My primary goal as a researcher of rhetoric and composition studies is to help writing teacher-scholars (and by extension the students they teach) develop what I call a “revisionary consciousness,” a kind of attitudinal flexibility that garners a willingness to listen to and contend responsibly with other points of view. Thus, instead of defining revision as a process of changing words, I theorize revision as a process of changing attitudes. Simply put, I am interested in finding ways to make myself and those around me rethink what it is we think we know so well. In nearly every one of my projects, I try to encourage (sometimes unconsciously) more pliant thinking by applying Kenneth Burke’s definition of metaphor—a process of “putting the wrong words together.” Burkean metaphor, I argue, has the power to disrupt; as such, it offers a method for provoking different ways of thinking. Through the productive disruption of expectations, I believe we can develop the epistemological pliancy—the revisionary consciousness—we all need to negotiate responsibly an ever-changing world.

My book, Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts (Southern Illinois UP 2005), fully engages Burkean metaphor by proposing and demonstrating alternative ways of reading, writing, and teaching that hear silences in such a way as to generate personal, pedagogical, and professional revisions. More recently, the concept of Burkean metaphor has unified the themes of my scholarly work in such a way as to manifest a complementary research strand—that of ethos, identification, and identity formation. Currently, I am working on a book project tentatively titled The Reflective Subject: Tropes, Emotions, Economies, which examines the effects of the unproblematized celebration of reflective writing in composition studies. Situating my analyses within a range of contexts (the writing classroom, the discipline of composition studies, and the public university), I critique the ways in which current scholarship conceptualizes reflective writing as a synecdochic representation of the “right” kind of worker subjectivity. Such synecdochic thinking, I argue, creates an epistemological frame whereby institutional identity formation becomes problematically invested in an economy of emotion.