Rhetorical Economies of Whiteness examines the interplay of rhetoric, whiteness, and economics—attending not only to how economic arrangements that sustain whiteness are rhetorically enacted and legitimated but also to how rhetoric itself operates as an economy to give identities exchange value. Case studies across the volume illustrate how economic and class structures incentivize adherence to whiteness as both an identity formation and a form of symbolic capital. Some contributo...

Rhetorical critics have long had a troubled relationship with method, viewing it as at times opening up provocative avenues of inquiry, and at other times as closing off paths toward meaningful engagement with texts. Text + Field shifts scholarly attention from this conflicted history, looking instead to the growing number of scholars who are supplementing text-based scholarship by venturing out into the field, where rhetoric is produced, enacted, and consumed.These field-...

A bold rethinking of public discourse, Public Modalities explores how people shape civic life through protest, media, and identity in an ever-evolving public sphere.This book explores the ways that scholars, journalists, politicians, and citizens conceive of “the public” or “public life,” and how those entities are defined and invented. For decades, scholars have used the metaphors of spheres, systems, webs, or networks to talk about, describe, and map var...

Images of poverty shape the debate surrounding it. In 1996, then President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform legislation repealing the principal federal program providing monetary assistance to poor families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). With the president's signature this originally non-controversial program became the only title of the 1935 Social Security Act to be repealed. The legislation culminated a retrenchment era in welfare policy beginning in the early 1980s....

Evidence shows that the increasing privatization of K–12 education siphons resources away from public schools, resulting in poorer learning conditions, underpaid teachers, and greater inequality. But, as Robert Asen reveals here, the damage that market-based education reform inflicts on society runs much deeper. At their core, these efforts are antidemocratic.Arguing that democratic communities and public education need one another, Asen examines the theory driving privatization, p...

The local school board is one of America’s enduring venues of lay democracy at work. In Democracy, Deliberation, and Education, Robert Asen takes the pulse of this democratic exemplar through an in-depth study of three local school boards in Wisconsin. In so doing, Asen identifies the broader democratic ideal in the most parochial of American settings.Conducted over two years across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, Asen’s research reveals as much about the possibil...

This third edition of Official Knowledge, a classic text from one of education’s most distinguished scholars, challenges readers to critically examine how certain knowledge comes to be “official,” and whose agendas this knowledge represents. A probing and award-winning study, this new edition builds on the tradition of its predecessors to question the rightist resurgence in education while substantive updates throughout show how such policies continue to define our commonsense not...

Libby Adler offers a comprehensive critique of the mainstream LGBT legal agenda in the United States, showing how LGBT equal rights discourse drives legal advocates toward a narrow array of reform objectives that do little to help the lives of the most marginalized members of the LGBT community.

An even-handed exploration of the polarized state of campus politics that suggests ways for schools and universities to encourage discourse across difference.College campuses have become flashpoints of the current culture war and, consequently, much ink has been spilled over the relationship between universities and the cultivation or coddling of young American minds. Philosopher Sigal R. Ben-Porath takes head-on arguments that infantilize students who speak out ag...

The second edition of Melanie Bush's acclaimed Everyday Forms of Whiteness looks at the often-unseen ways racism impacts our lives. The author has interviewed and surveyed hundreds of college students and reveals that even though we talk as though we live in a "post-racial" world after the election of Barack Obama, racism is still very much a factor in everyday life. The second edition incorporates new data and interviews to show how the everyday thinking of ordinary people contri...

As the fight for same-sex marriage rages across the United States and lesbian and gay couples rush to marriage license counters, the goal of marriage is still fiercely questioned within the LGBT movement. Rarely has an objective so central to a social movement’s political agenda been so controversial within the movement itself. While antigay forces work to restrict marriage to one man and one woman, lesbian and gay activists are passionately arguing about the desirability, viability, and s...

Americans today don't trust each other and their institutions as much as they once did. The collapse of social and political trust has arguably fueled our increasingly ferocious ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship. But is today's decline in trust inevitable or avoidable? Are we caught in a downward spiral that must end in institutional decay or even civil war, or can we restore trust through our shared social institutions? In Trust in a Polarized Age, political philoso...