College Composition and Communication Feb 2025

Postcapitalist Professionalization: Civic Education and the Future of Work

Chase Bollig

Abstract

Critiques of neoliberal capitalism have offered a rich vocabulary for the analysis of the political economy of literacy across professional, public, and classroom contexts. Since the Great Recession, commonplaces about work-readiness have been conditioned by economic precarity and changes to the social contract of work that blur the lines between professionalization and exploitation. Looking beyond the confines of the neoliberal present, the uncertain future of work for our undergraduate students will be shaped by what the World Economic Forum describes as the “double-disruption” of the pandemic and the rise of automation. Whereas neoliberal critique offers a vocabulary for describing many job seekers’ experience of the present, this article seeks to recover an element of “literacy hope” (Wan) by looking to speculative and utopian postcapitalist theory to inform and challenge career guidance conversations with students in writing studies. By framing the future as a resource in the rhetorical constitution of present-day workers, this article advances an inquiry-focused career-guidance pedagogy that asks: How do our assumptions about the future of work inform our relationships with employers and each other in the present?

Journal
College Composition and Communication
Published
2025-02-01
DOI
10.58680/ccc2025763370
CompPile
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Open Access
Closed
Topics
rhetorical criticism writing pedagogy graduate education literacy studies
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

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    Money Machine: Gig Writing, Automation, and Labor Troubles in Composition
    College Composition and Communication
  2. Daniel et al. (2025)
    Complicating Marx’s Role in Rhetorical Studies
    Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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CrossRef global citation count: 2 View in citation network → Build reading path →

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