This volume brings together sixteen essays on key and intersecting topics in critical cultural studies from major scholars in the field. Taking into account the vicissitudes of political, social, and cultural issues, the contributors engage deeply with the evolving understanding of critical concepts such as history, community, culture, identity, politics, ethics, globalization, and technology. The essays address the extent to which these concepts have been useful to scholars, policy makers, and citizens, as well as the ways they must be rethought and reconsidered if they are to continue to be viable.

Each essay considers what is known and understood about these concepts. The essays give particular attention to how relevant ideas, themes, and terms were developed, elaborated, and deployed in the work of James W. Carey, the "founding father" of cultural studies in the United States. The contributors map how these important concepts, including Carey's own work with them, have evolved over time and how these concepts intersect. The result is a coherent volume that redefines the still-emerging field of critical cultural studies.

Contributors are Stuart Allan, Jack Zeljko Bratich, Clifford Christians, Norman Denzin, Mark Fackler, Robert Fortner, Lawrence Grossberg, Joli Jensen, Steve Jones, John Nerone, Lana Rakow, Quentin J. Schultze, Linda Steiner, Angharad N. Valdivia, Catherine Warren, Frederick Wasser, and Barbie Zelizer.

Keywords in Writing Studies is an exploration of the principal ideas and ideals of an emerging academic field as they are constituted by its specialized vocabulary. A sequel to the 1996 work Keywords in Composition Studies, this new volume traces the evolution of the field’s lexicon, taking into account the wide variety of theoretical, educational, professional, and institutional developments that have redefined it over the past two decades.

Contributors address the development, transformation, and interconnections among thirty-six of the most critical terms that make up writing studies. Looking beyond basic definitions or explanations, they explore the multiple layers of meaning within the terms that writing scholars currently use, exchange, and question. Each term featured is a part of the general disciplinary parlance, and each is a highly contested focal point of significant debates about matters of power, identity, and values. Each essay begins with the assumption that its central term is important precisely because its meaning is open and multiplex.

Keywords in Writing Studies reveals how the key concepts in the field are used and even challenged, rather than advocating particular usages and the particular vision of the field that they imply. The volume will be of great interest to both graduate students and established scholars.

Learning from children about citizenship status and how it shapes their schooling
 

There is a persistent assumption in the field of education that children are largely unaware of their immigration status and its implications. In Knowing Silence, Ariana Mangual Figueroa challenges this “myth of ignorance.” By listening carefully to both the speech and significant silences of six Latina students from mixed-immigration-status families, from elementary school into middle school and beyond, she reveals the complex ways young people understand and negotiate immigration status and its impact on their lives.

Providing these children with iPod Touches to record their own conversations, Mangual Figueroa observes when and how they choose to talk about citizenship at home, at school, and in public spaces. Analyzing family conversations about school forms, in-class writing assignments, encounters with the police, and applications for college, she demonstrates that children grapple with the realities of citizenship from an early age. Educators who underestimate children’s knowledge, Mangual Figueroa shows, can marginalize or misunderstand these students and their families.

Combining significant empirical findings with reflections on the ethical questions surrounding research and responsibility, Mangual Figueroa models new ways scholars might collaborate with educators, children, and families. With rigorous and innovative ethnographic methodologies, Knowing Silence makes audible the experiences of immigrant-origin students in their own terms, ultimately offering teachers and researchers a crucial framework for understanding citizenship in the contemporary classroom.

Employing history, social theory, and a detailed contemporary case study, Knowledge for Social Change argues for fundamentally reshaping research universities to function as democratic, civic, and community-engaged institutions dedicated to advancing learning and knowledge for social change. The authors focus on significant contributions to learning made by Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Seth Low, Jane Addams, William Rainey Harper, and John Dewey—as well as their own work at Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships—to help create and sustain democratically-engaged colleges and universities for the public good.  

Knowledge for Social Change highlights university-assisted community schools to effect a thoroughgoing change of research universities that will contribute to more democratic schools, communities, and societies. The authors also call on democratic-minded academics to create and sustain a global movement dedicated to advancing learning for the “relief of man’s estate”—an iconic phrase by Francis Bacon that emphasized the continued betterment of the human condition—and to realize Dewey’s vision of an organic “Great Community” composed of participatory, democratic, collaborative, and interdependent societies.