This article explores how assemblage and affect theories can enable research into the formation of a collective working-class identity, inclusive of written, print, publication, and organizational literacies through the origins of the Federation of Worker Writer and Community Publishers, an organization that expanded its collectivity as new…

We argue that the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, with its dual emphasis on literacy and occupational skills, can serve as a new model for writing classrooms and writing program administrators. We further contend that the "contact zone" classroom should be replaced with community-based "federations."…

A feminist reading of four prominent literacy narratives--Mike Rose's "Lives on the Boundary," Richard Rodriguez's "Hunger of Memory," Victor Villanueva's "Bootstraps," and Keith Gilyard's "Voices of the Self"--shows that conflicts and anxieties about the consequences of schooling on working-class masculinity animate these texts. Each of these…

Working-class academic narratives reveal a number of common themes, like dual estrangement and internalized class conflict. A less popularized motif is the bookish child who is catapulted out of her working-class origins. But some working-class academics, like myself, were not academically ambitious as children. I am a nontraditional working-class…

Suggests that an examination of rhetorical practices at the local bar is instructive: (1) the barroom is predictably different from the university writing classroom; and (2) the barroom is surprisingly similar to the university writing classroom. Shows that the rhetoric that is valued most highly in today's writing classroom operates differently…

Discusses the life and work of Marian Wharton, a socialist and feminist who helped shape the English curriculum at the People's College in Fort Scott, Kansas. Develops a rich, historical-situated conception of how the rhetorical activities of women and other marginalized people are a complex interweaving of alliance and antagonism, of free choice…