Rachael
Main Claims

In her introduction to Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, Nancy Welch seeks to combine conversations about public writing and rhetorical history (with emphasis on the canons of delivery and memory) to understand how people have in the past and can continue to be successful in helping to shape the course of world events in the face of increasing privatization and constraint (1-6).

She targets neoliberalism as the enemy, noting how the combination of free-market ideology and social darwinism contribute to the eroding of public spaces for dissent and aid in the private sector's mission to repeal public programs and federal regulation that protect public interests (7). She spends quite a bit of time explicating the correlations between the aims of her own work and that of June Jordan's, from whom the title is borrowed, tracing the events and milieus through changing administrations from 1985 on to further detail the dramatic imapact of privatization on possibilities for public writing and individual liberties (7-13).

In the concluding part of the chapter "A Public World is Possible," Welch notes that though the complex nature of these power structures and hegemony-reinforcing events might seem overwhelming to the small acts of individual civilian writers, still there is hope (14-19). She marches us through examples like the the rallies of Latino workers in Spring 2006, or the setting up of a tent city on the UVM campus by conscientious students in protest of an expensive new building project. These examples, she asserts, "are genuinely grassroots. They are also remarkably, and necessarily, inventive as individuals and groups come together not only to raise good slogans but also to figure out how, through mainstream and alternative channels, to make their slogans heard while facing multiple foils" (17).

In the interlude that accompanies this first chapter is interesting in it's use of Gee's C's talk in which he advocates teaching (D)iscourses that have power in students' lives, as well as the languages of power as tools students can use to navigate within them towards their specific rhetorical (and frequently material) goals (21) She comments that though this is a "nice" thing for a bunch of comp teachers to hear, as it helps validate their daily and lifetime work, but often the reader/author/audience just doesn't care and come armed with prewritten dismissive responses. For her, the benefit of teaching these languages (or rather, for employing them) is so unlikely that it may not be worth it at all and students may come to internalize that failure, thinking that their efforts weren't enough. She advocates that we need to teach more comprehensive "rhetorics of power."

Assumptions about Method/ologies

I'm really not sure what to put here, honestly. I think it's clear from her introduction that Welch advocates the combination of valuable lived experience from people in all positionalities, as well as an incorporation of public memory, or history for evidence. Past that, I'm not sure how to categorize her methodology or her views on methodology based on this chapter.

Key Words: Public Writing, Protest, Globalization, Neoliberalism, Grassroots, Critical Literacy

Key Texts: June Jordan, Harriet Malinowitz, Susan Wells, Kieth Gilyard

Questions/Challenges

The weight of evidence Welch gives us in this chapter for all the ways public writing is in trouble seems to leave little room for hope, and yet she clearly retains some. I wonder how it is that Welch evaluates the good of public writing. In other words, is it enough that public writing happens at all, or do we need to see some real change come from the work we do in order to count it as a win?