Digital Ethical Dilemmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

-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!

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

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?

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?

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

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

Eileen’s Researcher Profile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rieff "Mediating Materiality and Discursivity"

Mary Jo Rieff, “Mediating Materiality and Discursivity”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Ever wondered what Progymnasmata is?

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

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

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

Kairos

Ethos

Dissoi logoi

Progymnastama

Spirit

Epideictic

Arrangement

Memory

Situation

Delivery

Ecology

Rhetorical analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions I have thus far:

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

Discourse analysis meets textual analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key Citations:

Fairclough. 1995. _Critical Discourse Analysis_
Huckin and Selzer.

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

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

691 blogging

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

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

Facebook takes the wind out of a blog

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!