Kairotic Inspiration

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Sarah Allen's Kairotic Inspiration offers the helping hand we all need if we are going to develop 'the habits of wonder' required to confront the climate-change-precipitated Sixth Extinction. Allen does this by reframing the project of rhetoric to include active efforts to engage with the nonhuman world and its many inhabitants. In the process, she introduces the prospect of 'becoming-with' and 'becoming in contradiction' as ways to slip the confines of rigid binary thinking and initiate a transformation that allows us to connect with and be changed by a nonanthropocentric vision of the world. If you're seeking inspiration in dark times, delivered by a serious thinker who writes beautifully, you'll find that and more in this remarkable work. -- Richard E. Miller, author of On the End of Privacy and Habits of the Creative Mind Throughout my career as a writing teacher, I have told my students that one of my primary objectives is to make them uncomfortable. I explain that when one is comfortable with something, one generally does not change it. However, when uncomfortable, we are likely to change, to adjust. Sarah Allen's Kairotic Inspiration: Imagining the Future in the Sixth Extinction asks us-writing teachers-to be uncomfortable with one of our fundamental pedagogical focuses: argumentation. She asks us to look to ecological approaches to critically question the ramifications of emphasizing argumentation in writing classes. Ultimately, she asks us to do something uncomfortable: she asks us to change. In doing so, Kairotic Inspiration not only expands writing studies' ecological turn but in doing so may provoke one of the most relevant (and needed) changes in how we think about teaching writing. -- Sidney I. Dobrin, University of Florida