I’ve decided to do a project involving the SU archives; specifically, a project that looks at disability advocacy on campus. On paper, disability advocacy seems prominent at Syracuse. It is present within academic life—through the Disability Studies Program (the first DS program in the United States) and the Disability Law and Policy Program. Disability is also widely represented through campus and community organizations. According to the DSP website, there are approximately fourteen university-affiliated organizations and centers that focus on disability, advocacy, and disability-related issues.

Center on Human Policy (thechp.syr.edu)

It is this influx of organizations—a mix between university, faculty, student, and community interests—that I plan to explore within my social history project. Specifically, I am interested in looking at the role that students have played in supporting and advocating disability rights through these organizations. I imagine the local establishment of the Center on Human Policy in 1971 has greatly impacted Syracuse students’ attention toward disability advocacy issues. The creation of the center, however, does not itself assure a strong student interest.

How did SU students become so involved, at least through organizations, with disability rights issues? How are these student organizations working toward social change?

As I’ve learned more about disability rights and (self-)advocacy, I’ve become increasingly interested in the way disability narratives are constructed:

Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee (bccc.syr.edu)

• Who tells them?
• How are they framed?
• How is the “voice” of disability manifested?
• What do we gain from these histories?

The purpose of this project, then, is an attempt to bridge my personal interests with disability narratives with the local (and historical) establishment of student-run, disability-related organizations on the SU campus.

My research questions will depend a lot on what materials I find, but I do have some tentative originating questions:

• In many ways, students with disabilities are Othered—low percentages of students with disabilities attend college and of those who do, few receive the “reasonable” accommodations they need. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau argues that “the space of a tactic is the space of the other” (37) and is determined by “the absence of power” (38). In what ways do SU’s student disability organizations occupy tactical spaces? How do they gain power through their institutional affiliations? How is this power negotiated?
• In “Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion for Social Movements,” Simons defines a social movement as “an uninstitutionalized collectivity that mobilizes for action to implement a program for the reconstruction of social norms and values” (36). How do university-affiliated organizations complicate this definition? How do these student organizations identify with, and differ from, larger social movements (such as the Disability Rights Movement)?
• What social, cultural, and political factors have shaped disability organizations over the years? How do these shifts relate to a larger understanding of the state of disability advocacy, both on campuses and within communities?
• How do student disability advocacy organizations employ rhetoric to organize and enact social change? In terms of genres, how do these groups use similar or different rhetorical moves? Do these moves differ from those made by other student advocacy groups?

I recognize that, with time constraints, this is an abbreviated archival project. However, I think this will project will provide me an opportunity to learn more about Syracuse’s advocacy history and how those historical factors and events have informed contemporary understandings of disability advocacy.

Quite frankly, I’m pumped to start digging!

 

Broadening what counts as archival work.

In “Archival Survival: Navigating Historical Research,” Gaillet offers an extended definition of what counts as archival texts:

“a wide range of artifacts and documents, such as (unpublished and published) letters, diaries and journals, student notes, committee reports, documents and wills, newspaper articles, university calendars/handbooks/catalogs, various editions of manuscripts and print documents (books, pamphlets, essays, etc.), memos, course materials, online sources, audiotapes, videotapes, and even ‘archeological’ fragments and finds” (30).

Glenn and Enoch also ask us to move away from the “upper-case-A Archives” defined by Connors (and reiterated by Bazerman) as “‘specialized kinds of libraries’ containing those ‘rarest and most valuable of data’ that usually exist in ‘only a single copy’” (225 qtd. in 16). This could mean a spatial shift from large research-university libraries to local community archives, but it also necessitates a shift in what kind of texts we value. Glenn and Enos see archival work extending beyond the university, beyond prestigious research libraries to explore more local and situational sites (something that Stake echoes again and again). This expansion allows us to collect information and gain insights about groups and communities who are not represented within the capital-A archives.

Considering our researcher positionalities.

"Archives Shaping Man" via Randolph County Archives

I was excited by the attention to researcher positionality throughout these readings because our readings thus far have addressed it only in terms of feminist research. And certainly, Glenn and Enos have some important things to say on this topic. They “acknowledge that histories are always partial and always interested” (21), arguing that researchers must continually “try to uncover the ways our positionality operates and to consider, throughout the historiographic process, how this stance channels us to write one kind of history and directs us away from other possibilities” (22). For me, this statement clarifies some of the conversations we’ve had about the role of ideology in research and how evidence is analyzed through particular lenses. Glenn and Enos warn against allowing our personal interests to misrepresent the evidence, arguing that “the reading and the theory should inform each other” (23).

Gaillet also acknowledges that historiographic projects require the researcher to become a part of—and participant within—the project, but she also extends this argument to archival work. Framed as storytelling, Gaillet argues that archival research “[makes] clear the teller’s prejudices” (36). In order to weave together facts, stories, histories and perspectives, these prejudices must be constantly negotiated.

Stake defines this negotiation as part of what distinguishes qualitative research from quantitative. He writes, “For qualitative research, the researcher him- or herself is an instrument, observing action and contexts, often intentionally playing a subjective role in the study, using his or her own personal experience in making interpretations” (20). Because qualitative research is interpretive, the researcher must always filter observations, data, and analysis through her own experiences and knowledge. And in this way, Stake argues that positionality must be considered for all researchers. Even quantitative researchers who strive for objectivity must, at times, be interpretive and thus qualitative (30).

Recognizing the human impact. 

In many ways, acknowledging the human impact of archival work is a continuation of the previous section. At the same time, though, it extends to a larger argument about the importance of who is represented (and how they are represented). Stake blends these two sides when he writes, “Human are the researchers. Humans are being studied. Humans are the interpreters” (36). The human element becomes important not only for the researcher but also for the researched.

“The topic of the research is not always human activity, but the perspective is the human perspective” (Stake 70).

In their discussion of historiographic research, Glenn and Enos argue that we must always think about the impact that the research will have on other “agents” of the archival process—namely, the people who are researched. They reference Royster (“When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own”), who claims that research projects must try to both understand and benefit the communities and people who are “subject matter but not subjects” (32 qtd. in 24). Harking back to Moss, all qualitative projects must always consider how to most accurately and fairly represent the people and communities that are studied.

Glenn and Enos’s conclusion is a great way to think about some larger implications for archival research and qualitative research more generally. They write, “When we engage in research, we need to know what our self-interest is, how that interest might enrich our disciplinary field as it affects others (perhaps even bridging the gap between academia and other communities), and resolve to participate in a reciprocal cross-boundary exchange, in which we talk with and listen to Others, whether they are speaking to us in person or via archival materials” (24). As qualitative researchers, we must negotiate our own interests and positionalities with those who are studied, whether those people are studied directly (as in ethnographic study) or indirectly (through the archives).

Glenn, Cheryl, and Jessica Enoch. “Invigorating Historiographic Practices in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.” Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition. Eds. Alexis E. Ramsey, Wendy B. Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa S. Mastrangelo. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2010. 11-27.

Gaillet, Lynée Lewis. “Archival Survival: Navigating Historical Research.” Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition. Eds. Alexis E. Ramsey, Wendy B. Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa S. Mastrangelo.Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2010. 28-39.

Stake, Robert E. Qualitative Research: Studying How Things Work. New York, Guilford Press, 2010.

“If we want to use literacy development for social (or community) change, we cannot do it within traditional educational institutions.” And then a question:

“If that’s true, then what are we doing trying to teach literacy for social change in universities?”

This question followed a discussion of literacy sponsors. Brandt defines these sponsors of literacy as “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (166).  That is, sponsors are authorial figures who hold the power regardless of whether they are doing something beneficial for others—such as enabling or teaching—or doing something beneficial for themselves—such as regulating or withholding. And in fact, sponsors hold that power regardless of whether or not they share it.

And though we, as writing teachers, are certainly sponsors of literacy, Brandt argues that we are not the only, or the most powerful, ones. Instead, we act as “brokers” who make our students aware of literacy uses and how they can best navigate a literacy economy (183). For Brandt, then, social change can’t come from traditional educational institutions because writing teachers aren’t powerful enough to make that change happen.

Community literacy is defined by Peck, Flower, and Higgins as “literate acts that could yoke community action with intercultural education, strategic thinking and problem solving, and with observation-based research and theory building” (200). More specifically, community literacy supports both social change and intercultural dialogue, presents strategies for decision-making to the conversation, and addresses a genuine inquiry (205). Within this context, then, community literacy is a collaborative effort to enact change.  And according to the authors, education and inquiry are central to community literacies (214-5).

This education isn’t necessarily attributed to institutionalized education, though. Peck, Flower, and Higgins write, “When university faculty enter communities to “consult,” they often assume their expertise is immediately transferable” (219). This speaks to the power struggles between sponsors and those who are sponsored. Then, a community literacy must negotiate these power struggles and engage with them in an open, intercultural, multi-vocal dialogue to make change. From this perspective, educational institutions can support change, but they cannot control it without community collaboration.

And finally, Kates approaches power and literacy from an historical perspective. Within the segregated South, the Citizenship School founders believed that if community members learned to read and write, so that they could register vote, “they could better address the poverty and social problems faced by their community” (485). In this way, literacy became a tool for fighting social injustice (491) and also a larger community commitment: “The acquisition of literacy comes with a particular responsibility—service to others who do not possess the ability to read or write” (496).

Though the Citizenship Schools were obviously educational institutions, they were not traditional schools. There was also an extracurricular element to these schools because as the students gained reading and writing literacy, they held classes in their own homes and attracted more community members to the cause (487). Because, in this context, literacy acquisition was (and still is) dependent on very real economic and racial barriers, traditional educational institutions alone would not have been able to enact social change through literacy. And as Kates points out in her conclusion, universities still struggle with these issues through service-learning programs.

None of these three articles answer a resounding “yes” to our abilities to enact social change within educational institutions. What they do show is that literacy and its effects are always contextual and local. Who is the sponsor of literacy? Who are the sponsored? What is the historical, cultural, and political context? What is the purpose, the end goal, the “social change”?

Can we teach literacy for purposes of social change within university power structures?

Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” CCC 49.2 (May 1998): 165-85.

Peck, Wayne Campbell, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins. “Community Literacy.” CCC 46.2 (May 1995): 199-222.

Kates, Susan. “Literacy, Voting Rights, and the Citizenship Schools in the South, 1957-70.” CCC 57.3 (Feb. 2006): 479-502.

In “More Methodological Matters: Against Negative Argumentation,” Ellen Barton explores composition’s recent “ethical turn” toward methodologies that support collaborative, participatory, and self-reflexive relationships. Specifically, Barton argues against the negative methodological arguments that circulate within, and limit, our field—arguments that present close-relationship methodologies in opposition to other methodologies. This negative argumentation implies that “research that does not incorporate collaborative and reflexive design and analysis is (vaguely) ethically suspect” (Barton 401), which has led to the gradual abandonment of methodologies that do not support collaborative relationships and self-reflexive practices (402).

Because of its focus on systematic analysis, empirical research is devalued within this framework. Barton outlines three implications of devaluing empirical methodologies:

1. Empirical frameworks that are ethical are ignored;
2. The field is cut off to particular research-based inquiries;
3. Our methodological options, as experienced or new researchers, are limited. 403

Using her own ethnographic research as an example, Barton argues that “not all studies in composition can or should be designed as collaborative and reflexive studies” (404). This acknowledgment necessitates a different understanding of how we define ethics. For Barton, ethical research requires total consent of research participants and complete representation of data (405). These requirements resituate empirical research into the realm of the ethical, positioning it is a viable, and necessary, form of research within composition studies.

Barton concludes on a hopeful note, claiming that the support of both empirical and non-empirical research methodologies will allow composition to “contribute a full range of ethically-formulated questions, methods, analyses, and interpretations from a truly interdisciplinary methodological repertoire” (410).

Barton’s article appears in 2000, and five years later, we see Richard Haswell also address the rift between research methodologies (and ideologies). In “NCTE/CCC’s Recent War on Scholarship,” Haswell examines historical trends within composition studies from 1940-1999. Like Barton, Haswell works against the idea that quantitative methodologies—”empirical inquiry, laboratory studies, data gathering, experimental investigation, formal research, hard research”—should be viewed within our discipline as “the enemy” (Haswell 200).

Haswell creates an argument for replicable, aggregable, and data supported [RAD] scholarship, which is different from empirical research—Barton’s focus. RAD scholarship avoids terms such as empirical and theory to avoid dichotomous oppositions between empirical and qualitative, research and theory (201). And unlike Barton, Haswell doesn’t overtly discuss ethics, although it is implied in his values of RAD scholarship—its ”comparability, replicability, and accruability” (202)—which allow compositionists to outline their research clearly and ethically.

Haswell himself lays out his methods clearly, looking at the historical record of three topics central to teaching college writing: the research paper, the benefits of writing courses, and peer review (206). He uses the CompPile database to find articles about these topics both within NCTE/CCC affiliated journals—College English, College Composition and Communication, and Research in the Teaching of English—and within other journals that explore these three topics.

Haswell’s research identifies a “severe decline” (215) in RAD scholarship within the three NCTE/CCCC-affiliated journals, a decline not mirrored within other disciplines, which leads to a warning that NCTE and CCCC are “letting others do their hard research for them” (217). In fact, Haswell’s entire conclusion is foreboding. He describes composition in terms of  a failing immune system, claiming that it lacks the ability to ward off external criticism of its practices with the solid data that other disciplines require (219). Finally, Haswell ends with a quotation from Written Communication founder Stephen Witte: “A field that presumes the efficacy of a particular research methodology, a particular inquiry paradigm, will collapse inward upon itself” (207 qtd. in 220).

Reading Barton and Haswell together raises a number of questions about the use of quantitative methodologies within Rhet/Comp and the state of Rhet/Comp itself:

• Barton and Haswell’s articles are night and day in terms of tone (hopeful vs. bleak). What caused such a shift in the exigency of our field’s division of methodologies?
• Barton uses the term empirical, yet Haswell avoids anything that could be labeled as “scientism, fact mongering, antihumanism, positivism, modernism, or worse” (200). How do we understand these differences in language? How do empirical studies and RAD studies differ and overlap?
• Barton writes, “Fewer and fewer studies, it seems, ask questions about how people think and write, about how people compose in real time, or about how groups of people write” (407). What does this mean about the discourse currently circulating within composition? What does it say about our disciplinary values?
• Finally, Haswell asks, “Will these trends, if they continue, lead to the eventual disappearance of college composition as a legitimate field of study?” (217). What are the ethical implications of ignoring empirical/quantitative methodologies? What are the greater disciplinary implications?

Haswell, Richard H. “NCTE/CCCC’s Recent War on Scholarship.” Written Communication 22.2 (April 2005): 198-223.

Barton, Ellen. “More Methodological Matters: Against Negative Argumentation.” CCC 51.3 (Feb. 2000): 399-416.

I’ve been thinking about my mom a lot today after reading about Komen for the Cure’s decision to end their partnership with Planned Parenthood. This news certainly hits home for personal reasons—my mom and I walked in many Race for the Cure events before and after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Also, cancer preventions and awareness are important to me, as the chances that I will develop one of those cancers is incredibly high.

What I keep coming back to, though, is the manipulative political rhetoric that has influenced this decision—that because Planned Parenthood provides abortions (as one of its many, many services), Komen for the Cure must be pro-choice to support everything that Planned Parenthood does.

Admittedly, I’ve been immersed in The Practices of Everyday Life for the past few days, and it has certainly influenced my thinking.  de Certeau writes that “both rhetoric and everyday practices can be defined as internal manipulations of a system—that of language or that of an established order” (23-4). And in thinking about rhetoric as manipulation, of the strategies of bodies in power manipulating those without power, without place, I think of the thousands of women who will be affected by Komen for the Cure’s decision. In the ThinkProgress article I read, Marie Diamond wrote, “The charity’s decision has succeeded only in depriving low-income women of cancer screenings that could save their lives.”

With Komen’s support, Planned Parenthood has provided screenings for hundreds of thousands of low-income women and women of color. And this decision, which was pressured by powerful, conservative institutions, stinks of fear-based rhetoric that—intended or not—has serious classist and racist repercussions.

I don’t have any answers for this devastating decision, but I think it’s important to be aware of the very real repercussions that rhetoric has when manipulated by powerful institutions. More importantly, my heart hurts for the thousands of women who will be affected by this decision. Hopefully, de Certeau is right about people without institutional power finding ways to fight back.

This “lack” of sexual ability prevails within our cultural narratives of disability. We see this in the news (e.g., stories of women with disabilities who are given hysterectomies so they cannot reproduce), in movies that equate sex with pity (e.g. I Am Sam), and in collective understandings of sex, sexuality, and ability.

Rodney Bell, Sins Invalid Performer - via Richard Downing

Sins Invalid: An Unashamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility, a performance project that explores disability and sexuality, seeks to disrupt these narratives. According to their mission statement, Sins Invalid works to “develop and present cutting-edge work where normative paradigms of ‘normal’ and ‘sexy’ are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all individuals and communities.” The project celebrates artists who have been historically marginalized because of their disabled, raced, or queered bodies.

More recently, Sins Invalid members and volunteers have been working on a film project to share their work with people outside of the San Francisco/Bay Area. The purpose of the film is to open a dialogue about the “taboo” issue of sex/uality and dis/ability and show that all bodies are both beautiful and valuable.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can visit their website to read more about Sins Invalid and even see some of their videos. To find out more about their film (or to donate to the project), you can visit their Kickstarter page. This project is a great opportunity to educate a wider audience about the beauty of all people’s bodies and to work against the idea that people with disabilities lack sexual identities. Best of luck to the group with completing the project!

Then I started watching the State of the Union. Obama talked about higher ed—giving more money to community colleges, decreasing college tuitions, and allowing teachers to teach in more creative ways. When Obama said, “Higher education can’t be a luxury; it is an economic imperative,” I started thinking about the importance of literacy education.

In many ways, literacy is a way to talk about the political uses of language. In “Redefining the Literate Self: The Politics of Critical Affirmation,” Min-Zhan Lu discusses the political dimensions of being literate. She writes that the ideal literate self must focus on ending oppression, grapple with our own privileges, approach histories more responsibly and respectfully, and affirm a yearning for individual agency (173). To do this, she explains, we have to change the way academics see and read other academics.

I would add to that a necessity to change the way we see and read the value of our students, our classroom practices, and our institutions. When people see systems as broken (and when, admittedly, those systems are broken), when people devalue particular languages and literacies, and when economic success is hinged on the mastery of certain literacies, we hurt our students by ignoring the politics of literacy.

As Richard Marback reminds us, if teachers are respectful of their students’ positionalities (and languages), we better position our students to learn. Marback writes, “For equality in schools to become a real possibility, we must in public dignify each other. To dignify each other, we must deliberate about the attitudes and goals we want in our schools” (29). I connect this to Obama’s call to respect the work done within colleges and universities, to recognize the importance of preparing twenty-first-century students to become productive (and engaged) citizens.

In order for literacy education to be successful, we have to negotiate our values and opinions about what literacy means within the field of Rhet/Comp. Obama makes a clear argument about teaching students skills, and at the bare minimum, literacy education is about reading, writing, and communicative skills. In a twenty-first-century society, however, literacies describe something more. Being able to communicative effectively through various media—written text, videos, images and sounds, in print or online—is absolutely necessary for twenty-first-century students to engage with, and contribute to, cultural and political discourses.

Lu, Min-Zhan. “Redefining the Literate Self: The Politics of Critical Affirmation.” CCC 51.2 (Dec. 1999): 172-194.

Marback, Richard. “Ebonics: Theorizing in Public Our Attitudes toward Literacy.” CCC 53.1 (Sept. 2001): 11-32.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Today–January 18, 2012–many websites are blacked out in protest of the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation. Please educate yourselves (and others!) about what SOPA could do and consider contacting your congressperson.

So now that we’re into the second week of 2012, I finally have some goals (do people still make/follow resolutions?) that I think will help get me through my first full YEAR of being a Ph.D. student.

1. Schedule some fun time. This past semester, I blocked off a few evenings to spend time with my partner and just hang out. I was skeptical about whether or not I’d follow an arbitrary schedule, but I did, and I’ll definitely be doing it again!
2. Do more yoga. I’ve been (loosely) practicing Ashtanga yoga for ~8 years, and it’s a great way to both exercise and relax. It makes me feel more alert, energized, and motivated.
3. Streamline my reading/notetaking processes. Last semester was the first time I’ve taken reading notes on my computer. It worked okay, but I think I could improve the process. I recently acquired an iPad (thanks, Santa) and purchased the iAnnotate app. I haven’t done too much with it yet, but it seems like it will be helpful (Re: “Making the Most of iAnnotate on the iPad” and “Mark up PDFs on Your iPad: iAnnotate PDF”). Plus, it syncs to Dropbox, which could help motivate me to organize my Dropbox account…
4. Attend 2 – 3 conferences. This one’s kind of a gimme because I was accepted to 3! They’re all in the same semester, and two of them are in the same week, so I may need to make some choices. Either way, very exciting!
5. Join an organization or committee. I’m really interested in joining Syracuse’s own BCCC: Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee. It would also be fun to join a committee within my department.
6. Try 30 new recipes. I love to bake, and my partner likes to cook. We tend to fall into patterns of making/eating the same things, though. I own enough cookbooks and follow enough food blogs (Joy the Baker, Crepes of Wrath, Skinny Taste, Smitten Kitchen, etc.) to do this easily. I just added a magnetic notepad to the fridge, which will be perfect for documenting new recipes.
7. Publish one piece of writing. And no, not a tweet (although I do want to keep up with Twitter!). It would be feasible to publish something in a year—even if that something is a review.

"New Year's Resolutions for 2012" via JoyofTech.com

And of course, there are a lot of resolutions out there that are totally worth supporting. “12 Realistically Mundane New Year’s Resolutions” is a great one, and “Four Digital Resolutions for 2012″ is certainly sound advice. There will be more goals set throughout the year, but I always get tripped up if I set too many at once.

So, ultimately, I plan to pace myself—to take everything one step at a time, get it all done, and enjoy it.