Writing Against The Curriculum: Anti-Disciplinarity in the Writing and Cultural Studies Classroom (Cultural Studies/Pedagogy/Activism) - Tapa dura

Writing against the Curriculum makes a significant and timely contribution to critical conversations about the place and status of the fields/areas of composition, rhetoric, and cultural studies. This collection is especially timely given substantial institutional pressures to rationalize writing, inquiry, and pedagogy into commodifiable and assessable forms; and, by demands to professionalize and package these fields as 'disciplines.' While Kristensen and Claycomb accurately refer to their collection as "border writing" (in Giroux's sense of the term), the text also has the critical, creative, and resistant energy of an affinity group-struggling within the nexus of classrooms, academic institutions, and neoliberalism. Writing against the Curriculum is a must read for students and faculty devoted to, in the words of Kristensen and Claycomb, "making space for the unruly, the resistant, and the radical" in composition, rhetoric, and cultural studies. -- Kevin Mahoney, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Composition, Kutztown University This volume is the guide book to anti-disciplinary living and teaching we've been waiting for. Composition and cultural studies come together here to expose the fractures in the corporate university, with its efforts to streamline production, contain difference, and turn out recognizable, disciplined commodities. Writing against such a limited curriculum, the scholar-activists included in this volume collectively seek to unleash all that is excessive and unruly about learning, teaching, and writing. In doing so, they position the writing classroom not as a mere gateway to disciplinarity and professionalization. Instead, the writing classroom here becomes a resistant location where new forms of knowledge, new ways of thinking and writing, and unexpected but vital forms of critical conviviality are generated. -- Robert Mcruer, author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and is a professor of English at George Washington University Writing against the Curriculum provides a timely and needed response for how Composition Studies and Cultural Studies can resist these trends, implement theory across pedagogical and programmatic contexts, and build anti-disciplinary praxis into an increasingly disciplined academy. * Composition Studies *

Writing against the Curriculum responds to the popularity of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and similar programs in U.S. higher education. Essays by administrators, faculty, and librarians-teaching introductory and advanced writing classes-argue that such classrooms make excellent spaces to question disciplinarity through the study of rhetoric, critical thinking, and curricular flexibility. This intervention in composition and cultural studies discourses enables the activist enactment of cultural studies' theory and addresses the theoretical implications of composition practices.