Rachael Shapiro

learner. teacher. maker.

Mortensen, Peter. “Reading Material.”

by Rachael

Published on: May 5, 2013

Categories: diss, literacy studies, Reading Notes

Tags:2001, deborah brandt, literacy and materiality, material reality, Peter Mortensen, rhetoric of literacy, toxic discourse

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Mortensen, Peter. “Reading Material.” Written Communication 18.4 (2001): 395-443. Print.

In this article, Peter Mortensen traces papermaking as the manifestation of “toxic discourse” associated with literacy. He looks at the environmental degradation and simultaneous low literacy rates in the Southern region where the U.S. paper manufacturing makes its home. He cites this concurrence as the material and social costs of “uneven and unjust literacy development.”

He notes that, although papermaking pollutes the air, land, and water and contains chemicals hazardous to human health, its manufacturing processes typically happen in rural locations that obscure its consequences from those who most frequently engage in the literacy practices that demand paper production in the first place.

Not only is paper manufacturing located in areas where there are fewer people consuming print materials, but, as Mortensen suggests, the environmental devastation that follows papermaking actually works to reduce literacy rates among the populations that are found in the rural South where mills are based. Or, as he puts it, “literacy tied to the mass consumption of print—the literacy of cities and suburbs—might be implicated, at least partially, in the suppression of literacies near the rural manufacturing communities that make such consumption possible” (397). He juggles arguments “on whether supposedly natural causes (geography and genetics) or social forces (economic and environmental exploitation) are responsible” for the perceptions about low Southern literacy rates. This leads him to conclude, as impetus for the article, that:

We need, in addition, to appreciate literacy as a material practice bound up in cycles of production, consumption, and waste whose outcomes are felt unevenly across regions in the United States and increasingly, across regions worldwide. Such an appreciation is, of course, an impetus to further scholarly inquiry, but also, as I explain in my conclusion, a call to social action. (398)

Mortensen is careful to note that his evidence is circumstantial, and that much of it comes from local narratives, where impassioned rhetorics by local stakeholders that might be suspect in academic proofs have more baring in the public arena.

Reviewing historical trends of literacy in the South, Mortensen finds a correlation between the increasing production of paper in the region and the decrease in print matter consumption by locals (401). Just as Northerners were increasingly provided narratives about “illiterate Southerners,” we saw “the emergence of regionally uneven demand for print material” (401). He draws a parallel here to the turn of the century industrial settlement of Appalachia, which “depended on the circulation of stories that presented so-called mountaineers as illiterate and therefore unequal to the task of exploiting the natural resources surrounding them” (401). [Connected to Wallerstein’s European Universalism, this is interesting… and raises important questions for me in Chapter Three, connected to ownership of mines/manufacturing in the Congo…how U.S. electronics industries first gained access to African conflict mineral supply chains.]

As a case study, Mortensen takes up Champion International and its mill in Cocke County, Tennessee, where the Pigeon River flows. While recounting a state then federal lawsuit for property damage against Champion International, he turns to former University of Tennessee president Charles Dabney as an example of how literacy sponsors can sometimes have “commitments that complicate their efforts to support literate institutions” (402-3). He notes Dabney’s frequent public addresses wherein he recounts the South’s low literacy rates, which in turn shores up demand for his own institution’s higher education services. M notes a concurrent newspaper report about the lack of county investment in public education, followed by an article describing a meeting with Dabney, Champion International’s mill superintendent, and the governor of Tennessee, wherein Dabney claimed to have invented an process to mitigate for the mill’s environmental impact on the Pigeon (it didn’t). Mortensen next reveals family ties between Champion and Dabney, explaining their conspiracy. Based upon the interests of these powerful players and a comparison of literacy, work, and education factors between Cocke county and an adjacent county without a paper mill, Mortensen draws the conclusion that:

Champion’s pollution of the east Tennessee environment had measurable consequences for literacy in the area. Following Dykeman’s logic, public money lost when businesses locate elsewhere, and public money spent coping with environmental degradation, is, plausibly, public money not invested in building more and better local institutions supportive of various literacies. (405)

While Mortensen does note the lesser investment of public funds into schools in Cocke County, he is careful to push back on notions of school-sponsored literacies as the only or most significant varieties. He argues, rather, that “it is just as important to appreciate how narrow definitions of literacy have been formulated and why they continue to be powerfully consequential” (411).

Further, investigating the ways in which “toxic discourse” links manufacturing and other corporate behavior with cancer-causing toxins and other public health concerns, Mortensen notes that “the rhetorical constituents of toxic dis- course depend on a figuration of literacy as purely cultural, without a substantial link to the material practices of production, consumption, and waste described in this article” (414). This is in part ascribed to the fact that groups using toxic discourse for self-advocacy rely on the notion that literacy can serve their interests and “[celebrate] it as enabling victims of environmental pollution to talk back to power, to effect positive change” (415). He insists that those groups must include nuanced considerations of literacy, and its unjust and uneven development, however, because:

But that testimony will be incomplete if toxic discourse fails to account for the fact that literacy as we know it today, the mass consumption of print material, produces massive amounts of toxic waste. And it will be more than incomplete: It will be maliciously negligent if we fail to acknowledge that this toxicity is least visible where demand for print is greatest and most deeply felt—in damage to liter- ate institutions, as I have argued—where demand for print is least. (415-6)

As a final gesture, Mortensen argues that we must not remain satisfied in the analysis that “something so seemingly natural as literacy might, in practice, have unnatural effects that are profoundly unjust in their distribution” (416). He argues that, instead we must take material action, though this is difficult due to the complexity and circumstantial nature of his case and the overall situation. Reviewing several suggestions regarding changing practices institutional and citizen paper consumption, Mortensen points out that “Critical here, just as in the PTF scheme, is the circulation of timely, accurate information and the ability of consumers to understand it.” He also suggests that the papermaking-literacy puzzle might be interrogated in writing and research course curricula.

Interestingly, Mortensen moves to the global nature of the papermaking and publishing industries, noting how the complexity of the global production, supply, and circulation networks can obscure our ability to understand the material costs of literacy as well as the literacy costs involved, arguing that:

What often goes unspoken is that global operations enable a flexible response to domestic developments that can threaten profits: health, safety, and environmental regulation among them. This flexibility may enhance shareholder value, but it has the potential to diminish what we can know about the consequences of the paper manufacturing process. (418)

He concludes, powerfully, that:

…it remains our responsibility, as persons who profess expert knowledge about the cultural and cognitive dimensions of literacies, to understand as fully as possible the material implications of literacies and to act decisively to ameliorate those literacies’ potentially toxic legacies. (421-22)

Quotes

My contention is that as we struggle to comprehend the cognitive, cultural, and technological implications of various literacies, we should also think critically about the mundane materials—paper, ink, glue—that enable many of them. Such critical thought could lead us to the conclusion, as I propose at the end of this article, that we take steps to inform ourselves much more deeply about the material processes (and their possible consequences) that make the stuff of reading and writing cheap and plentiful in North America today. (396)

However, the toxicity of papermaking is usually invisible to the consumers of print material: invisible in the real sense that, as I have said, paper mills are generally located at some distance from population centers, and invisible economically because at least until recently, the toll papermaking has taken in land spoiled and lives lost has not been figured into what we pay for newspapers, books, writing tablets, and so on. (397)

But the alignment of paper, printing, and publishing resources abroad does make it difficult to know about the consequences of manufacturing processes, especially papermaking, for workers and for those who must subsist in the environments touched by those processes. (420)

Citations:

In the early 1990s, academics began offering incisive critiques of such discourse on literacy (e.g., Apple, 1993; Donald, 1992; Gee, 1993; Giroux,1993; Macedo, 1994; Street, 1984; Stuckey, 1991).

Mutnick, Deborah. “The Strategic Value of Basic Writing: An Analysis of the Current Moment.”

by Rachael

Published on: March 1, 2013

Categories: basic writing, Globalization, Reading Notes

Tags:2000, deborah mutnick, ira shor, karen greenberg, min-zhan lu, neoliberalism, remedial education, students of color

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Mutnick, Deborah. “The Strategic Value of Basic Writing: An Analysis of the Current Moment.” Journal of Basic Writing 19.1 (2000): 69-83. Print.

Summary

In this impassioned essay, Mutnick argues against scholars inside and outside of Basic Writing who call for its abolition. Interestingly, she points out that arguments against BW programs are rooted both within the logics of neoliberalism and in rhetorics against it. She is writing in a historical moment in which the tightening of funding amidst privatization and global financial pressure, in which Basic Writing programs are under attack. She reminds us that, consequently, also under attack is open admissions, affirmative action, and the students of color and working class students who benefit from programs that help to equalize those students’ skills. Essentially, this article is an excellent recap of the political arguments for and against BW programs. As she put it: “To defend basic writing at present means contending both with conservatives who condemn us for allowing underprepared students through the doors of higher education in the first place and those in our own discipline who want to abolish remedial instruction because it stereotypes students and segregates them from the mainstream.“ (71)

She describes important attacks on BW, including Pataki and Giuliani’s January 1999 vote to end remedial education programs at all 11 CUNY 4 year colleges (73). She also cites Nancy Romer, an insider to CUNY politics, who described these cuts as “part of a global economic crisis that has yet to be felt in the United States,” and who had the insight that “Despite a budget surplus in both the city and the state, New York political elites, viewing these ominous economic clouds on the horizon seized the moment to decrease the public domain while expanding opportunities for capital” (qtd. in Mutnick, 73). Meanwhile, in that current political moment, people felt just safe enough, or just scared enough, not to take advantage of on the ground organizing that made space for open admissions in the first place.

Further, Mutnick recounts the then recent disintegration of University of Illinois at Chicago’s “urban mission,” explaining that:

UIC’s new mission statement for the 21st century explicitly rejects its “urban mission,” replacing the phrase with “urban university in a land-grant tradition.” As Severino comments, “The ‘urban mission’ is deemed ‘narrow’ and dismissed; UIC is now more oriented to the world than to its neighborhood” (50). (74)

Further convincing evidence shows Jeb Bush guaranteeing the top 20% of graduating high school students college admission, while striking affirmative action programs down. As she curtly points out, besides the fact that those student would have been admitted anyway, “The conservative doublespeak used to promote cultural diversity while wiping out equal opportunity programs reinscribes social inequalities in the name of fairness” (74). Continuing the evidence, she looks to Stygall’s discussion of changes at University of Washington, whose efforts claimed a “competition model,” but which Stygall see through as actually communicating “goals of privatization, corporatization, outsourcing, and downsizing” (76).

Mutnick recounts, as well, calls for the end of BW from within our field as well, from voices like Bartholomae, who notes the ways in which students may be stigmatized when placed in remedial courses and thought they should instead be mainstreamed. She recalls Karen Greenberg’s support for BW, and her arguments for better skills assessment in order to prevent administrators from attacking BW programs through their own assessments. And, Mutnick describes Shor’s objections in “Our Apartheid,” wherein he argues that Basic Writing programs merely equip underserved populations with the bare minimum skills necessary for making them exploitable, while keeping them unemployable as possible to maintain space for historically empowered workers instead:

Today, he argues, a labor surplus in the American economy caused by globalization and downsizing has created a demand for low-wage service workers rather than college graduates; and basic writing functions to impede graduation rates and channel students into “burger-flipping jobs” (91). Very relevantly, he calls attention to an increasingly obscene disparity of wealth in the U.S.A. and, mirrored in our own profession, the exploitation of part-time adjuncts, graduate assistants, and other “flexible” workers who teach basic writing on the academic margins. (77)

Finally, she cites Min Zhan-Lu as an example of scholars who point out the complexities between discourse varieties and the politics of representation. She head nods to the argument that BW’s tendency to essentialize language in ways that maintain “both standard English and academic discourse as higher forms of communication rather than as socially-constructed varieties of language” (78).

In her conclusion, Mutnick offers several suggestions for actions BW programs might take to fight against neoliberalism while continuing their important advocacy for students of color and others who have historically been excluded from the university in ways that ”place such critiques in political and historical perspective and choose our battles carefully” (79). She argues that we ought:

…to experiment with new models of instruction or support existing successful programs, including WAC, depending on local conditions; to forge partnerships between universities and public schools; to continue to research literacy outside the classroom in a variety of sociohistorical contexts; to participate more actively and effectively in public debates on higher education; and to support the activist agenda of emerging movements…(79)

Horner, Bruce. “WPA as Broker: Globalization and the Composition Program.”

by Rachael

Published on: February 27, 2013

Categories: Globalization, Reading Notes

Tags:2012, bruce horner, lingua franca, marx, world englishes, WPA

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Horner, Bruce. “WPA as Broker: Globalization and the Composition Program.” Teaching Writing in Globalization: Remapping Disciplinary Work. Darin Payne and Daphne Desser, eds. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012.57-78. Print.

Summary

Horner describes WPAs as brokers who move between many constituencies and who negotiate between the doing of and the nature of their own work. Their actions ripple within and across their own programs, their relationships within their institutional situations, and the broader network of writing programs nationally, and now globally, as “the privatization and commodification of all aspects of education affiliated with the current globalizing of the market economy mandates that this brokering network be understood as extending globally” (60). Specifically, positioned within these global and institutional circumstances, WPAs are charged with brokering in the commodified skills of English as the Lingua Franca, especially for goods and services current within the knowledge/information economy (61). Drawing on Marx, Horner explains that WPAs participate in the fetishistic commodification of English skills and writing through an occlusion of “the concrete labor of readers and writers and the social relations necessary to the production of such values–and instead treating writing abstractly as having in itself particular values irrespective of the work of readers, writers, or the social relations in which the writing is produced” (61). This trend is apparent in the rendering of writing courses into for profit credit hours or section loads for students and teachers, respectively, which can later be exchanged in local and global markets in the form of abstract labor.

He also cautions against “friction-free” metaphors of fast capitalism, such as “the fluidity of capital,” which obscure the material work that comes with translation of meaning across contexts (62), and argues that WPAs’ brokering in the friction-free, abstract concepts of writing obscures and maintains the power relations associated with every act of writing as translation. Similar rhetorics lead WPAs to think and speak in terms of “flexible labor,” and “generalizable writing skills,” wherein contingent labor is unspecialized and, hence, replaceable. Additionally, WPAs are lead in the current moment to describe their choices in terms of local situations and problems, thereby impeding potential alliance building and recognition of the forces of globalization as the cause of many of the local factors with which they’re contending.

Horner argues that:

Alternatively, WPAs, composition instructors, and their students can examine the relationship between the institutional conditions in which they find themselves locally and the pressures globally to acquire the skills of producing “standard written English” as quickly and cheaply as possible, for example, with the results of burgeoning enrollments, exploited teaching labor, heavy student debt, and so on, and they can develop responses, if not solutions, to those problems that resist these pressures in meaningful ways that do more than simply adapt to them. (69)

In this way, we might work to recognize the urge to speak and act as if writing is a series of general skills that can be packaged and delivered by replaceable labor is received through the forces of globalization with attendant moves toward privatization and service of the needs of the global labor market. Horner suggests that an inquiry into English as imperialistic and multiple and imbued with power might be one programmatic curricular response that WPAs could make which would make a viable argument for the work of writing programs and “activat[e] students’ and teachers’ sense of the importance of writing practices and interests devalued by global capitalism” (72). He offers that this shift in WPAs’ brokering as pandering to globalization’s demands in the university to confrontation of those demands would affect the value of teaching writing in the following ways: 1) recognizing the heterogeneity of composition courses and their outcomes would unravel the conception of composition as interchangeable, exchangeable skills and thereby afford more merit to teachers; 2) enforcing recognition of that heterogeneity would mean that composition programs would be charged with teaching writing as the complex subject “whose valuation is politically and socially contingent” (72), and 3) more recognition of the professional nature of comp work, with all resultant benefits.

He concludes that:

…WPAs can achieve a more coherent balance and redeem their reputation as brokers and simultaneously the work they broker by mediating the work of writing and the learning and teaching of writing on terms that address more directly the contradictions of globalization and the necessary friction of the labor of reading and writing as meaning production rather than communication commodity. (74)

Quotes

WPAs work as “brokers” in the sense of being “intermediaries” or “middlemen” insofar as they mediate between the work conducted in the programs they direct and the demands made on that work. (59)

Eliding the “social characteristics” of the concrete labor involved in the work of both writing and the teaching of writing through commodification of these as abstract skills exchangeable on the marketplace occludes the arbitrary and contingent character of the valuations of those commodities and, more problematically, the demands of fast capitalism in the production of such valuations: the demand for writing that is clear (to all) and (thus) efficient in its communication of knowledge globally (62).

Himley, Margaret. “Writing Programs ad Pedagogies in a Globalized Landscape.”

by Rachael

Published on: February 21, 2013

Categories: critical pedagogy, diss, Globalization, Reading Notes

Tags:2003, eileen schell, globalization and composition, globalized pedagogies, james paul gee, john trimbur, margaret himley, multiliteracies, sara ahmed, the new london group

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Himley, Margaret. “Writing Programs ad Pedagogies in a Globalized Landscape.” WPA 26.3 (2003): 49-66. Print.

Summary

In this reflective article, Himley reveals the process of updating the SU WP lower division curriculum in accordance with the demands of the global moment, moving from a domestic classroom to a globalized one (49). Responding to pressures from students, deans, and advancing disciplinary perspectives, the evolving curriculum she describes moves from post-process pedagogies with grade inflation to one in which “there has been a significant tropic move …—from conversation to circulation” (54). She invokes Trimbur’s “Composition and the Circulation of Writing,” wherein he advocates moving from singular focus on production of texts to “looking at the entire cycle of circulation that links production, distribution, and consumption” (55). Himley agrees that we ought to enlarge the textual economy, moving outside of our own classrooms in order to “locate students (and our courses) within larger and more complex contexts (other courses, professional sites, civic arenas) and within more of the processes and material realities and effects of textual economies” (57).

In the section titled “The Globalized Landscape,” Himley draws on Jeanne Gunner to remind us that our curricular and pedagogical choices work in material ways in the world to establish working and consequential meanings for what writing is and what it does. Looking at rhetoric from the New London Group and James Paul Gee, Himley probes the ambivalence that circulates concerning educating students to be sufficient workers for the new global economy and equipping them with the necessary skills for critiquing it.

She asks who students become, what skills and processes they need to understand, how the media of production shift these questions, and (citing Steven Thorley) how our “writing program’s required courses provide openings for educating citizens in addition to—or opposed to—educating emerging experts in the disciplines, future producers and consumers of a global economy” (62). Presenting the revised WRT 205 material, she argues that we ought to start with:

what students know and begin to ask questions about how that knowledge came to be formed, and then put those various analyses into conversation with other analyses—from other students as well as from course readings—in order to see the world and the self historically and from multiple perspectives, from peripheries as well as from positions of privilege. It is certainly our hope to locate student knowledges as knowledges, not as deficits, as ways of understanding the world that come out of particular histories, investments, values—in the same way we present and argue for/with our own knowledges. (64)

Quotes

The site for this very initial exploration is authorship, starting from this fundamental claim: as writing teachers and as a discipline, we have shifted our thinking and our tropes—from a domestic classroom, focused on the creative moment of the student composing process, to a globalized classroom, engaged in multimedia and multimodal textual production, distribution, and consumption. (49)

As educators, we struggle in these borderlands 3 to make sense of these convulsive changes in order to anticipate pedagogies that will work for students in their personal, professional, and public or civic lives. (57)

It is a way of thinking and writing that recognizes what Eileen Schell calls “transnational linkages.” It is a way of thinking and writing that locates us within emerging, dynamic and global economic, cul- tural, political, and social systems of meaning. It is a way of thinking that values the dynamic nexus of the “personal” and the “global” as interconnected and complex networks of discursive and material meaning-making and that locates us all as global citizens. (64)

Dingo, Rebecca and Donna Strickland. “Anxieties of Globalization: Networked Subjects in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.”

by Rachael

Published on: February 16, 2013

Categories: diss, Globalization, Reading Notes

Tags:2012, affect, donna strickland, globalization, material reality, rebecca dingo, transnationalism

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Dingo, Rebecca and Donna Strickland. “Anxieties of Globalization: Networked Subjects in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.” Teaching Writing in Globalization. Darin Payne and Daphne Desser, eds. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012. 79-91. Print.

Summary

Dingo and Strickland begin the chapter with a metaphoric description of the dual excitement and fear that comprise arguments about globalization as a Mobius strip that merely “circulates a never-changing rhetoric of anxiety within a closed system” (80). In order to break out of the cyclical pattern, they suggest, we must offer alternative rhetorics of globalization, which they do through the affective analytic. They then apply their alternative analytic to the student, teacher, and administrator in Rhet/Comp toward revealing the effect of anxiety of globalization. They explore this affect as it plays out among the subject linkages of the network produced by globalization, specifically between the groups Students for Academic Freedom and the New York University Graduate Student Organizing Committee.

Tracing the decrease in public funds for teaching in universities and the increase in funds for research and administration, and the subsequent overreliance on contingent faculty to manage the simultaneous increase in enrollment, the authors locate the “inextricable circle of materially significant affect” (83), wherein the public feels less investment on behalf of the university and, hence, reduces public funding even further, leading the institutions to buff up courtship of private investments.

Rhet/Comp, they point out, has not remained totally uninvolved in this cycle, as we provide administrators of hordes of contingent labor (Bousquet, “Composition as Managerial Science”). The authors suggest a more productive path through this polarized analysis of our field: “Rather than getting caught up in a defense of the field in the wake of globalization…, turning to the linkages among these subject positions produced in the corporate university provides an alternative to these polarized yet mutually reinforcing arguments” (84).

They note an appeal to “rights discourse” in the effort to unionize, but recognize that “in its appeal to universal values—tends to be more self-enclosed than linking. Moreover, rights discourse tends to maintain the dynamics of the existing power structure, putting the group asking for rights in the position of the subaltern,” however, this discourse has historically been productive in negotiations with the paternalistic discourse of the administration (87).

The authors compare the discourses of the GSOC and the SAF groups, watching how the two discourses circulate, overlap, and conflict in each other’s motivations and goals while unconsciously remaining motivated by the anxieties that actually link them. More specifically, the left-leaning grad students uses rights discourse to speak back to a university who paternalizes them, and yet the same sort of subject in the university (the lefty profs) paternalize the conservative students who use market discourse to advocate for their rights… meanwhile both groups’ material circumstances are united under the context of diminishing public funding for the university and its teaching. We all lose through inattention to these networks, and as Dingo and Strickland point out, “While we can’t escape the paternalistic institutions we inhabit, we can more productively negotiate these structures by mapping networks and taking action based on these maps” (91).

Quotes

Globalization comprises the social field for all discursive practices (whether in or out of the classroom), and mapping the circulation of affect structuring that field provides an essential tool for understanding globalization. (82)

Farrell, Thomas S. C. and Sonia Martin. “To Teach Standard English or World Englishes? A Balanced Approach to Instruction.”

by Rachael

Published on: February 16, 2013

Categories: basic writing, Reading Notes

Tags:Basic Writing, circles of english, esl, paul k matsuda, sonia martin, thomas s c farrell, world englishes

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Farrell, Thomas S. C. and Sonia Martin. “To Teach Standard English or World Englishes? A Balanced Approach to Instruction.” English Teaching Forum 47.2 (2009): 2-7. Print.

Summary

Farrell and Martin begin by disputing the assumption that there is a Standard English, and that this is what ESL students want to learn (2). They ask: “Has rapid change in the status of English as a global language left the classroom practices of many English language teachers lagging behind learners’ desires or even their needs?” (2). The authors assert that English standards are determined contextually, within communities of practice (3), noting that to try to teach SE is to do a violence to students’ identities.

In their discussion of world Englishes, the authors describe Kuchru’s theory of the inner, outer, and expanding circles of English users, explaining that English users (as with users of any language) say more about their identities and communities through their practice than about anything else. They explain that “teaching local varieties of English (such as Singlish) may be just as problematic as teaching inner circle Standard English,” and thus offer three guiding principles for practice:

Teachers need to carefully consider their teaching context (McKay 2002).
After choosing their target of instruc- tion based on that context, teachers should value their learners’ current English usage (El-Sayed 1991).
Teachers need to prepare learners for future international English encounters by exposing them to other varieties of English (Matsuda 2003) and by teach- ing them strategic competence when interacting with speakers who speak other varieties of English. (4)

Farrell and Martin encourage teachers to adopt context-dependent pedagogies that teach locally useful English varieties, while also exposing students to multiple varieties of English and developing “meta-pragmatic awareness skills” for intercultural communication (6). After offering a couple of sample activities for helping students develop a nuanced understanding of the plurality of English, the authors conclude that: “In order to better prepare students for the global world, and to show them that their own English is valued, teachers can implement a balanced approach that incorporates the teaching and learning context as well as the learners’ values” (7).

Queen, Mary. “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World.”

by Rachael

Published on: August 30, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, diss, Reading Notes

Tags:2008, activism, alliance, chandra mohanty, circulation, digital activism, digital rhetorics, m jacqui alexander, mary queen, rebecca dingo, rhetorical genealogies, transnational feminism

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Queen, Mary. “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World.” College English 70.5 (2008): 471-489.

Quotes

Feminist rhetorical studies must extend their analyses to examine how the modes of digital circulation matter in the mediation of relations among groups, communities, and nations, because this digital circulation often constructs and reinforces binary oppositions and rhetorics of superiority. 472

The complex relationship between digital technology and transnational feminist activism must become a central point of inquiry for feminist rhetoricians because Internet technology is profoundly implicated in globalized capitalist practices and integral to the resistance of local, regional, and transnational social movements to these practices. 472

The fundamental promise of rhetorical genealogy as a methodology for transnational feminist activism and scholarship is that it reconceptualizes and makes visible the multiple interactions between electronic texts and the material realities from which they emerge and through which they circulate to produce alternative fields for encountering each other in the moment of rhetorical action. 476

Examining the rhetorical transformation of these digital texts through their very mobility must include careful analyses of the particular ways in which digital circulation simultaneously involves multiple processes of contextualizing and decontextualizing; in other words, the rhetorical action of delinking text from one context cannot be separated from the simultaneous rhetorical action of linking text to (an)other context. The mobility of digital texts in time and space creates both proximity and distance among and between various cyberfields of rhetorical action—cyberfields that can reinforce reductive binaries of modern/traditional, liberated/oppressed, and progress/stasis and can create disconnection among feminists across the globe, but also ones that can dissolve these binaries to create opportunities for transnational feminist connections. The mobility of electronic texts and the representations embedded in them are crucial sites of rhetorical action and, thus, crucial sites for feminist rhetorical analysis. (485)

In what ways might thoroughly technologically mediated representations become acts of appropriation, subversion, and resistance to neocolonizing knowledge-power processes? (486)

Lu, Min-Zhan. “Living-English Work.”

by Rachael

Published on: August 30, 2012

Categories: diss, Reading Notes

Tags:2006, english only, globalization, living-english, min-zhan lu, political economy, politics of discourse, translingualism, transnationalism

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Lu, Min-Zhan. “Living-English Work.” College English 68.6 (2006): 605-618. Print.

Summary
In this article, Lu develops the concept of “living English” in opposition to English-only: the former recognizes the fluidity of language, meaning, and expression among and between users of English from varied positionalities and material realities, while the latter assumes a (false) unified standard code of correctness. She opens the article with an account of recent new stories of tongue surgeries in developing nations, where people’s goals are to speak “accent-free English” in order to be more competitive in the global marketplace.

Lu uses a combination of Marxist language and a sense of global context as a way to complicate her discussion of English-only versus living-English. She asks us to look beyond our linguistic and cultural borders as a way to understand the baring of our values on “the planetary scope of the hegemony of English” (612). She asks us to attend to our practices in our classrooms and our scholarship in order to consciously engage with the ideological production of language and its material consequences on a global scale. My own project makes this move of combining political economic concepts and theories of globalization in order to interrogate the impact of Western rhetorics of digital literacies, rather than English-only. Like Lu, I believe we ought to examine texts that reflect the maintenance of and manifestation of rhetorics in which we have a stake as writing teachers and as representatives of the advantaged, or One-Thirds world.

Quotes

English-only efforts involve geopolitical, economic, and cultural transactions.
They aim to control not merely which language can be used, where, and
when, but also and always how that language is to be used by its actual, possible, or imagined users. And they discipline users to be preoccupied with two and only two questions: What counts as correct usage in the eyes of those in positions to withhold educational and job opportunities? How might I best learn to work English strictly according to these rulings? (605)

I am increasingly convinced of my need to see the “popularity” of tongue surgery in “developing” countries as intricately informed by what we in “developed” countries do and do not do when addressing our own and our students’ ambivalence toward English-only rulings. (606)

Furthermore, the only motivation for learning English is to improve one’s career prospects in the capitalist global market. The reports can also serve as reminders that we live in a world increasingly ordered by the interests of “developed” countries such as the United States in globalizing their hypercompetitive, technology-driven market economies, what critics have termed “flexible, information economies” or “fast capitalism” (Castells; Harvey). (607)

Given the currency of such commissions in the current-day United States, all of us in English studies need to wrestle with our charge to produce only bodies (with a particular length of frenulum) and affects (such as tongue-tied or tongue-loose feelings) that are useful for a “biopolitical structuring of the world” according to the “business” logic of “developed” countries (Hardt and Negri 32). We need to raise and pursue two related questions: What gross actions and inactions on our part might have directly and indirectly pressured users of English to see symbolic and surgical fixes as the only viable resolution to their own and their children’s tongue-tied feelings? How might we best go about problematizing English-only rulings on the uses and users of English? (607)

English-only instruction parades the (seldom delivered) promise of ensuring access to wider communication and better educational and job opportunities.
But living-English users weigh dominant stories of what English-only instructions can do for them carefully against what such training has historically done to them and to peoples, cultures, societies, and continents whose language practices do not match standardized English usages. (608)

Living English users also weigh the promise of better educational and job opportunities against what English-only instruction cannot do: it cannot address their needs to use English to articulate-work out meaningful connections across experiences and circumstances of life consistently discredited by standardized English usages. (609)

That is, we need to fight for students’ right to fashion an English that bears the burden of experiences delegitimized by English-only usages. Moreover, we need to “challenge” ourselves to unlearn a “learned” disposition: our fear that attention to the needs and rights to transform standardized usages will interfere with rather than enhance the ability of individuals to learn English. (610)

Living-English users focus energy on how to tinker with the very standardized usages they are pressured by dominant notions of educational and job opportunities to “imitate.” (610)

We need to probe the ways our sense of ease with a particular usage might inadvertently sponsor systems and relations of injustice, even and especially when that usage seems to make normal and standard a particular experience that appears common, natural, beneficial to us. (611)

The four lines of living-English inquiry are in keeping with work in U.S. composition that marks as assets-critical resources-two aspects of individual users’ lives: (1) their actual, often complex, and sometimes conflicting relations with diverse languages and diverse ways of using English; and (2) their interests in using English to articulate aspirations for life that are consistently delegitimized by the logic of global business but critical to the well-being of peoples bearing the cost of existing structures and relations of injustice. (611)

How can I stay vigilant toward my professional training and thus often inadvertent sponsorship of the various English-only fallacies? (611)

the planetary scope of the hegemony of English (612)

How might I put my work in the context of escalating U.S. political and economic interests in harnessing information technology to maintain its global hegemony (Harvey)? (612)

How might U.S. composition articulate a global perspective that attends to rather than blurs the actual, specific, physical-social-historical contexts of individual students’ life and work? (612)

A global perspective on the work of U.S. composition in a world driven by the logic of fast capitalism must address the politics of language practices in scientific, technical, commercial, legal, and administrative writing. (616)

If we continue to sponsor English-only assumptions in our day-to-day practice, chances are that English will be used as a supposedly “neutral” tool for perpetuating the logic of a “free market economy”… (617)

Hesford, Wendy. “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.”

by Rachael

Published on: July 31, 2012

Categories: diss, Reading Notes

Tags:2006, methodology, the global turn, transnationalism, wendy hesford

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Hesford, Wendy. “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.” PMLA 121.3 (2006): 787-801. Print.

Summary

Hesford opens her article by noting that in the age of globalization, terrorism, the empire, and the nation are being redefined in new nationalist discourses (787). Her goals are to reflect on “imaginged global geographies in rhetoric and composition,” look at how we work with concept of citizen and nation in the confluence of the local and global, and to argue that we need to do a better job articulating the value of interdisciplinary humanities studies for positive work in the public realm (788).

In her first section, “Imagined Geographies,” Hesford points out ways in which universities are simultaneously reforming within the structures of global business and spreading a renewed nationalism. She turns to Morris Young, Fox, Matsuda, Horner, and Reynolds (among others) to demonstrate ways in which nationalism and imagined geographies have been interrogated and complicated within rhet/comp scholarship. Hesford applauds these scholars’ work, while warning against some scholars’ “resurgent localism and strategic retreat to disciplinary homelands” (789). Following Reynolds’ example, rather, she suggests we might “[hold] in productive tension material localities and epistemological locations” (790), keeping in mind the varied access to mobility afforded to people in various positions. She turns to Vorris Nunley and Gwen Pough’s works in African American and feminist hip-hop respectively, as a way to get at particular and transnational public spheres and their interaction with the more mainstream publics as they interarcticulate each other, in order to advocate for a comparative-historical approach in the global turn.

In “Can Ethnography Survive Globality?” Hesford considers important critiques of ethnography to question how the method might remain viable in the global era. Recognizing historical problems with the method, such as objectification of the subject, or the researcher becoming the main focus through over-accounting for her own position, Hesford uses examples of work in rhet/comp to point out that ethnography can survive if it turns to “an understanding of the intertextuality of local and global cultures,” flows of texts among transnational publics, a move away “from individual sites to the relations between sites” of study, and ultimately toward a “new cosmopolitanism from below” (792).

“Rhetorical History: Unbound and Unbridled” suggests that while it may seem like the work rhetorical history scholarship has devoted to recovery and canonization has left rhetoric without appropriate methods for the study of transnational rhetorics, in fact, many results of work in how and why particular groups have been excluded, and how they have produced their own negotiated rhetorics, will ultimately serve us. Scholars in transnational feminism and comparative classical rhetorical studies have contributed models for stepping outside of self/other, Western/non-Western, etc. binarizing approaches (793). Work in this area is leading us to overturn older conceptions about singular, static, or homogenous authors, texts, or contexts. While some scholars, Hesford reminds us, lament the lack of a unified methodological approach in our field, “as rhetorical scholarship reorients itself toward an examination of the global, it will increasingly need to pursue interdisciplinary and collaborative work” (794).

In “Homeland Security and the Humanities,” Hesford’s concluding section, she argues the especial importance of rhetorician’s informed, interdisciplinary, and collaborative intervention in the public sphere in our contemporary moment of global civil, economic, and political unrest. She argues that we should be less concerned with disciplinary identity, and more concern with what Barbara Warnick calls “the critic’s responsibility” (797). She concludes by writing that “…even as we forge these newly imagined geographies and critical roles, we must be apprehensive about idealistic notions of global civil society, skeptical of globalization’s bells and whistles, and attentive to its injuries and risks. Cautiously, we turn” (797).

Quotes

“A citizenry fearful of linguistic and cultural differences and nostalgic for nationalism tends to restrain minority discourses and the viability of alternative cultural citizenship” (788).
“The contradictory effects of globalization, its polarizing as well as democratizing functions, suggest the need for a critical localism and research methods that recognize the ongoing cultural work of ‘local’ spaces. As we think through the meaning of the global turn for research in rhetoric and composition studies, we must bear in mind that mobility is not an option for many groups and populations and “has in fact been forced upon others” (790).
Thus, as we move away from the analysis of single, discrete texts to study such transformations, we come to understand that the global turn required a comparative-historical frame and a broader understanding of culture, text, context, and the public sphere than what traditional rhetorical and ethnographic criticism provides” (791).
“The global ethnographic turn therefore requires a critical cosmopolitanism (if we are to embrace the term cosmopolitanism at all) that attends to historical, cultural, and transnational identity categories and transformations. Thus, the crucial question is not so much whether ethnography can survive globality (it has) as how global ethnography can reshape our approach to the rhetorical concepts of identification and difference and broaden our understanding of text, culture, and context. The promise of global ethnography for rhetoric and compositions studies lies in the conjoining of ethnographic methods and in our ability to engage the local and the global as travelling signifiers bound by material forces.” (792-3).
“Turning toward the global, therefore, does not make archival or historical work irrelevant. On the contrary, the global pivot calls for new questions about and new perspectives on the relation between past and present prototypes of globalization, consideration of how symbols and symbolic practices are appropriated, translated, and rehistoricized, and reconsideration of earlier transnational thinkers and international rhetorical figures” (795).
“We also need to consider the links between education and empire, the impact of security policies on the humanities, and the degree to which our colleges and universities, including the humanities are being co-opted by the global war on terror and national security initiatives” (796).
“Turning toward the global means supporting scholarly and pedagogical work that challenges the dialectic of recognition (namely, the binary frames of subject/object, self/other, and Western/non-Western) and disciplinary homeland nostalgia that have long dominated the field. The project also involves recognizing historical and cultural intertextuality” (796-7).