Abstract
The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement adds to a growing body of research committed to imagining the possibilities of engaged scholarship. The collection of essays engages with key questions such as: Whose rhetoric matters? What is embodied in the work of the citizen-scholar? How is the role of the citizen-scholar itself discursively produced? What does responsible rhetoric look like?
The volume is divided into three sections, each with five chapters. The first section, ‘Rhetoric Revealed’, explores the terrain of rhetoric in public life. The authors examine the possibilities and constraints of the public work of rhetoric, setting a solid foundation for the rest of the book. The next section, ‘Rhetorical Interventions’, features essays that provide illustrations of the kind of interventions that are possible when university folk collaborate with community members. The third section, ‘Remaking Rhetoric in Universities and Public’, focuses on the relationships between rhetoric, the university and the public. The essays in this section both celebrate and are critical of the public turn in rhetoric.
The general argument threaded through each of the chapters is essentially this: there is a relationship between the quality of human communication and a vibrant public sphere. The critical analysis of discourse – with all of its shortcomings – can be an important example of engaged scholarship because it uncovers which discourses are more privileged than others, possibly resulting in interventions that are designed to contribute to justice. And these interventions are what we see in essay after essay in this volume. This synopsis is a simplification of the delightfully complicated arguments that unravel essay after essay in this book. I found this to be a particularly compelling collection of essays because the authors write about rhetorical interventions but do not stop short of critically analyzing their own contributions to these interventions. Together, they outline what Grabill calls ‘a methodology of engagement’ or a theory of how to act that stands a good chance of being useful to others engaged in daily knowledge work (p. 193). The authors examine the rhetorical appeals made within texts and how the rhetorical force of texts themselves create a public. Each of the essays highlights key themes: the material impact of rhetorical work; notions of the public; and counter-narratives, themes to which I now turn.
Each of the essays in this volume engages with the dialectic of how rhetoric might be used to foster civic engagement and how such engagement is rhetorically constituted. The chapters traverse a wide range of possible publics from the academic conference (Condit), the meeting (Grabill), digital environments (Cushman and Green), university classrooms (Fleming; Juergensmeter and Miller), and sites of economic development (Ackerman; Jolliffee), to community projects with teens (Coogan; Flower) and written texts (George and Mathieu). Across this varied contextual landscape, the authors deliberate what, exactly, the public sphere means. They ask: If we choose to go public, what kinds of rhetoric will be useful? In what ways will we define and create the public? Relatedly, how might rhetoric be made public? Miller, in her essay, debates the power of rhetoric to both reveal and conceal. She asks: Can rhetoric be powerful if it is revealed – both as a practice and as a discipline? (p. 30). She reflects on what going public with rhetoric means: educating citizens to listen, finding common ground, and seeking good reasons for changing our minds. This kind of education requires a revealing of the tools of rhetoric.
And revealing the tools of rhetoric is what Cushman and Green set forth to do as they create a ‘praxis of new media’ in their work with the Cherokee nation and students in their multimedia writing class, having developed a website and CD entitled ‘The Allotment in Cherokee History: 1887–1914’. The website examined the kinds of rhetorical, literate, and legal struggles experienced by the Cherokees living in Indian Territory during the allotment period. Cushman and Green wrestle with the questions ‘What goes public?’ and ‘Who has the power to decide what aspects of community work are made public?’
George and Mathieu focus on the rhetorical construction of dissident texts. Unlike the tension of reveal or conceal that is explored in Miller’s essay, the rhetorical work of dissident press is intent on revealing. What is the rhetoric of dissent? George and Mathieu look at the rhetorical appeals made within texts such as ‘Hobo’ News. They also examine the relationship between textual circulation and the creation of a readership, or public. The public in their minds involves: ‘the act of readers’ paying attention importantly begins the creation of a public’ (p. 253).
Condit points out that most of the engagement of rhetoricians has been directed at the public sphere (through publications) rather than direct engagement with the public (scientific) sphere. She recounts four episodes where she engaged geneticists in scientific venues on the topic of the relationship between ‘race’ and ‘genetics’. Her goal was to ‘help stop the formation of a scientific consensus that would then be translated into the public realm as the indisputable scientific face that race is genetic’ (p. 130). Through this essay and others, we are reminded that the public is, as George and Mathieu write, an ‘ongoing space of encounters’ (p. 253).
How can rhetoric best respond to the issues of the human condition? The scholars in the book wrestle with the most relevant issues of our times including: economic development projects in Kent, Ohio (Ackerman), Uptown, Chicago (Rai), and in Augusta, Arkansas (Jolliffee); 21st century conceptions of democracy (Jarratt; Miller; Bruner); race-based medial research (Condit); learning disabilities (Flower); racial profiling of youth (Coogan); and the role of the classroom in creating democratic environments (Fleming; Juergesmeter and Miller).
What are the material consequences of rhetoric? On the materiality of language, Bruner writes:
there is an empirically determinable material reality out there that is somehow distinct from the way it is apprehended through language, that the distribution of resources is part and parcel of the relationship between experienced reality and its transformation via language, and that the relationship is thoroughly political. (p. 65)
The essays written by David Ackerman and Jolliffee most obviously engage with the materiality of rhetoric. The Community Literacy Advocacy Project – the focus of Jolliffee’s essay – was a collaborative effort of a health center and the Office of English Literacy at the University of Arkansas – resulting in a continuing project of ‘rhetorical activity and civic communions designed to promote community literacy and revive the dying town’ (p. 271). This is similar in scope to Ackerman’s project in Kent, Ohio where he shows how the development of Kent’s downtown accelerated when planners embraced the cultural and economic heritage as well as the university’s interests. Ackerman, involved in the project, proposed that downtown development was an opportunity to bring together many aspects of the cultural economy of Kent into an economic future and a site for reconciliation of a tragic past. Ackerman posits that rhetoric might join in collaborative economic pursuits, in recognizing the political economy of rhetoric and how rhetoric might influence the cultural economy.
Rai’s essay, too, demonstrates how the topoi of democracy functions ‘as persuasive rhetorical engines that proliferate meaning and mobilize action by activating discourse already circulating in the social imagination’ (p. 39). Her essay focuses on a demonstration of this concept through the public sphere project of the Wilson Yard, land once owned by a Chicago Transit Authority rail yard. Rai focuses on ‘the stalemate of competing rhetoric in Uptown’ and the vacant Wilson Yard. As she points out, though, ‘eventually public policy must act’ (p. 41) and, indeed, this is what happened a short time after this chapter was written. Wilson Yard was turned into a retail and apartment complex. I wondered: How was the decision about the now occupied Wilson Yard made? What rhetoric was ultimately successful and how?
Miller argues that the impact of rhetorical work needs to be grappled with on a case-by-case basis. Bruner, however, critiques this stance and argues that we need a more global and programmatic set of interventions. Rai perhaps offers a middle ground when she writes that it is the promise of the public sphere that propels people forward. She talks about ‘the promised ideals reflected within the model that provide many with the courage and the power, along with the rhetorical toolkit, to continually dream up and work toward new worlds that are more just and less cruel’ (p. 51).
The edition offers an alternative narrative to what the editors refer to as ‘a learned hesitation to engage’ (p. 10). The essays in this volume grapple with the tension of how rhetoric might be most useful. Engage those in power? We see this strategy in the essays written by Condit and Fleming. Or create counterpublics? We see this kind of intervention in the essays by Flower, George and Mathieu, and Coogan.
The scholars in this collection find ways to make their discursive work matter, all the while reflecting on the changing role of rhetoric in the public space and the work of rhetoricians in public life. Condit, for example, does a particularly compelling job of reflecting on her role as rhetorician in the process of trying to stop a consensus from forming around race and genetics. Most of the authors are critical of their role in the university and do not ignore the thorny issues of entanglement. As Ackerman points out in his essay, in sync with neoliberal world order, universities ‘are responding to decades of diminished public funding by searching for new revenue streams, some of which translates into incentives for the “scholarship of engagement”’ (p. 11). While some of the projects take place in the community, many of the authors wish to hold out hope for the potential of the university classroom as a critical site of engagement. As Fleming points out in his essay, ‘(b)ecause as much as we would like our classrooms to be more like our best publics, there are publics out there that we should wish were more like our best classrooms’ (p. 225).
This volume carves out space for the incomplete and completely necessary ways in which citizen-scholars work to improve the communities in which they work and live. This collection will reassure those of us working in the traditions of engaged scholarship and inspire those of us who are not yet doing so.