Dissertation: "Beyond Hope: Rhetorics of Mobility, Possibility, and Literacy"

Certified Spring 2011

Patrick W. Berry completed his doctoral work in the Center for Writing Studies and Department of English. In the fall of 2011, he will be joining Syracuse University as Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric. His research focuses on a central question: What can literacy really do? In composition and rhetoric, the answer to this question has alternated between hopeful and critical stances that are tied to competing understandings of what literacy is and how it works in the world. Focusing specifically on teachers’ and theorists’ beliefs in the power of literacy to provide economic, personal, and social advancement, his dissertation, “Beyond Hope: Rhetorics of Mobility, Possibility, and Literacy,” demonstrates how hopeful and critical positions on the transformative possibilities of literacy are not incommensurable, as some researchers suggest. He argues that a rhetoric of possibility, balancing modest hope and reasonable critique, is fundamental to imagining an approach to literacy education. To find evidence of this rhetoric, he examines the theories of literacy espoused by a select group of academics and teachers in light of the personal narratives of literacy they have published or otherwise shared. While the theories in question arrange hope and critique in clear hierarchies, the underlying personal literacy narratives situate these theories in balanced codependence. His published work has appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (2007) and, more recently, in the coauthored chapters of Ubiquitous Learning (2009) and Technological Ecologies & Sustainability (2009). Additional information can be found athttp://patrickberry.com.