The essays in this collection give voice to the plurality of approaches that scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition have when they set forth to assimilate Bakhtin for their varied purposes. The collection is arranged in three major sections. The first attempts to capture the most important theoretical extensions of Bakhtin's ideas, and does so with an emphasis on what Bakhtin might contribute to the present understanding of language and rhetoric. The next section explores the implications of Bakhtin's work for both disciplinary identity and writing pedagogy. The final section looks...

In After the Public Turn, author Frank Farmer argues that counterpublics and the people who make counterpublics--"citizen bricoleurs"--deserve a more prominent role in our scholarship and in our classrooms. Encouraging students to understand and consider resistant or oppositional discourse is a viable route toward mature participation as citizens in a democracy.
Farmer examines two very different kinds of publics, cultural and disciplinary, and discusses two counterpublics within those broad categories: zine discourses and certain academic discourses. By juxtaposing these two...