Composing Violence: Student Talk, University Discourse, and the Politics of Witnessing.

Abstract

This study examines undergraduates’ discourses on their writing about violence. In the last twenty years, composition scholarship has often turned to examples of student writing about violence in order to critique or justify personal writing assignments, while writing about violence in other genres is under-examined. This study demonstrates that students are writing about violence in courses across the university and in a variety of genres. In adopting an ethnographic approach, this study illuminates students’ behind-the-scenes writing practices and offers a more expansive view of how discourses of violence shape and are shaped by students’ academic writing practices than has been available to scholars and instructors up to this point.

Thematic and discourse analysis of interviews with students, as well as analysis of the students’ essays, reveal that students’ discursive engagements with violence are partial, contingent, and contextual. When writing about violence, students must negotiate competing, context-specific, and disciplinary understandings of violence. Furthermore, students’ experiences appear to mediate—and are mediated by—the process of writing about violence. At times, this complexity, struggle, and experiential engagement is not visible in the essays themselves, but is revealed in students’ talk about their writing.

These findings suggest that writing about violence can be an opportunity for students to reconsider their understandings of violence, reshape their experiences, and confront their positions within histories violence. At the same time, the partiality of students’ discursive engagements with violence can also essentialize victims of violence, divorce violence from the structures that produce it, and reproduce boundaries between students and the violence they write about. These findings point to the political and ethical importance of acknowledging that higher education is a crucial, but often ignored, site for the production of—and engagement with—discourses of violence. This dissertation calls for pedagogies that take seriously the experiences, ethical insights and theoretical savvy that many students already bring to their writing about violence. Such pedagogies must also work to make explicit the disciplines, theories, and ideologies that help shape the discursive field of violence in a given essay, course, or university, ultimately helping students locate themselves within histories of violence.