Sean Zwagerman

Biography

When I was in first grade, Sister Hannah Hurlehy nicknamed me “Professor Zwagerman.” She divined my fate long before I accepted it, and my path to academia was long and meandering. Between the uniformed years of Catholic school and the ivied towers of SFU, I flipped burgers for $3.35 an hour, travelled around California going to Grateful Dead concerts, taught children with auditory processing disorders to read and write, edited a magazine about railroads, worked for 10 years in the Bay Area fine dining scene, and got into various kinds of trouble.

Today, I teach courses in writing and rhetoric, and write about the compositional relationships among the word, the self, and the world. From intimate dialogue to public deliberation, from activism to academic writing, I analyze what people try to do, manage to do, and fail to do with words, and suggest how we might fail a little less often by speaking, writing, and listening differently. My thinking is informed by classical and contemporary rhetorical theories, ordinary language philosophy and speech-act theory, and realist social ontology. I mainly teach at the undergraduate level, but am happy to supervise MA and PhD students who are interested in rhetoric or writing studies, and who lean toward iconoclasm rather than orthodoxy.

Publications

work in progress:

• From Mind to Matter: Consciousness, Rhetorical Acts, and Social Ontology

the rhetoric of polarization and false beliefs:

• I Just Don’t Believe It: Convictions and Social Change, forthcoming from McGill-Queens University Press

activist rhetoric:

• Comedy for a Cause: Resisting Authoritarian Movements Using ‘Symbolic Reclamation’” (co-authored with Diana Solomon), forthcoming
• “How Not to Stop a Pipeline: A Critique of Activism in the Burnaby Mountain Protests,” in The Rhetoric of Oil in the Twenty-First Century, Routledge

writing pedagogy:

• “Local Examples and Master Narratives: Stanley Fish and the Public Appeal of Current-Traditionalism,” College Composition and Communication
• “The Scarlet P: Plagiarism, Panopticism, and the Rhetoric of Academic Integrity,” College Composition and Communication
• “A Marked Resemblance: Students, Teachers, and the Dynamics of Plagiarism,” in Critical Conversations About Plagiarism, Parlor Press

gender and humour:

• Wit’s End: Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy, University of Pittsburgh Press
• Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice (co-edited with Peter Dickinson, Anne Higgins, Diana Solomon, and Paul St. Pierre), Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• “Little House on the Tundra: Female Winners of the Leacock Award for Canadian Comedy” (co-authored with Diana Solomon), English Studies in Canada
• “The Scholarly Transgressions of Constance Rourke,” in Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers, Palgrave

the Grateful Dead:

• “‘Comedy is What We’re Really About’: The Grateful Dead in a Comic Frame,” Americana
• “When Deadheads Write: Love and Hate in the Emerging Field of Grateful Dead Studies,” Americana