I am embedding my mind map here. This is my first time tweaking code, so I'm pretty excited that you can actually see SOMETHING here. Let me know if it isn't working.
April 17 update
For social network analysis, I made connections to “network society,” because computing has made possible the data crunching that SNA depends on, to “relations” because SNA is looking at relations, particularly human-human interactions. I added another node as well, “data analysis,” which I have also connected to “network society.” It is true that it is primarily methodology but is so essential to SNA that it is almost like another concept.
April 3 update
I added a node for
Castells and a small web of nodes capturing some of the main features I see in
Castells. This is more interpretive than for some other scholars because
Castells doesn’t establish a theoretical framework with a set terminology. However, I decided to look at technological
innovation and diffusion as a node and time and space, combined for
convenience, as a node, which when bundled with human actors and non-human
actants from previous theories, generate a synergy leading to Castells’ network
society, another node. I recognize that
I am being redundant in listing “network society” in two places, except in the
main node I am using at as a label for a theory and in the second as a concept,
or perhaps better, an assemblage. This
node, in turn, connects to nodes for work and identity. Connected to the work node are also nodes for
the micro and macro changes in work, namely, how the network society has
changed first, the nature of work, capturing the types of positions emerging
and the changing workplace, i.e. the flexibility, stability and managerial
climate of the workplace, and second, the structure of the labor force in terms
of the economic structure of a country.
To be fai r, I should probably indicate international and global
interdependence here, too, but I already have a fairly complex diagram. I also connected concepts from Castells back
to CHAT, thinking in terms of workplace and organizational studies that would
probably illuminate Castells, to ecology due to the big picture nature of
Castells’ system, and to laminated chronotopes because of the space and time
relations that Castells include. I also
included institutions, a node previously associated with CHAT, because
sociologists such as Castells inevitably implicate institutions to one degree
or another.
March 27 update
I added a node for neurobiology connected to a node for "neural network," to which I attached nodes for "cognition," "emotion," "memory," "motor skills," and "sensory perception." These I connected to "mind." The idea behind this addition was to see the entire neural capabilities of human beings, i.e. the brain and nervous system as part of "mind," through which human beings interact with the world in any of the other ways implied by other theories. Bateson's theory, therefore, is in a sense compatible.
March 14 update
Even though I was inspired by Megan's mind map to make mine better, I haven't yet been able to come up with a better strategy. I'll keep thinking about it. In the meantime, I added Bateson with connections to "ecologies," "actor," "non-human actant," and "mind." I have the connections to the other nodes pass beneath "mind." I really should have them link through it, but that was an afterthought.
March 4 update
I had the impression that I had added Latour with the last update, but I later realized that wasn't the case. At any rate, I added a node for Latour along with connections to ecology, actor, non-human actants and relations. Actors and actants are obvious choices, but I think that Latour's approach, by focusing on tracing connections, makes relationships more explicit than some theories, though relationships are implicit in all network approaches. I also added "plasma" as a new node and "black box".
February 26 update
I added hypertext as a node and connected it to concept and rhetor/actor. Concept was associated with Foucault, but I'm repurposing it here because hyperlinked terms are usually key concepts operating within a text, and this is somewhat similar to concepts that organize discourse in a Foucauldian sense. I also connected hypertext to Vatz because of Vatz's claim that the rhetor generates the exigence for discourse. In hypertext, the assumption is that the rhetor (the user/reader) makes meaning by the links that are made. This is analogous, in that meaning is being generated by the operations of selection and connection.
February 21 update
I added CHAT as a node and connected from CHAT to actors (=people, in terms of CHAT), and actants (i.e. objects). I also added "laminated chronotope" as a new node connected to CHAT, but also to genre, speech act, and event, since I see these as connected to the concept. I also added "ecology(ies)" because this appears two places in the CHAT list. The mind map doesn't allow me to handle this in the way that I'd like. If I could do so, I would color-code connections to group nodes and connections into subsets, or I would draw boundaries around varies nodes. Ecology, to my mind, would be better treated in this way than as a separate node.
Earlier updates
Because I didn't initially realize that I needed to put my mind map in the blog and trace my additions as I went along, it is a little hard for me to reconstruct exactly what I did when. However, I know I did the following at different points:
I added Foucault to the mind map and put the discursive formations as a block of nodes connected to Foucault.
I added Spinuzzi and genre theorists to the mind map and made appropriate connections to these as well as back to aspects of the rhetorical situation.
The
core article in this interactive Kairos
article on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) describes how the five canons of
classical rhetoric omit many things that have always been interesting about
rhetoric but have become especially prominent with today’s greater awareness of
context and ecology and with the proliferation of digital and multimodal approaches
to communication. The first step towards
building a new model is to highlight the idea of delivery, particularly the ways that different media have diversified
forms of delivery. Next, the authors
survey the ways that delivery has changed, and bringing in theorizing about
digital and electronic media introduce the concept of mediation and
remediation. From here, they expand the
traditional canons by adding in mediation,
distribution and reception. However, they argue that the expanded version
still fails to account for “complex institutional networks” (p. 12). The CHAT
model captures rhetorical activity but also adds a larger social
framework.
The authors define CHAT as “the
emergent synthesis that has brought together Vygotskyan psychology, Voloshinovian
and Bakhtinian semiotics, Latour’s actor-network theory, and situated, phenomenological
work in sociology and anthropology” (17).
This comprehensive theory aims to provide a complete toolbox for mapping
literate activity.
A challenging term: Laminated
chronotope
The core
article (i.e. Prior et al, 2007) identifies laminated chronotope— as “embodied
activity-in-the-world, representational worlds, and chronotopes embedded in
material and semiotic artifacts” (19). Unfortunately,
I found this description pretty opaque. So
I did a quick web search. The Wikipedia article on “Chronotopes” points to “particular genres,
or relatively stable ways of speaking, which themselves represent particular worldviews
or ideologies.” This turned out to
be a pretty good definition when compared with Prior & Shipka (2003), who point
to how literate acts tie together embodied acts in the here in now with
representations involving intertextual traces of the past. In other words, all
chronotopes as embodied-representational “concrete time-place-events
deeply furrowed with, and constructed through, representations and with
representations always deeply rooted in chains of concrete historical events”
(Prior & Shipka, 2003, n.p.). Now I
understand where the descriptor “laminated” is coming from. However, as a temporary placeholder in my
mind, I prefer the idea of a knot, where a bunch of things are tied together
and assembled into a text in a given genre at one point in time. It makes sense for a complex concept like
laminated chronotope to have a compound descriptor, but it is a double-edged
sword—you trade simplicity for uniqueness, I guess.
(Personal photo of "Untitled," by Ruth Asawa, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art)
The question of mediation
“You
may have noticed that mediation is not on this list. What happened to it? In
fact, we did not drop it. From a cultural-historical perspective and adopting
James Wertsch’s (1991) terms, we take mediated activity and mediated agency as fundamental
units of analysis. In those terms, everything in the three maps (literate
activity, functional systems, and chronotopes) is about mediation” (22)
I
have problems with this sweeping “everything is about mediation” move. I find the concept of mediation to be quite
productive. While Prior is not saying
that everything is mediating, by not theorizing more precisely what is
mediating, the concept of mediation ceases to be particularly productive. For me that is a shame. When discussing the concept of mediation, on
pp. 6-7, Prior makes a case for its importance.
Now I am not sure how it can be built into the model because Prior is
right about the fact that mediation is not one thing, but the interaction of
multiple things. For example, genre is
mediating (Spinuzzi, 2003, p. 115), and genre can be seen as activity or practices (“social action,” as Miller, 1984 would have it) that is laminated, produced and distributed,
institutionally-situated, serving
specific communities, and so on. A
medium, such as television, for example, could be seen as mediating—though arguably
its mediation works through its diverse genres.
As a comprehensive theory to replace the classical canons that are
legitimately argued as insufficient, CHAT offers a compelling alternative. I am, however, disappointed that the concept
of mediation is not more specifically situated within the theory. In a sense Prior is correct in that the whole
system works together to generate symbolic action that serves a mediating role
in every society. At the same time, I
would argue that the moment of mediation, the interface that most precisely
functions as providing mediation is not distributed everywhere in the model.
Selected articles
Kairos and Community Building
Sheridan-Rabideau’s
focus in this article is to explore the literate activities of a particular
organization, Artists Now, in their efforts to put a billboard in their
community. The political, economic and material obstacles for Artists Now
illustrate ecological aspects to rhetoric that are not described in traditional
models but can be explored product through a CHAT approach.
Remediating
Science: A Case Study of Socialization
Lunsford’s
article looks at how scholarly communication in the sciences is changing,
particularly in the growth of databases as archival collections of raw
scientific data. As Lunsford says, “Because
these repositories are typically web-based… they represent information in rich
ways; they can be peer-reviewed; they can be available openly or by
subscription; and, importantly, they can be accessed by the same audiences that
are also accessing the electronic versions of scientific articles.” However, the development of such databases
suggest shift in the way that science is communicated and stored. Lunsford
suggests that this remediation of print journals may “represent a clear shift
in scientific memory practices” for scientists. Lunsford explores
ways that such remediation in scientific communication may be changing the
positioning of other elements in the complex CHAT network, such as audience,
rhetor and other members of the network.
CHAT connections
This
semester I am also taking an independent study that I’ve chosen to call
Discourse Theory. Originally I wanted to
take Discourse Analysis, but that never worked out, and my independent study
version of the course also fell through.
As I reflected on what I really wanted to learn about discourse, however,
I decided that I really wanted to learn how “discourse” has been used as a
theoretical concept in critical and social theory as well as linguistics. Some of the authors that I wanted to read
were Foucault and Latour and I also wanted to explore CHAT. I put Foucault and Latour on my reading list,
but noted that I was reading these authors in Theories of Network. I put CHAT
on my list, but mistakenly placed it under Spinizzi, probably because I was a
little confused about the differences between Activity Theory and CHAT. For my independent study, I am reading
Bakhtin, some sociologists like Giddens and Bourdieu, and linguistics discourse
theorists. But I am pleased with how I
can use the two courses together to get a much fuller overview of many of the theorists
that I’m interested in. That’s why I was
particularly interested in the reference list provided in this issue of Kairos.
Not only does it have some of the readings that I already have on my
list, but it is giving me a few more. In
addition, it is reinforcing connections that I am already making. In some ways, graduate school is like
collecting baseball cards—I keep looking for important players to add to my
collection.
Here is a
list of some scholars from the reference list that have been on my scholarly reading
wish list for a while and also showed up in the CHAT references.
Bakhtin (already own one of his books)
Bazerman (already own one of his books)
Casanave, Christine Pearson
Eco, Umberto (already own Kant & The
Platypus)
Engestrom, Yrjo
Goffman, Erving
Graff, Harvey (already own book)
Kress, Gunther
Latour (of course, we plan to read very
soon).
Ong, Walter. (already own book)
Prior, Paul. (1998). Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of
literate activity in the academy
Prior,
P., & Shipka, J. (2003). Chronotopic lamination: Tracing the contours of
literate activity. In C. Bazerman & D.d Russell (Eds.),Writing
selves, writing societies: Research from activity perspectives (pp.180-238).
Fort Collins: The WAC Clearinghouse and Mind, Culture, and Activity.
Retrieved from http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/prior/
Prior, P., Solberg, J., Berry, P.,
Bellwoar, H., Chewning, B., Lunsford, K.J., . . . Walker, J.R. (2007). Re-situating
and re-mediating the canons: A Cultural-Historical remapping of rhetorical
activity. Kairos, 11(3). Retrieved from http://technorhetoric.net/11.3/binder.html?topoi/prior-et-al/index.html
Looking
for a way to bring together the discourses of disciplinarity and the concept of
genre, I chose as my object of analysis interviews of notable academics that
are distributed within the discipline.
Typically this would be an interview in an academic journal, but it
could also be an online journal or forum or archived within a university
department, as Florida State University has done with its “Visiting SpeakersSeries.” I chose to begin examining this
object of study through a Foucauldian analysis, mostly because Foucault’s
concept of discourse seemed like a productive way to look at the discourses of disciplinarity. As a
matter of fact, I discovered that Foucault was not the best choice for an
analysis that placed significant weight on the concept of genre.
A
Foucauldian analysis would probably not define the interview genre explicitly,
but would more likely situate the interview genre within the larger academic
discourse, which would be the more salient object in a Foucauldian analysis. Let’s look at one example, “‘That Light-BulbFeeling’: An Interview with Clay Spinuzzi.” This interview, in a typical move, has
a blurb at the beginning introducing Spinuzzi as “an accomplished scholar and
teacher in rhetoric and technical communication” (McNely, 2013, p. 1). In other words, this interview, as is
typical, is predicated on the fact that there is a scholarly discourse, that
scholarship takes place within discrete fields, and that certain individuals
advance the field or discipline, and as intellectual leaders, are worth
listening to. The interview genre
reveals the existence of academic celebrity, and through what these prominent
scholars say in the interview, the discourse and the discursive formations that
structure it may emerge. The genre in
itself, however, is hard to theorize as very important in a Foucauldian
analysis, something that becomes clearer as we examine what might be regarded
as the nodes and links in the Foucauldian model. In
the first section of The Archeology of
Knowledge, Foucault discusses four types of discursive formations. The
first type builds the discourse around “objects of which it [the discourse] can
speak” (p. 46). The second is the
formation of “enunciative modalities” that have to do with the positioning of
the speaker as legitimated by his or her position within institutions or
settings that are valued by a society, permitting and shaping the types of
discourse that emerge. The third type of
discursive formation involves concepts around which discourse may organize
itself. Here Foucault gives some examples from economics and from botany, and
it appears that the concept is something like ideas that might catalyze
paradigm shifts in Thomas Kuhn’s model. Foucault suggests that “one tries to determine
according to what schematas (of series, simultaneous groupings, linear or
reciprocal modification) the statements may be linked to one another in a type
of discourse” (p. 60). The final type of
discursive formation is what Foucault calls “the formation of strategies” (p.
64). This refers to something like the
logical linkage of discourse elements, or, as Foucault puts it, “as
systematically different ways of treating objects of discourse…, of arranging
forms of enunciation…, of manipulating concepts” (p. 69-70). Thus, in a Foucauldian analysis, the first
three discursive formations—objects, subject roles and positions, and concepts—tend
to serve as nodes, I would argue, while strategies—the fourth discursive
formation—might be better seen as the linkages or connections between the nodes—or
perhaps an algorithm for directing the flow of information. In other words, the discursive functions
provide the skeleton of discourse as network.
What
then are the discursive formations of the interview genre? Or do multiple types of discursive formation
apply? The interview involves a
conversation with two interlocutors, a venue for publication, an imagined
audience consisting of disciplinary practitioners and potential disciplinary
practitioners, and the generic expectations offered by the genre frame. The concept of object does not seem
immediately helpful since a diverse array of objects can be discussed. Academic discourse encompasses many fields
and disciplines, each of which has its own set of salient objects and concepts. In fact, in describing the first discursive
formation, Foucault is not referring to objects per se, but to the rules
governing the emergence of a set of objects viewed and managed in a certain way
by discourse. While academic discourse
of all types examines and discusses its objects of study in conventionalized
ways, the interview genre does not seem the best place to seek these
rules. This brings us to a question of
scope that we must address before moving forward.
Foucault’s
model, as already noted, is built around the concept of discourse. Understanding
exactly what he means is hard to nail down, partially because at times he uses
the term in more or less the conventional way but at other times, as the
broader, more theoretical concept that he is generally noted for. A reasonably good definition of this is “a
loose structure of interconnected assumptions that makes knowledge possible”
(Bertens, 2005, p. 154). Above this
already fairly big picture position, Foucault poses another, even broader
level, episteme, which is described
as “the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period,
between the sciences when one analyzes them at the level of discursive
regularities” (1972, p. 191). Mills (2004) offers an explanation that is
perhaps a little more transparent: “An episteme includes the range of
methodologies which a culture draws on as self-evident in order to be able to
think about certain subjects” (p. 51). Clearer, this is macro level that
subsumes discourse. On the other hand,
Foucault’s view of discourse is larger than one discipline; instead, it may
connect multiple institutions and disciplines.
(See, for example, Foucault, 1972, p. 179). Nevertheless, it was the prospect of using a
Foucauldian analysis to examine the ways that disciplines and subdisciplines
enact and construct disciplinary values that drew me to try out the theory. After all, many of Foucault’s examples in The Archeology of Knowledge involve
disciplinary discourse at a given point in time. But when I began the analysis, I realized
that the interview genre exists—or could exist—in more than one discipline. In other words, the discourse governing the
genre must be the assumptions that undergird American academia, that confer
status on certain scholars, and that make it meaningful and interesting to
publish simulated conversations with them.
The discourse governing the content of a given interview or subset of
interviews, on the other hand, should be the values and reasoning that
undergird a specific discipline or research program. American academia arguably has a discourse
that extends itself into all disciplines and fields represented by institutions
of higher education, but individual interviews are more likely to yield the
objects valued by the discipline.
Research reports might be more fruitful for an analysis of academic
discourse per se, and indeed, Swales (1990, 2004) does reveal characteristics
of academic discourse through genre analysis that might be reinterpreted as
discursive formations. Going back to the
interview genre, Foucault’s third discursive formation, examination of concepts
that construct discourse, poses similar challenges when moving beyond
disciplinary boundaries. Examining
the concept of enunciative modality in
relation to the interview genre is more meaningful. The subject of an interview
is typically chosen for his or her notable contributions to theory or
methodology within a discipline. As the
subject, the interviewee is given a great deal of status, but oddly, not a great
deal of agency. Because an interviewee
has been chosen for well-developed and widely-promoted theories, he or she is,
in fact, constructed and positioned to a degree by his or her own theory. The interviewee explains and builds on the
theory but is unlikely to develop new theory or make substantive changes during
the discussion; in fact, the theorist has become constrained by the boundaries
of his or her own theory. In terms of
producing a description of academic discourse, then, the interview genre
reveals the way that academics are anchored by the discourse of their fields,
even their own contributions to it.
As
may have emerged from the previous discussion, within a Foucauldian analysis,
genre cannot quite serve as a node. In
rhetorical genre theory, genres might be seen as conveyors of action, or as
links, and in activity theory, as mediating nodes. Foucault’s approach tends to sideline them. It might be possible, in fact, to argue that
research genres encapsulate a strategy, Foucault’s fourth discursive formation,
in the way that they stabilize and display conventionalized academic
discourse. Initially, I believe that interviews
represented a less crucial part of the network of academia, but a recent
discussion with Louise Phelps challenged that notion. In a project that she is currently working
on, she discovered that a scholar’s networking activities, for example, hosting
conferences and mentoring other scholars have an important effect on scholarly
presence. Scholars with a presence in a
field are more likely to be interviewed, and being interviewed will surely make
a scholar more noticeable. In this
sense, the interview genre does play a role in terms of positioning a scholar
within the larger academic discourse.Indeed,
becoming more recognizable in more contexts can perhaps play a small role in
helping Spinuzzi (or Steven Pinker or Stanley Fish) to become
public intellectuals and speak for academia.
In this sense their own theories become the theories that represent
academia.
Most
interviews include a question about a scholar’s influences. For example, McNely details a number of
scholars who have influenced Spinuzzi such as David Russell, “his mentor and
dissertation director” (p. 2). Thus, interviews are genres that serve to
connect scholars explicitly to their ancestors in their discipline. If I am seeing discourse as network, is the
interview genre, therefore, a collection of nodes, a sub-network of the larger
academic discourse?
When
considering how nodes are situated and the relationships between nodes in the
Foucauldian model, it seems like human subjects need to be primary nodes. The interview genre certainly highlights the
centrality of scholars as subjects, in an immediate relationship with another
scholar, i.e. the interviewer, and building a connection to objects and
concepts. But here a problem emerges in
the Foucauldian model. He emphasizes the
situatedness of discursive formation, emphasizing how discourse constrains what
is noticed or can be said. This makes
discourse appear quite static. At the
same time, he is interested in discontinuities, and wants “to show that a
change in the order of discourse does not presuppose ‘new ideas’, a little
invention and creativity, a different mentality, but transformations in a
practice, perhaps also in neighboring practices, and in their common
articulation” (p. 209). Where do this
shifts come from given that subjects are seen as so limited in terms of agency? If subjects had no agency, discourse would
never evolve and none of the historical shifts that Foucault explored in his
genealogies would have occurred.
Perhaps
it has to do with information flow. If
we can assume that statements (in Foucault’s sense of the word) flow through discourse
as network, making use of nodes and paths (think discursive formations), and
moving between subjects in network (for example, interview interviewer and
interviewee, then there two things are likely.
First, repeating statements—knowledge as perceived, concepts as
highlighted, strategies as employed—reinforces existing networks, like burning
connections in a neural network in the brain, making certain types of discourse
stronger through use. The second possibility,
again using the analogy of the neural network, is the emergence of slight
shifts that subtly readjust the network, reshaping the discourse. How exactly this would lead to seismic
shifts, like paradigm shifts, is perhaps something that needs to be explained
by another theory.
Foucault’s
ideas about discourse do seem productive for discussing disciplinary discourse
as well as larger discourses. Using
Foucault to look at the academic interview genre brought me contradictions of
scope. It seems that the genre is
generated by the discourse of academia whereas the subjects (interview and
interviewee) are more plausibly situated within the discourse of
discipline. Nevertheless, considering
the linkages related to subject, stimulated by Foucault’s principle of enunciative
modality, does offer some insights into how academics are situated in relation
to each other within academic discourse.
References
Bertens, H.
(2005). Literary theory: The basics. London: Routledge.
Foucault,
M. (1972, 1989). The Archeology of
knowledge. London: Routledge.
Mills, S. (2004). Discourse (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and
research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and
applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spinuzzi’s
book, Tracing Genres through
Organizations, has been a valuable contribution to genre studies in general
but is also helpful as a demonstration of how activity theory can usefully
inform genre analyses. The book has had
a decent level of uptake, as judged by the 337 citations listed on Google
Scholar. A quick scan of the results
shows uptake in a number of areas—activity theory, genre theory, design
studies, technical communication, organizational management, information
management, composition, and others. This is not surprising since Spinuzzi’s
primary purpose in the book is to examine genre as a mediating artifact in a
complex activity system that connects multiple workplaces. Through the genre
tracing methodology, Spinuzzi is able to examine the ways in which technical
solutions are employed by different users over time and where problems can
emerge. Spinuzzi argues that many design
studies fall short in two ways. First,
in many cases, researchers look for a single trouble sport as a basis for
engineering new solutions. Second, too often designers are seen as heroes who
swoop in with a one-size-fits-all-solution.
Spinuzzi argues that a genre tracing methodology can reveal how destabilizations
do not result from a single trouble spot and yet do often have points of connection. He also believes that genre tracing reveals
ways that workers invent solutions of their own to manage problems. By paying attention to this, not only can
designers build in better solutions with insights from worker innovations, but they
can also offer more fluid, less centralized systems to begin with, systems that
incorporate workers’ ability to innovate.
To
be precise, genre tracing does not track at a single genre, but rather looks at
a genre ecology. In Spinuzzi’s study, the
core artifact is a genre system for recording and tracking accident statistics
in Iowa, but it is supplemented by other more loosely-linked genres, such as
the accident reports that feed into the system and ad hoc genres such as sticky
notes and photocopies that individual workers used to bridge weaknesses in the
main system. The “tracing” in the title
of the book is carried out in two different ways in the book. First, Spinuzzi traces the evolution of the genre
system over time, from collections of paper reports stored in files to a
mainframe collection system through a MS-DOS database to a database with a GIS
interface. At each level of development,
he also looks at three levels of scope—the macroscopic, the mesoscopic and the
microscopic. By employing different
methodologies—observation, videotaping and coding, stimulated recall,
interviews and so on—Spinuzzi was able to examine how the systems interacted
and how workers interacted with the system in general and moment by moment
interactions with the technology. By
comparing these levels, he identified contradictions (i.e. challenges at the macroscopic
level such as different purposes for using a software), discoordination (challenges
at the mesoscopic level such as misperceiving how a genre functions), and
breakdowns (microscopic problems such as selecting an inappropriate pull-down
menu), may draw on some of the same underlying realities or may have unintended
effects on each other.
Through the
study, Spinuzzi was able to demonstrate that genre tracing is a productive, multi-pronged
methodology. I got the impression that genre
tracing must entail significant time and effort for researchers. However, the results appear to offer valuable
insights that ought to be far-reaching for stakeholders in a complex activity
system like many organizational settings.
Reading Spinuzzi
Previously
I wrote about the experience of reading Foucault. Reading Spinuzzi was a very different
experience, most obviously because the book is very accessible. Spinuzzi explains his theory clearly, he uses
plenty of examples, and he moves forward systematically. To be fair, the book is much more concrete
than Foucault. Spinuzzi is making more
of a methodological argument and less of a theoretical one. But for me, reading Spinuzzi was interesting
in a different way. At some point in my
reading of Spinuzzi, I realized that I was, in part, reading through the genre in my hand to the
genre that a sense lurked behind it, namely, Spinuzzi’s doctoral
dissertation. Because neither the cover
blurb nor the preface stated that the book was a rewriting of Spinuzzi’s
dissertation, I wasn’t certain that this was the case, but I suspected it. As someone who expects to be starting
dissertation research in less than a year, I found myself reading about each
element of his methodology as something that I might potentially appropriate. I sensed strategic decisions, discussions
with mentors, and IRB paperwork. It was
interesting to read the book on two levels.
Incidentally, I did later I get corroboration that the book is a
reworking of Spinuzzi’s dissertation from two places, his blog and an interview
that he did.
Expanding the definition of genre
In
a previous discussion, I considered Miller’s (1984) definition of genre as “a
typification of rhetorical action” (p. 163), and Schryer’s (1993) concept of
genres as “stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough sites of social and
ideological action” (p. 208). Miller and
Schryer emphasize the rhetorical action that calls on genres to accomplish
things in the world while acknowledging the typified nature of genre as bearing
the traces of historical actions. Spinuzzi’s
(2003) definition of genre also notes the recurrent and typified nature of
genres. For example, he calls a genre “the
product or material residue of problem solving” that “provides a sort of social
memory” (p. 115). But he emphasizes another aspect of genre, its role in
mediating activity. “Genre,” he says, “can
be seen as both the product (object)
and the mediator of repeated activity”
(p. 115, italics in original). It is the
mediating quality of genres that provides the essential building block for the
genre tracing methodology. It is what
makes genres connecting nodes in a genre network, sites of action in the genre
ecology. Incidentally, talking about network versus ecology reminds me that Spinuzzi has a very interesting discussion on his blog of how he came up with the idea of "ecology" rather than "network" to describe what he was seeing when he was doing this research.
How Spinuzzi Empowered Me
Interestingly,
Spinuzzi’s book gave me two specific ways I might use the book or its ideas to
improve practice at my institution. Dr.
DePew’s Online Writing Instruction course was the first ODU course that
revealed to me how superior a course website can be over a learning management
system (LMS) approach to course management and communication. Additional courses using this
approach—including this one, Theories of Network—have further convinced me.
After the OWI course, I went to our Moodle support technician on campus and
asked him about using a course website approach. He pointed out that the history department
was doing so through the university website, and I looked into their practice
but discovered that they apparently had issues keeping these pages updated to
the level needed for practical course management. In consequence, I went back to Moodle. However, Spinuzzi’s discussion of open
systems (OS) approaches inspired me to go back to the support technician—maybe
with the book in my hand—to explore ways that we might open our system to more
dynamic interaction—whether through Moodle or another solution. Our tech guy is one of the good guys. He is cheerful, prompt and responsive. I believe he would be open to innovation. I made a list of things that websites allow
that Moodle does not currently allow as a way of opening the conversation. What might result from this, I don’t know,
but I can thank Spinuzzi for inspiring me to open the dialogue.
The
other way that Spinuzzi’s book empowered me came from the discussion of the
Texas Tech English department website.
As it happens, about two days ago, I discovered that the ESL information
on our English department site is extravagantly out-of-date. Since that is a
program that I coordinate, I sent an email to the other ESL teacher and the
department chair about the problem. It didn’t even occur to me that I might be
able to directly make the changes. But
even before finishing my reading of Spinuzzi’s discussion of the “brochureware”
approach of the Texas Tech site (p. 209), it struck me, “Hey! I don’t have to
be powerless here. Why can’t I get
permission to access and update the site myself?” As far as I know, none of my colleagues have
tried to manage the site. We depend on
computer support people and perhaps the department’s office manager, if I’m not
mistaken. But I once developed a website
back in 2001 or 2002 when things were truly clunky, so I imagine I can learn
what it takes to make the changes that we faculty might need to make in our
small department, and I imagine that everyone would welcome having another
person who knows how to do this. As I
read through the rest of Spinuzzi’s example, I also felt that the announcement
mechanism would be a good innovation for our department. While this is not
something that I could develop personally, it might be possible to get it built
in to our site. I know it would be
productive since we have had some challenges with communicating events in the
past. Again, whatever happens, I believe
that going back to my department and asking about how we manage our site and
how we might manage it better will probably be a productive conversation.
References
Miller, C. R. (1984.) Genre as social action. Quarterly
Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151-167.
Retrieved from http://www4.ncsu.edu/~crmiller/Publications/MillerQJS84.pdf
Schryer, C. F. (1993). Records as
genre. Written
Communication, 10(2), 200-234. Retrieved from
http://search.proquest.com/docview/85535463?accountid=12967
Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A
sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
My reading, Zanzucchi & Truong (2013), focused on how
faculty development initiatives could create and maintain an instructional
culture based on eportfolios. In terms
of the levels within an activity system, as Spinuzzi (2003) describes, Zanzucchi
& Truong focus on the macroscopic level.
On the other hand, the two summaries written by my classmates both
focused on the mesoscopic level, to use Spinuzzi’s schema. (See, for example, Spinuzzi, 2003, p. 30.) Yancey
et al (2013), summarized by Megan, looked at the need to develop a new
vocabulary for assessing multimodal portfolios and investigated the approaches one
might use for reading an eportfolio. As
part of their investigation, these authors read a simulated eportfolio and
examined the various ways that one might “read” such a genre assemblage. They also considered the ways in which an
eportfolio is an “emerging genre” that will in part be defined by the students
using it. Wierszewski (2013), as
summarized by Alex, also examined the mesoscopic level in a study of teacher
comments on eportfolios. By counting and
classifying the comments, Wierszewski was able to gain an early impression of
how teachers are transferring practices from previous paper-based assessment
experiences and adapting to eportfolios.
Both of these articles were helpful for me in fleshing out what
eportfolios are and how they might be assessed because they focused on the
mesoscopic level, that is, by connecting an imagined instructor with a given
set of eportfolios. My article, on the
other hand, looked at more extended parts of the activity system, namely, the
program level, in which multiple instructors are connected to each other and to
the instructional philosophy guiding the assessment outcomes of an entire
program. The fact that I was able to look
at both levels gave me a richer understanding of eportfolios and the
implications of using them as an individual instructor and within a program. It also gave me a chance to notice how
analyses can operate at different levels of scope.
References
Spinuzzi, C.
(2003). Tracing genres through
organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press.
Wierszewski, E. (2013).
“Something old, something new”: Evaluative criteria in teacher responses to
student multimodal texts. In H. McKee & D. N. DeVoss (Eds.), Digital Writing Assessment and
Evaluation (n.p). Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital
Press/Utah State University Press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae/05_wierszewski.html
Yancey, K.B., McElroy,
S.J., & Powers, E. (2013). Composing, networks, and electronic
portfolios: Notes toward a theory of assessing eportfolios. In H. McKee
& D. N. DeVoss (Eds.), Digital Writing
Assessment and Evaluation (n.p). Logan, UT: Computers and Composition
Digital Press/Utah State University Press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae/08_yancey.html
Zanzucchi, A.,
& Truong, M. (2013). Thinking like a
program: How electronic portfolio assessment shapes faculty development
practices. In H.A. McKee, & D.N. DeVoss, D. N. (Eds.), Digital writing assessment & evaluation (n.p). Logan, UT:
Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. Retrieved
from http://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae/14_zanzucchi.html
Zanzucchi, A., & Truong, M.
(2013). Thinking like a program: How
electronic portfolio assessment shapes faculty development practices.In H.A. McKee, & D.N. DeVoss, D. N. (Eds.), Digital
writing assessment & evaluation (n.p). Logan,
UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press.
Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae/14_zanzucchi.html
Probably
like most of the contributions to this collection, Zanzucchi and Truong open by
emphasizing the significance and timeliness of eportfolios as a pedagogical and
assessment advance for bringing writing instruction into line with digital literacies
and practices. However, the specific contribution of this article is to explore
the ways in which student eportfolios can be used at the program level,
particularly in ensuring that faculty share the same pedagogical values and
assessment practices. The authors
discuss the ways in which their program in particular has addressed the
challenge of uniting a large group of instructors in shared instructional
practices built around eportfolios. The
program, the Merritt Writing Program (MWP) at the University of California at
Merced (UCM), is somewhat unique in that the department was established and
developed outside of the English department.
However, in many ways, the institutions practices can be a good case
study for other institutions. For example,
although the program offers an academic minor, much of the work of the faculty,
as in many institutions, is within the FYC program. The sixty instructors currently working
within the program all use eportfolios as an assessment strategy, and the institution
has developed ways to work with this faculty to ensure shared practices. After briefly discussing their program’s
experience with eportfolios, the author outline the faculty development
approach they have developed. This is
probably the heart of the paper. They conclude by discussing the value of
multimodal approaches generally and the importance of low-barrier technologies
in particular.
The article should
be generally helpful to institutions seeking to develop or improve an
eportfolio approach. The authors include enough information about the faculty development
workshops that they have developed to offer an overview of what another
institution might do. Links back to their program page can also offer some
ideas about the sorts of resources that institutions might use to support
faculty. Although it is not the main
idea of the article, it also offers some impressions about the degree to which
an institution might unify practices.
For example, by having shared assessment activities and offering
workshops, the program can foster a shared philosophy for teaching and
assessing writing. However within this
loose framework, instructors can still develop their own assignments. But the fact that all instructors use the
eportfolio and the fact that the rubrics are shared means that assessment is
done in very similar ways for all classes. This means that students have the
confidence that their experiences are in alignment with those of other students
in other sections. It also makes the
task of instructors easier. The
desirability of using faculty development to find a balance between shared and
diverse instructional practices is a key insight of the article.
In terms of my own experience within my
institution, this article offered me some good ideas for taking back to our
writing program coordinator. We do not
use eportfolios and, in fact, do little with multimodal composing. I am not sure if there is much interest in
doing so. However, because we are
interested in bringing our diverse practices into greater alignment and because
we are forced by our accrediting body to evaluate a sample of student work, I
think I might be able to sell the idea of an eportfolio. We already have composition meetings where we
meet and assess student papers, both for our accreditation requirements, and more
often, to ensure that we are teaching and assessing our students in similar
ways. It makes sense to do this same type of work with digital documents
instead of paper documents. By moving
towards digital documents, we might also bring more multimodal practices into
our writing program.
One
productive definition of genre comes
from Miller’s widely-cited 1984 article where she describes genre as a fusion
of “substantive, stylistic, and situational” (p. 152) elements, an idea borrowed
from Jamieson and Campbell. More significantly, genre is “a recurrent,
significant action” (p. 165), or in other words, “a typification of rhetorical
action” (p. 163). This description of the mechanism that generates genre is
made clearer in Bazerman (2004) where he explains typification as a process
where recurrence brings about “standardized forms of utterances that are
recognized as carrying out certain actions in certain circumstances” (p.
316). My favorite definition of genre,
however, comes from Schryer (1993). She
says that “genres can be described as stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough
sites of social and ideological action” (p. 208). Implicit in this description is the idea that
genres always draw on previous textual experiences that serve as genealogical
antecedents and may always evolve. Thus,
genres trace the outlines of past communicative events to offer a semi-stable
pre-fabricated container for social actions roughly analogous to the social
actions embodies in those past events.
A
good introduction to the key terms in rhetorical genre theory comes from
Bazerman (2004). obviously, but
Bazerman finds speech acts a salient
starting point for his discussion of genre, as is also true in his (1994)
exploration of patents as a genre.
Although in the article on patents Bazerman problematizes speech acts in
relation to genre, the definition of speech acts as “meaningful social actions
accomplished by language” (2004, p. 311) can still serve as a reasonable
starting point. A couple of other terms
defined here in Bazerman (2004) are genre set and genre system. A genre
set is “the collection of types of texts that someone in a particular role
is likely to produce” (318). Devitt’s
(1991) study of the genres used by tax accountants in their work lives would be
a good example of a genre set. A genre system on the other hand is “comprised
of the several genre sets of people working together in an organized way”
(Bazerman, 2004, p. 318). In other
words, by bringing tax codes into the discussion of the genres of tax
accounting, we are talking about a genre set.
The tax code is not produced by the accountants, but it is part of their
activity system. Activity system is the
final key term I want to bring out of Bazerman’s (2004) introduction. In fact, he calls it a “system of activity”
(p. 319). Russell (1997) provides a more
precise definition of the construct of activity
system as “any ongoing, object-directed, historically-conditioned, dialectically-structured,
tool-mediated human interaction: a family, a religious organization, an
advocacy group, a political movement, a course of study, a school, a discipline,
a research laboratory, a profession, and so on” (p. 4-5).
Carolyn Miller and Charles Bazerman discuss some of the key terms and
concepts of genre theory in this youtube video (with French subtitles!).
Annotated bibliography of three of
the articles
Genre as social action
This
1984 article by Carolyn Miller is the classic, when Rhetorical Genre Theory
really started in many ways. Although
the article is old enough that Google scholar offers no statistics on how much
it has been cited, I definitely feel like I have seen this article in almost
every book or article that I have read on genre. Of course, Miller is not really the
beginning. In her article, she draws on productive
work done by Kohrs & Campbell on genre and refers to others whose ideas
played a role in her important formulation of the concept, such as Kenneth
Burke and Lloyd Bitzer. At any rate, it
was Miller who took the definitive step beyond the classificatory and formal
view of genre and described genre as a rhetorically productive term. As she describes in her statement of purpose,
“I will be arguing that a rhetorically sound definition of genre must be
centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is
used to accomplish. To do so, I will examine the connection between genre and
recurrent situation and the way in which genre can be said to represent
typified rhetorical action” (p. 151). In
the article she begins by examining previous views of a genre in literature and
rhetoric, then using the concept of rhetorical situation beginning with Bitzer’s
model, she describes how recurrent rhetorical acts become typified to create
genres, and how genres work productively within a theory of meaning.
Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity
Systems
To
best appreciate Bazerman’s 2004 article, “Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity
Systems,” it is helpful to consider the context. Bazerman’s contribution is the eleventh and
last in a collection of essays designed to systematically approach introduce “methods
for understanding, studying, and analyzing texts and writing practices”
(Bazerman & Prior, 2004, back cover).
The book is fairly unique in offering a variety of textual
approaches. It includes several
rhetorical approaches, discourse analysis and approaches that straddle
rhetorical and literary theory—such as narrativity and intertextuality. It also considers some less usual approaches,
like how text and talk interact in presentations or collaborative composing
situations and how children learn to write.
Each article in the collection defines key terms, describes the
approach, and explains how one would go about using the approach to perform an
analysis. As someone who has come into
rhetoric and English from a linguistic background, I was thrilled to find a
book that did a good job of drawing together methods of textual analysis that
had emerged within different traditions.
Within the context of this book, therefore, Bazerman’s article is
designed to give an overview of how genre theory compares with, and in some
ways, emerges from speech act theory and how genres are associated with each
other and operate within activity systems.
The article is a reasonable overview of the key terms, and like the
other articles in the collection, it does a reasonable job of describing how
one might pursue an analysis. The
weakness for me was Bazerman’s sample analysis.
I have read quite a few genre analyses, including widely-cited Amy
Devitt’s (1991) study of genres used by tax accountants, and of course, the two
cases included in the recent set of readings, Bazerman’s (1994) study of patents
and patent applications, and Popham’s (2005) look at forms used in medical
offices. Compared to these cases, Bazerman’s
(2004) analysis of school worksheets fails to capture the most salient features
of genres for novices to remember. The
analysis provides some helpful insights on the classroom instruction that he
was observing, but by focusing more on the activity system than the genre, I
think it provides a weaker case study than the others mentioned above, at least
for those less familiar with the concept of genre, as I assume would be the
case for an introductory book such as this.
Forms as
Boundary Genres in Medicine, Science and Business
Popham’s
(2005) article expands the concept of genre and offers an additional productive
path for the concept. Thus, the article
adds great value for those who are already familiar with the core concepts of
genre. From Miller’s (1984) article, we
are already prepared to see genre as offering insights on form, social function,
and to a degree, antecedent traces. Miller
(1994) sheds more light on the latter, showing how each time a genre is used,
it draws on this history and adds to it. Bazerman (1994, 2004) connects genres back to
speech acts and describes their operation within activity systems. All of this is background for Popham’s
article since she brings out the point that a number of genres are designed to
operate at the boundaries of discourse communities to mediate knowledge between
these communities. Popham gives the
example of forms that reconstruct a patient as scientific data for the doctor, forms
translate scientific data (test results, diagnostic observations, measurements
and so forth) into medically actionable information, and forms that translate
diagnostic decisions into billable codes.
Thus, the activity system of the doctor’s office or clinic uses forms to
reconstruct information in ways that it can be used by or seen as a knowledge
that is actionable in different ways by different classes of participants. Popham describes three terms that capture the
ways genres do this: translation, distillation and reflexion. Whereas the first term is more or less what
it sounds like, distillation involves condensing a complex set of information
into a much smaller set of information according to what is relevant on the other
side of the boundary. In other words,
all of the medical data in the chart used by medical caregivers becomes
distilled down into a small set of diagnostic codes associated with billing and
insurance. Reflexion is a more complex
term, but basically it refers to how the genre and the discourse strategies
reconstruct one discipline into terms useful for another discipline. The process is certainly largely unrecognized
by the disciplines themselves, but an example is when the physician’s actions
and the patient’s symptoms are both distilled into an insurance code. In a
sense, business has reconstructed the practice of medicine in a way that
deemphasizes the physician’s agency and authority since it has turned the
clinical visit into little more than a computational process spitting out a
diagnostic code.
Genre and cognitive linguistics
One
thing that caught my attention is a link between Miller’s view of genre (1984,
1994) and cognitive linguistic ideas about classification and semantic
constructs. When I was in my MA program
in linguistics, my favorite class was my semantics course. One concept that
grabbed my attention then and is still a productive concept for me is the idea
of prototypes. Lakoff (1987) builds a
case for rejecting a formalistic Aristotelian classification model in much the
same way that Miller (1984) does in her rejection of mere classification schemes
for genre. The main purpose of the book, in fact, is to develop the prototype theory model as an alternative.
(Image from Wikipedia)
Miller notes that “the semiotic framework
provides a way to characterize the principles used to classify discourse,
according to whether the defining principle is based in rhetorical substance
(semantics), form (syntactics), or the rhetorical action the discourse performs
(pragmatics). A classifying principle based in rhetorical action seems most clearly
to reflect rhetorical practice (especially since, as I will suggest later,
action encompasses both substance and form).” (152) Her reference to semantic framework is not
directly referring to work done in linguistics—though she does mention Halliday
and van Dijk, both of whom share the view that semantic content arises through social
usage, rather than pre-existing in some pure and logical form. In other words, by recommending a focus on
pragmatic considerations rather than formal features for classification and an
open class of items, Miller is very much in line with what linguistics were
also noticing about classification and cognition. Both approaches draw on theories of
expectation that are in harmony with cognitive science and prototype theory. In other words, human beings have
experiences, notice patterns across experiences, and develop mental models
abstracted from those experiences. That
is basically what genre is, and that is how human beings derive lexical meaning
as well. I have long seen genres as
functioning something like prototypes. I
am not the only one who has caught this idea, but it isn’t too widespread. Of course that can mean it isn’t as
productive as I think it is, or it might simply mean that other people have
focused on other aspects of genre. At
any rate, this is a concept that I intend to explore and that I believe may be
productive for me in the future.
Genre and networks
Genre
can be conceptualized in several ways. Bazerman (2004) and Russell (1997)
clearly see it as mediating within an activity system, as does Spinuzzi (2003).
Devitt apparently does not see it this way, though I have to revisit her
comments to recall exactly what distinctions she drew between her views and
theirs. However, within Rhetorical
Genre Theory, within which all of these theorists operate, genre always
involves recurrent social action, and generally functions as a middle term, as
Miller (1994) points out. In other
words, genre can be seen as a node or perhaps a channel. To use computer terminology, perhaps genre
could be seen as a router. Or perhaps it might be better seen as a medium
through which the message travels. Note
that “medium,” here again, is a computer term for a connecting cable, not
medium in the mass communication sense.
In any case, genre has little meaning without an ecological or network
view of communication. Within such a view,
it can serve a powerful role. This is
probably best represented by Miller (1994) when she employs Giddens’
structuration theory to describe the dual operation of genre, activated each
time as a communicative event which in turn reinforces the structure to make it
more salient for later appropriation for similar analogous uses.
References
Bazerman, C. (1994). Systems of
genres and the enactment of social intention. In A. Freedman, & P. Medway
(Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric
(79-101). London: Taylor & Francis.
Bazerman, C. (2004). Speech acts,
genres, and activity systems: How texts organize activity and people. In C.
Bazerman, & P. Prior (Eds.), What
writing does and how it does it (309-339). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Bazerman, C., & Prior, P. A.
(2004). What writing does and how it
does it: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices. Mahwah,
N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Devitt, A.J. (1991). Intertextuality
in tax accounting: Generic, referential, and functional. In C. Bazerman &
J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual dynamics of the profession (pp. 336-357).
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What
categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miller, C. R. (1984.) Genre as social action. Quarterly
Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151-167.
Retrieved from
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~crmiller/Publications/MillerQJS84.pdf
Miller, C.R. (1994). Rhetorical
community: The cultural basis of genre. In A. Freedman, & P. Medway
(Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric
(67-78). London: Taylor & Francis.
Popham, S. (2005). Forms as boundary
genres in medicine, science, and business. Journal
of Business and Technical Communication, 19(3), 279-303.
Russell, D. (1997). Rethinking genre
in school and society: An activity theory analysis. Written Communication, 14(4):504-554.http://www.public.iastate.edu/~drrussel/at&genre/at&genre.html
Schryer, C. F. (1993). Records as
genre. Written Communication, 10(2),
200-234. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/85535463?accountid=12967
Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A
sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
