Spinnuzi, Chapter 4

I'll begin by saying it was nice to see Texas prominently featured in this week's reading--two weeks in a row! However, the reality of Texas being late to the game in terms of recognizing the need for regulation on services and pricing is not surprising, nor is it nearly as captivating as the story of Wiley College.

Methodologically, this chapter from Spinuzzi is interesting because he uses two theories that do not agree on the nature of history in order to illustrate the how defensible and sound claims might be made about the data of telecommunications history. Activity theory is grounded in a notion of dialectical contradictions developing a stabilized object. Alternatively, actor-network theory focuses not on dialectics and development toward a single, stable object. Rather, ANT looks to multiple and contingent translations discusive and material propostions by actants. In this way, history becomes an accounting of temporarily stable propositions--made stable by a layered accumulation (not unlike the Vicki Burton's notion of rhetorical accretion)--that are constantly open to problematization and renegotiation by actants.

Spinnuzi's appeal to Machiavelli serves well his goal to historicize the strategies of a network by making "success" one of his guiding analytics.

Spinnuzi provides me with a way to imagine tracking the accumulation of propositions that making an organization or network: writing departments, major curricula, liturgical practice, layered literacy events. He also challenges me not ascribe an intentionality and coherence on to a set of practices that may not have been intended. In other words, don't read the history of a group or practice in light of its present ideology. Rather, I should look for moments of accumulation and contestation that enable the present articulation of a group.

Burton, Chapter 3

I might've gotten a little carried away. I've created topic headings so you might more easily find what you think's the most interesting section below to read:

--(Quantitative research on daily lives) This is such an interesting chapters to read for methods and claims about methods for variety of reasons. We can talk about Burton's methods or her presentation of Wesley's methods for "the care of our time" (72). Burton speaks to the connection of Wesley's time with the Holy Club when he was at college and their "methods" of accounting for one's use of time and and engagement with productive, reflective, or spiritual activity. Given the interest some of us have in more quantitative methods, Wesley's notation system for coding different activities throughout a day invites me to think about the ways we, as researchers, might collect such data today (quantified data about a person's daily life) and what activities our inquiry might be geared toward. The frequency and length of texts and tweets over a given day? Emails? What are the varieties of daily practices in which folks engage and what level of "care" do they bring to them?

--(Conforming/Transforming work of journals) When Burton notes the way life at Oxford is structured to generate a desire on the part of its students to maintain and normalize the sense of privilege they experience in that ivory tower (77), the spiritual and literate disciplines of journaling articulated by Wesley suggest a means of both social/personal control and transformation. While journaling might be read as a way for subjects to confess and make themselves into a Foucaultian docile subject, in the context of privilege it can be a way of calling into question the "natural," the given of life at Oxford. Inviting individuals and communities to write the details of their lives might enable them, through increased awareness, to intervene against their own complicity with oppressive structures or to enhance the exercises of agency Cushman so urges us to be cognizant of.

--(History-laden nature of literacy events) Burton's account of Wesley's "conversion" or "conviction" experience at Aldersgate situates his increase in spiritual life and power in a multi-layered literacy event connected to a long tradition of church history. While among the Moravians, Wesley's hearing of someone read aloud Luther's writings about the book of Romans leads him to write, "I felt my heart strangely warmed" (83). So, to break this literacy event down, we've got Wesley hearing a worship leader read aloud (a worship practice he got used to with his mother, Susanna) an exegesis from a 16th century Reformation instigator, composed in response to a 1st century letter written by St. Paul to an audience of Roman Christians. To recap, that's an oral rendering of a commentary on a letter, each centuries removed from the other. Such rich, historically laden literacy events (the trope of increased conviction upon hearing another's reading of Scripture) have a long tradition in western Christianity. For example, St. Augustine found himself led to a conversion experience during a sermon by St. Ambrose. Augustine was first taken in by the pleasantness of the rhetoric and then began to realize the truth that was being communicated. Having this sense of ecclesiastical (or church) history in mind I think realizes one fascinating dimension of the method Burton deploys for those interested in the history of sacred rhetoric in particular. The attentiveness to the specifics of the literacy event reveal the situational, contextual, and deeply rhetorical nature of communication about the divine. Often, speaking subjects (especially historical and orthodox figures) who voice their spiritual understandings are not thought to be engaged in what we in rhet/comp might see as 'good' rhetoric or rhetoric that is aware of its embeddedness in culture. They are often seen as adopting a kind of Boothian conquest rhetoric--win at all costs. However, Burton's rendering of Wesley's experience (and my supplementing of it here with Augustine's) indicate the necessarily shifting and radically specific nature of communication about the eternal and the divine.

--(History and ethics) One of the conversations that emerged post-colloquium in our class last week was a seeming difference between the kinds of ethical commitments owed by historical researchers to their subjects and those owed by ethnographers to their participants. There are a few ways in which Burton troubles this distinction. She sees her subjects as vivid and vibrant actors in social life and tries to give readers a sense of their rich lives, allowing us to see how diaries and journals worked to order the personal and spiritual lives of Wesley and early Methodists. At the beginning of the chapter, she turns to work of Ralph Cintron for a frame that allows her speak about the function of the journals in ordering the symbolic lives of their writers. What do we make of this link between an ethnographic frame and a historical inquiry?

Nancy Welch, Chapter 3

One of the central claims that runs through chapter 3 and its "interlude" is that the practice of argument--informed by context and situation--and an awareness of history is important to mustering any potentially response to present conditions that might compel individuals and communities to activism. More specific to the chapter, Welch addresses two strands of thought important in feminist rhetorics and activism (the maternalist and the postmodern) to claim that if their more debilitating aspects (respectively, potential reinforcement of traditionalist gender roles and political indecision) can be worked through, then they can provide teachers with ways to imagine helping students move through inquiry (finding a place to stand in ongoing debates/struggles) to making arguments (making a case for the stance they have chosen).

This chapter finds its exigency and momentum in stories and anecdotes from Welch's own experiences and from one of her students. She turns to theories, for the most part, to highlight the inadequate responses they've enabled their proponents to articulate in the face of serious political realities.

What Welch advances is a pedagogical imperative that students be offered in writing classes opportunities to practice the full range of rhetorical strategies that mightenable them both to investigate questions/issues and to represent (and defend) their answers to a publics that might not agree with them.

This text challenges me to more fully engage students with the rhetorical possibilities of audience and argument to take up more thoughtfully and carefully with them issues of disagreement and clear opposition and how to respond to challenges they might encounter, especially when voicing minority views ( for example, opposition to war in the midst of "patriotic zeal").

Gwen Gorzelsky. "Rhetorical Ethnography: Shifting Figures"

*Main claim(s) or research questions

-One of Gorzelsky's main claims is that attending to the figurative language used by ethnographic participants and researchers in the field as well as by researchers during the composing of an ethnographic text can aid the critical goal of just social change without promoting an agenda that overrides the goals and claims of research participants.

*Major assumptions about methods and methodologies.

-Ethnographic writing can be artistic (in the sense of inviting those who compose and read into experiences of greater wholeness and into revisions of their previous notions regarding research participants), drawing on metaphor both for constructing the research narrative and for conducting the analysis.

-Gorzelsky's methods for composing a rhetorical ethnography are described in a three step process: 1) identify the “embodied metaphors enacted by people in the field,” 2) examine the “language-based metaphors used in the field,” and 3) be aware of what figures arise in the process of writing the ethnographic account (88).

-Conducting ethnography involves an awareness of the cognition involved in communication. It also entails, more broadly, an awareness of the workings of communicative acts on the individuals who produce and hear them and within the systems they are a part. This involves special attention to metaphor.

-Identifying the metaphors at work in the field provides a glimpse into the workings of the social and thought systems of which those who deploy them are a part. Becoming aware of the metaphors used by researchers and participants enables researchers to revise the metaphors they use as researchers in order to change relational patterns with claims and metaphors of their participants, a personal change that can participate in social change.

*Key words/phrases/concepts

-metaphorics/figurative language--these are used interchangeably except when explicitly speaking about simile near the end of the chapter.

-gestalt

-relational patterns

-systemic

-conversion/change

*Key texts.

-Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

-Perls, Frederick, Ralph E. Hefferline, and Paul Goodman. Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York: Dell, 1951.

*Major questions/challenges the text posed for me

-Gorzelsky's central claim about the political work performed by critical ethnography seems to be that it allows for the researcher to work on herself, on her personal metaphors, on her engagements with research subjects. Yet, she was also a participant in the community she studied, a group working toward "progressive" social change around literacy education for socially marginalized youth and their families. And her reflective work around metaphors enabled her to understand her disconnects with other activists in this social justice project. Implicitly, this work Gorzelsky does on herself is not simply for the scholarship she produced, but it will inform her future work in similar situations. In other words, by understanding the clash of metaphorics she encountered and working to revise her own metaphors, she enables herself to be in the world with others differently the next time such disconnects occur--specifically, when they occur again in activist contexts.

-Gorzelsky also takes up one of the very points regarding spirituality we took up in class last Thursday regarding an implicit or explicit teleology toward which its movements are or can be directed. In fact, this was the organizing tension of metaphorics (the invocation by another Struggle organizer of the progressive and “good” end toward which the Christian path is directed and Gorzelsky’s subscription to a set of [post-]Marxist redemptive and revolutionary metaphorics) she found herself responding to in the last part of her article. If, then, a telos of progressive good is a part of the organizing energia, or vivid story, that shapes and propels individuals and communities toward just action in the very specific instances and predicaments in which they and others find themselves, how can we as ethnographers account for that ground of reality, that play of metaphorics? Also, there seems something very rhetorical to me in the attention to symbols paid by the other Struggle organizer. His interest arose from a desire to communicate what he saw as an eternal truth to a particular audience experiencing very specific social and materials realities, necessitating a shaping of that message specific to that audience.

-It also seems implicit in Gorzelsky’s account that academics/researchers will more often, if not always, be the ones within an ethnographic project that have a tenuous or tortured relationship with religiosity (and not even the especially evangelical brands [Presbyterians are generally known as part of the American mainline rather than as part of the more evangelical traditions]. What does this say to those researchers who may well understand the dangers associated with power dynamics of sovereignty (Foucault’s beheaded king) and of a progressive telos (don’t worry about your working conditions today; everything we will be better in the sweet by and by), but who at the same time claim an identity that participates in both of those risky stances? In other words, I wonder about the usefulness of her positioning of researchers (which by necessity had to come out of her own experience and positionality) for ethnographers who subscribe to the notion of a sovereign God and who believe in Her/His ability to intervene in material and discursive reality.

Bazerman, Charles. “Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts.” What Writing Does and How It Does It

*Major claims and research questions:

-Attending to the ways texts draw on the discursive universe of which they are part enables a much clearer sense of how writing produces specific understandings, identities, communities, and pedagogical data (84).

-All textual products evince deliberate or unintentional influence from other texts and words that preceded them (83-84).

-As writers, identifying other texts to use is a part of intertextuality. However, it also involves the specific deployments of other texts, the purpose behind their invocation, and the writerly identity created through relationships to other texts (94).

*Assumptions about methods and methodologies:

-Analysis of a range of both explicit and implicit intertextuality is possible, but it is usually less difficult to account for the work performed by those more obvious and explicit intertextual moves than the implicit ones (89).

-Intertextual inquiries may open broadly, with a general research question, but they should move to specific focuses as quickly as possible to yield useful analysis (91).

-The selection of the text(s) for analysis is critical for intertextual projects (91).

-A thorough analysis of intertextuality may require a single, short text; whereas, if specific expressions of intertextuality or generic aspects of texts guide the analysis, a more voluminous body of texts may be subject to study (91).

-After texts have been chosen, data collection begins by noticing language use patterns and apparent anomalies. Then researchers can move to interpretation of that data (92-93).

*Key terms:

-Intertextuality—“The relation each text has to the texts surrounding it” (84)

-Intertextual reach—the amount and variety of a text’s circulation among other texts (89)

-Recontextualization—how words evoke different meanings and effects based on their use in a new discursive situation (91)

*Key citations:

Many sources seem to inform Bazerman’s work throughout the chapter, but explicit citations (aside from student work and a professional magazine used as examples for analysis and John Swales’ Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings) come only in the “further reading” section (95-96). However, of those listed, these appear to be most useful: Graham Allen’s Intertextuality and Amy Devitt’s “Intertextuality in Tax Accounting: Generic, Referential, and Functional”in Textual Dynamics of the Professions (Eds.) Bazerman and Paradis.

*Questions/Challenges the text raises for me:

-Bazerman makes issues of scope—the scope of questions and the size of the data pool—in research quite clear. The more features of intertextuality one wishes to highlight and explore, the more difficulty a large data set creates. This raises, for me, questions about moments in scholarship when researchers may have collected a large body material (hundreds of surveys, for example) and then choose especially "interesting" or perhaps “representative” responses to examine at length with the larger data set providing a background and context. How can the criteria for the selection of examples to be given more extensive treatments be articulated? Are they always?

-Bazerman also invites me to remain aware of the fact that whether certain meanings were intended in a given use of language or through a specific textual practice, discursive and material effects (what texts do) may not align with the writer’s intention. This produces an interesting question about how to treat texts offered up for analysis by research participants who are part of larger, mixed-methods research projects. How can researchers who come to know their participants through a variety of inquiry methods--individuals to whom they have some ethical responsibilities--take participants' claims into account while also attending the effects of their texts?

A Quote

I wonder what the methodological implications of this stance are...

"What if, as researchers, we spiritually approached our research projects–-and our relationships with others in those projects-–knowing and confident that our words instead of our credentials were divine invitations to be in relationship with another, invitations that were able to both heal and serve?” ---Cynthia Dillard, On Spiritual Strivings: Transforming an African American Woman’s Academic Life

Introducing the blog

This is my blog for CCR 691: Comparative Processes and Premises of Research.