Proposal: "Rhetorical Agency in Online Communities"

This panel examines issues of agency in online discourse communities. Individuals who might previously have been limited by geographical location, disability or sociocultural norms are able to reframe their off-line identities through participation in online communities that remove specific rhetorical constraints experienced offline. A number of scholarly arguments have been made in this vein (Arduser, 2011; Young, 2008; Bowker & Tuffin, 2002; Zappen, Gurak, & Doheny-Farina, 1997). One needs only to pick up a Clay Shirky book to see abundant claims that we can all find personal and corporate agency online and that technology can be a great equalizer. According to these narratives, the Internet is supposed to be democratizing, enabling individuals to make choices and participate in activities unconstrained by location, time, access, and stigma that might limit individual agency in face-to-face situations.

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.