hints, allegations … another fine mess
I’ve updated Mild Sauce once again, adding a new character. Either it answers questions, confirms suspicions, or makes things more oblique than they already were. Comments are off for this post — any responses, send to me via e-mail.
dateline: detroit
I have noted in the past few months a couple of instances of Detroit appearing in less-than-ideal circumstances in some polls and studies and whatnot. One story had Detroit being the 7th most miserable city in America, while another centered on the emptying out of Detroit’s urban center.
Today comes news that Detroit is ranked the 3rd Most Dangerous City in America (Flint comes in at #6). Some context-free stats:
Detroit, Michigan
Rankings in Crime
Assault: 2
Murder: 6
Rape: 150
Motor Vehicle Theft: 2
Robbery: 5
Burglary: 14
This is apparently in conjunction with a related study (maybe even the same one, actually) that ranked the most dangerous states in America; our pleasant peninsula came in at #10:
Michigan is home to two of the most dangerous cities in America, according to the 2008 CQ Press city rankings. Detroit ranks third and Flint ranks sixth.
Rankings in Crime (out of 50 states)
(1 = Worst, 50 = Best)
Assault: 12
Burglary: 17
Murder: 10
Motor Vehicle Theft: 9
Rape: 3
Robbery: 19
So, you know, look out.
let us discourse on twitter
I have nothing against Twitter, tweeting, or, as Stephen Colbert would have it, tw@tting. However, at the risk of sounding like a tech burnout or tech fatigue victim, let me demonstrate why I am opting out of the new hotness:
- Four email addresses (school, Yahoo, GMail, AOL)
- Two blogs (this, obviously, and the occasionally-updated Mild Sauce comic strip blog … note to self, intro new character to Mild Sauce universe)
- One professional homepage
- One online CV
- A slew of wikis (3010, two for 1020, the Moby Diki, and participate in the WSU Rhetoric wiki)
- One Facebook account
Now, I’m not saying that I’m unique in this or anything. But honestly, I just don’t want to add one more thing to the mix here. So until I retire one of the above (which I don’t see happening anytime soon) I’m remaining proudly Twitter-free.
I think.
4Cs-section
Feel free to excoriate me, as usual, for my over-reliance on deplorable puns.
It has now been almost exactly a week (and some change) since I presented at my first 4Cs conference (and yes, I know that “4Cs conference” is redundant, since spelled out it means Conference on College Composition and Communication conference. I like the redundancy I like). Forthwith, some brief commentary thereon.
- Given that RSA and 4Cs are not the same conference, I kind of liked RSA better. There were more panels that I was interested to attend at RSA, and whether this was a function of (a) this year’s batch of 4Cs panels, (b) my own admitted lack of participation in many panels (I didn’t attend very many), or (c) a general distractedness from the work of the conference (which I attribute to personal reasons that I will not disclose here) I just didn’t get in to the conference aspect of my time in SF as much as I did at RSA last year.
- In response to points (a) and (b) above … Looking over the 4Cs program, I saw a lot of panels that seemed really atheoretical to me, or if not atheoretical than certainly ones that didn’t promise to delve into theoretical questions of much interest to me. Whether this is typical of 4Cs I cannot say, but talking with faculty members after (who I shall be politic and leave anonymous here) seems to confirm my reading of this year’s batch of work. Other faculty members have noted that 4Cs moves in cycles between being heavily theoretical and being more focused on questions of practice, so there remains the possibility that I just happened to catch 4Cs in one of its less-theoretical turns.
- Without accusing the scholarly work of any of the panelists involved, I think the workshop I attended (on pop culture in the comp classroom) is a good case in point. Except for maybe one of the talks (which focused on humor theory, new to me but certainly of interest), the presentations at this workshop were largely just a recitation of the kinds of ways these folks have been using popcult texts; so one presenter discussed her use of South Park, another did blogs, another did Second Life …. All valuable approaches, I’m sure, but I was rather hoping for an opportunity to join a conversation about why we might use popcult in the classroom, or even (following Rice’s example) ways we might use it other than ideological/cultural critique. These questions — which I would argue are fundamentally theoretical ones — weren’t the order of the day, to my disappointment. I will be fair and note that maybe this is what workshops do, and since this was my first I really have no prior experience to draw on for comparison.
- Beers: Anchor Steam, Fat Tire, a cider at the “Irish” Pub down the street from the hotel. Also something in a can that Bill bought but danged if I remember what it was called.
- More Indian food: chicken tikka masala at the joint across from the hotel. Keen place: it was BYOB so we bought some beers from the liquor store and walked it over to enjoy with our masalas and naan.
- I get the impression from peers and colleagues that my panel overall and my talk individually were well-received, even if there was also a consensus that being scheduled in the last slot of the day (4:45-6:00) made for a kind of exhausted and logy audience. I gave my talk from my computer, which I didn’t really like doing, but I’d made some last-minute revisions (fairly considerable ones) and hadn’t had an opportunity to print it out.
- Anne Wysocki (and two other scholars whose names I don’t remember, nor do I have my program handy) did an interesting panel that was really more art installation that conference talk, focusing on different ways to visualize moments in 4Cs history … Wordles, comics, timelines, videos, etc. After some time to walk and browse, Wysocki and The Other Two (my humblest apologies — I will try to update with your names soon!) led a discussion both on the moments as represented and on the “missing” elements from their representations. Of course, my head cold was raging and I heard very little of said discussion, but it seemed interesting.
- I have no illusions that they were there for little ol’ me, but I was pleased as punch to see the following scholars as auditors for my panel: V. Vitanza, C. Haynes, D. Davis, G. Sirc, E. Barton (okay, the last is kind of cheating since she’s my D of C, but still).
- From the other two Wayne State-related panels that I attended (or saw some of), I think we acquitted ourselves well.
- A thought on Wayne State. As noted, I didn’t attend many panels, but I was interested to note that several of my peers thought that much of the conference was kind of light on theory as well. Although Wayne isn’t (as yet) noted as a “reputable” rhetcomp program, I think the fact that many of its current rhetcomp students have such strong interests in theory and theoretical work (both in doing theory and grounding teaching practices in theory) bodes well for our rep in coming years. Maybe. I dunno.
- Nice to chat with our recent interviewees again, and pleased to learn that (as Rice announced before our panel) D. Mueller will be joining our friends in Ypsi in the coming year. It’s nice that SE Michigan might stand a chance at becoming something of a regional powerhouse in the field.
- I did see the Haight, Golden Gate Park, Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown, etc. Highlights were Amoeba Music in the Haight and the Japanese Tea Garden in the park.
- E. Barton’s award acceptance was quite nice, and I was happy that JG, WD, and I could be there to applaud our much-respected and -admired D of C. I like the sentiment she closed with, which I’ll poach here with a note that, after returning from the Cornell School of Theory and Criticism this summer, I plan to work on revising some papers for publication submission: “As I tell my grad students, when you write for CCC you write for the whole field, and knowing this award comes from the whole field is a tremendous honor.” I think I flubbed the second bit of that (EB can correct me if she reads this) but the first part (about the journal and the field) is a useful thing to keep in mind.
- One to grow on: I will by god win the Berlin Award for Outstanding Dissertation. That is my goal.
new hotness
Well, new Batman-related hotness anyway.
I gotta say, of these, my favorite is probably the Filmation logo from the late 70s. I’d give it a longer tail, maybe, and a slighter wider wingspan, but otherwise its a pretty sweet version of the bat-logo.
maximum theory
@ Wired.com
Awesome.
nutblaster … not a porno
A quick note on the beer front, since I have been admittedly lackadaisical about updating readers on that particular enterprise. For those who don’t know, among other outcomes of last year’s RSA conference was a commitment on my part to make more of an attempt to come to appreciate beer drinking. So far, this has largely been a failure, not so much because it turns out I hate beer or anything, but because I usually forget to follow through with it.
So, today’s post, an attempt to begin again/continue/resume said beer quest.
MCBW logo
At the most recent rhetoric reading group meeting, I tried out the Motor City Brewing Works’s “NutBlaster,” a blend of Ghettoblaster and Nut Brown ale. I grant I might have missed something since I’m not a regular drinker of either of the two source beers (or any beer, obviously) so I can’t speak to how the NutBlaster combines the flavors of the originals. That said, I enjoyed the NB on the whole, picking up some flavors in particulars: toast, wheat, and (duh) nuts among them … maybe even a little coffee-ish flavor in the aftertaste. The color effect is something like a dark brown sugar color, and although one or two of the dark beers I’ve tried in the past have had kind of an oily, viscous quality in the mouth, the NB had none of that: very smooth and crisp.
So, there you have it. My largely ignorant review of MCBW’s NutBlaster, for your reading pleasure.
louis althusizzair
Because you never know when you will need a picture of Althusser with mad bling.
constructing knowledges: constructing literacy
In “Ideology, Literacy, and Radical Pedagogy in Composition Studies,” Sidney Dobrin reconsiders some of the history of the field’s engagement with theories that tie literacy to broader questions of social and ideological import. As Dobrin presents them, these “Literacy Debates” have required of composition scholars that we understand literacy as more than a transhistorical and universalized body of discursive skills; more specifically, “compositionists have also begun to examine ways in which social ideologies influence not only how we teach writing and how students learn writing but also how we conceive of the very nature of what literacy is” (119). Broadly speaking, the field’s definition of literacy has moved from one that “traditionally distinguished between those who could read and those who could not” (127) to a definition that emphasizes both the cultural and contextual nature of literate practice (133-6) and points to the possibility of deploying radical pedagogies that would teach discursive practices that can be used for critique of unjust social arrangements (137-8).
Dobrin calls some composition scholars to task for perpetuating a discourse of crisis in literacy studies. This discourse of crisis allows for the pathologizing of individuals who are seen as not possessing whatever necessary definition of literacy is being argued for (129-30). Dobrin reads this series of literacy crises as indicating more about the field’s disciplinary and ideological commitments than about any real crisis in literate practice. As Dobrin explains,
… ultimately, literacy debates are defined by strategic maneuvers more so than [by] moral or ethical positions…. In their writings about literacy, scholars frequently mistakenly associate the systemic nature of discourse with the moral and ethical effects they hope to achieve. Frequently in our discussions about literacy we mistakenly attempt to devise pedagogies that we hope to serve as local panaceas for an ethical crisis of literacy that we have constructed from traditional theories of literacy. (129)
In part, this passage stands in line with Dobrin’s larger critique of the pedagogical imperative that stands to limit composition studies as an intellectual enterprise. Insofar as I agree with this critique, I find Dobrin’s analysis of the field’s literacy debates a fruitful one. However, this passage also points to a possible shortsightedness in Dobrin’s critique. While Dobrin’s analysis here focuses primarily on a question of the relation to theory to practice (here, the question being how our theories of literacy should dictate pedagogical practice), I read Dobrin here also critiquing the pattern of crisis-theory-pedagogy that emerges from his reading of the literacy debates. I would argue, in contrast, that the (re-) definition of literacy is an important task specifically for the ways in which it can further composition’s ideological, theoretical, and pedagogical work. That is, while Dobrin critiques such moves for being “strategic maneuvers,” I would argue that is exactly their strategic quality that makes them valuable for the field.
Implicit in my argument, then, is the belief that defining terms such as literacy is always ideologically loaded (this is the key premise underlying works such as Raymond Williams’s Keywords) and thus has important implications for composition theory and pedagogy. Dobrin errs in his critique cited above in that he emphasizes the constructedness of the literacy crisis rather than the ideologically strategic quality of such constructions. The shift in emphasis which I would urge on Dobrin would draw attention instead to the ways in which constructing a crisis and posing a solution thereto becomes a key part not just of theoretical and pedagogical work in composition studies but of its ideological commitments as well. In doing so, composition scholars and pedagogues open the opportunity for staking a claim for understanding literacy (or any contested terms, for that matter) in ways that make defining them arguments for particular ideological stances within the field. As an example, we might look to a work like Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, which in arguing for a multiliteracy approach for computer instruction in composition explicitly argues for a critical stance toward technology and the (often obscured) questions of power that come with its inclusion in the composition curriculum (a move which Adam Banks similarly makes in Race, Rhetoric, and Technology). By drawing attention to the discourse of crisis rather than to these strategic moves, Dobrin elides the question of how such (re-) definitions might be employed to further ideological commitments both within composition studies and without, in its relationship to other institutional and social interests.
fpotw
Or, you know you’re in grad school when … sentences like this make sense:
That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, “I am ideological.”
From Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Great read, by the way — a lot of fun.