Location, Location, Location

A bit of a preface is needed for this entry. I'm starting to blog with my CCR 601 course this semester. We're all establishing individual blogs, and we'll blog our responses to readings, notes, ideas about class projects, etc.

This week we focused on the idea of situating/locating ourselves in relation to composition and rhetoric as a field. We read Part I of Lisa Ede's book _Situating Composition_ , Louise Phelp's encyclopedia entry on "Composition Studies," and the proposal for the start-up of the CCR doctoral program. Location was the main focus of all the readings; how do we locate the field? What are its parameters and spaces and concerns? How do we locate ourselves in those spaces?

Ede’s discussion of location is drawn from feminist theory, namely Adrienne Rich’s important essay (1984) “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” reprinted in Rich’s Blood, Bread, and Poetry collection. Understanding where the subject is located socially and materially in a body, in place, and time is a hallmark feature of feminist thought. Indeed, Ede discusses transnational feminist theorist Caren Kaplan’s work on location, quoting her as saying on p. 28 that location is “discontinuous, multiply constituted, and traversed by diverse social formations” (Questions 182). Ede goes on to say in her own words that location is “multiply constituted and cannot helpfully be characterized as a single place or identity” (28). Her point is not to say that location is a matter of discussing the local, but it is an inquiry, a “rhetorically and materially grounded effort to think through some issues of scholarly practice in composition” (28).

Ede attempts to “locate” herself and her scholarly practices and institutional life in her opening scenarios and in her careful attention to the ways that specific narratives of composition have “located” the field and us in particular ways. She is interested in questioning and interrogating those “locations.” She cites landmark studies such as Crowley’s Composition in the University and Miller’s Textual Carnivals as those that name where we are and why, but she resists pointing toward those studies as the definitive answer.

What I like here is her careful, painstaking work to try to question what our field is and where we might locate it. In many ways, her point is that we can’t fix the field because where we locate it depends on our own situated discourses, vantage points, interests, institutional histories.


The same kind of fluidity and flux in naming and accounting for composition studies can be found in Phelps’ s encyclopedia entry. I always marvel at the multi-layered accounting for composition studies that happens in this entry. I sense in Phelps’s entry a similar commitment to the idea of location—locating ideas in traditions, in contexts, in competing discourses and tensions across those discourses: “No brief definition can capture the complexity and indeterminacy of composition studies in its current stage of development” (123). Expansion and differentiation.
Phelps notes that we seek to explain and impose order on composition studies by deploying the strategies of dominance, inclusion or pluralism, and dialogue. We try to impose order by mapping, creating dichotomies, defining key concepts, and creating schematic histories (128-29). Much of this course (601) tries to do this work, but, as Phelps points out, privileging multimodality and diversity in approaches—a “radical pluralism_-- is valuable and so is the impulse toward dialogue—keeping open a play of understandings about what composition studies is and where it is going (129).
“There is a growing sense that, in a disciplinarity so unstable, scholars must construct the field anew and must negotiate their constructions continually with those of others to achieve some common (but always evolving) understanding of composition studies” (130). I think this is an apt way of describing what goes on in our graduate program and at professional conferences; the stable ground is the constant inquiry and negotiation. This constant inquiry, though, can make people feel as if the ground is fault-ridden, a virtual peace of Southern California, constantly shifting on its plates.

Phelps works us out of this sense of “cacophony” into a metaphor we can follow: a river with branching streams and tributaries feeding it and a sense of common tensions and distinctive features of composition. Thus we move out of a sense of expanding possibilities and openness to a sense of common features and problems. Phelps is careful to avoid mapping and hierarchizing these tensions and features, though. I’m interested in Phelps’s idea that the American origins of composition studies give it a distinctive character and flavor: the constant reinvention, borrowing, sense of individual choice. I wonder, though, if nationality is as key as it might seem to be. Perhaps a great factor is capitalism, which encourages the social relations of the field as much as nationalism might.

Like Ede, Phelps is interested in interrogating practice. “Like concepts of writing, practice. . . has expanded its reference, becoming a generic term for symbolic activities and for professional and everyday activities that share with rhetoric such features as uncertainty…..”(133). She raises the idea of praxis (133).


The CCR proposal enacts an understanding of the field that is based, in large part, on the idea of situated practices.” There are a lot of echoes in the proposal to Phelps and Ede’s notions of situating and locating oneself in relation to the field. I quote from the proposal at length:

• Characterizing activities, functions, conceptualizations, and modes of teaching and learning written language as culturally and historically specific

The discussion of “cultural rhetoric” together with the concept of “situated practices” indicate a focus in the program on investigating the dynamic, dialectic relations among socially organized language activities, individual language users and events, and their cultural contexts. This theme directs attention to questions like these: how practices interact with (not simply respond to) theory; how local phenomena of discourse (practical instances and accomplishments of writing or talk) connect to global “contexts” (settings, group identities, ideologies, institutions); how writers and texts act upon and constitute contexts as well as being embedded in and shaped by them; and how participants of different cultures perform and understand communication behavior differently, or transport such culture-specific knowledge into intra- or intercultural situations. [25] The curriculum poses such questions pervasively, not only about writing activities but about rhetorical teaching, learning, criticism, and theory itself. This theme is reinforced in part by the requirement for historical perspective, discussed below (section I.C.3.d).

CCR, then, as it was designed was to encourage a situated, contextual, culturally aware understanding of writing, rhetoric, literacy, and communication. I don’t think we always get there, but the program itself pulls through the thread of location. I worry that situated practices often get read as “situating theories,” though. Another issue to discuss!