"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted."
-- Groucho Marx
Christopher is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Florida, studying Rhetoric and Composition in the English Department. His scholarly interests include writing studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, critical pedagogies, and writing that occurs in and around correctional institutions.
Christopher is writing his dissertation, which explores writing in prison as a complex network of written and circulated texts. This network includes writing by inmates and correctional staff, and allows certain conditions and actions unique to prison to occur; writing is the road upon which prisons create meanings, identities, ands struggle. This dissertation examines the writing of inmates and correctional staff writing to explore how these two bodies of writing interact through social genre theory, public/counterpublic theories, theories of writing as resistance, and pedagogy in prison-based education. The goal of this dissertation is to explain the complexity of the prison writing network as a functioning, dynamic site of writing. By understanding writing in the marginalized social space of prison, we can also see how descriptions of the production and circulation in other complex settings do not fully explain the effects of writing.