What Matters Who Writes? What Matters Who Responds?

Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo, and Susan West


Rather than finding knowledge in texts, in the products associated with earlier systems of intellectual property, I believe we are going to identify knowledge in the ways people work with information, in the ways that information is put to use. To give one specific example: in our classes, knowledge becomes what students do rather than what they study. Rather than study about history, that is, they become historians. Rather than study about writing, they become writers. And the knowledge they have comes from embodying those practices, in the doing of those acts. Will we be equal to such tasks of reimagining? At best, I am fearful we are not. But I believe we have no choice but to try, and to try hard, for we are already witnessing a bitter battle to control the future of all knowledge and all knowledge production, one that will surely write us and our students in ways I fear will support and replicate a system that is thoroughly imbued with destructive radical individualism and hypercompetition, with definitions of knowledge as a commodity to be owned, bought, and sold, and with representation of human agency as limited and narrow, one that excludes alternative forms of subjectivity and of ownership. When I pause to think about it, I can't imagine any more pressing and compelling reasons to confront the issues involved in the questions "What matters who writes?" and "What matters who responds?"
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Postmodern (un)grounding * Collaboration * Copy(w)right/Ownership * Possible Futures

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