The argument of this collection is that the cultural and intellectual legacies of postmodernism impinge, significantly and daily, on the practice of the Writing Program Administrator. WPAs work in spaces where they must assume responsibility for a multifaceted program, a diverse curriculum, instructors with varying pedagogies and technological expertise—and where they must position their program in relation to a university with its own conflicted mission, and a state with its unpredictable views of accountability and assessment.
The collection further argues that postmodernism offers a useful lens through which to understand the work of WPAs and to examine the discordant cultural and institutional issues that shape their work. Each chapter tackles a problem local to its author’s writing program or experience as a WPA, and each responds to existing discord in creative ways that move toward rebuilding and redirection.
It is a given that accepting the role of WPA will land you squarely in the bind between modernism and postmodernism: while composition studies as a field arguably still reflects a modernist ethos, the WPA must grapple daily with postmodern habits of thought and ways of being. The effort to live in this role may or may not mean that a WPA will adopt a postmodern stance; it does mean, however, that being a WPA requires dealing with the postmodern.
An unparalleled exploration of NOW’s trajectory, from its founding to the present—and its future
A new wave of feminist energy has swept the globe since 2016—from women’s marches and the #MeToo movement to transwomen’s inclusion and exclusion in feminism and participation in institutional politics. Amid all this, an organization declared dead or dying for thirty years—the National Organization for Women—has seen a membership boom. NOW presents an intriguing puzzle for scholars and activists alike. Considered one of the most stable organizations in the feminist movement, it has experienced much conflict and schism. Scholars have long argued that factionalism is the death knell of organizations, yet NOW continues to thrive despite internal conflicts.
Fighting for NOW seeks to better understand how bureaucratic structures like NOW’s simultaneously provide stability and longevity, while creating space for productive and healthy conflict among members. Kelsy Kretschmer explores these ideas through an examination of conflict in NOW’s local chapters, its task forces and committees, and its satellite groups. NOW’s history provides evidence for three basic arguments: bureaucratic groups are not insulated from factionalism; they are important sites of creativity and innovation for their movements; and schisms are not inherently bad for movement organizations. Hence, Fighting for NOW is in stark contrast to conventional scholarship, which has conceptualized factionalism as organizational failure. It also provides one of the few book-length explorations of NOW’s trajectory, from its founding to the modern context.
Scholars will welcome the book’s insights that draw on open systems and resource dependency theories, as well as its rethinking of how conflict shapes activist communities. Students will welcome its clear and compelling history of the feminist movement and of how feminist ideas have changed over the past five decades.
Logging in the northern forest has been romanticized, with images of log drives, plaid shirts, and bunkhouses in wide circulation. Increasingly dismissed as a quaint, rural pastime, logging remains one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States, with loggers occupying a precarious position amid unstable markets, expanding global competition, and growing labor discord. Examining a time of transition and decline in Maine’s forest economy, Andrew Egan traces pathways for understanding the challenges that have faced Maine’s logging community and, by extension, the state’s forestry sector, from the postwar period through today.
Seeking greater profits, logging companies turned their crews loose at midcentury, creating a workforce of independent contractors who were forced to purchase expensive equipment and compete for contracts with the mills. Drawing on his own experience with the region’s forest products industry, interviews with Maine loggers, media coverage, and court documents, Egan follows the troubled recent history of the industry and its battle for survival.
Selectivity and Discord addresses the fundamental question of whether there are grounds for belief in experimental results. Specifically, Allan Franklin is concerned with two problems in the use of experimental results in science: selectivity of data or analysis procedures and the resolution of discordant results.
By means of detailed case studies of episodes from the history of modern physics, Franklin shows how these problems can be—and are—solved in the normal practice of science and, therefore, that experimental results may be legitimately used as a basis for scientific knowledge.
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