In this article, we ask what it means to think of infrastructure discursively through situational analysis. First, we consider how policymakers have historically used writing and rhetoric to redefine, reframe, and resituate what infrastructure can be in technical documents. Second, we address the impact of policymakers' discursive practices on the spaces and material realities of communities. We view the infrastructural function of writing "as a conceptual foundation for revealing structures and foundations of organizations that affect people" (Read, 2019, p. 237). We use three texts as the space of our discourse mapping: President Franklin Roosevelt's "Fireside Chat on the Recovery Program," the Green New Deal, and President Joseph Biden's recently proposed American Jobs Plan. Through these three cases, we argue that infrastructure has always been defined in relation to environment. Any definition of infrastructure is rooted in environment or seeks to change environment. These shifts in definition have been used strategically to bring more visibility to marginalized communities and make their concerns central to the concerns of the United States' socio-economic agenda. We close with implications for both communities and policymakers.

“Joint Position Statement on Dual Enrollment from CCCC, TYCA, WPA, NCTE” Jan. 2020.

This article analyzes and reflects on dual enrollment programs at a two-year college and a four-year research university in the same city and branches into a critique of dual enrollment and an argument for the need for inter-institutional collaboration toward goals of student access and opportunity.

This article presents a new examination of the history of the first-year composition requirement using the “adaptive cycle” idea about the resilience of systems. The author argues that we may be experiencing the collapse of required FYC and should look to other possible futures of college writing.

This profile describes a new WPA’s choice to work incrementally to assess an inherited, fledgling First-Year Writing curriculum at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and change it over a three-year period with continual stakeholder involvement. The methods used for assessment were two rounds of instructor surveys and three rounds of direct assessment of student writing samples, motivated in part by the university’s reaccreditation review. The resulting curriculum’s main areas of focus are academic writing techniques, argument structure, and research-based writing.