This is a podcast of the paper I gave at the Rhetoric Society of America 13th Biennial Conference in Seattle, WA on May 26, 2008.  My paper, “Holding Back the Membership: Breaking Cycles of Despair and Rhetorics of Power in a Contract Negotiations Year,” was part of a panel I was on with Ken Ehrensal, Seth Kahn, and Cheryl Wanko.  Our panel was titled, “Responsible to Whom, for What?: Complex Audiences at Cross-Purposes in Labor Organizing.”  Our panel was focused on the last round of contract negotiations for our union, APSCUF.

If you would like to download full paper with my Works Cited page and cut selections, you can do that here –> Holding Back the Membership (doc)

 

 Holding Back the Membership, RSA 2008 [26:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (51)

In addition to all the vlogging we did and photos we took, we did our first experiment in podcasting for the KU Composition Conference.  Three students from my Advanced Composition class–Tim Crane, Katrina Albert, and Renee Franklin–agreed to having their panel recorded for a podcast.  A huge thanks goes out to them for their willingness to try this out.  

I just finished loading up the audio (with very minimal editing) and it sounds good!  If you’d like to check it out, click on the radio icon above.  A QuickTime (or other audio program) should start up and play the file.  If you want a little context for the panel, check out the paper assignment that provided the prompt for Tim, Katrina, and Renee’s paper.  Or, check out the Ramage-tagged posts on our class blog.

Hey all…welcome to another experiment in podcasting. This podcast comes to you from the 5th Annual Kutztown University Composition Conference for Student Writers. Three brave souls, Tim Crane, Katrina Albert, and Renee Franklin agreed to have their panel recorded for this little experiment. (btw…check out our vlogging from KUCC posts on the KU Comp/Rhet blog).

As you may know, I am now the proud owner of a “Snowball” by Blue Microphones. I went for this mic because it every review I read/watched pointed to this USB mic as THE mic to have for professional quality podcasting and digital recording. The big bonus with the Snowball is that is has the capability of 360 degrees recording…so, you can plop it down in the middle of a table, plug it into your laptop, and you’re good to go. And that’s what we did. I’ve gotta say, I’m quite pleased with the quality.

A Little Context:

This panel grew out of my ENG 230 Advanced Composition class this spring.  The first text for the class is Rhetoric: A User’s Guide by John D. Ramage.  Let me just say that the text is not a “user’s guide” in the “how-to” genre.  More of a “user of rhetoric” introducing the uninitiated to rhetoric through the lens of rhetoric.  Students learn in the first couple of pages that Ramage will not tell them what rhetoric “is,” but he will tell them quite abit about what it is like in terms of other things.  He suggests that rhetoric is a Western version of Tao or Dine.  In short, it’s a non-traditional introduction to rhetoric. 

To complicate things that are already complicated, the paper I assign focusing on Ramage is not a traditional paper.  It asks students to write a travel narrative recounting their journey through “Ramageland” (you can check out the paper assignment here).  The papers are generally very creative and quite engaging.  The three papers you will hear here are three such creative and engaging responses to my first assignment.  

I’d love to hear your responses to this podcast…in terms of the quality of the sound, thoughts on the papers, questions about the assignment, ideas about the conference, or…well…you tell me.  I’ll get out of the way now…you can click on the radio (top) or the play button below to hear the podcast.

 

 Journeys with Ramage panel at 2009 KU Composition Conference [47:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (57)

Yes, indeed Cooking with Dionysus iTunes podcast is LIVE!  Woo Hoo. 

No, really, I do know that I am just about the only person that is excited about this.  Really, I do.

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, I think I’ve got this now…looks like I messed up first file somehow. Here we go:

 

 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.”

 [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]