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!

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.

Now, this is enough to start the week off right. If you didn’t click “this,” then you should definitely click here to check out the “pre-pub discount” for Democracies to Come!!!! It’s been a long road, but Rachel and I are finally hitting the bookstores.

I’m back in my little concrete brick office.  I’ve returned from spring break with a worse sinus infection than when I left and now it seems like that nasty bug that my in-laws and nephew and nieces had is paying me a visit.  I’m always slow with transitions, but today I am dragging more than usual.

I did get quite a bit done over break despite not feeling so great.  All the final edits of the book (with Rachel Riedner) are done.  May pub date is on!  That’s good.  I also read a lot.  It’s weird to acknowledge that my job as an academic does not allow me a whole lot of time to read and/or write during the semester.  I’m changing that a bit though…trying to re-prioritize and make that space.

Anyway, not much to say…I just had a few minutes before class and wanted to reacquaint myself with Dionysus.  Turns out, he’s not around right now.  So, back to my concrete office I go.

Sometimes, on my 30 minute commute to work I replay words and arguments over in my head to try and get a better grasp of their contours and what they seek to do, the affects they have, etc. In my co-authored book with Rachel Riedner, one of our chapters takes a look at the role of despair in neoliberal rhetoric. We describe the role of despair in neoliberal rhetorics as follows:

What we see in the everyday working of despair, is the work of hegemony at the level of habitus—“a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions” (Bourdieu 82-3). That is, despair is not limited to one specific kind of experience within neoliberalism. Rather, it is a transposable disposition, flexible enough to contain expressions of resistance. As part of a hegemonic discourse, despair sneaks into everyday arguments about current conditions and possible alternatives (79).

This “transposable disposition,” in my mind, is part and parcel of a kind of “neoliberal commonplace”–a persistent pattern of cultural argumentation.

I first started working on questions of despair when I was first getting involved with our local union chapter and teaching an Advanced Composition course called “Global Literacies.” In both my union work and in my class I noticed a recurring pattern of moral outrage followed by some version of the statement: “there is nothing we can do.” On the one hand, this frustrated the hell out of me–especially in the union context–but, the persistence of the argument made me think that I should be thinking about what it means and what it does [see excerpt for a brief intro into how Rachel and I situated this issue].

Anyway, that set me on my current path of taking an interest in the “micronegotiations” of hegemony, so to speak. That is, the everyday arguments made in everyday contexts that rise to the level of “commonplace arguments.” You could say, I am working on a “commonplace book” that focuses on neoliberal rhetoric [if you are interested in what a commonplace book is, check out this power point presentation floating out there on the web].

As you may or may not know, one of the hot conversations on our campus right now is a vote of no confidence in our university president. At this point, the issue is part of a public discussion and we do not know whether or not such a vote will be taken. But the issue has certainly sparked a spirited discussion among faculty and in the community at large. Some of the emails that have made it into my “commonplace book.” More accurately, they have occupied my mind during my drives to campus each morning and evening.

Here’s a brief list of some of the issues I have been thinking about:

• how do individuals identify with institutions, in this case with our university
• what is considered “proper” and how codes of civility and manners overlap in discussions of “process” or “the way” an issue was handled
• public image of an institution. In particular, public images as constructed in images and PR material (reputation) and/or public images based upon actual practices
• shades of progressive–”liberal” ways of seeing
• The role of institutional authority in argumentation (thinking Robin Lakoff’s arguments in The Language War here).

Oooops…look at the time. Gotta run to a meeting!