Purdue University English 680r: Public Spring 2009 Wednesdays, 11:30-2:20, Heavilon 111 Instructor: Patricia Sullivan Office: Heavilon 401 Office Hours: 3-4:30 on Friday (and on most Weds) preferred email: [email protected] website: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~psulliva

Positioning Public Rhetorics is the anchor seminar of the new secondary area in Public . Our aim in developing cognate coursework in Public Rhetoric is to add depth to a domain of written literacy studies, and therefore extend the graduate program’s repetoire. As we view Shirley Brice Heath’s typology for the domains of literacy—home, school, community, and work—Purdue’s Graduate Program already offers in-depth work in school [WPA] and work [PTW] and the faculty [along with most of the field] are not interested in probing home literacy. So, Public Rhetoric is intended to provide in-depth investigation of Heath’s domain of “community”. Of course, we rename it to fit our view of perimeters that interest us. It is not lost on us that renaming has its consequences; so, one goal of the course is to explore the impacts of various naming activities at the field level.

We call this seminar Public RhetoricS to emphasize the plurality of constituitive views about how one might write/speak/communicate to a public or even assemble a public that fits with what one wants to write/speak/say. Yes, we could have pluralized Public as well (which you quickly realize reading Warner), except for the grammatical horror that would ensue— a collective of plurals might invite “fear and trembling” on our parts. We are open, too, to the interrogation of adjective-noun relationships, making our term instability complete as we pursue reveries about singular and plural, noun and adjective, and replacement words for “public” and “rhetoric.”

Though terms are unstable, we pursue a deliberative art [by this I mean a reflective praxis--blending of theory and practice--that is in some ways “codified”] for the production of “texts” involved in communication that aims to engage/persuade/lift up/entertain etc. adults in the U.S. (and elsewhere too). We are interested in the production of and interpretation of public acts of rhetoric. Some questions:

• How is public rhetoric related to the academic rhetoric we teach? Is it different? same? • What counts/is recognized as an act of public rhetoric? • Is public really the opposite of private? If so, can there be private rhetoric? • What “channels” are used in the practice of public rhetorics? What does 21st century technology add.subtract? And is the concept of channels under transformation? • How do some activities get lauded and others get punished? • What is a public? how does it operate? • While it seems like the 21st century and its Web 2.x culture should be changing Public Rhetoric, is it? in what important ways? • How does space now operate in public rhetoric? community? • How does dissent operate in 21st century Public Rhetoric? Is resistance necessary in a democratic public rhetoric? • Is public rhetoric the province of the masses? the popular? the majority? Can minority public rhetoric be a useful conception? • Is public rhetoric in opposition to religious rhetoric in this society? How relate? • Why is public rhetoric important to Rhetoric and Composition? • How do contemporary theories meet, intersect, argue in this arena? background from 2007 I’ll reprint the background statement I made for the 2007 course, as some core dimensions remain: I began researching this course with “community” as a domain of literacy, and unhappy as I always am with the term, I started bugging other faculty for alternative conceptions. Somehow, “public rhetoric” surfaced. So, I began to research the term in the humanities. I did some general research in R/C, TC/PW, philosophy, history, communications, cultural geography, economics, and sociology. Then, looking to cut down the area, I dropped history (because I was interested in 21st century developments) and economics (because every past class I have asked to read Castells has balked). I also minimized my search in R/C and TC/PW, thinking I could fill it in late. I read sociology first because I like it, and then went to political theory. I did a round of research in the online databases using “public rhetoric” (which unsurprisingly yielded very little and most of it in dissertations in R/C) and public AND rhetoric (which worked). I also used “” because almost all theoretical discussion on communication is framed through Habermas’ term and this term was the preferred one in communication (sometimes as a replacement term for audience and sometimes as a way to talk about the place of communication in political theory). After a month hiatus, I went to the disciplinary encyclopedias, interested in what terms they featured and what terms they tethered. I also identified some major journals and went through the issues of each for 6-10 years. Finally, as a check, I looked up some bibiliographies of pieces I thought important. At this time I also went to comp/rhet. And that was during break. I recount this process because I was taught this process for interdisciplinary research by Father Ong in the print era and by the librarians at Carnegie Mellon in the digital era. We can discuss it. reflection on 2007 My thinking in preparation for this year’s version of the course started with several considerations: 1) someone wanted to take the course again and needed it to be different (besides, I like Shirley’s approach of theming the WPA seminars); 2) I felt, and Mark Pepper reinforced, that some of those technology and community readings seemed too dated to be helpful for what we were thinking through; 3) I thought that pedagogical theory had gotten short shrift--while we did both theory and pedagogy they were separated in an area where they could profitably be considered together. response and new ideas • I added pedagogy to the title for this semester as a way to force myself to focus on pedagogical theory, I was helped by several new books on community literacy and engagement that I think are helping the pedagogical theory mature [we’ll read Flower’s Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. as well as articles and some of Elenore Long’s Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics]. • I then decided to focus on a particular medium of communication through which to examine technological issues--selecting photography as the semester’s culprit. I had read Ariella Azoulay’s The Social Contract of Photography and thought it gave us the edges we needed--political theory, photography, social theory--to get past thinking of photography as aesthetic (though it has always been a democratic art medium that threatens the fine arts), and that it also is a technology that is embedded in the web 2.0 culture. I added Hariman and Lucaites’ No Caption Needed which sets the issues up in our language and is more approachable than Azoulay. • I then changed the lens to Latour from sciences to social directly, by going to his textbook on doing ANT (actor-network-theory) and his exhibit tour with Peter Weibel Making Things Public. It gives us firm grounding in “social” as an assemblage which I think can transfer into “public”. • I kept two books from 2007, ’s Publics and Counterpublics and Leon Mayhew’s The New Public, as they set up the academic issues in the relevant academic domains--cultural studies and sociology/political theory.

FORUM We need to build a forum. Let’s do that today. Infrastructure choices: how operate; ease of set up; process for working with texts; ease of porting to a more permanent space; what moves enabled/disabled; allow pix?; etc. WORK Because this seminar is foundational for the secondary area, it is based on reading; because it is a seminar, it is also based on participation. So, each week everyone will weigh in (in writing) on the reading before class and that writing will be important to our discussion. We will also have activities (like building a forum): 40% of grade

Then, there is a group project: We are going to develop a minor in public rhetoric and writing as a way to explore the disciplinary and pedagogical boundaries and opportunities open to us in public rhetoric. 10 %

An, Oral Presentation of your final project: 10%

Finally, there will be a project that is tailored to your needs: it might be a portion of a dissertation chapter; it might be an extended pedagogy/action project [which includes a report]; or it could be a scholarly paper [which is suitable for conference presentation]. The type of project is your choice, but you need to make a short proposal to me by March 4.

TEXTS [AVAILABLE AT VON’S BOOKS]

Azoulay, Ariella. [2008]. The Social Contract of Photography. Zone Books [mit press] # ISBN-10: 1890951889 # ISBN-13: 978-1890951887

Flower, Linda. [2008] Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement (Paperback) Carbondale: SIU Press. # ISBN-10: 0809328526 # ISBN-13: 978-0809328529

Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. [2007]. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: U Chicago Press. # ISBN-10: 0226316068 # ISBN-13: 978-0226316062

Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel . Eds. [2005] Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. The MIT Press. # ISBN-10: 0262122790 # ISBN-13: 978-0262122795

Latour, Bruno. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP. [paperback ISBN:978-0-19-025605]

Mayhew, Leon H. [1997] The New Public: Professional Communication and the Means of Social Influence. Trade Paperback Cambridge Univ Pr ISBN: 0-512-48493-6 ISBN 13: 978-0-521-48493-0 Warner, Michael. [2005] Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books [mit press] Paper / ISBN 1-890951-29-3 / October 2005 21.95

There will be reading drawn from the disc I am distributing. There will be online reading (e.g., the Long book is at the WAC Clearinghouse; books on online activism are at the MIT Press site but free for download; we might do some YouTube watching; and so on). CALENDER

1/14 Course Introduction and build a talk-box 1/21 Working Frames: Meanings of “Public” • Michael Warner, Publics and CounterPublics • Jurgen Habermas, definition from The Structural Transformation of the Pubilc Sphere [Habermas folder in scanned reading] • , "Of Other Spaces" Diacritics [social/cultural folder -- foucault.pdf] • Jurgen Habermas, excerpt from "Modernity: An Incomplete Project" [Habermas folder in scanned reading]

1/28 Working Frames: Public in Rhetoric/Composition • Flower introduction and chapter 1 • Latour and Seibel, 876-883 and 916-933 • Asen, Robert. (2002). Imagining in the Public Sphere. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 35, 4: 349-367. [rhetoric/35,4asen.pdf] • Perelman, Chaïm, and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Madame. Section of New Rhetoric [perelman folder] • Cushman, Ellen. (1996). The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change. College Composition and Communication, 47, 1: 7-28. [activism/cushman.pdf] • Sheard, Cynthia Miecznikowski. (1996). The Public Value of Epideictic Rhetoric. College English, 58, 7: 765-794. [rhetoric/0-6.pdf • Wells, Susan. (2002). Discursive Mobility and Double Consciousness in S. Weir Mitchell and W. E. B. Du Bois. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 35, 2: 120-137. [wells.pdf]

2/4 no class (ill)

2/11 Communication --Its Tools and Tracings of Public • Mayhew, chapter 7 on advertising, marketing, and public relations • Cammaerts, Bart. (2008). Critiques on the Participatory Potentials of Web 2.0. Communication, Culture & Critique, 1: 358-377. [media and technologies/cmcarticles/fulltext7] • Dutton, William H., and Shepherd, Adrian. (2006). Trust in the Internet as an Experience Technology. Information, Communication & Society, 9, 4: 433- 451. [media and technologies/dutton.pdf] • Halavais, Alexander, and Lackaff, Derek. (2008). An Analysis of Topical Coverage in Wikipedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13: [media and technologies/cmcarticles/fulltext10] • Lange, Patricia G. (2008). Publicly Private, Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13: 361- 380 [media and technologies/lange] • Ong, Walter. (1980). Reading, Technology, and the Nature of Man: An Interpretation. pp. 132-149. [media and technology/ong.pdf] • Poster, Mark. (2004). Consumption and Digital Commodities in the Everyday. Cultural Studies, 18, 2/3: 409-423. [media and technologies/poster2.pdf] Read 1 of the following (choose by interest) : • Ball, Cheryl E. (2004) Show not tell: The Value of New Media Scholarship. Computers and Composition, 21, 403-425. [production/ball.pdf] • Black, Laura W. (2008). Deliberation, Storytelling, and Dialogic Moments. Communication Theory, 18: 93-116. [media and technologies/cmcarticles/fulltext2] • Cohen, Kris R. (2005) What does the photoblog want? Media, Culture, and Society, 27 (6): 883-901. [production/cohen.pdf] • de Vrees, Claes H., and Boomgarten. Hajo G. (2006). Media Message Flows and Interpersonal Communication. Communication Research, 33, 1: 19-37. [production/devreese.pdf] • Southwell, Brian G. () Between Messages and People: A Multilevel Model of Memory for Television Content. Communication Research, 32, 1: 112-140. [production/southwell.pdf] • Welch, Eric W., and Fulla, Shelley. (2005). Social Interactivity between Government and Citizens: The Chicago Police Department’s Citizen ICAM Application Demonstration Case. Political Communication, 22: 215-236. [media and technologies/welch.pdf]

If need some review on social software, you can see: Bryant, Todd. (2006, November). Social Software in Academia. Educause Quarterly, 2: 61-64. [production/Bryant.pdf]

Yochai Benkler (2005) On the new open source economics [talk] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/yochai_benkler_on_the_new_open_s ource_economics.html

2/18 Teaching “Public” as Engagement • Flower, ch 6-10 • Long, Elenore.(2008). Community literacy and the rhetoric of local publics. Parlor Press.chapter 9: Pedagogical practices. download at: http://wac.colostate.edu/books/long_community/ • Coogan, David. (2005). Counterpublics in public housing: Reframing the politics of service learning. College English, 67, 5: 461-482. [activism/coogan.pdf] • Herzberg, Bruce. (1994). Community service and critical teaching. College Composition and Communication, 45, 3: 307-319. [activism/herzberg.pdf] • Schutz, Aaron, and Gere, Anne Ruggles. (1998). Service learning and English studies: Rethinking “public” service. College English, 60, 2: 129-149. [activism/schutz.pdf] • Blythe, Stuart. (2004). Exploring the uses of itext in campus-community partnerships. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 18, 3: 270-293. [activism/blythe.pdf] • Cushman, Ellen. (2002). Sustainable service learning programs. CollegeComposition and Communication, 54, 1: 40-65. [activism/cushman2.pdf] • Grabill, Jeffrey T. (2003). Community computing and citizen productivity. Computers and Composition, 20:131-150. [activism/grabill2.pdf] • Grabill, Jeffrey T., and Simmons, W. Michele. (1998). Toward a critical rhetoric of risk communication: Producing citizens and the role of technical communicators. Technical Communcation Quarterly, 7, 4: 415-441. [activism/grabill4.pdf]

2/25 A Picture as Public Memory and Rhetoric? Hariman and Lucaites everyone reads 1-4 and 9; each of you read one of 5,6,7, or 8

from Latour and Weibel • 48-53 “A Palaver at Tutuila” Edwards • 58-63 “On Small Devices of Thought” Fukushima • 142-155 “Our Government as a Nation” Edwards • 388-395“What’s it Like to be Face to Face with a Great Ape?” Herzfeld • 662-669“Parliament of Fashion” Terreehorst/de Vries • 982- 87 “Still Life” Bhabha

• from Tom: Ekaterina Haskins. “Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37, 4 (2008): 401-422.

3/4 Public as Embodied/Disembodied • Mayhew: part 1 (3-48); part 3 (209-286) • Squires, Catherine R. (2002). Rethinking the black public sphere: An alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. Communication Theory, 12, 4: 446-468. [social/feminism/squires.pdf] • Fraser, Nancy. (1992). Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas. Critical Inquiry, 18, 3: 596- 612/_[places/fraser2.pdf] • Harold and DeLuca. (2005) Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 8, 2: 263-86. [places/harold.pdf] • Moran, Joe. (2006). Milk bars, starbucks and the uses of literacy. Cultural Studies, 20, 6: 552-573. [social/moran.pdf] • [if need background on feminism, the 2004 interview with Nancy Fraser is helpful]

3/11 no class CCCC 3/18 no class, spring break

3/35 Actor Network Theory, Sociology, and the Study of Publics Latour, Reassembling the Social part 1

4/1 Networks Part 2 Latour, Reassembling the Social part 2 Latour and Weibel, network articles

read one of : • Schinkel, Willem. (2007). Sociological discourse of the relational: The cases of Bourdieu and Latour. The Sociological Review, 55. 4: 707-29. • Preda, Alex. (2000). Order with things? Humans, artifacts, and the sociological problem of rule-following. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 30, 3: 269-98. • Crossley, Nick. (2004). On systematically distorted communication: Bourdieu and the socio-analysis of publics. The Sociological Review, 52: 88-112. • Harris, Jan. (2005). The ordering of things: Organization in Bruno Latour. The Sociological Review, 53: 165-77.

4/8: What is Public Writing and its Rhetoric? practical: construct our 200-level writing class in light of our semester reading, looking toward it being a first class in a minor, and considering one virtual genre--the blog

reading: • review relevant texts to question • Kumar et al, The Structure and Evolution of Blogspace [production/blogosphere/p35-kumar.pdf] • Nardi et al, Why We Blog [production/blogosphere/p41-nardi.pdf] • Cohen, What Does the Photoblog Want? [production/cohen.pdf] • Liu, Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse [production/liu.pdf] • Trimbur, Composition and the Circulation of Writing [production/trimbur2.pdf]

4/15 Democracy and Public Rhetoric practical: some work on our plan for a minor

reading: • Dewey Ch 5 of The Public and Its Problems [scanned folder/dewey] • Azoulay The Civil Contract of Photography (introduction, chapter 2 and 3)

4/22 Mostly Student Reading Reports practical: adjust group project to developing instances of courses that could run in a current 200-level writing course not being taught. Group proposal for which each person writes a course proposal. will be presented to the department head.

reading: • finish Azoulay The Civil Contract of Photography (chapters 7 and 8) • bring a reading to tell the class about

4/29 Presentations of your projects

5/6 Projects due