All Journals
1533 articlesJuly 2023
-
Seeking Out the Stakeholders: Building Coalitions to Address Cultural (In)equity through Arts-based, Community-engaged Research ↗
Abstract
Artists are an important, but under-recognized, aspect of rural community growth. This research article details a collaborative project between a statewide arts organization and academic researchers in West Virginia designed to document the needs of under-represented artists across the state. We share our theoretical approach that meshes stakeholder and standpoint theory and our research approach that uses participatory and arts-based methods such as asset-mapping and collage-based listening sessions. Ultimately, we provide a model for others interested in research projects that explicitly prioritize coalition-building throughout a project and demonstrate how cultural (in)equity shapes multiple facets of community life.
-
Designing Public Identity: Finding Voice in Coalitional Technical Writing with Black-Led Organizations ↗
Abstract
This experience report offers an applied example of coalitional communication design, written collaboratively by a white faculty member for a student grant writing program and a Black executive director of a community organization. Highlighting the needs, thought processes, and practical considerations of doing antiracist technical communication work collaboratively from varied identity positions, we detail an ongoing effort to redesign a Black community organization's public voice to honor Black humanity and communal healing. This example spotlights the possibilities of coalitional technical writing that deeply engages with and supports community needs, one way to meet the challenge of TPC's social justice imperative.
June 2023
-
Abstract
We offer an in-depth look at how a Black-led nonprofit, Life Pieces To Masterpieces (Washington, DC), stepped up to the challenges of 2020 – the devastation of the pandemic and of yet another wave of anti- Black violence. We place this story alongside scholarship about democratic education and the value of generative reciprocal relationships. While much of the scholarship focuses on university- community partnerships, we extend the analysis to look at the broader networks of relationships that nonprofits like LPTM cultivate. We argue that in the journey to equity and shared humanity, concepts like generative and transformative relationships need to account for the tremendous weight of systemic racism; this can be accomplished by explicitly centering the experiences and epistemology of Black communities. We show how these concepts were deployed and extended in LPTM’s activities from March–July 2020.
-
"Are you going to get in line?": Black Administrators Navigating and Negotiating White Cultural Norms ↗
Abstract
In this paper, two African American administrators share their experiences navigating and negotiating the White patriarchal dominance at two large, Southern, predominately White institutions (PWIs). Analyzing and trying to make sense of their shared experiences led us to discover that their challenges navigating the patriarchal society stemmed from failing to adhere to White cultural norms that permeate the fabric of these institutions. Our understanding has also led to the development of strategies for existing Black administrators and women of color who aspire to advance within and become successful in the Academy.
-
Abstract
The included infographic describes P.A.C.K, guidelines that are a starting point for creating public health tweets that better meet the needs of African American users:• Provide inclusive charts;• Avoid poor timing;• Communicate to individuals; and• Know your potential biases.
-
Pain, No Gain?: A Narrative Analysis Exploring the Accounts of Older African American Patients and Their Discussion of Pain Management Related to Chronic Illness ↗
Abstract
Drawing from interviews conducted as part of a study of older African Americans with multimorbidity, we argue how various forms of racism work together to shape communication between doctors and patients. By focusing on what patients say about pain, we highlight patient descriptions of their relationships with pain management, their interactions with healthcare providers, and how they navigate understanding their chronic conditions. Our documentation of patient experience with stigmas and biases suggests what is needed for more empathetic and effective communication within the doctor and patient relationship. We conclude by using the interview data to propose addressing racial inequality in health care in the United States through educational reform and training initiatives grounded in rhetorical research.
-
Abstract
Women of color are more likely to experience infertility compared to white women. Despite this likelihood, infertility continues to be associated with whiteness. This study examines the historical and modern influences of the hyperfertility narrative, a pervasive master narrative linking race and reproduction. Studying Instagram posts about infertility and race, McCann argues that women of color have had to fight for their very inclusion within infertility identities, illustrating the continued rhetorical salience that dominant narratives of race and reproductive enforce within support-seeking environments like Instagram. Specifically, this study demonstrates how WOCr rhetors counter hyperfertility by co-constructingnew counternarratives that frame experiences of infertility through experiences with race and racism. These counternarratives involve three empowerment strategies: witnessing, visual counterstorying, and attribution. By studying how marginalized rhetors counter hyperfertility narratives, the study illustrates a kind of invitational knowledge-building that occurs within histories of race and reproduction. Overall, this work pushes scholars and practitioners in reproductive care to acknowledge how racial identities, and perhaps personhood itself, is de/valued around and through reproductive abilities.
-
Abstract
Introduction to the Special Issue In Living Color: Amplifying Racial Justice Work in RHM
-
“Dismantle or Step Aside”: The Road to HIV Racial Justice Now! and The Push for Racial Liberation in the Domestic HIV Movement ↗
Abstract
While there have been tremendous advancements in HIV prevention, treatment, research, and care, vast health disparities still exist across race and ethnicity, as Black and Latinx people continue to have disproportionate rates of new HIV cases. Despite this fact, funding toward and implementation of policies that meet the needs of most impacted communities are virtually non-existent. Moreover, meaningful and impactful discussions about HIV have always required analyzing interlocking systems of privilege and oppression. Thus, in 2017, a group of scholars and activists of color developed HIV Racial Justice Now!, a nationwide grassroots coalition dedicated to advancing a racially just framework for the domestic HIV epidemic. In addition to developing The Declaration, a framework that can be used to push for racial liberation, HRJN disrupts traditional notions of HIV rhetoric, racial justice, and public memory by decentering whiteness in the domestic HIV movement.
-
Abstract
Radical doulas are often on the frontlines supporting multiply marginalized birthing people. In providing emotional and physical support to people in labor, doulas are uniquely positioned to witness, to respond, to intervene in the obstetric racism and other forms of injustice unfolding in birth settings—an invariably rhetorical process. In this interview, we talk with Stevie Merino—medical anthropologist, full-spectrum doula, and the co-founder/executive director of the Birthworkers of Color Collective in Long Beach, California. Merino discusses how reproductive, racial, and queer justice informs her birthwork. This interview highlights the discursive and material strategies queer birthworkers of color deploy to support multiply marginalized clients, and the ways they navigate and challenge the existing medical system.
-
Abstract
In 2015, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools (IRS) published its final report, testifying to Indigenous peoples’ experience of brutality and violence in the Canadian residential school system. Writing on the meaning and significance of reconciliation in 2012, author Naomi Angel defines the term as “an act of creation. It is about new conversations and discussions, about creating new archives . . . [it is] not only about creative collaboration, but collaborative creation.”1 Published eight years after Angel's death, Fragments of Truth engages in a dialogue with the present regarding Canada's project of reconciliation. The book is the published form of Angel's dissertation manuscript with updates provided by Dylan Robinson, a Stó:lō ethnomusicologist and one of Angel's research collaborators, and Jamie Berthe, a scholar of visual culture and imperial histories. Rhetorical scholars, particularly those interested in the archival turn in rhetorical studies, will find not only that this work offers a wealth of theory but that Angel's archival research is exemplary.Fragments of Truth is structured by an introduction, four primary chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction should be understood as required reading, as it defines and justifies key terms, historically situates the use of TRCs, explores the ethical dimensions of the author's research, and provides chapter and argument primers for the reader. The four chapters are divided according to theme, progressing in their degree of materiality. Chapter one details the history offered in popular discourse related to the Canadian IRS system; chapter two attends to the archive; chapter three considers testimony provided at IRS TRC events; and chapter four turns to the material sites of former IRS schools. The conclusion returns to what it means to call for reading truth and reconciliation as new ways of seeing.In the first chapter, “Reconciliation as a way of Seeing,” Angel reads the myth of a Canadian national identity of benevolence and tolerance against the history of the IRS system. Citing tactics in the determination of historical knowledge by the Canadian nation-state—namely the insistence on land acquisition as the starting point of history and the refusal to recognize the legitimacy transference of historical knowledge through the oral tradition (as is common by Indigenous people)—Angel argues that acts of suppression conceal narratives of violence and allow a mythos of benevolence to emerge and circulate. Turning to the picture, “Mountie Meets Sitting Eagle,” Angel surveys literature that argues that the image falsely conveys a benevolent actor, the Canadian national mascot known as Mountie. Angel calls for a deeper reading by offering an analysis of Chief Sitting Eagle that identifies features of stoicism, skepticism, and suspicion. Doing so complicates and calls into question the presumed relationship of peace between Canada and Indigenous peoples. Tracing the statutory changes with respect to Indigenous peoples, Angel identifies three significant legal moments and their respective modes of thinking: 1) the Royal Proclamation of 1763 with separateness and self-governance; 2) the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 with a policy of assimilation and a call for unity over diversity; 3) the Indian Act of 1876, which called for restrictive control of Indigenous life and provided the statutory framework for the IRS system. The analysis is not limited to government policy. Angel makes an important observation for scholars conducting research on the topic, noting that despite heavy involvement by the church, the Canadian government's move toward secularization means that much of what occurred is absent from the government archives. Contrasting the relative lack of memories of the IRS system by the Canadian public with survivors’ memories and the postmemories of their kin, Angel shares moments of abuse as well as camaraderie between students that were revealed in the TRC process. Angel places the Canadian TRC in a historical and global context, highlighting the advances made by Indigenous peoples in Australia and chronicling the advancements made through representation in Canadian government. Present throughout are the values underpinning the process of assimilation encompassed in the words, “Conceal,” “Desire,” “Grateful,” “Attempt and Remain,” and “Purchase, Wealthy” (44–47). Concluding with a discussion of iconic images in Canadian and Indigenous identities, Angel draws from the scholarship of Robert Hariman and John Lucaites on visual rhetoric to transition to the second chapter. Reconciliation becomes a call for a shift in relations of looking, seeing, and being seen.2In the second chapter, “Images of Contact,” Angel analyzes how images circulate in the TRC process and considers how these images are recuperated and re-narrated in the present. The work examines archival photographs of “everydayness” in the IRS system, as well as how they are read in various moments. Drawing from Christopher Pinney's concept of “looking past,” Angel offers a thoughtful rereading and resignification which might “challenge how images have been assigned meaning” (58). This act of resignification is a kind of “sifting” through collective memory for “colonial debris” which identifies the IRS system photographs as moments of “contact” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (58). One kind of image identified is the “before and after,” depicting a child before the IRS system and after. Angel's analysis highlights the presence of common tropes and points to the church's strategic use of such images. Temporally, the images reflect attention to the future in their projection of the idealized modern Canadian subject, as well as the past with the potential for re-envisioning the “before” pictures as encounters with pre-colonial subjects. The second image is “The Long Goodbye.” Deploying the “civic skill” of watching photographs, and considering their presentation over time, Angel traces the photograph to modern encounters through the TRC process (76). This reveals the negotiation of photographic meaning and the recuperation of the past that occurs with reading photographs as memory screens. An important aspect of this memory recuperation process is the digitization of the archive. While digital archives can increase access and decentralize information, the process of digitization also poses risks in the iterative process.Chapter three considers the role of affect and the use of testimony and performance at the IRS TRC events. Angel's approach to engagement puts front and center the politics of affect in the research process by including a mix of first-person perspective field notes and reflective analysis. The goal, Angel explains, is both to complicate the presumed objectivity of research and posit the validity of recognizing multiple testimonial truths. The presence of the first-person “I” throughout the chapter serves as a reminder that the information being shared is the voice of testimony filtered through the author. The testimony considered includes that of survivors and, on occasion, perpetuators of violence from the IRS system. A “rumination on the dynamics of reconciliation,” this chapter offers one possible interpretation of necessarily fragmented events (124). Significant in its detail is that, in the process of sharing experiences, survivors create spaces where public displays of affect become powerful sources for political intervention.Images of haunting offer new inroads for engaging in dialogue about the past; in the final chapter, “Reconciliation as a Ghostly Encounter,” Angel applies this framework to her experience visiting the “colonial debris” of physical school structures. Despite the materiality of the sites, Angel does not find a stable reading of their meaning. Instead, what exists is a “palimpsest, layered and textured by memory” (139). Building from various works on haunting, Angel calls for understanding ghostly encounters in the context of Canadian Indigenous epistemologies, which understand ghosts as figures in both dream and waking life. Additionally, haunting, and the unsettling experience that comes with it, is a way to complicate and “unsettle” colonial relations by rejecting the impulse to adopt the identity of the empathetic spectator (129). The theme of unsettling and transformation continues in the discussion of place and memory. Rejecting the impulse to stabilize an ontology of place in memorials and monuments, Angel turns to Pierre Nora's reading of memory as a site of constant negotiation, or “milieux de memoire” (132). Thus, while reconciliation constitutes an unearthing of truths, it is also always engaged in new meaning and memory making. In the same way that the documentary, The Learning Path, seamlessly moves back and forth between original archival footage and modern reenactments of daily IRS experience, so too does the return to sites of former IRS buildings (133).3 Angel offers the metaphor of “dancing with ghosts” to complicate the direction of haunting as occurring by multiple identities with various pasts and presents (134–135). Read as “a beating heart of episodes,” physical sites hold memories of trauma, abuse, and neglect, but also resilience and courage; previous lives haunt the grounds, but so, too, do new presences fill the sites with new and emergent meanings. Reading reconciliation as a ghostly encounter thus constitutes an encounter with the past, which opens the possibility of continual renegotiation and the ability to see beyond the tragic past to future possibility.Assessing the potential of reconciliation as new ways of seeing entails accepting the experience of unease that often arrives with remembering, revisiting, and revisualizing. In the conclusion, Angel explores this dynamic through a film examining the Canadian school system, Jules Koostachin's Remembering Inninimowin.4 The film follows Koostachin's journey learning the Cree language and reconnecting with her family in the aftermath of the IRS system. Reflecting on her own interpretation of the film in a later interview with Koostachin, Angel notes the barrier established with the refusal to provide translation for audiences viewing a final emotional moment shared between mother and daughter. But this is a moment of misrecognition. Koostachin does not refuse a translation to protect the emotional intimacy of the moment but to share her experience of not yet having the language to translate her own mother's words.Fragments of Truth is a detailed, genuine, and emotional engagement with truth and reconciliation. Angel's work effectively challenges the temptation towards determinism in returning to histories of violence and trauma, highlighting the potential for healing and new futures to emerge in the process of truth and reconciliation. Dylan Robinson and Jamie Berthe have beautifully conjured up memories, invigorating new life into Naomi Angel's work on Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools. Weaving together scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds, the project facilitates perspective exchanges, leading to new ways of seeing, particularly in the wake of trauma.
-
Abstract
On May 14, 2022, an 18-year-old white gunman murdered ten Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.1 In a rampage that appeared racially motivated, the gunman targeted victims in a predominantly Black neighborhood. The attack provoked outrage and prompted a familiar rhetorical refrain among Black Americans, in which many questioned their future in a country that seems irreparably anti-Black. “America is inherently violent,” said Zeneta Everhart, the mother of one of the Buffalo shooting victims, at a House Oversight Committee meeting. “My ancestors, brought to America through the slave trade, were the first currency of America,” she explained, “I continuously hear after every mass shooting that this is not who we are as Americans and as a nation. Hear me clearly: This is exactly who we are.”2 Everhart's criticism of race and violence in the United States—her articulation of America as an anti-Black colonial project beyond redemption—is a recent installment in a long history of Black rhetorical pessimism. Author Andre E. Johnson convincingly genealogizes this persistent, critical skepticism about the American racial character in his book No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner.Johnson traces Black rhetorical pessimism to Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, a leading Black spokesperson in the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. Turner was distinctive in his combination of stature and scolding. As a Georgia state representative and senior bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), his political prophecy warned against a future for Black people in the United States. In a notable rhetorical maturation, which Johnson thoroughly elaborates, Turner abandoned the “sacredness and divine mission of America” for the “sacredness and sacred character of God” (13). Turner ultimately advocated for Black emigration to Africa, prefiguring the political projects of both Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. “Such being the barbarous condition of the United States,” Turner once wrote, “and the low order of civilization which controls its institutions where right and justice should sit enthroned, I see nothing for the Negro to attain unto in this country” (7). In his analysis of Turner's rhetorical negativity, Johnson contends that pessimism, a prominent though misunderstood practice in African American rhetoric, is a productive and culturally sustaining discourse in response to persistent, entrenched racism.Upon Turner's death in 1915, W. E. B. DuBois remarked that Turner's life had been that of “a man of tremendous force and indomitable courage” (173). Turner was born emancipated in South Carolina in 1834. Regarded as a talented, exceptional youth, yet barred from formal education, Turner was schooled in his early years by family, local attorneys, and most significantly, the Methodist Church (7–8). He eventually became a Methodist preacher but chose membership in the AME, as the Methodist Episcopal Church would not, on the basis of race, permit him to become a bishop. As a member of the AME, Turner's career flourished. He preached in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., wrote for the Christian Recorder newspaper, and became a vocal supporter of the Union during the Civil War when he worked also to influence Congress and recruit soldiers. A Union victory inspired Turner's belief that the United States could become a “multiracial democracy” (8). After the Civil War, however, the Southern political powers unmade much of the progress of Reconstruction. Namely, Turner himself was expelled from office, following election to the Georgia legislature (8). At the same time, violence and disenfranchisement against Black Americans increased—a development that hardened Turner's political and theological outlook, thereby inspiring Turner's signature pessimism and Johnson's titular object of study.No Future in This Country consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 details Turner's criticism of the Supreme Court (an “abominable enclave of negro hating demons”) in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation (39). Chapter 2 explains how Turner developed a Black nationalist theology (“Negroes should worship a God who is a Negro”) (57). Chapter 3 charts Turner's opposition to the Spanish-American War (“The Negro has no flag to defend”) (81). Chapter 4 shows how Turner assailed Black post-Civil War allegiance to the Republican Party (“Negro devotees believe that the Republican Party is first and God is next”) (111). Chapter 5 articulates Turner's emigration rhetoric (“. . . why waste our time in trying to stay here?”) (125). Finally, Chapter 6 encapsulates the final stage of Turner's rhetorical pessimism (“I am as near a rebel to this Government as any Negro ever got to be”) (155). With each step in Turner's rhetorical and political development, Johnson illustrates not only how Turner used pessimism to persuade Black audiences toward action but also how Turner's productive pessimism anticipated major Black rhetoricians of the Civil Rights Movement.Among his most prominent interventions, Johnson establishes Turner's rhetorical and theological pessimism as an opportunity to expand the genre of prophetic rhetoric. Johnson defines prophetic rhetoric as “discourse grounded in the sacred and rooted in a community experience that offers a critique of existing communities and traditions by charging and challenging society to live up to the ideals espoused” (9). From Johnson's perspective, scholars heretofore have not effectively articulated prophetic rhetoric, in part because they have not extensively explored its development and application within African American rhetoric. Historically, for example, scholars have emphasized the rhetoric of American Puritans. Johnson, as an extension, proposes that prophetic rhetoric is “located on the margins of society” and “intends to lift the people to an ethical conception of whatever the people deem as sacred by adopting, at times, a controversial style of speaking” (9). From this standpoint, Johnson argues that the African American Prophetic Tradition (AAPT) provides scholars a new, third conceptual distinction within prophetic rhetoric—the first being “apocalyptic” and the second being the “jeremiad.”In apocalyptic rhetoric, speakers appeal to their audiences by revealing that current, exigent circumstances are part of a larger, cosmic plan that requires pivotal action. The jeremiad argues that, despite difficult and disorienting times, “chosen ones” must and are especially primed to actualize a righteous reality in line with a higher calling. Johnson reads AAPT against these two traditional strains of prophetic rhetoric by suggesting AAPT “has its origins not in freedom, but in slavery” (11). Accordingly, African American rhetoric has, occasionally, questioned a cosmic plan (i.e., the apocalyptic), asking instead “Where in the hell is God?” (11). Likewise, many Black rhetors have rejected the burden of being “chosen” and “did not have confidence or think that ‘the covenant’ would work for them” (11). From this perspective, Johnson argues Turner provides a gateway to an underappreciated avenue of rhetorical practice—“a pessimistic prophetic persona”—which contended that African Americans had no future in the United States and therefore emigration was the best option (14). In Johnson's view, this argument is prophetic in that it is both hopeful and revelatory, but it is also pessimistic in that it rejects traditional premises of redemption and covenant.No Future in This Country is more than a rhetorical analysis of Turner's speeches and writings. Framed as “a sequel of sorts” to Johnson's own The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (2012), this work offers a practice in rhetorical history, which Johnson defines as the “historical study of rhetorical events and the study from a rhetorical perspective of historical forces, trends, processes, and events” (14). In his methodology, Johnson illustrates how rhetorical practice and historical developments influence one another in a dialectical relationship. Rhetoric, as both constrained and enabled by speakers’ and audiences’ realities, provides a lens with which we can evaluate Johnson's analysis. Specifically, Turner's rhetorical pessimism (which operated at the margins of both rhetoric and society) sheds light on the analytical potential at the intersections of rhetoric and critical race studies.In particular, Johnson's reading of Turner urges further exploration into Afropessimism, a strain of critical race studies that seeks to highlight inherent anti-Blackness within traditional political and critical discourses. Johnson conceives of Afropessimism as “attempts to find space for voice and agency, to find recognition and inclusion in society will only result in more death” (17). Johnson argues that “much of Turner's work would also echo these sentiments,” since for “at least Black folks in America, there was no hope of achieving any notable and positive status, because not only would white people not allow it but anti-Black ideology shaped the American ethos” (17). While Johnson concludes that Turner's underlying belief in Black agency is not explicitly Afropessimist, this rhetorical history is nonetheless a provocative case study in the ideological and racial constraints that shape rhetorical practice (176).No Future in This Country asks rhetoricians to reconsider what agency looks and sounds like when hope is or seems lost. In a 1907 speech, Turner lamented that Black Americans were “‘tying their children's children’ to the ‘wheels of degradation for a hundred years to come’” (167). “God and nature,” he said, however, “help those who help themselves.” Over one hundred years later, Zeneta Everhart, mother of one of the Buffalo shooting victims, told Congress, “After centuries of waiting for White majorities to overturn white supremacy . . . it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves. . . . And I stand at the ready.”3 With his book, Andre E. Johnson reveals that with the works and words of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, Zeneta and many others may stand more solidly “at the ready.”
-
Abstract
Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope and How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World are models for bringing feminist rhetorical studies to bear on the current turbulent political and cultural times. As we write this review, we are experiencing an ongoing global pandemic; an extension of Cold War hostilities that are breaking down global trade—causing increased food insecurity and scarcity across the globe; attacks on women's rights in the United States; continued danger of asylum-seeking at borders in the United States and abroad; and violent attacks on racialized groups worldwide. These books offer glimpses of how rhetors carve out possibility within seemingly impossible situations. Read together, they can help rhetorical scholars theorize new forms of agency, coalition, belonging, and hope. While Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope traces hope and belonging in U.S. national contexts, and is especially situated in higher education, How to Belong focuses on patterns of agency and coalition-building transnationally. These books provide a better understanding of feminist rhetorical practices within and beyond nation state borders. Likewise, together, they show how rhetorical agency and coalition-building can explicitly respond to the uneven structures of power that frame all rhetorical action.Glenn's and Southard's monographs resonate with recent conversations in the field that take up how to do rhetorical work as we continue to navigate legacies of injustice and unprecedented instability. For example, as demonstrated in Rhetoric Review's most recent “Octalog IV,” considering how current instability has shifted how we all teach, research, study, and “do rhetoric” requires new approaches that are, like the ones Glenn offers, anchored in hope. Yet as the authors in the Octalog make clear, the urgency of our time requires us to question our taken-for-granted and established knowledge (see Martinez and Rois), expand beyond the academy (see Skinnel), and imagine new texts and methods (see Epps-Robertson and Van Haitsma).1 Like these authors, Glenn and Southard offer a hopeful glimpse of how rhetorical scholars can find unique forms of belonging and connection, even during seemingly hopeless situations. In response to Glenn's and Southard's monographs, we ask rhetorical scholars to consider how they might engage with hope and coalitions in their scholarship and teaching during fraught times.In Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope, Glenn forwards what she calls “rhetorical feminism” (4). She develops her theory of rhetorical feminism by tracing key feminist rhetorical practices, including those of women from outside of Western culture. The goal of the book is to equip the field with a new feminist lens that brings forth dialogue, deliberation, and collaboration. Through these practices, she theorizes alternative means of persuasion—a questioning of traditional rhetorical practices and attention to silence and listening. Throughout the book, she offers grounded instances of rhetorical feminism and hope for a new and open field of rhetorical studies.Examples of this hopeful rhetorical analysis begin in the first chapter. Glenn identifies “Sister Rhetors,” such as Maria W. Miller Stewart, Angelina Grimké, and Sojourner Truth, who exemplify how feminist rhetoric can be used to pursue the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, “the greatest good for all human beings” (5). Modeling agentive rhetorical action, she analyzes how these Sister Rhetors’ public speeches advocated for suffrage, expanding theories of rhetorical feminism. While identifying how individual exemplars’ rhetorical practices can broaden understandings of rhetoric as Glenn shows, the focus on individuals means that the book omits an extended analysis of the ruptures in the suffragist movement, caused by the virulent racism of white suffragists. This choice is significant given Glenn's focus on how rhetorical feminists can reach across difference. Nevertheless, the chapter “Activism” provides historical examples of how rhetorical feminism can guide activist movements, which Glenn further explores in chapter two, “Identities.”The chapter “Identities” focuses on rhetorical feminism's connection to lived experience and difference. With historical examples, Glenn demonstrates how coalitional work across difference is difficult. She analyzes an infamous public exchange between Mary Daly and Audre Lorde. Glenn takes the lesson that white feminists must acknowledge their privilege by practicing “silence and listening to Others” (42). While this focus on lived experience and listening are indeed important points for scholars of feminist rhetoric, this chapter does not address what this complicated, important work of dwelling in difference requires, most notably attending to histories of racial, ethnic, and gendered inequalities and violence. This dovetails with broader conversations in the field, particularly from Karma Chávez and Sharon Yam, scholars we return to later who address how coalitions can productively form across difference. Glenn's focus on rhetorical feminism gestures towards the possibility of coalition built on shared hopes. For example, in the chapter “Teaching,” Glenn explores how feminist teachers can honor their own and their students’ different lived experiences. This sort of rhetorical feminism, Glenn suggests, can help students cultivate the rhetorical awareness needed to navigate and intervene in structural injustices, including patriarchy.Likewise, in “Mentoring” and “(Writing Program) Administration,” Glenn critiques the “masculinist models’’ of mentoring that are used as gatekeeping mechanisms in academia to create exclusionary spaces (150). Glenn encourages rhetorical feminists to work on “disidentifying” from these norms and instead use familiar feminist rhetorical practices such as “dialogue, silence, and listening” to create relationships that are non-hierarchical, mutual, and networked (150). With these tools, feminist mentors can make room for more women and feminists in academia and begin to change the structures of the academy altogether. In fact, Glenn sees how on-the-ground academic administration can be a place where mentoring and coalition-building can happen. The final chapter, “This Thing Called Hope,” returns in time and space to the consequences of the Trump presidency. Glenn reflects on how rhetorical feminism should guide political action but spends much of the chapter pondering the academic successes of rhetorical feminism. For Glenn, the continued challenge of the Trump presidency (and now legacy) is why we need “this thing called hope” to guide us in working together (212). Like the scholars in the Octalog IV referenced above, Glenn demonstrates hope and new methods of bringing rhetorical feminism to bear on precarity in academic institutions. Extending Glenn's political commitments beyond the United States, Southard brings this sort of rhetorical analysis to global political contexts in How To Belong.In How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World, Southard explores how contemporary women leaders curated forms of belonging and agency that “[n]egotiated gendered and geographic boundaries” across “transnational flows of political and economic power” to move beyond citizenship and nation-state inclusion (3). She defines agency as a person's “can-do-ness” and, as such, considers how contemporary power relations might affect a rhetor's ability to be an agent of change (7). Southard looks to women leaders globally, turning most prominently to West Africa to better understand how women's agency has been constrained or enabled by political upheaval. Importantly, these leaders articulated belonging based on gendered violence and displacements by factional and national conflicts. Southard's observation extends work by transnational feminist rhetorical scholars who over a decade-and-a-half ago noted how “with few exceptions, scholars in rhetoric . . . have not systematically engaged the complex material and rhetorical dynamics of transnationality or questioned the nation state as a unit of analysis.”2 Her project does precisely this: shows how women denizens actively demonstrated the limits of the nation state.The book begins by examining the rhetorical practices of West African women who rearticulated notions of belonging based not on citizenship but instead through their relationships as “denizens of homes, landscapes, peace conferences, and politics” (Southard 18). Southard argues that these women redefined belonging and demonstrated how they, as rhetorical actors, were central to creating functioning peaceful communities. Southard highlights “dwelling practices,” such as seemingly powerless women forcing themselves into peace talks organized by men who are political leaders, establishing alliances between Christians and Muslims, and protesting when formal peace talks ignored them. While Southard situates her analysis in the recent political upheavals of West African nations in the 1990s, she does not address the longer history of European colonization in the area. Given Southard's project of engaging transnational work that decenters the nation-state, it would be productive to address this colonial history, which is responsible for the conceptualization of the nation-state as it currently exists in West Africa.3 As readers, we were drawn to thinking about how women denizens were engaging a decolonial project through their organizing.Southard moves on to examine how these women made it possible for Liberia to elect their first woman president. Southard reads Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's autobiography and public addresses to demonstrate how Sirleaf articulated women's national leadership as a necessary part of membership in a global community by normalizing women's rights within supranational and regional governing bodies, advocating for a national policy that protected women educators from sexual assault and crafting Liberian women's agency as a national and cosmopolitan ideal. While Southard demonstrates how Sirleaf and others became agentive rhetors, this focus on individual women who are empowered by existing political structures is complicated. We see the individualized nature of agency as similar to Glenn's discussion of this concept, a pattern that we discuss further below.Towards the end of the book, Southard presents the outcomes of African women's rhetorical agency, namely the success of creating a security resolution mandating that women be part of and protected in any peace talks. Yet, as Southard importantly points out in relation to the formation of UN Women 2010, this resolution did little to address the ways that supranational organizations privilege First World understandings of what it means to enact feminist change. Southard traces how the rhetorics of belonging espoused by Michelle Bachelet, the first Executive Director, reshaped the power relationships among global elites and the women they claimed to represent.As these brief summaries demonstrate, the ways that Glenn and Southard address the concepts of rhetorical agency and coalition-building productively shift scholars’ attention to how rhetors enact change on local and global scales. They offer ways to place the role of identity formation, agency, and hope within historical and contemporary feminist intentions. Glenn's theory of hope as a way to create more feminist futures and Southard's vision for rhetorical agency as “dispersed, networked, and interconnected” are places where feminist rhetors and activists build understandings of belonging and power (Southard 10).Questions of agency form the backbone of both Rhetorical Feminism and How to Belong. For both writers, agency is fundamentally linked to claiming a voice, working together, and taking action. According to Glenn, agency is “the power to take efficacious action” (4). She elaborates that agency “is always contingent . . . adopted strategically,” and can be used “to redefine rhetorical history, theory, and praxis” (4). This orientation could “represent more ethically and accurately the dominant and the marginalized alike (even as we rethink this metaphor); and . . . prepare the next generations of rhetorically empowered scholars, feminists, teachers, and citizens” (Glenn 4). Thus, agency is how we enact hope.Agency, for Glenn, is not just the ability to act but to imagine the radical possibilities of new social orders. Through a transnational lens, Southard adds that agency is “dispersed, networked, and interconnected” (10). Put simply, rhetorical agency is “what enables one to do rhetoric and how, where, and when one can do rhetoric” (Southard 7). Like Glenn, Southard links agency to “embodied social praxis” that is possible amid the constraints of the institutions and hierarchies we live in (12). Southard explains, “rhetorical agency [is] a negotiation between a rhetor's choices and their discursive contexts, such that interventional strategies are thought to shape and be shaped by transnational flows of political and economic power” (84–85). While Glenn's of agency at the of in to take action, Southard is particularly with how structures of power shape rhetorical Southard's of agency adds to Glenn's is a understanding of how women to together, such as through their shared of coalitions how different feminist have up agency in her of in rhetorical feminist thinking in chapter For example, in the of scholars such as who have for lived experience as a of Glenn and and into agency, a of or instead voice, even As scholars, we should the of the of and question how colonial structures that women were and from of Glenn agency, or the as a between silence or for individual She and rhetorical to agency in this of her which us such a does not that agency is both and this of agency as a means of claiming on a global is by the examples of agency by For example, in her chapter on as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's Southard explores how Sirleaf redefined national in to address women's as on women's of and Southard how Sirleaf adopted at transnational conferences, such as the World on that as change of supranational and national Southard traces how a public as a for rhetorical agency to but women Glenn and Southard to understand rhetorical agency as and in social to focus on individual rhetors it for to understand the and networked nature of We see this between individual agency and attention to and transnational economic structures as a project that more rhetorical scholars might take In we that both Southard's and Glenn's understandings of agency as within an individual who is empowered by their within political that can agency to individuals who are outside these one form of rhetorical We how agency is what we as agency in contexts not be agentive for Extending Glenn's discussion of the that what agentive for white not for to in the of rhetoric should be of the histories of and an awareness can Southard and Glenn's work to consider how agency is in legacies that forms of Glenn's of agency legacies of for why this has been made impossible across different and demonstrates awareness of new forms of rhetorical agency when she shows how West African women in legacies of power by forms of belonging that outside the concept of the The of belonging by the Liberian Women's and as Southard identifies who used rhetoric to create “dwelling both discursive and where they could with and their as of to with different for are unique and In this focus on the of rhetorical Southard for the ways that these peace women the of men and women by networked and with leaders to within Liberia as a and made space within public places to and for on these women's rhetorical Southard practices can places and nations from the or of the into places and nations where the marginalized and the can their We find this of agency in that existing political make it impossible to agency to rhetors can move and these to take action. Glenn focuses on to an existing Southard is how agency for these denizens outside of the colonial nation-state This networked and contingent understanding of agency not coalitions but it to change an of we in our on agency, of how feminist can form coalitions through both Glenn's and Southard's Glenn's understanding of rhetorical feminism is grounded in an that lived shape their to rhetoric and In her of rhetorical feminism as a theory and Glenn approaches this as a of identity is such that they an who are to consider in Glenn how rhetors can work productively across identity to form agentive In she a few different rhetorical strategies for including concept of and Glenn returns to historical examples to demonstrate how this coalitional work can be For example, she points out the of identity in U.S. feminism by the public exchange between Mary Daly and Audre an open a feminist for her to for all were constrained by her and the experience and of women and marginalized Glenn takes the lesson that all feminists must do the work “to open up across difference and that white feminists in need to consider their and in to Glenn's of the limits of feminist is Yet feminist on a coalition that the of is In her book, The with from a of feminist thought including and critiques feminism” for on within a and that must be in with for racial, and and to be by those most by these of working in coalition with through the question of how coalitions can form when we take identity difference as a of Glenn rhetoric and rhetorical listening as strategies for understanding and political focus on listening to lived experience is indeed an important for scholars of feminist this of listening of the complicated, necessary work of dwelling with an awareness of relations of power and to the between and Glenn provides an of what when coalitions form the hierarchies in Glenn does not offer a where rhetorical feminists used these listening strategies to form coalitions that used their networked, agency to change. While listening is an important of coalition with those who are marginalized about of power is for feminist This is that Southard focuses on her book and, in chapter as Michelle Transnational this chapter, Southard how Michelle used rhetorical agency as of UN Women to the of possibility for transnational and and as rhetorical While the transnational Southard looks at in this chapter are in a by at the that through UN and by leaders like Bachelet, Southard points to the coalitions that women across national borders and hierarchies through these This is where Southard's understanding of agency as and out in to Southard shows, for example, how address to the on the of Women made space for women's rhetorical For example, that must be by the local and lived of of and state violence the space for others to their in at the UN (Southard Glenn and Southard the of rhetorical silence and but Southard points to the power of listening as a form of for rhetorical scholars might as in this book are the strategies Southard points to for which for transnational and action, even as the book the local contexts of rhetorical and lived experiences. This is the of connection that can make transnational and change concepts of belonging and hope both We that these are and that can in our We these concepts as we for how rhetorical scholars can enact these in our Glenn identifies hope as a feminist way to us through of activist change. Rhetorical scholars across can from Glenn's of hope as a for activist research, and Glenn that the most feminist teachers are those who students to with analysis of the hierarchies and structures of power they move through in their Glenn identifies practices that must be in this of such as which frame students’ approaches to understandings of and agency, and action in response to this provides a hopeful at transnational feminism most rhetorical scholars in this at constraints on rhetorical agency, Southard looks at new for belonging rhetorical practices . . . in ways that and national As we Southard focuses on women as transnational who new ways of belonging as through and within transnational These forms of belonging help us the agency and rhetorical of those who outside and in between the of and the and of rhetors who are the rights of we are drawn to in Southard's book is that the goal of agency is not to within the structures of citizenship but instead in alternative institutions by women with shared and for the Southard and Glenn us to see hopeful of community within and outside of and together, Glenn and Southard show us that hope is and for to build belonging across difference. from what Glenn and Southard offer us in their monographs, hope and belonging should respond to existing structures of power and us to work and them. These books us with How do we form coalitions to pursue hopeful How can we transnational forms of belonging that in the of different lived of local can rhetorical scholars from these monographs and take up in their own research, and through Glenn and Southard's we how hope and belonging could create possibilities for change in our current While their on agency and coalition the field of rhetoric and to these the examples Glenn and Southard use to their of these could be For example, Southard's of agency as this as a of individual The way that transnational relations and these rhetorical possibilities is that scholars in the field have productively as we have above, Glenn's of agency and coalition, at difference and does not for the ways that different lived and within histories of white and we Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope and How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World with scholars who are work on agency and coalition, such as recent work by Karma Chávez and Sharon scholarship provides a of how different and groups form coalitional with one even For example, of it possible to build fraught colonial histories and creating the for relations and across in the possibility for agency and rhetorical action, both and outside established of political this understanding of coalition reads into the relationships between and In a recent given at the of extended her of coalitional possibility to address the most recent in and the transnational of with the and Likewise, what Karma work on coalition adds to this is an understanding of as always to and nation-state of Southard and Glenn's notions of agency to about how the rhetorical of are always marginalized necessary coalitional among the marginalized Chávez coalition the of the the the activist and to demonstrate how U.S. policy has to citizenship for the need for belonging outside of nation-state The book how working these violent and structures made possible of Glenn and Southard's texts can help scholars to the conversations about what agency and coalition can or should like in our local spaces and within in a fraught books demonstrate hope and scholarship work is working to coalition and belonging, these texts can help us cultivate new of in our work and our We scholars, as transnational feminist scholars and feminists of have called to rhetorical agency as always and
-
Racial Feeling-With, White Acknowledgement, and Rhetorical Quiet within the National Memorial for Peace and Justice ↗
Abstract
Abstract The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, commemorates victims of lynching in a three-part experience featuring 800 coffin-size monuments that appear to be suspended in the air. While providing a space for Black grieving, the memorial's design also creates an experience that invites white Americans to feel-with Black grief-yet-hope. This felt experience may produce discomfort for white visitors, as well as white acknowledgement of generations of white supremacist violence against Black Americans. Such an experience is possible because the memorial generates rhetorical quiet or the creative, artful, and public expression of interiority—an attempt to share that which is deeply felt but which often eludes efforts to be adequately communicated through traditional rhetorical/verbal forms.
May 2023
-
Abstract
ABSTRACTThe unique experience of Black Americans in the United States produces a physical and cultural space with a long history of misuse, commodification, and theft of the Black imagination and Black culture. These spaces, which also historically complicate notions of privatization and ownership, are replicated online today. In this essay, we propose the corner as a lens through which to interrogate whether Black networks online potentially produce a rhetorical digital commons and, further, whether the theory and practice of “the commons” adequately make space for the particular historical reality of Black America. To do so, we focus on three social media platforms wherein Black digital praxis meets the possibility of the corner: TikTok, Twitter, and Black Planet. These digital corners provide lessons that center the Black experience on- and offline, and point toward possibilities and limitations in our digital future. Ultimately we argue that the corner contradicts hegemonic modes of white supremacy in public spaces while also spotlighting the brutal realities of gentrification, commodification, and theft that fortify the exploitation of Black communities.KEYWORDS: Black/African American rhetoricdigital commonsdigital rhetoricsocial media Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 We use Black liberation here to reference freeing Black persons from multiple forms of political, social, and economic subjugation. Black liberation movements, theories, and theologies have been espoused by numerous organizations. Here. though, we reference any orientation toward this perspective whether explicitly named by individuals or simply inferred through their online activities. See Stokley Carmicheal’s “Toward Black Liberation” and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From# BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.2 See André Brock, Jr.’s Distributed Blackness, especially chapter four, for an insightful analysis on breaking the dichotomy of ratchetry and antiracism.3 See Nakamura 181–93.
-
Abstract
How can it be possible for disempowerment to be mistaken for empowerment?Isn't the dichotomy between the two abundantly clear?Erec Smith thinks not.Smith's ethos as a Black professor of rhetoric and composition places him in a unique position to critique anti-racist pedagogy.It is not his perspective that racism is not present in the academy: far from it.He has been the recipient of prejudice and discrimination from his graduate work all the way to his teaching.In his book, Smith includes personal experiences and anecdotes that help to illustrate his perspective.As a Black rhetoric and composition instructor in the majority White institution of York College of Pennsylvania, Smith has experienced these issues firsthand and has found that anti-racist pedagogy alone, which he argues can lead to a lack of academic rigor, is not necessarily the appropriate answer.Smith's main argument is that anti-racist pedagogy in rhetoric and composition often inadvertently disempowers students by ignoring important aspects of empowerment theory.This pedagogy instead encourages marginalized students to embrace their positionalities as the center of all arguments and to fall back into positions of victimhood.Smith explains that this "victim framing" creates "disempowered entities in need of enlightenment instead of empowered agents with selfefficacy and a desire to broaden the interactional and behavioral components of empowerment" (88).This victimhood allows students to escape from proper academic scrutiny which, in turn, reduces academic rigor.In his introduction, Smith begins his critique with a vignette in which W. E. B. Du Bois recounts an experience in a composition class at Harvard.In his first essay for that class, Du Bois had railed against racist issues present in society at the time and had let fly his own colloquial grammar and syntax.This first effort was met with a failing grade.From this experience, Du Bois noted, "[he] realized that while style is subordinate to content, and that no real literature can be composed simply of meticulous and fastidious phrases, nevertheless solid content with literary style carries a message further than poor grammar and muddled syntax" (Smith xix).Du Bois realized it was imperative to adapt to "standard English, " or what Smith prefers to call the "language of wider communication" (LWC) (5), rather than insist on communicating in the vernacular he grew up speaking.Using Du Bois as an example of code switching, Smith addresses the present climate of code meshing taught in many quarters of the rhetoric and composition field.According to scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Asao Inoue, and others, rhetoric and composition instructors who require their students of color to adapt to the LWC engage in a form of racism because this adaptation automatically alienates students' home dialects.As such, they propose that students in rhetoric and composition should be encouraged to inject their writing with African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as well as other dialect forms.In writing and speaking this way, anti-racist scholars argue, students embrace
-
Abstract
While much of the work on increasing diversity of U.S. schools has focused on urban and suburban contexts, rural schools and communities have seen an influx of multilingual immigrant and migrant students. Using qualitative data collected in English classrooms at two different rural high schools as part of a larger study, this article profiles two rural ELA teachers who stood out as unique supporters of their multilingual students’ literacy development. These profiles are contextualized in broader debates in writing studies about valuating language diversity and avoiding form-based approaches in instruction. In concluding comments, the author explores how these teachers don’t neatly fit categorizations of effective writing teachers and argues that writing researchers need to work across increasingly polarized divides to help make rural schools more inclusive spaces for linguistically diverse students.
-
Abstract
In this article, I center the voices and experiences of Yazmin, Valeria, Guadalupe, and Monet, four escritoras that participated in Somos Escritoras, a creative space for Latina girls (grades 6–12) that invites them to share and perform stories from their lived experiences using art, theater, and writing as tools for reflection and examination of self and world. For two weeks, these escritoras created art and composed personal stories from their lives that addressed the tensions and contradictions at the intersections of age, language, culture, and ethnicity they navigate daily as Latina girls. For my inquiry, I explored the following questions: How do Latina/Chicana girls use writing and art to describe their experiences, histories, and identities? What can we learn from their voices? In their embodied art and writing, the girls wrote toward the foundation that their mothers had paved for them through their hopes and dreams, sometimes deferred. Rewriting narratives of self, the girls drew on creative acts to examine their lives and reclaim their experiences. Theorizing the future, the girls construct a world for themselves rooted within the stories and voices of their ancestors and those of the writers, poets, and storytellers whose writing has carved out a place for us in the world. Their words offer important perspectives into the ways that we design spaces and literacy curriculum that centers their intellectual, cultural, and gendered ways of knowing and being as important resources for teaching and learning.
April 2023
-
Abstract
This Methodologies and Approaches piece interfaces conversations about social justice pedagogies in technical and professional communication (TPC), Black TPC, and online TPC instruction to discuss the social justice affordances of Slack in online instruction. Drawing on our experiences using Slack within an online graduate course during the COVID-19 pandemic, we consider how Slack supports pedagogical community building and accessibility in online instruction before presenting a framework for assessing instructional technologies in terms of social justice.
-
“Who Am I Fighting For? Who Am I Accountable To?”: Comradeship as a Frame for Nonprofit Community Work in Technical Communication ↗
Abstract
While entrepreneurship is a pervasive cultural concept, it is not universally applicable. Drawing on a year-long study with nonprofit workers, this piece articulates a frame for understanding technical and professional communication work within nonprofits rooted in comradeship, which privileges community needs, everyday people, listening, and solidarity across stakeholder groups. Such a frame offers a more nuanced understanding of how accountability frames the work of nonprofit employees and other stakeholders dedicated to social justice.
-
Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article argues that game design can be used to teach design thinking within a pedagogy of making. It analyzes qualitative survey responses from 12 writing teachers who asked students to design social justice games and argues that games not only give students practice in design thinking but that, as multimodal, embodied systems, games can enact social theories and, as such, be a way for students to empathize with and design for wicked social problems.KEYWORDS: Computer-based learningcritical theorypedagogical theoryrhetoric of technologysocial theoryusability studies Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsRebekah Shultz ColbyRebekah Shultz Colby is a Teaching Professor at the University of Denver. She has co-edited The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom and Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games. She has published articles on using games to theorize and teach rhetoric and technical writing in Computers and Composition and Communication Design Quarterly.
-
“Crusaders on a Quest for Democracy”: Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson’s Black Civic Pedagogy ↗
Abstract
This article examines Hunton and Johnson’s Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, which recounts their WWI YMCA service in France supporting Black troops. TCW exemplifies a long tradition of Black civic pedagogy, drawing on prophetic and empirical strategies to teach audiences that Black experience and racial justice are foundational to American democracy. Deploying the Black jeremiad, it exposes racial inequities and envisions a racially just future; deploying testifying, it combines narrative, reportage, and documentary evidence to empirically support its findings of white racism, Black heroism, and French egalitarianism. These strategies suggest possibilities and limitations for future practice.
-
Abstract
Abstract This essay discusses the usefulness of empathetic, relational pedagogy while teaching at CUNY in the time of COVID-19 and reflects on experiences with three students early in the author's career that led her to this pedagogical approach. A terminally ill student, a student who had been shot in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, and a student who became paralyzed in a motorbike accident led the author to reconsider the idea of the classroom as apart from the outside world. Embracing the sometimes frightening events happening beyond the classroom walls can lead to a deeper engagement with course texts as well as to a more meaningful student-teacher relationship and a sense of the course as personally significant. By constructing classrooms as places for listening and by striving to practice antiracist pedagogy, linguistically and culturally diverse students find themselves supported, even when the world outside becomes unstable and difficult to navigate.
-
Abstract
Abstract This essay details the evolution of an interdisciplinary course at a university with proximity to Baltimore, Maryland. The original course relied entirely on experiential learning via field trips. During these trips, students conducted analyses of museums as rhetorical and political spaces. As a result of the pandemic, the course evolved into one that relied entirely on students making virtual field trips for cultural organizations and for those at home. In both courses, students focused on issues of social justice as they pertain to museums: issues of access (who is able/encouraged to visit the museum?), issues of diversity (which artists/works of art are featured and who is offered positions of power within the organization?), and issues of engagement (does the museum offer exhibits/programming that is relevant to the public they serve?). In the revised class, students (1) virtually met with museum representatives to discuss their needs; (2) researched the types of resources, events, and objects that can be found in the different locations; (3) learned how to use technology such as Nearpod as multimodal composing platforms; and (4) created a virtual field trip to be used by that organization for educational and promotional purposes. By creating material for specific audiences, students not only learned the rhetorical skills of composing for diverse groups but also grappled with issues of equity, access, and engagement. While the revisions were made out of necessity, this essay details the transferable methodology that can continue to be employed in online classes and integrated into in-person learning.
-
Abstract
Ryan Baxter graduated from the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in 2017 with a BA in English language and literature. Following this, he completed a master of letters on the Gothic imagination at the University of Stirling in 2019. He is currently a master's student in English at Central Michigan University on the lookout for opportunities to gain teaching experience. His research interests include the Gothic from the late eighteenth century to the present, cinema and broadcast cultures in Britain and Ireland, theories of haunting and spectrality, epistemology, landscape studies, and spatial theory.Kelly L. Bezio is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where her research and teaching intersect with and inform the fields of cultural studies, biopolitical theory, American literature before 1900, critical race studies, literature and science, and health humanities. Her interdisciplinary scholarship foregrounds how insights from the past help us understand how to combat inequity in the present moment.Mark Brenden is a PhD candidate in writing studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he also teaches writing classes. His current research investigates the digital transformation of higher education, particularly as it relates to writing pedagogy.K. Narayana Chandran currently holds the Institution of Eminence Research Chair in English and Cultural Theory in the School of Humanities/English at the University of Hyderabad, India. An occasional translator and writer in Malayalam, he has been teaching a wide variety of courses and publishing papers in Anglo-American literatures, critical and reading theories, comparative and translation studies, and English in India—its history and pedagogy.Tyler Jean Dukes is a doctoral candidate and graduate instructor at Texas Christian University. She specializes in early British literature and the medical humanities. She is also a childbirth doula, a role that informs her scholarly pursuits as she investigates the connections between storytelling and healing. To attend one of her in-person or virtual narrative medicine workshops, please visit https://dfwnarrativemedicine.com/.Sandy Feinstein's scholarship ranges across early literature, most recently on Margaret Cavendish and Marie Meurdrac in Early Modern Women; and on Mark Twain and heritage management forthcoming from Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History. She has also published creative non-fiction on reading Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court during COVID-19. Cowritten articles with Bryan Shawn Wang appear in New Chaucer Society: Pedagogy and Profession, CEA: The Critic, and Angles: New Perspectives on the Anglophone World, among others.Ruth G. Garcia is an associate professor of English and Core Books at CUNY and cocoordinator at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her recent work includes “Fanny's Place in the Family: Useful Service and the Social Order in Mansfield Park” in Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory.An experienced teacher, scholar, and administrator, Sara M. Glasgow has served in higher education for over twenty years. She is currently dean of liberal arts at North Central Michigan College. Prior to coming to North Central, she was professor of political science at the University of Montana Western (UMW), where she was honored as the CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year for the state of Montana (2013). While at UMW, she taught core courses in American government, theory, international relations and strategy, and political economy, as well as basic and advanced courses in research methodology. She also offered depth learning opportunities in Norse history and culture as part of the university honors program, and majors’ courses in the history and politics of illness, her research focus. She holds a BA in international studies and Spanish from Virginia Tech; an MS in international affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology; an MA in English language and literature from Central Michigan University; and an MA and PhD in government and politics from the University of Maryland.Dana Gliserman-Kopans is professor in and chair of the Department of Literature, Communication, and Cultural Studies at SUNY Empire State College. Her research centers on the literature and culture of late eighteenth-century Britain, though the pandemic and eighteenth-century epistemologies have been a recent (and necessary) focus. Her teaching interests are far wider, spanning from Gothic literature to the medical humanities. She also serves as the associate editor of The Burney Journal.Eva Sage Gordon teaches writing at Baruch College, CUNY. She has book chapters forthcoming in Innovative Practices in Creative Writing Teaching, edited by Graeme Harper; and Authorship, Activism, and Celebrity: Art and Action in Global Literature, edited by Ruth Scobie and Sandra Mayer.Jennifer Horwitz received her PhD in literature from Tufts University and is a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her research focuses on representations of education in multi-ethnic US literature that help envision and enact the teaching needed in this time of climate crisis.William Kangas returned to college after twenty years as a journalist to complete his MA in English composition and communication at Central Michigan University, while working as a high school substitute teacher and consultant at CMU's Writing Center. He currently is an adjunct instructor candidate for a local community college and will be entering his second year of study for an MA in strategic communication from Michigan State University.Robert Kilgore is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB). He is currently the president of USCB's chapter of the American Association of University Professors.Kristopher M. Lotier is associate professor of writing studies and rhetoric at Hofstra University, where he teaches courses in first-year writing, professional communication, and digital rhetoric. He is the author of Postprocess Postmortem and has published articles in Pedagogy, Enculturation, and College Composition and Communication.Xiomara Trinidad Perez is a junior studying journalism at Hofstra University, with a minor in fine arts. She hopes to work in the publishing and news industry, as well as in any area that deals with visual media. She finds enjoyment in creative writing, curating visual media, and conducting research.Aidan Pierre was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a junior at Hofstra University, majoring in film and minoring in history. He has produced, written, and directed numerous short films and is a teaching assistant for an Introduction to Film Production course. He is a part of the Rabinowitz Honors College and has been on the provost's list for two semesters. Outside of class, he enjoys spending his time reading literature and baking bread.Timothy Ponce holds a PhD in English and a certificate in teaching technical writing from the University of North Texas. In addition to serving as an associate professor of instruction at the University of Texas Arlington (UTA), he also serves as the coordinator of internships and coordinator of technical writing and professional design in the Department of English.Elizabeth Porter is an assistant professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY. She is a scholar in the fields of eighteenth-century British literature, women's writing, and composition pedagogy. Her work has been published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Jody R. Rosen is an associate professor of English and OpenLab codirector at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her recent work includes the coauthored “Supporting Twenty-First-Century Students with an Across-the-Curriculum Approach to Undergraduate Research” (2020) in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Prameet V. Shah is a sophomore at Hofstra University. He is majoring in pre-medical studies and minoring in biochemistry.Christy Tidwell is associate professor of English and humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. She teaches a wide range of classes, including composition, STEM communication, science fiction, environmental ethics and STEM, and introduction to humanities; and her writing most often addresses intersections between speculative fiction, environmental humanities, and gender studies. She is coeditor of Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (2018), Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (2021), and a special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on creature features and the environment (2021).Bryan Shawn Wang is an associate teaching professor in biology at Penn State Berks. He has a background in protein engineering and synthetic biology. He has recently published on student choice and learning in Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments; on reviving ecologies in South Central Review; and, with Sandy Feinstein and Samantha Kavky, on interdisciplinarity and de-extinction in Comparative Media Arts Journal.Rachael Zeleny is assistant professor of English and integrated arts at the University of Baltimore. Her early research is dedicated to the multimodal rhetoric of the nineteenth-century actress. Her current research explores ways to gamify the classroom using virtual escape rooms and methods of incorporating experiential learning into virtual spaces. She conducts workshops on integrating these methods into the classroom.
-
Abstract
In the winter of 2022, I had planned a place-based literature course on Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design. A series of outings formed the backbone of the class: my aim was to have students connect to the place where they lived through experiences like standing atop the landfill to understand the afterlife of their waste and touring a colonial house to trace the violent foundations of the city's wealth. Instead, due to the omicron-variant surge, the course was largely conducted over Zoom and all but one outing became virtual. I found that a disorienting, nearly absurd sensation clouded the course when we discussed places that we should have been inhabiting together; instead of bridging the distance between the texts and the world, in the end, the course only accentuated that distance.Postcolonial/ecocritical place-based teaching is challenging for the precise reason that it is based on place and our places are changing now more than ever. And yet, as the kind of teaching the planet needs becomes more difficult, it also becomes more essential. In his foreword to Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, Graham Huggan asserts that “teaching is the most valuable thing we postcolonial/environmental scholars do” (xiv). Amid global health and ecological crises that perpetuate, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is a collection invaluable for its compilation of teaching ideas, resources, and commentary on the field of postcolonial environmentalism. But perhaps more importantly, it is invaluable for the sense of community it creates among educators who continue to dedicate themselves to a livable future.At its core, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media aims to show the analytical and pedagogical import of considering social and environmental injustices together through postcolonial ecocriticism. Editor Cajetan Iheka writes about the collection this way: “Taken together, the growing interest in postcolonial ecologies and the demand for a diversified curriculum addressing social concerns, including the climate crisis, makes this book a crucial contribution to the environmental humanities” (5). The majority of the essays are field-tested success stories of teaching postcolonial ecocriticism that offer a snapshot of the contributor's course. Most courses are literary, and while some are more typically environmental and others postcolonial, all experiment with the overlap of the two in exciting ways. The collection is particularly useful for teacher-scholars who know one side of the critical conversation—either postcolonialism or ecocriticism—and are wanting to bring the other to bear on their thinking and teaching.In recent years, postcolonialism has advanced the field of ecocriticism, a field long dominated by a Euro-American epistemology that put forth romanticized imaginings of pristine nature and prioritized wilderness conservation. While this hegemonic strand of environmentalism was challenged by scholars from a range of social and disciplinary perspectives, stoked in part by the US environmental justice movement in the 1990s, the conspicuous dearth of postcolonial analysis from ecocriticism remained. Due in part to the contributions of major critics like Graham Huggan, Rob Nixon, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, the second decade of the twenty-first century has come to mark what Iheka calls “the ecocritical turn in postcolonial studies,” characterized by increased critical attention to “the inextricability of colonial plundering from environmental conditions” (1). The recognition that colonialism and neocolonialism—and the world order they uphold—are dependent on land theft, resource extraction, and the degradation of Indigenous cosmologies with devastating consequences for people and the environment has fundamentally impacted both postcolonial and environmental studies, leading to the rise of postcolonial ecocriticism.This collection contributes to the critical project of postcolonial ecocriticism by emphasizing the practice of teaching it (even as you will also learn much about postcolonial ecocriticism itself from this impressive group of scholars invested in advancing and diversifying the field). Although there is now a number of major works that take up the study of postcolonial texts and environmental concerns, Iheka points out in his introduction that “none of them explores teaching postcolonial environmental texts” (3). Published in 2021, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is especially timely, as it responds to the growing demand by students that their education attend to past and present environmental and racial injustices. Uniquely positioned to expose these injustices, postcolonial ecocritical texts can help us teach the afterlives of colonialism that dually exploit local communities and environments.As you might expect from a collection that spans two fields, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is impressive in its scope and breadth: twenty-seven essays are organized into six sections. The geographic diversity of the literary and other cultural media analyzed in the book, and to a lesser extent the classrooms themselves, soundly positions the project in a global context. Together, the contributors draw on an “expanded sense of the postcolonial” (9) by including colonized spaces from the Global North in their discussions of the Global South. This approach is important, as it underscores shared systems of exploitation and solidarity outside region or nationhood. The collection also features canonical ecocritical and/or postcolonial texts like Indra Sinha's Animal's People and Ken Saro-Wiwa's Month and a Day alongside newer ones like Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, making it valuable to faculty who teach introductory and advanced literature courses. Finally, as the title emphasizes, the book examines media other than literature, and several key articles focus on teaching visuals, a crucial component of many environmental humanities courses.The first five essays, which constitute “Part I: Background and Theoretical Foundations,” showcase the intersections among postcolonial ecocriticism and other major theoretical frameworks, including environmental justice, Indigenous, queer, disability, and place studies. In the opening essay, Byron Caminero-Santangelo is motivated by “the unique contributions that postcolonial ecocriticism could make to transformative ways of imagining the world and to possibilities for action” (23). Arguing that environmental justice struggles in the Global South “are neither belated nor peripheral” (24), he shows instead that these struggles foreground fundamental elements of injustice, such as the role of multinational and transnational actors, too often ignored in US-centric conversations of environmental justice. Even as Caminero-Santangelo writes toward a global conceptualization of environmental justice, he acknowledges the equal importance of paying attention to specific and local circumstances. Throughout, the collection is animated by this “generative tension” (26) between the universal and the particular that centers the field of postcolonial ecocriticism.Together the contributors to section 1 unsettle the United States and Europe as epistemological strongholds in mainstream environmentalism. In “Finding Balance: Disability and the Ecocritical Lens,” Roanne L. Kantor describes the limitations in how disability is generally studied in the Global North. When disability is approached as socially constructed, in which “impairment happens offstage, such that its causes cannot be politicized or legally redressed” (55), it elides bodily harms inextricable from environmental hazards and disparities in medical care, as in Sinha's Animal's People and Rohinton Mistry's Fine Balance. Similarly, Brady Smith's “Place and Postcolonial Megacities: A Project-Based Approach” redresses the historic exclusion of urbanity in Euro-American literary traditions of “place” through a project-based course that examines how Okorafor's Lagoon complicates many students’ preconceived ideas of the environment.Pedagogy takes center stage in “Part II: Global Ecologies and Uneven Flows.” Each contributor shows how the study of postcolonial environmental literature necessarily shapes the structure and aims of their courses. Examples include creating opportunities for students “to discover their own power” through assignments like an open-ended field journal (81). In Margaret Anne Smith's “Decolonizing the Environmental Classroom: Increasing Student Agency through a Journal Assignment,” excerpts from these journals enable student voices to dominate that essay. Perhaps most radical, Elaine Savory describes a course that integrates lecturers from various environmental fields in the close reading of literary texts. Together, the essays in part 2 demonstrate how postcolonial ecocriticism is by definition interdisciplinary and intersectional because, as Savory puts it, “to think about the environment in postcolonial space is to think globally and locally at once, beyond disciplines and across time” (105).More localized considerations of postcolonial ecocriticism are featured in “Part III: Regional and Local Perspectives,” and Christina Gerhardt opens the section with a region that exemplifies climate injustice: the Pacific Islands. In her environmental humanities course, students explore the threat of sea level rise and the politics of representation as they view map collections and read Pacific Island literature, including Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner's Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter and Craig Santos Perez's From Unincorporated Territory [Hacha]. In choosing an island to represent in both essay and map form, students in the course are primed to think through ideological questions like who and what is centered in each representation and to what effect. Other essays develop these themes of positionality and audience. I particularly appreciate Salma Monani's honest appraisal of her pedagogical decision, as a woman of color in a majority-white classroom, to begin her introductory environmental course with “voices and situations familiar to [her] students” (132), even as the choice delays introducing Indigenous perspectives (Yurok, Hoopa, and Karuk) until a case study on water wars in the Klamath River Basin.While the third section brings together essays on a range of regions, from the Pacific Islands to the Caribbean to Latin America, it concludes with the challenges of using region as an organizing principle. There needs to be more attention on the Global East as colonizer and as colonized, Simon C. Estok insists, at the same time that teacher-scholars need to acknowledge the vast heterogeneity among East Asian nations. This work includes serious obstacles, not least of all because “teaching postcolonial East Asian ecocriticisms outside the region means teaching in a language and culture not of the region” (172). While most of ecocriticism is conducted in English, Estok includes untranslated Korean to highlight how “an inability to read something means an inability to receive the information contained in that writing” (172). Readers will find that Estok's essay resonates with critical linguistic conversations outside of this collection, including those on the politics of language in postcolonial writing, the traditional ecological knowledge embedded in Indigenous languages, and the need to diversify standard academic English in composition studies.“Part IV: The Lives of Animals” introduces the more-than-human community as an essential element of postcolonial environmental teaching. Although animal rights are often pitted against human rights—with one taking precedence over the other—essays by Jonathan Steinwand, Amit R. Baishya, and Jason Price eschew the hierarchal thinking that justifies environmental, racial, and (neo)colonial violence. Instead, both Steinwand and Baishya formulate courses that emphasize multispecies entanglement and, as Baishya defines, “the mutual constitutiveness of the human and the animal” (199). Price confronts the vexed animal studies debate on how to interpret cultural renditions of animals by teaching animist-realist African literature. Instead of reading animals as wholly outside symbolic meaning or not, Price helps students work toward “metaphoric-material approaches [that] successfully blend treatments of animals as literal and nonliteral without denying or backgrounding the animal” (221).Rhonda Knight and Mary Laffidy, a professor and a student, respectively, open the next section with a question that many of their co-contributors in the Global North grapple with: what scaffolding is required to help Western students engage responsibly with literature from other parts of the world? Their course focuses on speculative petro-fiction, in which new worlds are built on African and Caribbean cultures. Knight and Laffidy choose not to provide contextual resources directly but to create a multimodal assignment that guides students to fill in their own knowledge gaps. Students keep a reading journal and then rewrite parts of their journal for a public blog, building their capacity for research and communication in global digital contexts.The essays in “Part V: Extractive Ecologies, Environmental Justice, and Postcolonial Ecomedia” experiment with media that allow for new forms of storytelling. To understand art as a tool of empire and resistance, students compare hegemonic representations of the Caribbean with Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié’s exhibit Imagined Landscapes, in which bright colors are notably absent from his paintings and glitter reflects viewers’ faces, details that lead students to consider their own role in the exoticism and exploitation of the Caribbean landscape (Charly Verstraet). (This essay immediately made me want to learn more about the exhibit and to incorporate more art in my classes.) Another course describes the digital project Colonize Mars, “part choose-your-own adventure novel, part nonfiction account of Mars exploration past and future, and part video game” (273), created by Rachel Rochester (and now available to the public) for students to contend with interplanetary colonization and terraforming, as well as to envision alternative, sustainable futures.What will strike you over and over as you move through Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is the reminder that the stakes of our teaching are high. “Effective environmental pedagogy,” Rochester writes, “must expose the ideological miasma that normalizes colonial violence and its trail of environmental and social catastrophe while invigorating learners to identify alternative means of inhabiting the world” (274). The final section of the collection, “Part VI: Place-Based Approaches,” highlights pedagogical methods that engender these alternative means of inhabiting the world by rooting students in place. In “Ecocriticism in Nigeria: Toward a Transformative Pedagogy,” Sule Emmanuel Egya outlines the challenges and rewards of teaching ecocriticism in a country where the field remains relatively new and of incorporating place-based practices. Class trips to “ecological zones” around campus cultivate students’ concern for local environmental conditions alongside the desire to become agents of change. Additionally, in their significant contribution to the collection, Kristin Lucas and Gyllian Phillips contemplate how to resist a place-based pedagogy that reinforces settler colonialism by centering Indigenous texts that ask their settler students in Canada to engage with the continuance of colonization, as well as restorative human-land relations.Far from being provincial or parochial, the place-based courses shared in the last section illustrate the relevance of the local in studies of the global and offer expansive imaginings of what place-based education can be. For example, comparative learning is presented as place-based when images of oil spills in Ogoniland and writings by Saro-Wiwa lead students in Malaysia to make connections between the power structures that govern both postcolonial places in what Shalini Nadaswaran describes as a “text-to-world-to-self sequence” (324). In the final essay, Sarah Dimick and Cheryl Johnson follow a similar sequence in writing about students in a postcolonial literature course visiting a Chicago-based environmental justice organization. The experience is guided by pragmatics—bringing students to locales depicted in the literature would have required international travel—but also politics: “Without domestic context, students from relatively unpolluted areas of the United States who enroll in a postcolonial environmental literature course may inadvertently come to associate sacrifice zones . . . with distant geographies” (349). For faculty or administrators who need to be encouraged to include field trips in university courses, this concluding essay showcases the critical, reciprocal, and hopeful learning that can happen when students engage with environmental justice community work.While too often “place” is reserved for the rural and place-based teaching as excursions into “nature,” this collection integrates throughout pedagogical methods that invite the careful study of varied places, including urban and built environments. In her book that asserts the specificity of global connections, Anna Tsing (2005: 3) asks, “Where would one locate the global in order to study it?” We might read each essay in the collection as a response to that question. In fact, one of the most provocative moments in relation to place-based approaches appears outside the section labeled as such in “The Colonial Relation between Digitization and Migration in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West” when Sofia Ahlberg asks students to track their online activity, calculate its corresponding carbon footprint, and “imagine which part of the world their finger actually affects as they click and drag on their devices” (246). While it is difficult to find any serious shortcomings with this smart and capacious collection, brushes with the virtual world like this one made me wish that explicit discussion of online courses had been included, especially given the challenges of making local, material environments come to in virtual Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media will teacher-scholars in the fields of ecocriticism and postcolonialism to bring students to the place where the two to For an this collection, not only in the need for more postcolonial ecocritical teaching but also in the capacity to make to own course or the book, you will as you are in a of their and and, because course and are you will that it is more than to For the of the the contributors to this collection that you
-
Abstract
AbstractThis article proposes that the methods and philosophies informing corequisite teaching could be generalized throughout English studies to support students at all levels who are undergoing and recovering from pandemic-related traumas. Corequisite courses, which promote equity among first-year students, are designed with attention to trauma-informed approaches and a focus on process-driven writing. Instructors address noncognitive skills with students, such as time management and note-taking, and consider the cultural relevance of their reading and writing assignments. By describing specific activities and methods used at Hostos Community College, the article considers how strategies that are central to corequisite pedagogy might be widely adopted or adapted in this moment of reorientation for English studies. Additionally, the article suggests that mission-driven practices of community colleges serve as a model for higher education more broadly.
-
Visualizing a Drug Abuse Epidemic: Media Coverage, Opioids, and the Racialized Construction of Public Health Frameworks ↗
Abstract
In technical and professional communication, the social justice turn calls on us to interrogate sites of positionality, privilege, and power to help foreground strategies that can empower marginalized groups. I propose that mainstream media coverage of the opioid epidemic represents such a site because addiction to these drugs, which initially primarily affected White people, has been positioned as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice problem. I explore the strategies that were used to create this positioning by investigating themes in the visual rhetoric as conveyed through data visualizations and in the text of the articles in which these graphics were published. My results align with two previous studies that confirmed this public health framing. I also observed an emphasis on mortality, which contributes to our understanding of rhetorical strategies that can be used to engender support rather than condemnation for those suffering from drug addiction.
-
“The World Has to Stop Discriminating Against African American Language” (AAL): Exploring the Language Ideologies of AAL-Speaking Students in College Writing ↗
Abstract
Drawing on recent decades, literature in college writing that theorizes the importance of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) curricula for African American Language (AAL)-speaking students, this article offers empirical evidence on the design and implementation of a college writing curriculum centered on CLA and its influence on AAL–speaking students’ language ideologies with respect to both speech and writing. Qualitative analyses of students’ pre- and-post-Questionnaires and the researcher’s field notes demonstrate that the curriculum helped students view AAL as an independent, natural, and legitimate language and view themselves as critically conscious thinkers and writers—more likely and willing to develop their academic writing skills and the strategies that support employing their native language in writing—for example, code-meshing strategies. This study offers important implications for college writing instruction.
-
Conversation Shaper: Emotional Intelligence as a Teachable Skill: How Empathy-Based Training Can Shape the Writing Center into an Activist Space ↗
Abstract
The incorporation of emotional intelligence skillsets in tutor training helps build empathy and communication skills that better prepare tutors to work with a diverse range of students. These skills are important for holding space for the voices of diverse authors and encouraging authenticity. In addition, writing centers must examine the racism inherent in Standardized English and encourage tutors to look closer at their internalized biases. Previous research by writing center scholars shows that training based in emotional intelligence and training based explicitly in activist rhetoric have similar outcomes: tutors become empathetic toward historically underrepresented voices and are often motivated to take an active role in social justice. This paper pieces together these different approaches to illustrate their efficacy and the opportunity writing center training has to push back against the systemic racism rooted in writing pedagogy. However, it is important that this education is based in challenging the internalized biases of privileged writers to avoid using historically underrepresented voices as a tool for our own enlightenment.
Subjects: empathy, tutor training, social justice, emotional intelligence, diversity, systemic racism, Standardized English, approximating experiences
March 2023
-
Framing Palestinian Rights: A Rhetorical Frame Analysis of Vernacular Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement Discourse ↗
Abstract
This essay applies rhetorical framing analysis to vernacular student-created discourse promoting the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and Palestinian rights. The results of this study suggest that pro-BDS student activist-rhetors typically frame the BDS movement as a nonviolent movement to achieve Palestinian rights and hold Israel accountable for an ongoing system of oppression, discrimination, settler colonialism, and apartheid against Palestinians. This framing relies on the values of justice, freedom, equality, and joint struggle—values that strongly overlap with social and racial justice discourses focusing on intersectionality and justice for marginalized and oppressed peoples. In response to the rhetorical ecology for pro-BDS discourse, including counterframing by Israel advocates and the doxa that BDS is antisemitic, pro-BDS activist-rhetors regularly denounce antisemitism, emphasize Jewish support for the BDS movement, and draw comparisons to other struggles for justice and liberation.
-
Postracial Presumptions: The Supreme Court’s Undoing of the Voting Rights Act through Racial Ignorance ↗
Abstract
To warrant the weakening of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has actively manufactured ignorance of racism in the realm of voting. Through an analysis of majority opinions in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Abbott v. Perez (2018), and cases concerning states’ antivoting fraud restrictions, I demonstrate how considerable evidence of racial discrimination is deemed to fail the standard of proof imposed by the court. I offer the term postracial presumption to account for how dominant publics are empowered to reason as if the United States was beyond race, to employ postracial premises to warrant judgments for which there is insufficient evidence and, indeed, for which there is considerable disconfirming evidence. The essay demonstrates how presumption and proof burdens can be critical tools in the study of postracism and is suggestive of how racial ignorance cannot simply be rectified by more proof.
-
Conversations with Other-than-Human Creatures: Unpacking the Ambiguity of “with” for Multispecies Rhetorics ↗
Abstract
Multispecies rhetoric functions as an umbrella for diverse approaches to more-than-human communications that invoke distinct varieties of relations among human and other creatures. Amid that diversity, rhetorical engagements in which all creatures “speak” with others in mutual, iterative exchange can become lost. My argument is, first, that this particular variety of multispecies conversation is rare in discussions of multispecies rhetoric because rhetorical engagement “with” other creatures is often underspecified, and because it is incompatible with Aristotelian foundations that still often underpin rhetorical inquiry; and second, that it should be cultivated so that humans can invite other creatures to be more interesting than the anthropoexceptionalist lens may suggest, such that we can accomplish more together. A multispecies rhetoric wherein humans speak with other creatures, not only speaking for, about, or around them, requires drawing a distinction between capacities to affect/be affected and assumptions about any creature’s internal state of mind.
-
Abstract
After #BlackLivesMatter protests in summer 2020, many leaders in the US South reevaluated monuments dedicated to the confederate and segregation eras. Black affiliates of the University of Arkansas used the Twitter hashtag #BlackatUARK to demand the removal of memorials commemorating a segregationist senator and share their experiences of anti-Black racism on campus. We argue that #BlackatUARK provides a counterpublic memorial of campus life that opposes and transforms dominant public memories, geographies, and subjectivities. Our analysis of the hashtag expands the conceptual boundaries of the kairos/metanoia partnership to show how digital counterpublic memories gain momentum and produce tangible rhetorical effects across both digital and nondigital contexts. During its circulation, the hashtag opens and sustains a kairotic moment fueled by the exigent flow of memories of anti-Black racism on campus. Simultaneously, the hashtag ignites a metanoic moment whereby allies mobilize their regret about a shameful past to plan a more just future.
-
Abstract
Presents papers from the International Professional Communication Conference that was held in Limerick, Ireland, 17–20 July 2022. The conferences solicited practical ideas for redressing specific manifestations of injustice rather than theorize or deliberate about the nature of social justice.
-
Abstract
Communication apprehension can lead to professional challenges for individuals, teams, and organizations. This is the first study of communication apprehension that involved a randomized national survey of working adults in the United States and captured broad representation in terms of age, gender, race/ethnicity, managerial status, and other factors. The study showed that communication apprehension is common, including in group discussions, meetings, interpersonal situations, and public speaking. It is significantly more common among early-career professionals, women, introverted professionals, and professionals with anxiety. Interpersonal situations appear to be the situations in which contemporary professionals are most likely to experience high communication apprehension. This study suggests more attention is needed to address communication apprehension in interpersonal and group situations. It also frames communication apprehension as a matter of inclusion and team performance.
-
Abstract
Preview this article: Reviews: Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges:The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/3/teachingenglishinthetwoyearcollege32514-1.gif
-
Abstract
The late Ghanaian poet, Professor Kofi Awoonor, compared the discourses that govern the affairs of this world to the stickiness of chameleon remains. For Awoonor, when one steps into the chameleon's gluey byproduct, it is difficult to wipe it off.1 This imagery represents the rhetorical potency of capitalism, its affective circulation, and how its influence over our lives makes it challenging to emancipate ourselves from the grips of market forces. For Catherine Chaput, the market is a powerful rhetorical force. The market's inherent trait to habituate our experiences means when “we place our faith in this all-knowing construct, we displace our own agentive powers” (2). In Market Affect, Chaput critiques capitalism with the conviction that other anticapitalist critiques could not dislocate the “affective circuits” of capitalism (18). Taking on Michael McGee's challenge to rhetoricians to investigate the link between rhetoric and social theory, Chaput rethinks affect to explain how we might unmask, demystify, and challenge capitalism by reclaiming human rhetorical agency.Since market forces obscure the exploitative powers of capital and have “fused with the energetic power of affect . . . thinking and acting,” anticapitalist discourses, Chaput asserts, constantly find themselves trapped and subsumed by procapitalist discourses (29). Chaput believes scholars are increasingly frustrated with the impotence of prevailing ideological analyses that sought to help us avert the influence of capitalist instincts in our lives (28). Chaput presents affective rhetorical critique as a paradigm in this endeavor. Affective critique, Chaput argues, empowers scholars to locate the “agentive capacity in our traditional rhetorical theories, enhance it with contemporary materialist perspectives, and develop a practice through which to glimpse, and later engage, the affective sensibilities” (18-19). Affect operates as an “organic power” (29); it is not a “theoretical abstraction or an illuminating metaphor, but a concrete, physiological force circulating into, and out of bodies through their sensuous interaction in the world” (30). Through affective critique, Chaput offers scholars new ways of discerning liberatory strategies against the aegis of capitalism.Chaput explains how procapitalists exploit the potency of affective desires to illustrate how capitalism operates and its ramifications for society. For Chaput, in the same way capitalism became an impregnable force, so is the principle that could derail its strategic maneuvers. Chaput rereads the rhetorical traditions of the classical, medieval, and enlightenment periods and exposes how forces of enlightenment crippled the affective resonances of rhetoric. In recovering this lost rhetorical power, according to Chaput, scholars ought to account for the omissions of the affective dimensions in the traditional rhetorical discipline and the “non-agentive impersonal operations that function so inconspicuously as to bleed into the natural background of life activities” (23). Chaput claims this notion of affect “has existed alongside and underdeveloped within” the rhetorical tradition (23). To convalesce this lost critical framework, Chaput's affective critique seeks to “expand and augment, rather than displace” rhetorical theory's valorization of the Aristotelian conceptualization of rhetoric. Across four chapters, Chaput reviews how economic theorists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Milton Friedman and John Galbraith “intuited and engaged the living power . . . of affect” in their positions for and against capitalism (37). In the final chapter, Chaput weaves their arguments and brokers them with Foucault's work on biopolitics and neoliberalism, packaging Foucauldian ideas as the most formidable salvo on capitalism.In chapter two, Chaput stitches the conflicting epistemologies of affect in Adam Smith's analysis of capitalism and Karl Marx's critique of capital. Chaput reasons that Smith and Marx are primarily immortalized as the “founding fathers” of discourses involving two opposing political systems—capitalism and socialism. Considered the father of capitalism, Smith postulates the “invisible hand” doctrine to account for the circulation of capitalist desires. For Marx, capitalism alienates us from our agentive powers. While both understood that labor, not commodities or gold, is wealth, they proposed “differing conceptions of the power structure propelling human relationships” (39). Smith sees the market as a natural force that represents traditional designations of affect. For Smith, capitalism pulls us into the market and constitutes us just as nationalism transforms us into nation-states. This way, the market's “invisible hand” directs societal and human affective desires.For Marx, an empowering agent exists internal to human beings, and capitalism works because of commodity fetishism— the ability to transfer a specific human power into things. Power circulates among people and things, orienting human decision-making. Affect is depleted through exploited labor because capital is “a process of coercive labor that traps naturally fluid lie energies or affect, within commodity form” (57). Capitalism depletes our personal power because commodities transform our “creative, energetic social beings into mechanical, lifeless, individual beings” (57). For Marx, “affect is that which adds value to life, and it is the essence or the core of our being as humans to participate in such value-adding activities” (46). Chaput observes that “for Marx, capitalism closes people off, making them less and less receptive to social potentialities; it repels or pushes away identities other than capitalist and worker; it depletes life energy of both identities, making them mere caricatures of capital” (57). In effect, our sensory capacities are subsumed by capitalism.In chapter three, Chaput examines how John Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen's divergent but resonant thoughts fail to provide a robust framework for rethinking the problems of capitalism. A fundamental defect in their thinking is their valorization of rationality. Chaput realizes that the two shared many thoughts on the interconnectedness of the global market and the illogical human behaviors that drive economic attitudes. Capitalism, for Keynes, is global, but individual sympathies are national. In this case, “affect circulates locally while capitalism functions globally, forging a gap between our inner feelings and the outer reality of economic operations” (68). Keynes substitutes the “perfect invisible hand” with “imperfect visible arguments and grounds the need for greater economic deliberation among the public” (74). Veblen, likewise, believes in argumentation but not an explicit role. While Marx allows us to see how language produces a dominant ideology, Veblen extends this assessment to commodities. Because humans have little capacity to “outwit capitalism,” Veblen classifies workers as change agents (85). Both Keynes and Veblen neglect capitalism's affective dimension, which renders their theorizations inadequate to account for how affect circulates.In the immediate post–World War II environment, Frederick Hayek and Theodore Adorno turned their attention to the epistemic consequences of affect. They critiqued the scientific rationality logic as governing human decision-making processes. For Hayek, a rationally managed capitalist state, as envisioned by Keynes, produces poverty akin to modern-day slavery. “Managed capitalism” weakens individuals and does not allow for the assertion of human agency. Adorno rejects the persuasive force governing human desires, extending Marx and Veblen with Freud by realigning affect with rationality (97). Hayek vindicates the “self-regulating nature of capitalism, while Adorno discounts the “role of nonrational motivation” of “administrative society” to emancipate itself (91). As Chaput observes, Hayek envisions the market as working through our sensory orders clandestinely or unconsciously. As a result, we participate in capitalist orientations without realizing its corrosive maneuverings. For this reason, Adorno recommends “aesthetic interventions” that shock us out of our slumber (111). Instead of engaging in active “political and economic questions of the day, individuals turn to mass-produced entertainment, channeling their entire libidinal energies into consuming practices” (111). Chaput reasons that Hayek seems to be endorsed by recent democratic engagements even though he espouses and orients us toward antidemocratic tendencies.Chapter five addresses Milton Friedman's (pro-capitalist) and John Kenneth Galbraith's (anticapitalist) meddling with the politics of the right and left. Although these scholars are not economists by training, they offer perspectives on capitalism's pervasive power. Chaput's reading of them stamps the rhetoric of inquiry—reiterating the need to have rhetorical scholars import interdisciplinary literature into our critical projects. Friedman postulates that, guided by historical forces, “human behavior, particularly within nation states—functions with a high degree of consistency and requires an equally consistent monetary policy to maintain market stability” (114). Galbraith locates reality in contemporary political economy, consumer culture, long-term planning, and the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy, creating a “corporatized marketplace” (114). Friedman believes in rational choice, while Galbraith sees corporate power as the most important way to think about human decision-making. Chaput argues that Galbraith's postulations appear overstated since they leave unexplored “anticapitalist discourse bound to a false binary between rational and irrational” (137).In the concluding chapter, Chaput details what she considers the most formidable confrontation of capitalism. Relying on Foucault's late lectures on biopolitics and neoliberalism, Chaput recognizes that procapitalist discourses appropriate the “affective force corralling human behavior before and alongside rationale decision making” (137). For Foucault, procapitalists maintain a superior “rhetorical edge” because they rely on a theory that combines the complexity of physiological effects and the discourses that govern humans. This understanding, Chaput maintains, prompts procapitalists to envision humans as subject to the market's governing rationality. Consequently, the market's “superior” affective sensibility inoculates it against critiques that ignore its affective dimensions and operations. Chaput reasons that anticapitalist offerings must consider humanity's thought-making processes and our natural instincts. Chaput directs us to the Foucauldian praxis that unlocks an unceasing resistance to capitalist governmentality. She believes a “free to choose” doctrine with a grounding in “courageous truth-telling,” or parrhesia, is potent to reconstitute and reinvent the governing praxis of our lives (150). Admitting that capitalist governmentality is impervious to “rhetorical deliberation” (142), Foucault's doctrine permits us to locate the “persuasive power of modern political economy in the market's invisible vitality” (144). Through it, we might see the formation of human agency as a “continuous ontological becoming” that must be orchestrated from within (144).Chaput concludes that the Foucauldian praxis is rooted in Greco-Roman practices of individual governance based on the apparatus of the “care of the self” and the desire to dissect the relationship between power, subjectivity, and discourse. This perspective is to create a confluence between “subject formation, bodily instinct, and truth” (150). Chaput states that “whereas biopolitics reflects the indirect manipulation of predictable instinct-driven bodies, care of the self consciously realigns automated bodily responses so as to oppose institutional injustice through the eruption of parrhesia or courageous truth-telling” (150). For Chaput, parrhesia's discursive apparatus grants agency and transcends courageous truth-telling to “adherence to a particular lifestyle designed to cultivate the kind of person who could “spontaneously confront injustice” (154). Through this attunement, we can distinguish bad parhessiates from good parhessiates. The telos of Chaput's call is “to produce people compelled to confront injustice even at the risk of retribution, requiring a practice of everyday life that constantly adjusts one's knowledge, behavior, and instincts” (157). Parhessiates, Chaput continues, identify as “sociopolitical and economic critics” even in the face of strict opposition (157). As cynics, parhessiates identify with all humanity and act altruistically. Chaput charges critics to “assess the persuasive work of our bodily instincts . . . to invent an alternative affective milieu . . . to assert newly cultivated agencies, ones simultaneously empowered by our conscious and unconscious choice” (159).Chaput's intervention comes at a time of global conflict: the Israeli-Palestinian strife, Russian occupation and aggression, movements and surges for #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #Anti-racism, and the curricula of critical race theory. Chaput nudges scholars of rhetoric to examine the various affective circuits governing public debates. We might, for example, look to scholars and activists such as Ales Bialiatski, Cornel West, Nikole Hannah-Jones, etc. Specifically, attention to parrhesia charges media organizations and those in positions of power to give attention to vernacular discourses and ideas that dislodge oppression. Market Affect emphasizes that criticism of governing ideas goes beyond examining popular cultural products, innovations, and authoritative discourses. Market Affect prompts us to deconstruct the ideas that underlie and govern our world. Chaput prepares us to decipher and challenge the organizing force of human society and the creation of ideal material worlds that better serve the human commons.
-
Abstract
Remembering Women Differently features an introduction, fourteen essays, and an afterword. Yet this review must start with the cover, which cleverly addresses the perennial problem of how to represent that which has been erased or forgotten. It showcases the volume's overall interest in probing stories of historical women that could be remembered differently by visually marrying two case studies from the book. The background is a grayscale photograph of Amos Pinchot and Crystal Eastman in 1915, a nod to Amy Aronson's chapter on how Eastman went from a well-known twentieth century social movement activist to all-but-forgotten in the twenty-first century. We see Pinchot as a smartly-dressed figure with a hat and a bowtie. Yet Eastman appears only as an outline, her silhouette filled in with a colorful painting of flowering plants. These botanicals are the work of Maria Martin, the artist who painted the backgrounds for John James Audubon's famous Birds of America. As Henrietta Nickels Shirk elucidates in the volume, it is Martin's contributions that have faded into the background of public memory. While I'd never suggest you judge the book by it, this cover sets the stage for what is to come: a must-read book for scholars of gender, feminism, rhetorical history, and memory studies.The mother-daughter editorial team of Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey were deliberate in their selection of scholarly contributions that use archival research to demonstrate the range and complexity of topics surrounding memory of historical women. They brought together contributions from “. . . scholars from a variety of humanities disciplines—rhetoricians, historians, educators, compositionists, and literary critics—[to] employ feminist research methods to examine women's work, rhetorical agency, and construction and memory of female representation” (x). Letizia Guglielmo begins the volume with an agenda-setting introduction titled “Re-Collection as Feminist Rhetorical Practice.” This contribution surveys relevant literature to artfully frame themes that are threaded throughout the book, including memory and recollection, ethos and agency, and intersectionality and marginalization.Rooted in the goal of “challeng[ing] traditional conversations, not merely inserting women into existing understandings of the rhetorical tradition,” the essays are grouped into four sections: “New Theoretical Frameworks,” “Erased Collaborators,” “Overlooked Rhetors and Texts,” and “Disrupted Public Memory” (x). The volume's fourteen case study chapters span occupations, historical periods, and geographical locations, which grant ample opportunities for readers to compare and contrast these historical figures, their lives, and their circumstances. To provide a sense of these rich essays, I will discuss all contributions in the “New Theoretical Frameworks” section and the lead essays in the remaining three sections.The first section on “New Theoretical Frameworks” is an innovative collection of case studies that readers are likely to find most generative for projects in feminist memory studies. The section starts with Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher's compelling chapter, which builds on Royster and Kirsch's concept of social circulation to explore professional networks of women physicians, mathematicians, and computers. Based on her study of Rosalind Franklin, Alice Johnson Myatt's chapter offers a useful heuristic for understanding an understudied avenue for feminist memory studies: the historical figure who, once erased, has now had her reputation restored. In the third chapter, Maria Martin (not to be confused with the artist Maria Martin discussed above) details an important framework for studying African women's feminist agency as she explores the case of Nigerian leader and activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Historians of rhetoric will also be interested in the final essay of the section, in which Ellen Quandal traces the “afterlives” of Byzantine historian Anna Komnene as she has been represented by three different scholars. Each of the essays in this section offers insights into the unique circumstances of individual women while simultaneously underlining how their activism, contributions, and memory have been shaped by social, communal, and collective forces.Part 2 features chapters about women who collaborated with men and their subsequent erasure from history and memory in the contexts of the military, art, and education. For example, Mariana Grohowski and D. Alexis Hart's chapter explores how U.S. women service members have consistently had their contributions marginalized, downplayed, or downright erased. Yet they find considerable promise in the corrective and resistive power of digital archives and oral history collections, such as the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project and the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project, which allow women service members to narrate their own experiences. The authors of chapters in Part 3 ask readers to think differently about how women's rhetorical contributions are valued. For example, Kristie S. Fleckenstein casts Florence Babbitt as a visual rhetor who did valuable labor in crafting a family photograph album, arguing that in our haste to study women as writers and speakers, we ought not forget the “work, especially the memory work, performed by women as imagesmiths—significant figures in the visual rhetorical tradition—and their use of images circulates across the permeable boundaries of the private and the public” (139). Finally, Part 4 on “Disrupted Public Memory” explores how once-prominent public figures are remembered (or forgotten). While forgetting is sometimes the logical outcome of the passage of time, it can also be a complicated and multifaceted process, as Wendy Hayden demonstrates in her study of Lois Waisbrooker, whose ideas found purchase in anarchist, spiritualist, labor, and free love communities during her lifetime but is largely absent from contemporary discussions of nineteenth-century women's rhetoric.The book's afterword is clearly not an afterthought. Especially helpful for those teaching classes in rhetoric, memory, and history, Lynée Lewis Gaillet offers insightful commentary on how the essays could be read differently if ordered chronologically, by theme or genre, or by method and details how students could use the case study chapters in the book as models for their own investigations into feminist memory studies. Here, the editor also pinpoints the most significant shortcoming of the volume: “With a few fascinating exceptions (Martin, Presbey, and Quandahl), this collection focuses on white Western women working in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (259). The afterword calls for more scholarship that will “expand the scope of this work, adapting the research materials here for investigations of African American, Eastern, global, indigenous, Latina, and LGBTQI issues, among many others, occurring in a wide swath of places and times” and explains the need for additional collections that explore other facets of gender and memory (259). In this vein, fruitful collaborations may be forged between rhetoricians in English and Communication departments, as scholars in a special issue of Southern Communication Journal (2017, 82.4) have expressed similar commitments.Remembering Women Differently should be read—from cover to cover—by scholars of gender, rhetorical history, and memory studies. This carefully crafted edited volume is a welcome addition to feminist rhetorical studies, one that invites and is sure to inspire further engagement.
-
Abstract
In the wake of George W. Bush's 2004 (re)election, the National Communication Association's annual conference featured an intellectual “Come to Jesus” regarding Jon Stewart and his brand of comedy on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The “tl;dr” (“Too long; didn't read”) of this battle was that Professors Lance Bennett and Robert Hariman defended Stewart as a necessary agent in political discourse and public life; Professors Roderick Hart and Johanna Hartelius condemned Stewart's cynicism, arguing people substitute watching Stewart for material participation in public life to the grave detriment of the public sphere. Nearly 20 years later, James Caron's Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement makes a compelling argument that, while comedic speech has limits and is not by any stretch curative, it is an ideal stylistic fit in an era of postmodern truthiness because it creates an innovative public engagement in a participatory media culture (6).Caron “examines the relationship between satire and the public sphere, a relationship that creates a comic public sphere, a parodic counterpart to Habermas's classic articulation of a particular kind of discourse and set of social practices first associated with Enlightenment values and technologies” (2). Rather than presuming satire is political discourse, Caron's gambit is that “satire [is] a form of aesthetic communication supplementing political discourse with its mode of comic discourse” (7). It directly encourages citizens to act together in real life. Satire is public-directed—its purpose is not to mock one person but to direct attention to issues of broader public concern. In this sense, satire is generative.Caron moves through his argument in two parts. Part One is historical background and theoretical foundation. Part Two is comprised of a series of case studies.Caron defines satire in Chapter One saying “satire signifies those instances of comic artifacts that can “exceed . . . serious communications . . . for the sake of deliberation, advocacy, and exchange” (20). That is, the ridiculous and the ludicrous are effects of comic laughter. The ridiculous is designed to critique and improve its object; the ludicrous offers an appreciation of the object as is. Here Caron introduces a kind of rubric for understanding the comic: play, judgment, aggression, laughter. Play separates the comic from the earnest by providing a cue that something is funny. Judgment is critique that marks “The Comic” as both always serious and unserious simultaneously. Aggression enables ridicule and mockery. And laughter is, well, laughter. Here Caron makes one of the central moves of the book arguing, “satire's power lies in its rhetorical potential to change minds, to effect metanoia via it's a-musement” (26). This deconstruction of “a-musement” means we are not merely laughing about something; we are musing on it.Chapter Two investigates the distinction between the Habermasian theorizing on the public sphere and the contemporary reality of the digital public sphere. Habermas's construct relies on social and political bracketing of reality in which intellectual equals gather in coffee houses and argue enlightened perspectives on the issues of the day. The digital public sphere, on the other hand, values “personalized feedback, instantaneous interaction, participation potentially 24/7, and no geographic limitations” (38). But the digital public sphere is something of a Wild West scenario. While the democratization of participatory media culture invites those who would never have had access to Habermas's coffee houses, it also creates dis and misinformation, trolls, and other serious concerns. However, satire thrives in uncertain times: “Satire's most profound cultural role today, then, employs in comic fashion the basic ethos of modern/postmodern liberalism as part of the aesthetic-expressive rationality of Habermas” (50).In the final pages of Part One, Caron layers the nuance to note that “satire operates as comic political speech, not political speech, in the public sphere” (52). Satire operates within a playful aesthetic that fosters dissent, just of a different order than traditional political speech. Digital technologies afford more involved citizenship and (re)presentation as citizens, and so comic sense, irony, mock news performed satirically, comic name-calling and comic insults” are actually “in service to educating its silly citizens and furthering their conversation of engaged levity” (56–57). In this way, the comedic public sphere deals with fakery itself. Comics and satirists, then, are parrhesiasts, or those who speak truth to power. Both through satire and what Caron names “satiractivism,” there is potential for social justice, to turn a “ha ha into an a-ha!” (81).In the second half of Satire, Caron aligns his conception of the comedic public sphere with J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory, distinguishing between constatives and performatives. Constatives are statements of fact, report, or description that can be judged as true or false; performatives are not just saying something, but doing something (85). Austin also articulates the terms locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. Locutionary is a performance of the act of saying something. Illocutionary is the performance of the act in saying something (satire ridicules, for instance). And perlocutionary is saying something that produces effects.Caron contends comic speech in satiric mode is illocutionary in that it performs ridicule, but it has potential to be perlocutionary in that it changes people's minds. It has effects. It is, in spiritual terms, metanoia—a conversion or conversion of belief. Satiractivism, or activism generated through satirical speech, is a special kind of political speech act. It is both serious and unserious; both constative and performative.Caron introduces several pivotal case studies in Chapter Five in which “the comic public sphere and the public sphere often appear as one discursive domain” (89). For instance, we see comics playing with the news on SNL's Weekend Update, The Daily Show, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. These programs are locutionary—news with comic speech as rhetorical flourish. They are also illocutionary because they ridicule a comic but with the veneer of reporting. One of the examples Caron cites is Jordan Klepper's person-on-the-street interviews with Trump supporters.But these moments of “playing with the news” are not merely play, they are also a kind of satiractivism. They are quasi-perlocutionary. Jon Stewart hosting 9/11 first responders who had become ill led to the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, for instance. Caron also notes the “John Oliver Effect:” Oliver has always eschewed the sort of SNL Weekend Update formula in favor of in-depth, fuller investigations into a news story but done satirically. Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert are also examples of satiractivism, bringing comedy to “real news” in order to amplify it.Yet, satire has limits. It is a methodological paradox in that the satirist is trying to bring about a better society through critique but is often doing so by ridiculing. And sometimes, it can go too far. This is especially perilous when the audience is not prepared to laugh.Michelle Wolf's 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner is one such time when the audience in the room felt ridicule crossing a line into mean-spiritedness. Part of this challenge for humorists is the particular and universal audience. The WHCD audience (in particular) found the bites too biting. The universal audience understood better the impossibility of civility in the Trump years.Many pointed out how thin-skinned people in the Trump orbit of power were in inverse correlation to their political and cultural power. Speaking truth to power is supposed to be uncomfortable for those in power. But what if those in power are perpetual victims with an entire media infrastructure designed to amplify their victimhood? That is, is what Wolf did a “screed or satire?” (181).Caron's final chapter of case studies centers Trump as buffoon and troll. Caron asks whether satiric speech is harmful to a democratic public sphere because its uptake can be dangerously corrosive. Trump's characteristic defense is he was “just joking,” but as rhetorical critic and historian Jennifer Mercieca notes, Trump consistently “gaslights” the audience about his intentions when the effect crosses a line.1In his final chapter, Caron reminds readers that postmodernism isn't an abandonment of truth but a deep skepticism about truth with a capital T. Comedic style, then, is ideally suited in this moment to scratch the truthiness veneer. As he writes, “The comic logic of truthiness satire and satiractivism repurposes discursive integration and a regime of simulacra with a postmodern aesthetic” (209). Considering that more people believe in the truth of what they learn from those playing with the news than from those delivering it “straight,” imagining the possibilities for satirical speech in the comic public sphere is a generative and purposeful endeavor.
-
“Oh No She Did NOT Bring Her Ass Up in Here with That!” Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures ↗
Abstract
Preview this article: "Oh No She Did NOT Bring Her Ass Up in Here with That!" Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/85/4/collegeenglish32458-1.gif
February 2023
-
Scaffolding toward Self-Efficacy: Preparing Underrepresented Writers to Pitch as Freelance Authors ↗
Abstract
This article describes a Pitch Assignment, designed by two journalists turned faculty, to increase support and self-efficacy for writing majors enrolled at a minority-serving institution (MSI). Pedagogical theory to support pitching processes and development is substantially undertheorized. Much of the extant literature focuses on academic writing and editing for undergraduate research; this article extends that discussion by focusing on the needs of underrepresented students seeking careers in nonacademic fields. Those needs include opportunities for increasing confidence and skill for such nonacademic work as freelance writing for newspapers and magazines. For this assignment, students write a pitch for a preview or review feature they will write later in the course. This assignment scaffolds how to analyze, prepare, and successfully pitch to target publications of students’ choosing while developing a sense of self-efficacy that will transfer into future professional writing contexts. The authors conclude by reflecting on how this assignment might be approached differently by other instructors and how support for diversity might be offered in other ways.
-
Social Equity and Intercultural Communication in the Workplace: A Case-Based Technical and Professional Communication Assignment ↗
Abstract
As questions of social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion have come into greater focus in the field of technical and professional communication (TPC), we have developed an assignment sequence in our TPC courses centered on these issues. This assignment sequence reframes our units on workplace communication and correspondence and asks students to practice a variety of genres in addressing and creating cases of intercultural miscommunication, insensitivity, and ignorance in the workplace. We have adopted a case study pedagogy for this assignment in an effort to preempt the resistance that can sometimes accompany discussions of social justice in courses where social justice is not traditionally addressed. We have found that this approach makes the instruction more authentic, provides students with realistic workplace situations in which to practice professional correspondence, and highlights the existence and reality of social issues in the contemporary workplace.
-
Abstract
With funding from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Marva Cappello, Jennifer D. Turner, and Angela M. Wiseman convened a group of critical multimodal scholars in April 2022 to initiate a national agenda that prioritizes the use of visual and multimodal methodologies to promote educational equity and racial justice for youth of color. Our conference gathering included Reka Barton, Darielle Blevins, Justin Coles, Autumn A. Griffin, Stephanie P. Jones, Alicia Rusoja, Amy Stornaiuolo, Claudine Taaffe, Tran Templeton, Vivek Vellanki, and Angie Zapata. The dialogue presented in this article centers around a collaboratively composed image (see ) created three months after our initial convening. Participants from the conference chose an image that reflected our time together and represented our hopes and dreams moving forward. Inspired by kitchen-table talk methodology (), we share our ideas through images and text reflecting on how critical visual and multimodal methodologies facilitate access, equity, and hope in education and educational research.
-
Abstract
Set in one of the least privileged neighborhoods of the US Southeast, this research project took a discourse analysis approach to construct a day-in-the-life case study. It illustrates how, during an after school storybook cooking class, a 7-year-old, multilingual, Mexican American girl navigated local linguistic microaggressions and extended microaffirmations to her peers. At the same time, she contested and critiqued societal power imbalances associated with whiteness. This study widens the corpus of scholarship that has primarily examined children’s sociodramatic play and literacy development in preschool settings. It also broadens the body of research that has predominantly focused on students’ linguistic dexterity and metalinguistic awareness in middle and high school contexts.
-
Abstract
Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Multimodal Research for Racial Justice, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/57/3/researchintheteachingofenglish32352-1.gif
-
Agency, Identity, and Writing: Perspectives from First-Generation Students of Color in Their First Year of College ↗
Abstract
This paper highlights the perspectives of first-generation students of color in their first year of college, and the ways in which they exercised agency in their writing. Framed by definitions of agency as mediated action that creates meaning, the paper reports on qualitative data collected from a summer writing program for first-generation students and students of color, and from writing samples and follow-up interviews with six students who participated in the summer program. Findings suggest that students in their first year of college leveraged their social and discoursal identities to offer new ways of understanding an issue. They also wrote using a translingual approach, integrating different discourses and forms of knowledge, and challenging views of academic writing as monolithic. The findings also suggest the link between awareness and action, meaning that what and how students wrote were informed by their awareness of writing and awareness of themselves as writers and cultural beings. The study’s findings have implications for advancing more nuanced views of agency and academic literacies, and redesigning writing instruction at the high school and college level.
-
Abstract
Preview this article: 2022 NCTE Presidential Address: Equity, Justice, and Antiracist Teaching: Who Will Join This?, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/57/3/researchintheteachingofenglish32359-1.gif