Eastcoast-westcoast

Shifting Directions

2011-11-05T16:44:00.002-04:00

I've used this blog mostly as a place to post reading notes as I teach graduate courses, and I am reconsidering directions for it since I am not teaching a graduate course right now and will be on leave next year. So new directions--will this become a blog to support the reading I will be doing for my book project on agrarian rhetorics? Likely that is the direction I will go. More to come as I revamp and get going again.

21st century composing

2010-06-16T09:06:00.004-04:00

Tech Camp #2 response

Kathleen Yancey argues in "Writing in the 21st Century: A Report from NCTE" that the three challenges we face for 21st century composition/literacy are:

"Developing new model of composing, Designing a new curriculum supporting these models, ad creating new pedagogies enacting that curriculum" (8).

I think this report is a very good assessment of the challenges we face with 21st century composition. I sent this report out a few years ago when it first came out to the program listserv hoping we could spark some conversation about it. So it's good to have the opportunity to blog about this and see us engage the piece (again) in Tech Camp.

This piece was actually one an inspiration point for me to start up Tech Camp. I feel and still feel our models of composing in the program are engaging some aspects of the elements Yancey describes, but not all and not nearly enough. I think we can do more (and I can as well) to harness the power of self-sponsored writing that is so prevalent with social media. Where I think we have made quite a bit of progress in the program is around work with visuals and images. We have a number of assignments, readings, textbooks, and resources that engage the notion of visual rhetoric. But I sometimes wonder if we are doing enough to address students as "producers" of images as opposed to "consumers." It's a classic cultural studies move to analyze visual texts--how do we move beyond that to image production and construction and understanding what images do and can be.

Also, how can we harness the networked nature of so much of that writing and the understanding of audience. Yancey discusses the role of public writing (6, citing Hesse), and I am very interested in that, especially with respect to our WRT 205 course. How can we produce researched writing for various publics that want it and need it? In my 255 course that I mentioned in my previous posting, I think that I made some strides toward students addressing various publics.

Finally, the work on video is a reminder of ways production-oriented composition can take place across media. I like the idea of "writing with" that Lovett et al describe on p. 3. The course that George took on this past spring "Writing with Video" is based on this course model. I hope we'll have a chance to discuss how that course worked and what some of the products are.

More later....

Engaging Technologies

2010-06-16T05:53:00.004-04:00

OK, it's always good to have homework. I messed up and didn't do assignment #1 for Tech Camp, so I'm backtracking and combining both blogging assignments into one posting.

This was day one's prompt: "Reflect on your experience using media and technologies—images, audio, film, social media, hypertext, projectors, etc.—in your teaching. How does the Wysocki piece support, develop, or challenge what you already believe about writing and the teaching of writing?"

I've been pretty open to engaging technology in my teaching--blogging with graduate students in grad seminars since 2006 and some undergraduates in indp studies, for instance. I started blogging with students in CCR 601 in 2006. I've blogged in two additional grad seminars. I think that this has worked out somewhat well--students post their research notes and responses, respond to each other, and prime the pump for class discussion. Most students keep their blogs going beyond the class or had them before, in some cases.

So my life as a blogger has been pretty course-based. I have had periods of time when I've blogged on my own, especially about food and farming issues that I am tracking in the media. I've used my own blogging to get discussion going in undergrad classes of these issues. Some of my undergrads have read my blog posts on farming and food and send me their blogs as well.

As a teacher, I'm often using documentary, you-tube clips, and other media. I've had students do quite a bit with image work over the years--using images to design arguments about places and spaces, for instance. I had a 105 place-based assignment that had students analyze and represent a place in Syracuse (as part of the geographies of exclusion assignment). Students did a lot with google images and some with Flickr.

In my WRT 255 course (Fall 2008), II had students design an advocacy campaign as part of their final project. Some made videos, some designed brochures or websites, some hooked their videos to social media campaigns on Facebook. The work was really interesting. I'm sure Tech Camp was a huge influence in me going in this direction--also seeing Gail Hawisher speak about using video as a mode of writing.

Wysocki's article is helpful in thinking how I frame my work. I am interested in her argument about materiality and new media, in particular, and the idea that we can make student more conscious of the materiality of technologies, objects, and artifacts. I like the way she invites teachers of writing to the table and shows us what we can bring as well as what we will have to be open to learning. I connected a great deal to her point (p. 23) that we have to be open to the new type of work that is produced. This new work challenges us to rethink and push our criteria for assessing writing and our notions of what writing is and does.

My plan for my WRT 105 this fall is to go a lot farther than I have in the past with engaging social media, image work, and some work with video.

Blogging Tech Camp 2010

2010-06-15T11:25:00.008-04:00

We're at Tech Camp 2010 at Syracuse University! Welcome back to blogging for me for this week at least.

I'll try to capture some slices of life from Tech Camp.

This morning (Tuesday) we're talking about Anne Wysocki's piece "Opening New Media to Writing" from the book _Writing New Media_ and also about the idea of digital ecologies.

One of the main points we are discussing is the way Wysocki links new media to materiality and material culture. We also noted how she doesn't just link new media to digitality.

Other topics:

How do we value and understand the new work produced and practice the "generous approaches to new texts" that she calls for on p. 23.

How do students and teachers "remediate" the new technology with the old?

Feenberg on system-congruent design and expressive design (21).

Discussion of how we design digital ecologies.

Discussion of Web 2.0. Identified by interactivity and interconnectivity. George: "The thing becomes your participation."

Twitter and Tweeting--we all have twitter accounts now. How can twitter be a way to engage students in writing and research? A way to encourage learning, sharing of information, and participation? We started to work on ideas for how to incorporate twitter into our classes.

more to come! Good to be back blogging.

Digital Ethical Dilemmas

2009-12-03T12:35:00.004-05:00

Gesa Kirsch's _Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research_ brought us the term "ethical dilemmas" earlier in the semester. Those moments/challenges researchers face where they are faced with a knotty problem of "what to do" in a situation involving a participant and questions of representation, participation, and ethics.

Some of the ethical dilemmas and/or challenges to method we are seeing in this week's readings;

--how to deal with the fact that virtual communities (if they are open) can be studied without the participants even knowing there is a researcher present or that the researcher is deploying "publicly" available information. The big question here is what is private and what is public. As this collection points out, many online writers see themselves as writing to a private audience or partially private audience when the work they produce is fully and publicly available.

--This raises the question of how to participate in a community in which you are a researcher? And what do you do when you are already a participant and decide to study a community? Do you announce your new status? How do you negotiate the interpersonal relations and questions of trust and proximity that such a move makes?

--How to involve participants in the study--there are a number of strategies mentioned in the article by DePew on triangulating data. DePew wants us to consider how we might move beyond textual analysis and complicate our understandings through interviews and other kinds of actions. Scott Dewitt had participants give him virtual tours of their websites as a way of seeing how they interpreted their web work and also a way to include them in the process of interpreting their texts.

--That online communities are not necessarily face-to-face (although they can be) in the way that other communities are changes the relationship. So there can be an element of play and mythification in the circulation of representations online. So how to sort through and interpret that is a dilemma. That is where the triangulation that DePew calls for can come in as a way to understand what might be going on. But this raises questions as well about intentionality, and DePew gets into that as well as a problem.

--The other piece of this is what one can find out online about particular individuals or groups. Sidler discusses the role of the online researcher studying scientific communities as that of the "scavenger." As she points out, the "scavenger" is looking at multiple sources and sometimes discovers in the online meeting rooms or spaces that she is confronted with "too much information" (77). What do we do with that information? How does knowing "too much" affect the way we address the other information we are privy to in our research.

--"Digital artifacts pose interesting coding-related issues b/c they are less stable than print artifacts, alter relations between creator and audience, and can incorporate multiple media" (Blythe 203). This happens all the time for many of us who teach. A student consults a web-based resource. He/she goes back later to work with it again, and it is gone. Sure, there are online archives, but this is essentially a set of materials that have been pulled from "view." So what to do about that? If it's an archive where there has been no permission, what should the researcher do?

These are samples of the kinds of dilemmas posed by the authors in _Digital Writing Research_ that I hope we can work with some today. I wonder, too, how we address such dilemmas in our own research, but also as we teach students to engage in digital research as well.

Going digital

2009-12-02T22:24:00.003-05:00

It's that time of the semester when I find myself doing things like starting a facebook group for people who want to run or walk 100 miles in 30 days. OK, so I'm in a manic phase right now. It happens every year! The most "wonderful time of the year" is also the most challenging time of the year for all of us who are academics with project deadlines and grading to do, etc. My response is to take the excess energy generated and run and (walk) 100 miles. So.....

This week's readings in 691 are really useful. I'm glad we are ending our spate of reading for 91 with the collection _Digital Writing Research_. I think the framing of this project by McKee and DeVoss is really important. Their introduction is extremely useful, and I found Porter's preface helpful as well. I like that Porter does not let readers off the hook--he demands that the digital be given its due inside the field and outside as well. I will do some hopping and skipping around to try to touch on some key points.

I also want to point out that as we search for an Asst Professor in composition that Porter's preface to the book reminded me of all that the terms and expectations that composition carries with it and also how that is shifting:

"The term 'composition' signifies our particular interest in composing processes and also our affiliation with composition studies; it identifies what has long been a primary research locale for the field--the first-year college composition course. But the shift to he word 'writing' (which has been happening for some time now) reflects more accurately what our field has actually been doing: examining writing practices across numerous academic, public, and professional spaces, not just college classrooms. The ambiguity of the term 'writing' is also an advantage: it could refer to the text itself, or tot he process of creating the text" (xviii).

He goes on to point out that writing is an "action." We write to" do something." So the field's research explores all of these dimensions. Then he goes on to discuss the shift that "digital" brings, a "dramatic shift from the analog and print world to a new kind of writing space altogether" (xviii).

What is included in the digital:

"computer mediated technology" but also "technology--as cultural space" and as "technology-as production-space" (xviii). Porter wants readers to think beyond technology as a "tool," which is the language that is deployed far too often when describing digital work.

McKee and DeVoss in their introduction lay out a definition of digital writing research that demonstrates the array of spaces and actions that are being referred to:

1) "computer-generated, computer-based, and/or computer-delivered documents;

2) computer-based text production practices" (text is referred to broadly and includes a variety of artifacts;

3) "the interactions of people using digital technologies (communities and spaces)" (3).

These venues incite us to think through the methodological challenges and ethical dilemmas (Kirsch) that we might face Their list of eight bulleted sets of questions on p. 4 are particularly insightful. I find myself trying to answer each question in light of the rest of the book.

I'll have more to say, but this is a start for now to get me into the swim of laying out some of the conceptual shifts and methodological challenges this book is posing.

What strikes me as I reread the essays for this week is how much our field has made some of these questions invisible as well as visible. What have we taken for granted as we "move around" in digital spaces and yet don't always account for those spaces as spaces?

We've spent a lot of time talking about communities and concerns about research ethics? But how do digital communities pose similar and different challenges?

Spinning with Spinuzzi

2009-11-19T10:21:00.002-05:00

One question I wanted to raise today is not only the question of researching networks in our field, but researching organizations and also how to situate Spinuzzi's work not only in ANT and AT, but also in the field of professional and technical communication. What questions are considered, and how do those questions compare/connect to questions asked in rhetorical studies and composition studies? I think one interesting challenge to consider today for discussion is simply trying to define as well as work through the vocabulary of ANT and AT--Spinuzzi is shot through with a all kinds of terms and definition work. So not only do we have his definitions of them, but his application of them as he studies Telecorps. I found this an interesting study for consideration of how one applies complex dense theory work to ethnographic/qualitative work and also historical work (his chapter on the history of the telecommunications industry). That's a combination that you don't always see in our field.

ANT, AT, and Dead Dogs

2009-11-18T20:29:00.007-05:00

Rereading Spinuzzi was a reminder and remix for me of some of the work I studied when I took at a tech comm course at Milwaukee. I feel like I've been learning a lot about Actor-Network theory and Activity Theory already from reading Justin's blog notes, but it was good to revisit Spinuzzi and have his definitions.

"Activity theory is primarily a theory of distributed cognition and focuses on issues of labor, learning, and concept formation; it is used in fields such as educational, cognitive, and cultural psychology, although it is making inroads in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, communication, and anthropology" (62).

"Actor-network theory is primarily an ontology-an account of existence--and focuses on issues of power in science and politics, rhetoric, production of facts, agreements, and knowledge. It's used in science and technology studies, philosophy, and sociology" (62).

Both are expanding and beginning, in Spinuzzi's words, "to grapple with" one another and "have sharp confrontations" (63). Bring it on baby! Who doesn't love a good fight. But Spinuzzi's argument is that both sides "just don't get it" and resort to "mischaracterization," which he says is a shame because both ANT and AT have a lot in common (63).

Activity theory is weaving, and ANT is splicing as noted in Ch 2. Spinuzzi goes on to discuss AT's formation in Marx/Engels/Vygotsky and dialectical materialism and ANT's location/connection in Deleuze and Guattari and Latour. It was interesting to read more about the origins of each. It's interesting as well to see how Spinuzzi unfurls these theories in sort of a spiral fashion, moving back and forth between them, drawing lines of differences and connections.

One of the repeated tropes in this study is "Rex," the dead dog, who is the result of "blackboxing" in organizational communication. Because someone down the line doesn't communicate adequately about Rex's presence in the yard, Rex ends up dead in the street, at the border of a neighbor's yard--a metaphor for what happened in this communicative situation within the network. The customer who has the problem with the telephone line told the customer service agent about Rex and warned about him going out the gate, but the phone tech, who works for a different connected branch of Telecorps and a ways down the line does not hear about Rex. He opens the gate in a customer's yard and frightens the dog who runs into the street and is killed by a car. Then the chain of addressing Rex's death begins. Where to lay blame? Where was the communicative break-down or omission in the network? Knottworking? Net work? I want to keep thinking about Rex, too, as "canary in the mine" to test out ANT vs. AT. More to come, but these are some preliminary thoughts for now!

General Impressionism

2009-11-12T01:02:00.004-05:00

I visited the Turner to Cezanne exhibit at the Everson Art Museum on Sunday. As I rocketed through the exhibit with my 7 1/2 year old (she doesn't go at my pace at all and was in a hurry to get to her favorite art forms--ceramics--in the basement), I thought of how like blogging can be like impressionistic painting at times. The outlines, contours, suggestion of light and shadow, but not the full representation of what one has encountered. This is the state I find myself in tonight as I try to think through all the complexities of what we've been reading this week.

Missy has wondered aloud on her blog about why Logan doesn't do much to describe her approach to doing history (her methodology and methods), nor offer a meta-reading of her sources. That's a good question, and it's one that Barb L'Eplattanier takes up in her recent _College English_ piece about archival research and the missing methodologies sections in most historians' accounts. I like the points made by Missy and L'Eplattanier. But let me play the Melvin Tolson's devil's advocate here. The story of Logan's research methodology and methods is, in part, in the endnotes in Logan's book, though, and that's an interesting factor to consider as we read historical research. What functions to notes play in the books/articles? There are 23 pages of end notes in this 134 page book. So we can track the origins and pathways of her reading and interaction with texts beyond the ones she can cite directly in the text itself. What I notice is that most of what she researches is availabe online in electronic archives or in published accounts, not necessarily in archives. This was interesting to see--how much can be found online--at Duke and Springarn. This is part of the changing face of archives and original materials-so many can be found online (not all, but a significant amount).

In Gold's study, we have a lengthy introduction that describes his take on the field's work with disciplinary and instituional histories, and he squarely locates himself in the tradition of revisionist history or third-wave history (6). He is a proponent of the microhistory, coming out of Levi who defines it as a "belief that microscopic obervation will reveal factors previously unobserved (95, 97)" (Gold 7). He argues that small scale histories can inform large scale histories in refreshing ways. He takes aim at the work of Berlin and others who wrote our histories of the field from the standpoint of "elite theorists" and "institutional artifacts" (6). In many ways, Berlin was doing a monumental history (term from Nietzsche) that had the overtones of critical history.

Given this description, I think we can see that Logan is also writing microhistories as well. The key diffference is that she is concerned with the community and self-sponsorship of literacy and rhetorical education in non-school sites. Gold is more interested in Chapter 1 in African American students and teachers engaging the curriculum in educational institutions. We see Enoch taking a similar microhistorical approach. This is a way to deal with scope and scale in historical research.

I wondered as I read this week about further connections to be drawn across Gold’s study and Logan's study. Did you notice how Logan mentioned Gold's study early on? I think we can draw a continuum of literacy practices across Gold and Logan's studies and perhaps even Enoch’s. What are those literacy and rhetorical practices? How do they choose to study them, and why do they pick these specific sites and locations to study? What rationales are we provided? How does the historian's own location fuel the selection of sites?

What methodological and methods-based considerations and challenges are these three authors facing as they strive to represent historical “others” and their pedagogies and literacy practices?

What do historical studies like these microhistories (Gold's term) yield? What do we gain as we read them? What kind of renewed understanding of our field?

Maybe I'll have more questions to add in the clear light of morning. But let me end with a paragraph from one of my favorite pieces by Nietzsche about the "services" that history provides (from "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" 1873):

"These are the services which history can carry out for living. Every person and every people, according to its goals, forces, and needs, uses a certain knowledge of the past, sometimes as monumental history, sometimes as antiquarian history, and sometimes as critical history, but not as a crowd of pure thinkers merely peering at life, not as people eager for knowledge, individuals only satisfied by knowledge, for whom an increase of understanding is the goal itself, but always only for the purpose of living and, in addition, under the command and the highest guidance of this purpose. This is the natural relationship to history of an age, a culture, and a people: summoned up by hunger, regulated by the degree of the need, held to limits by the plastic power within, the fact that the understanding of the past is desired at all times only to serve the future and the present, not to weaken the present, not to uproot a forceful living future."

Follow-ups on feminist historiography and materialism

2009-11-07T10:26:00.002-05:00

Missy asked in class on Thursday about feminist historiography in rhetoric. I’ve included below a segment from the introduction to my forthcoming co-edited book with K.J. Rawson _Rhetorica in Motion_ where I describe feminist research principles in general and in feminist comp and rhetoric studies. I also mention the Susan Jarratt article I was describing in class where she addresses two types of feminist historiography.

In “Sappho’s Memory,” Susan Jarratt divides the work in feminist historiography into two areas: “recovery of female rhetors and gendered analysis of both traditional and newly discovered sources” (11). As I noted in class, VTB is doing both in her study—recovering women rhetors and also doing a gendered analysis of traditional sources (Wesley). Jarratt has a number of articles on feminist historiography that range from 1992-2002. A particularly insightful look at feminist historiography is in the 2002 special issue of feminist historiography in RSQ. I think there is a good summary of feminist research principles in Gesa Kirsch’s work as well for anyone who wants to follow up on that.

Santosh wondered why VTB didn’t take up Marx or historical materialism or even Marxist feminisms when she talked about material rhetoric. That’s a really good question. I think she is talking about materiality and material culture (the culture of the book), but not historical materialism as in Marx or Marxist or materialist feminisms. If there is any interest from members of the class, I will post an essay I wrote on blackboard about how we use the concept of the “material” in rhet/comp that addresses a version of this question that Santosh poses . I’ve long been interested in why we “skip over Marx” and materialist feminism in our field when many of us talk about materiality. What I found when I researched the article is how differently people use the term “material,” and I look at how the term has been used in feminist rhetoric and others areas. Laurie Gries, in her dissertation, has also mapping discussions about material rhetoric across multiple areas of the field.

From Schell, Introduction to Rhetorica in Motion
What are the key principles of feminist research?

While feminist scholars across the social science and humanities have usually eschewed the identification of a unitary feminist method and methodology, they have often agreed upon a set of general principles that guide feminist research practices. Mary Fonow and Judith Cook summarize five main principles of social science feminist research:

· first, the necessity of continuously and reflexively attending to the significance of gender and gender asymmetry as a basic feature of all social life, including the conduct of research;

· second, the centrality of consciousness-raising or debunking as a specific methodological tool and as a general orientation or way of seeing;

· third, challenging the norm of objectivity that assumes that the subject and object of research can be separated from each other and that personal and/or grounded experiences are unscientific;

· fourth, concern for the ethical implications of feminist research and recognition of the exploitation of women as objects of knowledge;

· and, finally, emphasis on the empowerment of women and transformation of patriarchal social institutions through research and research results. (Fonow and Cook 2213) [i]

As Fonow and Cook argue, epistemology—who can know and how one comes to know—was and is a central framework in feminist studies through which to consider existing terminologies for discussing knowledge and research approaches, “including agency, cognitive authority, objectivity, methods of validation, fairness, standpoint, and context of discovery” (2212).

Yet even as they summarize these five areas, drawn from their earlier 1991 anthology Beyond Methodology, they argue that the “spectrum of epistemological and methodological positions among feminists is much broader” (2213). In their review essay, they define newer trends, debates, and dilemmas in feminist research, including “the epistemic and ontological turn to the body,” (2215), the conception and practice of “reflexivity” (2218), “the crisis in representation” brought on by postmodern theory, the implications of feminist research for social action and policy” (2223), and “new advances and insights into applying quantitative analysis as a feminist method” (2226).[ii] They call for feminist researchers to “continue to critique, expand, and invent new ways of doing feminist research and theorizing about feminist critique” (2230)–a goal that Kelly and I share with the contributors of this volume.

Attempts to synthesize, present, and critique principles of feminist research also have a pronounced history in rhetoric and composition studies over the last decade and a half. Of particular importance is Gesa Kirsch’s Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication, a 1999 monograph that analyzes the “methodological and ethical implications of feminist research for composition studies” (x), especially with respect to qualitative inquiry. In her overview of feminist principles for research drawn from a wide swath of feminist literature on method and methodology across the disciplines, Kirsch identifies seven principles for feminist research; she characterizes these principles as specific commitments feminist scholars make to:

· Ask research questions which acknowledge and validate women’s experiences;

· Collaborate with participants as much as possible to show that growth and learning can be mutually beneficial, interactive and cooperative;

· Analyze how social, historical, and cultural factors shape the research site as well as participants’ goals, values, and experiences;

· Analyze how the researchers’ identity, experience, training and theoretical framework shape the research agenda, data analysis, and findings;

· Correct androcentric norms by calling into question what has been considered ‘normal’ and what has been regarded as ‘deviant;

· Take responsibility for the representations of others in research reports by assessing probable and actual effects on different audiences; and

· Acknowledge the limitations of and contradictions inherent in research data as well as alternative interpretations of that data. (5)

While Kirsch’s exploration of feminist principles of research and ethical dilemmas are applied specifically to composition studies, her work is significant for feminist rhetorical scholars. Indeed, she characterizes feminist research in rhetoric and composition as taking three major paths: “recovering the contributions of women rhetoricians”; “studying women’s contributions to the history and development of writing studies”; “studying how gender inequity effects women professionals in composition” (22). This overview parallels the view of feminist methodology offered by Patricia Sullivan in her 1992 article “Feminism and Methodology in Composition Studies,” where she notes that “feminist scholarship in composition” has been “reactive” and “proactive”:

It [feminist scholarship] focuses on received knowledge—as the existing studies, canons, discourse, theories, assumptions, and practices of our discipline—and reexamines them in light of feminist theory to uncover male biases and androcentrism; and it recuperates and constitutes distinctively feminine modes of thinking and expression by taking gender, and in particular women’s experiences, perceptions, and meanings as the starting point of inquiry as the key datum for analysis. (126)

While many feminist researchers have problematized the universal category of “woman” and the idea of uncovering “feminine modes of thinking and expression,” Sullivan’s concern is with theorizing how feminist research might proceed. To do this research, scholars have approached “two general strategies or approaches, one derived from the historical, critical, and interpretive practices of humanistic inquiry, the other from experimental and field-research models of the social sciences” (126).

The first branch of inquiry—“historical, critical and interpretive practices of humanistic inquiry”—has produced a rich network of “recovery and reclamation” scholarship in feminist literary studies and rhetorical studies. Second wave feminist literary scholars were particularly engaged in a significant project of recovering the texts of women authors who were lost or neglected in literary history, a massive archival recovery project sparked by second wave feminism that involved, in the words of 18th century literary scholar Jean Marsden, the twin challenge of “unearthing forgotten literature,” much of it out-of-print, and “uncovering as much information as possible about the women behind the texts” (657). The goal of this work was threefold: “to bring long-lost women writers and their work to light, to bring them into scholarly discourse, and to make their work available to students and scholars” (657). This groundbreaking work indelibly altered the literary canon.

Scholars in feminist rhetorical studies have followed a similar trajectory as their counterparts in literary studies by undertaking a massive recovery project to bring women rhetors to light. Much of this important work in feminist rhetorical studies has addressed rhetorical recovery guided by feminist historiography in rhetoric. In “Sappho’s Memory,” Susan Jarratt divides the work in feminist historiography into two areas: “recovery of female rhetors and gendered analysis of both traditional and newly discovered sources” (11). Jarratt notes that these two areas of rhetorical research have led us to reconsider and reconfigure “traditional rhetorical categories [the three proofs, five canons, topoi, tropes and figures], and along with them the relationships between past and present” (11). The intensive recovery efforts launched by feminist rhetoricians have produced a flurry of books and collections that uncover, collect, and analyze examples of women’s rhetorical practices and theories, thus contributing to the larger historical recovery project of feminist rhetorical histories. For instance, Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric edited by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald, provides a wonderful sourcebook of women’s primary rhetorical texts and practices across the span of several centuries and continents. Likewise, a series of edited collections have provided a useful selection of essays assessing the contributions of various women rhetoricians: Andrea Lunsford’s Reclaiming Rhetorica mentioned at the start of this introduction, Molly Meijer Wertheimer’s Listening to Their Voices: Essays on the Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women, and Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe’s The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric. Shirley Wilson Logan offers ground-breaking work with the publication of the anthology With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women, which provides a set of speeches and writings by African American women rhetors, which she analyzes in further detail in her single-authored book “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women (see also Royster).[iii] Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald’s edited collection Teaching Rhetorica has framed the ways that the reclamation of women’s rhetorics has contributed to new understandings of the ways we teaching writing and rhetoric. As they put it succinctly: “In other words, how are scholars teaching Rhetorica, and what is Rhetorica teaching them?” (2).

At the same time that the reclamation and recovery work in feminist rhetorics has been incredibly generative, it continues to be fraught with particular challenges and debates over the potential normativizing effects of scholarship based on the category of woman (see Rawson, Leweicki Wilson and Dolmage this volume), over the proper approaches and body of evidence that can be gathered and assessed about women’s contributions (see Gale, Glenn, and Jarratt), over the need to account for the way gender intersects with race, class and culture (see Royster and Simpkins), and over ethics and embodiment in feminist research (see Kirsch). Another key question posed by feminist researchers concerns the following: “How can feminist research come to terms with the complexity of gender and other categories of social difference and lived experience?”

[i]See also the introduction to Feminism and Methodology where Sandra Harding argues that there is not a “distinctive feminist method of research,” but three distinctive features of feminist research: 1) a “[r]ecognition of the importance of using women’s experience as resources for ‘social analysis” with the proviso that there is no universal woman and that “class, race, and culture” are “always categories within gender” (7); 2) a focus on the idea that feminist inquiry has the goal of “provid[ing] for women explanations of social phenomena that they want and need” (8); 3) the idea that the researcher “must be placed in the same critical plane as the subject matter, thereby recovering the entire research process for scrutiny in the results of the research” (9).

[ii] For more on debates and discussion of feminist research in the social sciences, see Marge DeVault’s Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research and Nancy A. Naples’ Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research

[iii] For a useful bibliographic essay on feminist research methodologies that address historical rhetoric, see Elizabeth Tasker and Frances B. Holt-Underwood’s bibliographic essay “Feminist Research Methodologies in Historic Rhetoric: An Overview of Scholarship from the 1970s to the Present.”

Works Cited from above as well as some helpful references

Biesecker, Barbara. “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25.2 (1992): 140-161.

Bizzell, Patricia. "Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?" Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30.4 (Fall 2000): 5-18.

---. “Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 11.1 (1992): 50-58.

--- ed. Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric. Special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.1 (Winter 2002).

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. 2 vols. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

---. “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either.” Philosophy and Rhetoric. 26.2 (1993): 153-59.

DeVault, Marge. Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999.

Fonow, Mary Margaret, and Judith A. Cook. “Feminist Methodology: New Applications in the Academy and Public Policy.” Signs 30.4 (2005): 2211-2236.

Foss, Sonja. Rhetorical Criticism. 3rd ed. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2004.

Foss, Karen A., Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy L. Griffin. Feminist Rhetorical Theories. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999.

---. “Feminist Perspectives in Rhetorical Studies.” Feminist Rhetorical Theories Foss, Foss, and Griffin 14-32.

---. Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2004.

Glenn, Cheryl. “Comment: Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62 (January 2000): 387-9.

Glenn, Cheryl. “Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62.3 (January 2000): 387-389.

Harding, Sandra. “Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?” Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues. Ed. Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 1-14.

Hesford, Wendy S. and Eileen E. Schell. “Configurations of Transnationality: Locating Feminist Rhetorics.” College English 70.5 (2008): 461-471.

Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Women’s Work: The Feminizing of Composition.” Rhetoric Review 9.2 (1991): 201-29.

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. 2nd ed. Pluto Press, 2000.

Jarratt, Susan. “Comment: Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” College English. 62 (January 2000): 390-3.

---. “Performing Feminisms, Histories, Rhetorics.” Feminist Rereadings in the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22.1 (1992): 1-6.

---. “Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” 62.3 (January 2000): 390-93.

---. "Sappho's Memory." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32. 1 (Winter 2002): 11-43.

Jarratt, Susan, and Lynn Worsham, eds.. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. New York: Modern Language Association, 1998.

Kirsch, Gesa E. Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999.

Kirsch, Gesa E., Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan –Rabideau, eds. Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003.

---. Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority and Transformation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.

Kirsch, Gesa E and Liz Rohan, eds. Beyond the Archives: Research as Lived Process. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univeristy Press, 2008.

Kirsch, Gesa E., and Patricia A. Sullivan, eds. Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.

Lauer, Janice. "Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline." Rhetoric Review 3.1 (1984): 20-28.

Logan, Shirley Wilson. "We Are Coming": Nineteenth-Century Black Women's Persuasive Discourse. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999.

---. With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995.

Looser, Devoney. “Composing as an ‘Essentialist?’: New Directions for Feminist Composition Theories.” Rhetoric Review 12.1 (1993): 54-69.

Lunsford, Andrea, ed. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995.

Lunsford, Andrea and Lisa Ede. “Crimes of Writing and Reading.” Ronald and Ritchie 13-30.

Lu, Min-Zhuan. “Review: Knowledge Making within Transnational Connectivities.” College English 70.5 (May 2008): 529-534.

Marsden, Jean I. “Beyond Recovery: Feminism and the Future of Eighteenth Century Literary Studies.” Feminist Studies 28.3 (Fall 2002): 657-62.

Miller, Susan. “The Feminization of Composition.” The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed. Richard Bullock and John Trimbur. Gen. Ed. Charles Schuster. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1991. 39-53.

Mohanty, Chandra. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

Naples, Nancy A. Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Plain, Gill and Susan Sellers. “Introduction.” A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Gill Plain and Susan Sellers. Cambridge University Press, 2007. 1-4.

Queen, Mary. “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World.” 70.5 (May 2008): 471-489.

Rich, Adrienne. “Notes Toward a Politics of Location.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986. 210-231.

Ritchie, Joy, and Kate Ronald, eds. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2001.

Ritchie, Joy S. “Confronting the ‘Essential’ Problem: Reconnecting Feminist Theory and Pedagogy.” Kirsch, Maor, Massey, Nickoson-Massey, Sheridan-Rabideau 79-102.

Ritchie, Joy S. and Kathleen Boardman. “Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption.” Kirsch, Maor, Massey, Nickoson-Massey, and Sheridan-Rabideau 7-26.

Ronald, Kate. “Feminist Perspectives on the History of Rhetoric.” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies. Ed. Andrea Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, and Rosa Eberly. SAGE, 2008. 139- 152.

Ronald, Kate and Joy Ritchie, eds. Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2006.

---. “Introduction: Asking ‘So What?’: Expansive Pedagogies of Experience and Action.” Ronald and Ritchie 1-12.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Ann Marie Mann Simpkins, eds. Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

---. “Marking Trails in the Studies of Race, Gender, and Culture.” Jones and Simpkins 1-14.

Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Methuen, 1987.

Sullivan, Patricia A. “Feminism and Methodology in Composition Studies.” Kirsch, Maor, Massey, Nickoson-Massey, Sheridan-Rabideau 124-39.

Sutherland, Christine Mason, and Rebecca Sutcliffe, eds. The Changing Tradition:Women in the History of Rhetoric. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1999.

Tasker, Elizabeth and France B. Holt-Underwood. “Feminist Research Methodologies in Historic Rhetoric: An Overview of Scholarship from the 1970s to Present.” Rhetoric Review. 27.1 (January 2008): 54-71.

Wertheimer, Molly Meijer, ed. Listening to Their Voices: Essays on the Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1997.

some basic historical research questions--feel free to add on to as we read

2009-11-05T13:49:00.001-05:00

-What role and purpose does history serve in rhetorical studies? In composition studies?
--From your perspective, what has been the primary benefit of historical research in our field?
--What are the major methods and methodologies for conducting historical research? Archival research for instance? Social histories? Feminist histories?
--How do such methods vary based on what kind of history one is writing?
-- In what ways do historians have to confront the challenge of historiography—the writing of history?
--What role does ethics and affect play in historical research?

--What are some of the common biases or problems historical researchers have to constantly battle?
--Some argue that all research is historical in one way or another--how is your work historical?

I'm just asking--gotta ask!

2009-11-04T20:31:00.004-05:00

I especially like Burton/Collins' work on Susanna Wesley, Hester Rogers, and all the Methodist women she writes about. I think her work on John Wesley is wonderful as well. I want to raise the question, though, of how to think about locating the subjects of the book. Women are interwoven into the fabric of Vicki's study of John Wesley. The two articles and Ch 2 we read are about women. Vicki's project starts with a vivid dream about Hester Rogers' spiritual journal. So given that, why focus a literacy study on John Wesley with him in the foreground and women in the background and why not focus it on Methodist women in the foreground with Wesley in the background?

This may seem like a cranky question (picture me in a high chair pounding a spoon and yelling), but I don't think it is. It's a sincere question (picture me in a chair looking thoughtful). Vicki offers a response on p. xv of the preface. This is a study of Wesley, but it is a study of looking at the "complex relationships between men and women in which women gain public agency with the assistance and support of a powerful man--relationships both fraught with power differentials and brimming with opportunity" (xv). This study is named for John Wesley, but it's also about "the roles of Methodist women and their relationships to Wesley as complicated and sometimes contradictory cases" (xv).

This is a book about Wesley's literacy and his sponsorship of literacies among the women and working classes of Methodists. Wesley is both supporter and controller, as noted (see Brandt on literacy sponsors). Given that, though, I do want to think about the title of the book--the word woman or even gender is not in the title. At the same time, Vicki points to the scholarship where Methodist scholars are asked to "stand with women." Her book clearly stands with women.

So what does this choice about the title and foreground/background mean? I know it is a principled choice, and I also know Vicki's study is a feminist one, and it may have been a particularly tough choice to make. John Wesley needs to be read into the rhetorical tradition. He is the most visible proponent/literacy sponsor. At the same time, there are many women who need to be read into the rhetorical tradition along with Wesley. So maybe we get the best of both worlds?

Coming back at this a second time after rereading Vicki's 1996 article in _Rhetoric Review_, I'm aware, too, of how she was/is trying to complicate our picture about 18th century Methodist women and the feminist impulse to recover feminist foremothers. She issues a caveat "proceed with caution." Vicki argues at the end of the piece that feminist rhetors looking at 18th century Methodist women need to proceed with caution and understand the complicated rhetorical situation faced by Methodist women: "Yet for some time I have been cautious about the feminist urge to automatically credit newly discovered rhetorical foremothers with bold, iconoclastic resistance that overwhelmed and destabilized the resident patriarchal power, for I believe the politics of such rhetorical situations is usually considerably more complicated." And then:
"The complexity of the Methodist women's rhetorical situation invites scholars to survey rhetorical territory with care, noting the roles powerful men and institutions have played historically in nurturing, controlling, and silencing women's discourse" (352).

So a point here is that the interaction of Wesley and other male agents authorized or sanctioned (again, literacy sponsors) women's speech, silence, and textual presences. These quotations really set up the work to follow--while Vicki's work is feminist recovery, it's also feminist recovery that fully acknowledges the fraught patriarchal contexts Methodist women were operating within and under. It also urges scholars not to over assign feminist agency and read 20/21st century feminist ideologies on to historical women (an important methodological caution about historical rhetoric/rhetorical recovery work). How do we avoid anachronisms and assigning our political agendas to historical figures? This is a critique we can find all over scholarship on feminist historiography. How do we resist appropriation of historical texts and voices? How do understand them in their own time and culture?

Finally, I think my question here is a question for all of us as we think about methods and methodologies and our own current and future research. How do we make difficult choices about how to foreground and background specific elements in our research? How do we make decisions about what will be the most important contribution we can make? How do we do historical work that allows for interarticulations across difference (the flux and flow and complex power relations between Wesley and Methodist women)?

On Feminist Material Rhetorics--a Reading of Burton's work embedded in feminist rhetoric

2009-11-04T20:17:00.002-05:00

In feminist rhetorical histories, scholars have undertaken a widescale recovery project to both recover and uncover rhetorical texts by women and regender the rhetorical tradition (see Bizzell, Glenn). The concept of materiality is frequently raised in this work as feminist scholars have accounted for the ways in which women’s texts and perspectives were muted or controlled by specific material conditions—pregnancy, childrearing, domestic labor, and care of others--and strictures against women speaking, reading, writing, or taking part openly in public life. To describe some of these specific conditions, the concept of “material rhetoric” and material analysis has been offered as a method and methodology by a number of feminist scholars. I discuss this work to point to the helpful insights it has created, but also to address how this work has defined a material approach to rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies that is grounded in the concept of material culture and cultural materialisms, not historical materialisms.

A wonderful example of “material rhetoric” applied in a historical context can be found in the 1999 essay by Vicki Tolar Collins on the rhetoric of Hester Anne Rogers, a British Methodist who was an 18th century spiritual leader and mystic. Collins’ article sets forth a method and methodology for studying the work of Rogers that is grounded in material rhetoric, what Collins refers to as the “theoretical investigating of discourse by examining how the rhetorical aims and functions of the initial text are changed by the processes of material production and distribution” (547). Drawing on Michel Foucault, Jerome McGann, feminist Christina Haas and more broadly on reception theory and the history of the book, Collins argues for material rhetoric as a rhetorical methodology that “is interested in the broad implications of materiality, such as cultural formations and the shaping of gender roles” (547). Material rhetoric, according to Collins, examines “the rhetorical functions in relationships among authors, text(s), publishing authorities, discourse communities, and readers” (547). A key focus of material rhetoric with respect to gender is the act of accretion, “the process of layering additional texts over and around the original text” (547). Collins is particularly interested in studying how rhetorical accretion enacted on women’s texts helps feminist critics analyze “material practices as mechanisms for controlling women’s discourse and shaping representations of gender” (548). In other words, material rhetoric is useful for feminist rhetoricians as it will allow us to examine how women’s texts and voices have been “culturally silenced” or muted. Collins argues that material rhetoric, when joined with the work of feminist historiography and feminist ethnography, can help feminist rhetoricians compile “material evidence of social, institutional, and commercial structures that brought women’s rhetoric texts to print” and assess they ways in which they were modified over time to fit particular rhetorical purposes (50).

Through her analysis of the ways in which Hester Rogers’ text undergoes accretion through prefatory remarks by male authorities, Collins shows us how Rogers’ role in the Methodist church and her relationship with church founder John Wesley was modified to fit particular cultural narratives that diminished and muted Roger’s influence and leadership in the church and that redirected the cultural gaze away from her relationship with church founder John Wesley. Through the process of rhetorical accretion, Rogers’ life and contributions were strategically managed by patriarchal authorities, thus her cultural and political influence were muted. Through her analysis of the material process of rhetorical accretion, Collins provides readers with an intimate look at the gendered, material dynamics of the publication and circulation of women’s texts. Thus, Collins’ work is a key example of how histories of rhetoric have increasingly embraced the “materiality” of texts and social practices while drawing upon feminist theories of gender and culture.

It should be clear, though, that Collin’s focus is not specifically on the material conditions of women’s lives during Rogers’ time, although she does address that theme to some extent. Her interest is primarily in the ways that Rogers' persona is constructed and managed rhetorically by patriarchal authorities through the various published editions of her spiritual journal. Therefore, the physical artifact of the text and its various editions takes precedence in Collin’s analysis because it is a concrete, physical artifact to analyze, but also because the text allows her to demonstrate a site where power, authority, and control are materially enacted over the body, reputation, and legacy of a woman.

Likewise, also working in historical rhetoric, Roxanne Mountford and Carol Mattingly and a number of other feminist rhetoric scholars have addressed material culture quite specifically with a focus on material spaces and material artifacts. Mountford analyzes women’s rhetorical practices as preachers, analyzing how “space, the body, and delivery” operate (3). In the introduction to The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces, Mountford acknowledges the rich work of feminist rhetorical historians, but she notes that none of these theorists have engaged ethnographic research. Most feminist rhetoricians focus on textual studies—examining rhetorical texts and contexts, visiting archives and repositories to uncover women’s texts, but feminist rhetoricians tend not to engage ethnographic research. It was through her own ethnographic study of three contemporary women preachers that Mountford “recognized the need to focus on the materiality of rhetorical performance” (4). Her study contributes, as she notes, to not only focusing on a “neglected art in the history of rhetoric”—preaching—but on understanding the function of gendered “performance, space, and the body” through ethnographic study. Ethnography as a research method allows Mountford to capture the performative qualities of women’s preaching and to examine much more than just textual practices—actual bodies moving through space and time, living, breathing, and witnessing with and among a congregation. In addition, Mountford is interested in actual physical spaces—“lecterns, auditoriums, platforms, confession booths,” but specifically in the pulpit, “the embodiment of clerical authority, a gendered location” and, thus, “ a rich site for exploring rhetorical space” (17). Throughout the book, Mountford combines rhetorical analysis of the history of preaching and women preachers with close ethnographic observation of the material world, shuttling back and forth between analysis of historical texts and ethnographic analysis of the material world. In doing so, she analyzes how “the body is not only an instrument of expression, but it also itself expressive of meaning” (7). As Mountford puts it, “it is really not possible to think about rhetoric without drawing in considerations of the body” (8) Thus, refiguring delivery as a canon of rhetoric “is critically important for feminist transformation of rhetorical theory” (9).

Paralleling the work done by Mountford, other feminist scholars have considered how the body, delivery, rhetorical space, and rhetorical artifacts need to be considered. This work has taken a variety of tacks and strategies. Nan Johnson has examined gender and rhetorical space and women’s parlor rhetorics in antebellum America. Carol Mattingly has addressed the rhetorical uses and effects of dress and costume for women platform speakers’ and writers, focusing specifically on the connection between dress, costume, and delivery. Lindal Buchanan has analyzed the effects of the gendered body on delivery and public reception. Scholars such as Maureen Goggin and Liz Rohan have examined women’s material artifacts—samplers and quilts--as forms of rhetoric. Clearly, we have arrived at a place in feminist rhetorical studies where the body, lived experience, and material artifacts set the terms for rhetorical discussion, and where feminist rhetorical methods and methodologies are moving beyond rhetorical analyses that consider texts to rhetorical analyses that consider a wide variety of material practices and objects.

What is responsible research?

2009-10-29T10:19:00.004-04:00

I've always enjoyed reading Heath and Cushman's studies and noting the connections and departures between them, especially the shift that Cushman makes toward participatory action research with reciprocity embedded in it. I also think Kirsch and Moss do a good job of framing the challenges associated with ethics, insider/outsider knowledge.

One of the key issues I'd like to discuss today comes from Missy's blog entry where she takes up the idea of responsible research. What constitutes responsible research in ethnography or activist ethnographic research? Responsible to whom and under what conditions? How do Heath and Cushman take up that challenge (Moss and Kirsch, too)--to whom do they feel responsible? Why? And where do we localize our sense of responsiblity in our research? I'm thinking about this with respect to Steve's comments yesterday in the CCRcolloquium. Steve's point is to funnel academic resources and opportunities to communities outside the university. His trajectory is not the composition classroom or the academic dept, but neighborhoods and communities and a bi-directional flow between the university and the community. Gwen spoke of her research not doing harm and benefiting those represented and contributing to understanding.

And the question of material constraints, which was raised in the readings and blogs this week (see Anna's blog). Cushman's participants seem to feel the relationship is fluid (as Cushman does as well). This is a 3 1/2 year set of relationships and with Heath a 9 year set of relationships. How do we deal with time, trust, and investment on either end of the research/participant spectrum? As members of our class consider doing qualitative research, what are your key questions, concerns, challenges?

What are Welch's methods?

2009-10-21T11:20:00.005-04:00

I'm puzzling through the question of Welch's methods in _Living Room_. I was up at 2 a.m. rereading a big chunk of her book. I read it this summer because I was inspired by the idea of public writing and experimenting with it in my courses, but I needed a refresher so I took some time to really pore over the book again. First off, I do find the book inspiring and feel solidarity with Nancy's project of asking our field to really come to terms with what it means to engage in public writing that addresses "living room" in a neoliberal economic order.

I was at the same anti-war march in NYC she was at CCCC and remember seeing here there, so I feel personally involved in her project and connected to many of the political protest moments she names. I also feel personally involved because I share many of her values in wanting writing students to be aware of and practice rhetorical strategies and tactics and understand histories of groups/communities/organizations/movements that have worked against the dominant power structures in U.S. culture.

Also as someone who has worked in the reproductive rights movement, in the anti-war movement, academic labor and feminist movements, I also appreciate her reading of the academy and its labor politics and her careful recounting of student movements. There is far too little attention paid to student-led movements in our field since the 1960s-1970s (when some were writing about student movements), but there is beginning to be some attention paid to that again in the work of Chris Carter's new book on rhetorics of resistance and also Rachel Riedner and Kevin Mahoney's new book _Democracies to Come_. My own work has documented academic labor movements. It's exciting to see this work and to see how solidarity movements launched by students and other groups are coming to the fore once again.

At the same time, for this class, I find myself reading this book very differently on the second round. I'm reading for methodologies and methods and trying to understand how a book like this is put together and what choices she made as a researcher. First of all, it is truly an essayistic book with chapters that could stand alone. Many of the pieces were previously published and developed for other venues. Her writing is balanced between an autobiographical perspective (her first-hand stories of experiences teaching or working as an activist), her students' narratives (which she recreates from observing them and class encounters/their texts), and scholarly researched argument that has an polemical edge coupled with historical accounts (drawn from secondary research mostly?). So this is a mixed methods study: personal narrative/ argument, classroom narrative/observation, theoretical research/argument, secondary historical research.

The methodology--the theory about how research should proceed--seems to be largely ideological and theoretical--driven by a belief in revolutionary socialism, activism/advocacy in general, and free speech rights. Feminist research methodology is a factor there as well, although not a consistent refrain throughout the volume

What laces the study together is first a focus on 1) public writing and the need to teach it: "More than just a topic du jour, the question of how ordinary people reach and persuade influential audiences has taken on intensified exigence as teachers find that the venues in which students' (can own arguments might gain a hearing have become noticeably policed and restricted" (4-5). So there is an urgency behind exploring this topic: neoliberal privatization, global capitalism, and corporate consolidation of the media has made it possible to restrict and control public space and airwaves and, thus, control the messages that ordinary people can express. Secondly, she wants to bring out/link a desire to engage public writing with the work of revisionary historiography (p. 5). She wants us to remember and work with students to embrace rhetorical histories of organized struggle: "By recalling the creative responses of earlier generations to constraints on (or prohibitions against) public visibility and voice, we can learn how individuals and groups, especially those lacking official platforms, have effectively argued for wider participation and greater democratization" (5). Those reading this book get an effective dose of labor history and freedom struggles and a sense of the rhetorical tactics and strategies of a wide array of movements plus stories of students in Welch's classes striving to engage those strategies.

We also get, to some degree, an evolving sense of Welch's activist literacies as she negotiates her own position as a secretary going back to school and becoming an academic, as the partner of someone battling the managed health care system for alternative cancer treatments, as someone engaged in solidarity struggles with workers and students and anti-war/peace protests. She tells stories with a point, she is polemical, and she argues with/challenges some of the scholarship in the field, pushing us to do more to engage public writing and the rhetorical histories of struggles, which we can draw strength and insight from (as she does). She puts her own story on the line. She is a part of movements, not simply a documenter/historian of them. She is trying to practice and teach what she preaches.

What is less clear to me is what research practices pertain to her addressing the words and lives of others in her account. What responsibilities and constraints does she have to the student narratives/voices and the activist narratives/voices? Some narratives/voices are in the historical record and can be drawn out from the texts of others representing them (secondary sources or primary collections), but what about those who are living/breathing folks? There is nothing in the book (that I could see?) about the research ethics she followed in working with the narratives of others. Maybe b/c this is not a qualitative or a purely historical study, she is not bound, in the same ways, since she is narrativizing and arguing, not "researching" a community. But isn't her classroom a community and the protest movements she represents a form of community? I think many pedagogical studies do just what Welch is doing: a mixed methods study, but I also think that as a mixed methods study, it serves many masters--rhetorical history, feminist theory, socialist theory, progressive comp, classroom teaching/teacher research.

What responsibilities do we have in terms of methods when we write about our classrooms and work with students? We all tell stories about what happened and what students did in our classes. How do we think through the ethical challenges of that kind of research (an abiding concern in our class this semester).

This may be beside the point for many readers who want to read this book and get a sense of how one might engage public writing and offer up assignments that do so. It might be beside the point for those looking for an inspiring story of how to take up public writing. But its not beside the point for us as we puzzle through the question of how to engage methods and methodologies.

American Lives in Brandt

2009-10-15T00:27:00.004-04:00

I've blogged about Brandt's book before--a couple of entries in 2006 when I read it with my 601 class (I blogged Chapter 5 in Oct 2006, see my blog archives, and also posted a response about Brandt's read on the agricultural economy). I didn't come at the book from a methodological perspective, though, so I'd like to think through a few questions here.

Since this book is entitled _Literacy in American Lives_, what pressures and burdens does a project like this carry when the nation-state is mentioned in the title? What is particularly "American" about this book and this kind of study (beyond the obvious geopolitical location)?

How does the focus on "American-ness" bear up under the pressure of the focus on a specific region (Madison, Wisconsin) and surrounding environs. Madison, as she notes, undergoes a transformation common to other mid-sized communities in the 20th century, moving from an agricultural economy to more of an information economy. Is there a uniqueness to a community like Madison, which is so heavily imbricated in the university as an economic agitator, incubator? What would a study look like that is not focused around a university town that has mushroomed so greatly and become more urbanized and suburbanized? Think of a another place where a study like this might be done--what might be different?

How do larger historical events and transformations play out against the backdrop of individual lives? What do individuals notice versus the researcher about such patterns? The military service piece is a big piece of what I noticed on this time around--the sponsorship of the U.S. military to boost literacy during war-time

Brand's interview questions provide us with an inventory-like, life course-style interview approach. How does that favor specific kinds of individuals? What might be other ways to research "literacy" in a life?

What role do artifacts of literacy play here? What are the relative merits of examining literacy artifacts versus literacy narratives? What are the possibilities and limitations of an interview approach focused on a life narrative?

How did she decide when she had enough interviewees? Why 80? Why select the different pairs/groups to feature?

What are the possibilities in the idea of literacy as an economic resource and literacy sponsorship as aiding and abetting in that (or suppressing that)? There is a consistent focus here on literacy as something to be "traded" for economic gain and power (a materialist notion of literacy). What are the limitations of that kind of framework? And what are the distinctions to be made across literacies?

Researcher Profile

2009-09-30T01:30:00.002-04:00

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"

2009-09-30T01:12:00.000-04:00

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

Ever wondered what Progymnasmata is?

2009-09-24T20:41:00.003-04:00

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

Rhetorical analysis

2009-09-23T11:51:00.007-04:00

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.

Discourse analysis meets textual analysis

2009-09-15T21:56:00.002-04:00

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?

691 blogging

2009-09-10T10:12:00.003-04:00

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.

Facebook takes the wind out of a blog

2009-06-26T10:25:00.003-04:00

For me, Facebook has taken the wind out of my blog. Not that I was posting a lot anyway...but now I post even less. I haven't posted since November!

I will try to crank it up around here and start posting again!

Stop Using Killer Kleenex

2008-11-23T09:42:00.003-05:00

One of the students Chris Bordne in my WRT 255 course is studying the advocacy campaign Kleercut, which is a campaign to call attention to the fact that Kleenex, a Kimberly Clark product, is made from virgin forest--the Canadian boreal forest to be more precise.

For more on the campaign launched by Greenpeace entitled Kleercut, see the link above.

Here's the basics:

"Did you know that it takes 90 years to grow a box of Kleenex? That's right, every time you use a Kleenex tissue, you are blowing away ancient forests. And every time you use Scott or Cottonelle toilet paper, you’re flushing old growth trees down the toilet. That's because Kimberly Clark, maker of these products, all but refuses to use recycled paper in its products."

Chris is launching a Syracuse University campaign via Facebook and also some other tools to get SU to stop using Kimberly Clark products. I'll post a link to his campaign once he's done with it. Other colleges have lauched this very campaign:

http://kleercut.net/en/node/909

Not Knowing Your LInes

2008-07-28T23:47:00.004-04:00

Last night I dreamed I was cast into a play, but I didn't know my lines the night before the performance. At first, I was relatively unconcerned about knowing my lines. I figured I'd put an index card in my hand and could read my lines or someone would hold up cue cards. Well, as the dream got further in, I realized that I needed to know my lines and couldn't fluff it in front of a live audience. So I futilely tried to memorize the lines, but nothing was sticking.

So I guess this is my re-entry after a week teaching and writing at Minnowbrook Retreat Center!

The play, by the way, was "Cinderella." And I was playing Cinderella. Half-way through the dream I made the joke to someone that since Cinderella was just a "dumb blonde" (an expression I thought was really fun in my dream, but not in real life) she wouldn't have to say much since she was the pretty, dense type. She could just fall and love and live happily ever after. The person/guy playing so-called "Prince Charming" reminded me that I had more lines than I thought, so I'd better get busy....

I remember being amused as a I dreamed about this that I was actually agreeing to be in the "Cinderella" play.

Is this a sign that the semester is going to start soon? That I don't feel ready to get back into the swing of things. Has the golden coach left for the castle without me or with me only half-way on board? Why Cinderella, a fairy tale that is not exactly my all-time favorite?

I woke up relieved I never pursued a career in drama....

This dream reminds of the "lack of readiness" dream I often have when the semester is going to start. In it, I'm supposed to be ready for my class, but I'm not. I don't have the syllabus or the assignments, and I'm trying to fluff it and give some kind of introductory lecture. The students either leave or disappear at some point in the dream, and I'm left trying to sort out what happened and how to carry on.

So....

Rotten Tomatoes

2008-06-22T23:30:00.004-04:00

ZZ the cat has decided he is far too tired to make an appearance on my blog tonight. There is bigger and more serious news to be discussed than his photo opps. Getting back to the agrarian focus that is part of this blog, I have been following the tomato/salmonella story in the news. Once again, we see how the food safety system in the U.S. is grossly underprepared to deal with food safety in the fruit and vegetable industry let alone the meat industry (that's a whole other level of madness with recalls of ground beef). A year or so back I blogged about bagged spinach and e-coli. Now it is tomatoes and salmonella outbreaks (Raw Red Roma and Plum and Round tomatoes grown in Florida and Mexico, it seems). Want to know how tomatoes get salmonella? Slate has a good article about the potential connection to industrial farming and waste run-off:

http://www.slate.com/id/2193474/ The subtitle in this article is from "Poop to Produce."

This weekend I transplanted about eight tomato plants in my backyard garden. You can't get more local than 20 feet from the kitchen. These plants were seeded from last year's crop, and I didn't plant a single seed--I just left them in the soil. So I'm holding out for these tomatoes, which have not even flowered yet. So it's going to be awhile.....

ZZ meets Photobooth

2008-06-18T17:33:00.000-04:00

Tech Camp 08

2008-06-18T17:04:00.002-04:00

Greetings from Tech Camp 08 at Syracuse University. We have been working with images, web pages, and tomorrow we will be working with video. We have been playing around with Photobooth (as evidenced above). So hopefully things will be looking up on my blog! Thanks to George Rhinehart, Derek Mueller, and Kurt Stavenhagen. More to come.....

Race for the Cure

2008-05-18T08:53:00.002-04:00

OK, it's been far too long since I wrote in my blog. The usual excuses apply-being department chair, being swamped, not blogging with a class. Mary G. and I ended up not blogging together as planned, but we did have some great conversations about the writing major in-person and about what she read, and she did just graduate. Congrats, Mary!

The real news around here is that Autumn ran the kids' 1 mile run for the Race for the Cure yesterday in Syracuse. 10,000 people showed up to the event, and there were hundreds in the kids' race. Autumn ran a 8 minute, 47 second mile! I know because I ran it with her and timed it. So at age six, she is already quite a runner. She told me this morning that she plans to eventually run the Badwater Ultramarathon in Death Valley. She has heard about this race from me since I told her about Pam Reed. Dianna and I ran the 5k with Autumn. I pushed Autumn in the jogger stroller for the entire 5k with the exception about 500 yards that she decided to run on her own. We had a good time, although it was hard for the first mile to have to dodge all the walkers walking five and six abreast having no idea there were "stroller runners" behind them. Now some purists will say that stroller runners should not be in races, but for some us, there's no choice but to run with a stroller if we want to do a race.

Anyway, summer race season has begun here.

Blogging the writing major with Mary

2008-02-23T09:12:00.002-05:00

Mary Gallagher (hi, Mary) is going to be one of the first graduates of our Writing Major at SU. Mary and I have the great opportunity this semester to do an independent study together about the growing scholarship on writing majors in Rhetoric/Comp. Along the way, Mary and I are also discussing how writing majors and Writing Centers can be "sites of social action" for students. Mary has been active in the Writing Center for three years, so much of her view of the department and our curriculum is shaped by that experience. Mary will also help us plan an event to welcome our Writing majors and introduce them to all of the faculty. That should be really fun.

We are going to be reading the special issue of Composition Studies on the Writing Major together over the next couple of weeks and blogging our responses.

Shiva-land and winter reading

2008-01-01T19:48:00.000-05:00

Make it a New Year's Resolution to read one of Vandana Shiva's books. Shiva is an global activist fighting for sustainable farming, environmental justice, and the rights of two-thirds world people, especially for indigenous farmers across the globe and in her native India. She is my all-time heroine--up there with Gandhi, Dr. King, Emma Goldman, and Mother Jones. She made an appearance on PBS tonight (reaired episode). You can view the transcript at:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/jan-june07/globalization_03-23.html

As for my winter break reading: I'm catching up on the latest issues of _College English_ and _CCC_. I'm getting ready to pick up Michael Pollan's latest book _A Manifesto for Eaters_ and Daniel Imhoff's book _Food Fight_ on the farm bill--all fodder for the paper I'm giving on the Rhetoric of Local Food at the University of Illinois guest lecture series. I'm also prepping a lot of readings on environmental justice for the mini-seminar I'll be leading in February.

As for lighter fare,I want to pick up Benjamin Cheever's (son of writer John Cheever's) book/memoir on running, which I've had my eye on, but couldn't afford until my sister sent me a bookstore gift certificate. I have been rereading Kathrine Switer's book _Marathon Woman_. If you don't know who Switzer is, look her up--she is the Syracuse University student who was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon under a race number. Jock Semple, the race director tried to throw her out of the race when he realized that she was a woman running with a race number. The famous photos have been much-circulated. Switzer, our home town girl, ran the Pompey Hills so much that she didn't even notice Heartbreak Hill at the Boston Marathon. So if you want a hill work out, just move to Central New York.

Such is the reading life.

Word of the Year: Locavore

2007-12-31T10:23:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year to all. As usual, the media is engaged in its rhetoric of retrospection. Last night while taking care of the cat of a friend who is out of town, I turned on the TV and found out about the "hottest" fashion trends for 2007 and 2008: animal prints are really going to be the thing. Zebra, in particular, is the hottest new trend. In the midst of the vacuous infotainment reporting, I thought if you can't "beat 'em, join 'em." Hence, this posting on the "word of the year." Mark Meisner from SUNY-ESF told me a few weeks ago that the word of the year is "locavore." Of course, I had to rush out and do a little research since this trend is one that I find more interesting than the latest "animal print" statement. So here is the scoop.

The New Oxford American Dictionary announced that its word of the year for 2007 is “locavore.” Locavore, according to the Oxford University Press blog, is a term used to describe the popular practice of “using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.”

A locavore is a person, but a locavore is also part of a movement, which “encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.”

Locavore came about in that laboratory of human innovation known as San Francisco. Four women coined the term in an effort to get local residents to eat a 100 mile diet comprised of local foods. Jessica Prentice, one of the four women, is actually credited with coming up with the word. You can read her story here.

http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/prentice/

I've been interested to hear people use the word locavore. I've heard some folks refer to themselves as such recently, so it does seem to be circulating. A few years ago, people referred to themselves as "foodies." Will they know switch to locavores?

Accompanying the discussion of Locavore is an accompanying literature of the locavore, punningly represented in the Columbia Journalism Review as “New Grub Street.” Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are key representatives of this trend, although there are dozens of titles that play out the key inquiry question: "If we are what we eat, what does that mean? Where does our food come from?" Pollan puts it well when he notes in the _Omnivore's Dilemma_ that we have reached an interesting point in our history where we need an investigative journalist to unravel the mystery of our food supply.

I'm particularly interested in a comment he made in a recent interview where he noted that:

"I know as a writer I've learned that you can't pitch a story on agriculture to an editor in New York, but if you call it a story about food, suddenly people are interested."

I think he's right about that.

There's a BURNING interest right now in Food writing and local food. The recent flurry of responses on the WPA listserv about food writing was pretty striking.
--the rhapsodic food memoir (e.g., Ruth Reichl) or a variation of it such as the "Coming Home to Eat" kind of memoir (Nabhan, Kingsolver)
--the discursive cookbook that is half recipes, half proclamation about local food (Alice Waters, Lappe and others)
--the investigative journalist take on food (Pollan, McKibben, Schlosser, and others)
--academic books on the culture, politics, and ethics of food (Nestle and others)
--let's not forget the agrarian essayists and memoirists, nonfiction writers who get short-shrifted sometimes because they mention the FARM, the actual origin of all food. Books like the recent one by Scott Chaskey about his organic farm, though, have a market and the Canadian TV show "Manic Organic" suggest there is a whole market there for the "farmer guide" to show the public from whence their food comes....
I won't get into all the documentaries about the food supply and farming, but they are worth exploring in another posting.

I'm fascinated by the idea that "food" sells and it is the lens through which to sell writing about agriculture and farming. Pollan even goes so far as to suggest we retitle the "Farm Bill" the "Food Bill" so people will actually pay attention to this archance bit of legislation and figure out how many billions of dollars we are paying out for corn subsidies to keep the high fructose corn syrup industry running--the same industry that is an engine for our obesity epidemic.

The Oxford blog says locavore a word to "watch," and I agree. I think it's worth watching the nonfiction "literature of the locavore," which I'm doing in an article I'm writing right now.

Snow and Drafts

2007-12-15T21:31:00.000-05:00

Where is that noreaster we have been promised? I guess it is slated to arrive tomorrow. I have to admit I wimped out and ran on the treadmill today instead of braving the cold. I did not go outside to run as I usually do on Saturdays. I need a large shaggy Siberian Husky to make me go out on a day like this or a crazy running partner who is undeterred by temperatures.

I'm reading 751 drafts, making comments, and enjoying all the work everyone produced this semester. It's great to see where everyone is taking the work of the course via individual projects.

Hey, Jon (Benda), send us part of your dissertation to read, and when you are you coming stateside so we can invite you to give a talk to the department? I will follow up on the reference you gave me about Chinese Rhetoric and the scholar you mentioned from Penn State.

Last but not least:

Everyone (well, maybe not everyone) is leaving town for the holidays, and while I'm often leaving town at this point, too, I have to admit some relief at not having to brave airport lines or train station delays. I won't be home for Christmas (well, home is actually here), and a part of me is relieved. Good luck to all vacating Syracuse for the holidays.

Wrap-up

2007-12-09T21:47:00.000-05:00

Jon Benda has been posting some incredibly helpful remarks on Lu's book and on his views about comparativism. Jon, keep it coming. I'm going to point to your remarks tomorrow in CCR 751, and I also emailed them to the class to read. The very issue you point to with Lu's book in your exams came up in our class. Brian brought in the review you cited for us to look at, so your response has been incredibly helpful.

Out in the 751 blogosphere, I see people posting away, putting up their revised social history manifestos. It's good to see where the thinking is--what is the same, what has changed, etc.

I thought I'd post a few of my own revised thoughts about teaching this class as part of my manifesto update. I taught this class for the first time in 1998, then 2000 (Jon's year), then 2007 (this fall). Teaching a class three times over about a ten year time period gives me a sense of how much of a changed landscape we are seeing with respect to social histories of rhetoric. There has been so much work with recovery and reclamation scholarship in relation to U.S. feminist rhetorics, African American rhetorics, Latino/a rhetorics, Native rhetorics, and also global rhetorics. Social histories of rhetoric provide a wider lens and address a wider array of rhetorical practices.

When I first started teaching 751, the course was conceived of as more a survey of social history within the bounds of 19th-20th century U.S. culture. Clark and Halloran's edited collection was a key text, and there were some texts out that detailed the social histories of women's rhetorics. There was a beginning discourse on American ethnic rhetorics and some rumblings about global rhetorics (mostly through comparative rhetorics). But the work on social histories of rhetoric was more about white-middle class activists and public figures--the same ethic we saw perpetuated in Clark and Halloran's collection, which is valuable for its inclusion of white men and white women's rhetorics, but marked in its complete omission of the rhetorics of peoples of color.

So I believe we have, in the last six years or so, seen a shift to "cultural rhetorics" in this area of inquiry that has been profound and heartening. The work of class members reflects this shift as well.

A couple of questions/issue emerged this term that I'd like to explore further:

--The critique of figure studies. At key points this term, questions were raised in class about the limits and constraints of figure studies (the focus on analyzing the rhetoric of a particular figure or individual in the history of rhetoric). I have mixed feelings about the critique of figure studies. Yes, figure studies can be limiting and constraining and can risk replicating the kind of monumentalizing history that Nietzsche counsels us to avoid. Yet there is something to be gained from the depth and richness of examining a life and a set of rhetorical works engaged by a specific person in relation to a larger cultural backdrop/community/organization. The key here seems to be context--how is a "figure" a cultural matrix and a site for intersecting and overlapping discourses.

--The question of how to study social histories. Should one study figures and communities and cultures comparatively or is a contextual, in-depth approach better? When is one better than the other? How do we study across communities as well as flesh out specific contexts? There is a tendency and a temptation to try to "sample" as many types of works and contexts as possible. What is the right balance between inclusion and the problem of creating the cultural rhetoric smorgasbord? I have asked the class to consider how they would teach a histories of rhetoric or social histories of rhetoric course, and I'd like to pursue that question further.

--The question of rhetorical methodologies. How are we inventing rhetorical methodologies to study these new--or, in some cases, well-established, but not traditionally included-- figures, communities, practices, and traditions? What does rhetorical analysis of a historical figure or community mean, exactly? How are we reinventing or reconfiguring the vocabulary and terminology of rhetorical studies to account for different rhetorical sites and practices? What lineages are we drawing upon for rhetorical analysis? Rhetorical theories by Aristotle, Burke? Cross-cultural inquiry? Conceptual inquiry? How do specific contexts and communities/cultures dictate their own terms and circumstances? This gets at the conversation we are having about the virtues and pitfalls of comparativism.

More later. . . I have other work to do, but I did want to get down some key questions that I think arose this semester that would be worth pursuing further.

I think Reva said it best when she remarked to Laurie on her blog that she'd like to see us do some debriefing over coffee so we can process where we've been and what we've done without the pressure of deadlines and projects taking us over. I'd like that to happen, too.

I think Reva's right, and I hope Trish's idea about an electronic space for our ongoing work might be another space/place to keep us going...

Randomness

2007-12-05T21:39:00.001-05:00

Well, my disintegration into informality continues. I wore SWEATS to our graduate class last week. SWEATS! I have never done that--NEVER, and I have been teaching since 1988. In graduate school, a friend of mine once commented: "I've never seen you wear blue jeans to class..." He was right. I think I wore black jeans once...

What's the purpose of this blog entry? I don't know. I'm tired, I'm full of M & Ms, and I just finished reading the class blog entries. I'm excited about everyone's projects in 751, and I'm glad Jon Benda FINALLY stopped by and commented on my blog. Jon was in 751 in 2000, right, Jon?

I'm curious to see what everyone will say about Lu tomorrow. Any thoughts out there? How does Lu's text fit into what we discussed last week about ancient rhetorics and the challenge of comparativism? I'll see if I can gather together some coherent thoughts by tomorrow morning to post. Jon, if you are out there, post your review of Lu's book. I think you have one out there that I read.

It all comes down to Kennedy

2007-11-28T22:42:00.001-05:00

I hope that search engines will not pick up this line and net a bunch of people who are lovers of the Kennedys (JFK, RFK, JFK Junior). I hope people won't read this and think I'm going to talk about the grassy knoll and the book depository and whether or not it was Oswald or the CIA who shot Kennedy.... Maybe people will think that the Kennedy I'm referring to is the band known as the Dead Kennedys (if you don't know what that refers to, then I'm feeling really old).

OK, nuff. I'm troping on Carol Lipson's line in her essay in _Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks_. She says that ancient Egyptian rhetoric all comes down to "Maat." And it's interesting to note that in the _Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks_, it all comes to George Kennedy as a starting point. Kennedy's book is a starting point and departure point for all kinds of investigations of ancient rhetorics from a variety of cultures. His work is also found to be inevitably flawed since it assumes the Greco-Roman tradition as the beginning and "normativizing" point for cross-cultural study (Lipson and Binkley 2). Here's what Lipson and Binkley have to say:

"George Kennedy's 1998 Comparative Rhetoric pioneers in this arena and is often used in the many courses being created. . . on comparative, alternative or multicultural rhetorics. But there is need for much more work, particularly for studies that approach the analysis of ancient cultural rhetorics from perspectives that do not seem to reify classical rhetoric as the culmination of the development of ancient rhetorical systems" (2).

Several other authors in the collection and also Campbell ("African Athens") acknowledge the influence of Kennedy. His book is an important departure point, but it is also inevitably flawed b/c it presents one version of ancient rhetorics as the main one. As the Lipson and Binkley collection shows, the origins of rhetoric go way, way back and we must analyze and assess contributions that come from vastly different geographic and cultural spaces than those we have been conditioned to expect through our originary narratives.

A few questions that always get played out in comparative study include:
What is being compared? What is the basis of comparison? What is the originary narrative? As Binkley puts it:

"Crossing disciplinary boundaries, I find that embedded within the methodologies of my own area of rhetoric are often unstated, and frequently unconscious, theoretical assumptions. Among those governing assumptions is the conception of the nature of origins, one which focuses on the origination of rhetoric in the Greek classical period of the late 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E." (47).

Binkley warns us about the "othering" that happens when we consider rhetorical traditions outside the originary narrative of Greco-Roman rhetoric (and she argues that contemporary discourses continue to color the representations of specific discourses and figures--9/11 discourses, for instance). She and Swearingen, in particular, ask us to look at figures and rhetorical practices in Ancient cultures that go outside of the parameters of our originary narratives and our parameters surrounding who can "do rhetoric." How have specific ancient cultures been "othered"--Mesopotamia, for instance (48). And how have specific forms of expression been "othered"--women's hymns and lamentations and African rhetorics. What investments do scholars of rhetoric have in maintaining specific geopolitical and cultural locations for their work? All of the writers we have read this week challenge us to look carefully at our originary narratives and to think about what is at stake in them.

What is key here is the question of representation as well as historiography.

--What is rhetoric in the specific cultural system that is being analyzed. How are definitions of rhetoric developed within the culture itself? What does it mean to analyze a culture rhetorically from a vantage point within the culture vs. outside from a Western perspective.
--Are these works social histories? Something else entirely?
-What about the problem of translation and the problem of finding extant texts. All the writers struggle with these questions, and what do they do to resolve them?
--How do we control for/address our own desires to find what we want to find in the past and map our contemporary desires on to ancient cultures?
--How do we balance the "strangeness" of these cultures, our estrangement from them, and our desire to make them familiar and graspable. What rhetorical methods and methodologies can help us as we struggle to do this work?
--What does ancient rhetorical study provide us--why does it matter? Clearly, we are being asked to reconceive our comfortable originary narratives, but what else do we gain when we revise Western rhetorics? What is it about our current historical moment that necessitates this "excavation" of "non-Western rhetorics."

I also balk at terms like "non-Western rhetorics" or "alternative rhetorics." I respect that we are grappling with ways to talk about and outside the Greco-Roman tradition. But non-Western implies that other cultures are being compared to the West. Alternative rhetoric implies an alternative to a dominant system. What about plan old "Cultural rhetorics"?

The book review I sent out to the 751 class by Teresa Grettano does a good job of summing up the readings we are taking up tomorrow, so I won't go systematically through them at this point.

Still out here blogging

2007-11-26T21:05:00.000-05:00

It makes me happy to see that all of the graduate students who took my 601 course last fall are still out there blogging a year plus later. Granted, I'm asking some of these folks to blog in the course they are taking with me now, but still....the blogs have stuck or they have stuck due to force of habit. It has been interesting to see what blogs become when they are not course-focused. How they meander to other topics--or not. Right now, in 751, we are moving way from blogging readings to blogging projects or writing up notes for the projects. Some folks don't want to blog their notes and put their projects out there, and I can understand that. Interestingly, this semester I thought nothing of posting an unpublished paper that I gave at CCCC on Emma Willard and Catherine Beecher a few years ago. Should I have hesitated? I guess I didn't. If someone wants that paper, they can have it. I feel like I was scooped anyway when I read Lindal Buchanan and I thought she said it better than me.

Madeline Yonker is going to visit the Nottingham Senior Living Community where I teach to give a talk to my senior writers about blogging. We're looking forward to it. Some of the folks in their eighties and nineties are thinking about starting blogs...

Anyway, will blog more tomorrow about Lipson and Binkley's collection.

Disciplinary Dis-orientations and Queering Rhetorics

2007-11-14T21:55:00.000-05:00

This week's readings allow us to see the various moments of disciplinary orientation and reorientation that happen when rhetoric is queered and queerness is rhetoricized (the premise of Kelly Rawson's major exam). I'd like to focus on Charles Morris's collection since no one has blogged about his work yet (the night is still young in CCR land, I realize).

I really appreciate the way Morris begins the collection _Queering Public Address_ with the Seneca Falls "boys" photograph. His point is that the photograph is a metonym for all the possiblities of doing queer rhetorical work. What the Seneca Falls "Boys" represent is, as Morris points out, subject to interpretation and subject to "historically specific cultural peformances, politics, and meanings" (3). The "Boys, elusively available on E-Bay, are now are enshrined in the collection of Andrew K. Schultz. The portrait, of course, poses all kinds of questions related to queer historiography. How can we hail the "boys" as historical subjects? How do we read their portrait, and through what lenses? How and in what way are they boys? What pleasures and satisfactions do we get from our viewing and from our understandings and mis-understandings of the portrait? What are we to make of the conventions of portraiture as exercise here? What's there, what is not there? Morris deliberately doesn't tell us much about the "Boys," but he does bring them into the project of the book as a way to foreground questions about doing queer rhetorical histories. And using the term "boys" is really interesting. Are these boys? Why use that term and not another?

"Queer sexuality as a prism for public address" is the focus of this book, and it lives up to that promise. Yet studying public address, as Morris notes, has been a pretty normative space and practice. The scholar of public address traditionally was to look for the great orator (good man speaking well) and look for his (and it was usually a HE) for the rhetor's magnum opus, his greatest speech of all time, the pinnacle of rhetorical achievement. Poststructuralism, cultural studies, and FEMINISMS (which Morris does not mention at first) have played a role in repositioning those notions of public address: challenging view of textuality, discursive traditions, communities, performance. So public address studies has begun to interrogate and reconfigure its boundaries and conceptual categorizations. But..... that only goes so far. As Morris points out, there is a resounding silence about queerness in public address scholarship and in archives and other spaces in rhetorical studies:

"In public address such silences echo through the archives, anthologies, syllabi, reviews, journals, and bibliographies that fail to speak or that distort and diminish, our names and invisible processes by which they are achieved, normalized, and perpetuated" (4).

The book aims to disrupt those silences and omissions, and it aims to establish a "beach head" in rhetorical studies for queer work. In fact, Morris makes a strong statement about not abandoning rhetorical studies and lighting out (as Huck Finn would say) for more queer-friendly academic territory or, as he puts it, "queer hospitable academic locations." In fact, Morris throws down the academic gauntlet. We are going to "stay our home ground and render it pink," he says (queer world-making as Berlant and Warner would say) (5). So in other words, Morris et al is here, queer, and the field damn well better get used to it, adapt, change, and make room. Now this is a manifesto!

That said, Morris goes on to explain that the collection he and the contributors have put together is, er, well, eclectic, but that's the beauty of it. The book appears to break out along the lines of historical recovery (uncovering and recovering or recuperating queer figures/rhetors) and also the work of exploding the categories of public address and of normativity writ large, what he deems the more radical work of queering historical studies. He returns to the Seneca Falls "Boys" as a way to pose these different approaches. The historical recovery model would be more interested in recuperating the photograph as an example of "recovery"--here are two men, likely lovers, captured at a moment in time in a place (Seneca Falls). Their presence is a testimony to queer life at that time. The more radical queer history approach, according to Morris, would not assign meaning or historical value to the photograph, but would be more interested in mapping the discourses we use to construct our readings of it--the discourses that shape our understanding of normativity and sexuality, our reading practices, the normative reach of public address. Morris continually asks us to return to interrogating our own stakes, our own desires, in writing histories, queering histories, engaging queer ideas. I like that he challenges us to go beyond recovery to theorizing and interrogating queerness and rhetoric as well.

The last few pages of the introduction raise many questions that I think we should read aloud in class. I won't record them all here, but I'll highlight the ones that stick out:

How is public address and rhetoric a regime of the normal??
How is rhetoric a regime of the normal? In what ways does rhetoric
s disciplinary and historical moorings constrain queer world making and queer histories?
What possibilities and pitfalls are there to an approach like Morris's of trying to "queer" a whole area of rhetorical study--public address. Where does the volume succeed, where does it not, and why?
What are the methodological risks taken as Morris and others try to queer rhetoric and rhetoricize queer theory?

Follow-up to Damian's talk

2007-11-07T23:22:00.000-05:00

I'd like to pursue a bit further the question I asked of Damian after his talk today. Laurie echoes this question, to some degree, on her blog when she asks about Damian's inclusion or exclusion of Greco-Roman theories of rhetoric.

My question today was really about the parallels as well as divergences that Damian sees between his work and that of scholars who are doing revisionist histories of ancient rhetorics such as Carol Lipson and others in her edited collection _Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks_ or Kermit Campbell (his recent article) or Lu on Ancient Chinese Rhetorics. Although Damian is not dealing with a BCE time period, I do wonder about fruitful links that could be made between MesoAmerican cultures and that of African cultures, Middle Eastern cultures, and Asian cultures.

Rhetoric of the Americas, not America

2007-11-06T16:30:00.000-05:00

All of the readings for this week's class on Social Histories of Latino/a rhetorics ask us to consider four main questions:

--What do we classify as writing, and why?
--Where do we locate our originary narratives of rhetoric and writing in the Americas? In other words, what might social histories of Latino/a rhetorics tell us about our traditional narratives of rhetoric that are drawn from the Greco-Roman tradition?
--What happens to our views of rhetoric and rhetorical education if we locate our originary narratives in different spaces and places outside of the Greco-Roman tradition?
--What can codex technologies teach us about rhetoric and writing?

Damian Baca amplifies these questions in his piece, asking us to consider a different trajectory for studying acts of witing:

"If, rather than theorizing rhetoric and writing based on the pedagogically vanguard “Composing-East-to-West” trajectory, specialists instead accept Mestiz@ codices as starting points, we are then left with expressions better suited to emerging non-Western rhetorics as well as current material realities in America and beyond."

I've execrpted some other quotations from Damian's book chapter that I will revisit later or in class. I need to go vote and am taking my senior citizen writers to Tracy Kidder's lecture tonight. However, I'll post these sections now so I can begin thinking about what they mean in relation to the work that Romano, Dussel, Villaneuva, and Calafell are doing.

Quote #1:

"Consequently, new modes of Mestiz@ historiography imply new ways to interpret history, rhetoric and composition, thereby having substantial implications for both practitioners and writing students.When in history did the Americas become literate, literary, and rhetorical? When did writing begin in North America? According to whose measuring stick? What counts as writing and what does it mean to be literate? What does it mean to be civilized? In the context of these crucial pedagogical questions, in Chapter Five I will examine more closely how writing specialists might read Mestiz@ scripts as a theoretical and historiographical paradigm, as a new vantage point to rethink the relationship between supposedly expanding notions of literacy and composition. The codices evidence precisely what the dominant historical imaginary erases and what English Composition lacks: co-evolutionary or parallel histories of writing and rhetoric in the Americas. This in turn radically compromises the cultural authority and hegemony of Composition’s historical emphasis on writing only as alphabetized, visible, and Anglo-European speech" (Baca)

Quote #2:
"Rethinking rhetoric and writing from Mestiz@ codex legacies advances a more constructive understanding of parallel writing systems and rationalities in America yet also promotes a critical intervention in the politics of writing instruction in the present. Such an intervention involves a decided departure from the paradigm of alphabetic supremacy. Writing specialists today need to invent far beyond the myths of a Greco-Roman horizon toward its challenges and mutations on a global scale. As writing specialists in the twenty-first century, we need to enact a new politics of rhetorical inquiry that reads colonial history both backward and forward, and aims to significantly revise the dominant narratives of Mesoamerican assimilation" (Baca).

Also, in what ways do these questions and comments relate to our discussion in past weeks of African American rhetorics, disability rhetorics, and Native American rhetorics?

Calling Alexander Graham Bell

2007-10-31T21:50:00.000-04:00

In "Interlude II" in "Lend Me your Ear" Brenda Brueggemann places a poetic phone call to Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. The poem is full of ironies. Bell isn't home, his d/Deaf wife and d/Deaf mother can't hear the phone, the d/Deaf narrator can't hear the beep, so she leaves a message when it's not recording. So the poem shifts to all the other mediums the narrator can use to get the message across: lip-reading, signing, the TTY, relay service, video, fax. All the communication technologies that would allow a d/Deaf person to communicate with Bell.

But the message can't get through. Why? Bell isn't listening, and he's not tuning into any of the other frequencies and registers that would allow a d/Deaf person to communicate. No, he's off making the argument that d/Deaf people should not marry d/Deaf people and create more d/Deaf persons. His argument would find sympathy with the woman who "calls" Brueggemann to ask her to mentor her daughter at Gallaudet into marrying a h/Hearing man.

The Medium is the message.

The narrator in the poem imagines signing a message to Bell only to have it burn his retina, turn him into a pillar of salt (the fate of Lot's wife).

Let's talk...no, let's listen, no let's look, no let's communicate on all channels, frequencies, screens, spaces.

In Interlude Three (which we didn't read for the class week, but I did anyway), Brueggemann writes about her challenges with phones at home and with her husband, noting that "[t]he phone is a sticking point, for better or worse in our marriage" (251). Brueggeman's h/Hearing husband hates using the phone, a fact that endeared him to her when she first knew him. They wrote notes and letters. But Brueggemann needs to use the phone to get things done, and she struggles to h/Hear and get things done. So its' interesting to see how she connects the Bell poem, her life with her husband, and the phone call she has with a Gallaudet student's parent who wants her to marry a h/Hearing man. There is a poetic and narrative connective thread throughout this book that creates a deep structure for analysis of the "in-betweenness" that Brueggemann experiences between d/Deaf an h/Hearing culture. The interludes are about the "Stuck between" (260). The spaces in-between.

I love that Brueggemann can do so much in this book, in part, because she is doing so much methodologically--mixing and combining qualitative research, rhetorical research, cultural analysis and critique, personal narrative, poetry. The experiences, knowledges and theories she works through require all of these methodologies. An adherence to one would mean the project would not have its multi-dimensional look and feel--a look and feel that create a prism through which we can view the many qualities of d/Deaf culture.

First Contact as a Site of Persuasion

2007-10-24T19:27:00.000-04:00

"the oppressed of necessity know more of the oppressors’ ways than the oppressors understand the ways of those whom they oppress" (Stromberg)

Stomberg's Introduction " Rhetoric and American Indians" offers a useful overview of the major questions surrounding social histories of American Indian rhetorics.One of the first questions he addresses is to review a major question in Native Studies--"What is an Indian?" He summarizes rather quickly the major challenges in a packed paragraph that I want to break apart a bit:

Indianness is about specific markers:
---"As Louis Owens indicates, “[W]e are confronted with difficult questions of authority and ethnicity: What is an Indian? . . . Must one be raised in a traditional ‘Indian’ culture or speak a native language or be on a tribal roll?” (3)" (Stromberg). In other words, what constitutes "Indianness." Cultural knowledge, blood quantam, affiliation on tribal rolls, all of the above?

Indianness is a white invention:
--Examined from another angle, we might consider the extent to which the “Indian” is simply “a white invention and . . . a white image” having little to do with actual indigenous peoples (Berkhofer 3)" (Stromberg). In other words, indigeneous people are not bounded by the creation of Indian-ness. Remember, Columbus thought the peoples he met were Indians as in "East Indians" when he arrived on shore. "Indian" was a designation brought by Columbus, by a colonizer, not a concept that made any sense within indigeneous cultures at the time.

Indianness is a rhetorical trope:
--"All of these questions raise the larger question of the degree to which the idea of the Indian is itself a rhetorical trope designed to perform specific functions within various discourses. As Gerald Vizenor asserts, “The word Indian. . . is a colonial enactment . . . an occidental invention that became a bankable simulation” (Manifest Manners 11). In Vizenor’s argument, thereareno “real Indians,” only more simulations that “undermine the simulations of the unreal in the literature of dominance” (Manifest Manners 12). " (Stromberg). Interesting. Reminds me of Baudrillard's discussion of simulacra and simulacrum.

While the category of Indian is interrogated by Stromberg and others, so is the idea of "rhetoric." While Stromberg draws upon Kenneth Burke's rhetorical vocabulary to buttress his analysis of American Indian rhetoric, he points to problems behind Burke's rhetorical framework.

Identification:
What happens to identification, a key term from Burke? According to Stromberg: "Even as Burke defines rhetoric as a process of establishing “identification” between self and other(s), the call for unity remains troubling for many American Indians haunted by an official United States rhetoric of assimilation that proclaimed a unity just so long as it was “our” unity.'"
For many American Indian speakers and writers, establishing a measure of identification with their white audience has been a primarydemand. As Burke asserts, “You persuade aman [sic] only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifyingyour ways with his” (A Rhetoric of Motives 55).

Consubtantiality:
When one's interests are joined and being substantially one with the other...what does that mean for American Indian rhetorics? Again, Stromberg: " In other words, the transformation to consubstantiality, a shared sense of identity, was to be only one way: the white way. As a number of the essays in this collection show, the complex negotiation for many American Indian rhetoricians has been to bridge communication divisions while maintaining an insistence of difference. "

The Master's Tools:
Stromberg sees the essential challenge faced by American Indian rhetors as the challenge of " discovering and applying another’s “available means of persuasion.” (Stromberg). The challenge was to persuade the "newcomers," the colonizers. As he puts it, the five men, seven women and three children "detained" and "taken to Spain" must have exercised " elocutionary gestures" to an "obdurate" audience. The problem was that Columbus saw himself as having the right to take them with him. He saw himself as superior to the "savages." What happens in asymetrical power relations?

So the point here is that American Indian rhetorics expand what counts as rhetoric and cause us to rethink our assumptions about rhetoric.

More needs to be said here about rhetorical sovereignty and survivance as key terms in American Indian rhetorics. However,I found Stromberg's framing essay useful as it tackles two major questions that are two halves of a whole:
Who does it mean to be Indian? What are the rhetorics of Indian-ness?
What does it mean to engage American Indian rhetorics and what does it mean to draw on concepts of rhetoric from the Greco-Roman tradition and contemporary Western tradition?

"Stay Seated"" The Good Old Daze of Educational Reformers

2007-10-16T23:08:00.000-04:00

Chapter Three of Lindal Buchanan's book and the conversation on J's blog (it's HOPPING!) sparked me to dig up the following conference paper I wrote in 2002 for CCCC about Emma Willard and Catherine Beecher. I really like the way she acknowledges the strategic rhetorical performance of Willard. When I wrote the paper below, there was little or nothing about Willard or Beecher written in our field, and then Buchanon's book came along and also Bacon's, both of which mention the public fight that Beecher had with the Grimkes. So it's great to see there are folks out here doing work on the rhetorical strategies of 19th century female rhetors engaged in educational reform--one of the great frontiers of advocacy in the 19th c. Remember--people debated how and why women should be educated. It sure was not a given.

The point that I'm always struck by is the view that these women (Willard, Beecher) were somehow conservative for making strategic rhetorical choices that drew upon the separate spheres ideology. I like that Buchanan points to the seated reading that Willard does. Reading was a familiar and more acceptable activity. J's blog really addresses that well. But I think we also need to keep in mind what Willard wanted--she wanted the state to fund women's education. This was an unprecedented and gutsy request. Women's education? Public funds for that? Asking legislators directly? How bold!

And Beecher--what a mass of contradictions. My favorite quote is the second below about how Beecher told women to stay home, but she was like a runaway coach herself. She didn't do what she advocated--she didn't marry, didn't have children, didn't stay home, didn't have a home to keep even though she wrote the bestselling housekeeping manual of the 19th c. She tirelessly advocated for women's education even though she quit teaching because it exhausted her. There's plenty to say about Beecher that I don't have time to say, so I'll leave readers with my CCCC paper, which is more concerned with how Beecher and Willard made their arguments than about their delivery, so I appreciate all Buchanan did to emphasize delivery, space, the body.

Separate but not Equal?: Emma Willard, Catharine Beecher, and the Rhetorical Struggle for Women’s Education, Eileen E. Schell, CCCC 2002

In the movement for the higher education of women, Emma Willard must be given first place. No other woman had made such definite experiments in education; no other woman had so daringly stepped into the limelight to wager her fight for education; nor was there anything at the time which compared in influence with her ‘Plan for Improving Female Education.” (Lutz 75).

"Catharine Beecher counseled women to effect change only by gentle influence--while, like a runaway coach, she circled the northern half of the nation, chiding her enemies and exhausting her relatives and friends.” (Boydston, Kelly, Margolis 14).

Her brother-in-law Calvin Stowe wrote to his wife Harriet Beecher Stowe that so strong and determined was Catharine Beecher that “[s]he would kill off a whole regiment like you and me in three days” (Boydston, Kelly, Margolis 14).

In this presentation, I offer a brief analysis of the public rhetorics of two nineteenth century women educational reformers who worked to persuade the American public that women deserved a good education, that the public should fund women’s educational institutions, and that schoolteaching was a profession suitable for women. The two reformers I will discuss are Emma Willard and Catharine Beecher. Emma Willard (1787-1870) was the founder of the Troy Female Seminary and the first woman to testify before a legislative body that women's education should be funded by public dollars. Catharine Beecher (1800-1878), was an educational reformer and institution-builder who initiated a campaign to educate and send "missionary" women schoolteachers to “civilize” the Western frontier. In my analysis of their rhetorical work, I will focus on how these women made strategic use of the rhetoric of “separate spheres” to validate the institutionalization of women's education and to open up teaching as a paid, respectable profession for women. This exploration is part of a book length project I am writing entitled The Rhetoric of Woman's True Profession, which explores how nineteenth century women educational reformers made strategic use of the ideology of “separate spheresto argue for women’s expanded cultural influence and for a career that gave thousands economic independence in the nineteenth century.

Although Willard and Beecher’s achievements have been widely acknowledged by historians of women’s education and teacher education and to a lesser degree by feminist literary scholars, their rhetorical and pedagogical work receive only brief mention in nineteenth century histories of women’s rhetoric and pedagogy in our field. The reasons for this seem three fold. First, these women are usually not identified as having an effect on the work of teaching composition or literacy instruction since they operated in the realm of female academies, not coeducational colleges and universities. Secondly, the analysis of their work has largely been the province by historians of education who, while they thoroughly explore their contributions, do not tend to focus on the rhetorical nature of their work. Third, the stance these two women took in relation to public persuasion and to feminism was an ambivalent and paradoxical and one that has often led to feminist scholars dismissing them as cultural conservatives because of their affirmation of women’s traditional roles. Little attention has been paid to why these educational reformers felt a separate spheres argument was a strategic rhetorical move and how it became a entry point for more radical claims about women's potential for cultural influence. In other words, the ideology of separate spheres served as a rhetorical commonplace in their work but one that both Beecher and Willard utilized in complicated and productive ways. As Anne Firor Scott has argued, Emma Willard’s rhetorical genius rested in “her ability to integrate new values with the prevailing ones” (5). On the one hand, she bought into the “idea of separate spheres and spoke highly of the patriarchal family” (5). On the other hand, she advocated women’s intellectual development and the establishment of first-rate women’s schools. Beecher’s rhetoric also affirmed patriarchal society and deployed sentimental commonplaces about women’s roles and spheres at the same time arguing forcefully for an expanded sphere of cultural influence for women. As Linda Kerber has argued in “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” the concept of separate spheres in the nineteenth century was a rhetorical construct that was utilized strategically by women reformers rather than a straightforward manifestation of “the cult of true womanhood, as some have assumed. In the remainder of my presentation, I will examine how Beecher and Willard strategically deployed the ideology of “separate spheres,” utilizing this rhetorical commonplace as an entry point for more radical claims about women's potential for cultural influence, paid work, and autonomy.

The Daughters of Democracy: Emma Willard’s Campaign
The daughter of a Revolutionary war farmer-soldier, Emma Willard (b. February 23, 1787 in Berlin, Connecticut) grew up with a strong sense of nationalism coupled with what Nina Baym has deemed a “ferocious ambition.” At the age of seventeen after receiving a piecemeal education, she began teaching at female academies in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and in Vermont, all the while continuing her education through self-study. In 1809, she married Dr. John Willard, a man twenty-eight years her senior, who encouraged her intellectual interests. Living near Middlebury College, Willard often mused on the separate and unequal nature of men and women’s education: “.My neighborhood to Middlebury College made me feel bitterly the disparity in education facilities between the two sexes, and I hope that if the matter was once set before the men as legislators, they would be ready to correct the error." Shortly after their marriage, the couple fell upon hard times and wanting to “relieve” her “husband from financial difficulties,” Willard opened a boarding school. Her “further motive,” she wrote, was to keep “a better school than those about me,” and a year or two later she “formed the design of effecting an important change in education by the introduction of a grade of schools for women higher than any theretofore known.” It was thus that Willard launched a plan to create a seminary for girls in the Hudson Valley, which was to be funded by public dollars.

To draw attention to her cause, she wrote a treatise entitled "A Plan for Improving Female Education," which she sent to New York state Governor De Witt Clinton. While Clinton was charmed by Willard’s intelligence and encouraged her to open the seminary, he made no commitment to public funds. To press her case, Willard and her husband attended the legislative session of 1819 in Albany, New York. At the request of several members of the legislative body, Willard read her plan before them and also “once before a large group of people” (65). When she read her address, she “carefully remained seated to avoid any hint that she was delivering a speech” ( Campbell 11). Willard’s reading was a landmark event in women's rhetorical history since it was highly unusual for women to speak in front of mixed audiences and virtually unheard of that a woman would make arguments before legislators about funding for women’s education (65). Willard’s biographer Alma Lutz has referred to her as the “first female lobbyist” in America.

As a rhetorical document, Emma Willard’s four-part “Plan” depends upon a simple but elegant formula, one based on both “tradition and innovation” (Firor Scott 6). First, she recited the defects of the current system of women’s education and speculated on their causes. Secondly, she discussed the principles that female education should follow. Third, she set forth a plan for a “female seminary,” the name she invented to describe an institution of higher education for women. Finally, she stated the beneficial effects society would reap upon publicly supporting such an institution.. The traditional elements of the argument she underscored were that. American life and culture and its democratic system of government were dependent on an enlightened citizenry, an ideology of Republicanism so frequently utilized in rhetorical work of this time (see Murray, Rush, Rowson). Since character education was a way to create that enlightened citizenry, and since women were chiefly in charge of raising children, women deserved to be educated as they would “elevate the whole character of the community.” The argument that the preservation of the Republic depended on educated women was the decades old argument of Republican motherhood (attributable to Benjamin Rush, Judith Sargent Murray, and Susanna Rowson). By using this familiar argument, Willard appealed to her audience's sense that education would better enable women to serve in their given cultural capacity, an argument that Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has characterized as one based on an appeal to expediency, that is that women would be given rights for the good of others, not for their individual good (14-15). To this ideology of Republican motherhood, Willard offered three innovations: public funding for women’s education, the encouragement of women’s “intellectual excellence” through study of higher subjects like natural philosophy (the sciences), and professional training to help them become teachers (7), all new concepts and radical ones at that.

In her plan, Willard convincingly points out that male education has been regulated and funded by the state, but that women’s education has been left to “private adventurers” whose qualifications are questionable and whose schools are subject to the capriciousness of parents and pupils. The current system of “adventure schools,”, she argued was riddled with problems. Moreover, such schools were only geared to equip women for a short period of their lives, that of courtship, thus “fit[ting] them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty.” In contrast to the haphazard ways in which female schooling was handled, Willard proposed a well-ordered system with four branches: moral and religious education, literary education, domestic, and ornamental. Willard assured her audience that she was not proposing a masculine education, but one that would “possess the respectability, permanency, and uniformity of operation of those appropriated to males” but that would emphasize women’s “difference of character and duties.” She also emphasized that the establishment of such female seminaries would allow for the production of a class of women who could teach in common schools and release men from that obligation. Her reasoning was that women, if “properly fitted,” could teach “children better than the other sex” (because of their patience and inventiveness with children) and at the same time do so more cheaply (12), a precursor to Beecher’s arguments.

While there were admiring supporters at the legislative session, there were also dissenting voices. A farmer commented “They’ll be educating the cows next” (Lutz 74). Other legislators voiced concern that women would be distracted by book learning from domestic duties or that serious study “would rob women of their delicacy, refinement, and charm” (74). Still others warned that women’s intellectual pursuits would “upset the established order,” damage “their health,” imperil “the race,” and potentially decrease the population (74).

Willard’s presentation of her “Plan” brought about a recommendation that the proposed academy (Waterford) be chartered and that it receive financial aid from the state's literary fund. The request for an endowment of five thousand dollars was voted down. Disappointed, Willard returned to Middlebury and published her Plan as a pamphlet at her own expense. The piece was widely read in America and in Europe, and while Willard regarded her presentation of the plan as a failure, she had garnered a number of supporters. Although she did not receive state funding for the academy she opened in Waterford, New York, she did capture the interest of others in the region. The citizens of Troy, New York asked her to move her female seminary academy from Waterford to the city of Troy , and the city’s Common Council passed a resolution to raise four thousand dollars through special taxes for the purchase of a school building. Willard’s Troy Female Seminary opened in Sept. 1821 and its curriculum offered courses in algebra and geometry, history, geography, and natural philosophy (sciences). She established an innovative curriculum, a system of peer monitors, and trained and sent out a phalanx of teachers. She set up a scholarship program for young women who wanted to become teachers but were too poor to pay for their education. She also continued to maintain a public role both as a speaker, an author of poetry, textbooks, and treatises, and an educational advocate who traveled and organized women and local people in support of schooling and teacher education. At her death and years later, she was recognized by Thomas Wentworth Higginson as the woman who “laid the foundation upon which every woman’s college may now be said to rest” (qtd in Lutz 75). For those of us working in women’s rhetorical history, Willard’s career affords us the opportunity to understand how traditional gender ideologies could be strategically deployed to create educational institutions for women and a respectable paid profession: teaching.

Gentle Persuasion: Catharine Beecher’s “Indirect” Directness
While Emma Willard, Horace Mann and others contributed significantly to the public discourses validating women's roles as teachers, Catharine Beecher became the chief popularizer of the notion that teaching was woman's true profession. Between 1829 until her death, she dispatched numerous public addresses, pamphlets, books, and traveled extensively to deliver her message that teaching was women’s holy calling sanctioned by God. Born in 1800 on Long Island, New York , Catharine Beecher successfully combined educational and domestic reform as her two lifelong projects (Boydston et al 19). While working as a teacher and educational advocate, she authored a dizzying array of treatises, essays, and books on topics as far-ranging as home economics, health education, female education, teacher education, religion, moral philosophy, and arithmetic. She also established a number of institutions including Hartford Female Seminary in 1823, the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati in 1833, and the Milwaukee Female Seminary in 1850, which eventually became Downer College and then the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where I completed my doctoral degree.

At roughly the same time that Beecher established her school in Hartford, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration were changing the face of American culture. Educational reformers Henry Barnard, Cyrus Pierce, and Horace Mann proposed a system of publicly funded common schools to act as a great equalizing factor (Sugg, 11-12). A chief problem with the common school plan, however, was that increasing numbers of men eschewed teaching in favor of pursuing work in business, law, medicine, ministry, and land speculation (Sugg, 38-39).. Aware that the number of teachers needed was expanding while the male teaching force was shrinking, educational reformers like Mann began to extol the virtues of women's suitability for teaching, knowing full well that women could be paid less than men (Sugg 30).

While we think of teaching now as a feminized profession, in the 1830s and 1840s, it was far from apparent that teaching should be a woman’s profession or that institutions for educating women for that purpose should be created. Prior to the nineteenth century, formal school instruction was seen as a temporary profession for young men on furlough from university study or local farmers or clergy who had enough formal education to qualify them to teach basic subjects. The exceptions to this were small "dame" schools taught by village women, which offered short-term instruction in reading and writing. Yet with the advent of mass schooling and the expansion of the American west, rising numbers of teachers were needed, and Beecher was more than happy to propose a system by which such teachers could be provided. In 1835, under the auspices of the American Lyceum, she delivered an address entitled "An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers." In this essay, Beecher put forward for the first time a detailed plan for creating a corps of women teachers (Sklar 113). In 1836, she launched a public speaking tour representing an agency that would bring teachers to Cincinnati for training to procure positions teaching out West. She spoke of this organization in Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Albany,NY and Philadelphia, Penn. In 1846, she attempted a second, more successful national tour and launched a full-fledged fundraising campaign.
. During her campaign of 1846, she followed a fairly standard three-pronged rhetorical strategy. First, she appealed to logic: to statistics about illiteracy and disrepair of school buildings, citing school board reports and eyewitness accounts from teachers. She painted a portrait of public schools as hellish places with "comfortless and dilapidated buildings. . . unhung doors, broken sashes, absent panes, stilted benches, yawning roofs, and muddy, moldering floors" (39). The teachers were in worse shape that the buildings. The 1844 report depicted them as cruel, harsh, intemperate and incompetent men "who lash and dogmatize in these miserable tenements of humanity" (39). Secondly, she brought out the emotional arsenal of pathetic appeals. She pointed out that in close proximity to these hellish schoolhouses were thousands of white middle class Christian women "sitting within the reach of their young voices, twining silk, working worsted, conning poetry and novels, enjoying life and its pleasures, and not lifting a hand or giving a thought to save them" (40). Beecher's solution was to bring the ill-trained and destitute children together with the idle silk-spinning young women. The result: a holy union of children and women in the larger enterprise of learning. She tapped into sentimental rhetorics about women’s natural dispensation toward mothering and exalted the loving relationship possible between a teacher and a pupil. Third, she topped it all off with a nationalistic agenda to save the American West with an army of female schoolteachers, appealing to xenophobic fears about immigrants.

Like a political candidate, she worked tirelessly to promote her cause. She sparked interest by sending circulars signed by Calvin Stowe, her brother-in-law and a clergyman, to county newspapers and small-town ministers, asking for names of women who might become missionary teachers. She also sent in advance articles to be printed in local papers (Sklar 175). After generating interest, Beecher, accompanied by Calvin Stowe or her younger brother Thomas, would dash into town to deliver a standard speech that presented her audience with her plan for missionary teachers (Sklar 170). By having a male “rhetorical proxy” deliver a speech to a mixed audience, she avoided the problem of appearing unwomanly. While Angelina Grimke faced an angry mob who burned the church to the ground after she spoke, Catherine Beecher often sat demurely on the stage, nodding and smiling as her words were delivered by a male relative. This was “indirect” influence in action.

After presenting her plan, Beecher asked groups of church women to give $100, and she established local support committees to raise funds to educate the teachers. In addition, she raised money be selling to these women copies of her Treatise on Domestic Economy or her recipe book, donating half of the proceeds to the cause(16). She also deployed letter-writing campaigns to procure the support of influential and wealthy individuals.

While Beecher's educational vision was grandiose, and it ignored the position of women of color and working class women, she succeeded in sending 450 women teachers to the frontier, and more importantly, she succeeded in normalizing and popularizing what was once thought to be an unimaginable scheme: to make teaching into an honorable profession for women and to see the widespread establishment of normal education. Six years before her death in 1878, over one hundred Normal schools had been founded (Feldman, 1974, p. 25). In 1880, two years after her death, the percentage of women elementary and secondary teachers outnumbered men (57 percent to 42 percent). By 1918, thirty years after her death, women constituted an unprecedented eight-four percent of all teachers (Feldman, 1974, p. 25).

Conclusion:
While suffragists often supported their arguments by drawing upon natural rights philosophy--the view that women were persons, therefore entitled to the civil and political privileges of citizenship, both Willard and Beecher drew upon what Campbell has deemed arguments of expediency. "it would be beneficial, that is, desirable and prudent, to give women rights" for the greater good of society(Campbell 14). The latter argument was their best support for an extended social and economic sphere for women because it made Beecher, Willard and others who sided with her seem as if they were gaining rights for the good of others--for men and for children and the good of the nation--not for individual women (Campbell 15). Such an argument was "feminine" as opposed to feminist, and it was more acceptable to the general public because it was in keeping with the ideals of "separate spheres" popular in the nineteenth century .Willard and Beecher’s appeals to Republican motherhood, to the idea that teaching was a calling, and Expediency suggest that they subscribed to gender ideals that, while incorporating aspects of the separate spheres, broadened and transformed that concept. Historian France Cogan has argued that a gendered counterideal existed concurrent with the "Cult of True Womanhood"--the "Cult of Real Womanhood. This ideal was a median point between the cult of true womanhood and the ideals of female autonomy and natural rights promoted in nineteenth century feminism. The Real Womanhood Ideal, contends Cogan, "advocated intelligence, physical fitness and health, self-sufficiency, economic self-reliance, and careful marriage: it was in other words, a survival ethic "(4).

Works Cited

Baym, Nina. “Women and the Republic: Emma Willard’s Rhetoric of History.” American Quarterly 43.1 (March 1991): 1-23.
Beecher, Catharine. “The Evils Suffered by American Women and Children: The Causes and the Remedy.”
Boydston, Kelly, Margolis.. The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her, Volume I: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. Praeger, 1989.
Cogan, Frances. The Cult of Real Womanhood.
Feldman, S.D. Escape from the Doll’s House: Women in Graduate and Professional School Education. New York: McGraw Hill, 1974.
Kerber, Linda K. “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History.” The Journal of American History 75.1 (1988): 9-39
Lutz, Alma. Emma Willard: Daughter of Democracy. Zenger, 1929.
Scott, Anne Firor. “The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822-1872.” History of Education Quarterly 28.1 (Spring 1979): 1-20.
Sklar, Katherine Kish. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1973.
Willard, Emma. “An Address to the Public: Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education.” Emma Willard School Online Archives.

Hush Harbors in African American Rhetorics

2007-10-10T07:41:00.000-04:00

"From the Harbor to Da Academic Hoood: Hush Harbors and an African American Rhetorical Tradition" by Vorris L. Nunley
in _African American Rhetorics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives_. Ed Ronald Jackson and Elaine Richardson. SIUP, 2004.

Nunley addresses "hush harbor sites" and "hush harbor rhetoric" in this essay.

"Hush harbor sites" serve as "camouflaged locations, hidden sites, and enclosed places as emancipatory cells where they come in from the wilderness, unite their tongues, speak the unspoken, and single their own songs to their own selves in their own communities" (223). What counts as a hush harbor site, both in the historical and contemporary sense for African American peoples? Nunley provides a fairly extensive list of possible hush habors: "Woods, plantation borders, churches, burial societies, beauty shops, slave frolics, barbershops, and kitchens" (223). Nunley cites Lawrence Levine who argues in _Black Culture and Black Consciousness_ (1997) that hush harbors were places where enslaved African Americans established spaces to have unauthorized, covert meetings in "bush arbors, cane breaks, or hush harbors" (225). A hush harbor is not only a place, it is a "conceptual metaphor" for strategies of "masquerade" "hidden in plain sight"(Nunley 226 citing Levine 83). Hush harbors became places where black folks escaped the white gaze and gathered to engage with one another. Historically, hush harbors were places where African Americans gathered to plan escapes from slavery, where worship in the black church was made possible. Citing Ira Berlin, Eric Sundquist, and Robert Wright and Wilbur Hughes, Nunley notes that many black institutions have emerged from the space of the hush harbor: "Formal institutions such as the National Colored Woman's Association, the Black Panthers, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference" (227).

In addition to the term hush harbor space, Nunley introduces the idea of a hush harbor rhetoric "" a rhetorical tradition constructed through Black public spheres with a distinctive relationship to spatiality (material and discursive), audience, African American nomoi (social conventions and beliefs that constitute a world view or knowledge), and epistemology" (222). Nunley argues that scholarship in rhetoric has neglected an understanding of "spatiality," which he calls "the distinctive fourth term of the rhetorical situation" (222).

Nunley warns the reader, however, that hush harbors are not just places where Black folks congregate, but they are Black spaces because "African American nomos (social convention, worldview knowledge), rhetoric, phronesis (practice wisdom and intelligence), tropes, and commonplaces are normative in the encounters that occur in these locations" (224). Space is an important construct in Nunley's essay. It's important not only because hush harbors are spaces, but because space has been relatively neglected in rhetorical study. Nunley reviews work on architecture, postmodern geography, and rhetorical studies of space (e.g., Mountford). While Mountford addresses how spaces produce meaning, Nunley points out that she doesn't look at African American "rhetorical spaces" as "expressions of a textual and rhetorical tradition" (228). Thus, hush harbors are more than a space for gathering, they are sites of practices AND "theorizing, epistemology and history " (230). Nunley goes on to show how this is the case in African American literature and public address, namely through The "Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm X's speech given in Cleveland on April 3, 1964. He offers a thoughtful analysis of how Malcolm X deployed a different ethos when addressing the black audience in Cleveland ("The Ballot or the Bullet) vs. addressing a predominantly white audience in his speech "The Black Revolution" given in Palm Gardens, N. Both speeches addressed similar themes, but the different audiences necessitated different appeals. Nunley shows how Malcolm X adapated his speech accordingly and how "The Ballot or the Bullet" given to a black audience in Cleveland is an example of hush harbor rhetoric. I like this section a great deal, but I'd like to see more analysis of how hush harbor rhetoric works in the "The Ballot or the Bullet." I get the general concept, but I'd like to see more close textual analysis of the speech itself so I can understand how Malcolm X was working within the hush harbor rhetorical space.

However, this kind of close analysis of public address is not Nunley's goal. The essay moves on to discuss the concept of black audience and black commonplaces (nomoi from Susan Jarratt). While Nunley sees hush harbor rhetoric as an important part of African American rhetorical traditions, he emphasizes that hush harbor spaces are not utopian respites free from the internecine conflicts and contradictions" (235). Harbor, perhaps, gives the concept of hush harbor the idea of a sheltered and safe space. But Nunley is not content to rest there--dwelling in the hush harbor has consequences and benefits as he shows in the "The Classroom as Contact and Combat Zone" segment of the piece where he discusses academic hush harbors. Nunley gives an example of an experience he had where he challenged two white graduate students who critiqued a multicultural textbook for being too race-based, Nunley and another student and African American faculty discussed the incident behind closed doors after the class. Yet Nunley uses this example to suggest how hush harbor rhetoric can be a transgressive pedagogical practice. He offers an example of how this can happen through the use of the "lyric shuffle" game that linguist J. Baugh discusses in his book and Beverly Silverstein's service learnign program at Crenshaw High in L.A.. Finally, Nunley ends the piece by arguing that hush harbor rhetoric provides scholars of rhetoric a useful "methodological and pedagogical possibility' (241).

As I read through, I wondered how hush harbors can parallel the space that Nan Johnson refers to as parlor rhetoric in her book on nineteenth century women rhetors? Nineteenth century white women were usually not welcome in public address, so how might parlor rhetorics parallel hush harbors, to some degree? What are the limitations as well as possibilities of comparing these two rhetorical spaces: parlor and hush harbor?

Syracuse and the "Jerry Rescue"

2007-10-03T11:12:00.000-04:00

Jacqueline Bacon's book is a wonderful model of historical research: rich with nuance and carefully considered analysis of archival, primary, and secondary sources. While class members in 751 are blogging about the assigned chapters, I thought I would take up our recent class tour of the Abolitionist sites in Syracuse, NY. One of the connections I've been trying to draw in the class is between the social histories and historiographical texts that we are reading and the local area, which is a rich site of social history for a number of social movements and causes.

A group of 751 folks including some of our offspring (!) went downtown on Sunday to get a sense of the abolitionist picture here in 19th century Syracuse. Dennis Connor from the Onondaga Historical Association took us on a historical walk through downtown Syracuse that highlighted some of the major locations and people who were engaged in significant abolitionist activity. The day we went (Sunday) was also the day before the commemoration of the Jerry Rescue, a situation where the citizens of Syracuse rose up against federal marshals who had imprisoned William "Jerry" Henry, a local African American man who was a "runaway" slave living in Syracuse and working as a skilled woodworker. William was taken into custody by federal marshals enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law Act, which forced all citizens to turn in runaway slaves or face a fine and imprisonment. This Act, part of the Missouri compromise, was mean to force citizens in the North to collude with the unjust slavery system of the South. While Syracuse was already a site of significant abolitionist activity, the tide was turned around the situation of William Henry. William was kept in police custody and at one point tried to escape. He ran down the street and was suppressed and struck by the marshals in public view and then dragged back to the jail. It was then hard to remain neutral about this issue. Abolition was no longer an abstract issue--one of the citizens of Syracuse was being dragged back into jail in plain view under an unjust law. A plan was fomented by Rev May and Rev. Loguen and others to break Jerry out of jail and get him to Canada. The "Jerry" rescure resulted whereby several hundred citizens gathered outside the jail, extinguished the gaslights, and broke into the jail with a battering ram and carried William out. He was hidden in various houses and dressed as a woman to conceal his identity before being taken to Kingston, Ontario by boat. The consequences for the rescuers were great in terms of facing conviction and trial. A film at the OHA illustrates the major aspects of the "Rescue."

Thus, the Fugitive Slave Law was a major incubator of activism for the citizens of Syracuse, and it stands today as an iconic moment in the history of abolition both locally and nationally. As we walked with Dennis through the city, he introduced us to several sites where speeches were made by Frederick Douglass, where runaway slaves were hidden (houses and churches), and he pointed out the sites of the court, businesses, and private residences where significant abolitionist actions were taken. What was clear is there was a rhetorical and material network in play and there were different levels of engagement depending upon the person, his/her position, and the time period--before and after the Fugitive Slave Law Act. Dennis also pointed out the ways in which African Americans were treated diffferently and often unfairly within the abolitionist movement--a point Bacon takes up as well. Those of us who attended were also struck by how much change the city has seen in terms of architectural razing and rebuilding. Many historical sites and residences are simply gone. The building where Daniel Webster gave his threatening speech about citizens obeying the Fugitive Slave Law or else (ironically) is still there--including the balcony he stood on as he delivered the speech.

If you haven't already, please go see the "Jerry" Rescue moument at Clinton Square. It faces the site of the jail where William Henry was unjustly imprisoned, and it depicts the dramatic scene of Jerry being spirited out of jail by Revs Loguen and May. Rev Loguen points north to freedom. While this was not what happened historically, it is an effective artistic rendering.

The site of the jail is a parking lot now. The folks who own it have not agreed to sell it to the OHA, which would like to create a monument there. I guess parking spaces still trump the commemoration of social justice.

I think we all found the walk very informative. There are now Freedom Trail markers around the city, and I recommend that anyone take the walk we did with Dennis. It was eye-opening and wonderfully linked to all we are discussing. It is also a reminder that the Jenna 6 should be fresh in our minds.

Chautauqua: the reasons for failure?

2007-09-26T10:08:00.000-04:00

It's perhaps difficult for many to understand the importance of public lectures and sermons in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We tend to think of lectures as "take or leave" in our day and age--something we might go to or should go to or occasionally as something we can't miss because the person is so well-known for their PRINT persona and ideas. But imagine a public lecture as EDIFICATION AND ENTERTAINMENT, as something you would want to go to, something you would travel many miles for in an open buggy in the cold or searing heat so you could hear someone speak for two hours or sometimes more. Think of certain speakers as celebrities--well known for their platform personas, their exciting ideas, their manner of fiery speaking. As we've been reading this week, oratorical culture in the 19th c. that was being transformed in specific cultural, social, and economic ways.

Now think of Chautauqua--the lecture and circuit series founded "on the shores of New Yorks' Lake Chautauqua in 1873" (211). According to Frederick J. Antczak and Edith Siemers (referred to heretofore as A & S), authors of "The Divergence of Purpose and Practice on the Chautauqua: Keith Vawter's Self-Defense," the series in the summer "drew thousands. . . to be part of educational programs addressed particularly to teachers" (211). Rev. John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller, the founders of the series, wanted to start a series in which well-known speakers and thinkers from the east would come to speak and educate those who would soon be teaching or were teaching those in the "West"--the teachers. The program was thought of as "an early form of [an] extension program in education" (211), a precursor to the Summer Institutes for teachers that we have now.

Notables such as the philosopher William James, Thomas Edison. U.S. senators, and others would hold forth on a variety of topics of interest and public value. Religious leaders also addressed spiritual and moral issues (211). So engaged were some of the participants that they would go back to their home communities and try to establish a Chautauqua-like series, which sparked the circuit series that Vawter became involved in. The Chautauqua circuit system arose in response to that need, which I will address later in this posting.

Now why 1870? Why did that time period give rise to such a series? The explanation offered in the article is the assessment by Gould that this was a time period of social unrest and economic change, a time in which people saw "the arrogance of the railroads and the trusts, a prolonged and severe economic depression, political corruption in city, state, and federal government, a 'stolen" Presidential election (Hayes-Tilden), and a wave of bitter strikes" (Gould qtd in Antczak and Siemers 212). Sounds pretty contemporary to me! The implication was that series helped people sort through vital and pressing issues of the day such as the "eight-hour day, the conservation of natural resources, pure food and drug legislation, city planning," etc ((212). While A and S spend a few pages extolling the successes of Chautauqua, their focus is on the demise of the program. I have to admit as a reader that I didn't want to hear about the decline of the series. I wanted to hear about it in its hey-day, and I wanted to hear about its circulation and effects throughout the 19th/early 20th century communities that it touched. But this is not the story the authors wish to tell. The story to tell is about its "ultimate failure" (213) and the role of Vawter in that failure.

Ironically, Vawter was responsible for Chautauqua's success as a circuit system even as he is hailed as the reason for its failure. Vawter's idea was to create a "circuit system" where towns in proximity with each other could maximize opportunities by booking a specific speaker into a regional area. The idea was to have "centralized control on the same schedule with the same 'talent'" (214). This system was to be a way to maximize efficiency. Speakers would move from town to town on a "tight booking" system. A system of quality control was applied where speakers moving from one town to another were "advised" about how to handle themselves given their performance at the previous town. This supposedly lead to the more fiery speakers being asked to "tone it down" so as not to offend the locals. The sentiment was that local organizing committees of the Chautauqua circuit began to lean toward "pap" rather than substance and that it began to get away from the civic motives that once guided it.

While there were good things about this system--reliable booking system, guarantee of a steady circuit--there were problems. Sometimes host towns came upon financial difficulties or bad weather or local organizing boards that didn't want specific topics or speakers. Vawter worked to make local organizing committees more responsible for ensuring a good turn-out and for being liable for the monies to pay the speakers once they agreed to a booking. Chautauqua became, more and more, a business enterprise, and local organizing committees began to want to promote only "crowd-pleasers" because they wanted to be able to sell tickets and not be left with having to pay-out to make up the difference. To illustrate the difference, A & S cite an example of a 1909 bill about lecturers vs.a 1925 bill that shows how Chautauqua's public function was taken over by "entertainment" interests: Tyrolean Alpine Singers and Yodelers for instance.

But as A & S put it, this is not a neat and tidy narrative. Vawter was "keenly aware of the decline" and felt torn between keeping the circuit going financially and keeping its public purpose alive. Vawter's papers reveal this struggle between "profitability" and a passion for civic virtue. The story of what happened to Chautauqua's circuit series is an interesting and unresolved one. A & S go on to suggest a number of interpretations of the archival materials and published accounts of what happened to the circuit program. The questions appear to be about the nature of the circuit's demise: Did it fail due to bureaucracy and commodification of speakers that Vawter encouraged in order to keep the series going? Did it fail because the "local committees" dumbed it down to the point where it lost its edge and social value? In other words, did it fail because local organizing committees "sold" out to entertainment over public edification? Did it fail because of oratorical culture losing its sway? Did it fail because the radio came along as an instrument of public entertainment and the automobile came along to transport people to far away towns and cities for amusements of other kinds like drinking illegal whiskey? This last question is mine, of course ;-). But the point here in the article is to be careful about how we interpret Vawter's involvement in the demise and to be aware of what we take on when we try to determine what happened to the Chautauqua series.

At any rate, the answers to these questions are not entirely clear, but what the Vawter-Chautauqua test case reveals is interesting for the examination of oratorical culture. As A & S put it, the example of Vawter asks us to think more about how "rhetorical values are in fact institutionalized and to examine what happenes to them. . . when they are" (224). I think this article raises interesting questions about institutionalized rhetoric as well as social histories. How are we to intepret the failure of a rhetorical enterprise? When something dies, why does it do so? Competing values, shifting interests, someone's big gaffe? The point A & S make is that we must "complicate our stories, stories of the tensions between the roles of the individual and the stories for the tensions betwen prinicples of cultural discrimination and the interests of institutions in their own material survival" (224).

Some of the discussion here made me think of Sinclair Lewis's novel _Main Street_, which offers a send-up of small town culture and its desire for entertainment and conservative forces moreso than challenges. But Lewis also treats small towns as complex enterprises as well.

Archives as Scenes of Collective Invention

2007-09-19T08:59:00.000-04:00

“The Archive as a Scene of Invention” Rhetoric and Public Affairs

Biesecker maintains that whatever the archive is, it is, above all, “ a settled scene of our collective invention, of our collective invention of us and it” (124). I think that this is a fascinating statement. The archive, then, is a scene of “doubled invention” rather than one of “singular discovery” (124). Biesecker notes as well the crisis in historical knowledge and questioning and movement away from master narratives (Lyotard) that has been a part of her field—communication studies—and every other major field in the humanities or social sciences where “History” has been “histories.” Even with the questioning of the master narratives that have guided history, Biesecker reminds readers that there has been a turn back to the archives as a potential unmediated passage back to the past since it contains material artifacts. She cites a series of cautionary articles that remind readers of the problems entailed in a turn back to the archives—that all archives are a mere “trace” (Derrida) of the past and that when we are dealing with archives, we are dealing with the ghostly traces of the past-not the full past. The effect, then, of the first four pages of the article is to raise a whole series of questions about the indeterminacy of using archives as a point for gathering material artifacts from which to reconstruct histories.

After raising a whole series of questions about archives, Biesecker turns to the cancellation of the “Enola Gay” exhibit proposed for the National Air and Space Museum in the nineties. The Enola Gay was the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Museum’s exhibit was to omit mention of Japanese victims of the blasts, but instead was to narrate the historic flights as those that ended the war. The exhibit was poised to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the bombings. The controversy hinged over whether or not to include “bits of the archive”—photographic evidence of the effects of the blast on survivors on the ground. Another piece of the controversy rested on having only part of the B-29 present for the exhibit—“mutilated” as some veterans argued. Both sides of the controversy were debating how to include bits of the archive and what effects those “bits” would have on the viewing public. Would they view the Enola Gay differently? As an engine of death, which, of course, all bombers are. Or as an engine of freedom that ended the war and eliminated unnecessary suffering even as plenty of unnecessary suffering happened because of the bombings?

. But Biesecker’s point, though, is calling into question what both sides were questioning about the archival evidence causing viewers to question the U.S. decision to use the bomb against the Japanese. In contrast, the documentary film “Price for Peace” (aired 2002) narrated the costs of the blast told from the perspective of Japanese survivors as well as the story of the flight. The documentary was, interestingly, not objected to by veterans, was introduced by Tom Brokaw (author of The Greatest Generation). So the question was not really over the effects, but over what “bits” and what those bits would do, how they would used.

So Biesecker’s point is that we need to investigate the archive itself rather than ut the archival evidence. Her point is that the archive cannot authenticate, but it can authorize (130). So she argues we need rhetorical histories of the archive, “critical histories of the situated and strategic uses to which the archives have been put” (130).

I like this piece a lot, and I find I want to read more by Biesecker after reading it. I’d like to see Biesecker draw out further the implications of the Enola Gay controversy, but, of course, she can’t because this was a response essay in a special issue on archives for the journal.

I think it is interesting to think of writing critical rhetorical histories of archives and their situated and strategic uses. I think that is a important claim, especially in light of the ways in which specific archives have been used and reused to authorize our rhetorical and composition histories in the field—the Widener Library’s special collections at Harvard for instance. The use of that archive so frequently has guaranteed that many of the histories of the field are about east coast, elite colleges and universities and not about other places, spaces, and types of institutions—although many historians are now looking elsewhere.

I’d like to talk more about how archives are scenes of collective invention. What do we invent? For whom? And for what stakes? And what are the ways in which we create national identities and nationalisms from our archives?

Blogging from Fargo/book launch

2007-09-17T17:11:00.000-04:00

Greetings from Fargo. I am at Bobb's Coffee house, a Taste of Seattle in Fargo, North Dakota, which is emblazoned with a Space Needle logo. As a former Seattleite, I was quite pleased to discover this Seattle-like coffee place NOTE: NOT STARBUCKS!. I was surprised, but pleased to find this place beckoning me as a drove a rental mini-van through the streets of Fargo (more on that later--they gave away all the sedans, and I'm stuck with a MINI-VAN). This coffee place does look a little like a Seattle coffee place--tin ceilings, wood floors, exposed brick. Anyway, I'm here waiting for my co-author Charlotte Hogg to fly in so we can join our other co-author Kim Donehower at the University of North Dakota. We are going to be give a lecture and sign books tomorrow. Our book _Rural Literacies_ (Southern Illinois UP) was released this summer, and this is our official book launch. I thought it was fitting that I could smell the cut wheat fields when I landed.

Anyway, I'll blog more tonight from Grand Forks, ND, and I'll write about Biesecker's article. If anyone from 751 is out there, think about this question: WHAT IS AN ARCHIVE? Biesecker offers some answers. It will be interesting to compare her answers with DeCerteau's.

More later! I'll check out everyone's blogs tonight.

History as "Cemeteries within Cities"

2007-09-12T00:26:00.000-04:00

Some questions to consider about history and historiography as we blog and get ready for class. I'll add more to this list.

--What do we make of Marx's claim that history is the history of class struggle?
--And in what ways do you see Marx's claims anchoring the future study of social histories? In what ways are we indebted to Marx, but also, in what ways, has the crisis in historical materialism shifted the emphasis in social histories?
--How might we tie Marx into DeCerteau's point on p. 58 that "all historiographical research is articulated over a socioeconomic, political, and cultural place of production" (58).

--I was interested in DeCerteau's point about the archive and information retrieval. I think he poses some interesting points about the archive as an institutionalized informatics of retrieval (the sciences of information). After reading DeCerteau, what statements are you formulating about the archive as an entity, a technology, a place?

Take a look at the passage on p. 87 of DeCerteau--the "cemeteries within cities":

"it [history] functions as an inverted image: it gives way to lack and yet hides it; it creates these naratives of th epast which are the equivalent of cemeteries within cities; it exorcises and confesses a presence of death amidst the living" (87). HIstoriography produces history and tells stories (87). How does writing, how does narrative shape history? Bringing in rhetoric and logic, DeCerteau addresses how history draws on syllogism and enthymeme (for explication).

There is a "French connection" at work here in the readings--Foucault and DeCerteau. Discuss the synergies and distinctions across these texts and account for the role of the French context on both.

I'd like to address geneaology as Foucault defines it in relation to historical discourse.

More on Nietzsche later. He requires his own blog post!

Teaching Rhetorical Histories

2007-09-05T11:41:00.000-04:00

“Rhetoric and Graduate Studies: Teaching in a Postmodern Age” Mountford and Reynolds _Rhetoric Review 15.1 (Fall 1996): 192-214.

I think Mountford and Reynolds make good points about how “rhetoric may be taught as a set of transdisciplinary theories of discourse that frame and inform the study of communicative practices as they vary and shift across multiple cultural sites” (193).

I’m particularly interested in the overview they provide of research on rhetorical education for graduate students. There is a focus on historical “sweeps” or surveys of the history of rhetoric. T.J. Miller is cited as wondering how revisionary rhetoric is accounted for in these surveys. Are these canonical surveys without revisionary content? Miller calls for scholars/teachers of the history of rhetoric to examine rhetorical history from a rhetorical perspective. I think that is very important—the rhetoricity of rhetorical history. It is clear from the overview that there are many questions to be considered about the way the history of rhetoric gets taught—“patterning rhetoric courses after traditional literature survey-courses and/or in service of composition may limit the study fo rhetoric and the potential of rhetoricality in ways that need no longer be reproduced” (200). Mountford and Reynolds present two alternative models that can be used in tandem.
1) dialogical; 2) transdisciplinary. The idea with dialogical is to pair/cluster readings across historical period to demonstrate similarities and differences—Aristotle and Burke, for instance. They argue that we need to “replace the study of history with historiography’’ a move that foregrounds theory and social practice” (201).

The transdisciplinary piece involves understanding how rhetorical study and rhetorical practice can extend and influence other arenas: law, public policy, etc. A rhetorical issue or practice can be traced across a number of domains. Mountford and Reynolds offer some really useful advice about how to create transdisciplinary clusters of pieces that illuminate new ways of studying and addressing rhetorics.

p. 209: I’d like to discuss the passage here that Mountford and Reyolds draw from Porter’s piece about creating boundaries around rhetoric and other fields. This tension is an interesting one—between making rhetoric the study of everything to rhetoric as a particular domain and discourse. What is the happy medium here? This is worth discussing, and it’s worth discussing in terms of our rhetoric curriculum of 731, 751, and 711, which are the required rhetoric track courses. One of the distinctions that I’d like to make is between the “rhetoric of,” which is rhetoric being used as a synonym for discourse or language, to rhetoric as an analytic, as a method, and a methodology. I think that the rub lies between these two uses of rhetoric.

Miller's piece is a good (earlier) companion with this one. I think both pieces constitute a hugely valuable resource. Every graduate student before going on the job market should read these pieces and plan a graduate course and an undergraduate upper-division course in the history of rhetoric that accounts for the different models presented here. Every faculty member should read these pieces before putting together a history of rhetoric survey and/or rhetorical theory course.

Social History as Imperative

2007-09-04T17:19:00.000-04:00

Why study and write social histories of rhetoric?

I must begin at home--with my home community,which has had a hand in creating a social history.

As part of a multi-generation farm family in eastern Washington state, I grew up surrounded by the paraphernalia of former generations. My great grandfather Frank A. Schell's Model T truck sat below our family’s barn, its slatted sides long ago rotted away, its wheels sunk into the mud. Our family’s barn rose above the truck to a grand height, one of the largest barns left standing in the neighborhood, its drafty and dim exterior and multiple hay lofts called to mind its former occupants: the cows, horses, and goats of previous generations. In the late fall in the 1920s and 1930s, the barn served as an apple shed where my great grandfather, my grandfather, my grandmother, and hired men packed the fall's apple harvest into boxes before hauling them to the railroad depot to be taken to market. In the 1960s and 1970s, the barn became a storage shed for the old and the new. I wandered through it many afternoons, gazing up at the tall stack of homemade apple boxes that rose to the rafters. Stacks of old wooden ladders and new lightweight aluminum ones leaned against the hand-hewn beams. My great grandfather's tools hung on the walls of the hay loft: cross-cut blades, scythes, shingle making equipment, horseshoes, and saddles. Even the feed boxes for the animals were still intact. The barn, once a vital site of production, now housed the equipment, tools, and treasures of former generations, and my grandmother, the caretaker of the family museum, spent hours puttering in the barn’s dim interior arranging relics from the past.

Being constantly surrounded by the past made me, in some ways, obsessed with the past, with history, with the way things once were and the way things came to be. I spent hours talking to my grandmother about the past, listening to her stories, and later typing them for her as she wrote her memoirs in her late eighties (she is now 99 years old). It seemed to me that I didn’t have any choice but to be interested in social history—being part of a farm family guarantees your line in history. But there was more to it than being indebted to the past and the unbroken line of continuity that comes from tracing one’s past. It was a sense of responsibility and duty to acknowledge those how came before and those who got ignored along the way. For our farm once existed and co-existed originally with the Native people—the Wenatchis—who made their home in the Wenatchee Valley for centuries before the trappers. miners, traders, and farmer-settlers came.

My family’s farm stood at the mouth of Brender Canyon, the area the Sinpushquoisoh band of the Wenatchi Indians referred to as the Land of the Blackbirds. Every year the Sinpushquoisoh people traveled through the canyon past the eventual site of our family farm on their way to dig camas roots known as “itwah” or biscuit roots. I grew up hearing stories of how a Wenatchi woman known by her English name Molly traveled on her horse past our farm in June and July to dig her yearly supply of the camas root.. The camas roots were dug in a high mountain meadow in the Wenatchee Mountains known simply as the Camas Lands. The meadow, emblazoned with blue camas flowers, yielded a good harvest of the bulbous root.. The native people dug the roots with a paca, a digging stick made from hard wood or from an elk or deer antler, and they stowed the roots in woven bags around their waists. The high meadow also yielded the sukalusah, another type of camas root, which had white blossoms, and sukwim, or wild carrots . The itwah and sukalusah roots were versatile; the Wenatchis ate them raw or they boiled, baked, or dried them. The camas roots were also used to make a flour to bake cakes or bread. Nearby the Wenatchi also gathered “wild potato, wild onion, tiger lily, cattail, wild celery and pine nuts. Early ripening berries were gathered in June, this month being called Shyayuaenscht or “Service Berry Gathering Time.” (Scheuerman 30).
After gathering camas roots, Molly would stop at the farm on her way back, and my great grandmother Katie Belle Threeton Schell usually served her a meal. Typical of the hierarchical relations between the white settlers and the Indians, Molly ate her meal on the steps of the back porch while the Schell family ate inside.

This bit of social history is not one that most people in my home community of Cashmere, WA know or would even care to know. The Pioneer Village Museum in Cashmere, WA proudly features the history of white settlement in its replicas of log cabins, stores, a one-room schoolhouse, and other structures. The cultural property of the Native people of the region is present in the museum as well, but it is behind locked glass display cases. It is part of a private collection owned by a white resident Willis Carey who left his collection to the museum. Frequently Native people come to the museum and try to take their cultural property back—stone tools, arrowheads, and other items. This property was dug--actually robbed-- from their ancestor’s graves. The museum will not return it the families that come to claim it.

The Indian people in Cashmere are largely gone now—living on the Colville reservation to the north or scattered here and there. The US government never granted the Wenatchis the fishing reservation they were promised in the treaties they signed, and there was not a way to remain in the community without having access to the livelihood that came from unfettered access to the streams and lands that once sustained them.

So social histories matter because it is a history, often, of social injustice as well as the struggle to right social wrongs. Now one might say what is rhetorical about any of this? The rhetoric is in the telling or the construction of historical accounts and their persuasive nature. It is in the way that one version of history gets told—white settlement and white pride and white racism—and in the way another version—the Native people and cultural annhilation—gets completely elided or relegated to a portion of a museum as the “past,” not the future. How did it become persuasive for one story, one history to be acknowledged as the important one? What power relations, public policies, and cultural arguments allowed that to happen? This is where the social historian of rhetoric can step in to addresss the gap between “official” histories of progress and inevitability and address the ways in which such progress was at the expense of whole classes of people and/or the environment. The example I cite is one from my own community, but there are thousands more to address. This is what makes social histories of rhetoric such a powerful area of development for the field. More later!! I have more to say about Thomas Miller and others in relation to this idea of social history.

Octalog II

2007-09-03T12:16:00.000-04:00

I enjoy the Octalogue entries (I & II) because they are mini-manifestos!
I’ll be progressively blogging over the next few days, but I wanted to comment in particular on Octalogue II, which sets an agenda, in many ways, for a course in historical study.

From Octalogue II:

“Serving Time in the Archives” “Where were the women? The people of color” (Ferreira-Buckley 26).

Ferreira-Buckley makes an excellent point about the nature of archival work: many of us do not receive training in the ways to conduct traditional research, and such research takes a lot of time and resources (travel to archives, time to sift through archival boxes, make sense of documents, etc). There is also the problem of language—knowing Hebrew, Greek, Latin well enough to read and translate texts. Ferreira Buckley worries that our obsession with theory and with its narrative structures will make for shallow or under researched histories. I find this an honest and reflective account. She raises many strong points about the nature of archival research: its material demands, in particular. But I want some thoughts from her about what it means to try to address, overcome, and/or compensate for these factors? What are ways that graduate schools should try to address these problems? With the speed-up productivity pressure around publication, how can academic departments and promotion and tenure committees factor in the time it takes to do traditional historical research?

“Storiography and Rhetoric and Composition”
Lauer writes critically of the ways in which our histories of the field are compromised by shallow methods of study.. She is particularly critical of how graduate students consume histories of the field: portraying historical figures as heroes or villains or as examples of particular theoretical categories. She makes a good point that there is a tendency to “fix” historical figures and scholars into a particular time and place instead of acknowledging how such figures/scholars grow and change over time, develop new ideas, take new directions. She opposes the static way in which some of us tend to read in the field: fixing a particular piece in time instead of trying to read it in context. What Lauer does not address are the ways in which the field itself helps perpetuate static readings through its writing of histories where hero/villain narratives are commonplace: e.g., Fred Newton Scott (hero) and Adams Sherman Hill (villain) in Berlin and Connors. I love Robin Varnum’s history of composition at Amherst College Fencing with Words because she avoids the binaries.

More later!

Going Back to the Land as Genre

2007-07-24T10:57:00.000-04:00

Last night, I picked up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's new book _Animal, Vegetable, Mineral_. A couple of folks said to me that they thought I'd like it because of my interest in local agriculture and sustainability. I'm up to page 70, and I am enjoying it. If you have not read it, the plot runs like this: Kingsolver moves from Arizona with her family (two daughters and husband) back to their "summer" farm in southern Appalachia. They have spent many summers there, but they are now going back to live--live off their land and feed themselves locally. The motive is living a more sustainable and connected lifestyle. Kingsolver lyrically describes the family's movement back into the local "foodshed." Her youngest daughter gives up Pop-Tarts. They all give up fresh fruit out of season. She describes the pleasures of gardening: growing asparagus and the coming promise of spring and green eatables.

Kingsolver mentions Gary Nabhan early on in the book. Gary is author of _Coming Home to Eat_, a wonderful book about Nabhan's attempts to eat locally in the Arizona desert. This is not an easy thing because it means making bread of mesquite flour and scavenging local cacti.

So Kingsolver does see herself writing in the genre of "going back to the land," the genre familiar to so many of us from reading _Walden_. As a matter of fact, she mirrors lines from Thoreau.

While there is much to like about Kingsolver's book, I can't help but feel a bit impatient with it even as I am enjoying it. These are familiar moves--write about reconnecting with your own local food shed. Michael Pollan's book _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ deals with this theme, in part, although the scope of his book is larger. This is becoming a rhetorical commonplace in the middle-class writer's life. Tell the story of reconnecting with nature and local food. Humorously describe your own struggles to move away from grocery store consumerism to local food webs. Lyrically describe the green shoots coming up in the garden. Talk about the value of the local farmer. Yadda, yadda, yadda...OK, I'm being too sarcastic.

This book will get people's attention. Barbara Kingsolver is an accomplished writer, she is well-known and much-loved. People will read her book, they will be affected, they will make changes-hopefully. Her husband Steven Hopp has included side bars in the book introducing ecological concepts and sustainable farming. She does point out how High-fructose corn syrup is leading to obesity. She points out the connection between fossil fuel use and food production (food miles--how far food travels to the table). She discusses the public policies that have made local agriculture difficult in the face of industrialized agriculture (The Farm Bill as the Farm Kill). OK, so she does a lot of teaching in this book.

There have been people preaching this message for years: small-scale farmers!!, sustainable farmers, organic farmers, community food security people, Slow Food advocates, farmers' market directors, rural folks with a lick of good sense in their heads. I guess for it to filter into middle class consciousness, it will take someone like Kingsolver or Pollan. Who wants to listen to a real farmer or rural person with a backyard garden?

Again, I'm trying to contain my critique so I can read the book and enjoy it. But I can't help but feel frustrated when I read Kingsolver. What she describes about eating seasonally was what I grew up with. We grew a big garden, canned fruit and vegetables for the winter,, ate locally as much as we could, including wild game. Eating locally, as she pointed out, the way a lot of rural people live and continue to live when they have a plot of land to scratch around in and not much money to burn. We lived this way because it was less money, we had the land, and we had the time, and we were tied ot the seasons and the soil. We lived this way, too, because my mom and Dad were depression era babies who knew that food shortages could happen. Ecology was just common sense, and food from the garden was good and fresh and cheap. Now that doesn't mean, though, that my Dad wasn't spraying pesticides on our commercial apple and pear orchards. He thoroughly bought into industrialized agriculture--after all, he had two degrees from land-grant institutions--WSU and Cornell-- where the latest technology was promoted. After all, the American consumer couldn't accept an apple with worm holes or aphid bites. So our family was contradictory; local food to eat, industrialized growing of apples and pears for export and domestic markets. Some of our apples made the journey by container ship to Japan.

What Kingsolver is trying to accomplish is not only the rendering of her experience, but a strong message about returning to the local--a message directed at those who are disconnected from the local. People will point to her book as a guide or an inspiration. I think it's an important book, but one I feel conflicted about for reasons I'm still figuring out.

Anyway, more to think about.....

Getting Back into the Swing

2007-06-28T21:41:00.000-04:00

Well, this has been a significant blog hiatus with my last entry in mid-April. C'mon, what happened?

Well, I interviewed for the position of Chair of my Department for one. That slowed me down some, and now that I've taken on the role, I'm finding it hard to get much time for anything. A double whammy. But what really made me stop writing and posting in April were the shootings at Virginia Tech. You see, I used to work there in the English Department--the same English Department where the shooter took classes. I know people who were affected by the shootings--colleagues, former students. It was eerie to watch the broadcasts and see familiar buildings and hear familiar names. Then I went down to Virginia Tech for a Research Symposium ten days after the shootings. It was a good trip, but being there brought the devastation home. So I didn't feel much like posting for awhile.

But I'm going to try to get back into the swing of things and post more.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot is food safety and the stories coming out about China's food industry. I've posted a bit before about food safety in the U.S.--ecoli in bagged spinach, for instance. But the situation in China really takes the cake. First it is tainted pet food, then toothpaste, then a variety of foodstuffs. Don't get me wrong--we have our own struggles with food safety in the U.S. Eric Schlosser tells us in _Fast Food Nation_ that it's easier to recall a child's toy than it is to recall tainted meat that can kill people. So we have our own problems. But the lack of regulation in China is serious business, and it is garnering serious media attention. I wonder what the global impact will be? How quickly will China address the regulation issue? What economic losses will be incurred for these exposes? How will the public discourse on the issue impact production, distribution, and buying?

Anyway, it's late. I'm exhausted. More another time!

April is the cruelest month: The Killing Frost

2007-04-14T23:27:00.000-04:00

What is a killing frost to those of who live largely indoor lives? It's probably not much to us other than turning up the heat or putting an extra blanket on the bed. Maybe if we're gardeners, we worry about our spring plants. As food consumers, we may see higher prices in the grocery store for food. But it's so much more to those who cultivate the earth for a living. As I've noted in other blog entries, the weather has stayed with me as a constant concern after growing up on an apple orchard in eastern Washington State. A killing frost can mean the difference between money in the bank and foreclosure. Recently, there was a spectacularly bad killing frost in Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky and other states that wiped out the pecan, peach, and apple crops among others. This on the heels of a horrible killing frost in CA for the citrus crop--see my January blog entry on that and on crop insurance. Perhaps some of you heard the NPR interview with Robert Chapman from Zebulon, GA who lost his whole peach crop. I've included a link below the audio file of the NPR interview plus an overview CNN interview. You won't forget it soon if you listen to Chapman talk about the fate of his crops, the role of the weather in farming, and his fatalistic attitude.

Peach crop is a 90% disaster

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WEATHER/04/12/frozen.crops.ap/index.html

Go to NPR and listen to peach farmer Robert Chapman from Zebulon, GA
http://216.35.221.77/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9554303

"
"A 25-degree freeze on Easter Sunday blackened the insides of Chapman's peach crop, which provides most of his income.
While Chapman's bushes and trees will still bear fruit next year, he says he may have to find another job in the meantime. Farmers throughout the region report heavy crop losses and are bracing for another expected cold snap next week."

Here's a typical April and May night on the Schell and Schell apple and pear orchard when it was in business:

In the morning, the radio broadcast the fruit farm report and in the spring the fruit frost forecast, which we listened to intently because all depended on its predictions about wind and air temperature and the likelihood of a killing frost. When the temperature dropped near freezing, often at 2 or 3 a.m. in the morning, my parents took measures to save the crop. To keep the apple and pear buds from freezing, my father, mother, and the hired men set out smudge pots, large blackened pots full of heating oil that resembled a cross between a genie’s bottle and a stove pipe. The pots sat squarely in the rows and when the temperature dropped, they lit the pots with a punk, a wick on a butane canister, resembling a giant-sized cigarette lighter. The fuel caught fire and produced a blue flame and smoke, which was piped through the pot’s chimney and burner holes. The heat emitted by the pots warmed the air and protected the precious buds. We called it "firing season."

For my mother and father and any of us on frost patrol, the nights were filled with watching the pots, a lonely exercise of walking the darkened rows of apple and pear trees illumined by the pots’ eerie orange glow. If the temperature continued to drop, the burner holes were opened to full capacity and the fire sucked in the oxygen and omitted more heat. Out in the orchards, one’s mind could wander and noises were magnified; a crash a few rows away could be a coyote or a neighbor’s dog or perhaps a cougar prowling its territory. A satellite blinking overhead could become a UF0. At first the chill and the uncertainty brought on by sudden noises kept one awake. As the night waned into the early light of morning, it was easy to become languid, the orchard rows warming and causing one to feel a pleasant, distant sensation while walking. Periodic checks of the thermometer stations positioned at key points in the orchard indicated whether the temperature was rising sufficiently or if there would be damage to the crops. A few hours of frost meant the buds were diminished and the fruit would be light or even non-existent.

Later came the electricity powered wind machines, the $15,000 towers with airplane-like propellers that circulate the air at night. The thwock-thwock-thwock of the machines could be heard across the valley all night, circulating the cooler air with the warm air. Even then, losses were still possible.

I remember one night in 1999 (late April/early May) when I was visiting Cashmere and on research leave, my mom was out of town, so I took her place as part of a two-person "firing" team that included my brother Mike and me. Earlier that night, Mike asked me to keep the phone by the bed and when he called, to check the temperature and turn on the wind machine on our Flowery Divide property, Later he asked me to come over to the Hansen place at around 3 a.m., one of our other orchards where he had pots set up to warm the buds. We kept adjusting the burners on the pots and trying to warm the air, but we couldn't get the temperature up over 30 in some places. The temperature just kept dropping. At one point, I started praying. At another point, I was swearing. Eventually, I was just numb and resigned, walking up and down the rows to check the pots. As the day dawned, we lost quite a bit of the crop on that place. I remember that we drove back to the farmhouse deflated and had breakfast. We did all we could to warm the air, and we still lost out against the elements that night. This was just one of many nights that Mike faced during his 20 plus years in farming.

Just a few memories. Even thinking about it gets the adrenaline going....

T.S. Eliot was right that April is the cruelest month.

The Myth of the Noble Farmer

2007-04-13T08:53:00.000-04:00

Brad Andrews took Tom Kerr's Public Essay class at Ithaca College and produced this really interesting critique of the myth of the noble farmer. Brad is the son of a former dairy farmer. As Brad points out, there is a tendency to rhapsodize about farm life and romanticize it, especially from the outside perspective. Brad debunks the myths, points out the hard, unremitting labor of dairy farming and, ultimately, notes that he was banned from farming by his father even as the Andrews family farm was auctioned.

Yet farming is clearly in his blood--he remembers it all even while decrying it. Thanks for writing this, Brad, and thanks for your honesty. Many of us want to see small farmers stay on their land and stay in farming, but you've indicated the strenuous work, hardships and struggle involved in the daily life.

Keeping telling the story, Brad.

The Myth of the Noble Farmer
Brad Andrews

The noble farmer. Each day he rises with the sun to begin his daily routine. He feeds his animals, milks his cows, and cleans his barn. . .all before breakfast. Later in the day, he'll go into his vast fields and harvest his crops. As the sun sets, he'll be back in the barn, milking and feeding once more. Then it's off to bed, only to rise again in the morning and repeat the same process.

It's easy to wax poetic about farming. It's a "simple" life, and in a world in which technology is growing exponentially and life seems to be moving at a faster pace, there's something appealing about a life working in nature's splendor, far away from the hustle and bustle of urban city life.

Not only is farming a simple life, the work almost seems to be a divine calling. There's a sense that farming is what people were "meant" to do. Humans have been farming for several millennia, and the general process hasn't changed that much. Farmers reach into the fertile soil and pull out the fruits of God's bounty.

Having grown up on a dairy farm in New York state, I can tell you: the "simple" life isn't nearly as simple as it sounds. The myth of the "noble farmer" tends to leave out one important fact: being a farmer is hard. It's back-breaking, dangerous, low-paying work with brutally long hours.

Let's look at a typical day for a "real" farmer:

6 a.m. - Awake and out to the barn to start work (milking cows/feeding animals)

Here's the thing about waking up at 6 a.m. every morning: it sucks. If you're the type that needs eight hours of sleep every night, you're hitting the hay at 10 p.m. each and every day.

But not only are you awake at 6 a.m., you're working at 6 a.m. Morning chores aren't especially brutal: they mainly consist of milking the cows and feeding all the animals. But the farmer is still on his feet for most of the morning, and on top of that, the farmer is required to squat down to put on and remove the milking machine from the cow. You may be thinking, "Squatting down? Big deal." Consider this though: if a farmer is milking 100 cows, that's at least 200 deep knee bends every morning. That's probably not good for your knees.

8:30 a.m. - Home for a quick breakfast.

If the farmer is lucky, she will not only have time to eat, but to grab a quick nap. The farmer's still got a tough day ahead, so any sleep is golden.

9:30 a.m. - Back to the barn to feed the animals again and take care of various other tasks (ridding the barn of manure, etc.)

One thing about animals that it's hard to grasp until you raise a herd of them is the fact that they tend to defecate. A lot. And if the animals are in a barn, that manure piles up (quickly). One of the more unpleasant tasks for the farmer is removing this manure from the barn.

Most farms will have a "barn cleaner" in at least the largest barn on the farm. Basically, the barn cleaner is a conveyor belt of sorts that manure can be shoveled/scraped/pushed into. The cleaner will then (slowly) take the manure outside into a waiting manure spreader.

For smaller barns or barns with no cleaner, however, the manure-removal task is far more strenuous. As much fun as shoveling manure into a spreader is, I’d be very happy to never have to do it again. Let's just say that I don't enjoy cow manure splashing on my face. (An admittedly infrequent but still all-too-common occurrence while shoveling.)

Noon - Home for a quick lunch.

Same as breakfast: eat and then sleep if you can.

1 p.m. - Out to the fields for harvesting or related work.

The myth of the noble farmer makes it seems like growing crops is easy as pie, like the soil was just made for growing plants. Not true. Besides all the possible weather nightmares, the soil itself is less conducive to plant growth than one might think. This is because most soil is loaded with large rocks, which damage plows and other machines and hinder plant growth. These rocks must be removed from the field before plowing. Let me tell you something: you haven't experienced boredom until you've spent an afternoon picking rocks out of an empty field.

Once the crops are ready, it's time for harvesting. This is not enjoyable. Corn harvesting involves driving a tractor and a combine around in circles. Believe me, if you sit on a tractor (especially an older model) for an afternoon and drive around you will be at best bored and at worst insane. The tractor is noisy and it vibrates, which can cause great pain and headaches for the tractor operator after a few hours. (Yes, some larger farmers are lucky enough to have SuperTractors with air conditioning and radios and all kinds of cool stuff. I’ll assume that makes their lives a little easier.)

The hay harvest is even less enjoyable. First, there’s the drive-in-circles step, as with corn, but then there’s the fun of “unloading” the hay. After the hay bales are brought back to the farm in a wagon, they must be loaded into the barn or hayloft. Usually a few workers carry the bales off the wagon and place them on a conveyor belt of sorts (“elevator” in farm lingo) that takes the bales to the hayloft. The hayloft is where the real party’s at, as a few unfortunate workers stack the bales into neat piles while dealing with the triple-digit temperatures and general lack of oxygen in the loft.

4:30 p.m. - Home again for a very brief break.

Basically just a chance to catch one's breath before another milking session.

5 p.m. - Repeat the 6 a.m. routine.

The day ends with more milking and lots more deep knee bends to remove milking machines. It’s a rough experience after having worked the whole day already.

7:30 p.m. - Done for the day. Hopefully.

Let's do some math. What we see here is a 13 1/2 hour workday. Granted, there are breaks spread out through the day, but even removing those breaks it's still an 11-hour day. Yes, farmers are hardly the only occupation that works long days, but keep this in mind: farmers never get a day off. Ever. Animals need to be fed and milked and cared for each and every day. Even if a farmer decides to take a "day off," these tasks still need to be completed. Therefore, an "off day" for a farmer still consists of at least a 5 or 6 hour workday.

All this means that a farmer is pulling at least a 60-80 hour workweek. Every week. It's no wonder so many farmers require their children to come out to the barn and help out with chores; they'd barely see their own kids otherwise.

And even a working week as "short" as 60 hours requires that nothing goes wrong. Unfortunately, one of the many challenges with farming is that something is always going wrong. When I'm at school, I try to limit my phone calls home because they are always depressing. Every conversation with my dad starts with, "Let me tell you about the day I had today." He then proceeds to tell me how a tractor broke, or that a cow died for no reason, or that the cows broke a fence and wandered downtown, or that the water pipes exploded and flooded the barn or that it hasn’t rained in a month or....

The list goes on and on. So many things can go wrong on a farm; therefore a farmer has to be more than just a farmer. He must be a mechanic, a veterinarian, a carpenter, a meteorologist, a plumber, or anything else that the farm needs. And, really any disaster is possible.

The weather is a constant source of concern. Admittedly, a job in which one can work with nature is a special gift. When the sun is shining and the birds are singing, it's hard not to be grateful for the opportunity to work outdoors in the sun. Nature can be a very beautiful thing.

Nature can also be a bitch. One of the hardest parts of farming is the fact that the well-being of the farm is completely and absolutely at the mercy of nature. Too much rain and the farmer is screwed. Too little rain and the farmer is screwed. Too many cloudy days and the crops will die. Too many sunny days and the crops will fry.

To illustrate just much weather can make a difference, here's a story from Summer 2005. My family's farm is located about three miles from another local farm. The two farms planted their corn at roughly the same time and used the same brands of seed and fertilizer. For some reason, our farm got 2.5 moreinches of rain this summer. We got a 25% higher yield from the corn. Thanks to 2.5 inches of additional rain. That's nothing, but it shows just how vulnerable the crops are to any weather changes.

As bad as my phone calls with my dad can be when he’s complaining about the weather, I'm always glad to just be talking to my dad on a given night; it means that he survived the day. Farming is among the world's most dangerous occupations. Hundreds of farmers die each year in the United States.730 farm workers perished in 2002 alone. Farmers are seven times more likely to die on the job than the average American worker. In addition to the high death rate, a staggering 150,000 farmers suffer a disabling injury each year.

Danger lurks in every part of a farmer's day. Cows may seem slow-witted and generally benevolent, but they are large, powerful animals with the ability to seriously injure a person. Farmers are very often victims of a damaging kick (my own father has been kicked in the face more times than he'd care to remember). A stampede can also result in devastating consequences.

Machinery is also very dangerous. One of a farmer’s worst nightmares is getting an arm or a leg caught in a running machine. (A very real possibility, unfortunately.)

There are a million other ways to get hurt on a farm. One of my uncles had to have shrapnel removed from his face when a piece of equipment exploded, shooting hot metal into his head. My other uncle was nearly crushed by a full wagon that broke off from the tractor that was towing it and rolled back down a hill. Both were back at work the same day. To them, it’s all part of the job.

As bad as farming can be, maybe milking cows for a living wouldn't be so bad if it were, you know, profitable. Another thing about farmers that's not mentioned in the myth of the "noble farmer" is that farmers don't get paid squat. As of this moment, the companies buy milk for is $15.33 per 100 pounds of milk, which works out to just $1.22 a gallon. Not included in that price is the fact that farmers have to pay milk companies to come get their milk.

$1.22 a gallon. Less than half of what a gallon of milk goes for at the average store. Not to mention that milk companies can also use some excess butterfat from each gallon for other dairy products. The price milk companies are offering farmers remained more or less constant for nearly three decades until rising from the $12-$13/per 100 range up to its current $15-$16 range in only the past few years. Hardly keeping up with inflation (or what milk has been sold for in stores).

With these prices, an average dairy farmer will maybe bring home $20,000-$30,000 a year. There are lower salaries out in there in the American workforce, but not many workers are pulling 80-hour workweeks to get those low salaries.

So let's see: low pay, long hours, and a high risk of injury? It's no wonder so many small farms are closing down in this country. Who would want this job? My own father forbade me from even considering farming as a potential occupation. (Not that he really needed to worry about that.) And I know he's not the only farmer who has given that mandate to his children.

Even if my father hadn’t barred me from farming, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to take over the family farm anyway. In April 2006, Andrews Dairy Farm will hold an auction to sell its cows and milking equipment. Facing mounting debt, my father and my uncles decided it was best to sell out now while they still were young enough to find new careers.

The auction will be a sad and frightening day for our family. Farming is all we’ve ever really known, and the future is full of uncertainty and doubt for the Andrews clan.

But while I’m scared to death, I’m glad my father’s future won’t involve farming. If he hadn’t died on the job, he’d probably have worked himself to death eventually. Such is the life of the noble farmer.

Oil in your Oatmeal: How much Fossil Fuel does it take to produce your food?

2007-04-11T20:32:00.000-04:00

Here's a great perspective on how food is interlaced with fossil fuel use. I recommend this essay as a quick and readable way to engage people in a discussion about the value of locally grown food.

The oil in your oatmeal
A lot of fossil fuel goes into producing, packaging and shipping our breakfast
Chad Heeter
Sunday, March 26, 2006
San Francisco Chronicle

Please join me for breakfast. It's time to fuel up again.

On the table in my small Berkeley apartment this morning is a healthy-looking little meal -- a bowl of imported McCann's Irish oatmeal topped with Cascadian Farms organic frozen raspberries, and a cup of Peet's Fair Trade Blend coffee. Like most of us, I prepare my breakfast at home, and the ingredients for this one probably cost me about $1.25. (If I went to a cafe in downtown Berkeley, I'd probably have to add $6 more, plus tip, for the same.)

My breakfast fuels me up with about 400 calories, and it satisfies me. So for just over a buck and half and an hour spent reading the morning paper in my own kitchen, I'm energized for the next few hours. But before I put spoon to cereal, what if I consider this bowl of oatmeal porridge (to which I've just added a little butter, milk and a shake of salt) from a different perspective. Say, a Saudi Arabian one.

Then what you'd be likely to see -- what's really there, just hidden from our view (not to say our taste buds) -- is about 4 ounces of crude oil. Throw in those luscious red raspberries and that cup of java (an additional 3 ounces of crude), and don't forget those modest additions of butter, milk and salt (1 more ounce), and you've got a tiny bit of the Middle East right here in my kitchen.

Now, let's drill a little deeper into this breakfast. Just where does this tiny gusher of oil actually come from? (We'll let this oil represent all fossil fuels in my breakfast, including natural gas and coal.)

Nearly 20 percent of this oil went into growing my raspberries on Chilean farms many thousands of miles away, those oats in the fields of County Kildare, Ireland, and that specially raised coffee in Guatemala -- think tractors as well as petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides.

The next 40 percent of my breakfast fossil-fuel equation is burned up between the fields and the grocery store in processing, packaging and shipping.

Take that box of McCann's oatmeal. On it is an inviting image of pure, healthy goodness: a bowl of porridge, topped by two peach slices. Scattered around the bowl are a handful of raw oats, what look to be four acorns and three fresh raspberries. Those raw oats are actually a reminder that the flakes require a few steps 'twixt field and box. In fact, a visit to McCann's Web site illustrates each step of cleaning, steaming, hulling, cutting and rolling that turns the raw oats into edible flakes. Those five essential steps require significant energy.

Next, my oat flakes go into a plastic bag (made from oil), which in turn is inserted into an energy-intensive, pressed wood-pulp, printed paper box. Only then does my breakfast leave Ireland and travel 5,000 fuel-gorging, carbon-dioxide-emitting miles by ship and truck to my grocery store in California.
Coming from another hemisphere, my raspberries take an even longer fossil-fueled journey to my neighborhood. Though packaged in a plastic bag labeled Cascadian Farms (which perhaps suggests birthplace in the good old Cascade mountains of northwest Washington), the small print on the back, stamped "A Product of Chile," tells all -- and what it speaks of is a 5,800-mile journey to Northern California.

If you've been adding up percentages along the way, perhaps you've noticed that a few tablespoons of crude oil in my bowl have not been accounted for. That final 40 percent of the fossil fuel in my breakfast is used up by the simple acts of keeping food fresh and then preparing it. In home kitchens and restaurants, chilling in refrigerators and cooking on stoves using electricity or natural gas gobbles up more energy than you might imagine.

For decades, scientists have calculated how much fossil fuel goes into our food by measuring the amount of energy consumed in growing, packing, shipping, consuming and finally disposing of it. The caloric input of fossil fuel is then compared with the energy available in the edible product, the caloric output.

What they've discovered is astonishing. According to researchers at the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of more than 7 calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400-calorie breakfast, I will, in effect, have consumed 2,800 calories of fossil fuel energy. (Some researchers claim the ratio is as high as 10 to 1.)

But this is only an average. My cup of coffee gives me just a few calories of energy, but to process 1 pound of coffee requires more than 8,000 calories of fossil-fuel energy -- the equivalent energy found in nearly a quart of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas or about 2 1/2 pounds of coal.

So how do you gauge how much oil went into your food?

First check out how far it traveled. The farther it went, the more oil it required. Next, gauge how much processing went into the food. A fresh apple is not processed, but Kellogg's Apple Jacks cereal requires enormous amounts of energy to process. The more processed the food, the more oil it requires. Then consider how much packaging is wrapped around your food. Buy fresh vegetables instead of canned, and buy bulk beans, grains, and flour if you want to reduce that packaging.
You may think you're in the clear because you eat strictly organically grown foods. When it comes to fossil-fuel calculations though, that isn't relevant. However it is grown, a raspberry is shipped, packed and chilled the same way.

There is some energy savings in growing organically, but it's probably slight. According to a study by David Pimentel at Cornell University, 30 percent of fossil-fuel expenditure on farms growing conventional (nonorganic) crops is found in chemical fertilizer.

This 30 percent is not consumed on organic farms, but only if the manure used as fertilizer is produced very close to the farm. Manure is a heavy, bulky product.

If farms have to truck bulk manure more than a few miles, the savings is eaten up in diesel-fuel consumption, according to Pimentel.

One source of manure for organic farmers in California is chicken producer Foster Farms. Organic farmers in Monterey County, for example, will truck tons of Foster's manure from their main plant in Livingston (Merced County) to fields more than 100 miles away.

So the next time we're at the grocer, do we now have to ask not only where and how a product was grown, but how far its manure was shipped?

Well, if you're in New York City picking out a California-grown tomato that was fertilized with organic compost made from kelp shipped from Nova Scotia, maybe it's not such a bad question.

But should we give up on organic? If you're buying organic raspberries from Chile each week, then yes. The fuel cost is too great, as is the resulting production of the greenhouse gases.

But if there was truth in packaging, where my oatmeal box now tells me how many calories I get from each serving, it would also tell me how many calories of fossil fuels went into the product.

On a scale from one to five -- with one being nonprocessed, locally grown products and five being processed, packaged imports -- we could quickly average the numbers in our shopping cart to get a sense of the ecological footprint of our diet.
What appeared to be my simple, healthy meal of oatmeal, berries and coffee looks different now. I thought I was essentially driving a Toyota Prius hybrid by having a very fuel-efficient breakfast, but by the end of the week, I've eaten the equivalent of more than two quarts of Valvoline.

From the perspective of fossil-fuel consumption, I now look at my breakfast as a waste of precious resources. What I eat for breakfast connects me to the planet, deep into its past with the fossilized remains of plants and animals which are now fuel, and into the future, when these nonrenewable resources will probably be in scant supply.

Maybe these thoughts are too grand to be having over breakfast, but I'm not the only one on the planet eating this morning. My meal traveled thousands of miles to reach my plate.
Then there's the rise of perhaps 600 million middle-class Indians and Chinese, already demanding the convenience of packaged meals and foreign flavors.
What happens when middle-class families in India or China decide they want their Irish oats for breakfast and topped by organic raspberries from Chile? They'll dip more and more into the planet's communal oil well. And someday soon, we'll all suck it dry.
A crude menu
A lot of fossil-fuel energy goes into the production of food:
-- Bowl of oatmeal porridge: 4 ounces of crude oil.
-- Serving of red raspberries: 1 ounce of crude oil.
-- Butter, milk and salt: 1 ounce of crude oil.
-- That cup of java: 2 ounces of crude oil.
-- Energy required to produce 1 pound of coffee: a quart of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas, or about 2 1/2 pounds of coal.
-- Energy required to produce one week's worth of breakfast for one person: More than 2 quarts of crude oil.
Chad Heeter grew up eating fossil fuels in Lee's Summit, Mo. He's a freelance writer, a documentary filmmaker and a former high school science teacher. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
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Enter the Meatrix: Viral Flash Activism

2007-03-13T00:36:00.000-04:00

In November of 2003, links to the flash film The Meatrix jammed the email in-boxes of computer users across the globe. A snappy three minute and 47 second flash film mimicking the plot and characters of the cult-classic film The Matrix, The Meatrix details the hidden truth about our food supply, that the small family farms of our national unconscious have been replaced by factory farms or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations ( CAFOs) run by large agribusiness corporations.

If you haven't seen the film, go to google right now, typed in "The Meatrix" and watch it. It will take you under four minutes. There is also an updated Meatrix film, too, that you can watch.

Produced by the new media company Free Range Graphics for the Global Resource Action Center (GRACE), a non-profit that fights factory farming and promotes sustainable agriculture, The Meatrix provides us with a critical lens through which to survey the social, economic, environmental, and cultural impacts of factory farming on rural communities and on us all since we all are consumers of food.

The Meatrix also provides an interesting example of new media organizing and critical literacy in action as it models what new media designers call “viral flash activism.” Viral flash activism uses short Macromedia Flash films that convey an organization or group’s message through a narrative that is mean to “inspire, amuse, and activate” a “target audience” (“What are Flash Films”). Viral flash activism films often make use of humor and pop culture references and are an effective organizing tool for drawing in the so-called Internet Generation. At the end of a viral flash activist film, the user is given a “clickable call to action,” which urges readers to get involved, take action, e.g., sign a petition, join an organization, participate in a specific campaign, or donate money.

The “viral” aspect of viral flash activism is the fact that the flash film is distributed quickly via a membership list and then mailed by members to friends, family, co-workers, and acquaintances. Viewers do not have to go a theater to see the film; instead, it is spread like a virus through the online community, mailed and then forwarded and re-forwarded to maximize its viewing and impact. Bloggers link to the film and so do the websites of non-profits and political advocacy groups, thus accelerating the film’s impact on the originating organization. The film has become an organizing banner for a variety of non-profit and advocacy organizations ranging from non-profits like Farm Aid to academic think-tanks like the Institute for Food and Agriculture Policy. The medium of viral flash activism has caught on and new flash advocacy films have been recently released such as the Organic Fair Trade Association’s 5 minute film “Grocery Store Wars,” a spoof of “Star Wars’ and a critique of genetically modified foods.

The Meatrix offers an interesting, strategic and quick way to introduce the general public to the debate over factory farming and also provides a case study for the radical potential of new media as an advocacy resource. The Meatrix works to sponsor a critical literacy moment for viewers, and it moves beyond mere agricultural literacy (simply knowing how food is grown) to what Jacqueline Edmondson calls a new alternative agrarian literacy, an understanding of the environmental, social, economic, and political consequences of the food system ; furthermore, the film offers an endorsement of developing sustainable food systems and sustainable ways of living (15; see also Frefoygle on new agrarianism).

Since most Americans buy milk, eggs, and meat that have been factory farmed, whether they/we realize it or not, The Meatrix prompts us to think of factory farms not as a problem “out there,” out of sight, out of mind, but a problem for us all. It encourages mutual identification between rural, urban, and suburban communities around the issue of food production, consumption, and agribusiness.

Harvest of Shame and Ag Education

2007-02-24T21:07:00.000-05:00

Hey, those of you out there who are teaching 205 with a focus on food politics, consider showing Edward R. Murrow's famous documentary "Harvest of Shame,"which debuted on network television in November 1960--right before Thanksgiving, the time of year when we are enjoying plentiful food. It is a documentary about migrant farmworkers and their working and life conditions. It is entitled "Harvest of Shame" for good reason.

I think it's interesting to show the documetary to your students (or part of it), then ask them to read Eric Schlosser's essay "In the Strawberry" Fields" from the _Atlantic Monthly_, which is about migrant workers (many of them undocumented workers from Mexico) harvesting strawberries. This piece, although written forty some years later shows how little has changed in terms of working conditions for many migrant farmworkers.....Indeed, a good question is "What has changed (or not) in the working conditions of this labor force?" This, then, can lead to all kind of interesting discussions about globalization, immigration policy, racism, food politics, etc.

In my 205 class, we have started our unit on immigration policy and immigration issues with this very assignment.

There is also a documentary called "New Harvest, Old Shame," which updates "Harvest of Shame."

The other thing on my mind tonight is ag education. We don't have an agriculture program/major here at Syracuse, so it's probably not on the radar screen for most academically inclined folks here, but if you have ever taught or will teach at a land grant university or if you are considering a degree in agriculture, consider this:

"Ag Gets Postsecondary Boost

The rising interest in agriculture education isn't limited to high school students. Universities, too, have attracted a diverse group of enrollees thanks to progressive changes in curriculum and industry demand for workers.

Enrollment in ag ed programs at land-grant colleges climbed to an all-time high of nearly 118,000 last summer, reported the Los Angeles Times. That's up from 64,000 in the late 1980s. The new student population is more than 50 percent urbanite, 40 percent female and 10 percent ethnic minority, according to the Food and Agricultural Education Information System, a clearinghouse based at Texas A&M University.

"We woke up a few years ago and said, 'Hey, no one's walking in our door,' Joe Stasulat, director of an agriculture internship program at the University of California-Davis, told the Times last July. So he, along with colleagues at ag schools around the country, overhauled the program.

Today's university-level agriculture programs lean much more toward lab- based research. Their students are just as likely to be studying genetically altered mice under fluorescent lights and engineering high-tech farm equipment than they are to be rotating crops. More undergraduates now study natural resources (such as urban forestry and range management) than study animal science.

University educators cite the availability of jobs as the top reason for the increase in ag enrollments. One California dean said industry demand outnumbers graduates by about 3 to 1. "

Now what this article doesn't really say is that agricultural economics is a big major for a lot of ag folks and the destination may be large agribusiness firms, not farms. What I'm interested in is how many beginning farmer programs these ag education programs sponsor. Are we producing more bureaucrats or more farmers? Now there's a place for the bureaucrats, of course....but since the farming population is aging, we are in need of beginning farmer programs, sustainable agriculture programs, training in organic agriculture. Is that happening in higher education ag programs, which are funded and supported by agribusiness research dollars? Or does that education mostly take place outside the land grant system?

Worth looking into....Also, a lot (and maybe most) of agriculture education in terms of learning to farm happens through apprenticeships and non-school environments.

2007 Farm Bill: Why We Should Care

2007-02-08T20:36:00.000-05:00

The 2007 Farm Bill proposals are out and circulating. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns has begun his PR blitz.

Chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns here in New York state had this to say about the Farm Bill in the New York Times and why we should care:

"There's invariably something risky, if not risible, about allowing Congress to decide what’s for dinner. Bad decisions about agriculture have defined government policy for the last century; 70 percent of our nation’s farms have been lost to bankruptcy or consolidation, creating an agricultural economy that looks more Wall Street than Main Street.
Now, after the uprooting of a thousand years of agrarian wisdom, we chefs have discovered something really terrible — no, not that the agricultural system we help support hurts farmers and devastates farming communities, or that it harms the environment and our health. What we’ve discovered is that the food it produces just doesn’t taste very good.

Who’s responsible for the blandness? Look no further than Washington: There you will meet not farmers, but the people determining how our farmers farm. They do it through the farm bill, a mammoth piece of legislation that designates American agricultural policy every five years and that Congress is preparing to take up in its new session.

This is a sweeping bill, omnibus in every sense — nutrition, conservation, genetic engineering, food safety, school lunch programs, water quality, organic farming and much more. It’s really a food and farm bill. If you’re a chef or a home cook or someone who just likes to eat, it affects you, because it determines what you eat and how what you eat is grown. . . ."

Eloquent words.....

So how to evaluated the 2007 Farm Bill proposals?

I don't feel fully prepared to comment on the pluses and minuses of the proposals under consideration, but I'll offer some preliminary thoughts about the recent press release/summary. There are some good components and others worth sorting through/analyzing further. I plan to read each proposal and will blog more about the proposals. It's interesting to note support for socially disadvantaged farmers as part of the package of proposals. What will that mean, exactly, though? Five billion dollars, but distributed in what ways? School meals are also mentioned. Hopefully, this means strengthening Farm to Cafeteria Programs.

Ethanol research/funding--really worth it? I'd like to research this.

Sustainable or organic agriculture--not mentioned in this press release? Are there any plans to support conversion of traditional agricultural operations to sustainable agriculture operations or organic ones?

How will the conservation program efforts relate to the overwhelming environmental impact that CAFOs (large-scale industrial livestock and dairy farms) are having on rural areas?

From the USDA.gov website:

JOHANNS UNVEILS 2007 FARM BILL PROPOSALS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31, 2007 - Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns today unveiled the U.S. Department of Agriculture's 2007 farm bill proposals. The more than 65 proposals correspond to the 2002 farm bill titles with additional special focus areas, including specialty crops, beginning farmers and ranchers, and socially disadvantaged producers.

"We listened closely to producers and stakeholders all across the country and took a reform-minded and fiscally responsible approach to making farm policy more equitable, predictable and protected from challenge," said Johanns. "We started with the 2002 farm bill and propose to improve it by bolstering support for emerging priorities and focusing on a market-oriented approach."

USDA began preparations for the 2007 farm bill in 2005 by conducting 52 Farm Bill Forums across the country. More than 4,000 comments were recorded or collected during forums and via electronic and standard mail. These comments are summarized in 41 theme papers. USDA economists, led by Dr. Keith Collins, studied the comments and authored five analysis papers.

The proposals unveiled today represent the final phase of a nearly two year process. Each detailed proposal provides information about why a change is needed, the recommended solution, and relevant background information about the impacted program or policy.

Highlights of the proposals include (funding reflects ten year totals):

Increase conservation funding by $7.8 billion, simplify and consolidate conservation programs, create a new Environmental Quality Incentives Program and a Regional Water Enhancement Program
Provide $1.6 billion in new funding for renewable energy research, development and production, targeted for cellulosic ethanol, which will support $2.1 billion in guaranteed loans for cellulosic projects and includes $500 million for a bio-energy and bio-based product research initiative
Target nearly $5 billion in funding to support specialty crop producers by increasing nutrition in food assistance programs, including school meals, through the purchase of fruits and vegetables, funding specialty crop research, fighting trade barriers and expanding export markets
Provide $250 million to increase direct payments for beginning farmers and ranchers, reserve a percentage of conservation funds and provide more loan flexibility for down payment, land purchasing and farm operating loans
Support socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers by reserving a percentage of conservation assistance funds and providing more access to loans for down payments, land purchasing and farm operating
Strengthen disaster relief by establishing a revenue-based counter-cyclical program, providing gap coverage in crop insurance, linking crop insurance participation to farm program participation, and creating a new emergency landscape restoration program
Simplify and consolidate rural development programs while providing $1.6 billion in loans to rehabilitate all current Rural Critical Access Hospitals and $500 million in grants and loans for rural communities to decrease the backlog of rural infrastructure projects
Dedicate nearly $400 million to trade efforts to expand exports, fight trade barriers, and increase involvement in world trade standard-setting bodies
Simplify, modernize, and rename the Food Stamp Program to improve access for the working poor, better meet the needs of recipients and States, and strengthen program integrity
The Administration's 2007 farm bill proposals would spend approximately $10 billion less than the 2002 farm bill spent over the past five years (excluding ad-hoc disaster assistance), upholding the President's plan to eliminate the deficit in five years. These proposals would provide approximately $5 billion more than the projected spending if the 2002 farm bill were extended.

The proposals are available at www.usda.gov/farmbill. Also posted on USDA's website are the Farm Bill Forum transcripts, farm bill comments submitted by the public, theme papers summarizing the comments and USDA analysis papers.

Fact Sheet: A Commitment to Rural America

Schine Center goes organic...or at least a little bit

2007-01-21T21:39:00.000-05:00

On Saturday, I stopped by Schine Student Center cafeteria at Syracuse U. to have lunch with my five-year old daughter. After we loaded our tray with the usual not-so-good for you fare of pizza, we spied a far-corner section of Schine cafeteria that, amazingly enough, included a display of organic snacks and apples. Organic snacks and apples in Schine? Schine Student Center home of Dunkin' Donuts, the chocolate covered donut and the canned whipcream Mochaccino? Yes, there is a small section off to the right in Schine stocked with Nature's Way products: energy bars, cracker and cheese packaged snacks, organic chips and nuts, and even some fresh fruit--Granny Smith organic apples from Washington state--probably grown in the Columbia Basin (maybe 50 miles from my family's orchard).

It was good to see this display, and we grabbed up an apple and put it on the tray to (futilely) blot out our fatty pizza. But I was immediately thinking of ways that the organic food display could stock locally grown organic produce and fruit--maybe farfetched since the dining services contract may not allow for this. But what that contract does allow for is some percentage of organic products now or they wouldn't have these. This may seem like it is about health--but it's likely about economics. These products will sell b/c organic food is big money--the health claims are persuasive to consumers; the sell factor is persuasive to the distributors. Whole Food has made organic products mainstream, and the dining services contracts at universities will increasingly reflect that--even Sysco.

So maybe it is the prime time to work on getting local food to SU. Why not? Many colleges and universities have moved to serving a certain percentage of locally grown food. When one of the eating clubs at Yale served organic food, the students started swarming the place. At Oberlin, students go out to local farms and buy produce, fruit, and meat directly and bring it back to prepare at their dining halls. Some universities have established direct relationships with farmers, getting them to supply organic milk, for instance.

Local Beak and Skiff cider has been sold at the snack bars and dining centers here on campus, so why not locally grown organic apples, organic mixed greens grown locally in greenhouses for the salad bar, free range organic chicken breast, etc.

OK, food for thought.

The national Farm to Cafeteria project is one way that local food is catching on campuses. The Farm to Cafeteria project brings together local farmers with public schools, colleges/universities, hospitals, prisons and other places where there are large scale dining facilities. The goal is to stock these places with local food--often organic, although not always. The point is to reduce shipping costs (fuel use in transporting food), and to guarantee fresher food. Instead of the food traveling 1,300 miles to the table, it will travel 30-50 miles. A big difference in creating C02 admissions, and we'll be able to taste the difference, in most cases.

Starbucks/Frankenbucks Coffee

2007-01-20T14:42:00.000-05:00

I've never been a huge Starbucks fan even though I lived in Seattle for seven years. But here's some good news about Starbucks these days, and it could be even better, and it should be since Starbucks uses a huge amount of milk in its coffees and drinks.

After receiving pressure for the last five years to stop or decrease its use of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBST), Starbucks has responded by stating that it will cut back on rBST milk: "We are actively engaged with all of our dairy suppliers to explore a conversion of all core dairy products - fluid milk, half and half, whipping cream and eggnog - to rBST-free [rBST is the industry euphemism for recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone] in our U.S. company-operated locations. Significant work on this front has already been accomplished, in fact 27 percent of the dairy we buy is already rBST-free and 37 percent will be rBST-free starting in January, 2007."

This will help push the industrialized dairy industry in the US to stop using rBST, and it is, hopefully, a step toward getting rid of artificial hormones in milk. Yes, there will be industry resistance--after all, higher milk yields can mean more money in the pocket of the processor and supplier and, to a lesser extent, the farmer, but Starbucks much publicized shift will send a strong message to dairy processors/suppliers, farmers, and agriculture programs at research universities (who helped develop the hormone and pushed farmers to use it) that American consumers don't want hormones in their milk.

The next fight is to get Starbucks to sell a great percentage of Fair Trade coffees--the subject of a future posting!

To Insure or Not to Insure: Farming as High Stakes Gambling

2007-01-20T14:25:00.000-05:00

Heather S. asked a good question about crops insurance in response to my posting about the citrus disaster in California.
Yes, it is possible to buy crop insurance against natural disasters like wind, hail, rain, freezing conditions, etc. The Crop Insurance Corporation sells many different policies for up to 100 crops, including yield insurance. The problem is that crop insurance is relatively expensive, and most small farmers have fairly small profit margins and little capital to expend on risk management. Many farmers take their chances with the weather b/c it costs so much money to grow and harvest the crop that it would be that much more to actually insure it. Some farmers insure only part of their crop or if they have some bad years, they may be more likely to insure (although they may be too broke at that point to insure).

For more on crop insurance, the USDA has a useful link. http://www.rma.usda.gov/policies/

They mention crop insurance against natural disasters like what happened in CA with the citrus industry and also yield insurance. Mostly, farmers hope for good conditions or if there are disasters, they may look to government programs for relief for specific losses.

Again, being a farmer with one major crop is like being a high stakes gambler. You can really lose big if you have hail, a freeze, a drought, or high winds.

Gettin' Back In & Oranges

2007-01-18T00:25:00.000-05:00

Well, 2007 already, a new semester. I had a Mexico-induced hiatus from blogging, and now is the time to start up again.

I'm ready to start blogging on food politics and agricultural issues again plus some other topics. I do want to say it has been horrific to see the news coverage of the citrus crop freeze-out disaster in CA. To lose 75% of your crop is to lose your future livelihood and your ability to farm. Some farmers are already hanging on by a slim thread, and one crop freeze-out can mean no ability to pay back production loans, which will mean foreclosure. I wonder if this freeze-out will mean a significant end to the citrus industry in CA with orange imports from Mexico and Central America replacing those CA oranges? Or maybe Florida growers will pick up the slack. As bad as things are for the farmers, you can be sure they are even worse for the migrant workers who pick and pack the crops. I'm glad to hear the CA govt is planning unemployment benefits of some sort.

I have to say, too, that seeing all the media images of frozen fruit on the ground this week freaked me out. Growing up on an apple farm, I (and my family) lived in dread that a freeze, hailstorm or windstorm would ruin our crop. One year we had a significant blow-down or windstorm. Right before harvest, a good percentage of our apple crop actually was knocked off the trees by high winds. I remember crawling around on the ground picking up windfalls to be sent to the Tree Top Juice Plant. I remember my Dad saying that the apples were dollars hanging on the tree and pennies rotting on the ground.

Fighting Fair with the Fowl and the Food System

2006-12-17T10:51:00.000-05:00

The semester is winding down, I've been battling some kind of weird stomach bug & headache for the past couple of days (and, no, I haven't been eating any bagged spinach). I don't feel well enough to go out to Dianna's party, but I don't feel sick enough to sit in front of the TV, so the blog is my happy medium.

Heather Shearer raised a good point in response to my blog posting about the e-coli scares. She pointed out that a lot of the problem stems back to grain-fed cattle issue. Here's what she said:

"Of course, a large part of this problem is the situation created by grain-fed cattle. Research suggests that the deadly strain of e-coli causing these problems was virtually unheard of in grass-fed cattle. Indeed, cows and crops used to mutually benefit each other (manure for fertilizer). That's no longer the case since the rise of factory farming.

In any event, it's enough to worry the vegetarians among us. We don't want to participate in certain practices -- and we don't -- but we have to worry about the health problems caused by meat-producers and meat-eaters anyway. I suppose it gives us even more reason to try to actively change the food-consumption landscape."

Good comment. Part of it, too, is that grain is subsidized and there is over-production-- a result of "get bigger or get out "farm policies since the seventies (and possibly earlier). So what to do with that cheap subsidized grain that you and I pay for--feed it to the cattle, fatten 'em up faster, and get them to market faster. Make a profit faster, too! Cattle are not set up to digest that grain, either, so we're going against the evolution of the cow.

Then take the subsidized corn crop and put it into high fructose corn syrup and make everyone fatter! How could we operate such screwed-up logic? It's called industrialized agriculture, and, yes, it puts food on the table and the shelves, but at what cost to our health, to the environment, to animals?

I agree with Heather that we have to change the food landscape, and one of the first vehicles for change is not only reform of the system, but "food literacy"--addressing how the food industrial complex actually works with the consumers who are dependent on it. Heather's research on the USDA food pyramid is a critical piece of this! i also think that with the past-peak oil situation that we have no choice but to reform oil-intensive agriculture.

So it will all come back to grass and the land soon enough. Start gardening!

Also, back to the question of broiler houses.
Some in Kentucky have fought back against broiler houses--and won. See this news release. Wilma, if you're out there, I suggest you contact Aloma Dew and the others who pressed this suit and ask them for advice.

Also, factoryfarm.org has a set of guidelines about how to confront a CAFO. I think there are good ideas here.
http://www.factoryfarm.org/guide/

United Poultry Concerns February 2, 2005
Tyson Chicken Held Accountable for Pollution

NEWS RELEASE

January 26, 2005

Contact: Aloma Dew 270-685-2034

Phillip Shepherd 502-227-1122

John Harbison 802-879-3940

Tyson Chicken Held Accountable for Pollution

Final settlement gives relief to neighbors: Tyson must reduce emissions

Owensboro, KY. In a “David vs. Goliath” battle, neighbors of huge industrial chicken operations, working with the Sierra Club, have finally won relief from the toxic pollution caused by Tyson Chicken. In a settlement signed today, Tyson has agreed to spend a half a million dollars to study and report on emissions and mitigate ammonia emissions that have been plaguing rural residents for years.

“Ever since Tyson moved in next door, my family has suffered from the stench, dust, and toxic pollution from their operations. Finally justice has been served, and Tyson is going to be on the hook for the problems they have caused,” said Leesa Webster, a plaintiff in the case. “’Home Sweet Home’ takes on a different meaning now—with Tyson being held accountable for their emissions, I can finally breathe easier,” added Bernardine Edwards, another plaintiff in McLean County who lives next to 16 chicken houses.

This settlement comes on the heels of a landmark court decision last November, when a federal judge in Owensboro ruled that Tyson is responsible for reporting toxic ammonia emissions from their operations. Since Tyson controls how the chickens are raised, what medications and food they are given, and Tyson received the bulk of the profit, the court ruled that they should no longer be off the hook for the consequences of their pollution—and editorials throughout the state praised this as a “common-sense” decision. This concept, called integrator liability, prevents Tyson from shifting the blame for their pollution to the local growers—and the ruling is expected to have far-reaching effects in rural areas around the country.

Today the final settlement consent decree was filed in Federal District Court in Owensboro. In addition to integrator liability, established in the 2003 ruling, Tyson must conduct ammonia testing at sites and report their findings. Tyson has also agreed to plant $50,000 worth of trees to act as a screen that will protect neighbors from the pollution coming from chicken houses. In addition, they will pay all legal fees connected with the case.

According to Sierra Club attorney Barclay Rogers, “This landmark decision will affect the entire industry. It’s clear that polluting factory farms have the responsibility to clean up their act and stop putting communities at risk.”

“After a long battle, we have won a victory for all the other families suffering from factory farm pollution,” said Norma Caine, a WebsterCounty resident who has been a leader in this fight for nearly a decade. “ We hope other citizens will now be able to speak up, and protect communities throughout Kentucky from this kind of pollution—for our families and our future.”

A Fowl Stench in Kentucky

2006-12-10T19:56:00.000-05:00

In response to my posting about CAFOs (factory farms) in upstate NY, I heard form Wilma Gilbert in Kentucky. Wilma says the following about a situation she is facing in her neighborhood in Kentucky with CAFOs:

Wilma Gilbert said...
Eileen, In ky we are suffering from the stench of two broiler houses of half rotten chicken carcasse and debree that was scattered in a field 50 feet from our home, it has been 24 days now and we still cant get out of the house for very long. This rotten stuff had never gone thru the decomposter, now let me tell you the worst , several tractor trailor loads of chickens went out of the same houses for market, I followed one truck and thought I would die from the smell, can you imagine eating chickens that had been running in there , we have had every official that we know to call, but nobody has the athority to do anything,. this has been going on for years, we have gone from a wonderful water well 100 percent pure to a 101 bacteria count and 3.1 e coli count, We are desperate and cant get any help for this, As far as we know the agriculture dept has the only athority . As far as we know a little scolding is all the farmer gets and we are left living in torment Thanks for reading Wilma Gilbert

Here's what the National Resources Defense Council says about the rise of broiler houses in Kentucky: http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/factor/stken.asp
There is a lack of a regulatory environment at the state level for water pollution caused by broiler houses, which Wilma speaks to in her posting.

I'm trying to get in touch with Wilma to find out more. Wilma, if you are out there, please post some contact information. I'd like to monitor the situation on my blog and get the word out. I'm wondering if the Kentucky Sierra Club could help out in an effort to address your local situation?

http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/factor/stken.asp

America's Animal Factories
How States Fail to Prevent Pollution from Livestock Waste
http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/factor/stken.asp

"Chapter 10

KENTUCKY

• Kentucky's geology makes large portions of the state particularly vulnerable to groundwater pollution from leaking hog manure lagoons.

• Kentucky is experiencing a boom in chicken houses, but they escape water pollution regulation.

In Kentucky, the number of farms raising hogs has dropped dramatically over the past 20 years as factory-scale operations have replaced family-size farms. The number of hog farms plunged from 33,000 in 1976 to some 2,500 in 1997.1 A trend toward larger hog operations, concentrated in a few pockets of the state, has led to big increases in overall hog production in some parts of Kentucky. Eleven counties have experienced a 25 percent jump in the number of hogs produced since 1982.2

Of Kentucky's approximately 2,500 hog operations in 1997, an estimated 50 operations had more than 2,000 hogs (an average of 5,850), and 70 operations had between 1,000 and 2,000 hogs.3

Kentucky's booming poultry industry is projected to expand dramatically in the next few years. Approximately 3.3 million birds are killed per week in Kentucky, raised in an estimated 1,100 broiler houses on an estimated 350 farms, according to projections for 1998. By the year 2000, the total number slaughtered will rise to an estimated 5.7 million birds killed per week in 2,100 broiler houses on an estimated 534 farms.4 Though nearby residents complain of intense odor problems and flies,5 the state's Economic Development Authority has provided significant tax incentives to two major food corporations to open poultry operations: Cagle-Keystone Foods and Hudson Foods (which has now been acquired by Tyson Foods, Inc.).6

Pollution Problems

Fifty percent of Kentucky is comprised of limestone, which is permeated with caves, sinkholes, and springs. In these limestone formations, known as karst, water runs underground through caves and aquifers and then emerges from springs into streams and lakes.7 Areas of karst geology are particularly sensitive to nutrient pollution and are ill-suited for siting hog waste lagoons or concentrated animal feeding operations.8 Unfortunately, Kentucky is now experiencing a proliferation of chicken houses and an increased concentration of swine operations in areas that are formed from karst, including areas close to Mammoth Cave National Park.9 Depositing animal waste in karst areas poses the following water pollution threats:
• Because underground water moves very rapidly and unpredictably, disease-causing bacteria from manure spread onto the ground have greater opportunity to enter groundwater and to contaminate nearby streams and lakes.10

• The rapid movement of animal waste into the groundwater limits the ability of soil and plants to take up nutrients, increasing the risk of nutrient pollution of groundwater and above-ground bodies of water.11

• Karst geography is by definition unstable. Sinkholes can form in unexpected areas, in particular where ground excavation occurs and where there is a change in the groundwater flow rate, both of which occur frequently with feedlot construction. Examples of the risks involved with lagoon construction in karst regions are documented by Dr. Nicholas Crawford of Western Kentucky University's Department of Geography and Geology in an August 5, 1998 report. He has documented a 1984 sinkhole collapse under a hog waste lagoon in southwest Barren County, which poured 2.4 million gallons of hog waste into the karst aquifer in less than five hours. Another sinkhole collapse under a hog waste lagoon in Logan County on April 29, 1991, drained more than one million gallons of hog waste into the karst aquifer, according to Crawford. This lagoon had a synthetic liner, but the collapse occurred above the synthetic liner. Crawford also documented lagoon leakage from two lagoons in Logan County which contaminated a spring.12

Regulatory Climate

Poultry facilities are excluded from any water pollution regulation under the state's interpretation of the Clean Water Act because poultry litter is not considered an industrial source of pollution. Despite documentation of well-water contamination linked to nearby land application of litter, the state agency claims it has no authority to take enforcement action against poultry factories.13

A major failing of Kentucky's environmental regulatory system has been its use of "no discharge" permits to CAFOs. Given the lack of water quality monitoring requirements for CAFOs and other assurances, this requirement is difficult to enforce. Moreover, requirements for waste management plans are not enforceable.

Even for processing plants, the "no discharge" permit is offered. For example, Cagle-Keystone's new chicken processing plant in Clinton County has been issued a "no discharge" permit and will be allowed to spray-irrigate up to 1.43 million gallons a day of plant wastewater on a hay farm near Lake Cumberland. The permit has no water quality limits, and inadequate monitoring requirements.14

Until recently, the state's regulation of swine was very lax. However, in response to the prospect of additional hog facilities coming into Kentucky, the Governor imposed a three-month moratorium in 1997, which was followed first by emergency regulations and then by permanent regulations for new factory swine operations with over 1,000 swine units. Existing swine operations of this size and other animal types (with the exception of dry litter poultry operations) are still covered under the old CAFO rules. The new regulations include notice to citizens in the vicinity, setbacks, restrictions of the land application of waste, and some additional regulatory requirements.15 However, among other deficiencies, the setbacks are inadequate, the nutrient management requirements are based on nitrogen limits rather than phosphorus limits, allowing more pollution to occur, and operators are not required to obtain training to run a factory farm.16 The Farm Bureau attempted to repeal the regulations with legislation in the 1998 session,17 but that effort was defeated. The newest version of the regulations, which took permanent effect in November 1998, requires that the owner of a livestock operation's pigs (typically an absentee food corporation) join with the owner of the operation's land (typically a farmer under contract to the corporation) in applying for a CAFO permit.18 This means that well-endowed corporations will share some of the responsibility for complying with environmental requirements with their contract farmers, who have historically shouldered the costly burden of manure-handling alone. Unfortunately, the Farm Bureau was able to weaken this important requirement from the proposed version, which made the corporations and the farmers equally responsible.19

The Kentucky Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet, the agency that issues permits under the Clean Water Act, currently permits 143 agricultural waste systems with 1,000 or more head of swine.20 The Cabinet estimates that there are between 50 to100 swine facilities that are required by law to get a water pollution control permit as a CAFO but have not been issued one.21 The failure to regulate these CAFOs stems largely from weak agency enforcement and a lack of state funding for inspectors, according to environmentalists.

The effectiveness of local controls is generally untested, because they are all relatively new. However, several counties have attempted to implement local controls on animal waste facilities"

Primary interviewee for this chapter:

Hank Graddy
Sierra Club-Kentucky
W.H. Graddy & Associates
P.O. Box 4307
Midway, KY 40347
Phone: 606-846-4905
Fax: 606-846-4914
e-mail: hgraddy@aol.com

Eat your veggies unless they are e-coli laden

2006-12-10T10:26:00.000-05:00

Eat 5 a day, right? Fruits and veggies. What's going on, though, with e-coli in spinach (this fall), green onions (most recently at Taco Bell), tomatoes last year? Do you think twice when you reach for the bagged spinach in the produce section or bunch of green onions? The source of the e-coli is not entirely known, but factory farming and manure run-off into produce fields is one of the suspects. This is why I like to grow my own spinach and green onions in my backyard, but like most of us, I buy such items during the winter from the same source: California.

Here's Marian Burros from the NYT. I also include a link below for a recent article in Forbes about the green onion/produce scares.

September 27, 2006, The New York Times
Eating Well

"Tainted Spinach Brings Demands for New Rules
By MARIAN BURROS

THE latest outbreak of food-borne illness, traced to a virulent bacterium in bagged spinach, is being called a watershed moment for American industrial agriculture, a time of reckoning for industry and government and the public.

Critics say the factory farming system needs an overhaul, with produce farmers and processors being subject to the same sorts of mandatory rules as the meat industry to protect against E. coli O157:H7 and other harmful bacteria. More outbreaks of disease are now traced to produce than to meat, poultry, fish, eggs and milk combined.

The dangers can be compounded once produce is taken home. The casual way many consumers treat bagged, cut up fruits and vegetables — not washing them, leaving them unrefrigerated — increases the likelihood that even a low level of harmful bacteria can multiply and cause illness.

Some scientists say the sealed bags add protection; others believe the sealed bags, if mishandled, actually help bacteria to proliferate.

The source of the E. coli O157:H7 blamed in the current outbreak is unknown. It may be irrigation water reclaimed from sewage treatment. It may be unsanitary conditions on the farm. But there is increasing suspicion that the cause may be water runoff from the many cattle farms near the fields in the Salinas Valley of California, where produce tainted with the E. coli has caused eight outbreaks of illness since 1995.

Water contaminated with E. coli from cow manure may have been used for irrigation or may have been deposited on the fields by heavy spring rains and flooding.

Dr. Trevor Suslow, a microbiologist at the University of California at Davis, called this case “the catalyst, the tipping point.’’

“This is a culmination of incidents that have been going on for 10 years and cattle have become the primary focus,’’ Dr. Suslow said. “Data from the last 23 years clearly demonstrate the potential for crop contamination from pathogenic E. coli in the watershed.”

Dr. Suslow asked the question on many critics’ minds: “Should cows be raised in close proximity to produce? Ideally you would like to see them well separated.”

Dr. David Acheson, medical director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition agrees that cows may be a serious problem.

“I’m speculating, but there is a logical link between cattle and manure getting into the water,’’ Dr. Acheson said.

Would the outbreak have been prevented if the farmers and processors of salad greens were subject to the same regulations that meat processors have been under since 1997?

“Farms can do pretty much as they please as long as they don’t make anyone sick,” said Carol Tucker Foreman, a former assistant secretary of agriculture and director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, a consumer advocacy group.

The F.D.A. has jurisdiction, but little regulatory authority, over the produce industry, and has fewer than 2,000 inspectors for more than 120,000 facilities, 250 inspectors fewer than in 2003. Even some high-risk foods are only inspected every two to four years. The Agriculture Department, which oversees the meat industry, has 7,600 inspectors for 6,000 facilities.

On Monday the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a frequent critic of the food industry, and the Food Products Association, an industry group, joined with others in a coalition to lobby for more F.D.A. financing. The agency estimates that, taking inflation into account, the budget for its Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition will have fallen by almost 30 percent from 2003 t0 2007. Its staffing decreased by 14 percent.

The increased number of outbreaks of produce contamination has put even more pressure on the agency.

“This is kind of a new situation and we don’t have a routine inspection cycle,’’ said Mark Roh, the acting regional director of food and drug for the F.D.A.’s Pacific Region. “Farms traditionally have not been inspected even when they were bagging lettuce,” he said.

Dr. Acheson and Mr. Roh both say the agency is considering mandatory rules.

“If rules were mandatory rather than voluntary it might tend to enhance the industry’s effort at compliance,” said Mr. Roh. He said regulations could be modeled on the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point system used in meat, poultry, fish and egg processing plants in which preventive controls minimize hazards in food.

Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, agreed.

“We need mandatory standards, enforced across the system,” Ms. DeWaal said.

Compounding unsafe growing practices are unsafe processing and transportation practices. From field to home, produce may be left unrefrigerated several times: immediately after it is cut; as it sits on receiving docks at warehouses and supermarkets and when it is in display cases.

Often supermarkets do not maintain proper temperature in refrigerated cases for meat, poultry and produce. Cases should be kept at 41 degrees or below to prevent most bacteria from growing, but they often reach 50 degrees. At room temperature bacteria double every couple of hours.

Shoppers can make the problem worse. Many people assume that because some fruits and vegetables are displayed without refrigeration, all produce is safe at room temperature.

“Consumers need to treat cut or bagged produce the way they treat their meat and poultry for safety,” Ms. DeWaal said. “Pick it up last; get it home and in the refrigerator...." article continues

See also recent coverage in Forbes http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hscout/2006/12/07/hscout536490.html

CAFOs: Not in My Backyard

2006-12-09T20:24:00.000-05:00

In May of 2005, I attended a local Sierra Club meeting that was focused on the problem of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs--basically factory farms--and their environmental impacts. The meeting was packed with local people and USDA officials and lawyers. Since there was a lawsuit pending against Willet Dairy, an upstate CAFO, there was someone present from their lawyer's office taping the meeting to make sure nothing libelous was said against the CAFO. It was a tense, but informative meeting. I sat in the back and tapped out notes on my lap-top. I was asked several times "whose side I was on," if I was a reporter, and "who I worked for." When I said I was an academic, everyone left me alone. I guess if you're an academic writing a book about the public debates over agriculture, then you are not a threat.

I learned that there are about 700 CAFOs in New York state, and many of them are dairy farms in upstate NY. I heard eloquent testimony from Connie and Scott Mather from Lock, NY about the problems they have experienced due to a dairy CAFO near their home. Some of Connie's testimony is below, which she posted on the website of the organization Rural Friends of New York, which wages battles against the environmental destruction of upstate NY.

Like most of us, when I think of dairy farming, I always picture the small-scale dairy operations that we're all used to driving by here in upstate NY. I'm used to seeing a cluster of Holsteins standing outside the barn or picking their way through the mud toward the pasture. I also have dairy farmers in my family: Wiard and Jean Groeneveld, my maternal uncle and aunt from Sultan, Washington and their farmer son Christian Groeneveld, so the small-scale dairy operation is a cherished part of my mom's side of the family.

But small-scale operations are being replaced by industrialized operations. Read Connie Mather's testimony and read the report the Sierra Club and the Citizens' Environmental Coalition entitled "The Wasting of Rural New York State: Factory Farms and Public Health," 2005, available for PDF download at http://www.newyork.sierraclub.org/conservation/agriculture/index.html.

This is our backyard, folks!

Soil and Water Conservation Society
Connie Mather 5H Route 3, Lock, NY 13092
February 26, 2004

"Neighbors Perspective and Action Appeal
My name is Connie Mather. I am part of a growing group of citizens looking for ways to protect our families, our properties and our natural resources from the effects of CAFO’s (also known as factory farms), in rural upstate New York. I’d like to share with you the words of a famous politician on agricultural policy:

“... To put an end to our backwardness in agriculture and to provide the country with the largest possible amount of market grain, cotton, and so forth, it was necessary to pass to large-scale farming, for only large-scale farming can employ modem machinery, utilize all the achievements of agricultural science and provide the largest possible quantity of market produce. [we] took the path of organizing large farms because it enabled us, in the course of several years, to cover the entire country with large farms and provide the country with the largest possible quantity of market produce. “

This is a pretty good description of the course of agriculture in this country and in New York State over the last few decades. This comes from a speech of Joseph Stalin in 1946, in Moscow, as presented to a meeting of voters of the Stalin Electoral District. History tells us that the collective farms, so similar to the government subsidized corporate factory farms of the USA today, were a devastating failure. In the 70’s the USDA asked our successful USA farmers to make trips to Soviet Russia to help them. After studying the situation there, our agriculturalists recommended that the workers be given small plots of land that they could grow their own product on. The smaller plots out-produced the larger collective farms by such incredible numbers that it offered a whole new perspective on smaller farms as sustainable to the Soviets. I have to wonder why the USA, at great expense to the taxpayers, is now subsidizing and promoting the same kind of “advanced farming” that failed so miserably in the U.S.S.R, while doing little to support the sustainable smaller farms so integral to the health of our rural society.

Now I would like to address factory farming on a more personal note, from a neighbor’s perspective.

I live in a small hamlet called East Genoa, by what has become one of the largest dairy CAFO’s in the Northeastern United States. It is one of about 23 dairy CAFO’s that reside in the once beautiful Finger Lakes Region of the Empire State. My husband and I moved to this agricultural district and bought 10 acres in hopes of raising our son in a clean, safe environment. I was going to try to teach school and fulfill a lifelong goal of having a successful organic strawberry u-pick farm, with a possible second high-profit low yield crop to allow for back-up diversity if needed. I was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania and knew that I wanted to farm as a second profession after teaching for 10 years in Philadelphia. None of that was to happen. Staying outdoors, getting healthy enough, or affording water filtering systems and sources has made that impossible here.
First of all, most days of the year, the stench on my property and in my house is so bad that it makes us sick. I mean it makes us literally SICK. I didn’t need to see the research results of latest studies of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide emissions to believe that the CAFO next door is emitting noxious gases. I didn’t need more research studies that showed the particulate matter and the ascetic acid from the silage bunkers are making it very near impossible to work outside or sleep inside in my house many nights.

Year-round spraying of liquid manure has made most of the fields around my home simply dumping grounds for seas of waste. In our community, upwards of 7500 bovine creatures contribute to huge cesspools that are uncovered and “geo” lined. For those of you who are wondering about “geo’ lined pits, that means no cement or synthetic linings, just holes dug into the ground. The detergents and any bad milk that can’t be sold is also dumped or piped into those open lakes of manure, along with the hormones and antibiotics tbat might be in the milk and manure. After that waste ferments for an undetermined amount of time, it is sprayed from the backs of huge tankards the size of tractor-trailers, onto the land or the snow. Summer, fall, winter, spring, it doesn’t matter. The waste is thrown on the fields. I am not a soil specialist, but somehow I can’t see whcre soil is benefiting from that kind of dumping. I see the runoff going into road ditches and small tributaries as I drive along the road. Those waterways feed the lakes of Cayuga and Owasco.

Huge trucks and large farm machinery barrel down the highways (Route 34 is yards away from my front door), The roads get wet with liquid manure, it dries and with the heavy traffic, becomes a fine dust that enters our home, our barn, our cars, and our lungs. Mowing the lawn, tending to our few animals or trying to garden is usually a “noxious affair”, after which we are sometimes sick with respiratory illnesses, headaches and even dizziness and nausea. This year, we couldn’t put up Christmas lights or decorations for the winter holidays because we couldn’t stay outside in the smell long enough to put up the lights.

In my opinion, the unnatural environment that the dairy creates has created an unnatural number of mosquitoes and flies.

Mosquito swarms seem to be a growing problem in our fields, yard and gardens. Could it be that the swarms of mosquitoes are coming from the thousands of tires that cover the silage bunkers kitty-cornered from our property? For the rest of the residents in Cayuga County, a fine of $35.00 per tire is levied if we have tires on our properties. That is because the County Health Department believes that tires lying around are breeding grounds for mosquitoes that carry West Nile Virus! Maybe those farm-exempt tires are marked somehow so the mosquitoes won’t breed there.

Swarming flies are also in abundance where we live. Even if the smell doesn’t get us if we try to BB-Q, the flies will swarm our food and us on a really busy spreading day. This type of swarming in excess is being sighted all around rural America where CAFOs proliferate.

One of the most disappointing aspects of living here is seeing the creeks, brooks and wetlands disappear.

Expanding numbers of livestock means expanded amounts of water consumed by my corporate neighbors. According to one management plan, each cow needs about 30 to 60 gallons of water a day. What that has meant for our communities is that wetlands are drained into large holding ponds, and small, once pristine brooks and creeks now are intermittently flowing, or diverted into holding ponds, or they are so contaminated with runoff that you can’t recognize them. Runoff of liquid wastes into our tributaries and sometimes directly into the Finger Lakes is common. I believe this runoff is inevitable because of the year round spreading and the volume of waste that needs to be gotten rid of by ever-expanding dairies. The marine life has suffered significantly with this violation and mismanagement of our precious natural resources. Currently, there is no mandatory testing of the waste from the CAFO’s in NY State before it is applied, so we have no idea what is ending up in our soil and water resources.

As a former educator, I believe that if you as professionals, educators and scientists alike, truly understand what is happening in the name of “advanced farming” in New York, you will take ethical and appropriate actions to rectify the policies and the lack of enforcement that allows these factory farms to assault every aspect of the lives of the rural peoples of New York State. The people of this region of New York have a strong heritage of political and social courage. This area was the center of the Women’s Rights Movement, an integral part of the Underground Railroad, and was the seed of strong religious movements. This heritage is reflected in the spirit of the real farmers and residents who are now mobilized and taking whatever actions they can to save our rural society and defend our Constitutional rights to protect our properties. Sustainable agriculture has a long, proud history of economic success, environmental stewardship,
conservation of natural resources and quality food production. We need your support.

The American Public Health Association has already asked for a moratorium on the building of all new CAFO’s until the empirical and anecdotal evidence can be considered. They have concluded, based on the research already reported, that there seem to be health risks to the workers on CAFO’s and to the residents of rural communities surrounding the CAFO’s.

I am here today to implore you, as Water and Soil Conservationists, to support that moratorium, and based on the very credible research already established, to take this a step further, and

CALL FOR A MORATORIUM ON ALL EXPANSION OF EXISTING FACTORY FARMS UNTIL THE EPA, DEC AND STATE AND COUNTY HEALTH DEPARTMENTS CAN MAN THEMSELVES WITH ENOUGH PERSONNEL AND ENFORCEABLE REGULATIONS TO ENSURE THE HALT TO THE DESECRATION OF NEW YORK’S NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE HEALTH OF ITS RURAL SOCIETY."
--Connie Mather

Got (Organic) Milk?

2006-12-08T19:05:00.000-05:00

Parade Magazine, that Sunday morning paragon of wisdom, has broached the subject of organic milk production in the U.S.. In their weekly soundbyte for Dec 3rd, 2006, they point out that organic cows in the U.S. can't keep up with demand from companies wanting organic milk products. U.S. food companies wanting to use organic milk are considering the importation of powdered organic milk from New Zealand and/or using soy milk from China or Brazil. Bad news: fuel costs to import the milk.

America’s dairies can’t produce enough.

By Lyric Wallwork Winik
Published: December 3, 2006, Parade Magazine
[In the News]

The Problem With Organic Food

"The U.S has about 9 million dairy cows, but fewer than 150,000 qualify as “organic”—so the makers of organic products must be resourceful. With organic food sales up 20% in recent years, at least one company is using soy milk from China and Brazil, and others are considering powdered organic milk from New Zealand. The good news for environmentalists: Organic means no pesticides were used. The bad news: Importing food from afar takes more fuel to get it to our plates."

It's good to see this coverage, but the question not answered in this soundbyte, is why are there fewer than 150,000 organic milk cows out of the nation's 9 million cows? Milk production in the U.S. is set up on the industrialized model. Most loans are for capital expansion for large dairy operations. Cummins from a Mother Jones article http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2006/04/organic_milk.html (see below) points out that “there’s a huge demand for organic products which has caused a shortage in supply because our public policy doesn’t help farmers make the transition [to organic]. So you either lower the standards or import from overseas.” What's tough about going organic? You can't use industrial feeds or fertilizers for three years; there are clear expenses involved in the transition. The article also discusses whether or not organic "mega-farms" should be called organic since they do not necessarily comply with pasture regulations (letting dairy cows graze for some of their food). In essence, large-scale organic dairy farms mean the cows are kept inside and fed the organic feed and no bovine growth hormones are used, which is good, but it defeats the purpose of the smaller-scale, pasture feeding operations that most imagine when they think of an organic dairy farm. Read on for more....

This does not mean that one should stop buying organic milk, but with the rise of large-scale organic milk operations and the USDA's allowance for that, it's important to think about what we are really buying when we buy organic: small-scale, local organic or large-scale industrialized organic? Large food companies have figured out that organic is profitable (Wal-mart & organics, fo instance)--so the farmers that supply these large chains are doing what they can to meet organic standards and cutting the sustainable and eco-friendly part out of the organic equation. As many small-scale organic farmers have argued, this is antithetical to the very idea of organic agriculture.

So here are a cornocopia of articles about organic milk production and the latest trend: large-scale "organic dairy operations" (an oxymoron). I'll try to keep this thread going about "what does organic really mean?" I also strongly recommend Michael Pollan's book _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ as he takes up this question in a thoughtful fashion. A great read! He distinguishes between small-scale organics and industrialized organics (EarthBound farms, for instance--the makers of the baby cut carrots and mixed green lettuce in a bag).

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2006/04/organic_milk.html
News: Can mega-dairies whose cows rarely get out to pasture still be called "organic"? And where's the government oversight?
By Cameron Scott April 26, 2006

2. “Wal-Mart’s Organic Offensive”
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/mar2006/nf20060329_6971.htm

3. See also Business Week article on “The Organic Myth” Learn about Stonyfield Farms--how is their organic yogurt produced? Industrialized organic or small-scale organic?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_42/b4005001.htm

4. http://www.uh.edu/ednews/2006/bglobe/200603/20060327farms.htmlThe Boston Globe
Monday, March 27, 2006 "UNH sees organic future for farms." See what one university is trying to do about promoting organic farming in the sustainable tradition. This is notable as most dairy science programs do not stress organic milk production.

The Future of Food in 2007

2006-12-02T12:36:00.000-05:00

Nothing less than the future of food in the United States will be debated in the coming year: 2007. The United States is due for a New Farm Bill. Most folks don't worry about the Farm Bill, thinking, of course, that there is no reason to think about it unless one is a politician in a rural state, a farmer, a grocery store chain owner, a large commodity trader, or an executive in a Big Food company. After all, Farm Bill or not, there will be still be (we hope or believe) the plentiful food supply we are all used to since WWII. Well, guess what, by ceding the formation of the farm bill to politicians and powerful special interest groups, we (yes WE--and I include myself in this number) have worked to ensure what the Community Food Security Coalition has referred to as "an unfortunate legacy of fewer farmers, lost farmland, unhealthy and hungry children, and polluted water and air" (Community Food Security News, Fall 2006). Yes, food is still fairly cheap compared to other commodities and readily available for many who can afford it, but at what cost to the environment, to public health, to small farmers?

Well, there is something we can all do about it--endorse the Kellogg Foundation's coalition project "The Farm and Food Policy Project," which we can all learn more about at:

http://www.farmandfoodproject.org/

I'm also posting the statement from the website. For those of us who do work with Food Politics issues in our Writing 205 courses here at Syracuse, this may be an interesting debate to engage in with our students: the question of how public policy has helped to create the loss of the small farm, the rise of the global obesity epidemic, the continuance of hunger in the U.S. and elsewhere, and the loss of farm land to overdevelopment and poor community planning. Researching the formation of this policy and its impact will be an interesting project and an eye-opener. Illiteracy about agriculture, about agricultural policy is at an all-time high in our nation because most of us have bought into the theory that food is simply there--cheap (relatively speaking), plentiful (always there), safe to eat (think twice about it since the latest spinach debacle), and safely produced (let's talk about pesticides, genetically modified organisms and migrant labor exploitation). There's plenty of good to go around, too. I'm not trying to be totally gloom and doom: the resurgence of local and regional farmers' markets, the rise of local organic agriculture and community-supported agriculture, urban community garden projects, school food learning projects and community gardens, the Slow Food movement. But we have a long ways to go to make those localized programs more a part of the larger national food framework.

Here's the statement:

"The Farm and Food Policy Project

A diverse coalition of family farm, sustainable agriculture, rural, public health, anti-hunger, environmental, faith-based, and other groups is forming to shape the 2007 Farm Bill.

The cross-sector approach of the Farm and Food Policy Project (FFPP) reflects a commitment to policy reforms that address the full spectrum of public needs addressed by this critical piece of legislation.

This broad and growing coalition believes that by working together, it can make real progress toward supporting family farms and local communities, improving health and nutrition, ending hunger, and increasing biodiversity and improving the quality of our soil, water and air.

Underlying the project's dialogue is a shared set of beliefs and values, which are:
• A widespread and diverse family farm system benefits rural communities and society as a whole;
• Extensive hunger and food insecurity in the United States are unacceptable;
• Strong stewardship commitments are key to maintaining farm and food systems into the future that will promote environmental and public health for our children;
• Stimulating new markets and restoring competition to the marketplace are vital to a fair, sustainable food system;
• Rectifying historic patterns of discrimination and making farm and food policies more responsive to an increasingly diverse society are critically important; and
• Rural and urban communities can work together to create a healthier food system.

The FFPP believes that all the major sections of the Farm Bill - commodity, nutrition, rural development, credit, conservation, research, and energy - hold significant opportunities for crafting more cost-effective and higher-impact policies that can increase farm profitability and improve the health of individuals, communities, and the environment.

In November 2006, FFPP will release a public statement - endorsed by a broad public interest coalition - identifying core priorities and opportunities for innovation in four areas:

1.) Advancing a new generation in farming and fostering market-based solutions

2.) Reducing food insecurity and enhancing public health

3.) Capitalizing on rural community strength to enhance economic viability

4.) Rewarding stewardship and improving environmental quality."

The organization plans to release a more specific statement about how they will influence the Farm Bill in the next week or so, so I will continue to blog about this. I'm also working on a chapter in my book _New Agrarian Rhetorics_, which will consider the public debate over this Farm Bill and past ones.

If you eat, you have a stake in agriculture.

Creative Shuttling

2006-11-26T09:09:00.000-05:00

John Trimbur notes that ". . . U.S. linguistic culture produces a systematic forgetting of the multiple languages spoken and written in North America and thereby constitutes a key source of American ambivalence toward multilingualism" (577). As he goes on to show, there was nothing un-systematic about that "forgetting." In essence, the forgetting was a form of cultural suppression. Trimbur argues for a transnational perspective to assess the status of other languages in the U.S. in relation to English: "To understand the cultural exchanges that shaped U.S. linguistic culture--its linguistic memory and its habits of forgetting--requires a transnational perspective that enables us to see how U.S. English took shape in relation to other languages" (579).

One of the key historical figures he uses as a reference point is none other than Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was worried about the Germans taking over and "Germanizing" the culture (instead of Anglifying it). He paraphrases Heath's analysis of the pattern in the U.S. "where the language of non-English-speakers who are seen to pose a social, economic, or political threat becomes the 'focus of argument' about linguistic status and political legitimacy (10)" (580). In Franklin's time, it was was the Germans. It is now Spanish-speaking people. We are experiencing such a moment with the hostility toward Spanish-speaking in many parts of the U.S., which is fueled by a sense of "social, economic, or political threat." Immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America (documented and undocumented) to take jobs in the U.S. has caused the kind of xenophobia that Franklin exercised about the Germans. Cities and towns have passed "English-only" ordinances or have exerted more localized attempts to control language such as hanging "English-only" signs in businesses. Meanwhile, such analyses of "linguistic threat" fail to address how North American policies have created such transnational labor migrations (NAFTA, for instance).

These systems of reaction to language difference (coupled with other kinds of difference) have shaped our educational system into a monlingual language environment: "Since the overturn of the classical curriculum and the establishment of graduate education on the German model in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. university has drastically curtailed the educational role of languages other than than English--whether Greek and Latin in the old-time American pietistic colleges or German for the Americans who went to German universities to get PhDs. Instead English has become the unquestioned medium of instruction and the vernacular of modernity identified with science, technology, and the professions" (583). Trimbur identifies the cultural, social, and economic structures that lead to monolingualism in U.S. culture, but I wonder, too, the interplay of cultural, social, and economic forces with specific individual choices. What is the mix here between taking on a new language (L2 or L3) and maintaining a tie to one's home language (L1)? What about that process?

Trimbur argues, in the end, for addressing "the status planning of languages and an additive language policy whereby all students as a matter of course speak, write, and learn in more than one language and all citizens thereby become capable of communicating with one another in a number of languages, code-switching as appropriate to the rhetorical situation. The goal such a national language policy, I believe, goes beyond a discourse of linguistic rights to imagine the aboliton of English monolingualism altogether and the creation in its place of a linguistic culture where being multilingual is both normal and desirable, as it is throughout much of the world" (587).

These sentiments are echoed throughout all of the readings. Canagarajah argues for the metaphor of "shuttling" back and forth across languages. His argument is that we should study the engagement with language and writing as a "movement" rather than as a static process. We should

"study the movement of the writer between languages; rather than studying the product of descriptions of writing compentence, we would study the process of composing in multiple languages; rather than studying the writer's stablity in specific forms of linguistics or cultural competence, we would analyze his or her versatility (for example, life between multiple languages and cultures);rather than treating language or culture as the main variable, we would analyze his or her versatility (for example life between multiple languages and cultures); rather than treating writers as passive, conditioned by their language and culture, we would treat them as agentive, shuttling creatively between discourses to achieve their communicative objectives" (591).

His study of Sri Lankan Professor K. Sivatamby demonstrates this principle of "shuttling" creatively across Tamil and English for a variety of publication contexts. Dr. Sivatamby makes several rhetorical/linguistic choices to fit the contexts and audiences that he is addressing. One of the points that most interested me was how Dr. Sivatamby compensated for the dearth of library materials by managing genre constraints: avoiding a traditional literature review and engaging in his analysis quickly, using ethnography as well.

In essence, Canagarajah models the kind of analysis we can do of multilingualism and writing; however, a key constraint occurs when the researcher is not fluent in the writer's language (a further issue).

Matsuda's essay is an interesting counterpart to Berlin and other histories of rhetoric and writing instruction where international students are not a focal point or even much mentioned. This is, perhaps, another linguistic suppression: "The history of international ESL students in U.S.higher education goes at last as far back as 1784. . ." (644). In discussing the successive waves of international students, Matsuda sketches a view of the language curriculum that is tied as well to national policies and social and economic forces (WWI and WWII). I found it particularly interesting to see the discussion of how different colleges and universities handled the "integration" or "segregation" of international students (placement, credit-bearing and non-credit bearing courses, students "sprinkled" throughout sections or grouped together). I found Matsuda's historical analysis of linguistic homogeneity and international students to be very fruitful as it assesses the inner workings of linguistic "containment."

Matsuda ends with this analysis: "To work effectively with the student population in the twenty-first century, all composition teachers need to reimagine the composition classroom as the multingual space that it is, where the presence of language differences is the default" (649). Again, to echo my previous posting, what does it mean to reimagine the composition classroom as the multilingual space?" Just a couple of ideas:

--assignments that describe and analyze multilingual contexts?
--texts that are multilingual and in translation?
--research that involves multilingual texts?
--overlapping/linked courses in language and composition?
Others???

Works Cited:

Canagarajah, A. Suresh. "Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling between Languages: Learning from Multilingual Writers." _College English_ 68.6 (July 2006): 589-604.

Matsuda, Paul Kei. "The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition." _College English_. 68.6 (July 2006): 637-651.

Trimbur, John. "Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English." _College English_ 68.6 (July 2006): 575-588.

Multilingualism: a few additional questions

2006-11-26T00:31:00.000-05:00

Laura's blog is chock full of interesting questions for us to consider in 601 on Tuesday. As I read over the special issue of CE July 2006 again, I kept wondering what a writing program cognizant of multilingualism--at all levels-- would look like?. As all the articles remind us, in one way or another, we are in disciplinary and programmatic settings where multilingualism is not necessarily valued--where the assumption is that linguistic competence is demonstrated in English. While many in our field will profess an allegiance to valuing various aspects of diversity, do we really value linguistic diversity? How is that defined? And what would a multilingual writing curriculum look like? I'm not asking this idly. I'm really wondering how to set up a first-year course and a writing curriculum that would work to value multilingualism?

I've had a number of classes where most of my students were multilingual. These were so-called "basic writing" classes at the community college and state university where I taught. Although I tried hard to acknowledge my students' facilities across languages, we ended up focusing on English. I tried to mine their language competence in other areas and drew on my own experiences as an exchange student trying to become fluent in French. Yet I feel I didn't do much beyond the anecdotal to do anything very deep with language study and multilingualism. I simply didn't know how, and when time was limited, I fell back on what I could do and what I knew best. I wonder what I missed out on, and I am also aware of my own limits when it comes to achieveing any sort of multilingualism. I took six semesters of college French, studied in France for a semester, and I have studied Spanish off and on for a number of years since high school (always losing ground because I don't keep up). It's so typical for many of us in the U.S. to feel linguistic security in being "English-only" speakers. I don't like that about being American. I can't believe how many times I met people in Europe and in Central America who spoke three or four different languages. Yet in America, we can get away with just one language and feel absolutely fine about it. Right now, I've been studying espanol in my spare minutes because I'm bound for Mexico in a few weeks, and I want to talk to people instead of making them reach over the linguistic divide to talk to me in English. Once again, I'm seeing my own limits as a student of more than one language: struggling to remember how to pronounce words, conjugate verbs, remember articles (feminine of masculine).

What I also wondered as I read through the articles again is how the question of multilingualism is also constructed/affected by the way "foreign language" instruction is handled in the United States--postponed until later in a child's education when developmentally mastering a language is much harder? And there is also the question of America's position as a global superpower and the assumption that English will be the language that everyone will strive for because of America's economic position. Linguistic economics. So composition studies reflects those assumptions rather than being unique in its expectations. A reform of composition studies would likely necessitate a reform of the whole of language instruction (K-12, too) as well, but in the meantime, we could do a lot more as a field.

It was said that 1 in 4 people in the U.S. are multilingual. So if we sort that out in our classrooms, will we find the same statistics?

I have more to say and some notes to post, but it is late, and I have to get to sleep. Don't believe the time stamp on this blog posting. The time stamps have been way off lately.

Stalag 7A and Life as a POW during WWII

2006-11-18T17:23:00.000-05:00

Dr. Sidney Thomas of the Nottingham Senior Living Community in Jamesville, NY gave a captivating lecture to over 50 people this past Wednesday. The Writers' Group, which I have facilitated at the Nottingham for the past six years, sponsored his lecture, and I had the pleasure of introducing Dr. Thomas. Dr. Thomas was Private First Class Sidney Thomas of the U.S. Army infantry during WWII. He and four other men were captured by German soldiers in a foxhole after the allied invasion of Germany. They were transported to Stalag 7A where they were kept for five months until the end of the war. When Dr. Thomas was captured and interrogated by an English interpreter working for the German command, he was asked for his religious background. He answered with no compunction that he was Jewish despite his friends warning to not do so. He was treated no differently than the other soldiers, for the most part, the Geneva Convention mostly followed. He gave his name and rank, but no other information.

More on Stalag 7A is available at:

http://www.303rdbg.com/pow-camps.html#stalag7a

Stalag 7A was not a luxury hotel: near starvation rations, no heat, no showers. Dr. Thomas took one shower during the five month period. He later thinks about what the "showers" meant in Germany--the death campus and those told to strip and take a shower. Fortunately, the shower was just that--a real shower, not a cover for the gas chambers. He didn't mention lice as a daily feature of life, but we could imagine what no bathing meant. The prisoners lived on potato soup and ersatz bread. They were kept from starvation by eating food from the Red Cross packages that came through occasionally. They traded the cigarettes that were in the Red Cross packages for bread that German civilians had when they were sent out on work details to Munich.

Having met others who were kept in the prison camps who were mostly aviators (officers), I find it interesting to see how an enlisted infantry man like Thomas was treated. The officers usually were not sent out on work detail. The prisoners in 7A who were enlisted men (not officers) were regularly sent out on work detail to Munich, which had been severely bombed. They were supposed to pick up bomb debris, but as Sidney put it, they were so weak from hunger that they were totally ineffectual. They also were not going to help out the Nazi regime more than they had to, doing only the minimum. According to Sidney, the German guards, mostly middle-aged men, did not really care that much. They were not paying real close attention when the GIs traded cigarettes for bread or when they poked around at picking up debris. Sidney told of a German woman passing him and putting a bun in his pocket and saying nothing. He still wonders to this day what she was thinking and why she was helping him. He also talked to German women who asked him what American prison camps were like since they had husbands incarcerated there. "They are getting more to eat than you are, " said Sidney with conviction.

As the war approached the end, Sidney and some of his fellow GIs were told to live in railroad cars in the Munich train yards. The prison camp was overcrowded with prisoners who had been moved from other camps as the allies advanced. Sidney now looks back on the "train cars" with some trepidation for the cars were how so many Jews were transported to the death camps. But Sidney and his fellow GIs survived living in the train cars, locked in every night and only let out when there were bomb raids on the yards. This was the most terrifying moment for Sidney and fellow GIs as there were no bomb shelters for them. They hid in ditches while allied bombs fell. All miraculously survived.

As the Americans neared Munich, Sidney and his fellow GIs were able to move about more freely. The German guards deserted and even offered them their weapons, which they feared taking since doing so might be a provocation. The only time Sidney felt afraid was when they saw some uniformed SS men in the town center glaring at them. Fortunately, nothing happened. At that point, the Germans knew defeat was imminent, and he supposed the SS men had had enough of the killing or were out of ammunition that day.

I was struck by how unafraid Sidney said he was in German custody. The Geneva Convention still held then (look at what a shambles it is now), and the imprisoned men were confident of the end of the war and allied victory. While he was made to work, he was not threatened or goaded into working past capacity. The worst was the near starvation. The prisoners thought about food all the time. The main subject in the camp was food, not the usual "sex and gripes about the Army," which Sidney said was the standard fare when they were fighting the war. Other prisoners were kept there, too: French, English, Russians.

When the American motorized divisions roared into Munich, Sidney ran alongside a tank and waved and was recognized as an American GI by one of the soldiers. They soldier said: "Hey, buddy, where the hell are we? " The soldier on the tank had no clue they were taking Munich. This was typical, according to Sidney. "The grunts never knew where they were. Only the officers. You moved out and followed orders. Later, you figured out where you were after you got there."

Sidney's also described various ethical dilemmas he faced in the camp, which I can describe in another posting. Again, I feel fortunate to be part of the Nottingham community where presentations like this one--an interaction around life experience and living history--is a regular event. I also feel fortunate to have met a new colleague. Dr. Thomas is a retired SU faculty member (1961-1985 he taught here).

Writing Space(s)

2006-11-18T10:10:00.000-05:00

It's such a pleasure to read Jay Bolter's second edition of _Writing Space_. He skillfully moves between an analysis of digital culture and print culture, moving back and forth across time and history to the almost current moment. I like how he places papyrus and codex alongside hypertexts. The juxtaposition is highly effective as it demonstrates his principle of remediation. What I'd like to do here is highlight some definitions in the first couple of chapters. My purpose is to anchor myself moreso in some of his claims/statements.

First off, the idea of writing spaces and space, the focal point of the title and much of the book.

Bolter argues that the spatial metaphor for writing and reading is as culturally powerful now as it has ever been" (12). When we speak of the Internet, we talk about "cyberspace." We speak of "visiting" websites (introducing the idea of "traveling" from one place to another). I think of a recent post I wrote that invited people to visit "Tanya's place," her blog in the "blogosphere." A writing space "is a material and visual field, whose properties are determined by a writing technology and the uses to which that technology is put by a culture of readers and writers. A writing space is generated by the interaction of material properties and cultural choices and practices" (12).

Now what does this all mean for electronic or digital spaces? Bolter says "[t]he space of electronic writing is both the computer screen, where text is displayed, and the electronic memory in which the text is stored. Our culture has chosen to fashion these technologies into a writing space that is animated, visualy complex, and malleable in the hands of both writer and reader" (13). Later, when I blog the info. about hypertext and hypermediation, this idea will come out further.

Bolter notes at the end of Chapter 1 that "[w]ith any technique of writing--on stone, on clay, on papyrus or paper, and on the computer screen--the writer may come to regard the mind itself as a writing space. The behavior of the writing space becomes a metaphor for the human mind as well as for human social interaction" (13).

Also, present in Chapter 1 is a meditation on the types of rhetoric that are out there about "the future of print" (4-5). There are the enthusiasts who predict the "end of the book" and the triumphant ascendacy of digital environments (Kurzweil, for instance, see Bolter, pp. 4) and then there are critics who discount the idea that print culture will be overtaken by digital environments. Bolter cites writer Annie Proulx's 1994 comment that no one will want to read a novel on a "twitchy screen" (5). In some ways, Proulx is too easy a mark. It's easy enough to prove her wrong when electronic books are available and Questia online holds many scholarly books available for access through subscription (not to mention digital/hypertext novels). Among the critics are the critical boundary setters who insist on "sensible limits to the computerization of culture" (5), Slouka, for instance. There seem to be the elegaic apocalyptics such as Birkerts who lament "the passing of the traditional literary culture" (6).

Bolter has highlighted the extremes here, and his purpose is not to indicate whether he thinks one is true over the other. Rather, his point is to avoid siding with specific predictions or wallowing in them, but to instead ask a more complex and interesting question about how we can "try to understand the current relationship between print and digital media" (7).

"It is not a question of seeing writing as an external technology force that influences or changes cultural practice; instead, writing is always a part of culture. It is probably best to understand all technologies in this way; technologies do not determine the course of culture or society, because they are not separate agents that can act on culture from the outside" (19). In other words, we need to avoid technological determinism, the idea of "technology" as an external force driving society when it is a human creation with particular goals and outcomes (not necessarily visible or understandable). I hear this same kind of deterministic rhetoric in relation to the idea of the "market" (the economy) as somehow external (an external force) outside of human endeavor. The "market" will tell us x, y, or z.

"Individuals and whole cultures do mold techniques and devices to their own purposes, but the material properties of such techniques and devices also impose limitations on their possible uses" (20).

One medium "remediates" the other, e.g., when there was the shift from "handwritten codex to printed book" (23). This is the process Bolter refers to as remediation" when " a new medium takes the place of an older one, borrowing and reorganizing the characteristics of writing in the older medium and reforming its cultural space" (23). The new medium brings with it specific aspects of the old one but "also makes an implicit or explicit claim to improve on the older one" (23).

Finally "[t]he best way to understand electronic writing today is to see if as the remediation of printed text, with its claim to refashioning the presentation and status of alphabetic writing itself" (26).

As Bolter points out, we live in a media saturated culture where "claims of greater immediacy are constantly being made, as new and older media view for our attention" (26).

What I really like about his first two chapters is the attention to language and terminology AND rhetorics of technology. He doesn't fall into the well-worn trap of the critic or the determinist/enthusiast. He stays true to the research question that drives this project: understanding the relationship between print and digital texts.

There is way more to say, but I have to go to the craft store to find mermaid stickers for Autumn. More later....

Escaping to the library

2006-11-18T09:04:00.000-05:00

Chris and Susan's library stories (in response to my post on being read to) made me think of the libraries of my childhood: the Cashmere public library, the Vale Elementary school library, and the rural circulating library we had access to in my hometown. Here are some stories, some of which I've written down in the past and some newer ones:

The Cashmere public library is a building the size of a small two bedroom ranch house, its shelves filled with books shrouded in crackling plastic dust jackets. There were five sections: the children's, the young adult, the adult fiction, and the adult nonfiction and reference. Small tables with fake varnished wood tops and vinyl chairs provided seldom-used reading space. Sheila Ogle, town librarian, presided over all, her beehive bobbing efficiently over the stacks of books she checked out to schoolteachers, farm wives, migrant farm workers, and gangly farm kids like me. There was something open and refreshing about Sheila. The previous librarian whom my brother and I had nicknamed Mrs. Applefuss, had been a retired school teacher, stooped, frail with a gray bun, orthopedic oxfords, and a prominent red apple brooch that clasped the top button of her shirtwaist. Checking out a stack of books with Mrs. Applefuss had been an experience in correction as she frequently marked misspellings and omitted words on library check-out slips. In contrast, Sheila was young and chatted breezily as she checked out books. Petite and only twenty-six years old, she drove a 1969 lime green Camaro with wide mag wheels and white pinwalls. She liked to speed to work on Highway 2, dipping over the white line, a careless habit that earned her many tickets. Her husband Randy, a placid cornfed looking farm boy in the glass business often drove her to work to avoid the white line incidents.
Every weekday morning at nine a.m., Sheila, in her homemade miniskirts, unlocked the front door of the Cashmere library, her platform shoes making stompy clonks as she swung open the plate glass door, flung down the open sign, and began business for the day. I was one of Sheila's pet projects, a fixture in the young adult section of the library where I was determined at age twelve to read "the classics". Sheila was all for the idea of my education in the classics. When I showed her the "classic reading list" I had discovered on the back of the "What Katy Did" series, she encouraged the project, handing me copies of _Silas Marner_ and _Wuthering Heights_.
"Start here," she said, flicking back a strand of her streaked blond beehive.
I remember laboring over the books one dry summer on the farm, my jean clad legs swung over the side of the gold loveseat. Far away in a nineteenth century British world, people spoke proper, clipped English. What stayed with me most was Heathcliff's terribleness, his gnashing teeth.
"It's a terrible story," I remarked to Sheila after returning the book.
"It's a love story," she said.
Neither of us knew what we were talking about. Twelve years later I wrote my master's thesis on _Wuthering Heights_.
When I wasn't fumbling my way through the "classics," I read with abandon the books in the young adult fiction section. When I wasn't reading books, I hungered for them. I needed books like some of my classmates needed that first school recess of the day; they rushed outside as if they had been penned. Although I could choose books from the school library, I hesitated to exercise my full reading habits in front of my peers as my love of reading made me the object of teasing and ridicule.
The teasing began in the third grade when I checked out a four hundred page book about Paul Bunyan. I had wandered through the library, as usual, searching for books to take home to read in the evening. I passed shelf after shelf of thin, insubstantial books with bright racy covers and thin much-read tattered ones. I felt myself always in a state of perpetual disappointment at the "chapter books" that were thought appropriately challenging for elementary schoolers. Those chapters were mostly made of air, I concluded, as I sped over the white pages with scanty clumps of large print black letters and the large colored pictures or black and white drawings that were thought to be necessary for kids. I needed a long book. A book full of lines and lines of black print, few white spaces, and few or no pictures. The Paul Bunyan book sat plumply, importantly in the midst of the thin books. It felt solid and meaty in my hand. I checked it out and brought it back to the school room.

At the end of the day, I stood at the doorway of the classroom in the kid-line-up waiting to march out to the bus; idly, I wondered what my mother would cook for dinner that night. My big-headed but affable classmate Pat noticed the book as we stood waiting.
"How many pages?" he said, fingering the side of the book crooked in my arm.
I looked in the back and saw the book ended at page 430. "Four hundred and thirty,” I said, with no hint of bragging in my voice. I was as matter-of-fact about books as I was about peanut butter sandwiches and carrots sticks I found in my school lunch bag
. Pat seemed impressed, but Pat's companions the dark-haired, freckled David and sandy-haired Scott hooted: "430 pages, 430 pages?"
"How long will it take you to read that book?" Scott asked.
The question hung in the air as the dismissal bell rang, and we dashed through the hallways toward the bus area. My book crooked under my arm, I did my best to keep to a fast trot, far enough in front of Scott and David but not far enough to avoid their calls of "bookworm."
That night when I sat down in the living room after clearing the supper table, I read determinedly, my eyes flying over the words, scarcely caring about the story. It was full of embellishments and posturing, anyway: Paul chopping down whole forests with one stroke of his ax, eating huge stacks of flapjacks, fighting off bears and wolves. My father told better hunting stories. I fell asleep over the book, my mom shaking me gently at 10: 00 p.m. I climbed the bare wooden stairs to my room, the book heavy in my hand. With great effort, I awoke early the next morning and read more pages. I reached page 100 when it was time to get dressed and go off to school. Scott and David were waiting for me in the reading classroom that morning.
"How many pages, bookworm?"
"One hundred," I said primly, brushing past them on my way to my desk.
They danced a jig and slapped each other's hands, chanting "A hundred pages! A hundred pages! Bookworm read a hundred pages!"

As usual, in my reading course, I finished my vocabulary sheets, spelling test, and reading lesson early. I went to the back reading corner. The Paul Bunyan book felt heavier than I remembered it, and I looked longingly at the other books in the "book corner." I dutifully read 15 pages while my classmates finished their work and as Scott and David looked back and snickered .
Every school afternoon and evening that week, I read the Paul Bunyan book. I read it after school instead of playing outside, I read it after dinner instead of watching TV. I read it early in the morning while my sister still slept and the sun crept up over the ridge of the Wenatchee Mountains, the dawn making the room light enough for reading. During the day, I was tired and listless but resolved as I did my school assignments and played with classmates. I was getting the day's work out of the way. All my energies were focused on finishing the book. Each day for four days I read one hundred pages; I finished the last thirty on Friday morning--fifteen before breakfast, fifteen during reading class. I thumped the book down on the desk. and slumped in my school chair, my head awhirl with Paul Bunyan's and Babe the Blue Ox's feats.
"She's done," Scott whispered. She read the whole book!”
My other classmates took notice, and I was teased for weeks after that. "Eileen read 400 pages in four days. Bookworm!!" After that, the feat was increased to 600 to 800 then to 1,000 pages, my appetite for reading taking on elephantine proportions. For a while, when the reading class visited the school library, Scott and David followed me from shelf to shelf.. They peered over the stacks to comment on the thickness of the books I selected. After I set a book down, they'd sneak over and pick it up and quickly flip to the back page to see how long it was, announcing the page total and laughing. Although I pretended to ignore them, I could see that my love of reading simultaneously interested and bothered them.
Indeed, my reading habits made me unpredictable and unpopular with some of my classmates. I knew words that others didn't, and I had a habit of springing those words on them in sharp and unaccustomed ways. After a girl-boy chase and scuffle on the playground, little boys often scratched their heads, wondering why I'd called them "cretins" or "gargoyles," words I'd acquired form reading my parent's National Geographic magazines. I was always trying out those words when I could, stumbling over their pronunciations, rivaling in their importance without quite being sure what they meant. Words were my ladder, my way out.
My reading minimally disturbed my family; they worried I was too pale and deemed me the "house pansy" for the long afternoons I spent reading on the gold loveseat in the living room. But they liked to read, too, so their complaints were minor. On holidays and on long winter evenings, my father read whole books often in one sitting--long political biographies and historical works When he liked a book, he wouldn't put it down. "I'll annihilate it," he'd say and he'd stay up long past his farmer's prescribed bed time, even after my mom turned down the heat and the house grew cold and the only light shining was the living room lamp illuminating the floor where he lay on the carpet, his head propped up with a brown fake fur covered pillow. After midnight, he'd stagger up to bed, shaking with the cold, half-drunk on language and complex political plot and then he'd read in bed unless my mom protested too much.
My mother read pop-psychology books, diet books, books on theology , and turned us on to the phrases she was learning at the Yokefellow encounter groups she and my father attended at the Methodist church. We learned dream analysis, transactional analysis and "role-playing." We analyzed dream symbols and underwent meditation exercises. My mother grew more and more liberated as the weeks went by. She got a lock for her bedroom door and went up there every afternoon to spend time alone.
Sensing a break in the motherly status quo, I protested:. "What will happen if I fall down the stairs and break my leg?"
"I think I'd hear you fall down the stairs and scream even with the door locked," my mother said flatly. "You kids have to give me some time alone. I need to read and think."
I grew up believing all farm wives fought for the space to read and think.
My brother belonged to the Military Book Club, and he devoured books on World War II and piled up his hardback club acquisitions on the fake walnut paneled shelves in his room next to his ammunition reloading equipment. My brother lived for war stories, and his vocabulary was peppered with precise military terms often ill-pronounced. Confiscate was pronouned "confisticate" and magazine was pronounced "mazagine."
Even my sister, busy as she was with her piano playing and track meets, read her bible and fashion magazines, and she kept a journal under her mattress that I read and thought about, barely keeping myself from advising her about which friends she should keep and which she should eliminate.
Reading was a fortification against the sameness and monotony of farm life. A book took us places when we couldn't get there any other way, and it let us get into someone else's head for awhile.
Since my reading habits were such an object of fun for many of my classmates, I concealed the true volume of my reading by ordering titles from the rural circulating library book catalogue. My mother explained that the rural circulating library was an attempt to reach the kids and adults who lived "in the brush," too far away from libraries or book stores. I imagined these bookless kids living in log cabins or in lone farmhouses at the end of winding canyon roads. With the library just four miles away from the farm, I felt as if I were cheating by ordering those books and possibly denying them to farm kids like Trina and Sandy Wallace who lived up at the end of Ollalla Canyon without running water or electricity. The guilt only lasted so long. I received those paperback titles in brown paper envelopes like Christmas gifts from distant relatives. I fell upon them when I got home from school and read them long into the night. I read about teen girls and boys who attended boarding schools in Boston. I read about girls living in apartment buildings in New York City. They rode subways, walked city blocks, and dined at the automat. I was hungry for knowledge of how others my age lived. I hoarded these bits of information like a raven keeping a cache of shiny objects.

On Not Being Read To by Busy Parents

2006-11-15T00:51:00.000-05:00

As noted in a previous blog post, in 601 we spent some time interviewing each other and taking down literacy histories and sponsorship stories last week. While walking in to campus today, I realized one important factoid that I forgot to share with Tanya while she was interviewing me.

My parents did not read to me when I was growing up. I have no memories (nada) of being read to by my parents when I was a child. I guess I should play the sad soundtrack/wispy violin music to accompany that revelation. When my parents were not working on our family farm or doing things for my siblings and I, they were reading for their own edification and pleasure. I guess it was expected that I'd watch and absorb the value of reading and eventually read on my own. My earliest literacy/reading memories, as I told Tanya, were of my parents reading the newspaper. They read the local paper _The Wenatchee World_ filled with stories about farming and local news, but they also took _The Wall Street Journal_. I remember them avidly passing the paper and discussing it with each other. Later on, we (my siblings and I) read the papers with them.

I had well-worn children's books, but I don't remember my mom reading to me at bed-time, and my Dad was probably "laid out" (as we used to say) on the living room floor after his 12 hour work day. I don't feel particularly bad about the not being read to realization. At the time, I didn't know that parents would read to their kids-I didn't think of it as an option or something I could ask for. I don't remember asking my Mom to read to me or lamenting the fact she didn't. I just remember wanting to learn to read myself.

Interestingly, I spent a lot of time reading to my "dolls" when I was about eight years old. I have several theories about this. One, I didn't know what else to do with those damn dolls, so I made them into "students." Two, I liked the idea of reading to someone (even inert dolls) and sharing books (maybe an attempt to enact the "being read to" exchanges I didn't have with my parents).

When I was in the third and fourth grade, we were read to (chapter books) by our teachers after lunch everyday, and I have great memories of my classmates and I sitting around bawling about the ending of _Where the Redfern Grows_ or clapping after we heard the final lines of_Follow My Leader_, a great story about a young boy recently blinded and his seeing eye dog named "Leader." These "serial installments" were a highlight of our days, and I don't remember anyone really acting out much during those reading sessions.

Yes, I read to my daughter. But I'm noticing she is increasingly impatient with Tom and I reading to her. She grabs the book and wants to "read" the parts she likes. So she is taking over. She is also "spelling" words. Copying down what she sees in books, and I'm not forcing her to use MLA documentation....

Linguistic variety

2006-11-13T11:58:00.000-05:00

A useful summary/overview of linguists' responses to the Oakland proposal/ebonics, including McWhorter.

http://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/ebonics/LingAnthro1.html

Check out Tanya's place

2006-11-12T16:27:00.002-05:00

Head on over to Tanya's place at SecuringaSpace so you can see what she has in store for us tomorrow in 601.
She has some engaging questions that will keep us going and posted the CFP for the conference that inspired and solicited the _Rhetoric and Ethnicity_ volume. I've hopped around on the blogs, and I see Laurie is on a roll on her 601 project--she has posted some really useful notes on her Independent Reading and Writing Project. I also see others doing the same. It's exciting to see the reading/writing projects starting to appear on the blogs.

One question I asked on Trish's blog was how "whiteness" is at work in this collection either as a concept or as an identity construction.

I'm also curious about the term ethnic rhetorics in relation to cultural rhetorics? Is ethnic rhetorics a subset of cultural rhetorics? Why not use the term cultural rhetorics instead? Too non-specific?

Robert Danberg has posted some interesting comments in relation to my Smitherman entry. He raises McWhorter's work and his disagreement with Smitherman. Take a look.

A larger question I have is what role does the conference proceedings play in the field vs. an edited collection conceived in a non-conference setting? I'm curious about the different rhetorical situations that each respond to and the different kinds of intellectual projects/processes that result. A number of you commented on the conference paper feel to many of the papers--acknowledging it as a limitation and a genre issue to be mindful of while reading. When I've talked to scholars about things they have published in conference proceedings, I usually hear a bit of an apology--"it was a conference paper" kind of remarks. What is the value of publishing more occasioned writing? How is the intellectual community/interactive feeling of a conference represented in a proceedings (or not)?

A Rich and Flexible Resource

2006-11-11T23:00:00.000-05:00

First off some definitions seem in order. Keith Gilyard in his "Preface" to _Rhetoric and Ethnicity_ defines ethnic rhetoric as language use "inflected with an ethnic difference" (v). He breaks down the definition further to account for "two directions for study":
ETHNIC RHETORIC
1) "attention to ethnic people employing any style of rhetoric, and 2) concern for verbal forms and discursive strategies unique or characteristic of particular ethnic assemblages" (v).

CRITICAL ETHNICITY
Gilyard discusses the debate over the use of race as a terminology. He argues that "given how saturated with conceptions of race our society is, that utilizing the semantic term race is unavoidable if one is truly interested in communicating with large numbers not only to contest racial reasoning but also to contest, in a concrete way, racial hierarchies" (ix). Critical ethnicity is a term Gilyard uses to describe "a search for the elements in various ethnic narratives that have the most political potential in a push for a more humane society, and it represents an impulse to share the fruits of that search with our students" (ix).

The volume that follows this introduction, then, is a enactment of critical ethnicity, addressing essay across two areas: History and identity and Pedagogy. As a conference proceedings from the Penn State Rhetoric conference, the volume gives a multi-faceted glimpse of the possibilities of ethnic rhetorics. Because this volume is a proceeding, though, we often only get a quick glimpse of an argument or a critical framework. I found myself wishing the authors had had more room to expand their thoughts and develop more historical background and analysis.

I found Smitherman's essay to be the most complete and compelling of the ones we read as a class. In "Meditations on Language, Pedagogy, and a Life of Struggle," Smitherman discusses the debates over the Oakland, CA school board's Resolution on Ebonics (issued in December 1996). She discusses the furor and reaction to the proposal while, at the same time, narrating a running history of language politics interwoven with some personal stories. As she points out, the use of "ebonics" was not radical: "They were simply proposing to teach the students and literacy and communication skills in the Language of Wider Communication in the United States, also known as 'standard English'" (5). The idea was to "use the students' home language as a bridge to move them to competence in 'standardized English.'" (5). Woven throughout her analysis are the reactions of prominent public figures who reacted negatively against the proposal. Interestingly, most of the responses seem to believe the school is trying to keep their students from success. Bill Cosby's infamous "Igno-Ebonics" comment...Ebonics in the eyes of these commentators is simly bad English, and the school district is racist for trying to utilized a language pedagogy that acknowledges the validity of students' home languages. In other words, language variety is perceived as a threat. The irony is that later in the article Smitherman shows that the innovative work of linguists and educators has had an effect on everyday people (p.11) when she cites an predominantly African American call-in radio show where the callers prove more informed than the host about language issues.

Ebonics, though, is a "term that has been around since 1973, having emerged during a caucus of Black scholars at a conference convened in St. Louis Missouri, by Dr. Robert Williams" (6). Ebonics, as Smitherman, explains "is not to be subsumed under 'English.' Rather it should be considered a 'parent' language in its own right, with 'descendant' languages in a number of regions around the world" (7). Turner's research on the impact of West African languages on the descendants of slaves in the Sea Island Communities of South Carolina showed a link between African languages and the English the slave descendants who lived there were speaking. These patterns were found more widely beyond the islands, too, a United States Ebonics (USEB).

Given the furor over Ebonics, Smitherman calls for scholarly and pedagogical work that understands "how and when the speaker or writer makes the decision to change the linguistic flow," citing Gilyard's _Voices of the Self_ as groundbreaking in addressing code-switching. She calls for a "systematic study of the language of Black women:" black women preachers, in particular. The biggest change she argues for, however, is that "high school and elementary teachers" need national credentialing standards that involve a course in language diversity. Yes, and college teachers, too.

As I read the article, I thought, too, of the need for a critical public scholarship on language issues--one that goes beyond the usual miss-or-mr. manners approach to language _Eats, Shoots and Leaves_ being a popular example or William Safire's usual pomp and bluster (sometimes he was/is funny). I think Smitherman is right that linguists and educators have had an impact on everyday folks' thinking about language, but when so many notables--Maya Angelou, for one, Jesse Jackson--speak out against ebonics, there is a huge gulf and a general public illiteracy about language issues and language variety.

I remember discussing these issues with my students in 205 course in 1997. I gave them an article about the actual methods being used in the school district, and they were incredulous that the controversy had blown up so much. As one student said, "this is a good teaching technique--common sense, in some ways."

When have people ever been "common sense" about acknowledging the richness of language when it comes to education? Most of us are schooled to think of language as a limitation, a constraint, not as a rich and flexible, multiple resource. I love Brandt's notion of literacy as a resource. I love Smitherman's discussion of language as multi-faceted, flexible, and as an instrument of beauty and expression.

Smitherman's essay was also beautifully written. I loved her line about her dad's old car "smoking" and "catching a flat." Her report of her grandmother's use of language: "If you don't do x or y," I'll beat you from Amazing Grace to Floating Opportunity" or " Genesis to Revelation."

How does our lower and upper-division writing curriculum promote an exploration language diversity? I'm assigned the Politics of Language course next year, so I'm hoping I can do more work in this area.

A State of Recovery

2006-11-11T16:44:00.000-05:00

I'm still in a state of recovery from the cold of the year. It has been an awful experience. It started last Saturday and has remained with me, peaking on Wednesday when I was practically comatose in my living room recliner.

Anyway, I think I'm on the mend, but I'll defer my bigger blog entry on the Gilyard and Nunley readings until later this evening.

I do want to give a shout for Terri's blog where she posted her responses to the Deb Brandt questions. The 601 class interviewed each other about their reading and writing experiences and literacy sponsors on Tuesday (we reported out our "findings" to the class as a whole). Terri was out sick, so she posted her responses on the blog, and they echo many of the themes we discussed in class. We saw similar patterns across our literacy experiences as well as some interesting/unique stories and entry points into engaging literacy:
--parents sponsoring our literacies early on (most of us were read to by parents)
--an early interest in books and reading and even an "obsession"--some of us got into trouble for reading too much or going overboard
--interest in writing fairly early on and some early successes, in some cases

There were a lot of interesting factoids, too, about childhood writing and reading experiences:
--Tanya had early writing success--she won a writing contest at age six.
--Immy grew up in an intellectual family--her father was an English professor and her mother also was a writer/thinker.
--Laura was writing letters early on to public officials and reading history voraciously.
--Trish and her sister taught the children in their neighborhood how to read and learn.
--Laurie and her Dad were reading philosophy together and discussing it.
--I thought it would be a good idea at age six to copy down the words of library books I liked so I didn't have to keep checking them out of the library. My mother explained that this was plagiarism, and that it was "illegal." I was crestfallen and feared being arrested (I thought illegal meant you could be arrested immediately), so I stopped.

I'll let everyone post their notes/follow-ups, but it was a productive discussion, and we wished we had more time to take down our literacy histories. We also wished we could find ways to ask our students some of these questions. All of us left the discussion with a healthy respect for all the labor Brandt performed with 80 interviews and data to analyze/interpret. A huge amount of work.

We also discussed aspects of the Feminism and Composition readings, and I went on a historical tour/timeline of feminism that covered the blackboard in the seminar room. I refer to it as the "Central New York as hallowed feminist ground lecture." Trish and Tanya say they have notes about it, so if they would post the timeline at some point.....

More later....