2020: My year in books

As with 2018 and 2019, keeping track of my reading was one of the simple pleasures of 2020, which for well-known reasons I won't get too deep into here was in most ways a quite miserable year. There was a moment where I envisioned reading more as a result of mostly-staying-home, and although I'm grateful for the safety and thoughtfulness of those closest to me, as evidenced by a few gaps in the reported dates on my list, my reading energy and focus ebbed and flowed.

Here's the list, followed by summative reflection. Re-reads are indicated by an asterisk*.

1. Post-Truth, Lee McIntyre (2018) - 01.05

2. The American Liberal Tradition Reconsidered: The Contested Legacy of Louis Hartz, Mark Hulling, Ed. (2010) - 01.13

3. Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine (2014) - 02.06

4. Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation, Jeff Blake & Sarah Knopp, Eds. (2012) - 02.07

5. Juicy and Delicious, Lucy Alibar (2012) - 02.11

6. Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward (2017) - 02.16

7. The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates (2019) - 02.26

8. The Celtic Twilight, William Butler Yeats (1893) - 02.29

9. Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education, Henry A. Giroux (2019) - 03.03

10. Paradise, Toni Morrison (1997) - 03.22*

11. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Steve Brusatte (2018) - 03.25

12. Nosotras. Historias de mujeres y algo más, Rosa Montero (2018) - 03.25

13. Take Me to Your Paradise: A History of Celtic Related Incidents and Events, Liam Kelly (2019) - 03.29

14. Before the Dawn of History, Charles R. Knight (1935) - 03.29*

15. The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America, Sarah Kendzior (2018) - 04.03

16. The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic, Mahogany L. Browne, Idrissa Simmonds, & Jamila Woods, Eds. (2018) - 04.04

17. Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis (2015) - 04.11

18. Unlucky, Zom Barber (2017) - 04.21

19. Neoliberalism's Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital, Adam Kotsko (2018) - 04.24

20. White Rage, Carol Anderson (2016) - 04.28

21. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber (1905) - 05.08

22. The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard (1849) - 05.10*

23. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1939) - 05.16*

24. Philosophy in the Modern World: A New History of Western Philosophy, Vol. 4, Anthony Kenny (2007) - 05.24

25. Shine of the Ever, Claire Rudy Foster (2019) - 05.26

26. Poems of Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete, Emily Dickinson (2012, 1890) - 05.28*

27. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré, & Alana Yu-lan, Eds. (2016) 06.07

28. Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann (2019) - 06.22

29. The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer (2017) - 06.28

30. The Oxford Companion to Beer, Garrett Oliver, Ed. (2012) - 06.28

31. How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi (2019) - 07.03

32. The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert (2014) - 07.11

33. Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020) - 08.13

34. Awful Archives, Jenny Rice (2020) - 09.04

35. National Parks of America, Lonely Planet (2016) - 09.23

36. Welcome to Hell World, Luke O'Neil (2019) - 09.27

37. Radicals in the Barrio, Justin Akers Chácon (2018) - 10.02

38. The Inheritance Trilogy, N. K. Jemisin (2010, 2010, 2011) - 10.21

39. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, Wendy Brown (2019) - 10.31

40. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving (1819) - 10.31*

41. The Hazel Wood, Melissa Albert (2018) - 11.05

42. Hiding in Plain Sight, Sarah Kendzior (2020) - 11.09

43. Refugees and Asylum Seekers: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives, S. Megan Berthold & Kathryn R. Libal, Eds. (2019) 11.14

44. Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell, Marta Russell; Keith Rosenthal, Ed. (2019) - 11.21

45. H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald (2014) - 11.22

46. Undoing the Demos : Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, Wendy Brown (2015) - 11.24

47. The Travel Book: A Journey through Every Country in the World, Lonely Planet (2005) - 12.07

48. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2017) - 12.23

49. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843) - 12.24*

50. The Bathroom Sports Almanac, Jeff Kreismer (2017) - 12.31

As usual, a number of reading tasks I took on over the past year were inspired by my professional work; McIntyre, Giroux, Blake & Knopp, Kotsko, Kolbert, Rice, Russell, and especially Brown have already emerged in my writing and teaching.  Relatedly, as the work/life demarcation softens, the job/work distinction ossifies. That is, I'm welcoming certain aspects of my work as more relevant to my personal life and identity, while others become more easily compartmentalized.

With similar intention, much of what I chose to read was informed by the political and public health conditions under which we spent much of the past year (Kendzior, Kendi, Anderson, Steinbeck). Others, I couldn't help but read (or re-read) through that same context (Dickens, Morrison, Foster). Directly related to that mission, my most visited publisher of the year was Haymarket Books —a "radical, independent, nonprofit" out of Chicago, Illinois — with seven completed titles on my list. Most of the HB books are edited collections of previously published material, augmented with updated essays and interviews. In the case of Davis Taylor, I learned that much of what I thought were new ideas about politics and justice were ones that have been developed and tested over decades, often by Black women. Unfortunately, a trend I've noticed over the past year involving folks of predictable political and demographic slants (re: leftist white dudes) is that some of them seem to think that the policies and procedures they're advocating for are brand new and that anyone who doesn't agree with their all-or-nothing approach is an enemy. Now, the "didn't do the reading" criticism is open to critique itself on classist and racist grounds, but when folks come after Angela Davis, as did happen in the lead up to the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, then the fact that they didn't do the reading is problematic.

While it would be disingenuous to suggest that this year was worse politically than previous years — more accurate to say that things became less comfortable for the privileged — there was a palpable recognition of how much our communal experiences and societal expectations are precarious and require defense. The National Parks travel guide was a literal and figurative illustration of this. Throughout that slow reading, my mind was moved to Albert Camus's The Plague (on the re-read list for 2021), which begins by observing that a pestilence — which I'm interpreting as a pandemic — as that "which rules out any future." For a long time, I've been wanting to purchase a National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands annual pass, to dedicate time traveling to our shared spaces and encountering the places in between. This upcoming year seems at once like the one it would be least pragmatic yet most needed.

Let's bring this to a close with that slight spirit of optimism. Along with the absolutely lovely Wingspan and my own backyard, The Strange Bird and H is for Hawk formed a multifaceted thematic I hope to build upon moving forward. Related only in title, Ducks, Newburyport was my most rewarding read of the year, and many of you can expect to be gifted that doorstop in the future, hopefully in person. Combining much of the above, along with recent conversations over how schools and teachers should function and what students should read, Sing, Unburied, Sing was my book of the year.

2019: My year in books

Similar to my 2018 list, and once again borrowing from McNely, here’s is my list of every book I read over the past year, followed by brief reflections on some of those readings.

Entries numbered in order that I read them, not in terms of ranking, which I did not do. Re-reads are indicated with an *.

1. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser (1970)
2. Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare (1594)
3. Interior States by Meghan O'Gieblyn (2018)
4. Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman (1910)
5. The Entrepreneurial Intellectual in the Corporate University by Clyde W. Barrow (2018)
6. Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison (1999)
7. Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump by Ryan Skinnell, Ed. (2018)
8. Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol (2014)
9. Performing Antiracist Pedagogy by Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young, Eds. (2016)
10. Calling My Name by Liara Tamani (2017)
11. Repurposing Composition: Feminist Interventions for a Neoliberal Age by Shari J. Stenberg (2015)
12. Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition by Bruce McComiskey (2017)
13. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (2009)
14. The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (431-404 bce)
15. Speak: the graphic novel by Laurie Halse Anderson & Emily Carroll (2018)
16. Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation by Debra Hawhee (2017)
17. Outline of a Theory of Practice by Pierre Bourdieu (1977)*
18. Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken (2014)
19. House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (1982)
20. Rhetoric and Demagoguery by Patricia Roberts-Miller (2019)
21. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers by Jackie Grutsch McKinney (2013)*
22. True: A Novel by Karl Taro Greenfeld (2018)
23. The Hike by Drew Magary (2016)
24. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (1994)*
25. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib (2019)
26. Paper Towns by John Green (2008)
27. Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad (2007)
28. Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua (1987)*
29. The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993)*
30. This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki (A) & Jillian Tamaki (I) (2014)
31. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by bell hooks (2004)
32. If We Had Known by Elise Juska (2018)
33. Goblin Market, the Prince's Progress, and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti (1862)
34. Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli (1986)
35. Corpora and Discourse Studies: Integrating Discourse and Corpora by Paul Baker & Tony McEnery, Eds. (2015)
36. The Vine Witch by Luanne G. Smith (2019)
37. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1878)
38. The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols (2017)
39. Wildwood by Colin Meloy & Carson Ellis (2011)
40. Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit (2016)
41. Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall (2015)

I'm in the fortunate position where my job requires me to read and to read things I find personally fulfilling. So it's never surprising when something I read ostensibly for my work ends up having an impact on how I view and interact with the world outside of work. This past year, Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, Roberts-Miller's Rhetoric and Demagoguery, and Stenberg's Repurposing Composition: Feminist Interventions for a Neoliberal Age all played that role.

Others that resonated in with me, some for reasons I haven't completely worked through yet, include: Allende (even though I despised the protagonist), O'Gieblyn, Abdurraqib (who may very likely show up on these lists with each new release), Nichols, and Solint.

In terms of quantitative goals, the infinite horizon remains forever beyond my grasp. But I did re-read some works that have been foundational for my scholarly and personal identity, like Grutsch McKinney, Anzaldua, and McCloud. Doing so helped me reconsider and reassess my understandings and uses of these works, and so I'm going to continue this project in 2020.

Finally, I read a few novels by authors who I appreciate from other forms: Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, John Green of the Anthropocene Reviewed, and Drew Magary (mostly by the late Deadspin). In each case, I was glad I did, and so that's another approach I'll maintain in the new year.

On a pedagogy of critical reflection

I like to think that revision and reflection are significant parts of my pedagogy. Reflective writing can help students retain what they've learned, it can promote transfer to other contexts, and it allows me, as the instructor, to understand and assess a student's writing and research processes. In many ways, I've found student reflective writing to be more useful than whatever product they make for one of my classes. In Technical Communication, a student could complete an instructions document that does not fully meet the assignment objectives, but they can still do well in class -- that is, they can demonstrate their learning -- by articulating what they think they missed, why they may have missed it, and what they would do next time to improve. Students can elect to revise and resubmit their completed documents based on their reflections.

Similarly, I participate in this reflection process throughout the semester, posting my self-critique and revision ideas to the course wiki, and now, on this blog space. In doing so, I'm not just interested in reflecting on what I'm doing and what I'm asking my students to do, but in doing so critically, approaching reflection as a concept, habitual practice, and complication. The term has achieved a sort of buzzword status across popular discourse and higher education alike, commonly as "critical thinking," which I feel is the crucial skill publics expect professional educators to convey to students. Rarely, in those external conversations, do I hear critical defined in any specific way (partially, of course, because that's not a thing that publics typically do).

So what do I mean by "critical"? And how does it apply to reflection? Since it's where I situate myself disciplinarily, I try to embrace the connotation used within Critical Discourse Studies, which Mautner (2009) summarizes as, "unveiling and challenging  taken-for-granted assumptions about language and the social, as well as recognizing discourse as a potentially powerful agent in social change" (pp. 123-124). With this definition as a guidepost, I encourage students to reflect not only on their work, but on the course and assignment, including through lenses of accessibility, alignment, and process. Applying that definition to my own reflective writing, I'm attuning myself to the ways my teaching and assignments create space for students to challenge institutional hierarchies, but also how my teaching reinforces those structures.

Just composing this post is leading me to two lines of inquiry. First, how are my assignment designs leading/constraining students to/from reflecting critically? Second, what can we learn from the differing ways that academia and publics define "critical." Next week, though, my plan is to write on the craft branding projects that graduate students in the Theory in Rhetoric, Composition, & Literacy Studies course that I teach are currently collaborating on. One group is making kimchi and the other is making beer. The groups are documenting their processes, with photographs, video, and text, and will next exchange notes so that each group can design branding for the other group's product.

2018: My Year in Books

Whenever someone asks me what I think they (or their kids) should read, and it really does happen often, I answer the same way: “more.” When asked that I read, which happens less frequently, I tend to trip over a more convoluted answer. Kind of like my consumption of beer or music, I approach my reading as contextual and seasonal. There's no one answer, other than the professionally-clichéd "it depends."

Providing evidence that only I saw or cared about, over the past few years, I’ve kept track of the books that I’ve completed reading. I started doing this for a few reasons: create a record of my reading habits, promote more diverse and inclusive reading, and motivate myself to read more.

Miming Brian McNely’s pattern (who also appears on the list), here’s my roll call, followed by brief reflections on the more resonant readings.

1. Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies by Elisabeth Buck (2017)
2. We Gon' Be Alright by Jeff Chang (2016)
3. Oh Beautiful Beer: the Evolution of Craft Beer and Design by Harvey Shepard (2015)
4. House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)
5. Last Nights of Paris by Philippe Soupault (1928, 2008)
6. The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors by Nicole I. Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, & Rebecca Jackson (2016)
7. Sport and the Neoliberal University: Profit, Politics, and Pedagogy (the American Campus) by Ryan King-White, Ed. (2018)
8. Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World (Composition, Literacy, and Culture) by Catherine Prendergast (2008)
9. Brewmaster's Table by Garrett Oliver (2005)
10. Buying In or Selling Out?: The Commercialization of the American Research University by Donald G. Stein (2004)
11. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
12. Podemos Cambiar El Mundo by Camila Vallejo (2013)
13. Facing the Center by Harry Denny (2010)
14. The Twilight of Equality by Lisa Duggan (2004)
15. We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)
16. The New Normal by Benjamin Bratton (2017)
17. Academic Conferences as Neoliberal Commodities by Donald J Nicolson (2017)
18. Remix: Reading Composition & Culture, 3rd Ed. by Catherine G. Latterel (2017)
19. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007)
20. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (2010)
21. Demagoguery and Democracy by Patricia Roberts-Miller (2017)
22. The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet & Sam Taylor (Trans.) (2017)
23. The Aboutness of Writing Center Talk: A Corpus-Driven and Discourse Analysis by Jo Mackiewicz (2016)
24. Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich 92018)
25. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib (2017)
26. Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2018)
27. Refugee by Alan Gratz (2017)
28. Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan (2002)
29. Gravity Falls: Lost Legends: 4 All-New Adventures! by Alex Hirsch (2018)
30. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant by Ulysses S. Grant (1885)
31. Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy by Anis Bawarshi & Mary Jo Reiff (2010)
32. The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, 3rd Ed. By Charlie Papazian (2003)
33. Silent Sparks: the Wonderful World of Fireflies by Sara Lewis (2016)
34. Around the Texts of Writing Center Work: An Inquiry-Based Approach to Tutor Education by R. Mark Hall (2017)
35. On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom Based Writing Tutoring by Candace Spigelman & Laurie Grobman, Eds. (2005)
36. The Neo-Liberal State by Raymond Plant (2009)
37. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1818)
38. Networked Humanities: Within and Without the University by Jeff Rice & Brian McNely, Eds. (2018)
39. We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion by Sep Kamvar & Jonathan Harris (2009)
40. House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)
41. Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity by Mya Poe, Asao B. Inoue, & Norbert Elliot, Eds. (2018)
42. Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology by Brian Noble (2016)

Above, I described my reading habits as, "contextual and seasonal." What I mean by "contextual" is I tend to plan what I read based on other things going on in my life and the world around me. If I'm to travel somewhere (say, for a conference), I might read authors or novels from/set in that place, such as Franzen and Erdrich in preparation for my short trip to Minneapolis. I do the same thing with music, and there was a Replacements/Prince/Hüsker Dü-heavy playlist.

Similarly, there are certain types of things I like to read at different times of the year. Science non-fiction in the early summer and something my daughter is interested in during the dog days, something Irish in March and something spooky around Halloween. This pattern is not a prescription, and I tend to read for work throughout the year.

Of the 42 books I completed during the 2018 calendar year, some have already revealed that they stick with my for longer. Not sure if any will reach the echelon of Caramelo or Discipline and Punish, texts I've read and reread since first encountering them (coincidentally, perhaps, both were originally assigned readings). But some on the current list have the potential to resonate, a concept which McNely defined as books that forces the reader to “pause, to think, to step back, to wonder." This is a concept I am primed for. Film that resonates for me will negatively occupy space in my mind for a few days after watching. Music resonates for me when I can play it while doing something else (writing, driving, running, etc.), getting occasionally pulled in but not necessarily distracted. When reading, I can measure the potential resonance in a more material way. Whether reading a physical book or on my Kindle, I am a profuse highlighter and annotator. These notes are later transcribed or copied to a file for further reflection. The books that I think resonate for me are those that elicit the most response.

By both qualitative and quantitative measures, much of my reading over the past year has proved relevant to current projects of teaching and scholarship. Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies by Buck, and the edited collection, Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity, edited by Poe, Inoue, and Elliot, will not only inform my thinking and writing, they are models of the sort of politically-cognizant scholarship that I hope to emulate.

A line of inquiry that I am currently working through involves analyzing the increasing marketization of institutions of higher education. King-White's Sport and the Neoliberal University: Profit, Politics, and Pedagogy (the American Campus), Stein's Buying In or Selling Out?: The Commercialization of the American Research University, and Plant's The Neo-Liberal State have proved useful for this extended project. The latter of these, in particular, is an excellent example of the "steel man" rhetorical strategy, where one lays out the opposition's argument as completely, sincerely, and good-faithed as possible to ensure that their own counter argument is as conclusive as possible.

Looking ahead to a future project, Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology by Noble worked because it provided a thorough analysis of two topics of personal interested -- dinosaurs and materialism -- but from a disciplinary perspective of anthropology that I am less familiar with.

After occupying years as a nightstand coaster, I finally finished Brewmaster's Table. Not limiting the category to beer, Oliver is among the best at creating written descriptions of physical experience. Doubled-up with my binging of The Handmaid's Tale television series, Future Home of the Living God by Erdrich was a little too much reflected by the current political moment to be taken on its own terms. Perhaps my favorite thing I read all year, Abdurraqib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us made me care -- deeply -- about Rick Flair and the Wonder Years' Suburbia I've Given You All and Now I'm Nothing, two pop culture artifacts I couldn't tell you much about before.

Bridging personal and professional interests, The New Normal by Bratton and Demagoguery and Democracy by Roberts-Miller are both concise yet thorough, articulating complex and contemporarily relevant arguments. I expect both to show up on my reference and course readings lists soon.

Finally, my daughter was assigned Refugee for her summer reading last year, a project that the whole family assumed. For her, it kicked off two fascinations: She's since read three other books by Gratz, and she has become simultaneously intellectually and politically invested in learning more about human displacement and movement. For her summer reading project, she drew parallels from the book's narratives to the contemporary issues of Central American migrants and the Mexico/US border. Her comparison of policies enforced by the current presidential administration and the rejection of the MS St. Louis do not reflect positively on the US.

Nobody asked for this

June 4, 2014. That was the last date I had published to this blog. Although not reflected in the current role of seven posts, it's a project I started way back in (I think) the summer of 2002, when I first moved to the Rio Grande Valley.

Over that run, I rebranded the blog a few times over, pivoting away from opinionated ramblings about sports and music to create a more focused journal reflective of my emerging professional identification. That did not stick, likely because I was already busy doing -- and writing -- other things.

This year, blogging is a practice I'm going to take up again. Some motivating factors/objectives:

Not everything I want to write about "fits" within my current research agenda. Presently, my academic writing is centered on research projects relevant to writing center work, with other major projects situated within technical communication and writing studies. But there are other things I'm interested in, some that I can fit into my scholarly agenda (soccer, paleontology), and others that are more tenuously connected (the current political climate, popular music). Blogging will provide me with the space to articulate and hash out ideas and perspectives that might not fit within the current scope of my professional work but that I'm interested in, nevertheless.

I'm an avid Twitter user, or at least responder, typically tripping over myself to revise pithy posts that receive scarce (but appreciated!) engagement. Same goes for Instagram and lurking the comments sections of the post-Gawker suite. While the actual benefits of these practices require further study, one clear drawback for my own writing is that because of the combined kairotic constraints of limited space and need for a quick turnaround, other online modes are less conducive for informed, thoughtful, and contemplative response. I want to respond to the things I read, but I want to do a better job of it.

When I do respond, I hope this blog allows me to receive feedback on germinating ideas that could develop into more substantial projects. At its best, I think, this blog will function as a sort of laboratory or greenhouse where I can work through ideas that could potentially sprout into more substantial, and professional relevant, writing projects. In order to facilitate this growth, I plan on leaving a slightly-curated comments section open, steadfastly ignoring the quantitative temptation of page views or engagements.

Even if no responses come, I still want to cultivate the habit of writing every day. As mentioned above, I do a lot of writing already, but like any practice (see also: running, second language learning, guitar, house maintenance) it can become too easy to skip a day, and then two, and then weeks without progress. Not sure that I need the post counter to reach 365 by this time next year, but writing every day is an attainable goal.

If I can do these things like write about things while maintaining a focused tone informed by my professional qualifications, I might actually contribute something of value here.

A Subtle Racism in World Cup Advertising

So we're halfway through the first week of my First-Year Writing course themed: "Rhetorical and Discursive Constructions of the World Cup." It's probably too early to make evaluative assessments of the course design, but judging by the quality of student responses, interest seems to be high. Our first whole group assignment involved an analysis of ESPN's "Time Zone" commercial, which presents a series of vignettes of people from various World Cup nations gathering together with their friends and compatriots to watch some football. The message is obvious: the World Cup is a shared, global event that brings people together locally, and because of that, creates a shared, global identity. The affirming slogan, "Every 4 years the world has one time zone," which closes the ad, explicitly makes this argument.

To be fair, my initial response to this commercial was wholly positive. As a matter of fact, the "shared, global experience" narrative, including having to wake up at odd hours to watch a game, is one of the main reasons I enjoy the sport. Taken together, however, the messages of this commercial tell an interesting, and somewhat problematic, story.

You may notice some of the national representations presented in "Time Zone" from Western media's more cartooney stereotypes: Fans in Rio de Janeiro dance and cook food on a rooftop. English fans meet at a pub. In Ghana, men literally use a bicycle and a car battery to power a single, meager television set (no mention of the $10 million the Ghanaian government afforded the national team to help in their preparations). Subtle, atonal strings reinforce the image of Japanese fans. The script could almost writes itself, assuming the script based its understanding of non-US life strictly on the basest of generalizations.

According to my students, the more interesting messages involved the portions of the commercial showing how fans in the United States and Mexico participate in this global community. The single US fan, a white man based in Seattle, is seen running along the street, setting up his out-of-office voice mail. Working off cues of location, suit, gender, apparent age, and the fact that he was leaving work, students inferred that the character was comfortably employed at a tech or software firm. Conversely, the section based in Guadalajara, Mexico, shows a young boy running (hurried movement is a common theme across the scenes) an extension cord through the city streets, tossing it over a wall to his friend's yard where food is cooking on the grill. (In Mexico, as in Ghana, fans must improvise to get access to electricity, apparently.)

For certain, borrowing power via extension chords is a lived reality for some residents of Mexico - but it's also a reality for people living in the United States. My students recognized this, and initially viewed these representations as examples of many possible realities. However, it is unlikely that all, or even many, US-based audiences would read this commercial with such nuance. Instead, a binary of economic class is created, with the US framed as economically superior. This is not insignificant, nor is it a coincidence.

According to Alsup (2001), "each culture, to some extent, misunderstands the other and thus defines it through a series of stereotypical lenses that don't accurately reflect reality" (p. 42). From that perspective, it can be presumed that a large portion of ESPN's viewers will interpret the representations of Mexico and the other nations in this commercial as indicative of the entirety of those nations and people.

This is how discourse can functionally reproduce racism.

While the larger themes of ESPN's "Time Zone" commercial are positive ones - unity, camaraderie, shared interest, etc. - the subtler messages portraying ethnic, racial, and national stereotypes ossify over time and can prove harmful when uncritically presented and reproduced.


********

Alsup, J. (2001). An English educator speaks across a disciplinary "Contact zone." English Education, 34(1), 31-49.

Teaching Writing through the World Cup

The original plan called for me to teach a dedicated section of Rhetoric & Composition I as part of the Department of Engineering's bridge program. (R&CI is the first part of the FYC sequence in the Writing Program at the University of Texas - Pan American.) This bridge program, partially funded by an NFS grant, would provide select students transitioning from high school with an opportunity to get a head start on their college course work. But Engineering wants the class taught during the Summer II session, when I'll be out of town. Naturally, I found this out just a couple weeks ago, and so I passed the course design off to another instructor, and went about swiftly developing a new design for the traditional R&CI course section I would be assigned to. Not wanting to simply plug in the course I had designed and used earlier in the year (which would have been easy enough - mostly just revise the calendar), I decided now would be as good a time as any to try out something I've been wanting to do since I got into the profession: teach a course themed on the World Cup.

This is not just an excuse to watch the games during class time (although, we most definitely will). It's an honest attempt to blend a significant contemporary cultural event into my approach to FYC, which relies on elements of discourse communities, genre study, and social justice pedagogy. Furthermore, events like the FIFA World Cup are ripe for critical investigation because they rely heavily on concepts of identification, capital, simulacra, and yes, rhetoric. (In some ways, I used the University of Kentucky's Craft Writing project as a model for thinking about this course design - just don't tell Jeff Rice.) Therefore, I contend that the World Cup, and soccer more generally, can serve as a useful vehicles for investigating objectives common across most college writing courses. In fact, there already exists a line of scholarship about the beautiful game as an academic topic, although admittedly little of it has focused specifically on writing. So, while acknowledging the disciplinary strain insisting FYC courses act as RhetComp intro courses emphasize writing about writing, I also want to capitalize on the idea that students are more engaged in writing work when they have a topical interest in what their writing about. Longer term goals include fleshing out potential usages of global football as a metaphor for teaching, thinking about, and doing writing.

A bit more about that "contemporary cultural event" concept: A significant part of my teaching is to help students use writing to move into the disciplinary communities they hope to enter into as professionals. With regards to the World Cup, it is likely that few, if any, of my students will formally move into that particular community, but I would counter that in many ways, some are likely already a part of it - as ardent followers of particular teams and as practitioners of the game itself. Even if not on the pitch, members announce themselves as part of this community through a variety of shared and individual discursive acts, including supporters groups, blogging, visual art, naming practices, national identification, gender performance, and social media, among other things. In fact, I would argue that world football fans are a larger part of their discourse community than most professionals are with the communities related to their jobs - there is is an investment based on cultural, familial, and identity, and not simply economic transaction, that permeates the global football culture, and I think that's important.

Here's the link to the current version of the course syllabus. Take a look, if you like, and tell me what you think, challenge my claims, and offer suggestions in the comments section below. If you'd like to participate in some way (such as responding to students via Twitter), please let me know that, too, and we'll figure something out.

Rhetoric & Composition I: Rhetorical & Discursive Constructions of the World Cup

Place in El Paso

Last week, before she and my wife left for our new home in the Rio Grande Valley, my daughter, EGMonty, and I had a short but profound conversation about place, identification, and dwelling. It went something like this:

EGM [to me]: So, you're from Massachusetts.

RWM: Yup.

EGM: And Mommy is from the Valley.

RWM: Yup.

EGM: And I'm from El Paso.

RWM [after a pause]: You know what? You're right.

OK, so perhaps this exchange was more name association than rhetorical investigation, but it did reveal something that I had, up to that point, drastically underestimated: my own daughter's sense of place. More specifically, about her ability to construct a place-based identification.

In "Inventions, Ethos, and New Media in the Rhetoric Classroom," Nathanial Cordova (2013) asserted that "rhetoric has always been the art of inventing, constructing, and cultivating these essential human relationships of dwelling" (p. 161). Cordova's idea, I think, speaks to the concept that individuals rhetorically create the meanings of their locations, particularly when those locations are ones that those individuals associate with their own identifications. Put another way, places mean to us what we say they mean.

I never had the experience of moving as a child. I spent (fortunately, some might say) my childhood in the same house and home that I was born into, and in line with the American mythology of upward mobility, I lived in that house until I left for college. My daughter,conversely, has already lived, over her first five years, in three different places in two different parts of Texas, and as a result, she has been able to develop a much more mature understanding of what it means to leave a place that one has associated as part of their identification. This isn't altogether remarkable - EGM has already visited some four times as many states and places as I had when I was her age, a part of her biography that has unfolded largely by her parents' design - but it was still came as a surprise to me that she had been thinking about our impending move in such a complex and personalized way.

EGM doesn't have much recollection of the fact that she was born in, and that our family used to live in, the Rio Grande Valley, so she doesn't view the move as a move back. For her, El Paso is where she is from. Now, what that will end up meaning for her over the course of her entire life is something I will have to patiently wait for her to reveal to me.

IRB Equitability

My plan is to spend a good chunk of this weekend completing a project proposal that I plan to submit for approval by the Institutional Review Board, which at UTEP is part of the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects. This, in and of itself, is not spectacular - I have gone through this process three other times, twice as the principle investigator. It is, however, my first time approaching the proposal process after having what I believe to be were a series of insightful conversations about the nature of the IRB process, the nature of projects involving humans as research subjects, and of the nature of institutional compliance.

Most of the conversations involved arguments about which disciplines should be required to complete the formal IRB process for each project, versus those that could reasonably expect a lower threshold of acceptance with their projects. Generally, it was asserted that the strict IRB procedure was in place for sciences like biology and psychology, where human participants might be subject to physical or severe mental harm. However, for research in Rhetoric & Writing Studies (and other disciplines unrepresented in these particular discussions), which can also use human subjects, the likelihood of personal invasion was considered significantly lower. Some of these arguments were made by folks representing RWS.

I bring this up not just to recap the content (I will say that there was little agreement on the Stanford Prison Experiment), but to articulate upon the difference. First off, in defense of my discipline, it would be short-sited to claim that the type of human research done in RWS is inherently un-invasive. Writing, in addition to being a mode of communicative discourse, is also a personal act that is representative of an individual's thought processes. As such, when studying and analyzing writing, particularly student writing, researchers must proceed with caution and due respect for their subjects' contributions. Secondly, by mandating that everyone complete the same (or at least similar) approval processes, the Institutional Review Board is facilitating equitability among researchers and academic disciplines, a concept that those disciplines still arguing for their disciplinarity should embrace.

Importantly, this is not a matter of false equivocalness - scholars in RWS know full well that the type of research we do must be thoughtfully planned, rigorously applied, and carefully assessed. So, for my fellow RWS researchers, the next time you find yourself completing the mountain of paperwork required by your local IRB, I implore you to embrace the process: not only will it help ensure the reliability of your project, it will also aid in the larger arguments about our disciplinarity.

Chris Hayes and word choice

This past weekend, Chris Hayes, host of the MSNBC show Up, provided an editorial comment that has already begun to leak into the national political conversation. Here's the most relevant portion of his commentary:

“I feel… uncomfortable, about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers, and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.”

Unfortunately, rather than facilitate a national debate on the power of language use, Hayes instead sparked a rather predictable bout of partisan outrage and name-calling (which may have actually lent a modicum of validity to his attempted point, not that anyone noticed that aspect). Most of these criticisms iterated that, in bringing up this issue the day before Memorial Day, Hayes demonstrated unsympathetic judgement and poor timing. I would tend to agree with this line of assessment.


This is not to say Hayes's point is completely without merit. For as long as there has been communicative discourse, organizations, governments, and individuals have purposefully employed specific language and rhetoric in order to achieve desired results. (For example, domestic propaganda is now a thing again, apparently.) But if the conversation Hayes attempted to start is one worth having, and I think it is, then it would be equally worth having at another time.


A savvier way to discuss this topic, perhaps, would have been to talk about the myriad ways that laudatory and jingoistic language can and have been used to rationalize certain political and military actions, and to save the "uncomfortable" qualifier for a diary entry. Instead, Hayes's point has resulted in a slew of ad hominem attacks and flag wrapping, with his kernel of a pertinent political discussion getting lost in the malaise. It is more than a little ironic that in an attempt to critically consider word choice, Hayes made such an unfortunate linguistic decision of his own.


Update #1: Chris Hayes released this "statement"/apology. The comments section is as you would expect.


Update #2: Hamilton Nolan, at Gawker, articulated support of Hayes's original point.

Note: This post originally ran on MerrySwankster.


Everyone’s favorite rock music revisionist, John J. Miller of the usually-respectable National Review Online, is at it again with the list makin’ and the tellin’ everybody how the world is. Miller is pertinent to this and other music-interested outlets mainly because hes the talking head who tried to appropriate a bunch of your favorite rock songs and recodify them as “conservative”, all in an easy-to-read list format. You know “Sympathy for the Devil”? It’s totally about preventing gay couples from having hospital visitation rights. (Or something.)


Miller’s original post was so popular/notorious/mind-numbingly ill-conceived, that it spawned the obligatory sequel. (The rationale being, I suppose, that like Hollywood blockbusters, every loathsome, under-calculated piece of crap that gets any attention at all deserves a second act.) In his most recent incarnation, Miller went to criticizing the unwanted fruits of his own labor, manifested in a recent article in the Journal of Popular Culture by Michigan State’s Michael T. Spencer. If you thought Miller was out over his head when writing about music, you should just see this guy take on academia!


Miller began by attacking the journal itself, pointing to a few article titles he clearly does not understand as proof of the inherent wrongness of “liberal-arts scholarship”. Take it from someone who’s actually read more than just a few titles: the Journal of Popular Culture is fun, interesting and without a doubt, academically thorough. It gives attention to matters that the academy traditionally ignores, and provides a platform for up-and-coming academics. Of course, phrases like the one’s I’ve just used all translate into “not conservative”, so it’s no surprise that JPC doesn’t fall into favor with Miller. It should be likewise unsurprising, then, that Miller misconstrues the bulk of Spencer’s article.


“Yes, it’s about me”, Miller asserted early on, which proves that someone told Miller what the title of Spencer’s article was. Had Miller actual read the article, he would maybe have picked up on Spencer’s actual intentions, such as questioning Miller’s “methods of analysis” (pg. 601) and understanding conservative reappropriation as “terms of authority and control over popular culture” (pg. 602). Stepping back, it is revealed that Spencer was concerned with how, “new conservatives are now producing ’scholarly’ work that attempts to blur the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’” (pg. 608). Furthermore, it should be noted that when Spencer argued that new conservatives have been, “investing meaning in rock music through a dialectical process of negotiated use”, he was absolutely on the money (pg. 603). The appearance that Miller only understood how (maybe) seven of those quoted words were employed does not mitigate the accuracy of Spencer’s claim.


But figuring all that out that would require actual reading, and reading’s an old man’s waste of time when all you want to do is rawk. Spencer investigated Miller insofar as the latter was the creator of a specific artifact that fell within the larger scope of the former’s interests. Or, allowing me an out-of-context misappropriation of popular culture that would make John J. blush, Miller is not a unique and beautiful snowflake.


This is not to say that Spencer’s article should be free from all dissent, and given that it was published in a reputable academic journal, I expect that the author would welcome warranted and well-though critique. For instance, I would have appreciated a greater emphasis on the role that contextualization plays when interpreting or critiquing artifacts of popular culture. Further, Spencer could have given Miller some benefit of the doubt. Surely he never expected his original list to be much more than a tongue-in-cheek attempt at rallying the base, right?


But Miller’s criticism offered nothing approaching these, and by attacking the academic-ness of Spencer’s writing, he ventured into a discourse community that he’s willing to chastise but not understand. (I’ll spare the reader the details of the academic journal process, but rest assured that Spencer’s article was vetted more thoroughly and with greater purpose than any of Miller’s posts, and to be fair, the post you are presently reading.) Towards the end of his rant, Miller lulls into a tired lament for the students who just want to rowk if not for nerds like Spencer assigning too much homework. He suggested that the increased amount of content published on behalf of academic study over the past sixty years or so is proof of the whole system being watered down and less effectual, and not, you know, a good thing that more people are presently permitted to engage in academic discoucrse.


Another ironically-funny school yard jab offered up by Miller was the claim that Spencer didn’t “add much to the conversation”, which can best be understood as another attempt by Miller to posit himself as the authoritative voice on everything: he decides what rock songs are about, and he decides who’s opinions on the issue matter. But his most egregious erring is the implication that it is he, not the people actually working at schools, that knows what’s best for academia. It’d call this another example of Miller’s hubris, but that this point, wouldn’t that be redundant?

Book Review: Last Call by Daniel Okrent

Note: This post ran concurrently at Beer Journal 

Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition

Daniel Okrent

I'm not expert in the field, but it seems to me that a good history book will accurately report on past events. A very good history book will accurately report while shining new light and by providing new insights. And a great history book will do those things, plus provide a lens for readers to use past events to interpret their modern worlds. Last Call, a singularly-focused tome by Daniel Okrent (Slate interview), former public editor of the New York Times and inventor of Rotisserie Baseball, falls into that last category.

In roughly 400 digestible pages, Okrent intricately detailed an era that school children across the nation can name, without focusing on the main points that most readers would already expect going in. Sure, Al Capone, Andrew Volstead and William Jennings Bryan get their due attention, but so do lesser-known noteworthy characters (in every sense of the term) Carry Nation, Al Smith, Billy Sunday and Sam Bronfman, none of whom are unjustly deified of damned. Places, such as the French-owned (and thus, prohibition-free) islands off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, are rightly treated as potential protagonists.

Perhaps just as important in this reviewer's estimation is the overall non-judgmental tone of Okrent's narrative, which does not fall into the predictable pratfalls of stereotyping the different people or events as simply "good" or "bad", but instead focuses on which were more effective and/or lasting.Okrent leaves it up to the reader to apply the lessons of prohibition to modern contexts. And there are many opportunities to do so. How you interpret these lessons is largely likely determined upon your present ideological slant.

For instance, modern day conservative talking heads like to remind everybody within earshot that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and that it was his party that freed the slaves. However, it is rarely mentioned that they are also the party the that installed big government Prohibition and, as a result, the federal income tax, two aspects of modern society that conservatives like to rail against. Furthermore, during the Prohibition era, Prohibitionist politicians aligned themselves with the KKK and had their campaigns supported by mobster and bootleggers, all groups that where able to make hay (and money) once alcohol was outlawed. Liberals might appreciate the way progressive politicians and privative citizens worked together to pass the 21st Amendment, but the good vibe can only last so long before remembering that modern day Democrats are too impotent to get Don't Ask Don't Tell repealed, let alone an entire Constitutional Amendment. What's more, the repeal itself took the flip-flopping of 17 senatorial votes, a prospect that should frighten any political party in the majority.

According to the sticker on the book cover, Ken Burns is working on turning Last Call into a PBS documentary chock-full of cameras panning over still photographs (it already has a Facebook page). That program is already listed as a must-see not just because of Burns's involvement, but because Daniel Okrent provided source material that is both thorough and vivid enough to provide surprises for history buffs that thought they already knew everything there was to know about the largest restriction of personal freedom in recent memory.

Orkent, Daniel. (2010). Last Call: The rise and fall of prohibition. New York, NY: Scribner.

Reviews:
NYT
Indie Bound