Hello. My name is Matthew Williams, and this is my blog. I’m currently a PhD candidate knee deep in my dissertation at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. What exactly do I do? Well…
I locate my scholarly pursuits within the tradition of critical composition studies. By this I mean that my teaching and my research is ultimately concerned with the relationships between the production of meaning through language and broader social dynamics. My current scholarship focuses on the intersections of literacy, education, and the political economics of post-secondary education. In particular, I’m interested in the ways that we use “literacy” and “college” as discursive spaces in order to organize and make productive use of the lives of students. The seeds of my current scholarship were sown during my time as an undergraduate student. It was while reading Marx, Foucault and later Emerson, Whitman, and Ginsberg that I began to take seriously questions concerning race, gender, class and their relationship to academia as well as education in whole. It was only a matter of time before the work of John Dewey and others in the distinctively American philosophical tradition of Pragmatism became the foundation for my scholarly pursuits. This ever-continuing encounter has profoundly influenced the theoretical orientations I bring to composition studies. After receiving a Master of Fine Arts in 2007, I immediately turned my full attention to questions concerning the role literacy education has in cultural reproduction as well as transformation. While my current work uses the university first year writing classroom as the pivot point for much of my inquiry, I am ultimately interested and perplexed by the entire range of education, from early childhood to adult education. Like many others in the tradition of American Pragmatism, my scholarly interests spring from a deep commitment to the project of theorizing and realizing a radically democratic future in our communities and in our world.
My dissertation in progress considers the effects of neoliberalism on writing instruction–particularly at the secondary and post-secondary levels–and contributes to the reconstruction of the leftist critique of modern liberal democracies through a resurrection of the more radical aspects of American Pragmatism
I also love baseball, autumn, and all things green and growing.
