OK…so, you may have been following my trials and tribulations trying to post my first podcast episode. Well, I think I’ve got the tech part of things worked out.

So, last week I was as CCCCs in San Francisco.  It was a great conference and our panel, Labor Rhetoric and Academic Organizing, went extraordinarily well.  We had a pretty packed room and it was a privilege to be presenting alongside such awesome colleagues: Mary Boland, Seth Kahn, Amy Lynch-Biniek, Rachel Riedner, and Eileen Schell (our respondent).  I was also quite pleased with the vigorous discussion following our papers.  That discussion continued on over to the Serrano Hotel for our CCCCs Labor Caucus Interest Group.  Truly a great way to cap off the day. 

As you may have seen, I decided to use this year’s CCCCs to enter the world of video blogging (vlogging) on our 

composition and rhetoric blog.  That was fun and has got me on a bit of a web 2.0 kick this week (don’t even get me started about Nings).  As I wrote earlier, I’ve got a rather ambitious tech agenda for the fall and I’ve submitted a tech request for some equipment that I hope will come through.  I also found out that I still have a small chuck of money from a Teachnology Grant I received a few years ago for WritersBlogK, a project I undertook with Aaron Barlow.  So, it looks like I’m going to pick up the Snowball after all!

In the meantime, I thought I would take the leap and try my hand at podcasting this week.  After a couple days of failure, I think I’ve finally got the hang of it.  Since I just presented a paper at CCCCs, I thought that would be a good test case.  So, here it is folks: “Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures.”  In addition to the paper I presented, I also included a bunch of “notes” that were in an earlier draft but had to be cut due to time.

CCCCs Paper: “Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures.”  Click the radio or the play button to listen.

 

 "Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures" [24:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (51)

OK…this is an experiment in podcasting. Ideally there will be an audio link to my CCCCs 2009 paper in this post. PodPress and I have been having…shall we say…differences of opinion as to whether or not my files are accessible. We’ll see if I’ve got the kinks worked out.

CCCC’s 2009 Paper: “Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures.”

Yesterday was a great day at CCCCs. All four of the panels I went to were fantastic. I did make one change in my schedule. I didn’t go to “We Have Been Here Forever” as I initially planned. Instead, I went to the session, “Community Literacies and Deliberative Democracy In and Beyond the University,” with Eli Goldblatt, Juan Guerra, Michelle Kells, and Carlos Salinas. Our panel, “Labor Rhetoric and Academic Organizing,” went extremely well…we had a packed house, our papers worked incredibly well together, Eileen Schell posed several key questions in her response, and many audience members walked with us over to the Serrano Hotel for our Labor Caucus Interest Group meeting. More on all of this when I have a little time (right now I am sitting in the hotel lobby waiting for my ride to the airport).

I was really looking forward to being here this year…and my expectations were more than met. The non-panel discussions I had with people who I haven’t seen since the last CCCCs and colleagues I see on a more-or-less regular basis were invigorating…which is, after all, why we come to these conferences in the first place, right?

More to come!

So…I figured what a better moment to begin vlogging.  We have a YouTube channel for our composition and rhetoric program and a blog…so, I figured why not play around a little while at CCCCs?  Check it out.

 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8IrE-981XQ&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b]

 
After spending some time reading through all of the sessions running tomorrow, I think I have my schedule for tomorrow:

• 10:30: “From Textile Mills to the Entrepreneurial University: Confronting the Political Economics of Writing”
• 12:15: “We Have Been Here Forever: Towards a History of Composition(ist)s of Color Rewriting Rhetoric within and beyond NCTE/CCCC”
• 1:45: “‘Driving into the Wreck’: A Feminist Inquiry of the Dissertation in Composition”
• 3:00: (no choice on this one, this is my panel) “Labor Rhetorics and Academic Organizing: Possibilities and Predicaments” 
• 5:00: CCCC Labor Caucus Interest Group

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytVZOqha0kk&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b]

I’m sitting here in Lehigh Valley airport in Allentown waiting to board the first leg of my trip to San Francisco.  I was reminded why I chose to fly out of LV and not Philly: no waiting in line, free WiFi, and a calm waiting area.  This is the way I want to start off my day–especially if I have to be in a plane for this long. 

I decided to go through my carry-ons just to see what I actually brought.  Here’s the main inventory:

• camera
• lots of pens
• notebooks
• union contract
• conference schedule
• laptop (obviously)
• web cam
• headset
• books
  • Democracies to Come  (shameless, I know)
  • Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinski
  • Don’t Think of an Elephant, by George Lakoff
  • Academic Collective Bargaining , ed. Ernst Benjamin and Michael Mauer
  • Rhetoric: A User’s Guide, by John Ramage
  • Emergent Publics, by Ian Angus
  • Communists Like Us, by Toni Negri and Felix Guattari
  • Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only, by Linda Brodkey
• June 2008 issue of CCC

Yes, that’s actually what’s in my bags.

Well, CCCCs here I come…rrr…actually not until tomorrow morning.  I’ve still got to finish packing, but it’s about time to call it a night.  

I’m quite excited about our panel and the labor caucus meeting for sure.  I’m also going to be playing around with blogging and podcasting from the CCCCs.  Blogging for sure.  Podcasting if I can get things up and running without too much hassle.  So, stay tuned.  Hopefully I’ll be able to cajole Amy, Mysti, Moe, Seth, Rachel, and others to post a little to our comp/rhet blog as well.  

In the meantime, here’s what I’m looking forward to:

NWS San Francisco Bay Area/Monterey, CA Zone Forecast: San Francisco County

Tonight…Mostly clear. Lows in the mid 30s to lower 40s. West winds 5 to 15 mph.  Wednesday…Mostly sunny. Highs in the mid 50s to lower 60s. West winds 5 to 10 mph. Wednesday Night…Mostly clear. Lows in the upper 30s to mid 40s. West winds 5 to 15 mph. Thursday…Partly cloudy. Highs near 60. West winds 5 to 10 mph. Thursday Night…Mostly clear. Lows in the 40s. West winds 5 to 15 mph. Friday…Mostly sunny. Highs in the upper 50s to mid 60s. Friday Night…Mostly clear. Lows in the 30s to upper 40s.

CCCCs is in San Francisco this week!

Yup, in just a few days I’ll be joining my agitating (in a good way!) composition pals in San Francisco for CCCCs.  I can’t wait to get there!  Not only am I totally excited about my panel, I am looking forward to helping reignite the CCCCs Labor Caucus!  And, how convenient is this, the Labor Caucus meeting is immediately following our panel…hmmmm, how did that happen?

Here’s the full description of our panel…come out if you can!

Labor Rhetoric and Academic Organizing: Possibilities and Predicaments

Session: D.22 on Mar 12, 2009 from 3:15 PM to 4:30 PM

As a field, Composition/Rhetoric attends carefully to academic labor issues, primarily regarding contingent faculty. This session highlights the limits of this focus and advocates for further action towards labor equity/justice in academia. Speakers articulate an array of labor problems, ranging from the importance of composition theory in staffing writing courses, to the abuse of immigrant labor on college campuses, and call for more aggressive, multi-layered (curricular, departmental, university-wide) labor organizing in response.

Amy Lynch-Biniek:

“When Teaching Is Generic: Connecting Composition Theory to Staffing Practices”

Administrators devalue Composition theory in order to justify staffing practices. If knowledge of Composition theory is unnecessary, if teaching becomes a generic skill, then courses may be cheaply staffed with graduate students and temporary employees who may have little knowledge of Composition. Consequently, pedagogy is less likely grounded in strong theoretical rationale. I argue that one tactic in a larger strategy for altering labor practices and improving Composition teaching is reasserting the essential role of Composition theory to composition teaching.

Seth Kahn:

“‘If I Don’t Do It, Nobody Will’”: Writing Program Faculty Fulfilling Management Responsibilities”

Growing numbers of management and shrinking numbers of full-time faculty positions significantly impact Writing Program faculty and administrators in two ways: (1) the well-documented deflection of resources away from faculty; and despite growing numbers of managers, (2) Writing Program faculty/administrators doing more management work. This presentation analyzes the second point, contending that writing instruction and program administration suffer when faculty take on management responsibilities, and that academic unions need to take a stronger stand on enabling faculty to concentrate on faculty work.

Rachel Riedner

“Immigrant Labor and Universities”

While university communities are an imagined community of students and faculty engaged in the project of education, these communities increasingly include immigrant workers. Immigrant workers are constructed to be both inside and outside the university: inside insofar as they reproduce the conditions of education for the university community, and outside insofar as they are not imagined as part of the community. This paper argues that with contracting immigrant labor comes a contracting out of community responsibility, resigning service and immigrant employees to invisibility in educational communities.

Kevin Mahoney

“Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures”

In the 1990s, labor conditions and labor organizing in higher education took center stage in rhetoric and composition. However, the field has not sought to deepen that project significantly through explicit rhetorical instruction in labor organizing and advocacy. Focusing on higher education labor organizing, this paper argues for a curricular project connecting explicit instruction in rhetorics of advocacy, new undergraduate majors in comp/rhet, and the field’s investment in critical citizenship.

Mary Boland

“Contracting Competing Interests: Unionizing and the Preservation of Academic Freedom.”

More and more academic workers are looking to unions to preserve their professional integrity. Unionizing can pose problems because the guild ideology that justifies academic freedom runs counter to the egalitarianism that underwrites unionization. The risk is that we may unintentionally redefine the terms of work in a manner that undercuts academic freedom. I illustrate how unionizing can generate competing rights among classes of laborers and jeopardize faculty freedoms and suggest that compositionists are uniquely situated to help anticipate these pitfalls.

Respondent: Eileen Schell