In my own work, I am endlessly wrapped up in the university, that nineteenth-century institution which was envisioned as a way of educating those who would have to continue the work of building a democratic state. The university was a place where the citizenry would gain cultural knowledge so they could become educated and would then be able to debate and argue and build consensus in order to try to build a better society. Beginning the third decade of the twenty-first century, it seems that mission may have failed, given way to corporate power, though perhaps we should not give up hope just yet. Regardless, there is something lost in the twentieth-century narrative that revolves only around institutions and organizations, a narrative thread that Mark Nowak brings us back to in Social Poetics.
