Lacan, Desire, and Composition

• In Event: Negotiating Identities, Cultures, and Discourses in Educational Settings

Abstract

This paper examines how desire is generated and circuited in career portfolio programs (i.e., high school-wide programs in which students compose portfolios for applying to college and applying for jobs). Specifically, this paper considers (a) how portfolio programs elicit desires for certain types of lives and careers and (b) how some students, in their writing and pre-writing, work to circuit desires in different ways. To study the social, trans-individual dimensions of desire, this paper mobilizes theories of the unconscious developed by Jacques Lacan. Although Lacan’s theories are growing in prominence in some corners of education studies, they have been taken up by only a handful of literacy scholars. This paper therefore addresses a significant gap in literacy theory and research.

Author

• Ross Emmerson Collin, Virginia Commonwealth University