Ellen Cushman & Terese Guinsatao Monberg’s “Re-centering authority” (Under Construction, pp. 166-180) carries for its subtitle: “Social Reflexivity and re-positioning in composition research.” The authors include what amounts to a thesis for the work in its opening paragraph: “Enact[ing] a more socially responsible scholarship, one that builds bridges to facilitate border crossings….[because] one of the most pressing problems in current composition research [is that] we’re often socially distanced from the cultures we study” (p. 166). The authors make no effort to conceal the pronounced autobiographical thread running through the study, providing fairly extensive personal observations and anecdotes to put “teeth” into terms which surface during the course of their survey: negotiating (ethnographic) authority; reciprocal relationships; even the “social reflexivity” and “re-positioning” featured in the subtitle. One part academic critique (or better, critique of academics) and two parts activist memoir, Recentering summons professionals in English composition and related fields to risk their “comfort zones” for roll-up-your-sleeves’ “contact [italics added] zone” interaction and dialogue (p. 178), with the hope that this will generate “social integration in all directions” (p. 177).
Considering a topos of Consistent/Inconsistent, Cushman & Monberg score high marks for their straightforward adherence to the idea of responsible, community-oriented use of academic authority: these are scholars who clearly consider themselves members of the larger society outside their local university’s walls, and Cushman in particular (as her full-length Composition in the streets demonstrates) “walks the talk” with reference to leading by example, entering the less-comfortable-because-different-and-removed-from-our-immediate-experience sectors of her own city area, initially as the basis for her doctoral dissertation. The authors also challenge themselves and fellow composition “authorities” to take a man-in-the-mirror approach to their work rather than place themselves above research “subjects.” Yet the survey becomes rather inconsistent when viewed from a distinct angle: by virtue of proposing their findings/conclusions in a scholarly setting, Cushman & Monberg are excluding the very marginalized persons they are supposedly speaking up for. Even when one grants that Recentering’s audience is essentially composed of professionals in the field of composition, Cushman & Monberg by definition are claiming authority over these peers, a fact which calls into question the two authors’ apparent mistrust of authority in general. Further, as Cushman notes in her doctoral project, she was in a sense using the marginalized around her as material for her thesis–she notes that she was “no Mother Teresa” and that risks abound in such studies, even with clear and respectable intentions. The allusion to upper-class white people (p. 178) is problematic as well, because it exploits precisely the type of racial difference the authors insist they are trying to be “responsible” about–are there no upper-class blacks, Latinos, or Asians who have similarly “rigid” attitudes towards various individuals outside their own habitus? Finally, the argu[ment] for a more complicated definition of authority” is specious: Who gets to define it? Why? How will it help people who are not involved in academia, people who function best with the kind of straight talk Cushman & Monberg purport to prefer? In contrast to their project’s stated and implied intentions, this last idea stands out as an internal contradiction inasmuch as it perpetuates the intellectualization of the discussion: complicating definitions results in more, not less, “professional” involvement which inevitably keeps the “little people” out of the loop (just look at tax law). And for the authors to undertake this study at all, they must of necessity claim an authority, one which they neither justify nor effectively distance themselves from in the present work.
