. Which is foolish, because the ways that we like instances of those other genres is an affective relationship, as well, and those ways contribute to their increased value. This is the toughest move for me to make, though: I’m not sure how willing I am to admit that simply liking a circulating instance of intellectual labor/property is an economic act.

Shapiro and Varian help me out, though in some of the key strategies they offer for entrepreneurial success. Here are two:

  • Personalize your product and personalize your pricing. This is easier to do on the Internet than on virtually any other medium since you communicate with your customers on a one-to-one basis.
  • Know thy customer. You can learn about your customer demographics by registration and about their interests by tracking their clickstream and search behavior analysis. Analyze this information to see what your customers want. (43)

Information is social, we know, and they indicate that the ways we shape and circulate it are simultaneously personal and economic. Shapiro and Varian’s advice, while grounded in a market-based perspective, offers us some interesting ways of thinking about writing and its value. Certainly, it’s in one way the same old “know your audience” advice rhetors have been familiar with for 2000 years, but when we put it into the cycle of work, appropriation, ownership, and use, it takes on a different meaning. And I love that phrase “tracking their clickstream” and want to apply it to our discipline’s thoughts about process, reading, and citation, which I think I’ll try to do in my next post.

Until then, I’ll close and say that I very much like the following texts:

Elbow, Peter. “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting out Three Forms of Judgment.” College English 55.2 (1993): 187-206.

Faigley, Lester. “Judging Writing, Judging Selves.” College Composition and Communication 40 (1989): 395-412. Rpt. Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing. Ed. Peter Elbow. Davis, CA: Hermagoras, 1994.

Ironmonger, Duncan. “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product.” Feminist Economics 2.3 (1996): 37-64.

Lindquist, Julie. “Class Affects, Classroom Affectations.” College English 67 (2004): 187-209.

Robillard, Amy. “Young Scholars Affecting Composition: A Challenge to Disciplinary Citation Practices.” College English 68.3 (2006): 253-70.

Shapiro, Carl, and Hal R. Varian. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 1998.

An Ugly Metaphor

preterite Composition Theory, Economics

Here’s a cheesy graphic that looks like it belongs in Microsoft’s Clip Art portfolio. Unfortunately, I’m afraid, it’s also my attempt to think about (1) how economic activity works qua writing and (2) how writing works within our discipline as economic activity.

work leads to appropriation leads to ownership leads to use and again back to work.

Sure: another simplistic attempt to represent how writing happens; an obvious, boring, and self-evident attempt to talk about The Process. Well, OK, not so fast, pardner: there are economic points of intervention here. Locations of heterogeneous practice and valuation.

First, on Work: this is Bruce Horner’s nuanced definition of work. This is the understanding from Terms of Work for Composition that our discipline regards and values Work in different ways, as scholarship, as pedagogy, and as the quotidian student activity of the classroom.

The value of each of those forms of work is somehow appropriated, and appropriated — according to Gibson-Graham and Resnick and Wolff — by different parties at different points in the progression from production to distribution. At the point of production, value can be appropriated in slave relations wherein the producer has no control over the conditions under which he produces (prison labor; the work of intellectuals under Stalin), feudal relations, market relations (you publish an article in order to put it on your cv and be promotable), gift relations, independent relations (you appropriate the value of your own labor), and others. I don’t have a sufficient grasp on rhetoric and the economics of distribution to be able to talk about those practices of appropriation here, but folks like Jim Ridolfo and Amy Robillard are doing smart and admirable work in that area.

Appropriation, as unavoidable economic practice, leads to various forms of textual ownership. Capitalism, as a mode of thought, concerns itself with private ownership. Socialism, as a mode of thought, concerns itself with state ownership. Communism is a mode of thought that inadequately addresses and fails to encompass public ownership, and I don’t think we yet have a term that is more adequate to that task. And as a term that addresses or attempts to address non-ownership, “The Commons” is certainly fraught with difficulties, as is “The Public Domain.” Nevertheless: work’s value is appropriated and becomes property, non-property, or something in between.

And we build upon that which has gone before; that which any entity owns. The verb that relates this act to property is “use,” and I don’t have a vocabulary for it, but “use” clearly takes us back to “work.”

I need to show this, I think, in projects — both students’ and my own — and then connect this cycle to my critique of how comp’s discourse has failed to engage a vocabulary of economy, and offer some concrete examples of work > appropriation > ownership > use > work et cetera. But that circuit, so far, is the happiest definition I have for what “economy” means in composition.

Does it work for you, or have I missed or ignored key considerations?

Spies Wanted

preterite Academia, Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

I’ve been going through this year’s CCCC program, and there are way too many things that I really want to go to: sixteen panels, two SIGs, one workshop, and one caucus. And that doesn’t even include the panels whose times interfere with one another.

Which is the reason for this post. With my scholarly interests, there’s no way I can not go and see session C.26 on “Textual Transgressions Online: Plagiarism and Fraud in Weblogs and Wikis,” but my colleagues (two Majors and a Lieutenant Colonel) are presenting at the same time at session C.11 on “The Role of Discourse Communities in the Composition Classroom at the United States Military Academy,” which — while I can easily ask them about their presentations — I’d be curious to hear what sort of questions get asked, given the preconceptions many academics have about the military. And I’d be even more curious to hear what Daisy Miller has to say about our Cadets at session C.14, as would my colleagues. (Why would the two panels that deal with my specific institution be scheduled at the same time?)

So if you have any interest in either of the latter two panels, I’d be grateful to hear whatever impressions you might have of them in a couple months. I’m very much looking forward to (once again) posting my notes and impressions of the sessions I’m able to attend.

Writing’s Economic Phenomenology

preterite Composition Theory, Economics

Scholars have trajectories, traced by the contrail arcs of their intellectual projects. As a newly minted professor, I’ve been thinking about what mine might be: how do I characterize what I’ve been working on and what I want to continue to work on as a line across the sky of my discipline?

What I’m doing, I think, is trying to develop an economic phenomenology of student writing, and with it a language of value that can talk about why people want to write that moves beyond the instrumental. Instrumentality we know quite well: do X and get Y. Barter and exchange: simple transactions. The richer field, though, is the motivation that inheres within the moment, the act of writing for writing qua writing. So I’m putting together unlikely bedfellows — Elbow and the so-called expressivist compositionists with Gibson-Graham and the so-called Marxian economists — but with a specific attention to moment, to the temporally present acts of writerly production, circulation, and distribution. I’m not much interested in questions of history — “Where did this come from?” and “What will this lead to?” — except as phenomenologically enacted: “What is this doing now?” This isn’t to say that I support any sort of ahistoricity: it’s just that economic analysis as applied to composition pedagogy too easily lends itself, as we see in the literature, to an abnegation of responsibility; to the sometimes irresponsible assertions that current problems are best thought about in terms of their past causes or future consequences, rather than considering — as Elbow, Emig, and others show us — possible immediate interventions.

J. K. Gibson-Graham describes some problematic tendencies in economic thought that I see some of the literature in composition as still taking for granted as foundational assumptions: “the tendency to represent economy as a space of invariant logics and automatic unfolding that offered no field for intervention; [and] the tendency to constitute ‘the’ economy as a singular capitalist system or space rather than as a zone of cohabitation and contestation among multiple economic forms” (xxi). (See, as an outstanding example, Giroux’s recent JAC piece.) As writing teachers, I believe we understand that such ways of thinking are inadequate, and yet the vocabulary with which we have been left to understand economic concerns is so fundamentally incommensurate with our understanding of day-to-day pedagogical practice — with the daily fact of being and teaching and writing in the classroom — that we simply don’t talk about economy except as something taking place outside the classroom. Our economic attitudes remove us from the classroom scene and moment of the creation of intellectual and affectual value.

That’s, as I see it, my contrail. It starts in definitional concerns and the idea of an economic vocabulary for composition, develops into notions about the multiplicity of valuations for writing, and attempts to begin to address the place of open source economic concepts in the the classroom. Beyond that, I’m not sure what it might look like, other than a thin and incomplete white line across a wide blue sky.

Top Rhet/Comp Schools?

preterite Academia, Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Rhetoric

A military colleague asked me today for advice about doctoral programs in composition and rhetoric. This colleague has a M.A. in English and several years of experience teaching and administrating writing courses, and is thinking about taking early retirement from the military and wondering where to go and what factors to consider. Of course it depends what areas you’re interested in, I said, and noted that it’s generally not a good idea to pursue a PhD without full funding from the institution (ideally with a 1/1 load for the TAship and the opportunity to teach and design a variety of courses) and health insurance, and it’s awfully nice (from my experience) to have a TA union, and so on. But programs themselves? Well, there are published and online guides, I know, but my colleague got me thinking, and so I’m curious as to what the proverbial word on the street might be:

What, in your opinion, are the ten best PhD programs in rhetoric and composition?

Of course, the criteria themselves for ‘best’ are open to debate, and again, it depends on what one’s scholarly interests are. I’d certainly expect to see Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, UT Austin, Michigan State, Carnegie Mellon, and Syracuse at or near the top of a lot of lists, and I’ve got strong feelings about the excellence of other programs as well — Pitt for its unique and compelling cultural studies approach, and UMass and UNH for their deep (and evolving) historical investment in the process approach — so I’ll ask: what do you think? What would your top 10 be, and what would you say their particular areas of excellence are?

Where do you admire?

The Plagiarist as Pokémon

preterite Composition Theory, Openness

pokemon beastie The ongoing debate surrounding TurnItIn and other plagiarism detection services (PDSs) has taken some interesting turns. Sharon Gerald has smart insights and suggestions about how teachers might deploy such services in their classrooms, to which I can only say: go, read, now. But I’m particularly interested when Clancy suggests that “the anti-PDS arguments… don’t address the underlying principles enough,” and I agree with her that we need to talk about those underlying principles more — but those principles are also why I disagree with the way she casts the debate. So, to sort this out (and I’m sure she’ll correct me if I’m misrepresenting her position), for Clancy the foundational question seems to be: if plagiarism must be detected in order to prevent it, how do we construct the work of the composition course in order to facilitate that detection and prevention?

pokemon beastie In Clancy’s words, “What exactly do you do at the moment of encounter with that paper that you’re 99.9% sure is plagiarized?” According to Clancy, in the past, such certainty came from the “intuition” of professors. First point of disagreement: it’s not “intuition” at all; it’s the instructor’s familiarity with previous drafts and strong engagement with the students’ style, which — in my experience — develops very early in the FYC semester. In other words, what Clancy calls “intuition” is a product of the way the contemporary composition course is constructed (or, OK, at least my composition course). So in that sense, the moment of detection has already happened, by virtue of the way we teach. It sounds to me like Clancy’s actually asking for verification, for which she offers five methods, four of which I use: Googling, talking to the student, requiring a paper trail, and requiring multiple drafts. (I agree that the ethics interview and “originality report” are obnoxiously didactic and sanctimonious.) Clancy says talking to the student can make the student angry, to which I’d reply: not necessarily, especially if you say to the student something like, “I notice your style and tone changed markedly in this paper. Can you tell me about your writerly decisions regarding audience? What sources and positions are you drawing from here?”

pokemon beastie More confusing to me is Clancy’s assertion that asking students to show their “paper trails” — their notes as well as their drafts — fosters an attitude that students are guilty until proven innocent. I don’t see how this can be so: making those trails visible and helping students to see that essays don’t spring fully formed from the foreheads of their authors is, for me, part of the processual work of the composition classroom. But then I see what Clancy’s saying: she’s assuming that showing the paper trail is done in service of plagiarism detection. It’s a similar case with Clancy’s assertion about submitting multiple drafts and “sources to compare the drafts to” in order to detect plagiarism: if one understands, rather, that writing gets produced in class, that the work of the writing class is writing, then those drafts are produced as an organic function of the course, as in-class material product (and, OK, evidence) of its valuable intellectual labor. And the instructor doesn’t have to “micromanage” at all — my students produce generative writing in class, respond to one another and revise, and so when I see the final document with all the evidence of textual work that preceded it, I spend the most time with their one-page reflective letters where they describe to me what changed and what didn’t, where they got stuck and un-stuck, what strategies they used, and why. Ultimately, I think Clancy runs into trouble when she sees that sloppy, recursive writerly process as serving plagiarism detection and prevention, rather than seeing the avoidance of plagiarism emerging organically from the processes that good writers use.

pokemon beastie And that perspectival shift is precisely my problem with TurnItIn: the enactment of an argument about how to best use PDSs performs an epistemological shift that causes us to privilege plagiarism prevention as the overriding goal, and to see all other aspects of composing as serving that end. TurnItIn privileges the appropriative moment and positions plagiarizers as Pokémon, telling composition teachers, “Gotta catch ’em all!” So criminalized, they must all be caught and punished. Of course, this language (consider Clancy’s use of “burden of proof”) is perfectly in line with the popular media rhetoric on plagiarism pointed out by Rebecca Moore Howard; language that constructs plagiarism as the ultimate “deadly sin” punishable by the “academic death penalty.” Such a language of criminality and the privileging of property rights obscures the way that writers work, cite, collaborate, argue, and respond to one another. But see, there are two impulses in Pokémon: the accumulative impulse (“Gotta catch ’em all!”) but also the give-and-take engagement of playing one card against another, one Pokémon against another, the pleasure in the way that texts and writers engage another. My problems with TurnItIn are that the ideological blinkers it offers show us only one value for writing — and, further, that it indicates to students that it’s perfectly acceptable for one party to appropriate that value while another party is criminalized for performing the same appropriation.

pokemon beastie I’ll whisper here my dark and unspeakable secret: dear reader, I won’t lose sleep if I fail to catch and punish every single wicked, evil plagiarist. Sure, I notice the odd changes of voice and style, and every time I’ve noticed such shifts (every semester save one since 1998), I’ve confirmed that there was indeed a problem, and followed up on it. But if The Doomful Specter of Academic Plagiarism called me before him to pass judgment upon my pedagogy and told me that I’d been found wanting — told me that a student had, heaven forbid, Gotten Over — I’d be like, “Well, OK. So?” Does that in some way invalidate my entire pedagogy? Does that show what a jacked-up terrible instructor I am? Does that show that said student learned nothing from the course and thereby offer a reason why we must use machines to hunt down and mercilessly exterminate the relentlessly proliferative scourge of plagiarism committed by the lazy and amoral students populating our courses?

pokemon beastie Well, here’s a thought. A while back, writing teachers were cheered by the arrival of a technological solution to the relentlessly proliferative scourge of spelling errors committed by the lazy and illiterate students populating their courses. Today, there’s a substantial body of empirical evidence pointing to the radical increase in homonym and wrong word errors in student writing following the rise in popularity of spelling checkers in word processing applications. So tell me: what kind of increase in ethical errors might we imagine seeing in student writing, if we were to pass along to machines the apparently overly onerous task of actually paying attention to how our students write?

Monuments

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Openness

In some ways, I may have it easier than instructors at other institutions when it comes to the question of plagiarism: here, our plagiarism policy is graven in stone.

Literally.

Here, plagiarism as a violation of the honor code becomes a matter of who one is, a performance of identity, as the intersection of an economic interaction (the appropriation of someone else’s written labor) with the affectual response to experience (that dreadful desperate sensation of feeling overwhelmed by work combined with the moral nausea at thinking of betraying ideals).

Which is why I’m so interested that my hometown newspaper has picked up the recent and ongoing discussion of how appropriate technological and profit-based responses are to such matters. One wishes those who have picked up the Post story or responded to its branches in other venues (I won’t link to the ugly, bigoted, redneck parochial crap that the Wichita Eagle allows to remain on its site) might have first read Rebecca Moore Howard’s insightful and compelling rhetorical analyses of our ongoing discussion of plagiarism. One wishes those who have picked up the Post story might have consulted folks with some expertise on the topic of writing, writing instruction, and plagiarism — but of course, as Howard points out, the issue of plagiarism is all too easily argumentatively reduced to judgments of instructors good versus students bad, students steal versus scholars borrow, neutral technology versus ethical decisions.

Take, for example, Platypus Matt’s repeated assertions in the Kairosnews threads (I know Matt, and I like Matt, and I figure he knows that here I’m not dissing but disagreeing) that “the victim” in cases of plagiarism is “the teacher.” Student bad, teacher good, innocence violated by rapacity. But how is the teacher “the victim” of plagiarism? How has the teacher lost or been injured? Matt quite explicitly dismisses the notion of the value of student work, and instead clearly constructs plagiarism as a concern of authority and pride: the student pulled one over on the teacher. The only way in which I could agree with such a perspective would be by asserting that I expect to always be in a position of knowledge and experience superior to that of my students — and that’s an assertion I’ll never make. Matt’s arguments seem to me to evacuate student writing of its implicit value as work.

Yet, at the same time, I’m very much inclined to agree with Matt’s strong critique of the discursive equation of writing to property. Writing isn’t scarce and solely owned intellectual capital, as Matt rightly points out: it’s in fact, a complicated amalgam of productive and distributive processes. Writing is produced by a complex interaction of social relations, labor, and technology; so, too, do those same factors of technology, labor, and social relations interact in profoundly complex ways to distribute writing. In both the production and the distribution of writing, we see information as necessarily constructed by human labor, and therein lies our concern with its appropriation.

The problem that I see is that TurnItIn.com performs precisely that same appropriation while simultaneously uglifying our relationships with our students. TurnItIn.com is an inherently suspicious technology of surveillance, sending to our students the message that none of them are sufficiently trustworthy in our eyes. I suppose I could be accused of having the luxury of that big stone monument and everything that goes along with it to rest my indulgence upon — but I’ve felt the same at other institutions, as well. More importantly, though, TurnItIn.com appropriates the value of student writing for the sake of its own profits, while at the same time criminalizing students for the very same practice. In other words, TurnItIn.com stands as a monument of staggering hypocrisy — and that’s not a monument I’m going to erect in my classroom.

Accepted

preterite Class (Marxian), Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

Looks like I’ll be in NYC this spring, and among fine company, judging by the rhet-comp blogosphere’s activity today. I submitted an individual CCCC proposal for the first time since 2000, and I’ve been placed into a panel titled “Capitalism, Commodification, and Consumerism,” so I’m definitely eager to see who I’ll be presenting with. And happy and grateful, as always, to have the opportunity to share what I’m working on.

My presentation’s current title is “Identity as Economic Activity: Representing Class from the Wealth of Nations to the Wealth of Networks.” I’m planning to do things differently this year: I’ll try to write it as a journal article first, and then condense it down to presentation length in order to (I hope) get some helpful feedback before sending it out.

Abstract follows, for those who might be interested.

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