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Chris Andrews' RSA Presentation: Doxa, Students, and Technology on the WPA-L |
A collaborative presentation of our 2012 Rhetoric Society of America (Philadelphia, PA) panel experience.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Chris Andrews: Presentation
Digitalized Delivery
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)@CateBlouke we need a "Tweeting about Conference Panels in the Age of Tweeting about Conference Panels" panel #rsa12
— John Jones (@johnmjones) May 26, 2012
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
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Extemporaneous? Not that kind of presentation.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
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
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Anxiety & the Conference Presentation
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Accessible Presenting
One of my concerns at any conference is the accessibility of presentations to differently abled audience members. Academic presentations are typically delivered orally. Audience members who are hard of hearing, have auditory or cognitive processing differences, or favor other modes of learning must work very hard to try to follow the typical conference presentation if it does not accommodate their needs. Orators must speak slowly and clearly to the entire room, organize their content and provide cues to that organization, and provide modified paper or electronic texts. These features are, of course, the elements of effective oral communication as well as accommodations to include differently abled people in the audience.
Some presenters provide visual textual supports with projected slides, whiteboards or smart boards, posters, or props. Like the oral delivery, visual aids must be carefully designed to include audience members of various abilities. Slides must use large readable text and simple designs, props and whiteboard writing need to be visible to the entire room, and the visual message should relate to, not distract from, the oral message.
The constraints of academic conferences, even at national and international levels, require creative planning for accessible presenting. Renting audiovisual equipment at conference hotels, for example, is very costly so not all conference sessions will have access. For the two papers I'm delivering at the 2012 RSA Conference, I fortunately will have access to an overhead projector for slide presentation from my laptop. I will also provide a few handouts with large print text of my speeches. But I'm still mulling over some accommodations:
- Slides: I know that presentation slides that supplement the speech rather than replicate it are generally more interesting and meaningful for an academic audience. I have heard critiques when presenters interrupt the extemporaneous flow of their presentations to read slides word-for-word: "Everyone can read your slides." But I know this is not true even if the slides are well designed to account for visual differences. According to "Creating Accessible Presentations at CCCC" (a tip sheet from the Disability Studies SIG), I should read each slide out loud. But I would like to present information in my slides complementary to but different from that in the oral presentation. Some of the visual information, such as a list of metaphors or a table comparing points of character and setting in my artifacts, will disrupt the oral argument if I read the slides out loud. Right now, I'm thinking that I'll briefly describe the content of each slide and make the slides available online. But I'm still thinking this problem through.
- Handouts: I want to provide a one-page outline of my presentation and references for audience members to help them follow my points, annotate the session, and remember these ideas afterwards. Ideally, I would save a tree and provide a URL for audience members to access this material online while I'm speaking. But will we have good connectivity in the session rooms? Will the people who most want my online materials have a computer and connection to access them? And if not, do I provide copies for everyone and risk a lot of wasted paper or just a few and risk unhappy audience members?
After the presentations, I'll provide some links to illustrate the accommodations I ended up using. And I would love to hear how others have created accessible presentations within the time, money, and environmental constraints of academic conferences.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Proposal: "Rhetorical Agency in Online Communities"
The three studies contributing to this panel show not only that these claims are not always true, but also that the reasons individual agency is challenged online involve a complicated mix of culture, context, and community values. Thriving online communities that begin as a gathering place for individual voices of dissent have the potential to become more dictatorial than democratic. Such online communities eventually build a shared identity, one that often takes the form of a community narrative. Such a narrative may offer new freedom, or it might simply become a venue for new and potentially dangerous hierarchies. By excavating individual narratives, participants who might lose agency in the dominance of the community narrative can regain agency and reframe individual and group identities; that is, communities can resist remediating old power systems.
Using multiple critical approaches, this panel will discuss these issues of identity, agency, and community in the online discourses of three different types of communities. The first paper analyzes the online construction of the Autism and Autistic Communities, illustrating how agency gained by a marginalized group may still be denied to others. The second paper examines narrative and counter-narrative threads on the website www.altmuslimah.com, a site devoted to examining gender issues in the Muslim community. The third paper examines a group of teachers’ assumptions about the power of technology and the agency of college students as they emerge on the WPA-L, the Writing Program Administrators’ e-mail listserv. Taken together, these studies also illustrate how the Internet provides diverse spaces for analyzing texts and narratives we might not have had access to before--behind the scenes teacher-talk, the splintered viewpoints of individuals in the “same” religious community, and autism advocacy groups whose competing values and beliefs constrain public discussion of autism-related issues.
Kimberly Elmore: “The Problem of the Autism Community, the Autistic Community, and the Many”
In “Rhetoric and community: The problem of the one and the many,” Miller (1993) challenges whether the tension inherent in constructing community from diverse individual values and beliefs is a problem to be solved or a catalyst for communal reconstruction. A shared-values community model divides the autism advocacy and self-advocacy communities. Through agency claimed by online autistic adults, who have trouble communicating orally in face-to-face situations, the self-advocacy community shaped an autistic-as-neurodiversity counter-narrative to the autism-as-disease narrative of the highly influential Autism Speaks. In 2009, Autism Speaks promoted a short film, “I Am Autism,” which portrays families battling the tragic consequences of autism. This film triggered strong online responses, including the “I Am [Hatred]” parody video, from neurodiversity proponents. These two videos personify the dualistic rhetoric of advocacy communities in the characters “Autism Community” and “Autistic Community.” The oppositional advocacy narratives dominate online autism communities and fail to engage each other in constructive sociopolitical rhetoric on autism-related issues. They also deny agency to individuals with diverging views—a problem of the two and the many. Antenarrative analysis (Boje, 2001) suggests how individuals’ stories excluded from the narrative and counter-narrative might be recovered from various online responses to these films. This analysis illustrates how the one community of autism stakeholders, who need not share identity or ends, might engage each other in rhetorical work to “construct one out of many, over and over again” (Miller, 1993, p. 91).
Danielle Saad: “Online Counter-Narratives of Muslim Women”
As humans, we look for common understandings of experience through the stories we are told and the stories we tell. For Muslims, the Qur’an and Hadith are the narratives to which they repeatedly return to understand and navigate the human experience. However, for many Muslim women, especially those living in the West, the traditional interpretations of these narratives, coupled with centuries old cultural overlays, don’t mesh with their lived experience in a meaningful way (Abdul-Ghafur, 2005; Droogsma, 2007; Kirmani, 2009). This is especially true when it comes to the hijab, or headscarf. However, a number of Muslim women are creating an alternate narrative online through blogs, articles, interviews, and multimedia. One such narrative site is Altmuslimah.com, which is dedicated to exploring gender issues in Islam. Using Narrative criticism (Fisher, 1984, 1985), this paper analyzes a number of artifacts on the Altmuslimsh website that deal with individual Muslim’s experiences and perceptions of the hijab. This analysis produces a number of counter-narratives that challenge the role of hijab in the dominant narratives of the Muslim woman’s experience. Muslim women on this site are using their personal agency to refute both western feminist narratives and traditional Muslim narratives, sometimes both at the same time.
Christopher Andrews: “‘Writing Instructors Really Are a Pretty Selfless Lot’: Constructing Students and Technology on the WPA-L”
In the productive disciplines of rhetoric, composition, and technical communication, there is no shortage of online talk about our students and their technology. On blogs and popular websites, on listservs and informal communication of all types, teachers and scholars debate the digital native meme, think about the implications of integrating texting and YouTube production in assorted writing classrooms, and focus our scholarly and daily attention on the relationship between our student’s communication and the machines they use to produce it. Our theories of technology and our conceptions of students interact everywhere in all our various professional discourses, including our online talk; it is in those discourses that, as we teach and as we interact with one another, domination and freedom “are exercised in a relativized world” (McKerrow, p. 96). This presentation focuses on a lengthy conversation thread from the Writing Program Administrators’ e-mail listserv, examining doxastic conceptions of central disciplinary concepts like technology, students, and the goals of writing instruction (as one type of rhetorical production), and the complicated ways in which different doxa combine to form questionable pedagogical and philosophical arguments. How do scholars and teachers talk about students and technology; what conceptions of students and technology does that talk reveal, and how do those conceptions interact, combine, or conflict in professionals’ discourse?
References
- Abdul-Ghafur, S. (Ed.). (2005). Living Islam Outloud: American Muslim Women Speak. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Arduser, L. (2011). Warp and weft: Weaving the discussion threads of an online community. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 41(1), 5-31.
- Boje, D. M. (2001). Narrative methods for organizational and communication research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
- Bowker, N., & Tuffin, K. (2002). Disability discourses for online identities. Disability & Society, 17(3), 327-344.
- Droogsma, R. (2007). Redefining hijab: American Muslim women's standpoints on veiling. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 35(3), 294-319. doi:10.1080/00909880701434299
- Fisher, W. (1984). Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public moral argument. Communication Monographs, 51, 1-23.
- Fisher, W. (1985). The narrative paradigm: An elaboration. Communication Monographs, 52(4), 347-368.
- Kirmani, N. (2009). Deconstructing and reconstructing 'Muslim women' through women's narratives. Journal of Gender Studies, 18(1), 47-62. doi:10.1080/09589230802584253
- McKerrow, R. E. (2010). Critical rhetoric: Theory and praxis. In C. R. Burgchardt (Ed.), Readings in rhetorical criticism (pp. 96-118). State College, PA: Strata Pub.
- Miller, C. R. (1993). Rhetoric and community: The problem of the one and the many. In T. Enos and S. C. Brown (Eds.), Defining the new rhetorics (pp. 79-94). Newbury Park, Sage Publications.
- Young, A. (2008). Disciplinary rhetorics, rhetorical agency, and the construction of voice. In B. Johnstone and C. Eisenhart (Eds.), Rhetoric in detail: Discourse analyses of rhetorical talk and text (pp. 227-246). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
- Zappen, J. P., Gurak, L. J., Doheny-Farina, S. (1997). Rhetoric, community, and cyberspace. Rhetoric Review, 15(2), 400-419.