Download or read book Rhetorics for Community Action written by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics, by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, offers theory and pedagogy to introduce public writing as a complex political and creative action. To write public texts, we have to invent the public we wish to address. Such invention is a complex task, with many components to consider: exigency that brings people together; a sense of agency and capacity; a sense of how the world is and what it can become. All these components constantly compete against texts that put forward other public ideals_opposing ideas about who really has power and who really can create change. Teachers of public writing must adopt a generous response to those who venture into this arena. Some scholars believe that to prepare students for public life, university classes should partner with grassroots community organizations, rather than nonprofits that serve food or tutor students. They worry that a service-related focus will create more passive citizens who do not rally and resist or grab the attention of government leaders or corporations. With carefully contextualized study of an after-school arts program, an area soup kitchen, and parks organizations, among others, Ryder shows that many so-called 'service' organizations are not passive places at all, and she argues that the main challenge of public work is precisely that it has to take place among all of these compelling definitions of democracy. Ryder proposes teaching public writing by partnering with multiple community nonprofits. She develops a framework to help students analyze how their community partners inspire people to action, and offers a course design that support them as they convey those public ideals in community texts. But composing public texts is only part of the challenge. Traditional newspapers and magazines, through their business models and writing styles, reinforce a dominant role for citizens as thinking and reading, but not necessarily acting. This civic role is also professed in the university, where students are taught writing that extends inquiry. Phyllis Mentzell Ryder's Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics turns to the rhetorical practices of nondominant American communities and counterpublics, whose resistance to 'good' public speech and 'proper' public behavior reveals alternate modes of composing and acting in democracy.

Download or read book Writing and Community Action written by Thomas Deans and published by Pearson. This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing and Community Action: A Service-Learning Rhetoric and Reader encourages inquiry into community and social action issues, supports community-based research, and shepherds students through a range of service-learning writing projects. Several chapters offer pragmatic advice for crafting personal, reflective, and analytical essays, while service-learning chapters present experience-tested strategies for doing collaborative writing projects at nonprofit agencies, conducting research on pressing social problems, writing proposals that respond to campus and community concerns, and composing oral histories. The assignments help students to see themselves as writers whose work really matters. Provocative readings spark critical reflection on community service and a range of social concerns (including economic justice, literacy, education, homelessness, race, and identity). Focusing on invention, audience analysis, and the social purposes of writing, Writing and Community Action encourages students to adopt a rhetorical frame of mind. Hopeful in tone, this book makes clear the ways that writing can serve as action in both academic and community contexts.

Download or read book The Public Work of Rhetoric written by John M. Ackerman and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Public Work of Rhetoric presents the art of rhetorical techné as a contemporary praxis for civic engagement and social change, which is necessarily inclusive of people inside and outside the academy. In this provocative call to action, editors John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan, along with seventeen other accomplished contributors, offer case studies and criticism on the rhetorical practices of citizen-scholars pursuing democratic ideals in diverse civic communities—with partnerships across a range of media, institutions, exigencies, and discourses. Challenging conventional research methodologies and the traditional insularity of higher education, these essays argue that civic engagement as a rhetorical act requires critical attention to our notoriously veiled identity in public life, to our uneasy affiliation with democracy as a public virtue, and to the transcendent powers of discourse and ideology. This can be accomplished, the contributors argue, by building on the compatible traditions of materialist rhetoric and community literacy, two vestiges of rhetoric's dual citizenship in the fields of communication and English. This approach expresses a collective desire in rhetoric for more politically responsive scholarship, more visible impact in public life, and more access to the critical spaces between universities and their communities. The compelling case studies in The Public Work of Rhetoric are located in inner-urban and postindustrial communities where poverty is the overriding concern, in afterschool and extracurricular alternatives that offer new routes to literate achievement, in new media and digital representations of ethnic cultures designed to promote chosen identities, in neighborhoods and scientific laboratories where race is the dominant value, and in the policy borderlands between universities and the communities they serve. Through these studies and accounts, the contributors champion the notion that the public work of rhetoric is the tough labor of gaining access and trust, learning the codes and histories of communities, locating the situations in which rhetorical expertise is most effective, and in many cases jointly defining the terms for gauging social change.

Download or read book Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement written by Linda Flower and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2008-07-24 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement explores the critical practice of intercultural inquiry and rhetorical problem-solving that encourages urban writers and college mentors alike to take literate action. Author Linda Flower documents an innovative experiment in community literacy, the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh, and posits a powerful and distinctively rhetorical model of community engagement and pedagogy for both marginalized and privileged writers and speakers. In addition, she articulates a theory of local publics and explores the transformative potential of alternative discourses and counter-public performances. In presenting a comprehensive pedagogy for literate action, the volume offers strategies for talking and collaborating across difference, forconducting an intercultural inquiry that draws out situated knowledge and rival interpretations of shared problems, and for writing and speaking to advocate for personal and public transformation. Flower describes the competing scripts for social engagement, empowerment, public deliberation, and agency that characterize the interdisciplinary debate over models of social engagement. Extending the Community Literacy Center’s initial vision of community literacy first published a decade ago, Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement makes an important contribution to theoretical conversations about the nature of the public sphere while providing practical instruction in how all people can speak publicly for values and visions of change. Winner, 2009 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award

Download or read book Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement written by Linda Flower and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2008-07-24 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement explores the critical practice of intercultural inquiry and rhetorical problem-solving that encourages urban writers and college mentors alike to take literate action. Author Linda Flower documents an innovative experiment in community literacy, the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh, and posits a powerful and distinctively rhetorical model of community engagement and pedagogy for both marginalized and privileged writers and speakers. In addition, she articulates a theory of local publics and explores the transformative potential of alternative discourses and counter-public performances. In presenting a comprehensive pedagogy for literate action, the volume offers strategies for talking and collaborating across difference, forconducting an intercultural inquiry that draws out situated knowledge and rival interpretations of shared problems, and for writing and speaking to advocate for personal and public transformation. Flower describes the competing scripts for social engagement, empowerment, public deliberation, and agency that characterize the interdisciplinary debate over models of social engagement. Extending the Community Literacy Center’s initial vision of community literacy first published a decade ago, Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement makes an important contribution to theoretical conversations about the nature of the public sphere while providing practical instruction in how all people can speak publicly for values and visions of change. Winner, 2009 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award

Download or read book Nineteenth Century American Activist Rhetorics written by Patricia Bizzell and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century the United States was ablaze with activism and reform: people of all races, creeds, classes, and genders engaged with diverse intellectual, social, and civic issues. This cutting-edge, revelatory book focuses on rhetoric that is overtly political and oriented to social reform. It not only contributes to our historical understanding of the period by covering a wide array of contexts--from letters, preaching, and speeches to labor organizing, protests, journalism, and theater by white and Black women, Indigenous people, and Chinese immigrants--but also relates conflicts over imperialism, colonialism, women's rights, temperance, and slavery to today's struggles over racial justice, sexual freedom, access to multimodal knowledge, and the unjust effects of sociopolitical hierarchies. The editors' introduction traces recent scholarship on activist rhetorics and the turn in rhetorical theory toward the work of marginalized voices calling for radical social change.

Download or read book Critical Situations written by Sharon Crowley and published by Longman Publishing Group. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Situations encourages students to identify critical situations in their communities, to develop rhetorical strategies for taking action in those situations, and to produce community-based writing projects. Critical Situations is an inquiry-driven brief rhetoric that introduces students to ancient rhetorical methods for inventing and arranging texts. These ancient methods are integrated into contemporary public writing, advocacy, and cultural studies approaches to composition as students write in response to situations in their communities, producing meaningful texts that motivate them to write. Historical and contemporary case studies are integrated into writing instruction to provide a strong introduction to rhetoric. A series of workshops offers students the opportunities to explore practical, theoretical, and ethical aspects of composition. students the opportunities to explore practical, theoretical, and ethical aspects of composition.

Download or read book Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics written by Elenore Long and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2008-03-22 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a comparative analysis of “community-literacy studies," Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics traces common values in diverse accounts of “ordinary people going public.” Elenore Long offers a five-point theoretical framework. Used to review major community-literacy projects that have emerged in recent years, this local public framework uncovers profound differences, with significant consequence, within five formative perspectives: 1) the guiding metaphor behind such projects; 2) the context that defines a “local” public, shaping what is an effective, even possible performance, 3) the tenor and affective register of the discourse; 4) the literate practices that shape the discourse; and, most signficantly, 5) the nature of rhetorical invention or the generative process by which people in these accounts respond to exigencies, such as getting around gatekeepers, affirming identities, and speaking out with others across difference.

Download or read book Rhetorics Literacies and Narratives of Sustainability written by Peter N. Goggin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-02-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Touching on topics including conservation efforts in specific locales; social and political constructions of rhetorical place and space; town planning and zoning issues; and rhetorics of environmental remediation and sustainability, this collection provides rhetoricians and environmentalists a window into the discourse on sustainability.

Download or read book Democracy s Lot written by Candice Rai and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the communication strategies of various constituencies in a Chicago neighborhood, offering insights into the challenges that beset diverse urban populations and demonstrating persuasively rhetoric’s power to illuminate and resolve charged conflicts Candice Rai’s Democracy’s Lot is an incisive exploration of the limitations and possibilities of democratic discourse for resolving conflicts in urban communities. Rai roots her study of democratic politics and publics in a range of urban case studies focused on public art, community policing, and urban development. These studies examine the issues that erupted within an ethnically and economically diverse Chicago neighborhood over conflicting visions for a vacant lot called Wilson Yard. Tracing how residents with disparate agendas organized factions and deployed language, symbols, and other rhetorical devices in the struggle over Wilson Yard’s redevelopment and other contested public spaces, Rai demonstrates that rhetoric is not solely a tool of elite communicators, but rather a framework for understanding the agile communication strategies that are improvised in the rough-and-tumble work of democratic life. Wilson Yard, a lot eight blocks north of Wrigley Field in Chicago’s gentrifying Uptown neighborhood, is a diverse enclave of residents enlivened by recent immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. The neighborhood’s North Broadway Street witnesses a daily multilingual hubbub of people from a wide spectrum of income levels, religions, sexual identifications, and interest groups. When a fire left the lot vacant, this divided community projected on Wilson Yard disparate and conflicting aspirations, the resolution of which not only determined the fate of this particular urban space, but also revealed the lot of democracy itself as a process of complex problem-solving. Rai’s detailed study of one block in an iconic American city brings into vivid focus the remarkable challenges that beset democratic urban populations anywhere on the globe—and how rhetoric supplies a framework to understand and resolve those challenges. Based on exhaustive field work, Rai uses rhetorical ethnography to study competing publics, citizenship, and rhetoric in action, exploring “rhetorical invention,” the discovery or development by individuals of the resources or methods of engaging with and persuading others. She builds a case for democratic processes and behaviors based not on reflexive idealism but rather on the hard work and practice of democracy, which must address apathy, passion, conflict, and ambivalence.

Download or read book Deliberative Acts written by Arabella Lyon and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twenty-first century is characterized by the global circulation of cultures, norms, representations, discourses, and human rights claims; the arising conflicts require innovative understandings of decision making. Deliberative Acts develops a new, cogent theory of performative deliberation. Rather than conceiving deliberation within the familiar frameworks of persuasion, identification, or procedural democracy, it privileges speech acts and bodily enactments that constitute deliberation itself, reorienting deliberative theory toward the initiating moment of recognition, a moment in which interlocutors are positioned in relationship to each other and so may begin to construct a new lifeworld. By approaching human rights not as norms or laws, but as deliberative acts, Lyon conceives rights as relationships among people and as ongoing political and historical projects developing communal norms through global and cross-cultural interactions.

Download or read book From Rhetoric to Action written by Eilionóir Flynn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains a global comparative study of implementation and monitoring mechanisms for national disability strategies. It comprises a comparative study that was conducted at international, regional and comparative country levels and that highlights critical success factors in implementing disability strategies or action plans worldwide. It explores emerging synergies between what is required to implement principles of international law contained in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and what it is possible to achieve through national policy and systems development. A number of critical success factors for implementing and monitoring strategies are identified, including leadership from government and civil society, participation of disabled people in implementation and monitoring, transparency and accountability in reporting on progress, independent monitoring and external review, and the ability to measure progress with indicators of disability equality.

Download or read book Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics written by Elenore Long and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a comparative analysis of "community-literacy studies," COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS traces common values in diverse accounts of "ordinary people going public." Elenore Long offers a five-point theoretical framework. Used to review major community-literacy projects that have emerged in recent years, this local public framework uncovers profound differences, with significant consequence, within five formative perspectives: 1) the guiding metaphor behind such projects; 2) the context that defines a "local" public, shaping what is an effective, even possible performance, 3) the tenor and affective register of the discourse; 4) the literate practices that shape the discourse; and, most signficantly, 5) the nature of rhetorical invention or the generative process by which people in these accounts respond to exigencies, such as getting around gatekeepers, affirming identities, and speaking out with others across difference. COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS also examines pedagogies that educators can use to help students to go public in the course of their rhetorical education at college. the concluding chapter adapts local-public literacies to college curricula and examines how these literate moves elicit different kinds of engagement from students and require different kinds of scaffolding from teachers and community educators. A glossary and annotated bibliography provide the basis for further inquiry and research. ABOUT THE AUTHOR After completing a postdoctoral fellowship through Pittsburgh's Community Literacy Center and Carnegie Mellon University, Elenore Long continued to direct community-literacy initiatives with Wayne Peck and Joyce Baskins. With Linda Flower and Lorraine Higgins, she published LEARNING TO RIVAL: A LITERATE PRACTICE FOR INTERCULTURAL INQUIRy. They recently published a fifteen-year retrospective for the COMMUNITY LITERACY JOURNAL. She currently directs the composition program and Writers' Center at Eastern Washington University. ADVANCE PRAISE . . . "COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS is the perfect entry to the exuberant practice of literacy in community. It brings contemporary research to life-in people, stories, and purposes. And it documents the amazingly diverse ways ordinary people go public. Moreover, Elenore Long's imaginative theoretical framework lets us understand and critically compare alternative images of local public life-from the literate worlds of church women, writing groups, and street gangs to the performances of community organizing, street theater, and local think tanks. Long's analytical and profoundly rhetorical insight is to compare community literacies in terms of their framing metaphors, privileged practices, and processes of rhetorical invention. And that is perhaps what makes the final chapter such a pedagogical powerhouse-a brilliantly critical and concrete guide to supporting our students and ourselves in local literate action." -Linda Flower, Carnegie Mellon "Elenore Long's COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS begins to articulate a history for community literacy studies, and such a history is essential for helping us figure out where we are going with this area of inquiry. Long provides a new set of tools as well, and her local publics framework, in particular, will prove valuable to researchers and teachers alike." -Jeff Grabill

Download or read book Vision Rhetoric and Social Action in the Composition Classroom written by Kristie S. Fleckenstein and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2009-11-16 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative volume, Kristie S. Fleckenstein explores how the intersection of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy in the classroom can help students become compassionate citizens who participate in the world as they become more critically aware of the world. Fleckenstein argues that all social action—behavior designed to increase human dignity, value, and quality of life—depends on a person’s repertoire of visual and rhetorical habits. To develop this repertoire in students, the author advocates the incorporation of visual habits—or ways of seeing—into a language-based pedagogical approach in the writing classroom. According to Fleckenstein, interweaving the visual and rhetorical in composition pedagogy enables students to more readily perceive the need for change, while arming them with the abilities and desire to enact it. The author addresses social action from the perspective of three visual habits: spectacle, which fosters disengagement; animation, or fusing body with meaning; and antinomy, which invites the invention of new realities. Fleckenstein then examines the ways in which particular visual habits interact with rhetorical habits and with classroom methods, resulting in the emergence of various forms of social action. To enhance the understanding of the concepts she discusses, the author represents the intertwining relationships of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy graphically as what she calls symbiotic knots. In tracing the modes of social action privileged by a visual habit and a teacher’s pedagogical choices, Fleckenstein attends particularly to the experiences of students who have been traditionally barred from participation in the public sphere because of gender, race, or class. The book culminates in a call for visually and rhetorically robust writing pedagogies. In Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom, Fleckenstein combines classic methods of rhetorical teaching with fresh perspectives to provide a unique guide for initiating important improvements in teaching social action. The result is a remarkable volume that empowers teachers to best inspire students to take part in their world at that most crucial moment when they are discovering it.

Download or read book Activism and Rhetoric written by JongHwa Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of this formative collection offers analysis of the work rhetoric plays in the principles and practices of today’s culture of democratic activism. Editors JongHwa Lee and Seth Kahn—and their diverse contributors working in communication and composition studies both within and outside academia—provide explicit articulation of how activist rhetoric differs from the kinds of deliberative models that rhetoric has exalted for centuries, contextualized through and by contributors’ everyday lives, work, and interests. New to this edition are attention to Black Lives Matter, the transgender community, social media environments, globalization, and environmental activism. Simultaneously challenging and accessible, Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement is a must-read for students and scholars who are interested in or actively engaged in rhetoric, composition, political communication, and social justice. Chapters 1, 6, and 13 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Download or read book Professing Rhetoric written by Frederick J. Antczak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-04-11 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing current theory and research in rhetoric, this volume brings together scholarship from a variety of orientations--theoretical, critical, historical, and pedagogical. Some contributions cover work that has previously been silenced or unrecognized, including Native American, African American, Latino, and women's rhetorics. Others explore rhetoric's relationship to performance and to the body, or to revising canons, stases, topoi, and pisteis. Still others are reworking the rhetorical lexicon to comprise contemporary theory. Among these diverse interests, rhetoricians find common themes and share intellectual and pedagogical enterprises that hold them together even as their institutional situations keep them apart. Topics discussed in this collection include: *Rhetoric as figurality; comparative and contrastive rhetorics; rhetoric and gender; and rhetorics of science and technology; *Rhetoric and reconceptions of the public sphere; rhetoric and public memory; and rhetorics of globalization and social change, including issues of race, ethnicity, and nationalism; *Rhetoric's institutionalized place in the academy, in relation to other humanities and to the interpretive social sciences; and *The place of rhetoric in the formation of departments and the development of pedagogy With its origins in the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference, this volume represents the range and vitality of current scholarship in rhetoric. The conversations contained herein indicate that professing rhetoric is, at the turn of the millennium, an intellectual activity that engages with and helps formulate the most important public and scholarly questions of today. As such, it will be engaging reading for scholars and students, and is certain to provoke further thought, discussion, and exploration.

Download or read book Looking for Trouble and Making It written by Rebecca J. Hayes and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: