[A] significant development within American cultural studies is the push to get beyond meditations, however well informed, on such issues as whether reform movements and their proponents were good or bad. One of the most promising avenues builds on the field’s increasingly expansive definitions of aesthetics, within which reform’s strategies of persuasion can be analyzed alongside—and can reshape our conceptions of—other modes of assessing value. Scholarship on reform will necessarily continue to engage narrow questions of political efficacy and moral credibility. But the relevance of such work to the field rests on its ability to illuminate a broader range of concerns as well. The energies animating and regulating reformist projects go to the heart of the representation and deployment of such key concepts as interiority and emotion, persuasion and coercion.

This is an excerpt from Susan M. Ryan’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 199).