Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Researcher Profile

Eileen’s Researcher Profile

My research interests go back to the particular place and locale of the family farm where I grew up—an apple and pear orchard in eastern Washington. I grew up in a household where business, economics, and labor issues were discussed over the dinner table and where the workplace was right outside the door and the business office was next to the kitchen. Labor problems were the core of many of our discussions at the family dinner table—how to get the work done and how to address the needs and concerns of those working for and with us to grow and harvest our crops. The weather and physical conditions were another big topic of discussion—how do we deal with forces that are beyond our control: rain or lack of it, hail that might destroy a crop in 30 seconds, frost that might come and kill the buds at bloom time, pests that my father had to deal with through increasingly noxious and environmentally damaging pesticides (we were regularly sent Christmas presents by pesticide companies!). And national and global markets were an abiding discussion. What would the price of apples or pears be at a given moment? I remember my Dad endlessly consulting a yellow newsletter he received from the Washington apple commission about crop prices. Where would the crop be sold—nationally or through export to Taiwan or Japan? How could we modernize the cooperative warehouse by father participated in so that we could compete with other warehouses and packing sheds? I grew up with questions like these echoing through my head—no wonder I became a dept administrator.

The workers/hired hands lived a stone’s throw from our house in housing that we maintained, and the boundaries between our family home, the workplace (the orchard), and the labor camp where many of the workers lived were permeable. Everything was intertwined, not as separate as it would be if one’s business were a commute into a city by bus or down the street. When people came from the city to visit, they were often startled by workers of varied shapes and sizes traipsing through our house to use the phone, bend my Mom’s ear about this or that problem in the housing units, and/or socialize with us and ask for help on varied needs. My mother was a social worker, in many respects. Many of the men that worked for us (and most were men) were vets of WWII, the Korean Conflict, and the War in Vietnam and their lives had been torn apart by military service, war, and often by the alcoholism that followed. Many had undiagnosed PTSD, and I remember the stories of their war-time service, which were often awful. Many had been drafted and sent off at 19 or 20 to fight and die. The war changed the way they saw the world and their lives, and they became part of the migrant waves of labor: picking CA vegetables, Florida oranges, WA apples. Many of these workers worked for my parents off and on for most of their adult lives.

I became interested in material conditions because material conditions were the stuff of day-to-day life: how do we hire enough people to harvest a crop, provide decent housing, deal with various needs, bail workers out of jail, and deal with broken lives. How do we get the work done in conditions that we couldn’t always-often-control.

We all contributed in the work of the family, but gender was a main way our labor was split between the farm and the house. I became interested in and resistant to the gendered labor of our family farm and my father’s sexism. And I watched my Mom, a college educated woman, who had given up a career as a teacher for her life as a farm wife and farm manager, deal, at times, with the anger and frustration of not having the public career she trained for and prepared for in college. My mom dealt with a lot of sexism in the farming community, especially after my Dad died and she was widowed at 51. She had to start driving tractors and bossing crews with my brother. Some of the men didn’t want to take a pay check from a woman or want to deal with a woman. She pushed my sister and I to be educated and independent and not rely on others for economic support and to fight against sexism.

Literacy was a big part of our family life. My parents read the Wall Street Journal and the local daily paper. They were inveterate readers—my Dad of political biography and my mother of psychological and spiritual texts. While they did physical labor for a living, they were constantly drawing on reading as solace, entertainment, and excitement. They liked books, writers, thinkers. They were political conservatives in the old sense (the party of Lincoln) and shared the agrarian sensibility of Thomas Jefferson.

All of this “experience” was buried in my head and in my body for years. I spent four years in college at University of Washington studying literary texts and criticism and leaving the farm behind (or so I though). In many ways, I WAS leaving the farm behind in choosing to attend the university in the biggest city in the state: Seattle. I deliberately avoided the agricultural-focused state university in eastern WA state—the place my parents, brother, sister, and whole extended family went to college. As a budding “literary critic” and an English major/writing minor, I did the usual work of close reading and analysis of themes and images in texts—New Criticism. I read the “canon” and then later was mad that I read so few women writers as an undergraduate; I felt that I had been cheated by a sexist education of great books by great men. I started reading Woolf when I was a junior and finished all of her novels in graduate school.

I started encountering feminist criticism in my senior year and just started to scratch the surface with it. When I started the master’s program I waded knee-deep into reading feminist literature--feminist literary analysis and the feminist theory canon at the time. I read French feminist theory, feminist literary criticism, and Anglo-American feminist theory. I took a couple of graduate seminars steeped in feminist theory and women writers. Rhetoric became an interest of mine in my final year of the master’s program, and I began to read bits and pieces of rhetorical theory and began to think more like a rhetorical critic than a literary critic. I wrote a thesis on surveillance and scopophilia, the two narrative frames in _Wuthering Heights_. I was interested in how stories were told in the novel through narrative framing—stories within stories. In retrospect, I can see I was trying to understand the concept of rhetorical framing.

I also started teaching a local community college as an adjunct after graduation. I learned about the world of freeway flyers, those who work at multiple colleges and piece together full-time appointments on multiple campuses without healthcare benefits or job security. These were women mostly eking out a living by teaching and many were fantastic writing teachers. I was just a novice learning from them and learning how to survive the day-to-day. While I sat in the office, graded papers, and engaged in shop talk about teaching and work, I was applying a sort of ethnographic perspective: what was this strange world of college teaching? Where was the pipe smoking professor of yore who hung around in a book lined office and talked about “lit-ra-ture.” Instead, we adjunct faculty sat around in tiny offices crammed with desks and comp textbooks, conferenced students cheek to jowl, and talked about what we were going to do in class the next day. Office mates confided in me about various things—teaching part-time for twenty years, enduring cervical cancer, memories of grad school in the Midwest. So many of those conversations are still deeply etched in my memory. I wondered: What was thing called teaching part-time? And why were there mostly women doing it?

I became interested in the gendered labor patterns in our field—the feminization of composition as Susan Miller and Sue Ellen Holbrook call it. I decided I wanted to write a dissertation about “feminization.” But where to begin?

At the time I began my research in the early nineties, there was not a wide array of work on feminist composition or feminist rhetorical studies that I could draw upon, although there was rich history of much earlier feminist communication scholarship. Elizabeth Flynn’s 1988 article “Composing as a Woman,” the first direct article in composition studies on feminism, had only appeared three years earlier. A book chapter and article by feminist scholars Susan Miller and Sue Ellen Holbook—and a handful of precursor articles on gender, pedagogy, and language (see Ritchie and Boardman 10-14)—referred to the idea that composition studies was a “feminized” field and explored gender, pedagogy, and the composing process.

Using those scholarly resources as a guide and inspiration, I worked across a range of disciplines to assemble an approach to my project on women’s labor as part-time teachers of writing that would be productive, poring over the literature on feminisms and labor studies, studies of sex discrimination in higher education by feminist scholars, studies of part-time labor from a variety of disciplines, Marxist and social feminist theories on class and labor, the rhetoric of inquiry, the sociology of the emotions, and institutional histories of writing and writing instruction. As I worked to assemble a research framework and discussed these approaches with my dissertation director (Lynn Worsham), I often felt like a bricoleur, cobbling together bits and pieces from a variety of fields and working hard to structure, synthesize, and assemble a coherent, if not complete, perspective on women’s work as part-time teachers of writing courses.

While my methods were often textually and rhetorically oriented, as I examined the common arguments and tropes about women’s work as teachers in documents, labor statements, and studies of part-time labor, I also extended my methods to include qualitative research: interviews with part-time women faculty about their responses and reactions to their working conditions and the ways that gender factored into their thinking about their work. Thus, my research was both multi-modal and interdisciplinary. It required that I be conversant in the work in my home discipline, but also conversant in the ways that other disciplines might pose the question of gender and part-time labor.

The process of doing this research was not seamless or familiar, but often radically defamiliarizing as I came to terms with other disciplines’—and my own’s-- research methods and methodologies. Having training in rhetorical theory was a benefit as it allowed me to analyze how different disciplines frame research questions, evaluate evidence, and make knowledge claims. As a feminist scholar trained to think about the politics of location (see Rich), I also thought about how disciplines frame their inquiries by defining specific power relations and worldviews. Undergoing this process of working across disciplines was often painful, intimidating, and overwhelming, but it gave me an appreciation for the challenges of interdisciplinary research, and it helped me to develop the habit of being accountable and self-reflexive about my choices as a researcher.

The struggle I underwent to launch my work was hardly unique; in fact, one could call it a feminist rite of passage; numerous accounts of feminist research tell a similar story of struggle, borrowing, invention, and adaptation. What seemed clear about my work as a feminist scholar—and that of my colleagues striving to do similar kinds of work—was that it required a mobility, flexibility, adaptability, and awareness of terms, concepts, and power relations—an awareness of the rhetorical nature of knowledge–that was both taxing and invigorating. The work I did as a feminist scholar also fed into my life as a feminist community member as I agitated for reproductive rights, for workplace equity, and for peace and social justice.

In a co-edited book that I'm publishing with K.J. Rawson, we discuss the idea of feminist rhetorical methods and methodologies as movement, as motion, and as action. I argue, as do others in the volume, that "[a]s feminist researchers, we are often in motion between our various standpoints and positions, between our disciplinary locations in the academy, and between the specific texts, contexts, places, spaces, communities and institutions we engage. Feminist rhetorical studies and interdisciplinary feminist studies as fields of inquiry are in constant motion as scholars debate and revise previously held notions of feminisms and rhetorics, introduce new subjects of research, new sites of inquiry, and engage methods, methodologies, and pedagogies in a variety of ways. Rhetorical studies is also in motion. As Ilene Crawford argues in the book, rhetoric is not only 'the study and practice of how language achieves its effects, i.e., persuasion,' but it can be a study and practice of our movement with/in rhetorics and with/in the world. Crawford asks us to consider our investments in our research methods and methodologies: 'What moves us through time and space? Physically? Emotionally? Intellectually? How are these three registers of movement connected and interdependent?' She reminds us that our work as researchers involves movement across time and space, but also across disciplines, communities and in, some cases, across the borders of the nation-state."

Rieff "Mediating Materiality and Discursivity"

Mary Jo Rieff, “Mediating Materiality and Discursivity”

She points to North’s categorization of ethnography as a method that has not taken composition by “storm” and claims that there have been a number of ethnographic studies since North made that proclamation. However, she argues that ethnography as a “pedagogical method” has not been theorized enough. Her article “attempts to fill the gaps in our field’s focus on ethnography by exploring the intersection of contemporary rhetorical genre studies and critical ethnography and by exploring the implications for teaching” (36).

Key quotes:
She discusses genre as “dynamic discursive formations used to carry out particular social actions, language practices, and interpersonal relations. AS the embodiments of these social actions, they are tools for accessing cultures” (37). Genres connect to ethnography study: “Cultures or communities use genres to engage in rhetorical action and to carry out social purposes, and their uses of genres reproduces the social values and ideologies embedded in the genres” (37).

“Genres as social actions, give shape and substance to cultural sites and in turn enable and enhance the communicative actions of the participants in that site” (37).

How does genre relate to ethnography? “By studying genres, ethnographers can gain access to both the production and reproduction of an organization’s knowledge, power, and cultural perspectives”(39).

Ethnography originated in “travel writing” (dating back to Herodotus) (41).

Major Claims:
A good piece of this article is connecting genre to ethnography. She brings it around to students and why ethnographic writing or literacy research is valuable to the classroom/student learning: “Students not only gain access to a valuable research genre that functions for various academic communities, but they also learn a genre that is fluid and dynamic rather than the often-rigid and stabilized genres of the writing classroom” (44). Students doing ethnographic research are transformed into “social actors.”

Because ethnography is time-consuming and immersive, its parameters must be adapted for use in the classroom. The term “mini-ethnographies” (Bishop) is used to describe more focused , short-term studies undertaken by students.

“Unlike textual analysis, genre analysis examines the dynamic interaction of text and context, asking students to simultaneously examine the recurrent features of genres and the disruptions of these repeated rhetorical actions as well as to interpret and analyze the ways In which these features reflect and reveal these situations” (45).

She claims genre analysis can be used to help students master mini-ethnographies, providing an example of a student who did a mini-ethnography of the law community (46). In doing this work, students learn genres as well—field notes, activity logs, chronologies, progress reports, interview transcripts, maps (46).

The argument here is that the “genre of ethnography makes visible the rhetorical action of the classroom community—which becomes a research community, a culture of inquiry— as well as enacting and embodying the action of communities and cultures under investigation” (48). Genre analysis seems to be a way to make ethnography work for students, in other words.

This is a piece well-informed by the scholarship on ethnography in composition studies. I also think that ethnography can be a useful tool in the classroom. At the same time, I would like to get a sense of the limitations and challenges of engaging ethnography with students. She hints at that with the citation of Zebroski’s article. Zebroski was a professor here at SU, and we had a huge emphasis on ethnography in the Writing Program in the nineties. There was a mini-ethnography assignment in WRT 105. It was an approach that many people liked, and we even had an “ethnography fair” in the program where students did workshops with instructors on how to do ethnographic work. As Zebroski notes in his piece, students did often have trouble analyzing the patterns in their data and the language implications as well. Some of the accounts students wrote were more descriptive than analytical and the claims about community and language practices ranged widely in skill and insight.

Would more of an emphasis on genre analysis have made a difference? Yes and no. Some of the sites students chose to study did not have much of an emphasis on producing actual genres. Rieff’s piece assumes that generic activity is a focus. What if it is not? Is genre analysis as a method a panacea to short-term ethnography?

Those of us who teach service learning classes often have our students use methods for research that border on the ethnographic. We’re not doing mini-ethnographies per se, but through the use of reflections and journals and observations, we deploy some of these methods. What I’d like to see Rieff do more with here is an investigation of location, position, and power relations with respect to the position of the student. What are some of the challenges of students doing ethnographies that involve genre analysis?


Key works Cited:
Miller
Bazerman
Cintron
Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner
Zebr

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Ever wondered what Progymnasmata is?

TJ reminded us all of the joys and pleasures of Progymnasmata. Ever wondered what it means?
from http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Pedagogy/Progymnasmata/Progymnasmata.htm

"A set of rudimentary exercises intended to prepare students of rhetoric for the creation and performance of complete practice orations (gymnasmata or declamations). A crucial component of classical and renaissance rhetorical pedagogy. Many progymnasmata exercises correlate directly with the parts of a classical oration."

Melissa pointed to the idea of having a "lexicon" for rhetorical usage
Other rhetorical terms ventured in class as ones class members would use in offering a rhetorical analysis:

Kairos

Ethos

Dissoi logoi

Progymnastama

Spirit

Epideictic

Arrangement

Memory

Situation

Delivery

Ecology

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Rhetorical analysis

I must admit that rhetorical analysis is my preferred approach to doing my own research and also a research approach I teach all the time in my undergraduate writing courses.

Consistently, my three books (fourth on the way) take up rhetorical analysis and also feminist analysis (esp feminist analysis in my first book and forthcoming book with K.J. Rawson). But I've worked with other methods to address my research questions--interviews, surveys, and even quantitative research (lite version for my work as a Chair/WPA).

More recently, I've been trying to think through how transnationalism affects how we do work in rhetoric in our field --what parameters and boundaries we imagine for our work in rhetoric (this resulted in the special issue co-edited with Wendy Hesford on transnational feminist rhetoric for _College English_). But rhetorical analysis remains a core feature of my work. So it's a comfortable fit to read the four articles this week. It's also useful to see how varied rhetorical analysis can be--

Some questions and quotes stood out this week--quotes that capture the capaciousness and all-inclusive nature of rhetoric and rhetorical analysis:

What is rhetorical analysis?
"By extension, rhetorical analysis or rhetorical criticism can be understood as an effort to understand how people within specific social situations attempt to influence others through language" (238). Selzer distinguishes between textual analysis (analysis of a symbolic act on its own terms) and contextual analysis, which seemed to be tied to intertextuality as Bazerman would discuss it (283).

What is rhetoric?
"As its definitions suggestions [Foss defining rhetoric as communication], the scope of rhetoric is broad. Rhetoric is not only written and spoken discourse; indeed, speaking and writing make up only a small part of our rhetorical environment. Symbols assume a variety of forms; any message, regardless of the form it takes on the channel of communication it uses is rhetoric and is appropriate to study in rhetorical criticism. Rhetoric includes then, non-discursive or nonverbal symbols as well as discursive or verbal ones. Speeches, essays, conversations, poetry, novels, stories, television programs, films, art, architecture, plays, music, dance, advertisements, furniture, public demonstrations, and dress are all forms of rhetoric" (Foss 4).

How does one do a rhetorical analysis?
"Once the basic feature of a rhetorical situation are identified or reconstructed, a rhetorical analysis can proceed in many different ways. It can follow the arrangement of the analyzed text closely, characterizing the multiple effects sequentially encountered by the audience. or it can be organized according to any of the systems of division offered in rhetoric such as genre features (good for mixed modes), by appeal, by lines of argument, by small-scale divides such as figures of speech" (Fahnestock and Secor 185).

Is there a better and worse way?
"Defining rhetorical criticism is akin to defining rhetoric: everyone seems to have a slightly different version, and that difference is both necessary and significant" (DeWinter 389).

What counts as worthy to analyze?
"What we choose to rhetorically critique is as important as how we choose to do it" (DeWinter 397). This is my favorite quotation.

Questions I have thus far:

--What definition(s) of rhetoric and theories of rhetoric fuel our understandings and applications of rhetorical analysis?
--What are our key terms for rhetorical analysis? Where do they emerge from? What traditions? What do we attach ourselves to by using specific terms and not others? For instance, how do our analyses of rhetorical texts in our own local contexts account for national, global, transnational contexts?
--Amber's question on Justin's blog is a good one--how do we read people instead of texts? How is rhetorical analysis suited for different contexts besides textual analyses? How do we read events, actions, and communities rhetorically?
--What is the role of "vernacular" rhetoric, the rhetoric of the everyday, and of talk, signs, symbols, things that aren't text in the traditional sense?
--How do digital texts challenge us to think about rhetoric differently (hearkening back to Wysocki)?
I'll have more questions, but these are significant ones for now.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Discourse analysis meets textual analysis

Well, I have come from the night of the living dead into the land of the living as I am trying to shake off this cold. Today is officially day 6 of the cold from hell, and I’m feeling better finally and am back to the gym. Progress!

I was struck by Rachael’s comment in her blog that our text _What Writing Does and How it Does It_ is rather “textbooky.” I thought so, too, when I first read it. The underlining in the introduction and the emphasis of points was the first indication of this. The use of the typeface is meant to cause the reader’s attention to linger to grasp key concepts and definitions. At the same time that the book is “textbooky,” it’s also useful for the way it expands the reach of discourse analysis into the realm of textual analysis.

My understanding of discourse analysis over the years has not been as wide-ranging and all-inclusive as this volume indicates. I always associated discourse analysis with colleagues in communication studies who were analyzing “talk” or “conversation,” what Bazerman and Prior refer to as a “focus on spoken language” (1). As they point out, discourse analysis has been a “major analytical method in social science research fields such as communication studies, sociology, and anthropology” (1). This book challenges and expands the notion of discourse analysis “to engage with written text” (1). I find this to be a very productive and useful expansion of discourse analysis, and one calculated to be popular with those of us in Rhetoric and Composition who are used to analyzing texts already. At the same time, I wonder how proponents of discourse analysis respond to this expansion? What is gained and what is lost in the movement across spoken into written language or vice versa? What utility does each have in its own realm?

That concern aside, I appreciate the turn toward textual analysis and the melding together of textual and discourse analysis, especially the focus on writing as a “social and productive practice” (2). I especially like the point about focusing on “what texts do and what texts mean” rather than what they mean (3). The six questions on p. 3 are significant ones as they focus on elements and features that indicate how texts are made/produced, shaped, circulated, received.

Bringing discourse analysis to textual analysis (the methods many of us are used to in literary studies and rhetoric) allows us to “examin[e] communicative practice so as to uncover signs of social identities, institutions, and norms as as well as the means by which these social formations are established, negotiated, enacted and changed through communictaive practice” (3). The question I had as I read that claim, though, was "hasn't rhetoric addressed that all along anyway?" We can return to that when we read Jack Selzer's essay in the volume next week.

Unlike most volumes that address a particular method, we are not treated to a history of the method or methods in the volume (which left the history junkie in me scrambling around looking for such a history--see Fairclough); rather Bazerman and Prior have allowed the 11 authors in the book to "model" their approaches to textual analysis (6). Each writer addresses the "basic concepts" and key studies in the area of their research focus. Then they offer an applied analysis and give suggestions for future readings (6).

I will be curious to see what everyone in the class thinks of this approach--does it work as a good introduction to a method? Is the combining/connection of two methods confusing? is this an example of the multimodality and methodological diversity that we read about last week?

One of the challenges posed by editing a book like this is how well a particular method is defined, analyzed, and modeled, and to what end? And for whom? And how well do common themes or threads--in this case methods--pull across the volume? Could you read essays from this volume and apply what you have learned about method, to some degree, or at least understand the method enough to develop a reading program to learn more and see it demonstrated in more research?

The structure of the book is twofold. Part I focused on "analyzing texts." Part II on processes of writing, textual practice. So there is a huge range here of essays, which we're reading and blogging. I'll be curious to read the blogs and see what you have made of these pieces.

Key Citations:

Fairclough. 1995. _Critical Discourse Analysis_
Huckin and Selzer.

Questions:
My question is, overall, how well this volume hangs together as a demonstration of how to undertake textual analysis? A number of students in our program have turned to Huckin's chapter as useful way to do content analysis in the past, so I am aware of the real utility of an essay like that.

I also wonder how much this text challenges our notions of textual analysis. How have we been doing "textual analysis" all along? What were your methods prior to reading this? Literary? Rhetorical? How conscious were you of analyzing and assessing your methods? Were you just doing an analysis and leaving it at that?

Thursday, September 10, 2009

691 blogging

I'm going to start blogging with my CCR 691 class shortly. We'll likely be posting researcher profiles to our blogs in the next day or so.

I will probably post something from the introduction to the book that KJ Rawson and I have just finished editing and are now proofreading _Rhetorica in Motion_, which address feminist rhetorical methods and methodologies.