James Rushing Daniel, PhD

Assistant Professor of English and Director of Basic Writing and Assessment
Department of English

My research theorizes how the writing classroom can valuably explore issues of precarity, economic inequality, and workers’ rights. I investigate how composition teachers can more effectively prepare students to parse and navigate contemporary economic conditions, discourses, and professional scenes and explore how collaborative writing and critical writing instruction can prepare students to analyze the rhetoric of the working world; confront injustice; combat workplace inequality; and advocate for themselves and others successfully.

I am the author of Toward an Anti-Capitalist Composition (Utah State University Press, 2022), a text that challenges the field of composition to come to terms with capitalism’s devastating effects and that articulates a model of composition pedagogy framing writing as a critical, collaborative, and political praxis. Employing this model of writing, the book addresses how issues such as worker productivity, student debt, and the technology industry may be productively taken up in the composition classroom. I am also the lead editor of Writing across Difference: Theory and Intervention (Utah State University Press, 2022), a collection that explores how inclusive and pluralistic approaches to composition teaching can support the bridging of racial, linguistic, and class divides in the writing classroom and in institutional contexts.

My work in writing studies and rhetorical theory has also been published in College English, Philosophy & Rhetoric, College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Enculturation: A Journal of Writing Rhetoric and Culture, and Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society.