Grounded in a series of local accounts, this webtext examines complex issues facing pre-tenure writing program administrators as they enter the professoriate while negotiating hybrid identities as teachers, researchers, and administrators. Developed out of a roundtable at the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication, the project also emphasizes contemporary alternatives to roundtable design that regard openness, accessibility, and persistence as priorities for delivery and circulation.

In Carolyn Miller’s Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre, she revisits her assertion that genres are cultural artifacts and questions the nature of the relationship between micro-level, individual speech acts, and macro-level genres and systems. To demonstrate this relationship, I analyze meta-genre accounts of the dissertation posted on the Writing Program Administrator (WPA) listserv, a forum for Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Within this discourse, I identify transitional threads —moments when the discussion shifts, which show the relationship between micro- and macro-level interaction on the listserv as well as constructions of the dissertation within Writing Studies. CMC highlights how micro-level speech acts aggregate and are impacted by macro-level culture, and it showcases the heterogeneity inherent in the rhetorical community of the listserv.

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