"The Managerial Unconscious offers an insightful reading of composition history that cuts through tired debates about composition management and labor to give readers a productive re-imagining of the work of composition. Both a revisionist history and a call to action, Strickland demonstrates that composition denies the field's managerial identity at its own cost."—
Bruce Horner, author of
Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique
"Strickland reads composition programs, past and present, as hierarchical workplaces, and the teaching of composition as a rough-and-tumble, complex economic enterprise. Without flinching she calls for our field 'to bring a critical, curious, and even skeptical attention' to the managerial, that is, to writing program administration. Her carefully wrought argument merits the attention of 'comp bosses' and faculty alike."—
Lucille M. Schultz, professor emerita, University of Cincinnati
"An important and deeply original work of scholarship that allows the profession to pull back the curtain and recognize its fundamental managerial identity. Over the course of this next decade, I expect The Managerial Unconscious to become one of the most important works focused on the connection between our professional identity and the labor system that supports it."—
Steve Parks, author of
Gravyland: Writing beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love
"Scholars and teachers of composition and rhetoric need to understand the economies in which they work, and
The Managerial Unconscious is a central text, successfully arguing that managerialism is not confined within the subfield of writing program administration but instead informs the entire discipline of composition and rhetoric."—
Rebecca Moore Howard, professor of writing and rhetoric, Syracuse University— -