Blame it on Oprah. Blame it on One City One Book. Blame it on the declining reading habits of ordinary Americans (as recent popular wisdom would have you believe). Just about every highschool, community center and early-college common curriculum in the past decade or so has tried out some version of a community-read initiative. SUNY Cortland, … Continue reading On the Value of “Soft Reading”
In her article published just a few weeks ago in Enculturation, Bonnie Tucker lays out a theory of what she refers to as technocapitalist disability rhetoric. Technocapitalist disability rhetoric (what I'll call TCDR), in Tucker's conception, is a familiar representation trope in which technology and engineering corporations utilize depictions of disability in an attempt to associate their … Continue reading Wired Utopia: Expanding Technocapitalist Disability Rhetorics
Compositionists have in recent years begun, in a mode similar to the ethical, social and Sophistic turns of recent decades, the collective project of mobilizing the discipline to hold in greater esteem the cataclysmic situations of public concern unfolding in front of our eyes. We need only examine the evening news … Continue reading When Worlds Speak: Apocalypse, Composition, Critique
And just like that, the Spring semester has flown by and will soon give way to the joys of summer. Before we end, however, I'd like to take some time to outline the final capstone project I'm assigning to my first-year writing students to end our time together and draw everything to a cohesive close: … Continue reading Apocalyptic Turn/Sparking Change
Writing and Mindfulness I first encountered meditation during the spring semester of my senior year of college. A group of twenty or so of us sat in a two-tiered circle, red and blue light shimmering inside from the interfaith center’s stained glass windows, as a philosophy professor/smiling mystic led us in breathing exercises. These exercises … Continue reading Writing and Mindfulness
Jacob Richter 