“Imagining Something Not Yet”—The Project of Public Writing: A Conversation with Paula Mathieu

Oct 15, 2026

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Interview explores Paula Mathieu’s rhetorical tactics and contemplative practices for cultivating hope amid political turmoil. Drawing on her scholarship of the “public turn” in Composition Studies and her book Tactics of Hope, Mathieu discusses teaching public writing, supporting public writing teachers, and sustaining community partnerships and service learning under political critique. She connects mindfulness with public engagement, emphasizing contemplative work as productive, reflective action and project building that helps writers imagine what is “not yet.”

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages8

Reading Time12 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Conversation: Hope and Tactical Rhetoric

Bloch, framing, and imagining the not-yet

Project building, archives, and community-based writing

Managing engagement and social media consumption

Current Issue From the Editors Weblog Editorial Board Editorial Policy Submissions Archives Accessibility Search Composition Forum 36, Summer 2017 “Imagining Something Not Yet”—The Project of Public Writing: A Conversation with Paula Mathieu Christopher Minnix Abstract: In this interview, Paula Mathieu explores the rhetorical tactics and contemplative practices necessary to cultivate hope in a period of political tumult. Drawing on her scholarship on the “public turn” in Composition Studies, a term she gave us in her vital Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition , Mathieu discusses tactics and strategies for teaching public writing and supporting the work of public writing teachers ata time when community partnerships and service learning are more susceptible to critique in political discourse. Mathieu traces out a synthesis between mindfulness and public engagement and underlines the importance of seeing the contemplative as productive and reflective of public engagement. Chris: For many of us in the field, the understanding of hope and tactical rhetoric that you develop in Tactics of Hope was, and continues to be, revelatory, as it expanded how we understand not only the practices of public rhetoric but the efficacy of public rhetoric. Hope, as you have argued,“is the tension between reality and vision that provides the energy and motivation to keep working”(19) . This special issue has asked contributors to think about what we might want from the teaching of public writing in our current moment. For many, this moment, one characterized by “fake news” and “alternative facts” might not seem the most hopeful of times for public rhetoric and public discourse. As public writing teachers, how might we cultivate hope during our current moment? What tactics of hope might we employ? Paula: I was really glad to be asked this question. How do we cultivate hope? I draw on Ernst Bloch and his work because for him hope is not an emotion. I mean, there’s an emotional component to it, but it really is a combination of emotion, analytic reflection, and action. Those three things are all what he defines as hope. We’re in a moment when I think it's very easy to feel very negative and to feel overwhelmed by the problem, to do what George Lakoff says in Don’t Think of an Elephant—respond to the frames you’re given because the frames are so overwhelming. It’s so easy to get hung up on covfefe and the Paris accords, all the kind of things that are so easy to get drawn into, but what Bloch really talks about in terms of hope is imagining something completely not yet. When things are so unhopeful, when you don’t just find yourself responding to the problems at hand but responding to the frames, that’s when we need to get outside the frames. Chris: That strikes me as a productive way of thinking about rhetorical participation and action. Instead of simply responding, hope, in Bloch’s terms might lead us to envision other projects, other forms of rhetorical action. Paula: I was just on a dissertation committee last summer. Her name is Kristi Girdharry. She’s at Northeastern. She helped build an archive of the Boston marathon bombing—people’s responses, their memories at the moment. Her project involved getting oral history, getting people to write, and getting people to remember. The rhetorical work wasn’t just analyzing, but building. That’s doing a project, doing something that’s related to these problems, but also imagining how people are going to interact with these texts and developing a whole worldview of how will the word change if we build something that allows people to interact with them. I think that kind of archive building is a really important move in our field. To me, that’s a really importantmove—to have some kind of project. It might be why I’ve been interested in street papers. They are about changing the way people perceive homelessness, but not in a “you shouldn’t think this way about h

FAQs

How does Paula Mathieu define hope for public writing in her framework?

Hope is not treated as a simple emotion; it is a combination of emotion, analytic reflection, and action. Mathieu links it to the capacity to imagine something “not yet.”

What rhetorical challenge does the interview describe about the current political moment?

The conversation highlights how political turmoil and overwhelming frames—such as “fake news” and “alternative facts”—can make people feel negative, stalled, or trapped in response patterns rather than outside them.

What kinds of actions does Mathieu suggest as hopeful rhetorical participation?

She emphasizes building projects rather than only responding or tearing things down. Examples include archive building, community-based writing, and organizing real-world initiatives such as climate marches.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by jay