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Present Tense is currently seeking submissions for its upcoming issue. We are a peer-reviewed, blind-refereed, online journal dedicated to exploring contemporary social, cultural, political, and economic issues through a rhetorical lens. Present Tense publishes short articles of 2,000-2,500 words, the length of a conference paper. We also encourage conference-length multimedia submissions such as short documentaries, flash videos, interviews and podcasts, as well as reviews that are thematically related to the goals of the journal. The list below suggests topics for submissions.

In addition to our regular articles and reviews, we encourage the submission of annotated bibliographies on specific topics. In coming issues, we welcome bibliographies from scholars, scholarly groups, and graduate courses on queer rhetorics, queer theory, or gender and body rhetorics. If you are interested in coordinating the production of such an annotated bibliography, please contact us at the email listed below.

For formatting and submission information, please refer to our submission guidelines at: www.presenttensejournal.org/submissions/

If you have any questions about submitting to Present Tense, please contact our staff at: editors [at] presenttensejournal.org

Marshall McLuhan would have turned 100 on July 21, 2011. We launch this collection of essays on December 31, 2011, thirty-one years to the day of his death. His work, ideas, and methods are alive and well in the field of Media Ecology, and some excellent scholarship in the past 10 years (Richard Cavell’s McLuhan in Space, Donald Theall’s Virtual McLuhan, Lance Strate and Edward Wachtel’s The Legacy of McLuhan) has re-assessed his relevance for the 21st century. In this centennial year, McLuhan has been celebrated by media theorists in Brussells (“McLuhan’s Philosophy of Media”), in Berlin (“Re-Touching McLuhan”), and in virtual space (“McLuhan Speaks”), the nearly year-long celebration on Maui (“MoM: McLuhan on Maui”), and around the world (in Winnipeg (2010), Toronto, Edmonton, Rome, New York, Katowice, Budapest, Liverpool and more).

But McLuhan remains a marginal, sometimes mysterious figure, most notably in his home discipline of English studies. McLuhan was as much a literary critic as a media critic, as much a rhetorical theorist as a media theorist. His place in the history of rhetoric has not been firmly established, despite his career-long commitment to understanding this vital branch of the classical trivium. The year-long celebration of his 100th birthday presents a kairotic moment for re-assessing his contributions and continued relevance in all these disciplines, or any field concerned with rhetoric, writing, and culture.

 

Congratulations to Kevin Brooks and David Beard on compiling this important and timely special issue!

Volume 2.1 continues the trend with especially timely work. The articles of Volume 2.1 describe political and technological developments with ongoing consequences: a US public relations firm’s promotion of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship; Arizona’s subjugation of immigrant bodies; and epistemological production through social media. Volume 2.1 includes our first case study, one that provides evidence in the continuing national debate on digital literacy, and our first analysis of the President’s oratory. The reviews of Volume 2.1 are also timely. Our authors review a recent book on writing assessment and an environmental rhetoric course taught in May and June of this year.

Volume 2.1 features the following articles:

PR Guns for Hire: The Specter of Edward Bernays in Gadhafi’s Libya – Sharon J. Kirsch outlines the work of a Massachusetts-based public relations firm on behalf of Muammar Gaddafi, locating it within rhetoric’s disciplinary fragmentation.

Not to Shy Away: Barack Obama’s Rhetoric of Friendship – Paul Lynch applies David A. Frank and Mark Lawrence MacPhail’s consilience-coherence heuristic to two key Obama orations: his 2008 Jeremiah Wright speech and his 2009 address at the University of Notre Dame.

Sociotechnical Notemaking: Short-Form to Long-Form Writing Practices – Brian J. McNely summarizes a recent debate on short-form writing practices, providing empirical evidence for the epistemological legitimacy of social media.

Troubling Citizenship: Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and the Rhetorics of Immigration Law – Gale Coskan-Johnson analyzes the legislation and practice of immigration policy along the Arizona-Mexico border in order to delineate the rhetorical features of contemporary US citizenship.

Review of Reframing Writing Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning – Chris Gallagher reviews Linda Adler-Kassner and Peggy O’Neill’s recent book on writing assessment, summarizing and critiquing strategies and frameworks for institutional change.

Environmental Rhetoric, Ethics, and Policy – Teaching Engagement – Derek G. Ross describes a philosophy for effective civic engagement through a graduate environmental rhetoric course he taught at Auburn University during the summer of 2011.

The editors of Present Tense feel lucky to work with scholars so attuned to current events, and we feel confident that the trend will continue during our upcoming special issue on medical, gender, and body rhetorics. As always, we would like to thank our authors, reviewers, responders, readers, and advisors for contributing to the journal during this first successful year. Without your help, guidance, interest, commitment, and hard work, this publication would not be possible.

Sincerely,

Joshua Prenosil, General Editor
Cristyn L. Elder, Managing Editor
Megan Schoen, Style Editor
Caitlan Spronk, Technical Editor
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, Technical Editor
Allen Brizee, Review Editor
Alexandra Hidalgo, Multimedia Editor
Elizabeth L. Angeli, Outreach Editor
John Williford, Design Editor

Nearly a century later, Bernays’s troubling defense of anti-democratic communication as a central component of democratic governance reverberates in a recent public relations campaign led by the self described “global management consulting firm,” Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Monitor Group, to “enhance” the image of Muammar Gadhafi¹ and Libya. Monitor Group’s multi-year, multi-million dollar efforts to shift international public perception of a dictatorial government and its leader remained behind the scenes until the spring of 2011 when protests broke out across Libya and confidential documents detailing Monitor’s campaign were leaked by the National Conference of the Libyan Opposition.

This essay places Gadhafi’s image management campaign within the history of the rise of corporate public relations in the United States in an effort to draw public attention to the “special pleaders” who reimaged Gadhafi’s Libya – and also to contextualize Bernays’s influential theory beyond the transnational industry he helped to create. In order to contextualize public relations, I will first describe it within the disciplinary fragmentation of rhetorical studies and then trace the prevailing logic of the public relations industry and its employment as a means of statecraft. I attempt to think through the continued political power of PR messaging and the necessity for transparency while addressing specific publics.

PR: Across the Disciplinary Divide

The relative lack of attention by rhetoricians to the rise of public relations in the United States is due, in part, to the disciplinary fragmentation of rhetoric toward the end of the nineteenth century, which pulled the study of rhetoric away from its theoretical, multidisciplinary, and civic roots. A brief history of the formation of what Steven Mailloux calls “disciplinary identities” helps to explain how public relations and the broader functioning of public discourse were lost in this disciplinary shuffle, particularly in the early twentieth century as the rise of corporate public relations gained momentum in the United States.² By the early twentieth century, the realignment of humanities disciplines relegated the study of rhetoric to departments of English, reduced to the teaching of writing, and to departments of speech, reduced to the teaching of public speaking. As these burgeoning fields of study attempted to legitimate their institutional place, speech communication scholars wrote histories of public speaking that dominated rhetorical studies for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century until historians of rhetoric in English departments began to examine the history of writing instruction and the rise of the modern-day composition. Although pioneering studies by James Berlin, Sharon Crowley, and Nan Johnson, among others, offer important additions to the history of rhetoric, their particular historical and institutional moment required grounding their research in the teaching of writing and classroom practice, not in broader studies of rhetorical theory and practice applicable to public discourse and public relations.³

Though late twentieth-century communication studies scholarship considers aspects of public relations such as crisis communication and media relations, the focus tends to be on image management, practical strategies, and analysis of best practices with little attention given to the social, political, and economic conditions in which particular discursive strategies are employed. Robert L. Heath’s introduction to Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations II, a collection of essays geared toward communication studies scholars, identifies “the dawn of a new era” in public relations scholarship, particularly in the United States, where scholars will move beyond social scientific approaches and consider “judgments of meaning and the ways it is formed” (1). This new era incorporates consideration of “the assumptions and principles of the rhetorical heritages, social constructionism, discourse analysis, and critical theory”—topics that have long been addressed in rhetorical scholarship by scholars on the English side of the disciplinary divide (1). To clarify the use of the term rhetoric in the title of his book, Heath finds it necessary to explain that “rhetorical theory has its own body of ideas and principles” and means more than manipulation or spin (3). The fact that his intended audience may not be aware of the “rhetorical heritages” he mentions, let alone their applicability to their work, makes clear how deeply PR is caught in the institutional fragmentation of rhetoric. While contemporary rhetorical theory returns the theory and practice of rhetoric to its multidisciplinary and civic roots, much work remains to close the gap between English and communication studies to better understand the magnitude of the rise of public relations in the early twentieth century and its impact on contemporary public discourse.

PR: Behind the Scenes

However, it is not just the splintering of rhetoric in the academy that led rhetorical scholars to overlook the role public relations and propaganda play in our contemporary world and in our histories of rhetoric. For rhetoricians, no less than for “the masses” imagined by Bernays, PR creates public images “privately,” in corporate centers of invention. Those who founded the field of public relations described themselves, in Bernays’s words, as “shrewd persons operating behind the scenes” who constituted an “invisible government” (61, 37). Because much of the work of the public relations counsel is strategically hidden, creating circumstances that appear to have occurred spontaneously, we need a fuller sense of how public relations became what Mark Dowie calls “a communication medium in its own right [and] an industry designed to alter perception, reshape reality and manufacture consent” (2).

Recent global events bring to light the theory and practice of behind-the-scenes image management. The campaign to soften Gadhafi’s image and to improve Libya’s international reputation occurred after the Bush administration worked to strengthen United States-Libyan relations. In 2004, the United States terminated sanctions and opened a Liaison Office in Tripoli, which was upgraded to a U.S. Embassy in 2006.⁴ Between 2006-2008, the Monitor Group, founded by professors from Harvard University, agreed to give Gadhafi an image makeover under a $250,000 a month contract plus an open expense account of up to $3 million (“Attention” 12). Their plan, paid for by the Libyan government, included an hour-long television program representing Gadhafi not as a dictator, but as an “individual thinker” (“Executive” 8). The program included interviews by renowned British journalist David Frost and was to be followed by full-length biography, which never materialized (“Executive” 8; Corn and Mahanta). In the “Executive Summary,” the in-house document obtained and leaked by the National Conference of the Libyan Opposition, the Monitor Group listed as a “key outcome” increased media coverage that was “broadly positive and increasingly sensitive to the Libyan point of view” (2).⁵

The “Executive Summary” makes clear that the Monitor Group considered the media plan to be a “vital component” of their project. Monitor identified “high-caliber individuals” who would visit Libya, meet with Gadhafi, and follow their visits with lectures and publications about their experience. Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University and then Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California Center for Public Diplomacy visited Libya three times and wrote in the Washington Post of the possibility of Libya becoming “the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government.”⁶ In response to The Nation’s request for clarification on payment received, Barber replied, “I did not take money from Qaddafi. The money to Monitor was coming from the Qaddafi Foundation,” an organization funded by Gadhafi’s son, “who was providing the impetus for reform” (Wiener). Barber continued, “Everyone gets paid. Consultants get paid, and I was paid by Monitor” (Wiener). Governments, corporations, for- and non-profit agencies, and individuals can and do employ the services of public relations consultants legally and ethically. However, without transparency in the process of rehabilitating Gadhafi’s image, the public has little opportunity to understand, let alone evaluate, world events. Monitor Group’s campaign can be identified as Bernaysian in its laundering of rhetorical agency.⁷

PR: Foreign Agents and Disclosure

In early March 2011, a week before news of the Monitor Group’s multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign broke, Harvard professor Robert Putnam described his 2007 trip to Libya to meet Gadhafi in The Wall Street Journal. Putnam recalls the initial invitation from Monitor Group—through a former student— requesting him to visit Libya to discuss his research on civil society and democracy with Gadhafi. Putnam notes that “an international consulting firm that was advising the Libyan government on economic and policy reform” would pay his standard consulting fee. He agreed to go, the first time. When asked to return for a second visit, Putnam declined, concluding “that the whole exercise was a public-relations stunt.” Putnam’s narration of events suggests that he was ostensibly invited to discuss his research and economic and political reform, not to participate in enhancing the profile of Libya and Gadhafi. Monitor Group’s “Executive Summary” tells a different story: it claims success by “leverag[ing] the reputation of key influencers engaged in conversation with the Leader in highly public forums” (“Executive” 14). These forums included articles by or interviews with Monitor’s “global thought leaders” in Newsweek, the Financial Times, National Public Radio, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

Monitor Group’s strategy of “establishing a dialogue with the international community through the media” by “showcasing and leveraging Libya’s links to some of the world’s influential thinkers” is not necessarily problematic in and of itself (“Executive” 13-14). But a discrepancy exists between the Monitor’s stated strategy and the “high caliber intellectuals’” understanding of their role. The Monitor Group’s “Executive Summary” makes clear that the international consulting firm fully understood their lobbying and public relations role. Monitor identifies the function of “the world’s foremost scholars and influencers” as “designed to elevate Libya’s agenda to a more prominent global position” with the media strategy intended to “elevate and clearly communicate Libya’s goals and agenda for the future” (“Executive” 3; emphasis added). The United States’ Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), originally intended to combat Nazi propaganda, provides a disclosure statute requiring U.S. firms who perform “acts in a public relations capacity for a foreign principal” to register their activities. FARA is intended to facilitate “evaluation by the government and the American people of the statements and activities of such persons in light of their function as foreign agents.” Evaluation is not possible without a clear understanding of what is at stake in the conversation; otherwise, we are left only with what Bernays calls the “intelligent manipulation […] of the masses” (38).

PR: Propaganda or Lobbying?

The techniques used by the Monitor Group in their attempts to revise Gadhafi’s image as a dictator share stark similarities with Edward Bernays’s 1954 campaign to topple the Guatemalan government at the request of one of America’s wealthiest corporations, the United Fruit Company. For an annual fee of likely more than $100,000, Bernays orchestrated an image makeover for democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz Guzman by turning his leadership into a threat to American democracy.⁸ To disparage the popularly elected leader, Bernays played on increasing Cold War fears and brought journalists to Guatemala to report on its “instability.” Arbenz was soon branded a communist and his government was overthrown by, in Bernays’s words, an “army of liberation,” consisting of 200 men trained by the CIA. Documents were made public following Bernays’s death, which, according to biographer Larry Tye, provide “vivid detail [about] his behind the scenes maneuvering and show how, in 1954, he helped to topple” the Guatemalan government (156).

Likewise, not until Monitor Group’s confidential documents were leaked did the public, including the readership of the media outlets that covered the story, gain a clear understanding of the PR campaign behind Libya’s makeover. Responding to growing pressure from international media and continued unrest in Libya, the Monitor Group issued a statement asserting that “much of the recent commentary on our work in Libya does not capture accurately who we are, what we do, and what drives us” (“Statement”). In an effort to recuperate their own image, Monitor reiterates that their work on behalf of Libya occurred during “a period of promise” when Gadhafi “had renounced terror, forfeited nuclear and chemical weapons and programs, and declared himself ready to rejoin the community of nations,” claiming to regret the short duration of that moment (“Statement”). Indicating that they will take accusations of lobbying “very seriously,” Monitor launched an internal investigation and hired outside counsel who found that Monitor employees saw themselves as “economic analysts and management consultants,” not as public relations counselors (Stockman). But a closer look led even the Monitor Group to concur that “some elements” of their work in Libya could be considered lobbying and “should have been registered under FARA” (“Regarding”). Monitor followed textbook crisis communication strategies of ethos-based self-management by acknowledging errors, taking responsibility, and taking action including “enhanced management training” (Stockman).

Conclusion: PR, Democracy, and Disclosure

From Bernays’s Guatemalan intervention to Monitor Group’s rehabilitation of Ghadafi’s image during his anti-democratic rule, a good word for dictators periodically issues forth from US public relations firms. Monitor Group’s campaign failed to “protect and advance the free flow of accurate and truthful information”; likewise, it did not “foster informed decision making through open communication”—two of the Public Relations Society of America’s principles for ethical practice.⁹ With multibillion dollar international “consulting” firms orchestrating the content of so much of our public discourse—the news; articles and stories across media outlets; lectures and publications by leading intellectuals, our politicians, and our government—the state of civic discourse suffers. Without transparency in the process of rehabilitating Gadhafi’s image, or the private production of any “public” image, with the means themselves undisclosed, the free flow of accurate and truthful information is deeply hampered.

Nothing is inherently wrong with using public relations to relate with the public or to tell a story in the best possible light and in the most effective way. However, when corporations, businesses, or individuals present their stories as “news” or rely on “experts” or “spokespeople” who are being paid to speak or write about an idea, person or product in a way that may shape beliefs, policy or global standing, the audience has a right to know, and public relations firms and their clients have a duty to disclose. With a multibillion dollar global industry hard at work spinning our realities, realizing Bernays’s claim that “[v]irtually no important undertaking is now carried on without [public relations]…,” scholars of rhetoric across disciplines have much work to do to pull back the curtain on the special pleader and better understand how the rise of public relations in the United States has altered communication in contemporary democracy.

Endnotes

1. Gadhafi’s Arabic name can be and is transliterated in many different ways. I have opted to follow the Associated Press with Muammar Gadhafi. return
2. The first chapter of Steven Mailloux’s Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition offers a detailed account of how “by the middle of the twentieth century, rhetoric as the study of language arts found itself radically fragmented into separate disciplinary domains with faculty that did not, and, for the most part, still do not talk to each other” (32). return
3. See Berlin’s Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges and Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985; Crowley’s The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric; and Johnson’s Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America. return
4. In early March 2011, the United States government cut ties with the Libyan government and imposed sanctions on the Gadhafi regime in response to its violent crackdown on protestors. return
5. The “Executive Summary,” titled “Project to Enhance the Profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi,” is a typical document produced by the PR team for the client and is not intended for public distribution. This 32-page document contains a detailed overview of the work completed by the Monitor Group including “Goals of the Project,” “Summary of Outcomes,” “Action Plan” (cataloging the “visitors” who met with Gadhafi), and a section detailing Monitor’s Ongoing Dialogue with Leading Individuals. The National Conference of the Libyan Organization released several other documents including the initial proposal for the project, a letter from Monitor’s CEO to Gadhafi’s head of military intelligence, Abd Allah al-Sanusi, who oversaw the Monitor campaign. The letter details the visits of leading intellectuals and discusses the financial arrangements including the $250,000 monthly retainer. For a complete list of documents, see www.libya-nclo.com/DocinEnglish.aspx. return
6. In addition to Joseph Nye and Benjamin Barber, other “high-caliber individuals” included the leading British intellectual Anthony Giddens, Harvard professor Robert Putnam, and philosopher and Professor of Political Economy Francis Fukuyama, among others. For a complete list, see “Project to Enhance the Profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi.” return
7. I follow Marilyn M. Cooper’s sense of rhetorical agency as emergent, enacted,  embodied, and distinct from postmodernism’s decentered subject. See Cooper’s recent “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” return
8. As Guatemala’s primary landowner, employer, and exporter, United Fruit controlled the country for decades through pliable dictators until the election of Arbenz, who confiscated and returned 200,000 acres of United Fruit’s land to the people of Guatemala. See Tye 165, 178. return
9. In 2000, the Public Relations Society of America, the world’s largest organization for public relations professionals, revised the Code of Ethics from an “enforcement” model to an “inspiration” model, because their expensive and time-consuming investigations and lawsuits yielded little success. See Fitzpatrick, “PRSA Code of Ethics Moves from Enforcement to Inspiration.” return

Works Cited

• Barber, Benjamin. “Gadafi’s Libya: An Ally for America?” Washington Post. 15 Aug. 2007. Web. 5 May 2011.
• Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.
• —. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Carbondale:  Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Print.
• Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. 1928. Ig Publishing, 2004. Print.
• Cooper, Marilyn M. “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” College Composition and Communication 62:3 (Feb. 2011): 420-449. Print.
• Corn, David, and Siddhartha Mahanta. “From Libya with Love.” Mother Jones. 3 Mar. 2011. Web. 5 May 2011.
• Crowley, Sharon. The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Print.
• Dowie, Mark. Introduction. Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. Common Courage Press, 2002. Print.
• Fitzpatrick, Kathy. “PRSA Code of Ethics Moves from Enforcement to Inspiration.” PRSA. Public Relations Society of America, 2009-2011. Web. 21 Aug. 2011.
• “Foreign Agent Registration Act.” The United States Department of Justice. n.d. Web. 6 May 2011.
• Heath, Robert L., Elizabeth Toth, and Damion Waymer, eds. Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations II. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.
• Johnson, Nan. Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Print.
• Mailloux, Steven. Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition. New York: Modern Language Association, 2006. Print.
• Monitor Group. “For the attention of Mr. ‘Abd Allah al-Sanusi.” The National Conference of the Libyan Opposition. 3 July 2006. Web. 14 Sept. 2011.
• —. “Executive Summary: Project to Enhance the Profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi.” The National Conference of the Libyan Opposition. 20 Mar. 2009. Web. 24 Mar. 2011.
• —. “Regarding F.A.R.A. Registration.” Monitor. 6 May 2011. Web. 31 May 2011.
• —. “Statement by Monitor Group Concerning Libya.” Monitor. Web. 24 Mar. 2011.
• Nye, Joseph S. “Tripoli Diarist.” The New Republic. 10 Dec. 2007. Web. 5 May 2011.
• PRSA. Public Relations Society of America. 2009-2011. Web. 21 Aug. 2011.
• Putnam, Robert D. “With Libya’s Megalomania ‘Philosopher King’.” The Wall Street Journal. 26 Feb. 2011. Web. 5 May 2011.
• Stockman, Farrah. “Firm Says it Erred on Libyan Consulting.” Boston Globe. 6 May 2011. Web. 6 May 2011.
• Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. New York: Crown, 1998. Print.
• Wiener, Jon. “Professors Paid by Qaddafi: Providing ‘Positive Public Relations.’” The Notion: The Nation’s Group Blog, 5 Mar. 2011. Web. 5 May 2011.

-Jim W. Corder “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love” (18)

For scholars in rhetoric and composition, the Obama presidency has been a pedagogical godsend. If you’re addressing the ancient style vs. substance or rhetoric vs. reality topoi, you can just Google these familiar pairs, along with “Obama,” to find an embarrassment of riches.¹ If you want to demonstrate the importance of multimodal writing, you might observe that the President “won the election for many reasons, among which was [his] writing—his two books, his eloquent speeches, his graphic posters, his emails with embedded video, and his text messages” (Yancey 317). If you want to discuss the importance of revision, you could show this photo of the President’s process:

But the real lesson of Obama’s rhetoric is captured by the topos of consilience-coherence, which I borrow from one of the earliest scholarly examinations of Obama’s speeches: David A. Frank and Mark Lawrence MacPhail’s analysis of Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) address (transcript and video). Though co-authors, Frank and MacPhail differ in their interpretations of the DNC speech. Frank feels the speech—which launched Obama into the national consciousness—offers consilience, a rhetoric “in which disparate members of a composite audience are invited to ‘jump together’ out of their separate experiences in favor of a common set of values or aspirations” (572). MacPhail, on the other hand, argues that Obama’s version of consilience erases coherence, “a conscious understanding and integration of difference in order to transform division” (572). Coherence, in other words, demands an honest discussion of America’s racist past, a discussion which, according to MacPhail, Obama studiously avoids in the DNC speech (573). MacPhail might be open to the consilience Frank perceives, but not at the price of a historical whitewash.² So divided are the authors on this question that they elect to “write together separately,” each presenting his argument alongside the other rather than trying to unify them (573).

My purpose in this essay is not to take a side in that argument, but rather to examine a different speech through this consilience-coherence hermeneutic. I refer to “A More Perfect Union” (transcript and audio), which Obama delivered in 2008 (almost four years after the DNC speech). Though the DNC speech put Obama on the national map, “More Perfect” addressed a much greater rhetorical challenge: the crisis occasioned by videos of Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor. The emergence of these videos, which showed Wright preaching at what seemed to be his angriest, suggested—at least to some—that Wright was some sort of America-hating demagogue.

Senator and candidate Obama was faced with a complex problem: how to explain a longstanding friendship with a suddenly infamous figure. He had to do this, moreover, within the context of the most delicate issue of his unlikely campaign: race. Obama faced a choice: choose consilience (in order to appeal to an idea of “post-racial” unity) or coherence (in order to justify the injuries and injustices that led to Wright’s anger). “A More Perfect Union,” however, refuses to resolve the tension between these competing visions. Instead, Obama pursues a larger rhetorical project—the development of the rhetoric of friendship.

In For the Sake of Argument, Eugene Garver outlines his idea of a rhetoric of friendship. Garver argues that liberal democracies, built as they are on negative liberty, tend to forsake public friendship in favor of public agreement. Citizens prefer irenic consensus rather than agonistic difference. But that search for consensus (what Frank might call consilience) can avoid seeking truth (what MacPhail might call coherence). Truth, Garver writes, “has too much divisive potential to be a subject for political deliberation” (14). Truth risks conflict because “what is true is true for someone” and not necessarily for all (17). Where consensus prefers to settle on a single narrative, truth invites plural narratives. Garver’s primary example is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which sought not to settle on a consensus narrative of apartheid, but instead to act “under the maxim that any freely offered account, especially if expressed by the oppressed, must be taken as true” (17). Abiding by this maxim, the TRC cast truth as “less a correspondence between statement and reality than a relation between speaker and hearer” (18). This relation is one of friendship in which one does not insist on agreement but rather remains willing to take the other’s story seriously. Friendship includes both consilience and coherence; people “jump together” with their particular stories and even grievances but without the need to settle on a consensus narrative.

In “A More Perfect Union,” this kind of friendship is Obama’s purpose. Obama admits that, in light of the videos of Wright, “the politically safe thing to do would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork.” Yet such a move would not only have defied credulity—Obama had chronicled his friendship with Wright in Dreams from My Father—but also would have committed the failing of which Obama accuses his pastor: “to simplify […] the negative to the point that it distorts reality.” Obama would therefore have to explain his friendship, which would be no small feat. It might be one thing to countenance Wright’s “God damn America” within a prophetic, Biblical tradition. It is another to explain your regard for a pastor who claimed that the U.S. government had invented AIDS. Judged as an argument, Wright’s latter claim is ridiculous and indefensible. Judged within the rhetoric of friendship, however, the question is not about whether the claim is true in a factual sense, but rather why it might be true for someone with whom we wish to maintain friendship.³

Obama addresses this complexity by offering a series of dissoi logoi on the American experience. He begins with the Constitution, which, while possessing the “core ideal of equal citizenship,” is also “stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years….” This 2008 observation sounds a sharp contrast to the 2004 DNC speech’s reference to slaves singing freedom songs, a reference that MacPhail dismisses as bordering on “the stereotypical image of the ‘happy darkie’ of traditional racism” (583). Obama goes on to praise America for being the only place on earth where his story is even possible, but he also recalls that his wife “carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners, an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.” His own story suggests another such tension. As “the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas,” he is still labeled both as “too black” and “not black enough.” He thus casts himself as both product and producer of a tension that he makes no attempt to resolve.

These unsettling and unsettled conflicts include those displayed by his pastor, a good man who has said some bad things. Like Obama himself, Wright contains contradictions, “the good and the bad—of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.” Wright’s church “contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.” There are also the black Americans of Wright’s generation, for whom “the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away.” These conflicting attitudes stem from a history that he recounts in detail.

In a nice use of paralipsis, Obama claims that “[w]e do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country” before going on to say that “we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist between the African-American community and the larger American community today can be traced directly to […] the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” This statement seems to reject consilience and to embrace coherence. That coherence, however, also includes the perspective of those white voters who might be alienated by the Wright videos.

Here, Obama seems to concede the perspective from which he is speaking—perhaps to a fault. He does not suggest that the real problem is white supremacy—that is, that whites tend to benefit from our system more readily than blacks and that blacks tend to suffer social pathology and institutional oppression more often than whites. Instead, he articulates the resentful suspicion that every successful African-American has probably benefited from affirmative action, a program perceived as an anachronistic attempt to make amends for a past that truly is the past. Obama seems willing to concede the “cruelty,” “ignorance,” and “bitterness” of the black community, but he seems reluctant to suggest the cruelty of claiming reverse racism, or that bitterness and ignorance may motivate such claims. This seeming imbalance of perspectives allows Obama’s desire for coherence to bend back on itself and become a sort of consilience for the white voters to whom he is also trying to appeal.

Earlier in the speech, however, Obama relates his pastor and his grandmother in a strikingly coherent example of friendship:

While the antithetical structure of this comparison (which becomes one of the speech’s most famous moments) appears to suggest what some called “false equivalence,” its anaphora weighs Obama’s grandmother far more heavily than his preacher: “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world.” From a stylistic perspective, there is not equivalence so much as relation: “These people are a part of me.”⁴

Meanwhile, the larger problem with the false equivalence accusation is that it implies truth is a matter of consistency and accuracy. “False,” in other words, suggests that Obama has misstated the facts—namely, that his grandmother must be more important to him than his preacher. Surely, Obama would not deny this. But the speech had long since rejected the idea that truth is about ratio rather than relationship. The two friendships that he claims do not rely on a consensus narrative in which loyalty is appropriately divided. Both consilience and coherence are cultivated in his refusal to adjudicate between the accuracy of his grandmother’s or his minister’s perspectives. This friendship presumes that black Americans will continue “to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life.” But he adds that “the path to a more perfect union [...] also means binding our particular grievances, for better health care and better schools and better jobs, to the larger aspirations of all Americans—the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.” The binding happens within struggle, not just after struggle. Truth is measured not in how we divide it—so much for his grandmother, so much for his pastor—but instead in how we join it together: this story with that story with another story, all the while tabling the law of non-contradiction.

This attitude may still seem like false equivalence or cheap consilience. But Obama then tells this story of friendship to close the speech:

It is tempting to dismiss this story as a sentimental kumbaya moment. But it is also a story in which a black man feels sorry for a white woman who had experienced childhood poverty. Though he never specifically identifies Ashley as white, he does observe that “somebody [might have] told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally.” In other words, Ashley is the type of white voter whom Obama has personified earlier in the speech. In this anecdote, however, those resentments are subtly rejected—not as false per se but as unproductive. After all, the friendship offered by this elderly black man reveals that commitment comes from someone who may be trailing “the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and biases that make up the black experience in America.” Invoking metonymy, we might say that coherence itself is here for Ashley, coherence offered in consilience. Friendship is extended by a member of the African-American community, whom Obama has portrayed within a framework of coherence to a member of the white community, whom Obama has portrayed within a framework of consilience.

Ultimately, this anecdote suggests that MacPhail is right: coherence has to precede consilience. It remains unclear, even in a “post-racial” America, whether we as a nation have been able to articulate the former in a way that produces the latter. Frank and MacPhail, after all, must write contrasting arguments. But in presenting these arguments together, they also present the possibility of friendship. The paradox of this rhetoric is that coherence is the primary gift of consilience.⁵

After his election, we would see this same paradox expressed in the President’s speech at Notre Dame (transcript), which addressed another intractable national dispute, namely abortion. As he did in Philadelphia, Obama’s Notre Dame address did not avoid reckoning with controversy: “I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it […] the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable.” Yet in addition to this admission, he once again addressed and apostrophized those with whom he might disagree, including a pro-life doctor who had written him a letter imploring him to use “fair-minded words.” Most interestingly, he was offered the opportunity to use such words when an anti-abortion protestor interrupted him: “Abortion is murder! Stop killing children!” Through the boos and the chants of “We are ND! We are ND!” the President remained calm. “We’re fine, everybody,” he said. “We’re following [valedictorian E. Brennan Bollman’s] adage that we don’t do things easily. We’re not going to shy away from things that are uncomfortable sometimes” (emphasis added). Not to shy away from things that are uncomfortable: this is the rhetoric of friendship that includes both consilience and coherence, that assumes what is hard is also what brings us together. Obama’s sense of agonism thus includes the dual and divergent meanings of the word, which include struggle and contest and gathering and assembly (15). This complexity reveals the highest aspiration of Obama’s rhetoric. It should be the duty of rhetoricians, and citizens in general, to hold him to this aspiration.

A version of this paper was offered at the 2011 CCCC in Atlanta, GA.

Endnotes

1. Some impute such otherworldly skill to the President that they claim that he hypnotizes his audiences. As a term, oratory still rates higher than rhetoric, so the President is praised as often for the former as he is blamed for the latter. His oratorical gifts win him comparisons to Aristotle, Cicero (here and here) and even Lucius Septimus Severus, the first African-Roman emperor. As with all things Obama, there are doubts. Some believe that William Ayers wrote Dreams from My Father, and even reputable sources have suggested that Obama is helpless without his teleprompter. In addition to inspiring teleprompter “watchdog” blogs, this accusation has prompted one republican lawmaker to propose cutting funding for the device. Obama recently satirized this legislation in his address at the White House Correspondents Dinner. return
2. As I say, Frank and MacPhail ask the question of Obama’s rhetoric; however, their article does not consider that Obama’s primary purpose in the DNC speech was to get John Kerry elected. Perhaps it was too much to expect either consilience or coherence from this single address. As Jeremiah Wright would eventually tell Bill Moyers in an April 2008 interview, “He’s a politician.” That sounds like something of an insult, but Wright appears to offer it as a simple recognition of rhetoric: “He’s a politician, I’m a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. Those are two different worlds. I do what I do. […] But he did not disown me because I’m a pastor.” return
3. In For the Sake of Argument, for example, Garver relates the story of a black South African student who claims that English must have been invented in Africa. When challenged to defend this claim, he offers this logic: if Afrikaans is the language of oppression, then English is the language of freedom. Since black Africans insisted on being the authorizers of their own freedom, English must be something they invented (19-20). A rhetoric of agreement insists that this man is wrong; a rhetoric of friendship, however, demands that we acknowledge the history behind the claim: “Simply to reject what someone thinks can be a rejection of the person as well” (20). return
4. Nor did those commentators who accused him of false equivalence object to the “equivalence” between the resentments of the struggling white middle class and the wounds of black people who grew up under Jim Crow. return
5. Their work offers what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call a “contact of minds” (14) in which the rhetor begins by acknowledging, at the very least, “that he must use persuasion, think of arguments capable of acting on his interlocutor, show some concern for him, and be interested in his state of mind” (16). Rhetoric itself begins in an a priori show of friendship. return

Works Cited

• Corder, Jim W. “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love.” Rhetoric Review 4.1 (1985): 16-32. Print.
• Frank, David A. and Mark Lawrence MacPhail. “Barack Obama’s Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience, and the (Im)possibility of Racial Reconciliation.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8.4 (2005): 571-594. Print.
• Garver, Eugene. For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print.
• Obama, Barack. “A More Perfect Union.” American Rhetoric: Online Speech Bank. American Rhetoric, 18 Mar. 2008. Web. 22 Apr. 2011.
• —. “Remarks by the President in Commencement Address at the University of Notre Dame.” Whitehouse.gov. The White House, 17 May 2009. Web. 7 July 2011.
• Perelman, Chaïm and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. South Bend, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1991. Print.
• Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “2008 NCTE Presidential Address: The Impulse to Compose and the Age of Composition.” Research in the Teaching of English 43.3 (Feb. 2009): 316-338. Print.

Clive Thompson, contributing writer for the New York Times magazine and columnist for Wired magazine, is keenly interested in emergent literacy practices. He’s no stranger to the field of Rhetoric and Composition, having written an insightful treatment of Andrea Lunsford’s Stanford Study of Writing in a 2009 issue of Wired (“On the New Literacy”). In the January 2011 issue of Wired, Thompson explores short-form writing practices—“text messages, tweets, and status updates” (“Tweets and Texts”)—invoking what Jeff Jarvis calls the distraction trope: “We’re often told that the internet has destroyed people’s patience for long, well-thought-out arguments” (“Tweets and Texts”). But Thompson has a contrary response to the distraction trope: a “torrent of short-form thinking is actually a catalyst for more long-form meditation” (“Tweets and Texts”). Thompson argues that short-form writing actually fosters longer, more considered explorations that sometimes evolve into substantial, formal prose.

Thompson cites Anil Dash, an influential blogger and technology advisor. He quotes Dash as saying, “I save the little stuff for Twitter and blog only when I have something big to say” (“Tweets and Texts”). Shortly after Thompson’s column appeared online, Dash responded with a lengthy blog post, arguing that “some ideas are bigger than 140 characters. In fact, most good ideas are” (“If You Didn’t Blog It”). Dash contends that “individual ideas in those flow-based media [such as Twitter and Facebook] don’t have enough substance for a meaningful conversation to accrete around them” (“If You Didn’t Blog It”). He suggests instead that blog posts (and other, longer-form media) enable a kind of ideational synthesis, where the persistence and stability of blog posts, in contrast to sometimes ephemeral flow-based media, foster a sense of permanence—ideas and spaces to which people may link and return to again and again. Despite his arguments in favor of blogging as a persistent medium for substantial ideas, Dash doesn’t seem to deny Thompson’s claim concerning the inventional usefulness of short-form writing.

Nicholas Carr does, however. Author of The Shallows and frequent proponent of the distraction trope (see, for example, “Is Google Making us Stupid?”), Carr publicly joined the discussion shortly after Dash, suggesting that “Short is the new long.” One of Carr’s contributions to the debate concerns the definition of what constitutes long-form writing, where what once would have been a “middle take” is now viewed as a “long take” (“Short is The New Long”). Carr also confronts Thompson’s primary claim, arguing that he “never describes precisely how or why this alleged catalytic action, through which the swirl of info-bits deepens our engagement with longer-form material, plays out” (“Short is The New Long”). Carr’s complaint is one of evidence and validity; seeing none, he suggests that Thompson’s argument amounts to little more than a “hunch.”¹

Thompson’s argument is ultimately about invention and heuristics, about the affordances of social software for getting people to write, and for those same people to think and know through their writing. In this article, I reframe these recent public debates about emergent literacy practices by situating the movement of short-form to long-form writing work within the disciplinary milieu of Rhetoric and Composition. More importantly, I provide findings from an ethnographic study of media researchers that illustrate how Thompson’s claim is significantly more than a “hunch,” that knowledge workers actually use social software in heuristic and inventional ways, in a kind of sociotechnical notemaking.

Reframing the Debate

To scholars in the field of Rhetoric and Composition, Thompson’s “hunch” has plenty of evidence: at least 50 years of research from a variety of methodological perspectives that support the notion that writing is explicitly epistemic.² We make meaning through our writing; sometimes short-form writing acts as a catalyst for longer-form writing. This is less a revelation than the sudden realization of such practices on a massive scale, thanks in part to social software and text messaging. But many of these newly visible practices have been observed, documented, and analyzed by Rhetoric and Composition scholars for years—in classrooms, workplaces, and experimental studies. Carr’s focus is trained in the opposite direction of Thompson’s claim—on consumption practices rather than production, what writing actually does for writers themselves.

Carr’s critique of Thompson’s primary claim hinges on a wayward assumption about the nature of the claim itself. Carr argues that “it’s a fallacy to assume that the availability of long-form works means that our reading and viewing of long-form works is increasing” (“Short is The New Long”). In following this argument, Carr moves away from Thompson’s claim, which has far less to do with consumption patterns than it does with illustrating how long-form public writing work may have gotten its start through short-form inventional practices. Put more simply: for Carr, the debate is about reading;³ for Thompson, the debate is about significant public writing work, extending a point made in his 2009 piece on emergent literacies: “Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment” (“On the New Literacy”). It’s not simply about consumption; it’s about the act of writing and publishing, about knowing and being in the world as one who writes.

This aspect of the debate is well-worn ground for scholars and practitioners in Rhetoric and Composition. Writing and rhetoric are productive acts—to study writing is to study how people come to know, and how they share and negotiate what they know. To write, to speak, to act in the world as rhetorical practice (in short forms and long forms) is to make meaning, to situate oneself—to think, make, and do. Robert Scott, Barry Brummett, Michael Leff, James Berlin, and many other prominent scholars have argued cogently and from a variety of perspectives that rhetoric is indeed epistemic, that rhetoric creates truth rather than simply revealing extant truths. A common thread woven into germinal Rhetoric and Composition scholarship is the notion that writing and rhetorical practice are ways of knowing and being.⁴

Writing is an increasingly pervasive human activity, a crucial, everyday aspect of making meaning in the world. As Andrea Lunsford notes in Thompson’s 2009 piece, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization” (“On the New Literacy”). We write constantly—with pencils, on mobile devices, in text editors, in emails and documents, and increasingly, through social software. These writing activities—however ephemeral, fleeting, or seemingly insignificant—are, in the main, “epistemologically productive” (Grabill and Hart-Davidson 1). Again, this is nothing new for disciplinary insiders. In 1977, Janet Emig argued that “writing represents a unique mode of learning,” primarily because “writing as process-and-product possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies” (122). Based partly on detailed studies of the writing activities of twelfth graders—note-taking, planning, revising, etc.—Emig suggests that “writing involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain” (125).⁵

In addition to these perspectives on writing as an epistemic activity, certain writing practices are likewise explicitly heuristic and inventional. Once again, for Rhetoric and Composition scholars, this is old news. In 1980, James Berlin and Robert Inkster argued that the cognitive mechanisms of classical invention, such as Aristotle’s topoi, constitute heuristic processes.⁶ Certain practices—outlining, sketching, underlining, writing in margins—are often heuristic and inventional, a way of formulating meaning through intentional and directed informal writing that often leads to other, more formal writing work. The field of Rhetoric and Composition has a rich history of studying this informal, transitory, often ephemeral writing work that supports more formalized modes of production. These are practices of planning and thinking about problems through informal writing work—small but significant inventional, heuristic, and epistemic practices.

Sociotechnical Notemaking and the Read/Write Web

For Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day, the term “sociotechnical networks” reflects the fact that technological tools carry social meaning that becomes embedded in the technologies themselves (21). Sociotechnical networks evoke the complexity of much contemporary online communication; they describe intricate relations among individuals and groups through enabling technologies such as social software. Clay Spinuzzi notes that sociotechnical networks are significantly instantiated in writing and rhetoric. Indeed, the sociotechnical networks of contemporary distributed work create situations in which “rhetoric becomes an essential area of expertise” because “we are all potentially in contact with each other, across organizational and disciplinary lines” (Spinuzzi 272). We have the potential, via social software and other enabling technologies of distributed work and education, to think out loud and be immediately heard by others through our writing.

Christina Haas defines “notemaking” as “the creation and manipulation of planning notes prior to, and occasionally during, writing” (98). In her experimental studies of writers’ planning processes, she argues that “[n]otes are at once the output of planning, a strategy for cognitive monitoring, and a writer’s first visible attempts at language” (98, emphasis added). Haas discusses the inventional and heuristic benefits of notemaking, suggesting that these practices created infrastructures of external memory and cognitive monitoring while aiding writers in developing conceptual structures that “provide a way to work out relationships between ideas and to develop” more complex arguments (98). This is short-form writing that is epistemologically productive. What if such writing work were enacted within sociotechnical networks, rather than individually or in small groups? What if notemaking was a public, interactive practice?

In his discussion of the distraction trope, Jeff Jarvis notes that Twitter did distract him at times during the writing of his most recent book. But he also argues that Twitter has unique benefits for long-form writing work: “it helped with my writing that I always had ready researchers and editors, friends willing to help when I got stuck or needed inspiration” (“The Distraction Trope”). Jarvis, I argue, was engaged in sociotechnical notemaking during such periods, using informal, networked, short-form writing work in digital publics as a heuristic and inventional practice leading to the generation of more formal prose.

There are unique benefits to public notemaking activities, where one’s thoughts and ideas, however small or ill-formed, are enmeshed in networks of potentially interested collaborators who can buttress cognitive monitoring and aid invention. When notemaking is shared with such fellow travelers, when these practices are viewable by potentially everyone, across different disciplinary and professional domains, how much more can 140 characters act heuristically, as a pivot for social interaction (Morville) and agonistic exchange, where ideas can be tested and developed, and where invention might flourish?⁷

Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social software are about consumption and production, about dialectic interaction on the read/write web. It’s no wonder short-form writing in sociotechnical networks is epistemologically productive, often leading to richer, longer-form writing work. Savvy writers might intentionally deploy sociotechnical notemaking as a powerful heuristic strategy for moving from short-form to long-form writing practices. Sociotechnical notemaking may therefore be defined as short-form writing work that is typically enacted informally via the enabling technologies of social software, with explicit heuristic, inventional, and epistemological implications. In the final section, I discuss such implications in professional practice, among knowledge workers who specifically deployed sociotechnical notemaking in conjunction with more formal modes of writing.

More than a Hunch

For almost nine months—from July, 2010 through March, 2011—I collected rich, granular data for an ethnographic study of professionals at a media research firm, following their work in planning, conducting, and publicly disseminating findings from behavioral studies of consumer privacy issues online.⁸ I had unique access to my participants’ communication practices—online and face-to-face, formal and informal, in social software and drafts of organizational deliverables. While a detailed discussion of this study is beyond the scope of this article, one of my findings clearly indicates that short-form writing work and sociotechnical notemaking did indeed act in heuristic and inventional ways for my participants, leading directly into longer-form professional deliverables. Below, I detail one example of the kinds of short-form to long-form sociotechnical notemaking practices that I observed repeatedly during my study.

As the lead project manager for the consumer research sessions described above, Jenn was responsible for leading data collection, and for generating a significant portion of the formal, organizational prose that was eventually disseminated. Jenn worked closely with Mike, the firm’s director, and Michelle, the firm’s communication specialist, throughout the project. During my study, these three were constantly in contact with one another: in the office; at lunches and meetings; and via email, Facebook, Twitter, and text messages. Through social software in particular, they exchanged ideas with one another, while seeding and testing preliminary findings via short-form writing work with broader public audiences.

During one week in late September, the firm conducted four research sessions with small groups of consumers—one each day for about three hours. These sessions were intensive, with Jenn and Michelle using a variety of creativity techniques to yield insights from consumers about privacy issues online. After the last session ended, Jenn and Michelle uploaded select photos of their conference room to Facebook, so that other team members, friends, and professional contacts might see some of the playful artifacts they used in their sessions (as in the photo above).

Interestingly, these Facebook posts—images accompanied by short, explanatory text—generated much discussion about the project among team members and contacts beyond the firm. The following day, Jenn, Michelle, and Mike arranged a debrief meeting to discuss initial insights gleaned from the research sessions. While the team gathered informally in the office before the meeting, talk turned to the Facebook posts as team members revisited the upbeat mood from the previous day. This prompted a move to a local restaurant instead of the firm’s conference room, where they spent their first ten minutes together debriefing through individual notemaking activities—writing in silence, with pen and paper, the most important insights that each gleaned from a week of sessions. Many of these insights would later be made into brief, arresting encapsulations of their findings, things like “learned helplessness” and “transparency is the new green.”

During the weeks that followed, these ideas were repeatedly expressed via short-form writing work and informal face-to-face communication, as Jenn worked through her detailed analysis of the data. Mike and Michelle periodically posted these ideas on Facebook and Twitter, garnering interaction from friends, clients, and industry contacts. Doing so, they engaged in dialogue with important influencers, adding weight to their developing ideas about how they would report and position their findings. Jenn’s formal writing work could be traced from Facebook, to pen and paper notemaking, to face-to-face discussions in the office, via email and social software, all the way through her qualitative data analysis application, outlines, coding spreadsheets, presentation software, and text editors.

Each link in the chain of Jenn’s writing activity matters. Some (such as notemaking, Facebook posts, and tweets) were strategically heuristic and inventional, while all were epistemologically productive—they helped her move from planning to dissemination, from informal short-forms to professional long-forms. A crucial link in that chain of literate activity was sociotechnical notemaking—the testing of ideas in digital publics, initial visible attempts at formulating complex, long-form writing work.

Findings from this study indicate that Thompson’s idea—that public, short-form writing work may often act as a catalyst for more considered long-form prose—is much more than a hunch. Indeed, sociotechnical notemaking is short-form writing work that is explicitly heuristic, inventional, and epistemologically productive.

Endnotes

1. Recent books by Dennis Baron and Sherry Turkle provide considerably more nuance and context for these and similar ongoing debates. return
2. Writing is epistemic, in fact, in many different genres and media—short, long, and in-between. return
3. This is because, for Carr, it appears that reading is the primary means through which one achieves engagement, a notion that’s not defined or quantified in any way in his blog post. Implicit in Carr’s argument is the corresponding assumption that writing, especially in short forms, does not constitute engagement. return
4. Indeed, for Barry Brummett rhetoric and writing are epistemic in an ontological sense—“all of what people do is in some way rhetorically shaped and, in its turn, rhetorically influential on others” (Brummett 4). return
5. Janice Lauer’s germinal work (“Writing as Inquiry,” “Composition Studies”) similarly explores writing as enacting complex languaging and learning processes, seeing writing as inherently epistemic. return
6. Berlin and Inkster argue that a heuristic “may be defined as a systematic way of moving toward satisfactory control of an ambiguous or problematic situation, but not to a single solution” (3). return
7. Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror provides yet another salient example, in a blog post titled “How to Write Without Writing.” Atwood sees his Stack Overflow site, a collaboratively edited question-and-answer repository for professional programmers, as providing “lightweight, focused, fun-size units of writing” designed to get programmers thinking out loud, through their writing, while improving communication skills in the process (“How to Write”). This is writing as discovery, where professionals are engaged in often short, “fun-size” writing activities within a sociotechnical network as a way to improve more formal modes of communication—programming, documentation, reports. return
8. This study was approved under Ball State University’s Institutional Review Board, #180393-1, “Exploring Ideation Sessions as Knowledge Work,” 16 July, 2010. As an ethnographic workplace study, my data consisted of site observations (both scheduled and impromptu) and corresponding field notes; interviews with research participants; audio recordings of work sessions and meetings; photographs; and artifact collection and analysis. The total data set is comprehensive, relative to the specific activities of my research participants working through the arc of consumer research sessions described herein.

I collected over 150 participant-produced artifacts, recorded over 60 hours of meetings and interviews (impromptu and official), conducted over 20 semi-structured interviews, took over 400 photographs, and traced my participants’ communication practices through two different social networks, collecting almost 2,400 tweets while simultaneously monitoring several hundred Facebook status updates from my three primary participants (out of seven total). Data analysis of the full corpus is ongoing; findings for the social software sample of this data (discussed in this article) were generated via process and descriptive coding, analytic memos, and theming of those specific artifacts (tweets and Facebook updates) within the larger context of my observations, field notes, and semi-structured interviews. return

Works Cited

• Atwood, Jeff. “How to Write without Writing.” Coding Horror. Coding Horror, 4 Feb. 2011. Web. 5 Feb. 2011.
• Baron, Dennis. A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
• Berlin, James. “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories.” College English 44.8 (1982): 765–777. Print.
• Berlin, James, and Robert Inkster. “Current-Traditional Rhetoric: Paradigm and Practice.” Freshman English News 8.3 (1980): 1–14. Print.
• Brummett, Barry. “Three Meanings of Epistemic Rhetoric.” Speech Communication Association Annual Convention. San Antonio, TX. Nov. 1979. Conference Presentation.
• Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic. Atlantic Mag., July/Aug. 2008. Web. 28 Mar. 2011.
• —. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. New York: Norton, 2010. Print.
• —. “Short is the New Long.” Rough Type. Rough Type, 16 Jan. 2011. Web. 16 Jan. 2011.
• Dash, Anil. “If You Didn’t Blog It, It Didn’t Happen.” Anil Dash: A Blog about Making Culture. Anil Dash, 4 Jan. 2011. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.
• Emig, Janet. “Writing as a Mode of Learning.” College Composition and Communication 28.2 (1977): 122–128. Print.
• Grabill, Jeffery, and William Hart-Davidson. “Understanding and Supporting Knowledge Work in Everyday Life.” Language At Work (2010): n. pag. Web. 28 Dec. 2010.
• Haas, Christina. Writing Technology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996. Print.
• Jarvis, Jeff. “The Distraction Trope.” BuzzMachine. BuzzMachine, 24 Feb. 2011. Web. 8 Mar. 2011.
• Lauer, Janice. “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline.” Rhetoric Review 3.1 (1984): 20–29. Print.
• —. “Writing as Inquiry: Some Questions for Teachers.” College Composition and Communication 33.1 (1982): 89–93. Print.
• Leff, Michael. “In Search of Ariadne’s Thread: A Review of the Recent Literature on Rhetorical Theory.” Central States Speech Journal 29 (1978): 73–91. Print.
• Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability. Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005. Print.
• Nardi, Bonnie, and Vicki O’Day. Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1999. Print.
• Scott, Robert. “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic.” Central States Speech Journal 18 (1967): 9–16. Print.
• Spinuzzi, Clay. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed Work.” Technical Communication Quarterly 16.3 (2007): 265–277. Print.
• Thompson, Clive. “On the New Literacy.” Wired. Wired Mag., 24 Aug. 2009. Web. 28 Mar. 2011.
• —. “Clive Thompson on How Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis.” Wired. Wired Mag., 27 Dec. 2010. Web. 28 Dec. 2010.
• Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Print.

In “Gates Locked and the Violence of Fixation,” Ralph Cintron defines rhetoric as “that disciplinary art that imprecisely tracks the making of social imaginaries” (51). Thus, rhetoric works to trace the ways that the collective life of the community slides from the official discourses of the state to the rhetorics of the everyday. One sense in which such making may occur can be found in McGee’s classic “In Search of the People.” McGee’s “people” are “a fiction dreamed by an advocate” and “political reality” is established when they agree “to participate in a collective fantasy” (343). In this essay, I track the relationship between US state law, federal law, and the collective life of the community. I ask what kind of citizen is invited to participate in the collective fantasy that I argue is invoked in current immigration law. What kind of imaginary does such a fantasy produce and in what ways does it echo throughout less formal public discourses? In order to explore these questions, I bring together three disparate textual sites: US immigration law, theories of citizenship, and right-wing grassroots protest. I argue that current US immigration law, at both the state and federal levels, invites individuals to participate in a deeply troubling mode of citizenship.

To continue, I turn to S.B. 1070’s article 8B:

For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or agency of this state or a country, city, town or other political subdivision of this state where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person. (1, emphasis added)

Opponents of the bill argued that the law legitimated racial profiling and that it gave police the legal right to harass people of color (“Racial Profiling”). Many in the police force suggested that the law would drive a wedge between officers and members of the community, who, because of the lack of papers on their person or in their family, would fear coming forward as witnesses to crime (Thornburgh). The impending law generated massive protests and economic boycotts, which failed to deter the passage of the law.

On April 11, 2011, the Obama administration filed a “Motion for a Preliminary Injunction” to prevent the implementation of S.B. 1070. The federal government argued, “the power to regulate immigration is vested exclusively in the federal government, and that the provisions of S.B. 1070 are therefore preempted by federal law” (qtd. in Bolton 2). The injunction recognizes that “unlawful presence in the United States is not a federal crime, although it may make the alien removable” (qtd. in Bolton 5). The administration’s argument rests on state preemption of federal law, and it turns on the alleged desire of the State to protect “legally-present aliens (and even United States citizens)” (qtd. in Bolton 16) from undue harassment by police. The injunction asserts:

Mandatory determination of immigration status for all arrestees conflicts with federal law because it necessarily imposes substantial burdens on lawful immigrants in a way that frustrates the concern of Congress for nationally-uniform rules governing the treatment of aliens throughout the country—rules designed to ensure our traditional policy of not treating aliens as a thing apart. (qtd. in Bolton 15)

Evidently “our traditional policy of not treating aliens as a thing apart” is different from the one that includes the “alien and sedition act of 1798, the Chinese exclusion act of 1882, Japanese internment during WWII, the legal statute in force until 1952 that required candidates for naturalization to prove “whiteness” (Lopez),  and what the ACLU calls “the unprovoked detention of hundreds of Arab, South Asian, and Muslim men after 9/11” (“Chertoff Shows No Remorse”). The government’s argument imagines a paternal, sovereign state acting to preserve the rights of both citizens and (“legal”) non-citizens; however, history suggests that the United States has been quite keen to engage in nation-building practices that “treat particular parts of the population as things apart.”

The federal suit also references foreign policy and asserts a desire not to offend allies. It points out that away from the border, neither citizens nor visitors from visa-waiver countries are likely to carry evidence of citizenship—in the language of the suit, such individuals would be “swept up” along with actual “illegal” aliens. In the narrative produced by the juridical processes around S.B. 1070, the federal government is positioned as a rational, lawful agent that makes use of the Constitution to protect citizens and aliens alike from the hysterical excesses of state government, while in the words of the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, “Arizona is the meth lab of democracy.” In effect, this binary performs a parody of Spivak’s critique of the western savior narrative¹ —in this case, the Federal Government is saving brown people from right-wing extremists. In fact, the practice of current federal immigration policy confounds the progressive rhetoric mobilized in the federal suit against S.B. 1070.

To begin with, we might ask about what NPR has called “a quieter change in the enforcement of citizenship and visas,” which “is happening along parts of the northern border.” This quieter change evidently refers to powers granted to the border patrol by Congress after 9/11 (Singel).  This policy extends the jurisdiction of immigration officials by 100 miles from the nearest international border, and the ACLU points out that the policy effectively creates a “constitution free zone” in a band around US territory (“Fact Sheet”).² Second, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency’s Section 287(g),³ established by Congress in 1996, “permits the federal government to delegate immigration enforcement powers to states and local officers” (Capps et al. 1). In other words, the law empowers local and state police, anywhere inside US territory, “to screen people for immigration status” (Capps et al. 1). Following the aggressive implementation of these policies, the Obama administration has pointed proudly to its record of deportation, which was at record highs in both 2009 and 2010 (Preston). According to CommonDreams.org, deportations “more than doubled during the Bush administration” and they continue to increase significantly under President Obama (“Obama Administration Immigration Deportations”). Briefly put, the arguments made by the Obama administration against S.B. 1070 are equally valid for both the 100-mile border extension policy and 287(g).⁴

While I find this state/federal juridical puzzle intriguing in and of itself, and I wonder why the public sphere is so quiet about it, what I aim to do here is to trouble citizenship. Thus, I ask, what kinds of citizenship practices produce and are produced by such laws? The speech act that is enacted at the border is an explicit performative—the declaration of citizenship. In the vast majority of cases, it is short and simple and familiar to any US citizen who has crossed into the US:

Border official: “Citizenship?”

Traveler: “United States” or “American.”⁵

The state compels the citizen to perform the nation in endless acts of reiteration that bring the state into being over and over again, sedimenting its historical construction. To refuse is to risk being turned away. The border has become naturalized as an exceptional space where everyone is aware that exceptional rules apply to normal behavior.⁶ There is, nevertheless, an interesting tension in this exchange in which citizens are simultaneously fearful and reassured since the border guard will no longer (after 9/11) take the citizens’ word for it but will examine their faces for signs of nervousness or subterfuge, search their passports for signs of forgery, and finally run their passport numbers through a private system of databases contracted to the US government by private corporations (Epstein 2).⁷ On the border, the “good citizen” is fearful but is also relieved to witness the nation-state working to protect the citizens. Individuals are interpellated into subject positions as citizens of the nation-state, and in the process they produce the national other. The question is this: what kind of citizen is brought into being by current practices of US immigration law?

The current geopolitical border of the United States brings into being practices of citizenship that are resolutely founded on fear of the other. Arizona S.B. 1070, the 100-mile border extension policy, and 287(g) each work to shift bordering practices into every day life at the center of the nation. Each time a US citizen on an Amtrak train in Rochester New York, or in a laundry mat in Miami Florida or a bus station in Phoenix Arizona declares their citizenship to a border agent or local official, they are drawn into a “politics of complicity” (Mohanty 8) with nation-building practices that seek to identify who is out of place in the nation. As the ACLU argues, bordering methods employed by the administration may be sweeping up legal residents and even citizens as well as establishing non-citizens as a “people apart.” In fact, there is no qualitative difference between the bordering practices of the federal government and those proposed by Arizona’s S.B. 1070; at both juridical levels, citizens are invited to view non-citizens as always already suspect, and to place the notion of security above the principle of justice.

If current state bordering practices produce a xenophobic citizen preoccupied with security, what types of citizenship emerge from current citizenship theory? Westheimer and Kahne identify three types of citizenship education: the personally responsible citizen, the participatory citizen, and the justice-oriented citizen. They ask what kind of citizen would support an effective democratic society (2). They find that only the third model allows for a citizenship “with politics” and they argue that a depoliticized citizenship may produce “service and character” but it “will not promote democracy” (3). In “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Asen argues that if citizenship were viewed as a “mode” then “it could not be restricted to certain people, places, or topics” (195). Asen is interested in a kind of “unruly” citizenship that “arises in part from the historical contingency of restrictions on citizenship” (195). These writers push against the limits of accepted definitions of citizenship in encouraging ways; however, both tacitly accept the notion of citizenship as a legal, juridical status. Unruly or not, all of their citizens are citizens.

Hence, Bosniak observes, “what is striking is that most theorists of citizenship treat the presumptively bounded character of the community of citizens as a given, ignoring the fact that the very category of “citizen” (as it is conventionally understood) presupposes the existence of outsiders to the nation-state’s membership” (33). She suggests the phrase “citizenship of aliens” as a performative paradox that asserts the value of the non-citizen while simultaneously exposing “the [exclusionary] character of previous conventional formulations of the universal.” Bosniak explicitly links her voice to Honig, who has fundamentally challenged the status of the term citizenship. Honig examines a wide range of texts to suggest ways that the “foreigner” performs particular kinds of work for the nation such that xenophilic notions of the good immigrant produce xenophobic notions of the bad immigrant (84). In other words, both liberal and conservative discourses on immigration lead to the scapegoating of the immigrant, because they fail to sever the link between democracy and the nation state that produces the nation’s others.⁸ As an alternative practice, Honig suggests:

Rather than return home to the nation and love it … fully and completely, democratic actors could move their fellows into democratic action along multiple registers: subnational, antinational, transnational, and national. (118)

In order to demonstrate how, instead, xenophobic underpinnings of the law and border security may surface among democratic actors in community discourses, I turn to a video from Yorba Linda, California that depicts a protest against a Muslim community organization:

The organization apparently intended to raise money for battered women and homelessness (“Hate Comes to Orange County”). Both the visual and verbal rhetorics of the protest mobilize an extreme form of nationalism. As women, men, and children walk from the parking lot into the building, the protesters, girded by American flags, chant “USA!, USA!” “Go back home!” “Stupid terrorists,” “Mohammed was a child molester,” and “Why don’t you go beat your wife like you do every night!” I would like to suggest that these protesters have close political (if not familial) ties to some of the proponents of S.B. 1070 to the extent that these groups also work to articulate the limits of the nation-state. In the rhetoric of the protest, the citizens recognize who is not at “home” in the nation.

Agamben tells us that the sovereign democratic state works constantly to define its limits by locating “bare life”—the body that is included through exclusion and excluded by inclusion in the life of the nation through the law: “the law applies to him in no longer applying, and holds him in its ban in abandoning him outside itself” (50). In other words, the nation-state (re)produces itself through a citizenship that recognizes its strangers (Ahmed). The three immigration laws examined here point to a legal discourse that gives credence to Agamben’s description of the modern democratic state. “Bare life” can be found dying of exposure in the southwestern deserts of the US where representatives of the state have made it illegal for citizens to leave jugs of water for weary travelers by naming the practice “littering” (“Man Faces Jail”). This democratic nation-state, by definition, “works to treat particular parts of the population as things apart.” In rhetorical studies we are in an excellent position to recognize the ways that collective national fantasies are produced in the meeting of the minds between speaker and audience, state and citizen, and to articulate the ways that such fantasies become political reality. If current immigration law encourages the sedimentation of xenophobic forms of citizenship, a national imaginary infused with fear of the other, then those of us invested in rhetorics that elevate social justice above security must work to create a different future.

Endnotes

1. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak constructs the sentence “white men are saving brown women from brown men” in order to capture the subject position of the British in India and their relationship to the abolition of sati (93). return
2. It is not completely clear how such internal checkpoints, often quite far from the border, claim Fourth Amendment legitimacy. They may constitute the stretching of a 1976 Court Ruling on US versus Martinez-Fuerte, which affirmed the Border Patrol’s right to stop and question motorists at “reasonably located checkpoints” away from the US/Mexican border. return
3. For an interesting presentation of the history of 287(g) and the “Secure Communities Program” that is currently replacing it and that has been rejected by the Governors of three states so far, see “Issue Briefing Series, Issue #3: 287(g) and Secure Communities: The facts about Local Immigration Law Enforcement” from The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Migration and Refugee Services/Office of Migration Policy and Public Affairs,” May 2011. Web. 9 June, 2011. return
4. Such arguments have been made persuasively by the ACLU and appear on Democracy Now, among other sites. return
5. I am assuming that the one crossing the border here is a juridical citizen of the United States. return
6. It is important to note the relative speed at which this process of naturalization has taken place. Benedict Anderson points out the paradoxical sense in which nations are imagined by nationalists as “primal” in spite of the historian’s recognition that the modern nation, bounded by (allegedly) fixed territorial boundaries—borders—is a product of modernity. return
7. Epstein explains, “A key factor in this ‘biometricisation’ of the borders is the increasing convergence of public and private sectors. The biometrics technology industry, for one, is flourishing: it reprented [sic] a US$ 1,56 billion market in 2005, forecast to more than double to US$ 3.4 billion in 2007, and to further expand US$ 5.26 billion by 2010 (2). return
8. Honig calls for a “democratic cosmopolitanism” (102) informed by a female gothic model of democracy (109) that embraces uncertainty, distrusts its leaders, and that eschews the unifying practices of nation building. In such a model of democracy, one would always acknowledge that the “good man” leading the nation is the very one that might possibly plan to cut your throat in the dead of night. You can never take your eyes off her or him. In such a model of democracy, the passionate attachments so often reserved for the nation could turn elsewhere. return

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Print.
• Ahmed, Sarah. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.
• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983. Print.
• Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech. 90. 2 (2004): 198-211. Print.
• Bolton, Susan R. “In the United States District Court For the District of Arizona: United States of America, Plaintiff vs. State of Arizona; and Janice K. Brewer, Governor of the State of Arizona, in her Official Capacity.” Scribd. Scribd, 28 July 2010. Web. 15 Apr. 2011.
• Bosniak, Linda. “The Citizenship of Aliens.” Social Text 56.16.3 (1998). 29-35. Print.
• Capps, Randy, Marc R. Rosenblum, Cristina Rodríguez, and Muzaffar Chishti. “Delegation and Divergence: A Study of 287(g) State and Local Immigration Enforcement.” Migration Policy Institute. Migration Policy Institute, Jan. 2011. Web. 15 Apr. 2011.
• “Chertoff Shows No Remorse for Round-up of Arab, Muslim and South Asian Men: Dodges Tough Questions from Senators on Torture.” American Civil Liberties Union. American Civil Liberties Union, 2 Feb. 2005. Web. 15 Apr. 2011.
• Cintron, Ralph. “‘Gates Locked’ and the Violence of Fixation.” Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life: New Directions in Research on Writing, Text, and Discourse. Eds. Martin Nystrand and John Duffy. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. 5-37. Print.
• Epstein, Charlotte. “Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing the Biometric Borders.” International Political Sociology 1.2 (2007): 149-164. Print.
• “Fact Sheet on US ‘Constitution Free Zone.’” American Civil Liberties Union. American Civil Liberties Union, 22 October 2008. Web. 21 August 2011.
• “Hate Comes to Orange County.” Online Posting. YouTube. YouTube, 2 Mar. 2011. Web. 12 Apr. 2011.
• Honig, Bonnie. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.
• “Jan Brewer Finally Admits She ‘Misspoke’ about those Alleged Beheadings on the Border.” New York Magazine. New York Magazine, 4 Sept. 2010. Web. 15 Apr. 2011.
• “Jon Stewart Blasts Arizona Over Immigration Bill: ‘The Meth Lab of Democracy.’” Gawker.com. Gawker Media, 26 Apr. 2010. Web. 13 Apr. 2011.
• López, Ian F. Haney. “White Lines.” White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York UP, 1996: 1-36. Print.
• “Man Faces Jail for Giving Immigrants Water.” CBS News: US. CBS Interactive, 4 Dec. 2009. Web. 12 Apr. 2011.
• McGee, Michael Calvin. “In Search of ‘the People’: A Rhetorical Alternative.” Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader. Eds. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudhill. New York: Guilford, 1999. 341-356. Print.
• Mohanty, Talpade Chandra. “US Empire and the Project of Women’s Studies: Stories of Citizenship, Complicity, and Dissent.” Gender, Place and Culture 13.1 (2006): 7-20. Print.
• “Obama Admin Expands Law Enforcement Program 287(g), Criticized for Targeting Immigrants and Increasing Racial Profiling.” Democracy Now. Democracy Now, 29 July 2009. Web. 15 Apr. 2011.
• “Obama Administration Immigration Deportations Exceed Bush’s Record.” CommonDreams.org. Common Dreams, 20 May 2010. Web. 15 Apr. 2011.
• Preston, Julie. “Deportations From U.S. Hit a Record High.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 6 Oct. 2010. Web. 12 April 2011.
• “Racial Profiling, SB 1070 Will Go Hand in Hand.” Arizona Daily Star. Arizona Daily Star, 16 Apr. 2010. Web. 15 Apr. 2011.
• Singel, Ryan. “ACLU Assails 100-Mile Border Zone as ‘Constitution-Free’ – Update.” Wired. 22 October 2008. Web. 21 August 2011.
• Sommerstein, David. “Border Patrol Asserts Authority Up North.” National Public Radio. National Public Radio, 15 Sept. 2010. Web. 12 Apr. 2011.
• Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The Postcolonial Studies Reader. Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. New York: Routledge, 1995. 24-28. Print.
• State of Arizona Senate, Forty-ninth Legislature, Second Regular Session. “Senate Bill 1070: An Act.” Arizona State Legislature. Arizona State Legislature, 2010. Web. 15 Apr. 2011.
• Thornburgh, Nathan. “Arizona Police Split on Immigration Crackdown.” Time. Time, 30 Apr. 2010. Web. 15 Apr. 2011.
• “Truth-O-Meter Says: Gov. Jan Brewer Talks of Beheadings in the Arizona Desert.” St. Petersburg Times: Politifact.com. St. Petersburg Times, 25 Mar. 2010. Web. 15 Apr. 2011.
• “United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S. 543 (1976).” The Roadblock Registry. 2011. Web. 21 August 2011.
• Westheimer, Joel, and Joseph Kahne. “Educating the ‘Good’ Citizen: Political Choices and Pedagogical Goals.” PS: Political Science & Politics (April 2004): 241-247. Print.
• Woodard, Colin. “Far from the Border, US Detains Foreign Students.” The Chronicle of Higher Education.  9 January 2011. Web. 21 August 2011.

Part scholarly monograph, part handbook, part rallying cry, Reframing Writing Assessment is an important addition to a spate of recent books on assessment that encourage K-12 and college teachers to take back our professional lives. (These books, like the one under review, tend to have titles featuring the prefix “re”: think Huot’s (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment, Maja Wilson’s Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, or my Reclaiming Assessment.) Specifically, Adler-Kassner and O’Neill’s goal is two-fold: “to convince readers—as individual professionals and as members of a profession—that we need to engage in […] discussions about writing pedagogy and assessment wherever they might occur” and to “provide readers with the necessary knowledge for engaging in these discussions” (9-10). The book is aimed at “all of us who care deeply and are invested in postsecondary writing instruction” (12). Though writing teachers and other interested parties might find the book illuminating, it is not a primer of writing assessment per se; in fact, it assumes readers already share a general disciplinary frame. The book will be most useful to Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) who share this frame and who are faced with the challenge of communicating about writing assessment with audiences within and beyond their institutions.

Indeed, the authors set the context and identify the exigency with the story of an anonymous WPA whose institution is considering adopting the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). After consulting her colleagues on the WPA Listserv, she writes a memo to the university assessment committee outlining her concerns about the CLA. The committee decides to abandon the CLA, but this decision owes nothing to the WPA’s influence. In fact, she learns that an administrator called her memo “unhelpful” and “[n]one of her suggestions for a locally designed assessment that would track students across their undergraduate careers was adopted—nor was it even discussed seriously at the time” (2). While this is not a very uplifting story, the authors use it to underscore the need to get involved if we wish to influence writing assessment in our institutions.

Adler-Kassner and O’Neill’s recommended strategy for getting involved is “framing,” as in building construction. (Somewhat surprisingly, the authors do not cite Goffman’s sociological frame analysis, and Lakoff’s linguistic theory of framing makes a late appearance, on page 93). “Once we understand the frames already in place,” they write, “we can begin to develop ways to build on these structures, to reframe writing and writing assessment in a way that will support our values and beliefs” (11). To this end, Chapters 1-3 examine dominant frames for writing and writing assessment. Chapter 1 describes how arguments about these topics are nested in larger, values-based conversations and debates about the purposes of education. Chapter 2 extends this discussion by analyzing the currently commonsense frame for American education, in which the purpose of education is to prepare students for the twenty-first century workforce. This narrow frame has considerable support and force, but the authors remind us that postsecondary teachers still have a say in how and what to assess: under the 2008 Higher Education Act, institutions, in consultation with accreditors, set their own “standards and measures” for student learning (32). But this does not mean we should act only according to our own lights; on the contrary, Adler-Kassner and O’Neill gently chide compositionists for not doing enough to “effectively speak to questions about education and student learning asked by those outside the academy” (37; emphasis in original). They emphasize repeatedly that these questions are “entirely legitimate—that, in fact, publics outside the academy should understand what is happening in postsecondary classes and institutions” (38). If we want to exert some influence on writing assessment, the authors counsel, we must work with these others, not against them.

This means we must understand how historical frames have shaped and still shape writing and writing assessment, and so Chapter 3 broadens the historical lens, while narrowing the conceptual lens from education to composition and writing assessment. Drawing heavily on histories by Brereton, Connors, Crowley, and Elliott, the chapter elucidates twentieth century historical work through the authors’ “frame” analysis. For instance, the authors revisit the familiar story of the inauguration of the required first-year course at Harvard in order to show how the “technocratic frame” gave shape to writing instruction at this key historical moment and continues to exert influence today. This chapter also limns composition’s disciplinary frame, drawing from rhetorical, sociolinguistic, and literacy theory. This synoptic section is necessarily general and selective, but the authors do an admirable job identifying key insights and beliefs that circulate in the field: e.g., “textual meaning is bound by the context including the writer’s purpose and audience” (56); “[e]rrors are part of learning […] and are best addressed in context” (59); “good writing needs to be defined by what is appropriate and effective for a particular audience […] purpose […] and […] context” (64).

Disciplinary frames built around these insights and beliefs have little sway; for example, “even with composition’s enthusiastic promotion of portfolios as a way to reframe writing assessment, the dominant frames constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have persisted, especially when portfolio assessment is expanded to units of analysis beyond the individual classroom or writing program” (69). But Adler-Kassner and O’Neill are hopeful that writing assessment can help shift these larger frames, especially if the field links its frames to contemporary psychometric theory. They do not make a convincing case that the psychometric establishment has broken from its positivist roots, but they do show that some important thinkers in educational measurement are pushing validity and reliability theory toward the field’s ways of thinking. In any case, the authors end this chapter with a rousing if now-familiar call to “communicate our knowledge effectively beyond our own discipline and specialties so we can affect the discussions being held in state legislatures, departments of education, corporate boards, policy commissions, and public forums” (80).

Chapters 4-7 show how we can meet this challenge. Chapter 4 outlines “strategies and techniques” in a “frame-changing basics 101” format (83). These strategies and techniques, adopted from media strategists and community organizers, emphasize connecting our frames with those of other “stakeholders.” We are again reminded that “others outside of our classes and programs also have a heavy investment in what happens inside them” and “people genuinely care about what students learn in writing classes” (87). With this in mind, the authors explicate various models of alliance building. (Readers of Adler-Kassner’s excellent book The Activist WPA will find some overlap here.) While the review of these models helpfully offers an opportunity to think through how we position ourselves vis-à-vis others and their values, the authors emphasize the need to remain “within the larger frames surrounding the academy and education generally,” a prerequisite if we wish “to be understood as ‘legitimate’” (99). Accordingly, their rhetorical strategies and tips for communicating with stakeholders mostly entail accommodating audience expectations: e.g., “get to the point,” “check the media outlet’s guidelines,” and “be prepared and polite” (emphasis in original; 107-109).

Chapter 5 provides pseudonymous case studies of writing professionals framing and enacting writing assessment processes that meet institutional demands while drawing on their disciplinary expertise. The case studies are drawn from a range of institutions (a two-year college, comprehensive state university, Jesuit college, and technical university) and program types (writing, WAC, engineering programs, and a writing center). Adler-Kassner and O’Neill do not shy away from the difficulties of this work. They confront in each case the limitations of what has been accomplished: the alliance building is generally limited and targeted; one administrator admits that her institution still frames assessment as an administrative function rather than a disciplinary activity; another uses scoring guides developed by another program. While the authors’ insistence on providing realistic portraits in which readers can see themselves is admirable, the cumulative effect of these allowances is to make one wonder what exactly is being “reframed” in these examples, which, after all, involve mostly traditional assessment fare: outcomes, rubrics, conventional training and scoring protocols, etc.

Chapter 6 extends the authors’ consideration of “the messy complexities of reframing writing assessment,” and it features inspiring interviews with two compositionists who have participated in assessment discussions and initiatives at the national level. The pseudonymous Professors Chaco and Embler are worthy of emulation and they offer sound advice—“paint a sort of verbal portrait about the everyday realities of schools” (152), for instance, and “work across K-12 and college around assessment, while respecting each other’s experiences and expertise” (157). At the same time, Adler-Kassner and O’Neill’s accurate and compelling description of “accountability” as the dominant assessment frame will surely give pause to the aspiring Chacos and Emblers among us. Indeed, Professor Chaco informs us that “in the last ten to fifteen years, things have gone downhill in a frightening way because of the increasing reliance on assessments that are poorly conceived, and people don’t research, or don’t pay attention to research, on the negative impact [they are having in] schools” (154). The authors are led to admit that “others—such as policymakers, special interest groups, corporate CEOs—are constructing the frames that […] define teaching and learning” (166). However, Adler-Kassner and O’Neill are indefatigable: we can influence and change these frames, they insist, if we “engage them more directly” (166). This direct involvement, they emphasize again, requires that we “work with [the dominant frame]—even within it, if necessary” (178). The authors might like to take a “more radical stance,” but they “know such a positioning would fall on deaf ears and ultimately cause more harm than good” (177). They counsel against advancing assessment models that are “too far outside of this dominant frame,” lest they (and we) be viewed as “’unrealistic,’ ‘impractical,’ or worse” (177).

Chapter 7, the final chapter, pulls together the key strategies discussed throughout the book. It begins with a brief discussion of two metaphors—honeycombs and networked infrastructures—that the authors recommend as potential tools for “story-changing.” While the metaphors are interesting, they are involved, and this reviewer could have used more discussion of just how to mobilize them in conversations with various “stakeholders,” especially those outside of the academy. In any event, Adler-Kassner and O’Neil next provide a list of “essential tips” for reframing writing assessment such as “use rhetorical skills to construct frames and tell different stories,” “get involved,” and “value community-based work and support faculty who do it” (188-190). They end the book on a distinctly enthusiastic note: after listing national professional organizations, they entreat us to “check them out! And remember … reframing writing assessment, like writing, is a process that improves with revision and practice” (191).

Readers are meant to close the book confident that we’ve been provided the encouragement and resources necessary to get involved and that our involvement will make a difference. Some readers, though, will have some nagging questions: Is it the case that all “outside others” have “legitimate concerns” and “genuinely care” about our students and their learning? Is it true that if we learn to argue better, people in power will start listening to us? What if the problem faced by the WPA at the beginning of the book wasn’t that she wrote an unconvincing memo but that no one read it in the first place? Similarly, what if the problem we face as a field isn’t that we’ve been unclear about the value of portfolios but that (as Professor Chaco implies) no one is listening to us? After all, frames are constructed as much to exclude as to include. The “policymakers, special interest groups, [and] corporate CEOs” that Adler-Kassner and O’Neil rightly say control the dominant frames for education are all too happy to exclude and—as we’ve seen in recent events in Wisconsin—even demonize the frames (and the working bodies) of teachers and program administrators. So while surely we should get involved in discussions about writing assessment, we need to anticipate the possibility that even our very best arguments from our most careful self-positionings may not find willing ears. Our involvement in discussions about assessment might need to entail intervention into how they work, and who gets to speak, in the first place. Reasonable, moderate, cooperative participation—a seat at the “stakeholders” table—may not be enough.

Still, Reframing Writing Assessment will help us be and talk smarter about writing assessment. This alone might not be sufficient to take back our professional lives, but it is necessary.

Works Cited

• Adler-Kassner, Linda. The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers. Logan: Utah State UP, 2008. Print.
• Gallagher, Chris W. Reclaiming Assessment: A Better Alternative to the Accountability Agenda. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007. Print.
• Huot, Brian. (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning. Logan: Utah State UP, 2002. Print.
• Wilson, Maja. Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006. Print.

My summer graduate course at Auburn University titled “Environmental Rhetoric, Ethics, and Policy” began with a series of interesting questions: students wanted to know what they could do about public policy and how they could possibly have any sort of social influence. The course, designed to foster civic engagement and teach elements of technical writing, such as audience awareness and conveyance of ethos, encouraged students to “learn their world” (the tagline from my course advertisements) in a whirlwind 10 classes with 15 students. By the time they finished, students were to be able to:

• Demonstrate an awareness of ethics in relation to environment-related situations and circumstances
• Analyze and discuss image events, activism, and the rhetoric of environment-related politics
• Analyze and discuss the rhetorical situation in relation to environment-related policy
• Discuss the policy-making process and the role of an engaged public
• Apply theory towards application in shaping public policy related to environment-related communication.

This last point, “apply theory,” caused some initial consternation, and excitement, in the class. Within minutes of our first meeting students knew they would be attempting to influence actual public policy.

In the interest of helping my students influence public policy, I designed my summer class to work with three concepts I see as valuable for the civic-minded teacher: pseudotransactionality, expertise, and critical engagement. In this essay, I’ll provide an overview of my intent for the class, then use our experiences with these elements¹ as a vehicle to explore what it means to teach civic engagement, an idea my students immediately processed as “activism.”

My plans for the first day of the class were to introduce the syllabus, start a discussion on “the environment” based on my own research, and then work through Wanda Martin and Scott Sander’s discussion of public policy in the classroom. Before we even got to the attendance policy, however, students were wrestling with an entire semester’s worth of work: they wanted to know how they could make a difference, how to get their voices heard. Students noted their concern about being labeled activists, about seeming like imposters.

We were on the right track, and we had a lot of work to do.

Service Learning and Civic Engagement at Auburn University

Our work in the class proceeded as an extension of the outreach philosophy at Auburn University. Service learning—using the classroom to reflect on community interaction—and civic engagement—engaging in social acts which strive to positively influence the community—are important parts of the university’s educational process. As a land-grant institution, Auburn is committed to serving the community, a concept that forms the basis for our mission statement. Our Office of Public Service, through its “Auburn Serves” portal, notes “Auburn University has a mission of Outreach—engaging its expertise in the community to improve the quality of life for citizens. Auburn encourages students to take an active role in the outreach mission.” This site provides resources to help students engage with their world and help faculty learn how to foster civic engagement.

Individual colleges at Auburn also encourage service learning and civic engagement. The College of Liberal Arts, for example, hosts a Summer Academy designed to help faculty “who are interested in incorporating civic engagement/service learning practices in their courses and learning how to integrate outreach into their teaching and research.” In addition, numerous individual courses help students learn by encouraging (or requiring) civic engagement in the form of volunteering, client projects, and community partnerships, among other activities.

Environmental Rhetoric, Ethics, and Policy: A Class Overview and Justification

Civic engagement is a critical part of any class which intendeds to prepare students for an active role in society. My summer course, a five-week intensive marathon of reading, discussion, and writing, was designed to engage students through civic engagement and ethics-based decision-making á la Paul Dombrowski’s statement that “[w]hat we write does have consequences, and we must accept responsibility for our words” (12). Assignments were split into two sections: ethics scenarios and a written public comment module.

Early in the class students responded to environmental ethics scenarios, such as those described on David Keller’s Environmental Ethics case studies site. Then, in groups, students created their own scenarios² and individually responded to each other’s posed problems. These assignments and associated lectures and discussions were designed to provoke an awareness of expertise, complexity, and a sense of real-world problems before moving toward the four-part final project.

The final project began with a proposal, transitioned to the construction of an informational report, and culminated with a written public comment that had to be both submitted to an outside decision-maker and presented in class.³ I chose this form of engagement because it culminated in work directly engaging with outside audiences while still allowing time for teacher and peer feedback. Many students actually began their research process by contacting decision-makers to determine an appropriate course of action, and some stayed in contact with the decision-making agency and associated contacts throughout the entire project.

My pedagogical model for the class stemmed from Wendell Berry’s words in “Think Little”: “I would rather go before the government with two people who have a competent understanding of an issue, and who therefore deserve a hearing, than with two thousand who are vaguely dissatisfied” (84). To extend Berry’s concepts, this class considered civic responsibility as the kind of “active citizenship” Dubinsky advocates in his examination of the “Land-Grant Way,” and what Martin Gregory seems to intend with his call to “help students acquire capacities of heart and mind” (39) in his reflection on teaching empowered students.

Pseudotransactionality: Educating Community Intellectuals Through Audience Awareness

In order to teach an awareness of civic engagement and rhetoric in action, I designed class projects to consider issues of pseudotransactionality, defined by Spinuzzi as the problem of writing “patently designed by a student to meet teacher expectations” (337),⁴ and to motivate real projects with which the students felt a true investment. In pseudotransactions, students design writing to meet pedagogical objectives. As Spinuzzi notes, “Resulting versions of the genre have evolved to accomplish the goals of a specific classroom rather than those of the workplace that the classroom supposedly emulates” (343).

The problem of teaching in a way that avoids pseudotransactionality is twofold. First, work produced for class must be graded, and “although teachers may be able to spot the characteristics of pseudotransactionality in a particular document, they might not be able to accurately predict what writing strategies will work better” in non-educational contexts (Spinuzzi 343). Second, true avoidance of pseudotransactionality means that student documents must exit the classroom and engage with their intended audience. This creates the danger of a student sending a document, which, even after extensive editing and teacher feedback, still fails in its objectives. I feel that benefits outweigh the risks, as the anxiety associated with sending a document motivates attention to detail and awareness of rhetorical structuring, which enforces awareness of the rhetorical construction of expertise and authority.⁵

Expertise: Establishing the Right to be Heard

Establishing expertise is hard work for any member of the public. For public policy to be made or changed in a democratic society, a decision-maker must recognize a contributor’s right to speak. As Helga Nowotny notes in“Democratising Expertise and Socially Robust Knowledge,” “The question of whose knowledge is to be recognized, translated, and incorporated into action has been exacerbated under pressure for democratization” (152). Democratization in science-relation decision-making leads to its own set of problems, however, as established by H.M. Collins and Robert Evans’s “The Third Wave of Science Studies,” in which they contend that we need more and more effectively defined experts. Brian Wynne’s response, in which he notes that “we can agree that expertise is real, but its salience, validity and authority with respect to a public issue are still conditional” (“Seasick” 403) muddies the waters, and further consideration of expertise by Collins and Evans in their 2003 article, “King Canute Meets the Beach Boys,” notes that science mixed with politics creates imprecision (435-436). In short, the politicization and rhetorical construction of expertise leaves civic-minded citizens in a difficult situation: to effect change, one must convey expertise and authority, even if one has not dedicated their life to the study of a particular issue.

By having students research and write informational reports on an issue they wished to see changed before they actually sent a letter to a decision-maker, I hoped to help students empower themselves with the right to speak while establishing expertise and authority. This led us to discussions of credibility, information management, and citation strategy. I was asked, for example, if a student could use multiple sources from the same overarching website in the report. My response forced me to work directly with issues of both pseudotransactionality and expertise: “If you get 10 sources from [one government site], you’ve probably learned a lot, and, numbers-wise, you are not wrong, per se, assignment-wise. 10 sources from the same government-sponsored source, however, indicates a strong bias, and won’t be accepted by any decision-maker because no triangulation has occurred.” This later evolved into a classroom discussion on the power of the informational report as a source of “objective” information where source material creates an argument through placement and internal conversation, rather than from explanation or exposition.

Critical Engagement: Negotiating (and Questioning) Authority

Teaching civic engagement is not just about telling students they need to be involved, but about teaching them how to become involved in a meaningful way that conveys authority.⁶ To complicate matters, engagement may mean offering criticisms of existing policies or expertise to those who are actively engaged in shaping public policy. To this end, we examined the public policy-making process as described by both W. Michele Simmons in Participation and Power and Catherine F. Smith in Writing Public Policy (both books were read and discussed in their entirety). Smith gave us the groundwork, Simmons gave us complexity. As Smith states early in her book:

Making public policy means deciding what is and is not a problem, choosing which problems to solve, and deciding on solutions. The process occurs in a political context of pluralism. Problems are conceived and defined differently by variously interested actors. Solutions are achieved through mutual adjustment and adaptation of interests. Decision often demands compromise and reflects institutional constraints. The framework for decision is governmental. (1)

Simmons’s work complicates this outline, arguing, “The citizen’s status is marked by low interaction with the technical experts as well as little power in influencing the final policy” (122), in part, because, as Thomas G. Goodnight notes, “many forms of social persuasion are festooned with the trappings of deliberation, even while they are designed to succeed by means inimical to knowledgeable choice and active participation” (215). Policy proceedings often hinge on adherence to rules (which may not be made accessible to involved publics) and perceptions of expertise.

Brian Wynne’s discussion of Cumbrian sheep farmers⁷ and Tarla Rai Peterson’s description of Canadian Aboriginal involvement in policy decisions⁸—both examinations of competing worldviews and models of expertise—led us to issues of local authority. One student noted, for example, that families living on the Gulf Coast have more local expertise on the Gulf oil spill than many of the scientists, simply because they see what is happening every day. Personal experience, however, doesn’t often convey a sense of expertise: to be engaged you must take action, but to be heard you must convey authority. This line of reasoning ultimately led us back to the rhetorical structuring of letters and reports by forcing us to consider how someone who may have limited constructed ethos (through degrees, titles, or affiliation) creates a document that is read as a professional and viable addition to the policy-making process.

Conclusion

By creating an environment where students were forced to examine their own professionalism (e.g., “How do we prove we know what we’re talking about?”) rather than simply discussing it (e.g., “How would you do this if you actually planned to submit a letter?”), we established that access to credible information is critical in influencing public policy.

Perhaps one of the most recurrent themes of the course was the frustration involved in an ethics-based model of critical civic engagement. One evening the students expressed frustration about truthfulness in advertising in response to discussions about agendas and the hidden costs of everything from fossil fuels to hybrid vehicles.⁹ We noted that “T(t)ruth” is complex, and the civic-minded citizen has the at-times-unfortunate burden of keeping informed and ensuring that policymakers hear concerns. Conversely, we also agreed that expedient decision-making may not allow time for public debate or, in a time of crisis, may have no easily adaptable precedent.¹⁰ As Simmons notes, real civic power comes from influencing policy makers before policy is made—writing a comment or catching one’s senator in the elevator to suggest a course of action that informs their political activities from there on out.

This course encouraged students to become empowered and seek active change in their world while working through issues of pseudotransactionality, expertise, and critical engagement. As students learned the complex footwork involved in dancing with activism, we, as with all courses, encountered numerous problems, from difficulty in obtaining information to determining proper audiences. The course was limited in that we had a very short amount of time in which to work, and real-world constraints, such as potential informants or decision-makers not returning communication, restrictive formatting and space requirements,¹¹ and the at-times unsettling realization that not everyone would agree with students’ proposed policy changes, kept us busy. At the same time, what students may have perceived as problems I often saw as important lessons in civic engagement and public rhetoric. Ultimately, these students identified real problems and worked with informants, decision-makers, their teacher, and their peers to strive toward positive change in their world. I hope our class model can help others do the same.

I thank the students who participated in this course for all of your hard work, dedication, and willingness to try to change your world. I also thank Jonathan Arnett and my anonymous reviewers for excellent feedback and suggestions as this article developed.

Endnotes

1. This commentary essay has been approved by Auburn University’s IRB Chair. Because of the nature of the course and the identifiability of the students’ projects, however, I will avoid discussing specific project details in this essay. return
2. Class models came from cases printed in Intercom magazine, my own work, and the cases presented in Harris Jr., Pritchard, and Rabin’s Engineering Ethics text. return
3. Students selected projects with which they felt a personal connection. While levels of engagement did vary, most students in the class were easily able to articulate a personal connection to both their research interests and their proposed stance and comment. return
4. See also work by Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch and Joseph Petraglia. return
5. For better or for worse, my students received both positive and negative responses to their writing. In one case, a student’s public comment was poorly received because of issues of tone and presentation we had attempted to solve prior to submission of the document. Conversely, another student received immediate feedback that the identified problem and policy suggestions would be discussed at the next city council meeting, one student’s letter was published in a local newspaper, and other received a detailed letter from a senator specifically written in response to the issues raised (not a form letter). In each case the student initiated the discussion, but lessons learned through negative feedback are admittedly hard to take. return
6. As a reviewer of this work noted, there is great value in telling people that they need to be involved in their world. This act of raising awareness can point people toward issues with which they may be unfamiliar, or let people know that their voice is important in a decision-making process. return
7. See “Misunderstood Misunderstanding: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science.” return
8. See “Subverting the Culture of Expertise: Community Participation in Development Decisions.” return
9. Students were surprised to learn about the prevalence of rare earths in “green” products, such as the more than 20 pounds of lanthanum in a Toyota Prius’s battery (Folger 138). This conversation evolved into a discussion on the hidden costs associated with production of just about anything. The topic came up again later when we sidetracked onto a discussion of Wendell Berry’s 1987 piece “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” and his rhetorically powerful statement, “I would hate to think that my work as a writer could not be done without direct dependence on strip-mined coal. How could I write conscientiously against the rape of nature if I were, in the act of writing, implicated in the rape?” (112). return
10. See Schwartzman, Ross, and Berube’s “Rhetoric and Risk.” return
11. Some students adapted their public comments for online commentary, others for newspaper publication (at the behest of the institutions which ultimately published their work). In some instances the allowed formatting or spacing was significantly different from the comment they initially wanted to submit. While problematic, this taught a valuable lesson in adapting work for public consumption. return

Works Cited

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