Publication Abstracts
“Agency, Invention, and Sympatric Design Platforms,” Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, ACM: 2007.
This project investigates the problems associated with course software platforms from the perspective of user-centered design, examining student agency and invention specifically in environments like WebCT, Wikis, and MS SharePoint 3.0. I argue for course design platforms that are structured on informed technogogies at the instructor and curricular levels. Drawing on concepts from biological evolution and anthropology, I propose that instructors, researchers, and administrators promote and create design platforms that are sympatric, that foster student agency and invention through user localization technologies that also embrace rhetorically complex social interaction. I further argue that researchers in Rhetoric and Writing Studies are particularly well positioned to write and/or co-create sympatric course platforms.
“La Frontera y El Chamizal: Liminality, Territoriality, and Visual Discourse.” The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, Proceedings of the 2008 Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference, Eds. Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick (forthcoming—2009).
This study explores the Chamizal National Memorial and the U.S.-Mexico border (la frontera) from a rhetorical perspective, not strictly as a historical site of struggle (though that context is essential), but in terms of the ways in which these spaces are made to speak today in both dominant and counterhegemonic terms, through competing visual representations that reflect an oppositional ethos. One of the fundamental assumptions of this project is that visual and spatial rhetorics may be coterminous and overlapping, and that the construction of any place, or the analysis thereof, must consider both aspects simultaneously.
Therefore, in order to approach both the spatial and visual aspects of this contested region, I draw upon research in critical geography and rhetoric to explore the erasure of local historiographies at the site of the memorial as I work toward a rhetorical understanding of liminal spaces and territoriality that foregrounds the conflation of the spatial and the visual. I examine the Chamizal and the physical border as spatio-discursive locations, considering the ways in which the material reality of the built environment is used as a site of ventriloquism for competing interests in liminal and formerly liminal sites of struggle. I argue that the combination of physical territoriality and discursive spatialization creates rhetorical stratigraphies, layers of material and social strata that must be negotiated by inhabitants in liminal areas such as the El Paso/Juárez border.
“Cultivating Rhetorical Dispositions through Curricular Change.” Undergraduate Research in English Studies, Eds. Laurie Grobman and Joyce Kinkead (book chapter, forthcoming—2009).
Drawing upon recent work in Undergraduate Research as a curricular movement (Karukstis and Elgren, 2007), this chapter argues that programs and departments of Rhetoric, Writing, Technical Communication, and related fields should focus first and foremost on curricular change as a method of fostering meaningful udergraduate research, change which is inculcated at our institution by the development of rhetoric and writing courses that study rhetoric and writing itself.
At the center of this curricular philosophy for our redesign of the professional writing course is the concept of rhetorical dispositions, a method of heuristic thinking and doing cobbled together from several sources, including the idea of “learning dispositions” that originated in educational research, the “durable, transposable discpositions” of Bourdieu (1977), and the “rhetorical aptitudes” of Faber (2002). Properly realized, the concept of rhetorical dispositions is simultaneously a curricular and pedagogical approach that promotes metacognition and complex rhetorical thinking, and gives our undergraduate students both a grounding in theories of rhetoric essential to effective communication in the contempoarary workplace, and the opportunity to become participant researchers in our field. I describe the importance of drawing upon our field’s own disciplinary content, its relationship to the concept of rhetorical dispositions, and the programmatic curricular change that grew out of such an approach. Most importantly, I describe the impact that such curricular change has upon our undergraduate students as researchers and knowledge workers, how our workplace writing course has been transformed as a site for fostering meaningful inquiry that can contribute to our disciplinary knowledge.
