Manolescu, Beth I. “Religious Reasons for Campbell’s View of Emotional Appeals in Philosophy of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37 (2207): 159–80.

Article: Manolescu, Beth I. “Religious Reasons for Campbell’s View of Emotional Appeals in Philosophy of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37 (2207): 159–80.

 

Summary: First, . . . I argue that he [George Campbell] offers a theory of inventing emotional appeals analogous to a classical ‘‘place’’ system of invention. Second, this article complements broad explanations of Campbell’s view of emotional appeals. . . . Campbell’s religious concerns were inextricably linked with concerns about social and political order. Third, this article complements research on the sources of his rhetorical theory. . . . Given Campbell’s vocation and publications, his religious purposes ought not to be discounted.8 Thus this study highlights the need to study theories of rhetoric in the contexts of an author’s ‘‘other’’ works and practical concerns.

I first detail Campbell’s arguments for a moderate preaching style and for a view of the Gospels as undesigned testimony—as reports of matters of fact—that reveal God’s truths. I then argue that these positions shape Campbell’s conception of emotional appeals as inventible and intimately connected with appeals to reason, as well as his assumptions that passion and reason are universal, passive faculties of mind (162).

 

Area Cluster: Theory, History

 

Methodology: rhetorical analysis, history, historiography

 

Most Valuable Citations:

-George Campbell The Philosophy of Rhetoric.

-Walzer, Arthur E. ‘‘Campbell on the Passions: A Rereading of the Philosophy of Rhetoric.’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 72–85.

 

 

Money Quotes:

 

Campbell’s theory of mind helps to explain why he can abandon neither reason nor passion. He cannot abandon reason given his view of the faculty as a fundamental ability to classify sense perceptions—one that humans share with animals even though humans are superior to animals, and some humans are superior to other humans (Philosophy 48). He cannot abandon passion given his view that passion is the mover to action (Philosophy 78; ‘‘Pulpit’’ 463–64). But if Campbell designs a rhetorical theory with the needs of preachers in mind, then we may ask what practical circumstances motivated his theoretical choices (163).

 

Campbell’s call for order in the mind and his concern that enthusiasm disrupts this order is a counterpart to the moderate fear that evangelism would revive fanaticism and disorder; his preoccupation with preaching may be explained in part by a desire to regenerate morality to maintain national order (Sher 31–2, 44). Again, we see that Campbell puts a premium upon reason in preaching (168).

 

Campbell wants to maintain a need for scripture—to argue that religious truths exist in the Bible and not just in the ‘‘book of Nature,’’ for example (Lectures 357) (168).

 

Campbell wants to constrain interpretations of scripture. The mistaken belief that reason can generate truths has, for Campbell, led people to look to the Bible to confirm their beliefs—or, put differently, to invent arguments to support false doctrine—rather than to simply see the truths revealed there (169).

 

The following explication of Campbell’s conception of emotional appeals in Philosophy of Rhetoric highlights three main points. First, both reason and emotion are relatively passive faculties—an appealing theoretical position given Campbell’s desire to constrain scriptural interpretations. Second, emotional appeals are inventible or designed—not unrehearsed or spontaneous externalizations of internal states that may promote disorder. This position helps rhetors design emotional appeals tempered by reason since their design involves marshalling evidence. It also helps rhetors to distinguish themselves from those who put a premium on emotional displays. Further, it helps to bolster the authority of revealed religion; God speaks to humans through the Bible rather than through the enthusiastic, spontaneous ravings of an unsound mind. Third, both the invention and presentation of emotional appeals are practically inseparable from reason. Thus rhetors may avoid the extremes of lukewarmness and enthusiasm, and work to maintain religious, social, and political order (171).

Severino, Carol. “English Contact Languages and Rhetorics: Implications for U.S.

Severino, Carol. “English Contact Languages and Rhetorics: Implications for U.S.
English Composition.” College Composition and Communication. 59.1(2007): 128-138.

Reviewed texts:
Dialects, Englishes, Creoles, and Education
Shondel J. Nero, editor
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006

African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom
Arnetha F. Ball and Ted Lardner
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making of Chinese American Rhetoric
Luming Mao
Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006

Abstract (Summary):
The spread of English caused by colonization, slavery, and immigration has created multiple contact varieties of English; “Englishes,” such as African American Vernacular English, Indian English, Philippine English, Caribbean Creole English, Hawaiian Pidgin, West African Pidgin English, Spanglish, and Tex-Mex, are the native or second languages of vastly more of the world’s population than those few who speak a more mainstream variety of American or British English as a native language. To demonstrate the legitimacy of each English variety and to argue for and illustrate “concrete strategies for a pedagogy of inclusion” (14), the contributors use a variety of methods-for example, contrastive analysis of the contact variety of English with Standard English (Rickford on AAVE; Pratt Johnson on Jamaican Creole; Govardhan on Indian English), excerpts from students’ journal entries (Hall Kells on Tex Mex), and statistics on program placement (de Klein on West African Pidgin).\n Mao’s making of Chinese American rhetoric seems to be more of a personal and academic mission than a sociopolitical one.

Methodology: Review
Citation:
Provocative Quotes:
“Read together, these works emphasize how social change inevitably entails linguistic change inevitably entails linguistic change, which in turn demands change in pedagogy and research” (129).

“Like Ball and Lardner, Nero and many (but not all) of her contributors view college composition as doing more than just teaching academic writing; instead, they would say, composition should teach and “teach about” multiple literacies, discourses, and registers—academic, public, popular, and vernacular—according to multiple sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and performance situations” (130).

“knowledge about AAVE, argue Ball and Lardner, has not led to classroom change; what writing teachers study in their teacher training classes does not change what they do in the classroom. AAVE speakers are still stigmatized and struggling to achieve, Ball and Lardner argue, precisely because their teachers haven’t changed their pedagogy. The problem is no longer lack of information about AAVE, but the negative language attitudes held by writing teachers that inhibit classroom change” (131).

“if reading critical race theory seems to disempower rather than empower white teachers…perhaps it should be read and discussed at different periods throughout the semester and juxtaposed with service work in community centers or writing centers so that white teachers come to recognize their white privilege and their AAVE students’ disprivilege, but instead of focusing their own guilt, they can concentrate on ways to improve literacy instruction for AAVE students and thus rectify sociopolitical inequalities” (134).

“A linguistic issue overlooked by Mao is that hybrids work both ways, especially for bilinguals. Chinese American bilinguals use Chinese patterns when they speak English, but do they also use American English rhetorical patterns when they speak Chinese? Are they viewed as impolite…in their expressions of request or gratitude when they visit or return to China? As Mao portrays it, the only feature that is American about Chinese American rhetoric is the English language code, but a bilingual, bi-rhetorical contact situation is never that simple, as pragmatic studies of Chinese-English bilinguals show” (137).

“To complicate the matter further, what should be the role of English (not foreign language) composition teachers in preserving, not only the discourse patterns and vernaculars of their students’ Englishes, but their non-English native and heritage languages (e.g. Spanish, Chinese, Korean) and therefore these features of their identities and histories? “ (138).

“These three books, all useful in our composition and rhetoric courses, demonstrate that as contact varieties of English continue to spread and their speakers fill our classrooms, teachers and scholars will grapple with the vexing questions of what their roles are as recognizers, preservers, or users (or not) of the students’ languages and vernaculars, and what their goals are for English and composition teaching” (138).

Lee, Carmen K.M. “Text-making practices beyond the classroom context:

Lee, Carmen K.M. “Text-making practices beyond the classroom context:
Private instant messaging in Hong Kong.” Computers and Composition 24 (2007): 285–301.

Summary/Abstract: “This article explores the ways in which instant messaging (IM) texts are produced by a group of university students in Hong Kong. Even though there exists a body of research on linguistic issues of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in non-Western contexts, much emphasis has been placed on the features of CMC English used by ESL learners. Instead of focusing on one particular language, this article reports on a number of language-related issues that are specific to the Hong Kong CMC context such as the use of Chinese and English, invented Cantonese spellings, and code-mixing. Drawing upon qualitative data such as observational notes and interviews, my study analyzes the text-making practices associated with the use of IM (ICQ and MSN Messenger) within the New Literacy Studies (NLS) framework [Gee, James Paul. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies. London: Routledge; Barton, David, Hamilton, Mary, & Ivanič, Roz (Eds.). (2000). Situated literacies, London: Routledge; Street, Brian V. (1998). New literacies in theory and practice: What are the implications for language in education? Linguistics and Education, 10(1), 1–24], which is a social practice approach to the study of reading and writing in real-life contexts. This article concludes by arguing that learning to produce texts in IM involves an entirely different process from that of formal language learning in the classroom. In a multilingual society like Hong Kong, teachers and educators need to be aware of such differences so as to bridge the gap between actual uses of language in students’ private lives and the form of language used in the formal classroom context” (285).

Methodology: ethnographic and qualitative interview and chat text data analysis,
observations. Logbook keeping
Citation: Naomi, Barton, Bazerman, Herring, Sugimoto
Provocative Quotes:

“This study suggests that before labeling online text messages as “bad” language, teachers and educators need to take account of at least two issues: (1) young people take on different roles in different contexts of writing in different cultures, and thus different text-making practices are employed, and (2) one should be careful when comparing students’ use of language online and in classroom writing: Learning to write in classroom settings and learning to write text messages online involve essentially
different processes” (286).

“text-making practices in the context of this study refer to the ways in which people choose and transform resources for representing meanings in the form of text
for different purposes. To better understand these practices, it is also important to study people’s beliefs, perceptions, feelings, and other values that are relevant to the production of IM texts” (289).

“Owing to a long history of bilingual language policy as well as the massive exposure to non-Chinese cultures, unlike other parts of China that are essentially monolingual, code-mixing has become a norm in everyday talk in Hong Kong, especially among the educated” (295).

“Owing to a long history of bilingual language policy as well as the massive exposure to non-Chinese cultures, unlike other parts of China that are essentially monolingual, code-mixing has become a norm in everyday talk in Hong Kong, especially among the educated” (297).

“while many CMC text-making practices are shared by different
cultures, such as the abbreviations and emoticons that have been discussed in existing literature, many of them are often shaped by the social practices situated in the broader social context” (298).

“expressiveness and communicativeness override accuracy Online” (298).

“In IM activities, to summarize, young people have the power to create and change their own literacy practices based on existing knowledge that is situated in a broader cultural context. To conclude, learning is embedded in literacy events in people’s everyday lives, including not only out-of-school but also within formal classroom environments. To bridge the gap between actual uses of language in students’ private lives and the form of language used in the formal classroom context, teachers and educators need to be
aware of the practices involved in both contexts” (299).

Jackson, Brian. “Jonathan Edwards Goes to Hell (House): Fear Appeals in American Evangelism.” Rhetoric Review 26.1 (2007): 42–59.

Article: Jackson, Brian. “Jonathan Edwards Goes to Hell (House): Fear Appeals in American Evangelism.” Rhetoric Review 26.1 (2007): 42–59.

 

Summary: This article traces the argumentum ad baculum, or appeal to fear, from Jonathan

Edwards in the eighteenth century to the contemporary fundamentalist Christian practice of staging morality plays, often called Hell House. In his scare-for-salvation sermons, Edwards used descriptions of the reality of hell to invoke psychosomatic reactions of terror in his audience, and we see similar rhetorical tactics at work in evangelical hell houses. In a post-9/11 world where leaders, governments, and media can exert considerable power over individuals by frightening them into impulsive behavior, and considering the New Testament’s message of love, this strategy seems questionable (42).

 

Area Cluster: History, Theory

 

Methodology: rhetorical analysis, historiography, history

 

Most Valuable Citations:

-Jonathan Edwards

-Chauncy, Charles. Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England.

-Marsden, George M. Fundamental American Culture.

-Hell House. Dir. George Ratliff. Documentary.

 

Money Quotes:

 

the ontological certainty of hell required an intense, animated, terrifying homiletic to awaken souls to a real danger so that they could be snatched from it by Christ’s atonement. Was there a more reasonable activity to engage in for a preacher with a backsliding congregation? If the house is on fire and there are children sleeping in the beds, you do not “speak to it only in a cold and indifferent manner”; rather, you shout like a maniac (WJE 4:247). The preacher’s style, imagery, delivery, and urgency should rise to meet this danger (46).

 

The British philosopher John Locke is important for understanding Edwards’ argumentum ad baculum for two reasons. First, Locke argued for what has been called the “double conformity” of language—that words, if they are to be useful in conveying knowledge, must conform as closely as possible to ideas and to things. . . . Second, Locke taught Edwards about sense experience. Edwards’ appropriation of Locke changed the landscape of American religious rhetoric by calling into question the old Ramist method of Puritan preaching called the technologia, the method of arranging sermons logically in order to demonstrate truth to the mind (Marsden 63) (47).

 

In order to use fear appeals for the glory of God, the preacher had to make the members of the congregation sense the awfulness of hell psychosomatically—in the body and the mind (47).

 

By 1743 the backlash against the emotional fury of the Great Awakening had put the scare-for-salvation camp on the defensive, and Edwards’ Religious Affections was an attempt to distance himself from the uncontrolled psychosomatic reactions to James Davenport’s night sermons (Marsden 283–84) (50).

 

Sharon Crowley has recently argued that American fundamentalist rhetoric—what she categorizes as “apocalyptist”—has become a significant cultural force that sets itself in opposition to both secular and religious liberalism by standing on non-negotiable, ontological realities (14). Their rhetorical practices emphasize the need for Christians to convert unbelievers so that they too will avoid being “left behind” at the Rapture, or cast down to hell at judgment (51-52).

 

The Hell House itself is a dazzling example of spatial rhetoric that suggests what Gregory Jackson has called the “aesthetics of immediacy” (130). . . . This focus on what Dickinson calls “the materiality of rhetoric” brings attention to the experience of bodies in space—inhabiting space, encountering space, moving through space—and the purposeful construction of material space for desired effects (6). Rather than rely on mere metaphor to induce psychosomatic trauma as Edwards does, this Hell House constructs a physical sermon that invokes the aesthetics of immediacy via amateur dramaturgy and sequential staging (52-53).

 

The same critique could be applied to Hell House. Just as Chauncy suggested, it is difficult for the rhetorical critic to determine whether the terrified reaction of young people to Hell House X is a realization of sinfulness or a reaction to having hell scared out of them. Chauncy argued that reactions to some of the Great Revival’s sermons had more to do with the dramatic presentation—the exuberant stage presence of the preacher, the low flickering of the candles in the dark meetinghouse, the howling of the wind through the cracks in the wall, and the collective hysteria of young people in a moment of sublime horror—than with any real sense of the need to repent and accept Jesus (56).

 

As other Christian churches have pointed out in their criticism of Hell House’s argumentum ad baculum, such an excitement in the presence of sublime torture is foreign to the concept of charity that is the central appeal of Jesus in the New Testament, whether hell exists or not (57).

 

 

Tags: HellHouse CChauncey JEdwards evangelical Christian affect fear tgeiger history historiography GreatAwakening hell performance 2007

 

Lloyd, Keith. “Rethinking Rhetoric from an Indian Perspective:

Lloyd, Keith. “Rethinking Rhetoric from an Indian Perspective:
Implications in the Nyaya Sutra. Rhetoric Review 26.4(2007): 365-384.

Summary: “As Aristotle began to codify rhetorical practices in Greece, a theoretical and
pragmatic text on argument, the Nyaya Sutra, emerged in Ancient India, founding
one of six key philosophies of India. Though it describes in detail a procedure
of reasoning based on a five-part method of dialogic presentation, the rhetorical
emphases of the Nyaya approach have been mostly overlooked. This essay proposes
Nyaya’s inclusion in the field of rhetorical studies, exploring its methods
within their historical context, comparing its approach to the traditional logical
syllogism, and relating it to the contemporary perspectives of Stephen Toulmin,
Kenneth Burke, and Chaïm Perelman” (365).

Area Cluster:
Methodology: Compare and Contrast
Citation: Burke, Foss and Foss, Ganeri, Jansen and Toulmin, Perelman, Kennedy, Vidyabhushana

Provocative Quotes:

“The West’s relative ignorance of Nyaya, according to Jonardon Ganeri,
stems from a misperception that the East is more mystical, less interested in
systematic thinking” (366-7).

“These contrasts may seem esoteric, but we miss the importance and significance
of the Indian approach if we simply assume, as many logicians have,
that Nyaya offers little but a primitive logic better addressed by the Greeks or
that we can simply restate the method in a three-part syllogism” (373).

“Nyaya posits a transcendent view of reality, but describes it in immediate,
situated ways. Toulmin focuses on this situational aspect of argument as key to
practical reasoning” (376).

“Nyaya is far from a “new way,” but it certainly provides some
perspective on how we make practical arguments, how we make and describe
immediate decisions. The model is about this fire, this mountain, our present situation,
not all fires, all mountains” (380).

“Nyaya also explains how practical reasoning may work in context. Avoiding
the West’s abstracted logic, Nyaya never separates theory from practice and
reveals how we may not need major premises or warrants to make decisions.
Because it exposes the inferential structure of argument, it applies well to both
ethical and scientific reasoning” (381).

“Because it begins with testing the hypothesis, as Joseph M. Rogers and Mahendra Kumar Jain note, it also relates fruitfully to scientific inquiry, furthering connections between science and rhetoric. What took thousands of years and a paradigm shift in Western thinking was anticipated in India twenty-three hundred years ago” (381).

“This essay begins the process of inclusion and reconceptualization needed to
recognize Nyaya as a significant rhetorical perspective while offering a glimpse
at an alternative to Western rhetoric and history. While Jonsen and Toulmin
demark two views of reasoning used in the West, Nyaya offers an alternate third
approach, providing insight into the rhetoric of how we make decisions and arguments,
who we make them for, and for what ends. It also offers a glimpse into the
thinking of a culture and tradition largely unfamiliar in the West, as well as a
broader view of the goals of rhetoric and the human relations that it implies” (381).

Miller, Keith D. “Second Isaiah Lands in Washington, DC: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” as Biblical Narrative and Biblical Hermeneutic.” Rhetoric Review 26.4 (2007): 405–24.

Article: Miller, Keith D. “Second Isaiah Lands in Washington, DC: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” as Biblical Narrative and Biblical Hermeneutic.” Rhetoric Review 26.4 (2007): 405–24.

 

Summary: Even though Martin Luther King, Jr. constantly cited the Bible, no one has seriously examined his rhetoric as biblical hermeneutic. Here I argue that in “I Have a Dream,” King explodes closed memories of the Exodus by reconceptualizing a hermeneutic of (Second) Isaiah as he interprets African-Americans’ experience of oppression and exile in Babylon/America and their hope for a new Exodus. Drawing on African-American political rhetoric, King spotlights biblical writers’ dialogue with each other and extends the arc of biblical narrative into the present. He also anticipates certain forms of liberation theology of the 1970s and beyond.

 

Area Cluster: Theory, History

 

Methodology: rhetorical analysis, history, historiography

 

Most Valuable Citations:

-Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred:

-Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination.

-MLK “I Have a Dream”

 

Money Quotes:

 

King himself sometimes fit contemporary actors into the coordinates of biblical narratives, especially the Exodus. After being convicted of violating an unjust law during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956, King reflected on his setback: “You don’t get to the Promised Land without going through the wilderness” (“Address” 200) (408).

 

For generations, experts on ancient Hebrew and Greek held forth in the cloistered chambers of liberal, largely white Protestant seminaries, privileging themselves alone as knowledgeable and informed interpreters of scripture and completely ignoring other sources of interpretation, including African-American sources. Liberation theologians in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s took inspiration from the civil rights movement—and sometimes from James Cone’s theological manifesto of 1969—and used prominent religious presses and forums as crowbars to pry the doors of these chambers and demand a hearing for their own emancipatory readings of the Bible, including the Exodus (408).

 

King concludes his “We are not satisfied” litany—an eloquent catalogue of racial inequities—by using the phrase “And we will not be satisfied until” to introduce his quotation of Amos 5:24: “And we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Amos 5:24 does not merely supply simple, beautiful metaphors for the arrival of justice and righteousness. For biblically literate protestors at the March on Washington—and all other devout Jews and Christians—each passage of scripture pulls a very long train of signifiers. For believers, any quotation from Amos entails not only the whole project of Amos but also the larger phenomenon of Hebrew prophecy (409-10).

 

By citing Amos as he does, King appeals to Amos’s expression of God’s concern for an entire people and thereby affirms the fundamental assumption of Judaism that religious experience is profoundly social and the related presupposition that material and spiritual conditions are intimately and indissolubly related (410).

 

Later in the speech, instead of selecting original phrases for the climax of the “I have a dream” litany—the most memorable lines in his entire oratory—King reiterates (Second) Isaiah 40:4–5—a prophecy of hope that occurs roughly two hundred years after Amos and after the Babylonians had hauled the Hebrews into captivity and exile in 587 BCE (411).

 

By incorporating the passage from (Second) Isaiah, King summons not only a specific biblical writer but also the broader enterprise of biblical authors and editors to extend the Exodus beyond its original, particular manifestation (414).

 

Given that communities of faith shape biblical interpretation and that no one can proceed in a neutral fashion, a question arises: Which interpretation of history and the present informs one’s understanding of the Bible?

In “I Have a Dream,” King implicitly responds to this question by proposing a double reading of the Bible that for many listeners (especially whites) is radically new. This interpretation directly confronts those who cling to a closed, fossilized memory of Exodus and believe they already abide in a “Christian nation” (418).

 

By readapting the Exodus narrative in “The Birth of a New Nation” and “Death of Evil on the Seashore” and by using “I Have a Dream” to refashion the imagery of Exodus, (Second) Isaiah, Mark, Luke, and John, King implicitly asserts that—despite the closing of the biblical canon and despite European and Euroamerican theologians’ enduring preference for generating abstract treatises—the struggle for social justice continues and, therefore, biblical authors’ ongoing, dialogic narrative and hermeneutic about social struggle can and must extend into the present moment. Further, he implicitly affirms that like biblical writers, contemporary preachers and theologians must recognize the primacy of narrative (419).

 

College faculty can profitably encourage students to examine “I Have a Dream” as part of the nonviolent struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, as an African-American jeremiad, as a Burkean performance/text, and as the culmination of King’s evolving oratorical motifs. But, as Elizabeth Vander Lei and Bonnie Kyburz persuasively argue, many teachers embargo any discussion of religion in their classes—a tendency that seriously hampers their students’ ability to plumb“I Have a Dream.”

This situation can change. Faculty and students can learn how, instead of bypassing religion, King not only appealed to secular documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation—in “I Have a Dream” but also engaged the Judeo-Christian faith of most of his audience (420).

 

Tags: MLKing tgeiger 2007 IHaveADream hermeneutics bible justice religion Christian prophecy Exodus Isaiah PRicouer KMiller

Wu, Hui. “Writing and Teaching behind Barbed Wire: An Exiled Composition

Wu, Hui. “Writing and Teaching behind Barbed Wire: An Exiled Composition
Class in a Japanese-American Internment Camp.” College Composition and
Communication. 59.2 (2007) 237-262.

Summary:
“By reflecting on Japanese internment camps executed by the U.S. government in World War II, this article examines camp schools’ curriculum and writing assignments and an English teacher’s response to student essays to show how racially profiled students and their Caucasian teacher negotiated the political meanings of civil rights and freedom” (237).

Area Cluster:
Methodology: case study
Citation: Russell, Bizell, Pratt, Glenn, Tidball

Provocative Quotes:

“Student essays, as part of the literacy, activities designed and controlled by the government, nonetheless reveal independent thinking and forceful resistance to evacuation, a result opposite to what the government sought” (238).

“This historical case study will peer backward into classroom at Denson High School within the Jerome camp in Arkansas as the students and their English teacher, Virginia Tidball, attempted to negotiate together the political meanings of civil rights in a complex environment where they were required to learn and teach democratic ideals and a discourse that conflicted with reality—the classroom behind barbed wire. The collective memories of racially profiled and segregated student writers leave a bitter taste in the mouth when the reader realizes that despite American success stories and the national hallmark of democracy and freedom, ours remains a xenophobic society which amidst patriotic zeal…may still disenfranchise its citizens and residents” (239).

“it must have been difficult for students to develop their points logically in an illogical political situation where democracy still remained an illusion” (246).

“Student internees presented Japanese immigrants as people, instead of impersonalized, even dangerous “enemy aliens” living in “little Tokyo’s” described in government document” (248).

“In spite of loneliness, separation, and disappointment, students demonstrated patriotism and loyalty to the country and were determined to follow the government plan, only with their own strategies” (249).

“student papers present their strong identity as American citizens whose civil rights were deprived without justifiable reasons, an institutionalized persecution with which they could not come to terms and that they felt obliged to criticize as citizens” (250).

“The crescendo that students’ voices reached made it possible to conclude that Tidball, teaching with her mouth shut, deployed silence as pedagogy, likely as a political strategy as well, to provide a forum where her students were able to express their political positions openly and freely without being patronized or judged by the teacher” (253).

“In many ways, Virginia Tidball’s experience teaching a marginalized ethnic group about whom stereotypes abounded and whose national loyalty the hysteric wartime society suspected is not unlike that many composition teachers today struggling to navigate and hear the voices of similarly marginalized populations, some of whom our increasingly xenophobic societies also suspect” (255).

“Tidball’s silent teaching has resulted in student empowerment and symbolizes an effective pedagogy that can mitigate negative political dynamics even in today’s composition classroom” (255). S

“Tidball’s silence…transforms the classroom from a passive, ideologically suffused environment to one that allows, indeed listens to, voices of dissent. Her tacit teaching provides a model for the “contact zone” (255).

“if teachers acknowledge their limitations of their training and acknowledge about their students, they would be willing to give up their voices as authority. They would rather serve as “voiceless” instructors, who recognize, intimately and respectfully, students’ right to their own cultures and languages” (256).

Landstrom, Catharina. “Queering Feminist Technology Studies.”

Landstrom, Catharina. “Queering Feminist Technology Studies.” Feminist Theory 8.1 (2007): 7-26.

Summary: This article argues that the influence of heteronormativity on the conceptualization of women and technology in feminist constructivist technology studies creates serious problems for the analysis. It is argued that a habitual reproduction of heteronormativity, present in the surrounding culture and in the technological communities studied, has prevented the adoption of approaches to the subject conducive to the objective of this feminist research. Acknowledging that destabilizing gender can undermine the critical thrust of feminist critique, the paper turns towards queer theory for ideas about how to produce criticism that does not rely on the stability of identity.

Area Cluster: 106 – Information Technologies

Methodology: Lit review, Criticism

Most Valuable Citations: W. Faulkner, E. Grosz, J. Butler, D. Haraway

Money Quotes:

“This sub-field resists technological determinism but tends to ‘black-box’ gender identity as the major cause in the gendering of technology, which leads to analyses representing gender as stable and technology as malleable. This can be understood as a result of a failure to adopt new ways of theorizing gender. One reason for this shortcoming is the habitual reproduction of heteronormativity, which prevents a constructivist approach to gendered subjectivity. Instead the gendered subject functions as the determining factor in the gender/technology relationship, which counteracts the explicit objective of understanding coproduction” (8).

“Feminists take social constructivism as one point of departure, assuming that technology is not socially neutral, but that it embodies social relationships, including gender, which order the contexts of creation and use. Faulkner argues that this perspective ‘obliges us to view gender as an integral part of the social shaping of technology’” (9).

“Vehviläinen, thus, represents all women as identifying with a femininity that is the opposite of masculinity, which determines their relationship with technology. This may be true for women who identify with a heteronormative femininity defined in a relationship to masculinity, but not necessarily for those who do not, for example, many lesbians” (13).

Schneider, Stephen. “The Sea Island Citizenship Schools: Literacy, Community Organization, and the Civil Rights Movement.”

Schneider, Stephen. “The Sea Island Citizenship Schools: Literacy, Community Organization, and the Civil Rights Movement.” College English 70.2 (2007): 144-167.

Summary: Schneider examines the Citizenship Schools as a site of education for social change. “Such a history serves as a complication of critical pedagogy’s belief that “the primary means of affecting social change is to translate activist into liberatory classroom practices” and as an argument for re-conceiving the relationship between rhetorical education and social change (Cushman 7). By complicating the claims of critical pedagogy, we recover the contributions of American educators and activists to education for social change and we understand these contributions in organizational, rather than merel curricular, terms” (144-5).

Area Cluster: 108, 101

Method: analysis

Valuable Citations: Susan Kates, Shor, Malcolm X, Septima Clark, Gilyard

$Money Quotes$ 

“It would seems sensible to locate the development of the first citizenship schools within this broader hisotry and to understand them as institutions organized only indirectly in response to the Brown decision. Furthermore, there is a longer history of educational organization within southern African American communities that influenced Clark and Jenkins in their advocacy of citizenship schools. In fact, the development of unofficial educational programs within African American communities can be traced to the eighteenth century (Cornelius 17). It could thus be said that the Brown decision and the citizenship schools actually represent two extensions of a much longer tradition of community organization around literacy and educational access” (148)

“But despite the similarities between Highlander’s citizenship education programs and Freirean critical pedagogy, it is important to note that historically, the Citizenship Schools developed alongside functional literacy programs such as those developed by the Office of Education and UNESCO” (156)

Campbell, Kermit. “There Goes the Neighborhood: Hip Hop Creepin’ on a Come Up at the U.”

Campbell, Kermit. “There Goes the Neighborhood: Hip Hop Creepin’ on a Come Up at the U.” CCC 58.3 (2007): 325-345.

Summary: Campbell looks at the way in which hiphop can offer a critical perspective  that textbooks and critical discourse cannot. Examining the ways in which rappers such as Jay-Z and Eminem critique society, he argues for an understanding of hiphop and its applicability to composition classrooms. 

Area Cluster: 101 and 108

Valuable Citations: Young, Villanueava, Rice, Richardson, Smitherman

$Money Quotes$

“So, if what Jigga (also Jay-Z) asserts bears any truth, then a lesson is to be learned here: This thing called hip-hop, this innter-city, youth-driven artistici and cultural movement has accomplished in our soccieity what emabttled muticultrualims has been powerless to acomplish-that is, to make teh inhabitants of America’s inner cities relatable and indeed loveable. ip-Hop has, in other words, humanized not just blackness-for the civil rights movement did that-but ghetto blackness, given it a name, an identity, a voice, and a viable economy of expression.”

“Within pedagogical fields like composition, I doubt that very many of us would publicly censure (or censor, for that matter) student interest in hip-hop. (Colleagues of mine have allowed their students  to write about hip-hop, bu then the reason I know this is because the students were directed to me for help with the subject._ Even with such generosity of spirit among us, I wonder whether we see student consumption (and production) of hip-hop  as a way to engage them. as a serious way to explore, for instance , the complex dialectic between the social constructions of blackness and whiteness, the ghetto and suburbia.”

“We must remember that all those that truly feel and express a passion for Hiphop are tapping into a reservoir of creative energy that others imply cannot access. That is what makes us special!”