ABSTRACT
Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era calls on the field of writing studies to take up a necessary agenda of social and economic change in its classrooms, its scholarship, and its communities to challenge the rise of neoliberalism and right-wing nationalism.
Grown out of an extended national dialogue among public intellectuals, academic scholars, and writing teachers, collectively known as the Writing Democracy project, the book creates a strategic roadmap for how to reclaim the progressive and political possibilities of our field in response to the "twilight of neoliberalism" (Cox and Nilsen), ascendant right-wing nationalism at home (Trump) and abroad (Le Pen, Golden Dawn, UKIP), and hopeful radical uprisings (Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring). As such, the book tracks the emergence of a renewed left wing in rhetoric and activism post-2008, suggests how our work as teachers, scholars, and administrators can bring this new progressive framework into our institutions, and then moves outward to our role in activist campaigns that are reshaping public debate.
Part history, part theory, this book will be an essential read for faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in composition and rhetoric and related fields focused on progressive pedagogy, university-community partnerships, and politics.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part Part I|84 pages
Mapping the Political Turn
chapter 3|9 pages
“Organize as If It Were Possible to Create a Movement That Will Change the World”
part Part II|66 pages
Variations on the Political Turn
chapter 6|12 pages
“I’d Like to Overthrow Capitalism, But Meanwhile, I Would Like the Nazis to be Completely Demoralized”
chapter 10|12 pages
Sustainable Audiences/Renewable Products
chapter 11|13 pages
The Political Turn and the Two-Year College
part Part III|98 pages
Taking the Political Turn