“Insightful, well-written, and a valuable contribution to feminist rhetoric and composition, especially feminist writing pedagogy and feminist writing program administration.”
—Elizabeth Flynn, Michigan Technological University
"Stenberg’s work toward a feminist ethic of repurposing illustrates how scholars of rhetoric and composition have engaged in pedagogical practices that, if we remain attentive to them, can help us recognize, intervene in, and repurpose the excesses and erasures of education in a neoliberal age."
—Composition Forum
In Repurposing Composition, Shari J. Stenberg responds to the increasing neoliberal discourse of academe through the feminist practice of repurposing. In doing so, she demonstrates how tactics informed by feminist praxis can repurpose current writing pedagogy, assessment, public engagement, and other dimensions of writing education.
Stenberg disrupts entrenched neoliberalism by looking to feminism’s long history of repurposing “neutral” practices and approaches to the rhetorical tradition, the composing process, and pedagogy. She illuminates practices of repurposing in classroom moments, student writing, and assessment work, and she offers examples of institutions, programs, and individuals that demonstrate a responsibility approach to teaching and learning as an alternative to top-down accountability logic.
Repurposing Composition is a call for purposes of work in composition and rhetoric that challenge neoliberal aims to emphasize instead a public-good model that values difference, inclusion, and collaboration.