This Rhetorical Life

This summer, Cruz Medina reached out to This Rhetorical Life to share an interview he had done with Ana Castillo. As Medina states in this episode: As a writer, Ana Castillo’s work is the art that identifies subject matter before those of us who are academics and scholars are able to apply lenses or qualify and [...]

  “Homonormativity has had two kind of strains of theoretical emphasis, one of which has been the focus on neoliberal prerogatives and priorities into institutions and everyday life, and gay and lesbian formations in particular, and I say gay and lesbian for a reason. And the development of a prescriptive set of social codes that [...]

In any event, first [thing] we have to make contact with is the situation that we are entering and what kind of context we are teaching in, and for. And we have to then educate ourselves into the context. In addition, the other thing is, the political conditions not only change from place to place; [...]

Image of Ira Shor from BBS Radio In part one of our interview, Ira Shor tells us about growing up in the Bronx, his early experiences of education, joining social movements, practicing critical pedagogy, and his first encounters and early collaboration with the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. I discovered what it was like to sit [...]

I just don’t understand why we have to talk about every mode of belonging as some kind of citizenship. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m interested in people’s practices of resistance. I’m interested in people’s practices of belonging. […] I’m interested in people’s practices of world-making.  — Karma Chavez I’m increasingly persuaded [...]

We tend to assume that captioning is objective. It’s just copying down. We tend to privilege speech sounds, and there’s just something about speech that sort of makes it seem easier to transcribe. It’s straightforward and objective, but it’s so much more complex than that—especially when you add in non-speech sounds, especially when you consider that everybody has a [...]

I started the research really struggling to understand how seemingly good people could say such awful things, and that’s really what I wanted to understand. I think what I found is that people are not all one thing or another. They aren’t as awful as they seem in a particular moment. Our students are struggling [...]

There’s a certain set of conceits around academic freedom that limit its functionality and its practice, and those conceits often have to do with critiques of state power, critiques of colonization, critiques of structural violence. –Steven Salaita I think using academic freedom as a way to open these more political conversations and more potentially more [...]

Scholarship is designed to reach some sort of conclusion, even provisional, whereas the podcast because I think it’s still anchored in a kind of entertainment model [stardust clicking] is actually sort of less interested in conclusions and probably also—even if it was interested—that that’s sort of antithetical to the form that it’s working through. You [...]

Can’t we find more creative ways to report these stories? The story of Michael Brown is so important, but we get trapped, I think, in this narrow narrative that we’ve been telling for a really long time. —Tessa Brown Social media and mobile technology has particularly been important for people of color, for working class [...]

From a feminist perspective, what does it mean to live a rhetorical life in a globalized world? Why is a feminist perspective productive for 2013? What are important sites and lived spaces in which we need to be rhetorical? How do you bring a feminist perspective that highlights a transnational world into your teaching, your administrative duties, your service work, your field commitments, personal life, and your activism? How do you locate transnational issues and sites that are important? And finally, how do you enact a feminist transnational method? On March 22nd, the CCR Graduate Circle hosted our first live-recorded podcast event:  “Feminist Perspectives on Living a Rhetorical Life in a Transnational World.” To facilitate this conversation, we invited a range of diverse speakers with different areas and levels of expertise on transnational feminism and rhetorical studies. Participants in the panel included Rebecca Dingo, Dana Olwan, Anna Hensley, Tim Dougherty, and Eileen Schell. To read a PDF of the full transcript, please download it here: Transcript for Episode 7. The music sampled in this podcast is “Stay the Same” by Bonobo.

As undergraduates, students are often unaware of the specializations available to them with their majors and future graduate careers. In an effort to help students negotiate these challenges, Theresa Keicher—a PhD student in the Composition & Cultural Rhetoric program here at SU—spoke with Jim Seitz, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. We asked if he could share some of the productive ways that students could start thinking about specializations within Composition and Rhetoric. Episode 6 explores the process and challenges of specialization that undergraduate and MA students face when applying to English and Composition Studies graduate programs. To read a PDF of the full transcript, please download it here: Transcript for Episode 6. The music sampled in this podcast is "One Word Extinguisher" by Prefuse 73.

There are many rhetorical issues to explore through the Occupy Wall Street movement: the framing of the 99% vs. the 1%, materialist physical rhetorics of occupied space, and so on. We'll get at those, but it's also important to note that the most commonly stated victory of the Occupy movement is a rhetorical one. That is, we often hear about the movement changing the national conversation. Episode 5 explores the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street movement and features an interview with filmmaker Dennis Trainor Jr., who discusses his recent documentary, American Autumn: an Occudoc. This episode also includes a response from Deborah Mutnick, Professor of English at LIU Brooklyn. To read a PDF of the full transcript, please download it here: Transcript for Episode 5. The music sampled in this podcast is audio from American Autumn.

As writers and composition instructors, we struggle to keep up with the influx of new tools and composing spaces, from Twitter and Wordpress to tablets and smartphones. Though the digital age might have us believe we live in a unique era, we have always been multimodal, forced to choose between traditional alphabetic writing and other modes of communication, such as speaking, listening, and image making. Or at least, that’s what Jason Palmeri argues in his engaging new book, Remixing Composition, released last spring by Southern Illinois Press. Episode 4 features Jason Palmeri discussing digital and multimodal composing, the challenges of incorporating multimodality into our curricula, and the importance of interdisciplinarity. To read a PDF of the full transcript, please download it here: Transcript for Episode 4. The music sampled in this podcast is “One Word Extinguisher” by Prefuse 73.

Central to our work in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric is the teaching of first year writing. Regardless of your position in the university, you have inevitably found yourself or still find yourself sitting in a dungeon on the bottom floor of a building in a cubicle grading papers, meeting with students, and chatting with colleagues about how life is really unfair. No doubt during one of those venting sessions you have dreamt about how wonderful it would be to be paid more, to have fewer students in each of your classes, and to have more freedom in your classroom to teach what students want and need to learn. Episode 3 features Professor Tony Scott talking about the influence and ongoing relevance of his book Dangerous Writing: Understanding the Political Economy of Composition. To read a PDF of the full transcript, please download it here: Transcript for Episode 3.