Our new faculty search is afoot.  Kutztown has posted our job ad to its website:

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Kutztown University of Pennsylvania enrolls approximately 10,000 students in graduate and undergraduate programs. The University is located in the borough of Kutztown in a charming rural setting, and is within 20 minutes driving time of the diverse metropolitan areas Allentown/Bethlehem and Reading, and within 60 minutes of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. The University is very interested in hiring employees who have had extensive experience with diverse populations.

The English Department invites applications for a tenure-track position in Composition and Rhetoric beginning Fall 2009.  Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric preferred, ABD accepted with completion of dissertation before second year of appointment.  Demonstrated experience and research in one or more of the following areas a plus:  History of Composition and Rhetoric, Classical Rhetorics, Multicultural Rhetorics, Visual Rhetorics, Writing Program Administration, Assessment of First-Year Writing, or WAC.  Strong applicants will also be committed to a “stretch model” approach to introductory composition courses. 

The 4/4 teaching load will include College Composition, Introduction to College Composition, Honors Composition, and Advanced Composition with opportunities to develop and teach upper-level and graduate courses in Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy Studies. Three (3) years of college-level teaching experience required with significant experience teaching Composition.  Successful interview and demonstration of teaching abilities required. 

Send a letter of application, vita, three current letters of reference, and all official college-level transcripts to Dr. Kevin Mahoney, Chair, Composition Faculty Search Committee, 241 Lytle Hall, English Department, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA 19530.  Only complete application packets will be considered.  Review of applications will begin November 14, 2008 for MLA interviews and will continue until the position is filled.  For more information on our program, visit our website at: http://kucomprhet.wordpress.com or contact the Committee Chair at Mahoney@kutztown.edu.

Kutztown University of Pennsylvania is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer and actively solicits applications from women and minority candidates.  Kutztown University of Pennsylvania is a member of the State System of Higher Education.

Ah…some good panels I’ll tell ya.  I ended up going to that new media panel and it was worth it.  One panelist looked at “populist rhetoric” and technology…especially in relationship to the current presidential election.  She was interested in the ways in which the “Internet candidate” seems to coincide with “the populist candidate” in the press and the rhetorical framing of the campaigns.  The second guy was interested in opening up scholarly publishing to collaborative Web 2.0 kind of texts–especially when it comes to considering those texts “legitimate” as academic and scholarly work.  And, the third panelist, an anthropologist, was looking at “the vernacular web” and some of the ways in which the new Web 2.0 is opening up more vernacular uses of the Internet.

The second panel, Rachel’s “transnational rhetorics” panel was fab.  Rachel talked about Zapatista’s rhetorical work in constructing openings and news spaces in civil society.  Katherine Mack looked as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and how the NGO, IJR was moving it’s work in supporting transitional justice across the African continent as part of an “African Renaissance.”  Scott Wible discussed Bush’s “National Security Language Initiative and MLA’s response to it.  And, finally, Rasha Diab looked at Anwar Al-Sadat’s role in constructing the possibility of peace between Egypt and Israel in the 1970s.  Both panels were well attended and the discussion afterwards was great.  I even got to see Lu-Ming Mao at the Transnational Rhetorics panel…always great to run into folks from Miami.

Anyway, I’ll keep it brief…I’m going to meet Seth, Ann, and Rachel for dinner for some great Seattle food and continuing awesome conversation.

Still sunny, 64 degrees.  Beautiful!

After several delays and longer than expected layovers, I’m in Seattle for RSA.  The bummer is that last night Rachel and I and a group of folks were going to get together for a little book launch celebration…but, alas, I didn’t get in until 11pm.  Good thing that Ken and Trish were around and willing to hang out for a while in the lobby of the Westin, have a few drinks, and talk the night way.

I’m just about to head over to the hotel to pick up my conference materials and scout out the sessions for the day.  I will be going to Rachel’s “Transnational Rhetorics” panel at four o’clock which promises to be fabulous!  There’s also an intersting looking session at 2:15 on “Implications of the New Media” which is calling me, I think.  We’ll see.  Our panel, “Responsibilities to Whom, For What?: Complex Audiences at Cross-Purposes in Labor Organizing,” is not until tomorrow morning…

I just got off the phone with Rachel and was happy to hear that I’ll be joining her, Seth, and Ann for dinner tonight!  Yeah.  All is not lost.  Rachel promises many tragicomic tales of her trip here and I’ll get to meet Ann.  Anyway, despite what you’ve heard about Seattle:

Sunny and a beautiful 60 degrees!

So, I come home today after attending my niece’s graduation…she’s graduating from pre-school…and find a box sitting on my front porch. What was in the box you ask??? Copies of Democracies to Come from Lexington Books!!

That’s right folks…we’re in print. The official pub date is May 28th, but Rachel and I got our advanced copies today. It feels so great…especially after such a long process. The best part of it all is that we’ll be able to bring copies to RSA in Seattle this weekend. We planned to have a little pre-release, party Saturday night anyway…now, we’ll be able to make it official!

The end of the semester is for the most part here. Students are finishing project, papers, and exams. And faculty are knee deep in grading. And as I sit at my desk reading and responding to student papers, I am having my android dreams of the robot army to come.

In particular, I am thinking about hybrids…cyborgs to be more precise. Cyborgs that cross disciplinary boundaries and who neither respect, nor desire, disciplinary fortifications. That does not mean that cyborgs are wishy-washy about their agenda or intellectual commitments. No, cyborgs just start from a different place.

In fact, the whole “literacies” family of CURLS robots is a little underdeveloped in the whole scheme of things. The more I think about it, the more I think that cyborgs are more fitting than robots when it comes to literacies. Take digital rhetorics/literacies, for example. On the one hand, we could develop a robot that would approach its task from the rhetoric angle–and do it quite well. However, digital writing/design bleeds into several other areas–even in the immediate family: desktop pub, info design, and media studies, for example. So, when thinking about designing a “digital rhetoric” robot, it would make more sense to turn to a cyborg.

Such a proposal will be tricky, though. After all, cyborgs do not exactly have a glowing reputation–think Blade Runner, Terminator, and, of course, the Borg–Donna Haraway notwithstanding. But an interesting way of approaching the task at hand, methinks. Diversify the robot army.

Yes, it’s the end of the semester.

Yes, I’m punchy.

Sunny skies, low humidity, 78 degrees.

We just got word yesterday that Democracies to Come is in press! Woo Hoo!! It’s been a long road for sure. Word has it that we will have copies in about a month. Major props go to the production crew at Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield for moving our book to production so quickly once we finished all the final editing.

If you’re interested, here’s a excerpt from the Lexington page for our book:

Democracies to Come: Rhetorical Action, Neoliberalism, and Communities of Resistance draws upon a variety of contemporary sites and moments (e.g. IMF/World Bank protests, writing emerging from social movements in struggle against neoliberalism, classroom praxis, postcolonial literature, student activism) to explore new relationships—pedagogical, emotional, affective, and social—that can be the basis of political and social organizing. Approaching pedagogy as a space of learning, Democracies to Come argues that pedagogy becomes a cultural force for democracy in its own right, a cultural literacy, which intervenes in a multiplicity of systems, institutions, cultural formations, and constituencies.

I’m just so excited. Now I can move on to finishing my paper for RSA next month in Seattle…and I promised Seth to have a book chapter description to him by the end of the weekend. This is just the little push I needed to jump into writing…er, after planting flowers, going to a birthday party for my friend’s kid, and soaking in this wonderful day.

If you haven’t checked out InkWork, well, you should. Even if it’s only to understand the references I am about to make in this post. You see, Seth, Amy, and I have been writing about contingent faculty issues of late.

Over the past couple of days a conversation I had with my friends Pegeen and Doug a couple of years ago is coming back to me in pieces. My memory seems to work that way. I’ve never been good with quick recall. It seems many of my memories go into a kind of deep sleep and are slow to wake. They come back slowly, emerge–overlapping conversations; images places and contexts, fragments of words, feelings, and ideas. With focus I can call these spirits back–but they need to know they are welcome and are being called for a reason.

The conversation in question had to do with hospitality. To be honest, I can’t remember (yet) what got us on the topic. I think that Pegeen was writing on hospitality…or thinking about it as a critical category. I think that, but that part of the memory is not, yet, awake. I remember that we talked about the role of hospitality in our families. About how hospitality carries with it a whole web of reciprocal relationships…reminding me of anthropological and theoretical discussions of gift economies and the possibilities of giving.

Anyway, I think that conversation came back because of some of the InkWork discussion of contingent faculty. I don’t know how to think about this issue without thinking about the importance of the very terms of our discussion–the language we use to talk about “contingent” faculty. It seems there are no “good” words here. “Contingent,” “adjunct,” “temporary,” “part-time.” Each terms carries baggage–or, better, frames our ways of thinking about “contingent” faculty. Consider this discussion of “contingency” posted on Wikipedia:

In philosophy and logic, contingency is the status of facts that are not logically necessarily true or false. Contingency is opposed to necessity: a contingent act is an act which could have not been, an act which is not necessary (could not have not been). Contingency differs from possibility, in a formal sense, as the latter includes statements which are necessarily true as well as not necessarily false, while a statement cannot be said to be contingent if it is true necessarily.

In colloquial English, a contingency is something that can happen, but that generally is not anticipated. Planning for contingencies often requires a more imaginative approach, because contingencies are inherently not obvious. Large organizations, such as governments, are often criticized for not planning for contingencies because the construction of plans to deal with contingencies often involves thinking outside the box. Beforehand, contingencies are hard to predict; this failure to appreciate contingencies ahead of time has led to the formulation of Murphy’s law.

“Contingent” faculty…faculty that “could not have been” or may not be? Contingent upon…what? Necessity? My point here is not simply to play with words. Rather, it is to suggest, along with all those folks interested in “framing,” that language carries ideas without any work on our part (Lakoff 4). I wouldn’t say that language determines the practices…but I would say that without thinking through the work that language does, we reinforce and reinscribe the practices and ideas carried by the language we use.

For example, the contractual language to describe contingent faculty here is “temporary faculty.” Temporary. Not permanent. Fleeting. Here today, gone tomorrow. But “temporary” and the more often used term “temp” connects us to the likes of ManPower, Kelly Services, or even The Office. “Temporary” reinforces the contingent nature of the position and constantly underscores one’s lack of job security. It also undercuts the professional character of being a faculty member. Ryan understood this.

I think this is one of the main reasons why Janice, the chair of our department, insists upon using the term “visiting faculty” instead of “temps.” It’s that term “visiting” that got me thinking about hospitality and my conversation with Pegeen and Doug. What kind of hospitality does one show visitors? I think that the connection between our social codes on hospitality and visitors might be suggestive of how we might re-articulate how we interact with “temporary” faculty. Don’t get me wrong, hospitality does not and should not take the place of a struggle to end universities (and most neoliberal industries) reliance upon contingent labor and the accompanying de-professionalization of academic work. However, given the fact that hospitality makes demands upon the “hosts” as well as the visitors, it might be interesting to explore that frame.

For example, “good hosts” does not put up their visitors in dirty basements. You don’t invite people over for dinner and feed them yesterday’s left-overs while you eat a hot, freshly made meal.  There are problems with this concept, of course.  Visitors are not supposed to overstay their welcome.  Very often there is a premium placed on “nice” conversation–avoiding “hot” topics in order to keep the conversation pleasant.  But what is interesting to me is the fact that hospitality foregrounds people not positions.

Who knows…tomorrow I might find the concept too problematic…or deeply flawed…but I am chewing on it now, so I thought I’d share.

That’s right…breaking news from the blogosphere: Seth Kahn’s got a blog!  So, do yourself a favor and check out Here Comes Trouble for a window into Seth’s world!

OK, this is a quick one…a little discursive bit harvested from a facebook site “Kutztown University Needs to Change.” This site was created by a couple of students who decided it was better to organize than just sit around and complain.  A noble idea, no?  One might even call it active citizenship.  As of this post, that facebook group has 1,118 members.  Not bad for a week old…ahh, digital activism.

Anyway, a couple of days ago a Kutztown University administrator joined the group and has been responding pretty regularly to the students…mostly in the form of “you need to understand how the university works.”  One of his posts from earlier today is my nugget for today:

Just some suggestions. Before you go asking for changes on your main points, you need to make sure that you understand where the University is now, that you are being reasonable and rational in your approach, and that you aren’t asking for wants and desires rather than just needs. Wants and desires are the things you’d like to have if possible, needs are those things that are required out of necessity. For example, I want and desire a new Harley, but I don’t need it to get to work (and my wife won’t let me have one anyway). So, if I base my whole outlook on getting that Harley, I will be disappointed, even though I can still get to work. It is similar with this University. We aren’t Harvard or Yale. We don’t have a gigantic endowment. Our tuition and fees are low compared to Penn Sate and surrounding State public schools. Therefore, sometimes we are only going to be able to give what is needed, not what is wanted or desired.

“We are only going to be able to give what is needed, not what is wanted or desired.”  Nice move.  Notice the movement in this argument…the movement suggests that the space of needs is narrow.   And, I would argue, the administration is best positioned to determine what are needs and what are desires.  KU is positioned next to Harvard and Yale to frame “endowments” and to Penn State and “surrounding state public schools” to frame “tuition.”  Interesting.  One could wonder, justly I think, what can actually be changed?  That is, we are both NOT privileged ivy league schools.  And, “we” are GENEROUS with our tuition.

I am too tired at the moment to really work this though…but this is another piece to the argument that is being worked out locally.  One of the little pieces I am working on right now is called “Shut up and Teach!”  Perhaps, the nugget above is a piece of reasonable neoliberal discipline?  Echoes of the World Bank at moments.  More, so much more to write.