Networked Process: Dissolving Boundaries of Process and Post-process

Helen Foster's NETWORKED PROCESS: DISSOLVING BOUNDARIES OF PROCESS AND POST-PROCESS is a rigorous and extensive exploration of one of the dominant metaphors of rhetoric and composition, and, more broadly, of the formation and the future of an academic discipline. Foster offers an important new approach to research in the field, one that explores and moves beyond the tension between "writing process" and "post-process" positions. Her notion of networked process promotes a culture of inquiry that grapples with the complexity of writers, writing research, pedagogy, and curricular change. Central to networked process is a theory of networked subjectivity, an idea that complicates and reformulates commonplace assumptions about student, teacher, and disciplinary identities. Networked subjectivity is grounded in the material reality of writing work and a fundamental acknowledgment of multiple literacies and multiple ways of knowing and being in the world. In NETWORKED PROCESS, Foster offers a compelling and timely investigation of the future of the discipline, arguing convincingly for the promotion of the undergraduate writing major and for the coalescence of disciplinary identity around the increasingly complex, postmodern notion of networked process, encapsulated by the re-visioning of rhetoric and composition as rhetoric and writing studies. HELEN FOSTER holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Purdue University and is currently associate professor of English at the University of Texas El Paso, where she serves as director of the Rhetoric and Writing Studies Program. She has presented papers at numerous conferences and is published in various journals. Her research areas include the history and theory of composition studies; rhetorical and cultural studies theory, particularly regarding issues of power, knowledge, marginalization, and legitimacy; and the emerging area of undergraduate rhetoric and writing studies.