Rhetoric of Respect

Winner of the 2016 IWCA Outstanding Book/Major Work Award

Drawing from her decade leading Salt Lake Community College’s Community Writing Center (CWC), Tiffany Rousculp advocates cultivating relationships within a “rhetoric of respect” that recognizes the abilities, contributions, and goals of all participants. Rousculp calls for understanding change not as a result or outcome, but as the potential for people to make choices regarding textual production within regulating environments. The book’s dynamic movement through stories of failure, success, misunderstanding, and discovery is characteristic of the way in which academic–community relationships in transition pivot between disruption and sustainability. 

By inquiring into the CWC’s history, evolution, internal dynamics, relationships with stakeholders, and interplay between power and resistance, Rousculp situates the CWC not as an anomaly in composition studies but as a pointer to where change can happen and what is possible in academic–community writing partnerships when uncertainty, persistence, and respect converge.