'And now that I know them': Composing mutuality in a service learning center

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subject-object, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction fo who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses.