As many of you know, I am scheduled to teach my new course, “Rhetoric, Democracy, Advocacy,” in the upcoming (spring ’10) semester.  This will the be first time that the course is offered.  Unfortunately, the course was scheduled in conflict with the only other rhetoric course in our department…as a result, several students who would have liked to take both, cannot.  Worse yet, this means that my course has a low enrollment and, given the “budget crisis,” my be cancelled unless a few more students add the class. I posted quite a bit about the class a while back, but I thought I would post again in case there are any KU students out there interested in activist rhetorics and democracy.

Course Description

ENG 316: Rhetoric, Democracy, Advocacy The connection between rhetoric and democracy is an old one dating back to the origins of both concepts in Western traditions. Simply put rhetoric—the skilled use of argument and persuasive discourse—and democracy were seen as ways to replace violence as the primary means of governing and resolving conflict. This course argues that the intimate connections between rhetoric and democracy are critical to retain and reclaim for the health of democratic society and culture. American democracy has been defined not only by its institutions and Constitutional frameworks, but also by vibrant traditions of citizenship advocacy that have relentlessly stretched the boundaries of democratic freedoms, identities, and protections. A healthy democracy requires citizen advocates who are skilled in the analysis of public discourse and the rhetoric of advocacy. This course will be a sustained study of the theory and practice of advocacy rhetoric, primarily in the American context. In addition, this course will raise practical questions about what citizenship advocacy means in a context of increasing globalization and new media. 3 s.h. 3 c.h.

Course Rationale

Despite the historic connection between the rise of democracy and the rise of rhetoric in Western traditions, rarely do we study rhetoric as a “citizen discipline.” That is, while it is common to find courses training students in the “expert rhetorics” of corporations (public relations) and political campaigns, there is a general lack of courses that focus on the role of citizen advocacy as integral to the health of democratic cultures. As one of the missions of higher education is to train critical citizens capable of meeting the challenges and responsibilities of an ever changing world, this course seeks to make such training an explicit part of the English department’s curriculum.

Books for the Class

• Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy (Semaphore Series)
• The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control
• Rhetoric for Radicals: A Handbook for 21st Century Activists
• Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement
• Rules for Radicals
• Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885-1937

So, there ya have it!  Come one, come all!

Here’s a preliminary list of books for my spring course, ENG 316 Rhetoric, Democracy, Advocacy.

• Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy (Semaphore Series)
• The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control
• Rhetoric for Radicals: A Handbook for 21st Century Activists
• Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement
• Rules for Radicals

I think I’ve got another book on order, but for the life of me I can’t think of what it is at the moment and the file is at work.  I also have some articles and on-line material that we’ll bring into the mix.  If anyone has any “must read” books and/or articles for a class like this, please pass them along.

Not surprisingly, my friend Seth Kahn down at West Chester is teaching a class similar to this one…another parallel made to order.  Just too cool.  A little plug for Seth…he’s co-edited with JongHwa Lee an awesome book, Rhetoric and Activism: Theory and Contexts for Political Engagement due out early 2010.  The next time I teach ENG 316, I’ve gotta put this one on the reading list.

I am very excited that I will be offering ENG 316 Rhetoric, Democracy, Advocacy for the first time.  I designed this course about a year and a half ago and now it’s finally on the books and in the schedule.  Interested?  Well, here’s the official course description:

I. Course Description: ENG 316: Rhetoric, Democracy, Advocacy

The connection between rhetoric and democracy is an old one dating back to the origins of both concepts in Western traditions. Simply put rhetoric—the skilled use of argument and persuasive discourse—and democracy were seen as ways to replace violence as the primary means of governing and resolving conflict. This course argues that the intimate connections between rhetoric and democracy are critical to retain and reclaim for the health of democratic society and culture. American democracy has been defined not only by its institutions and Constitutional frameworks, but also by vibrant traditions of citizenship advocacy that have relentlessly stretched the boundaries of democratic freedoms, identities, and protections. A healthy democracy requires citizen advocates who are skilled in the analysis of public discourse and the rhetoric of advocacy. This course will be a sustained study of the theory and practice of advocacy rhetoric, primarily in the American context. In addition, this course will raise practical questions about what citizenship advocacy means in a context of increasing globalization and new media. 3 s.h. 3 c.h.

II. Course Rationale

Despite the historic connection between the rise of democracy and the rise of rhetoric in Western traditions, rarely do we study rhetoric as a “citizen discipline.” That is, while it is common to find courses training students in the “expert rhetorics” of corporations (public relations) and political campaigns, there is a general lack of courses that focus on the role of citizen advocacy as integral to the health of democratic cultures. As one of the missions of higher education is to train critical citizens capable of meeting the challenges and responsibilities of an ever changing world, this course seeks to make such training an explicit part of the English department’s curriculum.

I’ll post the book  list for the class in a little  bit.  If you have any questions about the class, drop me a line.

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

Well, it’s just about 11:30 on Valentine’s Day. I taught this morning–saw the second part of the Frontline Documentary The Persuaders–and I will teach again at noon and 1:30. After that is the Rep Council meeting that everyone has been waiting for. We will be considering a vote of no confidence in Kutztown University President, Javier Cevallos. All the discussion that has taken place across campus, in our department meetings, on-line, on the blog, and in the media now is a backdrop for a decision today. The decision? Whether or not APSCUF-KU should proceed with a vote of no confidence.

Yes my friends…these are heady times. What has been interesting throughout this discussion is that there has been virtually no discussion on the specifics of APSCUF-KU’s bill of particulars–that is, of our actual reasons for introducing a discussion of a vote of no confidence. What’s also interesting is to watch the dynamics of how faculty members (in particular) relate to the issue of a no confidence vote. I don’t mean whether specific faculty members do or do not have confidence in President Cevallos. No, what I am thinking about has to do with how faculty responses show particular understandings of democratic literacies–that is, the everyday practice of democracy.

I recall in Habermas’s study of the “bourgeois public sphere,” a discussion of the interconnection between that public sphere and particular bourgeois values (and I don’t mean to position “bourgeois values” here in a derogatory sense like they’re “bougie.” I am thinking of these values in their historical sense). I am thinking about this because much of the discussion around the vote had to do with the way the discussion was introduced and how and through what media the discussion was introduced. Put another way, the tenor of the public discussion (at least in terms of the faculty discussion) seems to point to some kind of Emily Post guide to the ettiquette of public discourse, or institutional behavior. Something like that.

More to come on this for sure…I’ve gotta go teach.

The other night I had trouble sleeping…too much going though my head. Instead of letting my restlessness go to waste, I decided to pay Dio a visit just to run some stuff by him. When I told him what was keeping me up all night, he laughed and laughed and laughed. “All I can think about is making sausage,” I tell him. No matter how hard I tried, I could not let my thoughts settle into sleep.You see, I like sausage. I like those sausage biscuits with egg at Wawa, I like summer sausage, I like turkey sausage, Italian sausage, chorizo sausage, even tofu sausage. Don’t get me wrong, I am not claiming to be some kind of sausage “aficionado.” I just like the stuff and think that the world is a better place for having sausage in it.

But here’s my conundrum: when I start thinking about what goes into making sausage, I get a little queezy. It’s rather disconcerting. I mean, it’s one thing when the image I have in my head is of the family farmer bringing her or his pigs to the local butcher. You know, the kind of images conjured up by Bob Evans commercials. It’s another thing entirely when you have the image of factory farms and the mass production of meat that we are introduced to in Fast Food Nation, for example. You see, I want to imagine the sausage I eat through the Bob Evans lens. But, I confessed, that’s difficult to do. Yeah, I know, I could go to Dietrich’s Meats or Allentown’s Farmer’s Market and then I would have a better idea how my sausage is made. So, maybe I’m just being lazy.

“Look,” Dio said, “you’re coming at this all wrong. I hate getting serious on you, but you’ve thought yourself into the classic consumerist corner.” He explained his surprisingly complex theory of that consumerist corner. I’m still thinking about it.

Let’s see if I can reconstruct it a bit here. My problem was that I was caught (even more than I had realized) by a rather sophisticated pattern of argument. First, there’s the obvious issue of the real conditions of production–that is, the “way” that sausage is made. It’s true that mass production of sausage on the factory model leads in pretty disturbing directions. Sausage, after all, is mostly made up of scrap pieces of meat–and not all of the those pieces of meat are, shall we say, “meat.” There’s all sorts of stories of rats, feces, and pieces of human flesh making it into mass produced sausage. After all, with everything ground up, it’s not easy to distinguish scrap ham from scrap rat. Because of these (very real) stories, we hear the cliches “you don’t want to know how sausage or legislation is made.” The force of that piece of conventional wisdom is to encourage you to ignore the process of sausage-making. Ignorance, after all, is bliss. It’s an odd, but powerful, sort of move. If we accept this notion, then we are encouraged to associate the ability to enjoy or desire sausage on the condition that we “forget” it’s process.

I have to admit that at this point Dio almost lost me. I mean, usually he’s kind of jolly…but here he was taking me for a winding intellectual journey. I was really just trying to put the whole sausage thing out of my mind.

Anyway, Dio stopped his discussion–perhaps recognizing my fading attention–to make sure I noticed the point he was about to make. “Notice that ‘forgetting’ is put back on the individual.” Huh? He pointed out that there was a conceptual shift in the argument from the actual process of sausage-making to the individual’s ability to enjoy sausage. The individual’s ability to enjoy sausage depends upon her or his willingness to forget about the process of sausage making. He insisted that that was an important point.

He explained that once the focus is shifted onto the individual, three things can happen. First, and most obviously, attention can be taken away from the process of production, insulating those making sausage from scrutiny. Second, the more abject the process of sausage-making is made, the greater the gap becomes between the everyday and the process of sausage-making. That is, if sausage-making is marked as “gross” or “horrific” then in the everyday we will turn away from it, thus decreasing our familiarity and comfort with the process. Finally, if someone calls attention to the process of sausage-making and the specific problems located in the sausage factory, others can now discipline that person on the grounds that she or he is interfering with her or his enjoyment or desire.

“Are we seriously talking about sausage alienation?,” I asked with a tinge of sarcasm.

“In way, yes. But remember, it’s never just about sausage…especially when we have a nice piece of conventional wisdom that uses sausage as a point of comparison,” I was told.

That reminded me of one of the books we are reading for my Advanced Composition class: George Lakoff’s, Don’t Think of an Elephant. Lakoff’s book deals with framing–specifically how progressive and conservative discourse is framed by different concepts of the family. He argues that “framing is about getting language that fits your worldview. It is not just language. The ideas are primary–and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas” (4). So, if we look at the conventional wisdom as a set of ideas (a commonplace argument, perhaps???), we’re talking about the ideas that are conveyed by the conventional wisdom about sausage-making. Given the grin that was extending across his bearded face, I could see that I was finally catching on.

“You are always talking about how rhetoric and democracy arose at the same time,” noted Dio. “So maybe it will help to do one of those flashback sequences for you. By 600-500BC, sausage-making was a pretty common practice. Common enough that folks in China, Greece, and Rome were mentioning it in their daily conversations and even in some of their notes,” he explained. “It was common enough, that is, that the concept of sausage was available for use as a metaphor. Don’t forget that there were a whole lot of people that hated the rise of democracy…and the idea of grinding up a bunch of different meats and packaging it in an intestine offers just too easy of a metaphor for those who hated democracy.”

I began to follow…surprisingly. I gave it a whirl.

So, basically, the sausage-making metaphor does work in a culture. If we move away from the particular issue of sausage-making and look for those “ideas” that are connected to the language, we could argue that:

1. One of the ways to divert attention away from the actual process through which something is made–e.g. decisions–and turn it toward the individual’s negotiation of her or his relationship to that process, has the affect of shielding the process from scrutiny. In effect, it takes the actual process of “making decisions,” to continue the example, as a given. As an individual I am asked to choose between discomfort and pleasure. If I agree to accept the process as a given, I am rewarded with enjoyment. Why be upset with something that can’t be changed? Or is the result of a force beyond one’s control?
2. If I assume that the process of making decisions (i.e. sausage) is messy, disturbing, upsetting, etc., then I will be inclined to not inquire into the specific ways in which they are made. The more common it is for me to “look away” from the process of decision-making, the less familiar the process becomes. That is, one becomes alienated from the process of decision-making. We know, however, that decisions still need to be made (someone has to make them) so we turn to a particular caste of people who make decisions. We enter into an uneasy agreement–you make the decisions and we will not ask how those decisions are made.
3. There is a problem with this agreement though. What happens when the products of the process (decisions, sausage, medications) are problematic, unhealthy, or dangerous? In those cases, we are in a bind. We don’t know how the decisions were made, so we can’t tell if there was malice, carelessness, or incompetence. We are not, after all, familiar enough with what goes into the process to evaluate it. If someone does begin to call attention to the process and speak in a language that suggests knowledge of the process of decision-making, we are confronted with the first bargain we made: we agreed to diverting our attention away from the process of production in exchange for pleasure, comfort, status, leisure, whatever. And if we have a sufficient investment in these latter things, we will view the person calling attention to the process as attacking us–we will defend ourselves. Ultimately we have to defend ourselves in a different language, though, since we cannot defend ourselves in the language of process. We call attention to the improper “way” in which the person is raising the question. We would draw attention to how the person is crazy for critiquing something that cannot be changed. We chastise the person for being “uncivil” or “improper.” We call attention to the fact that the person broke a social compact to turn our attention away from the process of making sausage.

“Hmmm,” I concluded.

Dio smiled again, handed me a cup filled with wine, and leaned back into his chair. “Now don’t go and make the same mistake you made last semester.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got yourself all worked up with your analysis, I see. Just don’t turn your analysis into a rubric. There’s danger in introducing a false opposition that can lead you back to frustration,” he advised.

“Like….?”

“I like the whole thing you did there in your ‘#1? about exchanging pleasure for an agreement to ‘look away’ from the process of making X. However, that does not mean that ‘pleasure’ or ‘joy’ is in opposition to critical reflection. There is joy in decision-making, joy in critical analysis, joy in trying to draw attention to problems in the way things are done. The apparent opposition is also disciplining–it wants you to feel like you have to set aside joy if you are to be critical. How many of your lefty pals have made that mistake historically.” He paused for a moment, perhaps caught by a memory, and took a sip of wine. “Carnivals are important. Even if you are looked upon as improper or crude. If joy is seen as improper or crude, then we learn something about our cultures.”

We sat in quiet for a while until sleep finally closed in. I bid Dio goodnight and headed to bed. “Sausage,” I muttered. He smiled.