Contemplating the Participatory Turn in Rhetorical Criticism

Conversations Between Rhetorical Criticism and Qualitative Inquiry

Returning to the overlaps and tensions we identified in the introduction provides a way to synthesize the individual and collective contributions of the essays toward illuminating the value of rhetorical fieldwork and other hybrid forms of critical/cultural scholarship. In the introduction, we articulated five points of connection between rhetorical criticism and qualitative inquiry: critical/cultural approaches, everyday encounters, performance, bricoleur/bricolage, and reflexivity in the role of the researcher. Marking how they emerge in and between the essays provides a set of tangible examples of efforts to operationalize these themes and in which to ground future conversations about these intersections.

Qualitative Inquiry and the Revitalization of Rhetorical Praxis

As acknowledged in the introduction of this special issue, a number of scholars have recognized the potential for qualitative inquiry to enhance rhetorical research (McKinnon, Asen, Chavez, & Howard, 2016; Middleton et al., 2015). First, as has been argued elsewhere (Hess, 2011; Middleton et al., 2015; Middleton, Senda-Cook, & Endres, 2011; Pezzullo, 2003), the turn toward qualitative inquiry by rhetorical scholars has opened up rhetoric to a broader range of rhetorical activity, practices, and phenomena than possible by relying on the theoretical concepts and methodologies available in the domain of rhetorical theory and criticism alone. Sustaining Conquergood’s (1992) claim that rhetoricians have “much to gain from ethnography, particularly understanding the cultural constructedness of key concepts such as ‘reason,’ ‘the rational,’ ‘the logical,’ ‘argument,’ ‘evidence,’ and so forth,” rhetorical scholars have made use of the methodological practices and theoretical assumptions of qualitative inquiry to rethink many of rhetorical inquiry’s common topoi (p. 81). For example, critics of social movements have benefited from ethnographic and qualitative approaches to account for how space/place (Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011), performances (Fenske, 2007; Pezzullo, 2001, 2003), and vernacular discourses (Hess, 2011; Middleton, 2014a, 2014b) that fail to achieve textualization nuance the field’s understanding of activism and social movement(s) by complicating, challenging, and sustaining rhetorical theories of political agitation. Likewise, through ethnographic engagement in a variety of contexts, ranging from rallies to school board meetings, rhetoricians have come to understand better how arguments succeed and fail within the actually-lived spaces of democratic deliberation (Asen, 2015; Herbig & Hess, 2012).

In this issue, the contributors highlight the ways in which the internalization of some of the methodological commitments of qualitative inquiry provide a better lens into the rhetorical practices, argumentative fields, and discursive terrain of social phenomena ranging from airport security to performances of sexuality to collective trauma. In each case, these studies and others in the discipline highlight that in situ engagement with rhetorical phenomena helps rhetoricians make sense of things made with words in ways different from what close textual analysis (Leff, 1990) can accomplish. For example, by weaving together traditional qualitative approaches, including interviewing and informal focus groups, Dunn identifies how qualitative approaches can strengthen the insights available to rhetorical critics by triangulating disparate texts. Similarly, McHendry highlights the ability for qualitative approaches to help supplement and generate texts for rhetorical analysis that enable scholars to analyze the rhetorical underpinnings of everyday practices that are sustained through a combination of texts and performances. Through weaving together his experiences with airport (in)security, he illuminates the rhetorical discourses that circulate among broader publics in ways that sustain or call into question those security practices. In each instance, the authors expand the range of rhetorical productivity that informs their analysis. But, more than merely adding discursive, material, and/or embodied forms of evidence, their research demonstrates how the synthesis of these forms of meaning making produces more complex and insightful findings than those available by examining any single form of rhetorical action unto itself.

Second, an engagement with qualitative inquiry provides rhetoricians an opportunity to meaningfully re-connect their scholarship with the material realities of the phenomena with which they interact. For example, Light takes up the perspective of the “citizen tourist” to experience the everydayness of memorialization. McHendry puts special emphasis on the material forces placed upon the body as experienced in the context of airport security. Even the examination of “duties to the dead” offered by one of McKinnon’s co-authors, Johnson, reflexively implicates the experiences of the critic alongside those who have passed on. By expanding texts to include lived phenomena, as well as to understand how communities interact with texts, rhetorical fieldworkers are empowered to sharpen the consequence of their criticism. If Ott (2004) is right in his criticism that rhetorical critics have become predictable insofar as they consistently interrogate texts of all stripes only to find them “not progressive enough” (p. 195), then a turn to qualitative modes of inquiry enables rhetoricians to move beyond the text as such and to rediscover that “texts are worldly . . . [and] even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted” (Said, 1983, p. 5). More importantly, integrating techniques of qualitative inquiry within rhetorical criticism foments a form of critical consciousness that enables critics to take account of “the realities [of power and authority] that make texts possible . . . [and that] deliver them to their readers” (Said, 1983, p. 5). By enabling critics to experience these realities alongside the audiences of traditional rhetorical texts, the inclusion of qualitative inquiry into the interrogation of rhetorical phenomena assists rhetoricians in accomplishing this aim.

Finally, in this special issue, McKinnon et al. argue that by turning to participatory modes of rhetorical theory and criticism, rhetoricians are positioned to better account for the ethical demands created by their scholarly endeavors. For example, by reconnecting rhetorical practices, and especially texts, to the social worlds that create and experience them, rhetorical scholarship informed by qualitative inquiry is no longer able to assume that texts are “produced, but by no one and at no time” (Said, 1983, p. 4). Eliminating this fiction, Said (1983) argues, opens the way to a critical consciousness that aims to “arrive at some acute sense of what political, social, and human values are entailed in the reading, production, and transmission” of rhetorical practice, as well as to identify how critics can contribute to criticism that “thinks of itself as life-enhancing” and committed to the “social goals” of “non-coercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom” (p. 29). By adapting research practices from qualitative inquiry and placing oneself within the immediate political contexts—including security theater, national public memory, anti-border militarization, or prostitution—experienced by the rhetorical communities one seeks to understand, participatory modes of rhetorical criticism empower critics to trade politics-deferred for immanent political participation in ways that re-position rhetoric as a practical undertaking aimed at improving the possibilities for rhetorical action available to the communities toward which it directs its focus (McHendry, Middleton, Endres, Senda-Cook, & O’Byrne, 2014).

(Sub)Disciplinary Synergies: Rhetoric’s Promise for Qualitative Inquiry

As participatory approaches to rhetorical criticism develop along an ever-intersecting plane with qualitative inquiry—at once learning from and contributing to this well-established approach to research—it is important to make explicit what rhetorical criticism can bring to qualitative inquiry. We refer to rhetoric in two senses: first, as a specific form of discourse that is meant to influence and persuade audience(s) within particular contexts, and, second, to the academic discipline of rhetoric. While qualitative inquiry has recognized the importance of rhetoric as a discursive tool to enhance qualitative research, especially with regard to the process of disseminating research products or evaluating the persuasive strategies employed within a culture (Philipsen, 1992; Van Maanen, 2011), the collective scholarly conversation in the discipline of rhetoric can also be of value to qualitative inquiry. The field of rhetorical studies offers a set of theoretical resources that focus on the ways in which material/symbolic discourses enable and constrain how people make sense of their worlds. Specifically, rhetorical heuristics focus on rhetoric as a form of civic publicity, develop a vocabulary to analyze discourse per se, offer different ways of interpreting communication practices, emphasize opportunities to make moral judgments about communication, and articulate the consequences for the identities of participants, audiences, rhetors, and researchers.

First, rhetoric as a field of study is inextricably linked to the civic and modes of publicity. This traditional focus of rhetoric on public citizenship offers a valuable heuristic for understanding how cultural activity is fundamentally political. In other words, viewing cultural activity from a rhetorical lens, from the theories of rhetoric as an art of public civic engagement, allows qualitative scholars a different vantage point. As Madison (2014) argues, “Rhetoric politicizes performance though contested assumptions, discursive power, and critical publicity” (p. 111). In some cases, this connection to civic engagement is explicit, such as Asen’s interviews of state legislators regarding faculty power in the state of Wisconsin, as discussed in McKinnon et al.’s essay. Here, Asen articulates the act of interviewing into a larger rhetorical conception of civic judgment and political parity. In Light’s essay, the relationship between national memorializing and civic duties is put on display as she articulates how participants/audiences of the 9/11 memorial are enlisted as participants in security practices. Likewise, McHendry examines how travelers in airports are similarly situated within security practices and both overtly and indirectly fashioned as defenders of and/or threats to the body politic. In other cases, the connection requires additional teasing out, such as in Dunn’s remarks about the social status of sex work. In her case, the interrogation of the sociopolitical assumptions undergirding both prostitution and the political economy of television reveals the intertextual relationship between them. The nature of “representation” occurs both in the reading of how television practices portray sex workers and in the regulatory frameworks of the State that oversee sex work. Reading prostitution and sex work in this way, Dunn’s analysis has civic implications for those who work as legal prostitutes, like in Nevada, and those who do not, and especially for those who consume media regarding sex work. In this sense, rhetoric provides a theoretical framing for connecting social and cultural activities into larger political and representational systems.

Second, a rhetorical heuristic offers a discreet critical framework for systematically interrogating cultural practices in order to identify underlying logics manifested through embodied actions, metaphors, narratives, subject positions, opportunities for agency, and other rhetorical devices. These devices afford different perspectives on strategic action and everyday social life. Qualitative scholars interested in the ways that persuasion or advocacy circulate throughout communities can benefit from foundational assumptions and theories of rhetoric as strategic action. McKinnon’s co-authors, Chavez and Asen, recall projects that attend to the many ways that vernacular and official discourses engage in strategic and tactical argumentation. Adopting such a rhetorical lens might reveal logics at work that would otherwise go unnoticed or unexplained in qualitative work. Similarly, Dunn’s essay reveals conflicts between feminist assumptions, media representations, and participants’ understandings of themselves as (sex) workers. A rhetorical heuristic highlights the strategic choices that everyday people make to build communities and coalitions, articulate their identities, gain power, or undermine others. By placing these concerns within a rhetorical framework, qualitative research is able to not only explain how these meaning-making practices unfold, but also interpret, assess, and offer critical evaluations of their strategic value.

Third, a rhetorical heuristic offers additional perspectives and tropes that researchers can draw from as they develop theories in/of the field and analyze the data collected in those contexts. Viewing the world through a rhetorical lens highlights discourses that function as forms of power, thereby enabling, constraining, and implicating how humans not only make sense of, but also make change in, their world(s). Rhetorical theories aimed at uncovering the development of cultural practices, for example, accomplish this by enabling insightful analysis and nuanced understanding of discourses that are developed within rhetorical communities. McHendry’s article provides an example of the processes by which the TSA exerts power through its performance and how travelers engage in their own performances that support the (sometimes fictitious) portrayal of safety. Just as rhetoricians are beginning to see manifestations of these theories in rhetorical places, embodied practices, collective actions, and participants’ descriptions of these phenomena, qualitative scholars could benefit from having an awareness of these theories as a way to explain the communication practices they uncover in their research.

Fourth, rhetorical critics often consider their scholarship and theory as “heuristic and moral” (Brummett, 1984), especially when implicated in real-world decision-making settings. This function of rhetoric has a profoundly pedagogical power, both in the sense of the classroom and in an everyday rhetorical sensibility of the critic and populace alike, whereby rhetorical theory is instructive for people making moral choices. Put another way, rhetorical scholarship should be in the world, make judgments upon the consequences of discourse, and have an impact on those around us. Certainly, many qualitative scholars, critical and participatory action researchers, in particular, believe that their work has important consequences; yet, a rhetorical focus expands the scope of influence beyond one case into larger social and political contexts. Critical rhetorical work exists at the intersection of micro- and macro-contexts, looking to the relationship between larger social discourses and their immediate situated performances. Rhetoric attends to historical circumstance and future possibilities, accenting the kairotic moment of the present within which speakers offer discursive directions informed by intersubjective perspectives of reality (Hess, 2011). For example, Chavez’s work in the McKinnon et al. essay calls forth the politics of border issues in linguistic, temporal, and spatial/regional terms, which all feature in her analysis of the relational dynamics of fieldwork. In Light’s essay, she reads the immediate horizontal and vertical vectors of the National 9/11 Memorial alongside larger discourses of terrorism, national security, and tourism, which inform her notion of social surveillance. Informed by a multitude of discursive intersections, these ways of reading offer judgments that cut across text and context, producing nuanced judgments about political life for readers and those with whom we interact in the field.

Fifth, articulating one’s identity has implications not only for the self but also for researchers and the choices of representation they make. Emerging from the crisis of representation, Denzin and Lincoln (2011) argue, “The interpretive bricoleur understands that research is an interactive process shaped by one’s personal history, biography, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity and those of the people in the setting” (p. 5). Rhetorical theory and method offer some useful resources for understanding that these elements of identity (personal history, race, etc.) are rhetorical performances. Bringing rhetorical theory to bear on qualitative inquiry allows for thinking of reflexivity as a rhetorical process, alongside thinking of representation as a rhetorical process. This means that critics are embracing a rhetorical reflexivity that invites “boundary crossing into performance/history” (Morris, 2014, p. 105), enabling connections between present performances of identity in the field and the historical forces that produce identity. Dunn struggles to reconcile the representations of the women on Bunny Ranch with her observations and interviews, and eventually turns to an intertextual approach to make sense of the narratives of sex work as cultural, historical, communal, and individual. Additionally, McKinnon et al. provide several instances of troublesome representation. They discuss how researchers represent themselves both during fieldwork and in essays, how researchers represent the people they study both in writing and in public presentations, how researchers have responsibilities when accessing and depicting sensitive information, and how they protect participants’ identities through pseudonyms even when the participants themselves might advocate for the use of their real names.

In all of these ways, rhetorical scholarship is positioned to both add to and sharpen the insights available to qualitative scholars. The contributions that rhetorical criticism has for scholars who do fieldwork do not end with the analytic theories researchers can apply after data collection. Rather, they offer potential benefits for scholars at every stage of the research process. In some instances, like reflexivity, rhetorical scholarship does not so much make a new contribution to the work done by qualitative scholars as it offers another facet to the discussion of how such concerns are accounted for in contemporary critical/cultural studies. On the other hand, rhetoric also holds out the possibility of activating new considerations among qualitative scholars, such as materiality, emplacement, or the strategic dimensions of discursive practices. However, as discussed in the next section, the impetus toward rhetorical fieldwork should not be cast in terms of which tradition holds a position of dominance, but rather how, by creating open pathways for dialogue and valuing hybrid research approaches, scholars from both domains are positioned to produce more energized and critically insightful forms of research.

Conclusion: Engaging Transdisciplinarity

The essays in this special issue not only display a range of possibilities for in situ rhetorical fieldwork, but also illuminate some of the productive possibilities that these approaches offer to qualitative and rhetorical scholars alike. Even as we detail the potentials of these approaches, we recognize that they are not suitable for every project. Our purpose is not to change both rhetorical criticism and qualitative inquiry entirely. Rather, our aim is to theorize the foundations of contemporary practices of rhetorical fieldwork, to offer some examples of that scholarship, and to unpack the consequences this turn in rhetorical criticism has for not only rhetoric but also qualitative scholarship. In other words, our aim is not to displace either (critical) qualitative scholarship nor to minimize the unique insights produced by (critical) rhetorical fieldwork. Rather, our purpose is to suggest that this moment of methodological and theoretical foment in rhetorical studies has broader implications for how we think about the relationships between approaches to research and the possibilities of collaboration between (sub)disciplines. We conclude by thinking through this possibility in terms of transdisciplinarity and the potential it holds for scholars working at the intersections of qualitative and rhetorical scholarship.

In the now canonical meditation on the productive engagements possible between rhetoric, ethnography, and performance, Conquergood (1992) encourages communication scholars to consider the important insights that researchers stand to gain by facilitating border crossings between commonly-recognized divisions in the communication discipline. The contributors to this volume take up Conquergood’s challenge, enacting creative border crossings between rhetorical and qualitative inquiry, as well as identifying further possibilities to make good on the potential foretold by his challenge to communication scholars. In particular, we argue that the blending of qualitative and rhetorical inquiry through rhetorical fieldwork, as the essays in this special issue do, offers a transdisciplinary approach that does not simply apply one to the other, but blends the two research approaches into a new critical praxis. This new approach has the potential to revitalize rhetorical scholarship by providing new perspectives on the process, production, and reception of discourse. Likewise, it creates the opportunity to further hone the findings of qualitative scholars by regrounding their research into the practical and strategic uses of meaning-making activities that are invented, modified, and challenged by the communities they research.

Taken together, the contributions to this issue point toward the value of transdisciplinary research as a way to both enliven critical/cultural scholarship and to create dialogue around important social, political, and cultural exigencies whose significance transcends and traverses the methodological expertise of scholars within any particular discipline. For example, Sprain, Endres, and Petersen (2010) note that transdisciplinary research is a problem-oriented approach that draws from relevant tools that will help address a social problem. Like bricolage, transdisciplinary research can be likened to a quilt that makes up a whole through seemingly disparate parts. We choose to think about the cross-pollination of methodological practices present in the contributions to this volume as “transdisciplinary,” rather than “interdisciplinary,” deliberately. As Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) note, the distinction between the two approaches to integrating theoretical or methodological commitments of disciplines and sub-disciplines is significant. In the case of the latter, interdisciplinarity “appl[ies] the theoretical categories and methods of different [sub]disciplines to the same issue or problem in a way which leaves them [i.e., the theoretical categories, methods, and their (sub)disciplinary homes] untouched” (p. 112). In the case of the former, transdisciplinarity demands that sub-disciplines internalize the theoretical commitments and methodological practices of other scholarly traditions in ways that do not simply subsume and reproduce those practices and commitments. Guided by the problem that propels one’s research, transdisciplinarity blurs the boundaries between (sub)disciplines, putting those boundaries at risk in ways that allows scholars to develop the most complementary set of approaches for interrogating the problem of interest.

Said differently, we do not locate the value of the contributions to this volume, as well as the groundswell of scholars blending rhetorical and other (often qualitative) methodologies, in terms of the degree to which those scholars most effectively and faithfully reproduce the practices of their colleagues. Rather, we argue that rhetorical fieldwork provides an exemplar of problem-driven scholarship that invents critical and epistemological approaches that are best suited to examine particular social, political, and cultural phenomena. For example, rhetoricians who advance these approaches are not doing ethnography as such, and it would be unfair to praise or criticize scholarship in that tradition for its failure to do so. Rather, they are demonstrating the value of transdisciplinarity by offering examples of how rhetorical scholars can take up ethnographic practices, regrounded in the traditions of rhetorical theory and criticism, to illuminate the exigencies on which such research is focused more fully than either a purely qualitative or a purely rhetorical approach could offer. In doing so, these efforts point toward promising possibilities in both domains of critical/cultural studies. These are possibilities that we believe are highlighted by the contributions to this issue and that we hope proliferate through the conversations this volume provokes.