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?
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
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?
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Researcher Profile
Eileen’s Researcher Profile
My research interests go back to the particular place and locale of the family farm where I grew up—an apple and pear orchard in eastern Washington. I grew up in a household where business, economics, and labor issues were discussed over the dinner table and where the workplace was right outside the door and the business office was next to the kitchen. Labor problems were the core of many of our discussions at the family dinner table—how to get the work done and how to address the needs and concerns of those working for and with us to grow and harvest our crops. The weather and physical conditions were another big topic of discussion—how do we deal with forces that are beyond our control: rain or lack of it, hail that might destroy a crop in 30 seconds, frost that might come and kill the buds at bloom time, pests that my father had to deal with through increasingly noxious and environmentally damaging pesticides (we were regularly sent Christmas presents by pesticide companies!). And national and global markets were an abiding discussion. What would the price of apples or pears be at a given moment? I remember my Dad endlessly consulting a yellow newsletter he received from the Washington apple commission about crop prices. Where would the crop be sold—nationally or through export to Taiwan or Japan? How could we modernize the cooperative warehouse by father participated in so that we could compete with other warehouses and packing sheds? I grew up with questions like these echoing through my head—no wonder I became a dept administrator.
The workers/hired hands lived a stone’s throw from our house in housing that we maintained, and the boundaries between our family home, the workplace (the orchard), and the labor camp where many of the workers lived were permeable. Everything was intertwined, not as separate as it would be if one’s business were a commute into a city by bus or down the street. When people came from the city to visit, they were often startled by workers of varied shapes and sizes traipsing through our house to use the phone, bend my Mom’s ear about this or that problem in the housing units, and/or socialize with us and ask for help on varied needs. My mother was a social worker, in many respects. Many of the men that worked for us (and most were men) were vets of WWII, the Korean Conflict, and the War in Vietnam and their lives had been torn apart by military service, war, and often by the alcoholism that followed. Many had undiagnosed PTSD, and I remember the stories of their war-time service, which were often awful. Many had been drafted and sent off at 19 or 20 to fight and die. The war changed the way they saw the world and their lives, and they became part of the migrant waves of labor: picking CA vegetables, Florida oranges, WA apples. Many of these workers worked for my parents off and on for most of their adult lives.
I became interested in material conditions because material conditions were the stuff of day-to-day life: how do we hire enough people to harvest a crop, provide decent housing, deal with various needs, bail workers out of jail, and deal with broken lives. How do we get the work done in conditions that we couldn’t always-often-control.
We all contributed in the work of the family, but gender was a main way our labor was split between the farm and the house. I became interested in and resistant to the gendered labor of our family farm and my father’s sexism. And I watched my Mom, a college educated woman, who had given up a career as a teacher for her life as a farm wife and farm manager, deal, at times, with the anger and frustration of not having the public career she trained for and prepared for in college. My mom dealt with a lot of sexism in the farming community, especially after my Dad died and she was widowed at 51. She had to start driving tractors and bossing crews with my brother. Some of the men didn’t want to take a pay check from a woman or want to deal with a woman. She pushed my sister and I to be educated and independent and not rely on others for economic support and to fight against sexism.
Literacy was a big part of our family life. My parents read the Wall Street Journal and the local daily paper. They were inveterate readers—my Dad of political biography and my mother of psychological and spiritual texts. While they did physical labor for a living, they were constantly drawing on reading as solace, entertainment, and excitement. They liked books, writers, thinkers. They were political conservatives in the old sense (the party of Lincoln) and shared the agrarian sensibility of Thomas Jefferson.
All of this “experience” was buried in my head and in my body for years. I spent four years in college at University of Washington studying literary texts and criticism and leaving the farm behind (or so I though). In many ways, I WAS leaving the farm behind in choosing to attend the university in the biggest city in the state: Seattle. I deliberately avoided the agricultural-focused state university in eastern WA state—the place my parents, brother, sister, and whole extended family went to college. As a budding “literary critic” and an English major/writing minor, I did the usual work of close reading and analysis of themes and images in texts—New Criticism. I read the “canon” and then later was mad that I read so few women writers as an undergraduate; I felt that I had been cheated by a sexist education of great books by great men. I started reading Woolf when I was a junior and finished all of her novels in graduate school.
I started encountering feminist criticism in my senior year and just started to scratch the surface with it. When I started the master’s program I waded knee-deep into reading feminist literature--feminist literary analysis and the feminist theory canon at the time. I read French feminist theory, feminist literary criticism, and Anglo-American feminist theory. I took a couple of graduate seminars steeped in feminist theory and women writers. Rhetoric became an interest of mine in my final year of the master’s program, and I began to read bits and pieces of rhetorical theory and began to think more like a rhetorical critic than a literary critic. I wrote a thesis on surveillance and scopophilia, the two narrative frames in _Wuthering Heights_. I was interested in how stories were told in the novel through narrative framing—stories within stories. In retrospect, I can see I was trying to understand the concept of rhetorical framing.
I also started teaching a local community college as an adjunct after graduation. I learned about the world of freeway flyers, those who work at multiple colleges and piece together full-time appointments on multiple campuses without healthcare benefits or job security. These were women mostly eking out a living by teaching and many were fantastic writing teachers. I was just a novice learning from them and learning how to survive the day-to-day. While I sat in the office, graded papers, and engaged in shop talk about teaching and work, I was applying a sort of ethnographic perspective: what was this strange world of college teaching? Where was the pipe smoking professor of yore who hung around in a book lined office and talked about “lit-ra-ture.” Instead, we adjunct faculty sat around in tiny offices crammed with desks and comp textbooks, conferenced students cheek to jowl, and talked about what we were going to do in class the next day. Office mates confided in me about various things—teaching part-time for twenty years, enduring cervical cancer, memories of grad school in the Midwest. So many of those conversations are still deeply etched in my memory. I wondered: What was thing called teaching part-time? And why were there mostly women doing it?
I became interested in the gendered labor patterns in our field—the feminization of composition as Susan Miller and Sue Ellen Holbrook call it. I decided I wanted to write a dissertation about “feminization.” But where to begin?
At the time I began my research in the early nineties, there was not a wide array of work on feminist composition or feminist rhetorical studies that I could draw upon, although there was rich history of much earlier feminist communication scholarship. Elizabeth Flynn’s 1988 article “Composing as a Woman,” the first direct article in composition studies on feminism, had only appeared three years earlier. A book chapter and article by feminist scholars Susan Miller and Sue Ellen Holbook—and a handful of precursor articles on gender, pedagogy, and language (see Ritchie and Boardman 10-14)—referred to the idea that composition studies was a “feminized” field and explored gender, pedagogy, and the composing process.
Using those scholarly resources as a guide and inspiration, I worked across a range of disciplines to assemble an approach to my project on women’s labor as part-time teachers of writing that would be productive, poring over the literature on feminisms and labor studies, studies of sex discrimination in higher education by feminist scholars, studies of part-time labor from a variety of disciplines, Marxist and social feminist theories on class and labor, the rhetoric of inquiry, the sociology of the emotions, and institutional histories of writing and writing instruction. As I worked to assemble a research framework and discussed these approaches with my dissertation director (Lynn Worsham), I often felt like a bricoleur, cobbling together bits and pieces from a variety of fields and working hard to structure, synthesize, and assemble a coherent, if not complete, perspective on women’s work as part-time teachers of writing courses.
While my methods were often textually and rhetorically oriented, as I examined the common arguments and tropes about women’s work as teachers in documents, labor statements, and studies of part-time labor, I also extended my methods to include qualitative research: interviews with part-time women faculty about their responses and reactions to their working conditions and the ways that gender factored into their thinking about their work. Thus, my research was both multi-modal and interdisciplinary. It required that I be conversant in the work in my home discipline, but also conversant in the ways that other disciplines might pose the question of gender and part-time labor.
The process of doing this research was not seamless or familiar, but often radically defamiliarizing as I came to terms with other disciplines’—and my own’s-- research methods and methodologies. Having training in rhetorical theory was a benefit as it allowed me to analyze how different disciplines frame research questions, evaluate evidence, and make knowledge claims. As a feminist scholar trained to think about the politics of location (see Rich), I also thought about how disciplines frame their inquiries by defining specific power relations and worldviews. Undergoing this process of working across disciplines was often painful, intimidating, and overwhelming, but it gave me an appreciation for the challenges of interdisciplinary research, and it helped me to develop the habit of being accountable and self-reflexive about my choices as a researcher.
The struggle I underwent to launch my work was hardly unique; in fact, one could call it a feminist rite of passage; numerous accounts of feminist research tell a similar story of struggle, borrowing, invention, and adaptation. What seemed clear about my work as a feminist scholar—and that of my colleagues striving to do similar kinds of work—was that it required a mobility, flexibility, adaptability, and awareness of terms, concepts, and power relations—an awareness of the rhetorical nature of knowledge–that was both taxing and invigorating. The work I did as a feminist scholar also fed into my life as a feminist community member as I agitated for reproductive rights, for workplace equity, and for peace and social justice.
In a co-edited book that I'm publishing with K.J. Rawson, we discuss the idea of feminist rhetorical methods and methodologies as movement, as motion, and as action. I argue, as do others in the volume, that "[a]s feminist researchers, we are often in motion between our various standpoints and positions, between our disciplinary locations in the academy, and between the specific texts, contexts, places, spaces, communities and institutions we engage. Feminist rhetorical studies and interdisciplinary feminist studies as fields of inquiry are in constant motion as scholars debate and revise previously held notions of feminisms and rhetorics, introduce new subjects of research, new sites of inquiry, and engage methods, methodologies, and pedagogies in a variety of ways. Rhetorical studies is also in motion. As Ilene Crawford argues in the book, rhetoric is not only 'the study and practice of how language achieves its effects, i.e., persuasion,' but it can be a study and practice of our movement with/in rhetorics and with/in the world. Crawford asks us to consider our investments in our research methods and methodologies: 'What moves us through time and space? Physically? Emotionally? Intellectually? How are these three registers of movement connected and interdependent?' She reminds us that our work as researchers involves movement across time and space, but also across disciplines, communities and in, some cases, across the borders of the nation-state."
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
She points to North’s categorization of ethnography as a method that has not taken composition by “storm” and claims that there have been a number of ethnographic studies since North made that proclamation. However, she argues that ethnography as a “pedagogical method” has not been theorized enough. Her article “attempts to fill the gaps in our field’s focus on ethnography by exploring the intersection of contemporary rhetorical genre studies and critical ethnography and by exploring the implications for teaching” (36).
Key quotes:
She discusses genre as “dynamic discursive formations used to carry out particular social actions, language practices, and interpersonal relations. AS the embodiments of these social actions, they are tools for accessing cultures” (37). Genres connect to ethnography study: “Cultures or communities use genres to engage in rhetorical action and to carry out social purposes, and their uses of genres reproduces the social values and ideologies embedded in the genres” (37).
“Genres as social actions, give shape and substance to cultural sites and in turn enable and enhance the communicative actions of the participants in that site” (37).
How does genre relate to ethnography? “By studying genres, ethnographers can gain access to both the production and reproduction of an organization’s knowledge, power, and cultural perspectives”(39).
Ethnography originated in “travel writing” (dating back to Herodotus) (41).
Major Claims:
A good piece of this article is connecting genre to ethnography. She brings it around to students and why ethnographic writing or literacy research is valuable to the classroom/student learning: “Students not only gain access to a valuable research genre that functions for various academic communities, but they also learn a genre that is fluid and dynamic rather than the often-rigid and stabilized genres of the writing classroom” (44). Students doing ethnographic research are transformed into “social actors.”
Because ethnography is time-consuming and immersive, its parameters must be adapted for use in the classroom. The term “mini-ethnographies” (Bishop) is used to describe more focused , short-term studies undertaken by students.
“Unlike textual analysis, genre analysis examines the dynamic interaction of text and context, asking students to simultaneously examine the recurrent features of genres and the disruptions of these repeated rhetorical actions as well as to interpret and analyze the ways In which these features reflect and reveal these situations” (45).
She claims genre analysis can be used to help students master mini-ethnographies, providing an example of a student who did a mini-ethnography of the law community (46). In doing this work, students learn genres as well—field notes, activity logs, chronologies, progress reports, interview transcripts, maps (46).
The argument here is that the “genre of ethnography makes visible the rhetorical action of the classroom community—which becomes a research community, a culture of inquiry— as well as enacting and embodying the action of communities and cultures under investigation” (48). Genre analysis seems to be a way to make ethnography work for students, in other words.
This is a piece well-informed by the scholarship on ethnography in composition studies. I also think that ethnography can be a useful tool in the classroom. At the same time, I would like to get a sense of the limitations and challenges of engaging ethnography with students. She hints at that with the citation of Zebroski’s article. Zebroski was a professor here at SU, and we had a huge emphasis on ethnography in the Writing Program in the nineties. There was a mini-ethnography assignment in WRT 105. It was an approach that many people liked, and we even had an “ethnography fair” in the program where students did workshops with instructors on how to do ethnographic work. As Zebroski notes in his piece, students did often have trouble analyzing the patterns in their data and the language implications as well. Some of the accounts students wrote were more descriptive than analytical and the claims about community and language practices ranged widely in skill and insight.
Would more of an emphasis on genre analysis have made a difference? Yes and no. Some of the sites students chose to study did not have much of an emphasis on producing actual genres. Rieff’s piece assumes that generic activity is a focus. What if it is not? Is genre analysis as a method a panacea to short-term ethnography?
Those of us who teach service learning classes often have our students use methods for research that border on the ethnographic. We’re not doing mini-ethnographies per se, but through the use of reflections and journals and observations, we deploy some of these methods. What I’d like to see Rieff do more with here is an investigation of location, position, and power relations with respect to the position of the student. What are some of the challenges of students doing ethnographies that involve genre analysis?
Key works Cited:
Miller
Bazerman
Cintron
Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner
Zebr
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Ever wondered what Progymnasmata is?
TJ reminded us all of the joys and pleasures of Progymnasmata. Ever wondered what it means?
from http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Pedagogy/Progymnasmata/Progymnasmata.htm
"A set of rudimentary exercises intended to prepare students of rhetoric for the creation and performance of complete practice orations (gymnasmata or declamations). A crucial component of classical and renaissance rhetorical pedagogy. Many progymnasmata exercises correlate directly with the parts of a classical oration."
Melissa pointed to the idea of having a "lexicon" for rhetorical usage
Other rhetorical terms ventured in class as ones class members would use in offering a rhetorical analysis:
Kairos
Ethos
Dissoi logoi
Progymnastama
Spirit
Epideictic
Arrangement
Memory
Situation
Delivery
Ecology
from http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Pedagogy/Progymnasmata/Progymnasmata.htm
"A set of rudimentary exercises intended to prepare students of rhetoric for the creation and performance of complete practice orations (gymnasmata or declamations). A crucial component of classical and renaissance rhetorical pedagogy. Many progymnasmata exercises correlate directly with the parts of a classical oration."
Melissa pointed to the idea of having a "lexicon" for rhetorical usage
Other rhetorical terms ventured in class as ones class members would use in offering a rhetorical analysis:
Kairos
Ethos
Dissoi logoi
Progymnastama
Spirit
Epideictic
Arrangement
Memory
Situation
Delivery
Ecology
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Rhetorical analysis
I must admit that rhetorical analysis is my preferred approach to doing my own research and also a research approach I teach all the time in my undergraduate writing courses.
Consistently, my three books (fourth on the way) take up rhetorical analysis and also feminist analysis (esp feminist analysis in my first book and forthcoming book with K.J. Rawson). But I've worked with other methods to address my research questions--interviews, surveys, and even quantitative research (lite version for my work as a Chair/WPA).
More recently, I've been trying to think through how transnationalism affects how we do work in rhetoric in our field --what parameters and boundaries we imagine for our work in rhetoric (this resulted in the special issue co-edited with Wendy Hesford on transnational feminist rhetoric for _College English_). But rhetorical analysis remains a core feature of my work. So it's a comfortable fit to read the four articles this week. It's also useful to see how varied rhetorical analysis can be--
Some questions and quotes stood out this week--quotes that capture the capaciousness and all-inclusive nature of rhetoric and rhetorical analysis:
What is rhetorical analysis?
"By extension, rhetorical analysis or rhetorical criticism can be understood as an effort to understand how people within specific social situations attempt to influence others through language" (238). Selzer distinguishes between textual analysis (analysis of a symbolic act on its own terms) and contextual analysis, which seemed to be tied to intertextuality as Bazerman would discuss it (283).
What is rhetoric?
"As its definitions suggestions [Foss defining rhetoric as communication], the scope of rhetoric is broad. Rhetoric is not only written and spoken discourse; indeed, speaking and writing make up only a small part of our rhetorical environment. Symbols assume a variety of forms; any message, regardless of the form it takes on the channel of communication it uses is rhetoric and is appropriate to study in rhetorical criticism. Rhetoric includes then, non-discursive or nonverbal symbols as well as discursive or verbal ones. Speeches, essays, conversations, poetry, novels, stories, television programs, films, art, architecture, plays, music, dance, advertisements, furniture, public demonstrations, and dress are all forms of rhetoric" (Foss 4).
How does one do a rhetorical analysis?
"Once the basic feature of a rhetorical situation are identified or reconstructed, a rhetorical analysis can proceed in many different ways. It can follow the arrangement of the analyzed text closely, characterizing the multiple effects sequentially encountered by the audience. or it can be organized according to any of the systems of division offered in rhetoric such as genre features (good for mixed modes), by appeal, by lines of argument, by small-scale divides such as figures of speech" (Fahnestock and Secor 185).
Is there a better and worse way?
"Defining rhetorical criticism is akin to defining rhetoric: everyone seems to have a slightly different version, and that difference is both necessary and significant" (DeWinter 389).
What counts as worthy to analyze?
"What we choose to rhetorically critique is as important as how we choose to do it" (DeWinter 397). This is my favorite quotation.
Questions I have thus far:
--What definition(s) of rhetoric and theories of rhetoric fuel our understandings and applications of rhetorical analysis?
--What are our key terms for rhetorical analysis? Where do they emerge from? What traditions? What do we attach ourselves to by using specific terms and not others? For instance, how do our analyses of rhetorical texts in our own local contexts account for national, global, transnational contexts?
--Amber's question on Justin's blog is a good one--how do we read people instead of texts? How is rhetorical analysis suited for different contexts besides textual analyses? How do we read events, actions, and communities rhetorically?
--What is the role of "vernacular" rhetoric, the rhetoric of the everyday, and of talk, signs, symbols, things that aren't text in the traditional sense?
--How do digital texts challenge us to think about rhetoric differently (hearkening back to Wysocki)?
I'll have more questions, but these are significant ones for now.
Consistently, my three books (fourth on the way) take up rhetorical analysis and also feminist analysis (esp feminist analysis in my first book and forthcoming book with K.J. Rawson). But I've worked with other methods to address my research questions--interviews, surveys, and even quantitative research (lite version for my work as a Chair/WPA).
More recently, I've been trying to think through how transnationalism affects how we do work in rhetoric in our field --what parameters and boundaries we imagine for our work in rhetoric (this resulted in the special issue co-edited with Wendy Hesford on transnational feminist rhetoric for _College English_). But rhetorical analysis remains a core feature of my work. So it's a comfortable fit to read the four articles this week. It's also useful to see how varied rhetorical analysis can be--
Some questions and quotes stood out this week--quotes that capture the capaciousness and all-inclusive nature of rhetoric and rhetorical analysis:
What is rhetorical analysis?
"By extension, rhetorical analysis or rhetorical criticism can be understood as an effort to understand how people within specific social situations attempt to influence others through language" (238). Selzer distinguishes between textual analysis (analysis of a symbolic act on its own terms) and contextual analysis, which seemed to be tied to intertextuality as Bazerman would discuss it (283).
What is rhetoric?
"As its definitions suggestions [Foss defining rhetoric as communication], the scope of rhetoric is broad. Rhetoric is not only written and spoken discourse; indeed, speaking and writing make up only a small part of our rhetorical environment. Symbols assume a variety of forms; any message, regardless of the form it takes on the channel of communication it uses is rhetoric and is appropriate to study in rhetorical criticism. Rhetoric includes then, non-discursive or nonverbal symbols as well as discursive or verbal ones. Speeches, essays, conversations, poetry, novels, stories, television programs, films, art, architecture, plays, music, dance, advertisements, furniture, public demonstrations, and dress are all forms of rhetoric" (Foss 4).
How does one do a rhetorical analysis?
"Once the basic feature of a rhetorical situation are identified or reconstructed, a rhetorical analysis can proceed in many different ways. It can follow the arrangement of the analyzed text closely, characterizing the multiple effects sequentially encountered by the audience. or it can be organized according to any of the systems of division offered in rhetoric such as genre features (good for mixed modes), by appeal, by lines of argument, by small-scale divides such as figures of speech" (Fahnestock and Secor 185).
Is there a better and worse way?
"Defining rhetorical criticism is akin to defining rhetoric: everyone seems to have a slightly different version, and that difference is both necessary and significant" (DeWinter 389).
What counts as worthy to analyze?
"What we choose to rhetorically critique is as important as how we choose to do it" (DeWinter 397). This is my favorite quotation.
Questions I have thus far:
--What definition(s) of rhetoric and theories of rhetoric fuel our understandings and applications of rhetorical analysis?
--What are our key terms for rhetorical analysis? Where do they emerge from? What traditions? What do we attach ourselves to by using specific terms and not others? For instance, how do our analyses of rhetorical texts in our own local contexts account for national, global, transnational contexts?
--Amber's question on Justin's blog is a good one--how do we read people instead of texts? How is rhetorical analysis suited for different contexts besides textual analyses? How do we read events, actions, and communities rhetorically?
--What is the role of "vernacular" rhetoric, the rhetoric of the everyday, and of talk, signs, symbols, things that aren't text in the traditional sense?
--How do digital texts challenge us to think about rhetoric differently (hearkening back to Wysocki)?
I'll have more questions, but these are significant ones for now.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Discourse analysis meets textual analysis
Well, I have come from the night of the living dead into the land of the living as I am trying to shake off this cold. Today is officially day 6 of the cold from hell, and I’m feeling better finally and am back to the gym. Progress!
I was struck by Rachael’s comment in her blog that our text _What Writing Does and How it Does It_ is rather “textbooky.” I thought so, too, when I first read it. The underlining in the introduction and the emphasis of points was the first indication of this. The use of the typeface is meant to cause the reader’s attention to linger to grasp key concepts and definitions. At the same time that the book is “textbooky,” it’s also useful for the way it expands the reach of discourse analysis into the realm of textual analysis.
My understanding of discourse analysis over the years has not been as wide-ranging and all-inclusive as this volume indicates. I always associated discourse analysis with colleagues in communication studies who were analyzing “talk” or “conversation,” what Bazerman and Prior refer to as a “focus on spoken language” (1). As they point out, discourse analysis has been a “major analytical method in social science research fields such as communication studies, sociology, and anthropology” (1). This book challenges and expands the notion of discourse analysis “to engage with written text” (1). I find this to be a very productive and useful expansion of discourse analysis, and one calculated to be popular with those of us in Rhetoric and Composition who are used to analyzing texts already. At the same time, I wonder how proponents of discourse analysis respond to this expansion? What is gained and what is lost in the movement across spoken into written language or vice versa? What utility does each have in its own realm?
That concern aside, I appreciate the turn toward textual analysis and the melding together of textual and discourse analysis, especially the focus on writing as a “social and productive practice” (2). I especially like the point about focusing on “what texts do and what texts mean” rather than what they mean (3). The six questions on p. 3 are significant ones as they focus on elements and features that indicate how texts are made/produced, shaped, circulated, received.
Bringing discourse analysis to textual analysis (the methods many of us are used to in literary studies and rhetoric) allows us to “examin[e] communicative practice so as to uncover signs of social identities, institutions, and norms as as well as the means by which these social formations are established, negotiated, enacted and changed through communictaive practice” (3). The question I had as I read that claim, though, was "hasn't rhetoric addressed that all along anyway?" We can return to that when we read Jack Selzer's essay in the volume next week.
Unlike most volumes that address a particular method, we are not treated to a history of the method or methods in the volume (which left the history junkie in me scrambling around looking for such a history--see Fairclough); rather Bazerman and Prior have allowed the 11 authors in the book to "model" their approaches to textual analysis (6). Each writer addresses the "basic concepts" and key studies in the area of their research focus. Then they offer an applied analysis and give suggestions for future readings (6).
I will be curious to see what everyone in the class thinks of this approach--does it work as a good introduction to a method? Is the combining/connection of two methods confusing? is this an example of the multimodality and methodological diversity that we read about last week?
One of the challenges posed by editing a book like this is how well a particular method is defined, analyzed, and modeled, and to what end? And for whom? And how well do common themes or threads--in this case methods--pull across the volume? Could you read essays from this volume and apply what you have learned about method, to some degree, or at least understand the method enough to develop a reading program to learn more and see it demonstrated in more research?
The structure of the book is twofold. Part I focused on "analyzing texts." Part II on processes of writing, textual practice. So there is a huge range here of essays, which we're reading and blogging. I'll be curious to read the blogs and see what you have made of these pieces.
Key Citations:
Fairclough. 1995. _Critical Discourse Analysis_
Huckin and Selzer.
Questions:
My question is, overall, how well this volume hangs together as a demonstration of how to undertake textual analysis? A number of students in our program have turned to Huckin's chapter as useful way to do content analysis in the past, so I am aware of the real utility of an essay like that.
I also wonder how much this text challenges our notions of textual analysis. How have we been doing "textual analysis" all along? What were your methods prior to reading this? Literary? Rhetorical? How conscious were you of analyzing and assessing your methods? Were you just doing an analysis and leaving it at that?
I was struck by Rachael’s comment in her blog that our text _What Writing Does and How it Does It_ is rather “textbooky.” I thought so, too, when I first read it. The underlining in the introduction and the emphasis of points was the first indication of this. The use of the typeface is meant to cause the reader’s attention to linger to grasp key concepts and definitions. At the same time that the book is “textbooky,” it’s also useful for the way it expands the reach of discourse analysis into the realm of textual analysis.
My understanding of discourse analysis over the years has not been as wide-ranging and all-inclusive as this volume indicates. I always associated discourse analysis with colleagues in communication studies who were analyzing “talk” or “conversation,” what Bazerman and Prior refer to as a “focus on spoken language” (1). As they point out, discourse analysis has been a “major analytical method in social science research fields such as communication studies, sociology, and anthropology” (1). This book challenges and expands the notion of discourse analysis “to engage with written text” (1). I find this to be a very productive and useful expansion of discourse analysis, and one calculated to be popular with those of us in Rhetoric and Composition who are used to analyzing texts already. At the same time, I wonder how proponents of discourse analysis respond to this expansion? What is gained and what is lost in the movement across spoken into written language or vice versa? What utility does each have in its own realm?
That concern aside, I appreciate the turn toward textual analysis and the melding together of textual and discourse analysis, especially the focus on writing as a “social and productive practice” (2). I especially like the point about focusing on “what texts do and what texts mean” rather than what they mean (3). The six questions on p. 3 are significant ones as they focus on elements and features that indicate how texts are made/produced, shaped, circulated, received.
Bringing discourse analysis to textual analysis (the methods many of us are used to in literary studies and rhetoric) allows us to “examin[e] communicative practice so as to uncover signs of social identities, institutions, and norms as as well as the means by which these social formations are established, negotiated, enacted and changed through communictaive practice” (3). The question I had as I read that claim, though, was "hasn't rhetoric addressed that all along anyway?" We can return to that when we read Jack Selzer's essay in the volume next week.
Unlike most volumes that address a particular method, we are not treated to a history of the method or methods in the volume (which left the history junkie in me scrambling around looking for such a history--see Fairclough); rather Bazerman and Prior have allowed the 11 authors in the book to "model" their approaches to textual analysis (6). Each writer addresses the "basic concepts" and key studies in the area of their research focus. Then they offer an applied analysis and give suggestions for future readings (6).
I will be curious to see what everyone in the class thinks of this approach--does it work as a good introduction to a method? Is the combining/connection of two methods confusing? is this an example of the multimodality and methodological diversity that we read about last week?
One of the challenges posed by editing a book like this is how well a particular method is defined, analyzed, and modeled, and to what end? And for whom? And how well do common themes or threads--in this case methods--pull across the volume? Could you read essays from this volume and apply what you have learned about method, to some degree, or at least understand the method enough to develop a reading program to learn more and see it demonstrated in more research?
The structure of the book is twofold. Part I focused on "analyzing texts." Part II on processes of writing, textual practice. So there is a huge range here of essays, which we're reading and blogging. I'll be curious to read the blogs and see what you have made of these pieces.
Key Citations:
Fairclough. 1995. _Critical Discourse Analysis_
Huckin and Selzer.
Questions:
My question is, overall, how well this volume hangs together as a demonstration of how to undertake textual analysis? A number of students in our program have turned to Huckin's chapter as useful way to do content analysis in the past, so I am aware of the real utility of an essay like that.
I also wonder how much this text challenges our notions of textual analysis. How have we been doing "textual analysis" all along? What were your methods prior to reading this? Literary? Rhetorical? How conscious were you of analyzing and assessing your methods? Were you just doing an analysis and leaving it at that?
Thursday, September 10, 2009
691 blogging
I'm going to start blogging with my CCR 691 class shortly. We'll likely be posting researcher profiles to our blogs in the next day or so.
I will probably post something from the introduction to the book that KJ Rawson and I have just finished editing and are now proofreading _Rhetorica in Motion_, which address feminist rhetorical methods and methodologies.
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.
Friday, June 26, 2009
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!
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Stop Using Killer Kleenex
One of the students Chris Bordne in my WRT 255 course is studying the advocacy campaign Kleercut, which is a campaign to call attention to the fact that Kleenex, a Kimberly Clark product, is made from virgin forest--the Canadian boreal forest to be more precise.
For more on the campaign launched by Greenpeace entitled Kleercut, see the link above.
Here's the basics:
"Did you know that it takes 90 years to grow a box of Kleenex? That's right, every time you use a Kleenex tissue, you are blowing away ancient forests. And every time you use Scott or Cottonelle toilet paper, you’re flushing old growth trees down the toilet. That's because Kimberly Clark, maker of these products, all but refuses to use recycled paper in its products."
Chris is launching a Syracuse University campaign via Facebook and also some other tools to get SU to stop using Kimberly Clark products. I'll post a link to his campaign once he's done with it. Other colleges have lauched this very campaign:
http://kleercut.net/en/node/909
For more on the campaign launched by Greenpeace entitled Kleercut, see the link above.
Here's the basics:
"Did you know that it takes 90 years to grow a box of Kleenex? That's right, every time you use a Kleenex tissue, you are blowing away ancient forests. And every time you use Scott or Cottonelle toilet paper, you’re flushing old growth trees down the toilet. That's because Kimberly Clark, maker of these products, all but refuses to use recycled paper in its products."
Chris is launching a Syracuse University campaign via Facebook and also some other tools to get SU to stop using Kimberly Clark products. I'll post a link to his campaign once he's done with it. Other colleges have lauched this very campaign:
http://kleercut.net/en/node/909
Monday, July 28, 2008
Not Knowing Your LInes
Last night I dreamed I was cast into a play, but I didn't know my lines the night before the performance. At first, I was relatively unconcerned about knowing my lines. I figured I'd put an index card in my hand and could read my lines or someone would hold up cue cards. Well, as the dream got further in, I realized that I needed to know my lines and couldn't fluff it in front of a live audience. So I futilely tried to memorize the lines, but nothing was sticking.
So I guess this is my re-entry after a week teaching and writing at Minnowbrook Retreat Center!
The play, by the way, was "Cinderella." And I was playing Cinderella. Half-way through the dream I made the joke to someone that since Cinderella was just a "dumb blonde" (an expression I thought was really fun in my dream, but not in real life) she wouldn't have to say much since she was the pretty, dense type. She could just fall and love and live happily ever after. The person/guy playing so-called "Prince Charming" reminded me that I had more lines than I thought, so I'd better get busy....
I remember being amused as a I dreamed about this that I was actually agreeing to be in the "Cinderella" play.
Is this a sign that the semester is going to start soon? That I don't feel ready to get back into the swing of things. Has the golden coach left for the castle without me or with me only half-way on board? Why Cinderella, a fairy tale that is not exactly my all-time favorite?
I woke up relieved I never pursued a career in drama....
This dream reminds of the "lack of readiness" dream I often have when the semester is going to start. In it, I'm supposed to be ready for my class, but I'm not. I don't have the syllabus or the assignments, and I'm trying to fluff it and give some kind of introductory lecture. The students either leave or disappear at some point in the dream, and I'm left trying to sort out what happened and how to carry on.
So....
So I guess this is my re-entry after a week teaching and writing at Minnowbrook Retreat Center!
The play, by the way, was "Cinderella." And I was playing Cinderella. Half-way through the dream I made the joke to someone that since Cinderella was just a "dumb blonde" (an expression I thought was really fun in my dream, but not in real life) she wouldn't have to say much since she was the pretty, dense type. She could just fall and love and live happily ever after. The person/guy playing so-called "Prince Charming" reminded me that I had more lines than I thought, so I'd better get busy....
I remember being amused as a I dreamed about this that I was actually agreeing to be in the "Cinderella" play.
Is this a sign that the semester is going to start soon? That I don't feel ready to get back into the swing of things. Has the golden coach left for the castle without me or with me only half-way on board? Why Cinderella, a fairy tale that is not exactly my all-time favorite?
I woke up relieved I never pursued a career in drama....
This dream reminds of the "lack of readiness" dream I often have when the semester is going to start. In it, I'm supposed to be ready for my class, but I'm not. I don't have the syllabus or the assignments, and I'm trying to fluff it and give some kind of introductory lecture. The students either leave or disappear at some point in the dream, and I'm left trying to sort out what happened and how to carry on.
So....
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Rotten Tomatoes
ZZ the cat has decided he is far too tired to make an appearance on my blog tonight. There is bigger and more serious news to be discussed than his photo opps. Getting back to the agrarian focus that is part of this blog, I have been following the tomato/salmonella story in the news. Once again, we see how the food safety system in the U.S. is grossly underprepared to deal with food safety in the fruit and vegetable industry let alone the meat industry (that's a whole other level of madness with recalls of ground beef). A year or so back I blogged about bagged spinach and e-coli. Now it is tomatoes and salmonella outbreaks (Raw Red Roma and Plum and Round tomatoes grown in Florida and Mexico, it seems). Want to know how tomatoes get salmonella? Slate has a good article about the potential connection to industrial farming and waste run-off:
http://www.slate.com/id/2193474/ The subtitle in this article is from "Poop to Produce."
This weekend I transplanted about eight tomato plants in my backyard garden. You can't get more local than 20 feet from the kitchen. These plants were seeded from last year's crop, and I didn't plant a single seed--I just left them in the soil. So I'm holding out for these tomatoes, which have not even flowered yet. So it's going to be awhile.....
http://www.slate.com/id/2193474/ The subtitle in this article is from "Poop to Produce."
This weekend I transplanted about eight tomato plants in my backyard garden. You can't get more local than 20 feet from the kitchen. These plants were seeded from last year's crop, and I didn't plant a single seed--I just left them in the soil. So I'm holding out for these tomatoes, which have not even flowered yet. So it's going to be awhile.....
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Tech Camp 08
Greetings from Tech Camp 08 at Syracuse University. We have been working with images, web pages, and tomorrow we will be working with video. We have been playing around with Photobooth (as evidenced above). So hopefully things will be looking up on my blog! Thanks to George Rhinehart, Derek Mueller, and Kurt Stavenhagen. More to come.....
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Race for the Cure
OK, it's been far too long since I wrote in my blog. The usual excuses apply-being department chair, being swamped, not blogging with a class. Mary G. and I ended up not blogging together as planned, but we did have some great conversations about the writing major in-person and about what she read, and she did just graduate. Congrats, Mary!
The real news around here is that Autumn ran the kids' 1 mile run for the Race for the Cure yesterday in Syracuse. 10,000 people showed up to the event, and there were hundreds in the kids' race. Autumn ran a 8 minute, 47 second mile! I know because I ran it with her and timed it. So at age six, she is already quite a runner. She told me this morning that she plans to eventually run the Badwater Ultramarathon in Death Valley. She has heard about this race from me since I told her about Pam Reed. Dianna and I ran the 5k with Autumn. I pushed Autumn in the jogger stroller for the entire 5k with the exception about 500 yards that she decided to run on her own. We had a good time, although it was hard for the first mile to have to dodge all the walkers walking five and six abreast having no idea there were "stroller runners" behind them. Now some purists will say that stroller runners should not be in races, but for some us, there's no choice but to run with a stroller if we want to do a race.
Anyway, summer race season has begun here.
The real news around here is that Autumn ran the kids' 1 mile run for the Race for the Cure yesterday in Syracuse. 10,000 people showed up to the event, and there were hundreds in the kids' race. Autumn ran a 8 minute, 47 second mile! I know because I ran it with her and timed it. So at age six, she is already quite a runner. She told me this morning that she plans to eventually run the Badwater Ultramarathon in Death Valley. She has heard about this race from me since I told her about Pam Reed. Dianna and I ran the 5k with Autumn. I pushed Autumn in the jogger stroller for the entire 5k with the exception about 500 yards that she decided to run on her own. We had a good time, although it was hard for the first mile to have to dodge all the walkers walking five and six abreast having no idea there were "stroller runners" behind them. Now some purists will say that stroller runners should not be in races, but for some us, there's no choice but to run with a stroller if we want to do a race.
Anyway, summer race season has begun here.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Blogging the writing major with Mary
Mary Gallagher (hi, Mary) is going to be one of the first graduates of our Writing Major at SU. Mary and I have the great opportunity this semester to do an independent study together about the growing scholarship on writing majors in Rhetoric/Comp. Along the way, Mary and I are also discussing how writing majors and Writing Centers can be "sites of social action" for students. Mary has been active in the Writing Center for three years, so much of her view of the department and our curriculum is shaped by that experience. Mary will also help us plan an event to welcome our Writing majors and introduce them to all of the faculty. That should be really fun.
We are going to be reading the special issue of Composition Studies on the Writing Major together over the next couple of weeks and blogging our responses.
We are going to be reading the special issue of Composition Studies on the Writing Major together over the next couple of weeks and blogging our responses.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Shiva-land and winter reading
Make it a New Year's Resolution to read one of Vandana Shiva's books. Shiva is an global activist fighting for sustainable farming, environmental justice, and the rights of two-thirds world people, especially for indigenous farmers across the globe and in her native India. She is my all-time heroine--up there with Gandhi, Dr. King, Emma Goldman, and Mother Jones. She made an appearance on PBS tonight (reaired episode). You can view the transcript at:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/jan-june07/globalization_03-23.html
As for my winter break reading: I'm catching up on the latest issues of _College English_ and _CCC_. I'm getting ready to pick up Michael Pollan's latest book _A Manifesto for Eaters_ and Daniel Imhoff's book _Food Fight_ on the farm bill--all fodder for the paper I'm giving on the Rhetoric of Local Food at the University of Illinois guest lecture series. I'm also prepping a lot of readings on environmental justice for the mini-seminar I'll be leading in February.
As for lighter fare,I want to pick up Benjamin Cheever's (son of writer John Cheever's) book/memoir on running, which I've had my eye on, but couldn't afford until my sister sent me a bookstore gift certificate. I have been rereading Kathrine Switer's book _Marathon Woman_. If you don't know who Switzer is, look her up--she is the Syracuse University student who was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon under a race number. Jock Semple, the race director tried to throw her out of the race when he realized that she was a woman running with a race number. The famous photos have been much-circulated. Switzer, our home town girl, ran the Pompey Hills so much that she didn't even notice Heartbreak Hill at the Boston Marathon. So if you want a hill work out, just move to Central New York.
Such is the reading life.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/jan-june07/globalization_03-23.html
As for my winter break reading: I'm catching up on the latest issues of _College English_ and _CCC_. I'm getting ready to pick up Michael Pollan's latest book _A Manifesto for Eaters_ and Daniel Imhoff's book _Food Fight_ on the farm bill--all fodder for the paper I'm giving on the Rhetoric of Local Food at the University of Illinois guest lecture series. I'm also prepping a lot of readings on environmental justice for the mini-seminar I'll be leading in February.
As for lighter fare,I want to pick up Benjamin Cheever's (son of writer John Cheever's) book/memoir on running, which I've had my eye on, but couldn't afford until my sister sent me a bookstore gift certificate. I have been rereading Kathrine Switer's book _Marathon Woman_. If you don't know who Switzer is, look her up--she is the Syracuse University student who was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon under a race number. Jock Semple, the race director tried to throw her out of the race when he realized that she was a woman running with a race number. The famous photos have been much-circulated. Switzer, our home town girl, ran the Pompey Hills so much that she didn't even notice Heartbreak Hill at the Boston Marathon. So if you want a hill work out, just move to Central New York.
Such is the reading life.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Word of the Year: Locavore
Happy New Year to all. As usual, the media is engaged in its rhetoric of retrospection. Last night while taking care of the cat of a friend who is out of town, I turned on the TV and found out about the "hottest" fashion trends for 2007 and 2008: animal prints are really going to be the thing. Zebra, in particular, is the hottest new trend. In the midst of the vacuous infotainment reporting, I thought if you can't "beat 'em, join 'em." Hence, this posting on the "word of the year." Mark Meisner from SUNY-ESF told me a few weeks ago that the word of the year is "locavore." Of course, I had to rush out and do a little research since this trend is one that I find more interesting than the latest "animal print" statement. So here is the scoop.
The New Oxford American Dictionary announced that its word of the year for 2007 is “locavore.” Locavore, according to the Oxford University Press blog, is a term used to describe the popular practice of “using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.”
A locavore is a person, but a locavore is also part of a movement, which “encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.”
Locavore came about in that laboratory of human innovation known as San Francisco. Four women coined the term in an effort to get local residents to eat a 100 mile diet comprised of local foods. Jessica Prentice, one of the four women, is actually credited with coming up with the word. You can read her story here.
http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/prentice/
I've been interested to hear people use the word locavore. I've heard some folks refer to themselves as such recently, so it does seem to be circulating. A few years ago, people referred to themselves as "foodies." Will they know switch to locavores?
Accompanying the discussion of Locavore is an accompanying literature of the locavore, punningly represented in the Columbia Journalism Review as “New Grub Street.” Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are key representatives of this trend, although there are dozens of titles that play out the key inquiry question: "If we are what we eat, what does that mean? Where does our food come from?" Pollan puts it well when he notes in the _Omnivore's Dilemma_ that we have reached an interesting point in our history where we need an investigative journalist to unravel the mystery of our food supply.
I'm particularly interested in a comment he made in a recent interview where he noted that:
"I know as a writer I've learned that you can't pitch a story on agriculture to an editor in New York, but if you call it a story about food, suddenly people are interested."
I think he's right about that.
There's a BURNING interest right now in Food writing and local food. The recent flurry of responses on the WPA listserv about food writing was pretty striking.
--the rhapsodic food memoir (e.g., Ruth Reichl) or a variation of it such as the "Coming Home to Eat" kind of memoir (Nabhan, Kingsolver)
--the discursive cookbook that is half recipes, half proclamation about local food (Alice Waters, Lappe and others)
--the investigative journalist take on food (Pollan, McKibben, Schlosser, and others)
--academic books on the culture, politics, and ethics of food (Nestle and others)
--let's not forget the agrarian essayists and memoirists, nonfiction writers who get short-shrifted sometimes because they mention the FARM, the actual origin of all food. Books like the recent one by Scott Chaskey about his organic farm, though, have a market and the Canadian TV show "Manic Organic" suggest there is a whole market there for the "farmer guide" to show the public from whence their food comes....
I won't get into all the documentaries about the food supply and farming, but they are worth exploring in another posting.
I'm fascinated by the idea that "food" sells and it is the lens through which to sell writing about agriculture and farming. Pollan even goes so far as to suggest we retitle the "Farm Bill" the "Food Bill" so people will actually pay attention to this archance bit of legislation and figure out how many billions of dollars we are paying out for corn subsidies to keep the high fructose corn syrup industry running--the same industry that is an engine for our obesity epidemic.
The Oxford blog says locavore a word to "watch," and I agree. I think it's worth watching the nonfiction "literature of the locavore," which I'm doing in an article I'm writing right now.
The New Oxford American Dictionary announced that its word of the year for 2007 is “locavore.” Locavore, according to the Oxford University Press blog, is a term used to describe the popular practice of “using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.”
A locavore is a person, but a locavore is also part of a movement, which “encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.”
Locavore came about in that laboratory of human innovation known as San Francisco. Four women coined the term in an effort to get local residents to eat a 100 mile diet comprised of local foods. Jessica Prentice, one of the four women, is actually credited with coming up with the word. You can read her story here.
http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/prentice/
I've been interested to hear people use the word locavore. I've heard some folks refer to themselves as such recently, so it does seem to be circulating. A few years ago, people referred to themselves as "foodies." Will they know switch to locavores?
Accompanying the discussion of Locavore is an accompanying literature of the locavore, punningly represented in the Columbia Journalism Review as “New Grub Street.” Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are key representatives of this trend, although there are dozens of titles that play out the key inquiry question: "If we are what we eat, what does that mean? Where does our food come from?" Pollan puts it well when he notes in the _Omnivore's Dilemma_ that we have reached an interesting point in our history where we need an investigative journalist to unravel the mystery of our food supply.
I'm particularly interested in a comment he made in a recent interview where he noted that:
"I know as a writer I've learned that you can't pitch a story on agriculture to an editor in New York, but if you call it a story about food, suddenly people are interested."
I think he's right about that.
There's a BURNING interest right now in Food writing and local food. The recent flurry of responses on the WPA listserv about food writing was pretty striking.
--the rhapsodic food memoir (e.g., Ruth Reichl) or a variation of it such as the "Coming Home to Eat" kind of memoir (Nabhan, Kingsolver)
--the discursive cookbook that is half recipes, half proclamation about local food (Alice Waters, Lappe and others)
--the investigative journalist take on food (Pollan, McKibben, Schlosser, and others)
--academic books on the culture, politics, and ethics of food (Nestle and others)
--let's not forget the agrarian essayists and memoirists, nonfiction writers who get short-shrifted sometimes because they mention the FARM, the actual origin of all food. Books like the recent one by Scott Chaskey about his organic farm, though, have a market and the Canadian TV show "Manic Organic" suggest there is a whole market there for the "farmer guide" to show the public from whence their food comes....
I won't get into all the documentaries about the food supply and farming, but they are worth exploring in another posting.
I'm fascinated by the idea that "food" sells and it is the lens through which to sell writing about agriculture and farming. Pollan even goes so far as to suggest we retitle the "Farm Bill" the "Food Bill" so people will actually pay attention to this archance bit of legislation and figure out how many billions of dollars we are paying out for corn subsidies to keep the high fructose corn syrup industry running--the same industry that is an engine for our obesity epidemic.
The Oxford blog says locavore a word to "watch," and I agree. I think it's worth watching the nonfiction "literature of the locavore," which I'm doing in an article I'm writing right now.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Snow and Drafts
Where is that noreaster we have been promised? I guess it is slated to arrive tomorrow. I have to admit I wimped out and ran on the treadmill today instead of braving the cold. I did not go outside to run as I usually do on Saturdays. I need a large shaggy Siberian Husky to make me go out on a day like this or a crazy running partner who is undeterred by temperatures.
I'm reading 751 drafts, making comments, and enjoying all the work everyone produced this semester. It's great to see where everyone is taking the work of the course via individual projects.
Hey, Jon (Benda), send us part of your dissertation to read, and when you are you coming stateside so we can invite you to give a talk to the department? I will follow up on the reference you gave me about Chinese Rhetoric and the scholar you mentioned from Penn State.
Last but not least:
Everyone (well, maybe not everyone) is leaving town for the holidays, and while I'm often leaving town at this point, too, I have to admit some relief at not having to brave airport lines or train station delays. I won't be home for Christmas (well, home is actually here), and a part of me is relieved. Good luck to all vacating Syracuse for the holidays.
I'm reading 751 drafts, making comments, and enjoying all the work everyone produced this semester. It's great to see where everyone is taking the work of the course via individual projects.
Hey, Jon (Benda), send us part of your dissertation to read, and when you are you coming stateside so we can invite you to give a talk to the department? I will follow up on the reference you gave me about Chinese Rhetoric and the scholar you mentioned from Penn State.
Last but not least:
Everyone (well, maybe not everyone) is leaving town for the holidays, and while I'm often leaving town at this point, too, I have to admit some relief at not having to brave airport lines or train station delays. I won't be home for Christmas (well, home is actually here), and a part of me is relieved. Good luck to all vacating Syracuse for the holidays.
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