Coercively Compromised Authorships: Risk Factors in Spaces of Writing Practice
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Abstract
This dissertation project explores the potential for coercive interactions to shape
collaboratively authored, singularly credited textual productions. Building on the work of
Composition Studies, which reflects a sustained history of engagement with issues pertaining to
coercion (e.g., authority; hierarchy), and grounded by the argument that all authorship constitutes
at least some degree of collaboration, the driving inquires of the project explore multiple sites of
writing practice to identify factors that may act as doorways for coercive pressure, including
worst-case scenarios of coercive collaboration that find an individual facing punitive
consequences for a text substantially authored by unacknowledged collaborators.
The dissertation ultimately offers a heuristic tool designed for pedagogical use: a
framework identifying five risk factors of coercively compromised authorships. These factors
include: external stakes; interactions with authority; loss of control; changed relationship with a
text; and the erasure of collaborative influences. The rhetorical continuum created by the
framework encourages users to see collaborative interactions embedded within texts, and to then
strategically consider the potential for coercion situated within them. Ideally, the heuristic and
the continuum-like view of coercive risk it creates will foster more nuanced critical evaluation of
textual authorship; additionally, explicit attention to coercive risk factors may function as a
safeguard against future acts of coercive collaborations.