The Structure Remains: Naming the Patterned Relationship Between Failure and Resilience in CCCC Chairs' Addresses from 2000 to 2025

Abstract

This dissertation examines twenty-five years of CCCC Chairs' addresses since the turn of the 21st century to the year 2025. The addresses—delivered at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication and published in the journal College Composition and Communication (CCC)—were examined through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis. Drawing on Powell (2004), Gee (2008), and Fairclough (1992), it argues that the patterned relationship between failure and resilience across the archives functions as a structuring logic for how writing professionals should relate to the field's most persistent vexing issues, and how it redistributes the responsibility of repair work and recovery onto those in the worst position to refuse it, particularly the teaching majority. The study itself was originally organized around five research questions that were later refined and fixed to three for understanding the use of failure and resilience rhetoric throughout the addresses. Those questions are as follows: how CCCC Chairs frame vexing issues in the context of their addresses; what forms of resilience are called forth in the name of the field for responding to those issues; and what does this relationship reveals about the field and how it distributes responsibility among writing professionals and across the field of Rhetoric and Writing. Using Roen's (2006) "vexing issues" as a waypoint for identifying moments of institutional negligence and professional constraint, the analysis identifies sixteen initial failure codes across the dataset. Through iterative reading, these initial sixteen were later refined to four analytical clusters capturing the most unrelenting vexing issues bearing on the professional realities of writing professionals for the past twenty-five years: namely, the institutional marginalization of writing instruction and deprofessionalization of writing instructors; the normalization of professional precarity; the affective tax; and the supremacy we do not name. Findings suggest that across the archive Chairs routinely name vexing issues and sanction resilience formations among writing professionals in response to those named vexations. The simultaneity of these effects is what was traced across each of the addresses across twenty-five years of them since the year 2000. This study also suggests that the simultaneity of these effects redirect attention inward, toward writing professionals, toward their affective and professional dispositions rather than toward institutional arrangements responsible for producing conditions that require resilience in the first place. This also study draws on Hoerl (2020) to illustrate just how the redistributive practices of failure and resilience rhetoric combined are not evenly borne, largely falling on those who do not fit in a majoritarian, white, male academic model This dissertation contributes to existing literature on CCCC Chairs' addresses, failure and resilience, rhetoric, and the working conditions of writing professionals. It offers the first sustained analysis of the addresses as a site where the pairing of institutional failures and affective resilience rhetoric absolves institutional producers of professional precarity from accountability while burdening those most impacted by those precarious conditions.