A friendly critique of the field, The Politics of Writing Studiesexamines a set of recent pivotal texts in composition to show how writing scholarship, in an effort to improve disciplinary prestige and garner institutional resources, inadvertently reproduces structures of inequality within American higher education. Not only does this enable the exploitation of contingent faculty, but it also puts writing studies a field that inherently challenges many institutional hierarchies in a debased institutional position and at odds with itself.

Instead of aligning with the dominant...