Who is the public at the public university? Creating a mission through literacy and citizenship

April 30, 2014
Prof. Amy Wan, Co-Director of First Year Writing at Queens College, is the author of Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times (U of Pittsburgh P, 2014), an examination of citizenship, literacy, and the productive worker-citizen in the United States. Drawing on literacy studies, composition history, and citizenship theory, along with historical evidence of U.S. immigration and labor practices and policies in the early 20th century (1910-1929), the book constructs a history of work-inflected citizenship and the role of literacy in its cultivation and complicates liberatory and participatory notions of citizenship commonly taken up by contemporary literacy teachers.