Chris Andrews: Presentation

Want the notes and PowerPoint? Send a request to christopher.andrews at ttu dot edu.

Chris Andrews' RSA Presentation: Doxa, Students, and Technology on the WPA-L 

Digitalized Delivery

@CateBlouke we need a "Tweeting about Conference Panels in the Age of Tweeting about Conference Panels" panel #rsa12

— John Jones (@johnmjones) May 26, 2012

In what should be no surprise to May Seminar attendees (some of you will remember Alec Hosterman's article on the topic in Intercom 56.10), Twitter has become a significant part of the complex network of academic conference discourses. Conferencegoers are using Twitter to preview their own panels, to advertise the panels of others, to share the contents of their presentations, to give a sense of what the "can't miss" panels are, and--perhaps most importantly--to extend the session's dialogue, questions, and debate beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the conference itself. There are plenty of guides on the Web for how attendees can make the most of Twitter (see RMM), and even academic studies on the matter (see Wired Campus, for example)

So wish I was with @KimEl and @cdmandrews at #RSA12 - hope they keep tweeting so I can follow virtually

— Deanna Mascle (@deannamascle) May 25, 2012

Yesterday, Collin Brooke (Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Syracuse) posted some interesting thoughts on his blog about the relationship between panel delivery and Twitter; I thought these would be relevant to share here, especially since the three of us were charged with tweeting and liveblogging RSA as best as we could.  Describing the characteristics of a live-tweetable presentation (presentations with clear audiovisual signposts, a slower speaking pace), Brooke makes the case that presenters who wish to have their presentation RTed should take "shareability" into consideration as they're planning the delivery of their paper. Brooke offers a compelling theory for why certain panels may not have been as well-tweeted as others: because RSA publishes conference proceedings, more people tend to deliver by reading than might otherwise (likely in order to save labor on refitting the already-written paper for the far different mode of oral delivery). Such presentations are far more difficult to tweet than those where speakers work from notes or extemoraneously. One thing the three of us talked about after the first day what that we noticed much more reading than we'd expected from panels across the board (see Danielle's earlier post for more on this). Given the context that Brooke points out, all the reading we saw makes sense. (Of course, sometimes you read because you want to, and sometimes you read because you only *just* finished writing it the night before...)

There was still a lot of activity on the #rsa12 stream, but this is an interesting case for helping us understand the complexity of doing intellectual work in the 21st century. Even if we're not making solely digital presentations, our scholarship is knotted in a high-velocity digital network that affects what sense(s) audiences and remediators are able to make of it.

RSA14 idea: "Pimp my Panel: Twitter and the Art of Academic Teasers" #RSA12

— Christopher Andrews (@cdmandrews) May 26, 2012

Extemporaneous? Not that kind of presentation.

Our panel was largely uneventful. There were three people there who weren’t our friends – thank you Lora Arduser and Mark DiMaggio for your support! – and I’m conflicted as to how I feel about that.  With so many sessions (20) at the same time AND the placement of our panel in the last spot of the day (5-6:15 pm), I wasn’t expecting a large crowd. There are just too many interesting things to choose from. The rhetoric of Roman coins? Super cool. Wish I could have heard that.

It would have been nice to get a sense that people are interested in the work that Kim, Chris, and I are doing, although in some respect a smaller audience takes a little bit of the pressure off. For anxiety-based reasons, a decent sized audience allows you to kind of gaze out and see no one, but a tiny audience forces you to spread the eye contact among the few, specific individuals more intimately. I always feel I need to do more entertaining for small groups than larger ones.

And speaking of entertaining, let’s take a short stroll down audience engagement land, which is not anywhere near the Loews Philadelphia hotel.  With the exception of one, every single presenter I’ve seen here has read her paper aloud to the audience. Most have not had any visual aids. Those that  did use PPT read from their slides. I’m surprised by this, although I might be alone in my surprise. I don’t really think this would fly in the basement of the Education Building. I am aware that this is standard Lit conference behavior, but I didn’t expect it from rhetors.  It could also just be that I went to sessions where the presentation style was to read – remember, you miss 95%. 

You know, quite honestly, I’d love to write more, something all theory-like and intellectual, but I’m tired. Conferences are mentally and physically exhausting, and truly I think they take some time to process over the few days afterward.  It has been a whirlwind of theory – very tasty, slow to digest.

RSA: A brief list of things that are cool.

1. Rhetoric conference in Philadelphia, hallowed ground for negotiated society and the use of language of all kinds, in all levels, and in many languages. I've heard and seen more different kinds of language in one day today than I have in... maybe ever.

2. Vising a panel where two of the three presenters couldn't attend (family matters), and staying to engage in not only a good presentation but also in a nearly 45-minute discussion of that presentation afterward. How rewarding that must have been for the presenter!

3. In Philadelphia, Italian ice is called Water ice.

4. 'The Signer.'

Day One: Rhetorical Analysis of...

I'll be honest. I tend to blow conferences up in my head. Not in an angsty 'I hated your paper and wish I had a revolver' way (which is the gist of one comment in the very first session Danielle and I attended), but in a deific 'I'll finally see Scholar X and it will be fantastic' way. Sometimes that holds up. Sometimes it's just a little bit of a let-down because everyone reads their paper*. Sometimes you want to pull out your laptop and work on slides for your own presentation. And sometimes--hopefully only very rarely--you feel like getting up to leave because you can tell five minutes in that the first speaker (and maybe the other two) is going to seriously waste your time.

One thing that struck me about most of the panels I visited on the first day (one on object-oriented-rhetoric, one on material rhetoric, one on social (media) delivery, and one on identity and composition-rhetoric) was how theory-laden most of the work was. I wasn't especially surprised by this, but especially when considered from the context of our own backdrop of Texas Tech tech comm and rhetoric, I couldn't help but notice that many of the presentations I saw were largely absent of a text or a corpus under inspection. Lots of theory, lots of Latour, and little specificity. This isn't a *bad* thing, and I know there were plenty of sessions that did work out from specific examinations of objects, texts, and contexts (I heard about an investigation of Roman coin rhetoric that I was sad to have missed), but Kim, Danielle, and I had a series of moments where we'd look at or text one another and wonder if our panel--with its very specific rhetorical analyses of very specific artifacts--was somehow out of place.

Of course this is an overgeneralization. The second session I attended, "Rhetorical Remains: Affect, Enactment, and the Living Dead," chaired by Anne Wysocki, was an engaging and, well, affective exploration and representation of invention, voice, memory, and ordinary language and objects and how we might pass them through the inventios of different people, or how we embalm voices or disregard 'facts' or resist page logics at the same time as we engage academic nonvisual logics. Another paper in a different panel, presented by Jeff Rice about sentiment and engagement through social media delivery, took up craft brewing and an event called 'Dark Lord Days' to offer thoughtful perspectives on network tracing and the mythic and communal characteristics of social media. I enjoyed the first session very much, too; Alex Ried's discussion of mobile objects and glitching as a source of agency and thought was especially good, even if Latour and the New Aesthetic are a lot to take at 9:30 in the morning.

A high point was the keynote. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karly Kohrs Campbell presented a riveting discussion of American Exceptionalism and the phrase "a city on a hill" in presidential rhetoric. Starting with Puritan (not Pilgrim; sorry, Reagan) John Winthrop's sermon, their analysis pointed out the iterations of this phrase as used by Ronald Reagan and JFK, and then discussed the debate point of American Exceptionalism in Mitt Romney's attacks on Barack Obama. I won't say their address "saved the day" because it honestly didn't need to be saved. But after an exhilarating but exhausting morning of theory, their embrace of texts provided an important reminder of--as Danielle has discussed in a previous post--our audience here at RSA, and the diverse manifestations of that thing called "rhetorical scholarship."

Also. I could eat all of Philadelphia. Even the chocolate-dipped onions.

*Something that, as graduate students, we are often encouraged to avoid like the plague. Anathema? More like just another theme.

Even If You Go to Everything, You'll Still Miss Most of It

Academic conferences can be like triple-tiered bookstores that taunt you with tomes you want badly to take home with you but can’t fit into the limits of your credit card (or the available time in your life).  RSA 2012 is a big tease in a bad way, with 20 options for each session slot and no breaks between sessions. If you want to eat, you have to miss something.  And you are already missing 95% of it just by virtue of having to make a choice, so if you come in 2014 pack some granola.

I chose the first session this morning because I was lured in by “Heidegger” in one of the paper descriptions, never mind that the panel was largely focused on Latour, about whom I know next to nothing. Much of this hour went right over my head, although I did scribble frantically things to look up later. I say that honestly, because I think there is a danger in having to pretend, as grad students, that we know all of these theorists inside and out – a danger to ourselves via our mental health, that is. The beauty of metacognition and the accessibility of information in 2012 is that as long as we know what we don’t know, we can eventually get around to knowing it, preferably post-quals.  

It doesn’t help, however, if your notes say this:

Heidegger

Tool analysis…tool environment humans

Manifold assignments, all possibilities in the situation

Human engagement  is relations constructed by totality of equipment

Objects become rhetorical when? Bind us map public space

Relationality

and when midnight comes ‘round and you try to blog about them you have no idea why you wrote that or what you wanted to say about it.  The most fabulous of those cryptic notes is “bind us map public space” and I might make a haiku out of that some day. Anyone who takes a stab at it and posts it in a comment will receive a free éclair from the Reading Terminal Market (purchased by Chris Andrews).  If you don’t win a free éclair but happen to be in Philly, please stop by RTM and get one for $4. It is better than the Doubletree cookie.

On a more serious note, however, some fascinating ideas that came out of this session did manage to stick for me. The first of these is the question of the agency of objects, as objects are always doing things we don’t understand without even our knowledge of them doing those things (Things are happening in our pockets without our knowledge, according Alex Reid (SUNY Buffalo).) The speakers were talking specifically about mobile technology, but this struck a chord with me in regards to the headscarf as well. I maintain that the veil is a technology, and I can certainly imagine how it might do things the wearer and observer do not understand, even while it is performing certain functions they do understand like limiting the gaze and enacting modesty. I’m more interested, however, in the agency the veil has outside of the functions assigned by humans.

Speaking of the veil, I felt compelled to also take in a session that included a paper called “Re-Framing the Veil: Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis as Comic Corrective” by

Christopher Basgier (Indiana University). In addition to confirming for me the contradictions and multiple meanings attached to the veil in both Western and Islamic discourse, Basgier’s discussion highlighted via Burke’s Comic Corrective the ambivalent attitude some women – especially those from Muslim majority countries – have toward the veil, when there is an impossibility to fully accept or fully reject the veil in its totality. Something that especially stood out for me from Basgier’s presentation was a brief note he made about the margins between the frames, the gutters between the pictures.  That is where we, the readers, perform closure.  I wondered here, upon hearing this, if that is what I do when I piece together narrative fragments scattered across websites. Are each of the artifacts I work with a frame? Am I performing closure work in the gutters? And if so, am I getting the story right?

I worry a great deal about speaking for my hijabi sisters via my analysis of the artifacts they produce. A 3^rd session today, one on Intersectionality, reinforced this fear for me. Malea Powell (MSU) discussed reframing legitimizing narratives, emphasizing especially the work that needs to be done on training graduate students to work with and teach not only “real rhetoric” but also indigenous rhetorics that currently seem to exist only in silos. She quoted Lee M? : “There is a story in every theory.” My hope is not to let the story in the theory overshadow the story in the narrative.  Also in this panel, David Wallace (UCF) offered 10 Principles Guiding the Teaching and Practice of Rhetoric and Composition. They were each useful, but #4 “Engaging in Responsible Rhetorical Agency must be rooted in an understanding of identity as multiple and contested” and #9 “We must account for differences in our trajectories in moving toward rhetorical agency that embraces intersectionality” each seem particularly relevant for my work. I am hyperaware of the multiple, contested identities of the women I study. I am aware of the varied trajectories. My concern is in the messiness that makes for my research and how adept I’ll be when working through that intersectionality in my dissertation.

Good stuff here in Philly. Quite a lot to chew on. More buffet tomorrow.

Anxiety & the Conference Presentation

Preparing for any kind of presentation always takes me much longer than I feel it should.  As I prepare for this panel presentation at RSA this week, the same anxieties are resurfacing again. It isn’t that I’m anxious about people watching me, or that I’ll trip and fall, or stumble over words, lose the war with technology, or drop my notecards (although those things HAVE happened to me in the past). For me, the anxiety comes from the fear that I won’t connect with my audience. Will they get it? Will I be able to bring them along the journey of ideas I am attempting to lay out before them? 

Because really, let’s be honest. We’ve all seen the presenter trip, drop the notecards, or fumble with tech behaving badly. And when we do, we forgive them and even feel embarrassed on their behalf. These are excusable things. These annoyances don’t necessarily disrupt the relationship between speaker and listener.  Unless it is a clear case of the speaker just really not being adequately prepared, we can work with a bit of nervous tripping over wires. 

Preparation, however, is key, and not just preparation of the practice-my-delivery sort either. I’m talking about a presentation prepared for a particular audience on a particular occasion – kind of like that delicious Italian hoagie made especially for you with oil and mayo, no peppers, hold the oregano, extra provolone on a hard roll. We have ALL seen the presenter that exhibits no sense of kairos, didn’t prepare well or at all, isn’t engaging, presents a confusing argument, or has clearly recycled the presentation from another gig.  We may politely nod along like a good little audience, but inside we’re angry! We feel our time is wasted and that the speaker only cares about (in the words of my 6-yr-old daughter) “puffing up his attitude” (or CV). We take notes just to pass the time and avoid slinking down into the uncomfortable hotel conference room chairs.  We want the disrespectful presenter to just. Stop. Talking. Now. Please. 

I do not ever want to inflict this agony.  My goal is always to invite my victims into a conversation I’m trying to situate for them. I want them to “get it,” so they can take the ideas from the jumping off point I’ve provided and engage the issue further.  There are myriad junctures at which the listener can be lost, and that is the root of so much of my anxiety. How much do they already know? Is this the right visual aid? How much does this group need on a slide? How loaded is this term? How much unpacking is necessary without being a bore? Is this topic going to anger someone in the audience? Then add to those the host of universal design issues that I’m sure I’m handling the wrong way.

Same topic, similar spin doesn’t ever equal identical presentation. This particular presentation is headed towards its fourth iteration. Beginning as a written project for a grad class on rhetorical analysis, it next had to be shaped into something suitable for an online audience during class. I believe we had maybe 10 minutes, and there was a great deal of typing (or cut/pasting) involved. Knowing classmates would have the transcripts to read through after class alleviated any worry over pacing or vocal presentation as the main goal was to get the essentials pasted into the chat box as quickly as possible while simultaneously being able to answer questions from other MOO inhabitants. A third iteration involved morphing the topic into 1/3 of a panel presentation on rhetorical agency to be delivered at last summer’s May Seminar in Lubbock. Aside from the challenges of tweaking the presentation of the topic to fit within the panel framework, there was also pressure to create something that would be engaging to an audience composed of  peers at all stages of coursework and faculty. Sure, we’re all TTU TCR, but the diversity of experience, interests, and expectations is of wide girth.  May Seminar presentations can be classic, and as much as possible presenters must try to “choke them out.”  (We miss you GZ!)

This time, my topic is being shaped for an audience of rhetoricians about whom I know very little aside from their own presentation titles. I’m a smart cookie, but I always have terror that I’m the least intelligent person in the hotel when I go to these things. I study the program to see who is going to be there and what they’ll be talking about. I look for themes, recurring topics. I read up on the conference speakers. And then I decide on the answers to the questions I ask above. (I also go see my therapist and pace a lot and have wine and breathe to my center. )  While I’m at a conference, I go to sessions to do recon work – gathering info on the tone and quality of other sessions. I take note of hecklers. I internalize which mistakes not to make. Then I might adjust some more. Usually, I end up realizing that I’m NOT the least intelligent person there, nor the most dreadful, and I do have some interesting goods to deliver.  It would be nice to arrive at that conclusion without the wash of anxiety, but for me that’s probably not going to happen. I always have to walk through it to get to the other side.