Ross Collin

Genre in Discourse, Discourse in Genre: A New Approach to the Study of Literate Practice

Focusing on matters of power and difference, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee’s theory of Discourse. Although both theories offer productive ways of understanding literate practice, it is argued, they are limited in crucial respects. Genre theory offers few ways of understanding how and why some social actors have an easier time than others in producing generic texts and getting their texts deemed “legitimate” by recognized authorities. Gee’s theory, meanwhile, does not explain precisely how and where (i.e., at which conceptual level) communicants come to match Discourse to situation. This article contends that these limitations may be surpassed if the two theories are brought together in a particular way. In this new approach, genres and Discourses are viewed as mutually constitutive forms: Genres exist within Discourses and Discourses exist within genres. In adopting this approach, it is argued, researchers may study how particular genres are made to elicit performances of Discourses connected to particular social groups.

Lives on file: a critical assessment of the career portfolio genre

This article examines the ideological dimensions of the career portfolio. This genre, an increasingly common part of high school and post-secondary school curricula, invites students to collect items from multiple domains and to reflect upon what these items say about who they are and where they are going. Through a critical analysis of the primary instructional form used in one schools career portfolio program, this article describes how the genre calls students to present themselves as certain kinds of people inhabiting certain kinds of worlds. More specifically, it is argued the genre prompts students to individualize themselves and endorse in their portfolios a middle-class ideology of self-cultivation and self-promotion.

Mapping the future, mapping education: an analysis of the 2011 State of the Union Address

This article presents a discourse analysis of President Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address. Fredric Jameson’s concepts of cognitive mapping, cultural revolution, and the unconscious are employed to examine the president’s vision of educational and economic transformation. Ultimately, it is argued this vision evokes a world in which individual citizens direct their deepest aspirations into channels of capitalist development. Prominent among these channels are reconfigured structures of education.

Dress Rehearsal: A Bourdieusian Analysis of Body Work in Career Portfolio Programs.

This article examines how career portfolio programs at two secondary schools establish corporeal regimes. Both programs require students to compose portfolios that plot their trajectories through school and into paid work. Prior to graduation, students defend their portfolios before panels of educators and businesspeople. Employing the Bourdieusian concepts of capital and habitus, this article investigates how these programs set up systems that value certain kinds of bodies. Further, it examines how students negotiate these systems and display different kinds of bodies in different kinds of ways. Ultimately, it is argued these disparate bodily performances are read by authorities as indicators of the types of paths students are travelling or should travel into the future.

Selling the self: career portfolios and the new common-sense of immaterial capitalism

This article presents a discourse analysis of a popular guide to composing career portfolios. Comprised of documents from work, school, and personal life, career portfolios chart workers’ personal trajectories from past to present to future. Job applicants use these texts to sell themselves to potential employers. In explaining how to compose portfolios, it is argued, the guide examined in this article (re)produces and circulates common-sense ideas about work in our current era. Central to these common-sense notions are: personal investment in work; deterritorialization of socio-cultural resources (e.g. ways of thinking, speaking, and interacting developed in non-work domains); and reterritorialization of these same resources in the domain of work. To explore these common-sense ideas, I engage Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris arguments about immaterial capitalism and the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of labor.