Coercively Compromised Authorships: Risk Factors in Spaces of Writing Practice

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.