Comment & Response: Reimaging the Social Turn

The special issue on "Reimagining the Social Turn" (July 2014) undertakes a welcome survey of history and present trends in the study of social, political, and economic issues in our field. Tony Scott and Nancy Welch's "One Train Can Hide Another" is Marxist ideological critique at its most brilliant, intricately written but nowhere incomprehensible or pretentious. Steve Parks's "Sinners Welcome," like everything he writes, is incisive and inspiring. Jonathan Alexander and Susan Jarratt's "Rhetorical Education and Student Activism" describes an exemplary application of its title in a timely account of Muslim student activism at the University of California-Irvine.With all there is to admire in the issue, I hate to nitpick, but . . . First, in their editors' introduction, Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander bravely proclaim, "The social turn serves as a powerful lens through which to see composition's ongoing grapp...