In a society in which expertise becomes increasingly specialized, we need to understand how to manage gaps in knowledge between experts in various fields and between experts and the public in general. That need is especially great in the public sphere, where technical understanding and lived experience do not always align. This study attempts to model the process by which discipline-specific topoi filter into common knowledge and general topoi are acknowledged by experts. It first addresses the issue of expertise in complex rhetorical places, then employs Michel Meyer's reinterpretation of ethos, pathos, and logos to show how experts and non-experts in such places negotiate rhetorical relationships. The study then explores the social and rhetorical mechanisms by which ideas become commonplaces, building on the established theory of symbolic convergence. Finally, the study demonstrates proof in principle with a brief analysis of one topos in the Reports of the Immigration Commission (1911).

Scholars in our field frequently explore issues of positioning and disciplinary identity, thus revealing insecurity about our institutional value. We must realize that our homelessness within the academic neighborhood is a position of strength, not weakness. As knowledge grows increasingly specialized, our ability to position ourselves in various places within an institution gives us administrative flexibility, marketability, and proximity to the fields that we study.

Listening Up will change the way you view radical literacy education, offering a personal look at the Freirean ideas that guided Rachel Martin's early years of teaching, and the theories and classroom experiences that urged her to take a second look. Through her own compelling example, Martin demonstrates the power of a sustained dialogue between critical theory and classroom and community practice. The ideas Martin draws on help us think in new ways about how power works. They provide the possibility of seeing how teachers' own needs, fears, and desires might find a place in classroom inquiry as we come to see how our relationship to domination is a matter neither of complete acquiescence nor absolute resistance. While the goals of meaning-making and becoming colearners have become guideposts in radical teaching, Martin aims in a different direction. She advocates for a pedagogy that places teachers in a more genuine position of colearner as together with students, they question the meanings they make. Later chapters highlight the practical implications that notions of multiple voices and identities have for the teaching of writing and the questions they raise about the teaching of reading. Martin also describes community publishing projects. Poor and working-class people are too seldom able to have their written visions and strategies distributed, to become part of the way the world is described and possibilities for change are widely considered. Martin argues that community publishing does that, as it also links self-definition to self-determination.