Also, I’m assuming you’re making some sort of argument about a current commodified state/treatment of student writing…and then arguing against it???

And while your comment about the lack of economists cited/named in the work of rhet/comp scholars might/should/does seem like a “no-brainer,” it is a very illuminating and important point. I have thought it so odd that while my committee members are constantly telling me to (re)theorize class, I have never been given the names of any economists to read nor encouraged to read any economic texts. So I am always grateful for the numerous references I can garner from your writings here.

Now, as for the “few sentences”: that’s a bit of a taller order.

The problem, as I see it; what I’m addressing in Chapters 1 and 2: composition, as a discipline, talks about economics in a few very specific ways; ways that can problematically divert our attention from grave concerns about the economic inequalities caused by scarcity. First, there’s the discourse on the economics of the academic profession, i.e. instructors-as-laborers, as seen in the work of Joe Harris, Donna Strickland, and others. Related to this discourse is the discourse on the economic backgrounds of academic professionals, i.e. the so-called “working-class” academic trope (which often becomes a self-pitying navel-gazing for which I have little patience), as seen in the anthologies Coming to Class and This Fine Place So Far from Home. In fact, with a very few exceptions (which I’ll get to in a bit), the only ways people pay attention to students as economic beings is to pay attention to the class of students — and students’ class is always understood as being either prior to college (i.e., what their parents do for a living) or subsequent to college (i.e., how college vocationally prepares them for careers, as in Mark Longaker’s May 2005 College English essay). Furthermore, following the lead of Henry Giroux, many scholars who do look at class through the lens of critical pedagogy are, in effect, doing class without economics and Freire without Marx. There are a few welcome exceptions; folks who are doing some smart stuff understanding students as economic beings and their work in the writing classroom as having economic value: Bruce Horner, John Trimbur, and Min-Zhan Lu. And that’s it. The worst of it is, even with the burgeoning buzz about “economics” in composition (the Longaker essay; Lu’s September 2004 CCC essay), and the class warriors who say they’re tackling economic concerns, I have yet to see A. Single. Article. from an economics journal in anyone’s Works Cited. Not one.

So there’s the problem. The solution; what I see as my contribution? Chapters 3 and 4, as described above, directly connect perspectives on class to the work of certain poststructuralist Marxist economists and then Chapter 5 places those economic perspectives on class within the context of students’ work in the wired writing classroom, because as I’ve repeated ad nauseam, the things that make people so excited about digital technologies operate via precisely the same means by which those technologies make economic inequality — the injuries of class — visible: they replace labor-intensive processes with capital-intensive processes. However, I point out in Chapter 6 that conventional understandings of economic scarcity are upended by the open source movement (which is itself very much associated with digital technologies), which understands the value of digitally reproducible texts as being dependent upon the free and open exchange of ideas. Information is not a scarce good: one student’s understanding of a text does not diminish another student’s understanding of that same text. The open source movement indicates ways in which technologies (computers, literacy) can help writing teachers rethink the privileging of scarcity that rests as the foundation of rationalizations of economic inequality, by making visible the cracks within that foundation. Ultimately, the values associated with the open source movement — not the techniques, but the way computers allow and demand new cultural practices — profoundly alter our understanding of the production of writing and education. Mainstream economics posits scarcity: there isn’t enough to go around. The open source movement contends that, in fact, there is.

I know that’s more than a few sentences. Does it make sense?

How’s Tink, BTW? I’m going to an orthopedist about both of my knees–don’t think it’s a luxating patella problem though.