Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University. Executive Director, New City Community Press.

In Class Politics: The Movement for a Students Right To Their Own Language , I examined how composition has attempted to align itself with progressive movements for social and political change. In doing so, I tried to understand how issues of class, race, and language formulated a definition of the professional field which simultaneously argued for its political efficacy but professionalized it away from community partnerships from actual political work.

One of the lessons I learned from that project is the necessity of academics to support the literacy and political rights of both students and local communities. I have tried to do this work by creating programs such as those which link the literacy goals of community organization to the work of the university or bring university students into public schools as tutors. (Much of this work is detailed in Writing Beyond the Curriculum, College English 2000.) My current book project examines the possibility of such work to move the institutional workings of writing programs and higher education towards a more inclusive sense of public responsibility.

Over the past five years, I have also created New City Community Press, a community press which works with disenfranchised communities to both record their stories and to use them as a vehicle to argue for greater political power. Among its publications are books on disability culture and immigrant labor rights as well as oral histories of local communities, such as Chinatown and the Forgotten Bottom in Philadelphia. I am now working to expand this press nationwide. Finally, I have been active in organizing political caucuses with composition studies through the Progressive Caucus as well as organizing faculty nationwide through Teachers for a Democratic Culture.