Mark Houston

I believe that the world is defined by entanglement—the irreducible interconnections between material things, organisms and places, language and reality. Studying these interconnections drives my research and my teaching. To write and teach writing is to enter into a complex web of interactions. There is no simple this separated from that, no linear writer, topic, audience relationship.  My teaching invites students to listen to these complex social, material, and ecological intra-relations. This attention to entanglement prompts students to think and write in rhetorically versatile ways that challenge binary dualisms. I want my students to learn that being and writing in the world involves seeing things as inextricably interwoven in complex and mutually shaping ways, rather than as simple either/or, zero-sum choices. Writing well demands empathy, emotional intelligence, and understanding and speaking to complex intra-connections, practicing what Donna Haraway calls “tentacular thinking.” These complexities require writers to listen, learn from, and speak back to existing genres; social and political relations; and the material connections of place, time, and their own bodies. Therefore, I ask students to view rhetorical situations as ecologies both metaphorically and literally by incorporating concrete material relationships and place-consciousness in their writing.

Publications

“Messy Plates: Using Food-Themed Writing Courses to Resist Anthropocene Disorder.” Teaching Ecocomposition in the Age of Climate Change. Edited by Justin Everett and Russell Mayo. Parlor Press, 2023. (Forthcoming).

“Riding Out of Abstraction: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Re-materialization of Social Justice Rhetoric in ‘The Sacred and the Superfund.’” Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2022.

 “Writing Things: What’s the (Performative) Matter in Composition?” College Composition and Communication, vol. 73, no. 2, 2021, pp. 338-364.

Selected Presentations

“Planting the Seed: Learning Advocacy Writing through a Community Gardening Organization Partnership.” Conference on College Composition and Communication, Chicago, Illinois, 15 February 2023.

“Learning from and Writing for a Community Gardening Organization: Learning Local Advocacy Literacies through Food Justice.” Conference on Community Writing, Washington, D.C., Online, 21-23 October 2021.

“Messy Plates: Using Food-Themed Writing Courses to Resist Anthropocene Disorder.” Conference on College Composition and Communication. Virtual Annual Convention, 7-10 April 2021.

“Writing Phenomena: New Materialism, Performative Matter, and Teaching Composition.” Conference on College Composition and Communication. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 13-16 March 2019.

“‘Project Rawhide’: Neoliberalism, Environmental Rhetoric, and a Nebraska Poultry Facility.” You Are Here Conference. Omaha, Nebraska. 23-24 March 2018.