digital rhetoric and professional communication
First off, what a bizarre intractable rhetorical situation this is! There is the broad cultural characterization that professors do little work because they teach so few classes, which even in itself is accurate characterization of many professors' workloads. This is followed by a whole sub-genre of essays describing the intense demands placed on academics, how... Continue Reading →
Long ago, when I was an undergrad, I learned how to read Tarot cards. (Hey, stop rolling your eyes; I saw that.) I haven't done it in years, though when I was a professor at Cortland we'd go on writing retreats to this Adirondack camp with our students and my colleague, Vicky Boynton, and I... Continue Reading →
Asao Inoue has a thoughtful post here revisiting James Berlin and the idea of composition as instruction in democratic citizenship. Undoubtedly there is a deep connection to classical rhetoric in this connection, though Berlin revitalized that link for the postmodern era. Like Inoue, I was also strongly affected by Berlin as a grad student in the... Continue Reading →
Two weeks ago I wrote a post about Mark Lilla's NY Times op-ed, "The End of Identity Liberalism." As I noted then, I did not imagine many of my colleagues would share his views (and neither do I, as I think that post made clear, though perhaps I had different objections than other academics). Chris Newfield offers... Continue Reading →
In a New York Times editorial, "The End of Identity Liberalism," Mark Lilla, a Columbia history professor, makes an argument that runs against much of the discourse I hear from the academic left. I am curious what others think of it. In part I'm writing this to work through my own thoughts on the matter. All... Continue Reading →
I went to see Arrival last night. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it fits into the subgenre of science fiction where scientists save the world in the face of aliens, panicked citizens, paranoid politicians, and trigger-happy soldiers. To be sure there are other kinds of contact movies (E.T. for example) where friendly... Continue Reading →
In our Teaching Practicum, we're reading Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. If you aren't familiar with it, it's an interesting texts with many contributors that seeks to identify some of the threshold concepts of our discipline where "threshold concepts" have some specific, though unsurprising, characteristics: Learning them is generally transformative, involving “an ontological... Continue Reading →
Perhaps you are familiar with the recent and excellent essay collection, Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition (edited by Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers). If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it, but I'm not here to talk about it today. It's just the inspiration for the title of this missive, where I... Continue Reading →
I seem to have developed a recent preference for the term "cognitive-media ecology." It's not a term one finds readily bandied about, but it references a familiar concept or at least an intersection of two familiar concepts: media ecology and cognitive ecology. Though they are separate fields with the latter including a more constellation of empirical... Continue Reading →
