Enrollment Outreach as Constitutive Rhetorical Infrastructure

Chase Bollig, Gonzaga University

(Published March 4, 2020)

Public narratives of higher education position first-generation college and historically-marginalized students in a state of tension between access and excellence: their success maintains cultural narratives of social mobility, but “too much” access raises alarms among commentariat about the lowering of academic standards. As Steve Lamos observes in Interests and Opportunities, one way that universities have managed this tension is by recruiting among “high-achieving minority students” (93). Programs serving such students have proliferated nationally, with colleges and universities recruiting among underrepresented communities, working to boost academic outcomes and retention, and fostering community or a sense of belonging on campus (see Ward et al. for an overview of these initiatives). These initiatives are guided by research in student development,^[1] but they also showcase the rhetorical resources available to students in their efforts to navigate difference on campus and the rhetorical tools available to institutional actors seeking to counter these students’ feelings of alienation.

Enrollment outreach programs targeting academic, material, and social conditions that remediate or exclude underrepresented groups are also infrastructural interventions: mobilizations of material, symbolic, and human resources and networks with the express purpose of addressing the breakdown of college access and retention. Many of these programs also target individuals’ rhetorical subjectivity, a condition by which individuals are recognized as legitimate participants in rhetorical encounters, and may be understood as a form of rhetorical constitution that persuades underrepresented students to attend and persist at institutions that have historically under-served them.

In rhetorical studies, constitutive rhetoric names the processes by which a speaker calls an audience into being as subjects oriented toward rhetorical action. Maurice Charland coined the term in 1987 to account for the role that collective address plays in the construction of a coherent peuple québécois during the Quebec sovereignty movement of the 1960s and 70s. This theory describes the ideological effects of addressing and positioning audiences by synthesizing Kenneth Burke’s notion of identification with Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation and Louis Althusser’s theory of ideological interpellation of subjects.

While Charland’s essay and its approach have produced a rich body of scholarship investigating the textual constitution of subjects by organizations or movements (Enck-Wanzer; Tate), leaders (Leff and Utley; Sweet and McCue Enser; Triece), and other rhetoricians (Drzewiecka), challenges to key premises of constitutive rhetoric invite revision of this theory. For example, public sphere theorist Michael Warner challenges Althusser’s model of interpellation, asserting that a public emerges not in response to a text but through “the reflexive circulation of discourse” (90). Similarly, Ronald Walter Greene argues that rhetorical subjects are implicated in modes of production, not to be viewed “as a ‘meaning effect’ and/or psychological effect of discursive processes inherent to ‘texts,’ but [as] a specific kind of subjectivity ethically, politically, economically, and culturally produced and valued for the work it can and cannot accomplish” (49). In addition to these challenges to the primacy of texts in rhetorical constitution, scholars such as Catherine Chaput and Jenny Edbauer Rice have nuanced the model of rhetorical situation that undergirds Charland’s constitutive rhetoric. Edbauer Rice’s “rhetorical ecology” has been particularly influential for observing how the circulation of rhetoric “destabilizes the discrete borders of a rhetorical situation,” operating instead within “a network of lived practical consciousness or structures of feeling” (5).

In light of these critiques and complications, to understand the production of rhetorical subjects, their positioning in social space, and the formation of publics, we need a model of constitutive rhetoric that foregrounds the distribution of agency across encounters and over time. In short, because rhetorical constitution exceeds enunciation, constitutive rhetorical theory would benefit from a model of encounter that frames rhetorical activity not as an individual address but, in Burke’s terms, “as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reënforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill” (26). In this article, I analyze university responses to the breakdown of infrastructures of college access and retention to argue that infrastructure provides a model of rhetorical encounter better suited to understanding the production of rhetorical subjects in context. These interventions, while advancing administrative interests, also function as a form of constitutive rhetoric, as attempts to encourage the emergence of campus publics among the historically-marginalized groups by staging scenes of recognition with the university and its representatives through managed encounters over time.

Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks

This article derives from a larger IRB-approved mixed methods research study on recruitment and retention of low-income and first-generation college students. For that study, I worked with university archivists and staff at a large, state university in the Midwest^[2] to identify programs targeting low-income and first-generation college students for recruitment, financial and academic support, or community-building on campus. I collected and analyzed materials from the development and promotion of these programs, including two different cooperative housing scholarships and an outreach and academic prep initiative called the Future Leaders Program. To supplement textual representations of program participants, I also conducted seventeen semi-structured 30-60 minute interviews with program participants and alumni and eight interviews with current and former staff. These interviews focused on understanding how first-generation college experiences and identification practices shaped how these students navigate the conditions of their marginalization on campus.

I analyzed this data using grounded theory methods, a research practice that entails simultaneous collection and analysis that, through iterative processes of memo writing and reflection, identify emergent codes and themes that serve as a lens for the data (Charmaz 155). Working on that project, I observed that although program activities and informal interactions among participants frequently employ traditional constitutive rhetorical address, this framework does not account for efforts to socialize participants to college cultures, rhetorical processes that more closely resemble Burke’s “dull daily reënforcements.” The constitutive rhetorical framework premised on discrete rhetorical situations became strained as I coded archival materials and interview transcripts for descriptions of these socializing efforts, which manifest in structured mentor relationships, service activities, cultural excursions and campus visits for the FLP and in cooperative labor, connections to place on campus, and extended debates about the make-up of the dorms. Emerging as a supplement to this framework was a sense that the production of rhetorical subjects is also an effect of crafted, managed encounters distributed across space and time in ways that resemble infrastructure, the “pervasive enabling resources in network form” that enable knowledge work (Bowker et al. 98, emphasis in original).

In public discourse, infrastructure refers to mass-scale material or logistics resources that, remaining largely unseen, enable economic or civic activities (from the National Highway System to the electrical grid). As a metaphor, then, infrastructure conjures a taken-for-granted material “substrate” upon which stuff is built or across which stuff is distributed. Influential scholarship in information science and science and technology studies has substantially nuanced this perspective on infrastructure by examining the intersecting (and co-constitutive) material, networked, and social conditions that regulate or enable human activity. In their study on a geographically-dispersed community of scientists using networked communication and the sharing of research materials, Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder challenge the common perspective that infrastructure is “a substrate…that is built and maintained, and which then sinks into an invisible background” (112). While many of the “characteristics of infrastructure” they identify include conditions that make infrastructure harder to notice (including its embeddedness, its transparency, and its connection to membership in and conventions of communities of practice), they also observe that “infrastructure is a fundamentally relational concept. It becomes infrastructure in relation to organized practices” (113). In fact, their project not only looks at the consequences of networked communication and technology in facilitating research activity, but also in maintaining a sense of “close-knit community” in the process (132).

Since Star and Ruhleder’s influential work on infrastructure, scholarship in information science and science and technology studies has continued to develop our understanding of these intersecting conditions and their relationship to knowledge work. Geoffrey Bowker and colleagues’ study of infrastructure advances a definition, cited above, that foregrounds infrastructure as a condition of possibility for knowledge work. For these authors, a relational perspective on infrastructure includes “thinking about infrastructure not only in terms of human versus technological components but in terms of a set of interrelated social, organizational, and technical components or systems…” (99). Similarly, Paul N. Edwards investigates how a network of researchers on climate change come to scientific consensus. He offers “knowledge infrastructures,” which “comprise robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions that generate, share, and maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural worlds” (17, emphasis in original). Across these studies, we observe significant connections between infrastructure and the means by which these infrastructures enable community.

Dànielle DeVoss, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill spearheaded the expansion of infrastructure studies into rhetoric and composition with their application of Star and Ruhleder’s framework to the conditions of possibility of multimodal invention for students working in campus computer labs. Observing that infrastructural analysis includes but exceeds hardware and space used by students, they argue that an understanding of infrastructure in rhetoric and composition

would include the policies and standards that regulate the uses of that room…[,] systems of support for the work that takes place in the room…[,] the budget and funding…[, and] structures for surveillance within the room and within the spaces to which the machines allow access.” (20)

Similarly, in his Writing Community Change, Grabill echoes Bowker et al. and Edwards to argue for attention to “infrastructures of possibility,” “the mundane and often invisible discursive rules and practices that bound what we can do as writers and citizens” (4). Just as DeVoss et al. observe infrastructural conditions of possibility for agency and production in digital media composing, Grabill argues that “‘information infrastructures’ frame what is possible for writers and writing in community contexts” (20). He further observes that this information infrastructure bears directly on activists’ efforts to mobilize community members and challenge city policies. In other words, infrastructure makes their deliberation efforts possible.

Whereas DeVoss et al. demonstrate that infrastructure shapes the possibility of agency in digital media contexts, and Grabill illustrates the role of infrastructure in enabling civic activity, Nathan R. Johnson and Meredith A. Johnson argue that infrastructures themselves may be leveraged rhetorically toward persuasive ends. Analyzing the failure of airline infrastructure during the 2014 polar vortex weather event, the authors challenge the concept of infrastructure employed by DeVoss et al. as too narrowly conceived, as “particular technologies rather than as an entire circulatory system that enables action.” The authors describe the breakdown of such a system in their flight delays, lost luggage, and in a dispute over additional baggage fees that hinges not on the content of their argument but rather on a glitchy scale that demonstrates the arbitrariness of the standards and protocols that the airline employees leverage against them. In this example, the authors model the analysis of a network of carefully managed encounters between customers and company representatives acting as “infrastructural people toggl[ing] between being agents of infrastructure supporting the network and organizing new infrastructural action.”

While infrastructural analysis offers a productive vocabulary for many forms of rhetorical activity, this scholarship has not yet extended to processes of articulating and positioning rhetorical subjects that attend constitutive rhetoric. Regarding enrollment outreach programs in my study, infrastructures enable the work of community-building, mediating relations among participants and the university through academic standards and communication protocols. But the infrastructures that sustain students’ rhetorical activity are wide-ranging: from admissions and financial aid protocols to dorm maintenance, from the funding and distribution of a dorm newspaper to the maintenance of spaces where students congregate. Because, as Star and Ruhleder argue, infrastructures become visible upon breakdown (113), in the sections that follow, I go into greater detail into three infrastructural breakdowns and institutional interventions responding to these ruptures. While the primary response may be material or administrative, these interventions also serve to produce or position rhetorical subjects who are poised to accomplish rhetorical work for the institution. Just as Jeffrey T. Grabill claims that to understand the rhetorical work people do together, “we must render visible the infrastructure that remains...invisible and that supports, locates—participates in—that rhetorical work” (21), I would suggest that we should similarly attend to the infrastructure that makes possible the production of rhetorical subjects.

College Access as Infrastructural Breakdown

Scholars in composition and literacy studies have long analyzed and critiqued public debates about college access, including the roles that affirmative action and selective admissions have played in shaping access for historically-marginalized groups. Understood as debates about distributions of state, national, and institutional resources as well as concerns about higher education “pipelines” for communities of need, these debates function as exigence for the architecture of many enrollment outreach programs, as institutions and advocates rally financial, logistical, and human or symbolic resources to address needs of students, communities, and the institution.

Moreover, these debates and the programmatic responses they generate must be understood within wider contexts of racial (in)justice and literacy because, as Catherine Prendergast argues, backlash against efforts to extend educational access, including white anti-affirmative action sentiment, originates from a larger pattern of treating literacy as white property. Steve Lamos similarly identifies how affirmative action and access initiatives may be read as constrained by what Derrick Bell describes as “interest convergence,” expanding when greater access serves hegemonic white interests and being undermined during periods when interests were understood to be divergent (7). In this context, literacy itself functions as a resource being managed and disputed across communities.

With these contexts in mind, I turn now to archival materials from the development of the Future Leaders Program as a case study in how infrastructural breakdown (low enrollment among black students in the 1980s) and intervention (the design and implementation of a college prep outreach program) are implicated in the production of rhetorical subjects. The FLP grows out of a response to the persistently low enrollment of African American students following the implementation of affirmative action initiatives in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The program operates local offices in the largest cities in the state, recruiting high-achieving historically-marginalized students to the program and, ultimately, to college at the host university. Local city coordinators serve as community liaisons, leading outreach efforts in area schools and providing academic preparation, tutoring, counseling, service, and enrichment opportunities for program participants prior to their enrollment in college. This design, which combines extensive pre-college mentoring with campus visits and admissions and financial aid assistance, reflects tensions surrounding the institution’s understanding of the breakdown of college access pipelines for historically-marginalized communities. In a 1985 speech to the city’s Urban League, the university president at that time asserted that “Minority students are not prepared to seize the opportunity of higher education. Nor are they necessarily encouraged to do so by teachers, counselors, and their peers; or even by the example of black and Hispanic role models in significant numbers” (“Affirmative Action”). By articulating the problem in terms of academic preparation, the president targets students’ subjectivity as a site of institutional intervention, so that “opportunity” exists independent of institutional failures, and with the right guidance, minority students can “seize” higher education.

If a lack of preparedness or mentoring represent one perspective on the breakdown that necessitates university intervention, other archival documents demonstrate an approach that locates the rupture in the university’s relationships with communities that have been historically marginalized in enrollments. Seeking to understand the failure of prior affirmative action efforts, in 1985, a Provost’s Task Force comprised of faculty and staff across the institution issued a report on black student recruitment titled “Conspicuous by Their Absence.” This report’s diagnosis of campus climate issues and its recommendations were central to the development and implementation of the FLP in subsequent years. In the report, authors posit that low black enrollment, while aggravated by problems of preparation and financial aid, may be understood primarily in rhetorical terms, as the result of black students’ “decision to reject [the host institution] as their institution of choice” (ii). This phrasing counters deficit constructions of target communities, focusing on students’ agency, on the failure of the university to argue for its value to these groups. The authors elaborate: “All of the issues [affecting recruitment and retention of black students] were related to institutional image, efforts, atmosphere, and practices” (ii-iii).

With this, the university required a means by which administrators could “improve the outlook and aspirations” of students prior to college while also addressing concerns about how the campus atmosphere could better encourage black students to flourish on campus (Provost’s Task Force 8). In diagnosing campus shortcomings, the report emphasizes three primary factors influencing black potential students’ college choices: image, or the way that the university is perceived by black communities; environment, the conditions of student and faculty life on campus; and racial ignorance among students, which the Task Force identifies as the underlying cause for instances of racial hostility. Taken together, these themes suggest an orientation towards black enrollment as concerned with the conditions of possibility for the emergence of black publics on campus as with academic standards imposed on the students. To address these problems, however, required a mechanism by which the university could shift perceptions over time, among target communities and current and prospective students. As I observe below, the design of the FLP allows administrators to accomplish this goal by staging encounters that serve as scenes of recognition among participants, institutional representatives and students, and even the campus space itself.

These archival materials contextualize the design of the FLP, including its emphasis on mentorship and community outreach. These materials also demonstrate that the program may be understood as a response to infrastructural breakdown—not only the maldistribution of financial resources that inhibits K-12 instruction or “college readiness” but also resources represented by networks of college representatives and advocates, of literacy sponsors, and rhetorical resources that shape communities’ perception of the institution.

While the program’s ambitions are apparent in these archival materials, its reach is constrained by finite university resources. As such, students in middle school or high school must apply for a limited number of spaces in a cohort, meeting academic, personal, and behavioral standards for eligibility as well as demonstrating financial need. Program aspirants and their guardians or parents are interviewed by staff in order “to give us a sense of who, and not the student, but which family is more likely to stick with this for the long haul,” as one former director notes (Mitchell). Family engagement matters because participants’ continued involvement in the program (and financial aid package, once they get to college) requires completion of at least 80% of program activities and a record of good behavior. With this in mind, initial interviews with FLP candidates investigate the relationship between student and parent, for example, by asking whether they have support for homework. Likewise, although low-income status is a requirement for participation in the program, the interview also must reveal which families have what former program director Dr. Mitchell describes as “basic things, like, do you have a ride to the meeting?” In this way, interviews are premised on an individual’s ability to articulate herself and her educational and career goals, her “Future Leader” potential, to a range of audiences (school officials, program staff) and in coordination with her family’s testimony and ability to demonstrate financial need (but not destitution). At the same time, these rhetorical possibilities are constrained by material “basics” such as transportation.

Additionally, effectively promoting college access also depends on the staff’s ability to connect with communities, recruiting high-achieving underrepresented students through school networks but also community leaders, churches, and even through social services. As another former director observes, “what it takes is that our staff is highly engaged and embedded in communities in such a way that when there are high-achieving, gifted [students] eligible for our program, these community members are reaching out to us, that we have the necessary connections within the community to ensure that we maintain a constant flow of eligible [students] coming into our program” (Abbot). These community relationships, while dependent on individual staff members’ effectiveness or involvement, are also an expression of the program’s design. By being involved with the community that the program serves, staff can more effectively manage the rhetorical problems facing the university, including the institution’s image in that community.

College Affordability as Infrastructural Breakdown

Although the programs that serve as case studies in this article were developed prior to the modern college cost and student loan crisis, with the FLP originating in the late 1980s and the scholarship dorms in the 1930s, many research participants in these programs identified noted that financial aid shaped their choices to attend the host university. In this respect, the FLP, which offers a full-ride scholarship for participants, and the cooperative housing scholarships, which offset housing costs in exchange for a cooperative work requirement, represent institutional interventions in a breakdown of college affordability. Moreover, by linking financial support to behavioral and academic standards or to academic performance and cooperative labor, these programs reveal the relationship between material or financial support in enrollment outreach and the rhetorical constitution of “scholarship” students.

In many ways, the distribution of financial resources that enable college attendance and the emergence of publics on campus remains obscure to scholars in rhetoric and composition, and our engagement with college costs is more often framed in terms of access more generally, so that, as James Rushing Daniel asserts, “debt remains undertheorized in composition” (200). At the institutional level, Alberti has argued that (lower-cost) regional campuses and so-called second-tier schools function as “working-class colleges” (566), and beyond rhetoric and composition, scholars such as Hoxby and Avery observe that sticker price and geography often factor into first-generation college choice even when qualifying for financial aid would lower costs of attending more prestigious universities (1).

Financial aid awards and the conditions of their disbursement also represent a factor in the conditions of possibility for the emergence of campus publics among low-income and historically-marginalized groups targeted by enrollment outreach programs. The staff of the FLP recognize that the award package functions not only in material terms but also symbolically for communities of need targeted by the program (Mitchell). At the same time, navigating higher education bureaucracy may be alienating for students and parents with no prior college experience. As such, Dr. Abbot observes, “We literally make sure that there is a staff member from our financial aid services unit that goes down to each city and walks the parent and the [student] through completing the FAFSA form.” Program staff also recognize that even apparently mundane interactions, including navigating these forms, may reveal tensions between home cultures and college cultures:

First-generation children have no clue. And even worse, their parents have no clue. There’s a suspicion on the part of people in this economic class of authority and of the government. So imagine the kinds of looks and responses we get when we say we need your tax forms, we need your Social Security number. Automatically they say, ‘What do you need that for? The kid’s going to school, what’s my Social Security number gotta do with it?’ Well, FAFSA needs [it], the federal government needs it so they can see how much money to give your kid. So it’s really hard to explain that to people who haven’t had this as a matter of course. (Mitchell)

This suspicion and the constitutive tensions it unearths reminds us that even those aspects of higher education infrastructure that may seem to be “a matter of course” are ideologically and culturally charged.

Whereas outreach and recruitment are central to the design of the FLP, the cooperative housing scholarships do not actively recruit students prior to enrollment. Rather, these programs use the housing application forms to invite participants from among qualifying students receiving federal student aid. Following an additional interview (during some periods of the programs’ history), students are admitted to the cooperative dorms and provided a discount on housing in exchange for a work assignment in the dorms for a number of hours per week (usually 6-10, depending on the program and the year). These placements historically ranged from custodial to working in the rec room to tutoring, with preferential work assignments going to individuals who lived longest in the dorms (Murray).

Interviews with cooperative housing scholarship recipients revealed that, for many, the work requirement was an important factor in community cohesion among residents. One resident during the 1970s observed that “All the work was done by the students. […] The only employees were the dorm director, assistant director, Charlie the maintenance guy, and three cooks” (Murray). When asked about attitudes toward the work requirement, this resident replies, “I don’t ever remember hearing anybody grumbling about it” and that “everybody bought into the idea and knew that it was part of their commitment, both from a financial standpoint and just from the community standpoint of the dorm” (Murray). Another resident from around the same period describes how many of their closest college friends came from the dorms because “that was our circle. We were working with them, living next to them, eating with them. It’s almost hard not to let that be your main social group” (Price). Most of the cooperative housing residents also noted the value of being in a program where residents were “in the same boat” financially and in terms of their academic commitments.

With the shift to professional staff for food service and custodial duties and the relocation of the cooperative dorms to modern dorm facilities, many of the work requirements of the cooperative housing scholarships have shifted. The current program director reveals, however, that not only have campus contexts for these programs changed, so, too, have student cultures and expectations: “The student population also changed. So students don’t want to clean the bathrooms, […] and we don’t have the amount of work to be able to have 96 people do it. And unfortunately, our facilities can’t accommodate cooking for that many people either. So we’ve kind of gone away from some of that. But to keep the cooperative spirit, they work in committees together” (Jackson). Additionally, she notes, “We’re seeing a lot more students who, you know, have jobs outside […]. They also super involved elsewhere on campus, too.”

Historically, then, the cooperative housing work requirement represents an affordance of infrastructure that not only lowered labor costs to run the dorms but also promoted a sense of group identity so strong that these are the only dorms on campus with large, active alumni associations (Jackson). Over time, as campus conditions, cost and space considerations, and cultures shifted, the infrastructure that sustained cooperative housing also faltered, transforming the conditions of the scholarships away from shared labor and toward other forms of shared experience. While these program snapshots are not exhaustive, these accounts offer perspective on the role that one form of institutional infrastructure, financial aid, may play in enabling the rhetorical constitution of Future Leaders and scholarship dorm residents.

Dispossession on Campus as Infrastructural Breakdown

The above snapshots reflect concerns that more intuitively address the “pervasive enabling resources in network form” that we have come to associate with infrastructure in metaphorical or literal terms. The first section details how the university’s response to a breakdown of K-12 college access infrastructure entails developing a program that embeds college culture ambassadors in communities of need, working with cohorts of “Future Leaders” to promote college access through mentoring and enrichment. The second section documents how scholarships and their attendant expectations (as academic performance, standards for behavior, or even labor requirements) enable experiences associated with thriving on campus. In this section, I consider how structures of feeling that result in alienation or that cause historically-marginalized groups to question their “belonging” on campus may be read as infrastructural breakdown and how attempts to foster identification with institutional representatives and enrollment outreach peers may be understood as constitutive rhetorical infrastructure, even as these practices appear dependent on human agencies or individuals’ rhetorical choices.

In light of arguments by Prendergast on the regulation of literacy as white property and Lamos’s analysis of affirmative action in terms of Bell’s interest convergence theory, we may ask whether alienating structures of feeling that challenge who “belongs” on campus represent a breakdown of infrastructure or rather an expression of its design. As Patricia Williams argues, as public spaces become increasingly privatized, “a limbo of disownedness keeps blacks beyond the pale of those who are entitled to rights of commerce, liberty, and happiness” (71). Programs promoting community necessarily operate within this ideological context, so that constitutive appeals naming participations as Future Leaders or first-generation college, for example, also counter implicit or explicit narratives of exclusion.

Although rhetoric and composition scholars writing about infrastructure have not framed their inquiry in terms of race or class, scholars such as Bethany Davila and Hannah Dickinson reveal how space and place may be racialized. For example, in their analysis of discourses surrounding Detroit on their campus, Davila and Dickinson observe that even references to places themselves function as ideologically-charged, racially-coded language (94). In light of this, I consider how the FLP’s attempts to promote ownership of campus among historically-excluded groups may be read as infrastructural intervention, an attempt to fashion a network of constitutive rhetorical resources that serve as the basis for the development and flourishing of publics on campus.

For the predominantly black students participating in the FLP, dispossession may be felt as overt or more subtle micro-aggressions that suggest to participants that they should “keep your diversity over there,” as one student recounts from her attempts to participate in campus organizations (Burton). Even move-in day can be challenging: Da’vante Rawlings, a Future Leader from a deindustrialized and racially homogenous rustbelt community, demonstrates how alienating structures of feeling inhere to apparently mundane college encounters:

Even on the first day, the people that help you move in, they’re all white. In fact, eight white people like, ‘hey, welcome.’ There’s nothing wrong with that. Where I come from, of course there’s racial ignorance, but I choose to ignore all that stuff. I wasn’t going to make it a big deal. I see all these people and they just help me out. They’re clapping. Welcome to [campus]. I finally get here and I’m trying to get situated. This is where the isolation thing starts to come in because immediately, I’m isolated. There are people that run up and down the hall. They were white. The people that are at [the rec center] playing basketball, they were white. It got to the point where I couldn’t see any other color. (Rawlings)

Program staff who recruit Future Leaders to campus are aware of this challenge and attempt to mitigate feelings of alienation through retention counseling. As Dr. Mitchell notes,

If you’re sitting in the class with a hundred people and you are the only black person in the class, it will make you think twice about your abilities, about whether you belong, and about the kind of decision you’ve made. And this happens to our young people all the time, which is why we create the support networks outside of the classroom to reinforce this notion that even though it may not look like your high school class looked like, this looks like what the world looks like. And so you’re going to have to engage the world on its own terms, and it’s not always going to look like what you want it to look like. (Mitchell)

These statements by Rawlings and Dr. Mitchell provide a snapshot of the discursive and affective contexts that structure the rhetorical problem facing students from marginalized communities as they enter college. Specifically, these students must adjust to shifting social contexts (from community to college, from academically adept to academically at-risk, from mature social network to less-developed social network) and must perform “belonging” while also negotiating classed and raced college discourses.

The FLP seeks to address issues of campus environment that contribute to alienation by designing and managing rhetorical encounters among participants, communities, and institutional representatives in ways that stage what Arabella Lyon calls “scenes of recognition” with the institution and that foster identification with “Future Leader” subjectivity to help assert a sense of belonging. Lyon uses “scenes of recognition” in Deliberative Acts to describe aspects of the rhetorical processes by which marginalized or excluded individuals or groups counter patterns of dispossession and assert their legitimacy as subjects (or even their humanity). She uses this concept to “mark[] the moment and position of meeting in disclosing and sanctioning” the shared world constituted by deliberative acts or performances, the “acknowledgment of living together in the world” (55).

While not necessarily constituting deliberative performances, the processes of structured and intentional positioning of FLP participants creates opportunities for marginalized students to see themselves in and among institutional representatives and campus spaces. For example, one program city coordinator describes leveraging her personal connection to the community—that she lives in the neighborhood that she serves, that she attended a school in the district—to demonstrate to pre-college Future Leaders that “they can do it because I did. And I know that might not be right. It’s not going to be true for everybody. But that’s just how I approach students when I meet them” (Fischer). This practice creates opportunities for recognition through metaphorical identification, which Krista Ratcliffe notes, “foregrounds resemblances based on commonalities, thus backgrounding differences” (68), and is enabled by program policy that recruits staff from among the communities being targeted (Mitchell).

The FLP further counters feelings of dispossession through a campus visit “Summer Academy” for high school juniors and a “Summer Bridge” for incoming first-year college Future Leaders. These activities leverage campus facilities in conjunction with logics of reproduction and recognition to reinforce a sense of “belonging” on campus. For many participants, the Summer Academy represents their first time on any university campus. As Dr. Abbot observes,

We don’t want them to be intimidated by the size of the buildings. By the size of our campus. By the size of classrooms. […] We want them to have a strong familiarity with campus, to the point that it feels like their second home. It’s also important too because once you have that sense of “I belong here, this is my home,” then you become more comfortable to immerse yourself in the community.

During this visit, students live in the dorms, attend classes in different buildings across campus, and eat in the campus cafeteria. In the mornings, academic instruction reproduces the conditions students will face in college with classes taught by university instructors and faculty. In the afternoons, the program introduces participants to working professionals, to better understand these professions and “what it takes” to do that kind of work (Mitchell). The program also tries “to match” community, business, and university leaders with their students demographically, to promote the idea that “if she can do it, I can do it too” (Mitchell). Dr. Mitchell observes that

by the time they get here […], that’s their bench. Or that’s their building. Or I know what dorm I want to live in, I know who I want my roommate to be, you know, I know the kind of things I’m going to put on my wall. So it becomes—they have a sense of ownership actually…And a sense of belonging.

In this respect, the Summer Academy leverages university infrastructures constitutively: the program asks participants to see themselves as members of this community by creating and reinforcing a routine as they do laundry in the dorms, learn in the classrooms, and explore the campus. With this, physical infrastructures on campus become part of affective constructions of campus that mitigate alienating structures of feeling.

The campus visit also amplifies the persuasive appeal in recruiting high-achieving under-represented students. As a high school student, Da’vante received recruitment letters from elite universities and HBCU’s, but his Summer Academy experience strengthened his commitment to the FLP’s host university:

Instead of just getting a letter from [the host university], […] we came down to the campus. […] They pay actual professors here to teach you. They put you in an actual dorm…I don’t even know how much that costs. For four weeks, we’re going to give you full access to the [rec center]. […] During the summer, I’m sure that’s expensive. The meal plans being afforded to us. They gave us [university branded] stuff, notebooks and different things. The investment that was made, that monetary value, and then not only just the money to give that us experience of a day in a college student’s life and having different people from [the university] come talk to us […] When you have this information and you go back home, you make your final decision, […] from the standpoint of you’ve been to [campus], you know what we have to offer, you’ve gotten cream of the crop pretty much. Now the decision will be that much easier for you to make. (Rawlings)

As this student’s account suggests, campus spaces (and even campus-branded notebooks and materials) help promote identification with the host campus. By structuring this first encounter and fostering a sense of “investment” in participants, the FLP stages scenes of recognition between participants and the host institution, shaping how participants see their relationship with university.

Just as the campus visit during high school represents a rhetorical intervention, an attempt to constitute Future Leader subjects who “see themselves” at the host university, the program’s Summer Bridge for incoming first-year students leverages group identification and rhetorics of space to counter alienating structures of feeling and to cultivate Future Leader cohorts on campus. The Summer Bridge program positions Future Leaders affectively and socially with mental and physical health programming and orients them to the expectations of college with courses and study sessions in social sciences, English composition, and math. Another former interim director describes the impact of the Summer Bridge courses as creating a “diversely-operating [college] cohort” […] that extends beyond students from within a single city (Lawrence). She notes, teaching the students to reposition themselves is part of the project of the program:

Once students come to [college], they become [Mascots]. And so in every sense of the word, whatever their FLP experience has been, they still are of course perhaps challenged in different ways, as all first-generation college students are, but there’s an identity that they assume as all college students do of “I’m somewhere new, I can help to reinvent myself.” That’s not to say that every bit of who you were changes, or that you mask that or that you eliminate that, but you become now college students. We’re more consciously playing up that identity shift. But for the most part they reposition themselves, and we sort of help them to reposition themselves as now belonging to this huge, vast resourceful place. (Lawrence)

This account of repositioning reflects an important insight for an infrastructural perspective on rhetorical constitution or public formation. Given that, as Warner asserts, publics are self-organizing within “preexisting forms and channels of communication” (106), an infrastructural perspective on constitution asks, how might the enabling contexts and rhetorical affordances of an encounter be understood as deliberately crafted to promote the emergence of publics? In the case of the FLP, Ms. Lawrence’s statement here suggests that the program recognizes that collective identification cannot be assigned but can be cultivated through the management of scenes of recognition, so that Future Leader publics maintain an aspect of self-organization while also being subtly shaped by the university and the FLP.

Infrastructure and the Production of Rhetorical Subjects

In this article, I have explored how the design and implementation of enrollment outreach programs may be understood as infrastructural interventions with specifically constitutive effects. As case studies bringing together infrastructural frameworks and constitutive rhetoric, the FLP and the cooperative housing scholarship programs illustrate the limitations of a theory overly-reliant on rhetorical situation. These programs’ extended involvement with participants, promotion of program-affiliated subjectivity, and attempts to improve affective campus experiences confound what Greene characterizes as “the tendency of the case-study approach in rhetorical criticism to ‘textualize’ the case as a situated practice [in ways that are] likely to limit the understanding of interpellation to a moment of enunciation” (47). The programs also highlight how processes of socialization and cohort formation emerge as an affordance of program design, as an effect (in part) of the crafted, managed encounters over time that make up the years-long involvement with the Future Leaders Program or the cooperative housing scholarships. Moreover, infrastructure offers vocabulary for observing how the scenes of recognition and communicative pathways designed by program staff elicit rhetorical effects or enable rhetorical activity (identification with first-generation college program staff, a sense of ownership or belonging, shared commitment to the cooperative project of the dorms).

An infrastructural framework for constitutive rhetoric also more effectively foregrounds the relations of production of rhetorical subjects. For example, program activities and rhetorics situate “Future Leader” subjectivity not only as good student behavior (i.e., through academic counseling or community engagement) but also as a counter to feelings of dispossession of campus resources or alienation through sustained, managed encounters over time. Such efforts entail positioning and persuasion that distribute the inauguration of rhetorical subjects across scenes of recognition. In doing so, the program also enacts strategic efforts by the institution to manage relationships with historically-marginalized communities by encouraging participants (and by extension, their families and community members) to see themselves as part of the campus.

By extending a constitutive perspective to infrastructure, this article also develops further analyses that implicate infrastructure in social relations. Such analyses—including accounts of customers versus corporations, civic rhetorics and WPA work relations—also suggest the value a constitutive rhetorical perspective on infrastructure. This perspective acknowledges that the protocols and regulations that constrain rhetorical activity also constitute participants as rhetorical subjects in order to support cultural, economic, and political regimes. Likewise, as with analyses of technology and space, infrastructures regulating social relations become more apparent in breakdown. Finally, these arguments invite further exploration of the means by which infrastructures constitute, position, and constrain rhetorical subjects in managing rhetorical activity, including how infrastructures stage scenes of recognition among rhetorical subjects.

Although an infrastructural framework for constitutive rhetoric compensates for some limitations of constitutive rhetoric premised on rhetorical situation, this framework would not be appropriate in all contexts. Rather than displacing situation, my analysis seeks to offer another perspective on the production of rhetorical subjects, particularly pertaining to multiple managed encounters over time. In this respect, this article invites further inquiry into the range of rhetorical activities enabled by infrastructure.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the editor, Laurie Gries, whose feedback on the early draft of this manuscript was invaluable, and to the two anonymous reviewers whose generous and thoughtful feedback strengthened this work substantially.