In Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom, winner of the 2009 JAC’s W. Ross Winterowd Award for composition theory, Kristie Fleckenstein presents a provocative theory of social action and describes how it can be used to help students recognize personal, cultural, and social injustices and gain tools to make changes in the world. Social action, she argues, emerges from visual habits, rhetorical habits, and place, and she refers to the interplay of these as a “symbiotic knot.” Because ways “people think through imagery” and assign visuals “meaning, significance, and power”(163), Fleckenstein claims that to identify and address social injustices we must recognize the ways we see and develop new ways of seeing. Her approach is distinctive for its use of visuals to teach habits encourage students to participate actively in the world and become compassionate, empathic citizens—the ultimate goal, she claims, of social action.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric