Christian R. Weisser

In Moving Beyond Academic Discourse (2002), Christian Weisser follows the social turn in composition and publics theorists such as Habermas and Fraser to argue that students should be writing for publics. He defines public writing as "written discourse that attempts to engage an audience of local, regional, or national groups or individuals in order to bring about progressive societal change" (90). He also argues for understanding the composition scholar as a public intellectual—not in the show more sense that Stanley Fish espouses as someone who can speak on all issues to all people (125), but in the sense that one can speak on a variety of issues to any public. show less