ABSTRACT
The rhetorical norms around scholarly engagement presume that scholars participate in activist work outside their professional spaces. The avatar of the activist-scholar is the energetic graduate student who fulfills their academic responsibilities while also pursuing activist interests in the “community.” This chapter argues the presumption that activist rhetoricians and other scholars must traverse the border between academy and community reifies the border between the engaged scholar and academia itself. Rhetorical studies, and higher education generally, have always to some degree been invested in traversing the campus-community border. Rhetorical studies, both its communication and composition manifestations, came of age alongside the land grant movement. The most striking rhetorical move associated with hegemonic models of engaged scholarship is the production of borders in order to transgress them. The rhetoric of engaged scholarship partakes in bordering practices that mobilize scholars’ activist energies toward a pre-figured model of the non-academic community and away from the cruelty of the academy itself.
