Reclaiming Accountability
Improving Writing Programs through Accreditation and Large-Scale Assessments
foreword by Pamela Takayoshi
“This book will strongly poke at and rattle our thinking about writing studies and research, about what we are doing in writing classrooms, and about how, why, and where we write.”
—Martha Brenckle, University of Central Florida
“This book is needed in the field of writing studies. The contributors’ thinking about conceptual questions that go to the heart of our discipline—how have our epistemological positions toward writing and methods become normative in damaging ways?—is illuminating, insightful, and educational.”
—Pamela Takayoshi, Kent State University
Re/Orienting Writing Studies is an exploration of the intersections among queer theory, rhetoric, and research methods in writing studies. Focusing careful theoretical attention on common research practices, this collection demonstrates how queer rhetorics of writing/composing, textual analysis, history, assessment, and embodiment/identity significantly alter both methods and methodologies in writing studies. The chapters represent a diverse set of research locations and experiences from which to articulate a new set of innovative research practices.
While the humanities have engaged queer theory extensively, research methods have often been hermeneutic or interpretive. At the same time, social science approaches in composition research have foregrounded inquiry on human participants but have often struggled to understand where lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people fit into empirical research projects. Re/Orienting Writing Studies works at the intersections of humanities and social science methodologies to offer new insight into using queer methods for data collection and queer practices for framing research.
Contributors: Chanon Adsanatham, Jean Bessette, Nicole I. Caswell, Michael J. Faris, Hillery Glasby, Deborah Kuzawa, Maria Novotny, G Patterson, Stacey Waite, Stephanie West-Puckett
