In response to speculations about the impending obsolescence of higher education's most emblematic sites, I explore how campuses thrive by fostering civically vibrant and not-strictly-curricular forms of writing and rhetoric. I draw from the spatial turn in rhetoric/composition, as well as from scholarship on the field's civic aims, to reframe rhetorical education and college writing as location-based activities tied less exclusively to formal instructional spaces and more dynamically to the campuses within which they emerge. Taking UC Irvine as a case study, I combine ethnographic research with analysis of archival materials to elucidate how three features of campus life—campus planning, campus organizations, and campus publications—encourage students and other inhabitants to participate as writers and rhetors in the ongoing development of the civic geography. After focusing on cocurricular manifestations of rhetorical education and college writing in the first three chapters, I move in the final chapter to consider formal instruction through the lens of this rejuvenated conceptualization of the institutional terrain. Ultimately, by concluding with an analysis of how and why writing and rhetoric instructors draw pedagogical inspiration from their campuses, I hope to position "Campus Life" as a timely and practical intervention into debates about the future of these multifaceted sites.

In this dissertation, I trace the figure of youth through three sites of rhetorical education since the mid-twentieth century, analyzing how our investments in youth are “always already” infused with political economic logics and values. I explore how we engage youth in our disciplinary conversations, what we rely on it to do, what it does unbeknownst to us, and how it both facilitates and limits our critical pedagogical ambitions. Through this inquiry, I intervene in ongoing discussions about how capitalism has changed and threatened the work we do in higher education by considering some of the smaller, more slippery ways that neoliberalism moves through our academic and intellectual spaces. As I track the depth and breadth of capitalism’s influence in rhetorical education, I tune in to affect, a powerful pedagogical medium in the neoliberal age and, I ultimately argue, a vital and capacious creative mode through which we might locate new possibilities for rhetorical education and rhetorical agency in this moment.

Feminist theorists have chronicled lesbian feminists’ role in developing a theoretical and political foundation for the academic fields of gender studies and queer theory. Many queer theorists have critiqued lesbian feminists’ rigid policing of lesbian identity, noting that this often resulted in the exclusion of women of color, trans women, and sex radicals from lesbian communities. However, there is little work that chronicles the political, racial, and gender diversity among lesbian feminists. As a result, lesbian feminism is frequently depicted as a social movement solely comprised of white, cisgender women, erasing the major political, theoretical, and cultural contributions that women of color and trans women made to these communities. Such depictions fix lesbian feminism’s political legacy and minimize its significance to contemporary social movements.

“A Woman’s Place” traces the relationship between lesbian feminist history and contemporary popular culture in the U.S., illuminating lesbian feminism’s influence on the queer and feminist political movements of today. This cultural history draws from my archival research at the Lesbian Herstory archives, the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, along with the special collections at Michigan State University and Smith College. In addition to archival research, my methods include textual analysis, political economic analysis, and ethnographic interviews. Through critical readings of letters, newspapers, and organizational documents chronicling major political conflicts from lesbian feminist history, I argue that the persistent tension and disagreement within lesbian feminist communities was a mark of their political diversity. I contrast these historical conflicts with contemporary depictions of lesbianism in popular culture, which circulate and reinterpret lesbian feminist political legacies. Using a range of examples, including an indie pop band, an Amazon original television series, and a viral Instagram account, I analyze how lesbian feminist conflicts over race, gender, and sexuality play out in contemporary contexts. I argue that the political questions and concerns animating lesbian feminism remain relevant for queer and feminist thinkers and activists today, particularly regarding the persistence of a gendered division of power and the importance of building alternative social and economic institutions for women. Focusing on this history of collaborative struggle helps to both illuminate our political present and map a path forward for the future.

Feeling Engaged: College Writers as Literacy Tutors brings together scholarship in the rhetoric of emotion and in civic writing to show how emotions - confidence, anger, embarrassment, pride, hope, fear, gratitude, guilt, shame, compassion, enthusiasm, and ennui - shape the roles we take on in K-16 literacy networks. This dissertation takes as a case study the community-engaged composition courses, poetry workshops, and literature classes I coordinated in 2011-2013. The undergraduates I led in this work tutored K-12 students in after-school centers and public schools in Mexican American communities, assisting with homework, writing poetry, and leading close readings of American literature. Employing participant observation, interviews, and discourse analysis, Feeling Engaged argues that the success or failure of such partnership hinges on the emotional labor of its participants.

Chapter 1 - Blogging Critical Literacy: Notes Toward Engaged Progressivism - offers a model of a community-engaged composition course, one in which students draw from their experiences as language learners and tutors, and from discomforting online and in-class conversations about inequality, in orienting their research into literacy education. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 document and analyze literacy in two after-school centers with which we partnered. Chapter 2 - Genre and Emotional Roles in K-16 Poetry Workshops - shows how emotion shaped, and was shaped by, the genres employed in our poetry workshops. Chapter 3 - (Bi)Literacy Sponsorship in Latin@ After-School Spaces - demonstrates how after-school centers themselves can help bicultural, transnational students to develop ethnic pride and bilingual competence and to engage with family literacy networks. Chapter 4 - Teaching Police Discourse at Barrio Center - follows a Criminal Justice Club led by a police-officer-in-training; it both critiques police discourse and demonstrates the progressive potential the officer and his students found in it. Chapter 5 - The Emotional Labor of Outreach - turns to an 11th grade English classroom in a public school, documenting a series of literature and rhetoric lessons delivered there by undergraduates and narrating their progression through five stages of emotional labor: frustration, surprise, empathy, enthusiasm, and care. Cumulatively, the chapters argue that emotions provide essential feedback on the efficacy of K-16 literacy networks.