Precarious Citizenship: Ambivalence, Literacy, and Prisoner Reentry

Precarious Citizenship: Ambivalence, Literacy and Prisoner Reentry examines the role of literacy in the experiences of formerly incarcerated people as they navigate the process of reentry into mainstream citizenry. I argue that the unsustainability of mass incarceration has created uncertainty about the place of formerly incarcerated people in the democratic imaginary, opening for debate who deserves to participate in civic life. In response, higher education is increasingly being called upon to address the precarious citizenship of formerly incarcerated people and, I argue, serves to credential formerly incarcerated people not only for future employment but for inclusion in social life. The literacy narratives these individuals tell, however, are marked by an ambivalence toward the power of literacy as a mechanism for inclusion, as well as an ambivalence toward mainstream inclusion itself

Fugitive administrative rhetorics

This article is a work in defining fugitivity in writing program administration. We return to the intersecting phenomena of the pandemic, of climate change, of state-sanctioned violence, of gerrymandering, and of stolen rights. We recognize the complicity writing programs have with this status quo, and we hope that Fugitive Administrative Rhetorics is a helpful framework for developing WPA practices that diverge from this complicity. Our writing is intended to acknowledge a deep scholarly debt within rhetoric and composition to the first fugitives of the academic space, the multiply marginalized students and faculty that built the undercommons: Black, Indigenous, Latinx, queer, women, immigrant, neurodivergent

Against social death: rhetorical resilience at the intersection of higher education and the prison

“Against Social Death: Rhetorical Resilience at the Intersection of Higher Education and the Prison” is a qualitative study of the experiences of formerly incarcerated people who participated in college programming in prison or upon their release. Throughout, I argue that incarcerated people engage in everyday rhetorical practice in their resistance to social death. Specifically, I chronicle how the convergence of higher education and the prison produces new rhetorical possibilities through which these students’ rhetorical resilience is strengthened, amplified, and practiced in new ways. At the same time, while research participants often say these college-in-prison programs are life-changing, even life-saving, they rarely report that they are able to leverage their education for material gains once they are released. This notion runs counter to common literacy myths about higher education in prison, which suggest that advanced literacy leads to better economic opportunities and greater assimilation with mainstream society for people who are lacking in both opportunity and ability. By focusing on moments of convergence between everyday rhetorical resistance and the privileged practices of the university, “Against Social Death” examines how incarcerated college students navigate academic practices to create an identity and social connectedness that is habitable, authentic, and resistant to the social mechanisms and logics that would reduce them to absence, automation, and powerlessness. Most significantly, my dissertation envisions pedagogy that can facilitate these students’ educational goals without leaving unchallenged the carceral logics that frame them in deficit terms. My work offers guidance for literacy educators working with marginalized students, but ultimately, I argue that a commitment to equity and justice cannot be addressed through the writing classroom alone and requires other forms of political action