If rhetoric and composition is taking a “public turn,” Frank Farmer cautions, let’s be sure that the “public” we imagine actually exists.
Farmer examines what a public is—or, more precisely, what publics and counterpublics are. His close examination of the punk zines
and his new term, citizen bricoleur, highlight the creative ingenuity of counterpublics, and reshapes usual assumptions about how to engage in civic life. His consideration of disciplinary counterpublics in the final half of the book reveals new perspectives about how expertise functions within the dominant public sphere: he shows us why our expertise in writing studies is rarely enough to get us heard within those all-too-common public outcries about the failures of composition classes. The book is sharp, timely, and wellworth the read.