Kathleen F. McConnell
Professor of Rhetorical Studies 
Editor-in-Chief, Review of Communication

My scholarship combines rhetorical criticism with critical university studies. I write about academic life, professionalism, academic labor conditions, histories of higher education, and media representations of the college experience. In Advocating Heightened Education: Seeing and Inventing Academic Possibilities (Lexington Books, 2020), I address reform efforts aimed at detaching education from its campus infrastructure. I argue that higher education's bulky and incommensurable institutions serve a critical modality. Their diversity of form retains the possibility of divergent and transformative educational futures. I illustrate my argument with ethnographic and archival details of two unusual campuses, The Evergreen State College and California State University, Monterey Bay. 

My current research aims to repurpose career technical and vocational education (CTVE) and direct it toward restoring civic infrastructure. Through a City Innovate STIR Labs partnership, I am working with the City of Detroit Office of Talent Development and Performance Management on a career advancement program.

A second project looks at the founding of the first feminist art program at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno). 

Ph.D., Rhetoric and Public Culture, Indiana University
M.A., Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University
B.A., The Evergreen State College 

Email

Preferred: kathleen.mcconnell@sjsu.edu

Telephone

Preferred: (408) 924-5374

Links

• Advocating Heightened Education: Seeing and Inventing Academic Possibilities (Lexington Books, 2020).
• "Teaching and Learning in an Age of Precarity: Toward a Pedagogy of the Transitory" (Communication Education, 2019)
• "Fear of Etiolation in the Age of Professional Passion" (Text & Performance Quarterly, 2018).
• "Labored Speech: Reconsidering How Communication Studies Works" (The Review of Communication, 2018).