Repurposing Composition: Feminist Interventions for a Neoliberal Age

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.

Shari J. Stenberg is associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of Composition Studies through a Feminist Lens and Professing and Pedagogy: Learning the Teaching of English.