***

“How does one create respect under conditions of little or no respect?” (x).

Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday

Cintron begins Angels’ Town with a discussion of making and divides his project in two parts: 1) the making of ethnographies, reflecting on and critiquing both the methodology at large and his own research practices and 2) the making of ourselves through performance and display as we exist within systems of power (ix). Cintron’s own project is an ethnography of a Latino/a community outside of Chicago, although he encourages us to think of his book as a “project in the rhetorics of public culture or the rhetorics of everyday life” (x). That is, he situates his ethnographic research into an analysis of public culture—exploring public performances that range from clothing and car decorations to linguistic styles and geographic boundaries (x). According to Cintron, such an approach blends traditional (anthropology-based) ethnographic methods with cultural critique (xi).

Taking a page from de Certeau, Cintron introduces tekhne—“a reasoned habit of mind in making something” (xii)—as a supplement to his theme of making to explore art (performance) in everyday contexts.

In many ways, my summary of this book will never do it justice as Cintron carefully crafts a narrative rich with symbolism and metaphor, methodological reflection, and narratives from those with whom he worked/lived. Even in the book title—named for two different Angels who represent the tragedy and comedy of the town—we see attention to a larger commentary about the lives of people who exist within the subaltern. Even his pseudyonyms for the town and for the people are larger tropes “of the difficult of finding truth inside the lie, the lie inside the truth” (xiii).

Chapter Breakdown

In chapter 1, “Starting Places,” Cintron offers more about his methodology, beginning with his move to Angelstown in 1981, his involvement as a researcher working on his dissertation from 1987-98, and his on and off work within the community from 1990 to the book’s publication date. It’s interesting how Cintron describes his interactions and “different social roles” that allowed him to move beyond the typical scope of a researcher as he tutored children and took them to museums, translated for adults, and actively participated in the community with which he researched. This detail speaks nicely to his metaphor of the collection basket—a metaphor of someone “who moves at the level of the heart, and so much is dropped into her or his life” (2). Particularly with ethnography, the researcher is like the collection basket that receives information and details about the lives who contribute to it, and this book is an attempt to empty that basket, to give back.

This reciprocity can also be seen in the argument Cintron establishes between ethos and logos.  arguing that they are bound together and that a person’s character is integral to their ability to persuade (3). The ethos of the ethnographer, Cintron argues, is created during moments of interaction, which leads to his central claim: “The persuasiveness of the ethnographic knowledge claim is constituted through and through, both in the moments of fieldwork and the moments of the final text, by ethos” (4). He takes this a step further, though, to point out that there is also a deep and important connection between our early-life experiences (ethos) and our the research and fieldsites we pursue (logos) (7). These experiences help us sift through observations and negotiate between knowledge claims and memory. Cintron is not interested, then, in ethnography for its traditional goals of attempting to “get into the heads” of the people researched who are bound by their geographic and linguistic conditions; rather, “this text is about the conditions of in-betweenness, an almost unlocatable place” (12) and his purpose is “to talk of these contradictions and nuances as they appeared in individual lives” (13). Like Canagarajah, Cintron is careful to establish his own subjectivity within these shifting negotiations and how his own experiences both allow and deny him access to the culture and community he studies.

In chapter 2, “Mapping/Texting,” Cintron offers some background and spatial analysis about Angelstown, introducing the importance of maps as representations of “the discourses of measurement” (17). That is, he examines maps of the neighborhood and the separate wards in order to show how the place-names that appear on the map are part of a “network of idealizations that enable the buying and selling of property” (21). In some ways, then, this measurement is one of property and economic value, which is why the tensions with Angelstowns gangs—and particularly The Latin Kings—is a tension with the police of reclaiming space (“recovering” the streets) in order to make Angelstown (and communities like it) more marketable. Here, Cintron invokes Nancy Fraser’s articulation of the public sphere as a space where people both struggle to be heard and struggle to silence others (27). This is important because within such a space, rational discursive interaction doesn’t exist because, as Cintron notes, “The public space can never be a place for equally contending ‘rational’ voices when the society itself is so fissured that an accent, a gender, an appearance, or an action can by itself signal in the minds of some a discourse that should not be heard” (27). It is this space—where members of the community struggle within different systems of power and struggle socially and economically—that Cintron’s analysis exists.

Chapter 3, “Looking for Don Angel,” begins with a discussion of documents (which reminded me of the argument Canagarajah makes about the power of the research article and the argument Brandt makes about our documentary society). Specifically, he analyzes the rhetoric of legal documents—passports, green cards, driver’s licenses—in order to understand their cultural meaning and how they construct and cross the binary of truth/lies. In Angelstown, the forging of legal documents is a reclamation of power from the “literate burearcracy” that controls printed documents and, thus, tries to control who does and does not belong (52). This chapter focuses on Don Angel, a chero (ranchero) who gave Cintron access to two different types of illegal documents—ID cards and birth records—so that he could analyze the role these documents play in “bridg[ing] distance in cultures that have grown so large that knowledge of the Other is not often the norm” (55). The dynamic of truth/lies plays out through the “truth” that such documents tell about a person, the suspicion of those in power who use these documents to regulate norms (“the separation of one individual from the masses” 56) and the deceit in forging by those who such documents marginalize. These documents “are products of a lack of trust that plays itself out as a momentary curtailment of freedom at the moment of verification” (56), offering temporary—and controlled—moments of “freedom” to exist within the system of dominant power. And even this transient space is deceiving because Cintron writes, “Don Angel’s false documents were a display of identities allowing his person to escape observation. They increased the bureaucratic clutter. They parodied and manipulated bureaucratic discourse and its forms of representation so that he could hide behind the array” (57). That is, they represented truth only in the way that they (successfully) forged and mimicked truth.

Cintron also analyzes the gestural and oral discourses of Don Angel and how he performs a set of stylized actions (viejito performance) that set him apart from others in the community. Don Angel—with his mix of verbal and gestural modes, Spanish and English, and stories influenced by cultural traditional knowledge—becomes a powerful metaphor in the text for the fractured nature of the community and another binary: the outdated/modern. Importantly, Cintron ties this binary into a discussion of a cash economy because those who buy into modernity (and stay up to date with technologies, skills, capitalistic values) benefit more economically and allow people to pass more easily into the systems of power (66).

In chapter 4, “A Boy and His Wall,” Cintron focuses on a different metaphor: the wall as both a barrier and as a space “on which imagination can write out a desire and protect the self” (100). The walls Cintron analyzes belongs to Valerio Martinez, a teenager, which mirrored the way Valerio was both confined within his social and socieconomic realities and chose to represent himself beyond those constraints. The thing that interests me most in this discussion of Valerio is Cintron’s focus on his LD label:

It was as if in the everyday world where discourse is largely performative and social, constructed in groups or dialogically, he did well, but in the school world of metadiscourse—where discourse and its parts become the objects of study or, in short, testing grounds for evaluating individual competence—he started to short-circuit. 101

This statement, in particular, critiques an educational system stuck in a model that attempts to diagnose and sort students based on de-contextualized testing practices that privilege particular (normative) bodies and forms of knowledge. This relates back to the discussion of truth/lies because we frequently uphold medical and educational authorities as Truth despite the social acknowledgement that Othering is constructed. In this particular case, Othering occurs through the diagnosis, indicating that “LD may be less ‘there’ in the tested subject and more in the social/political contexts in which the testing occurs” (104). This creates a vicious cycle of failure because Valerio had struggled (because of the constraints and values of the classroom), LD tests identified this struggle, and he was sorted (ie. therapy, tutoring) accordingly in order to integrate back into the mainstream classroom and mainstream ideology of what education is. So instead of changing the system, these students are themselves expected to change—and, because they rarely have power—are powerless against a system that offers them no alternative. Valerio’s bedroom walls, then, became a space where he could represent himself—albeit hyperbolically—in ways that imagined a different life.

Cintron also focuses on gangs here to explore how hyperbolic images are performed and embodied. The cars (brightly painted, impeccably maintained), the clothes and hairstyles (carefully constructed) represent ways that community members attempt to pass through their socioeconomic and material realities—to perform an identity that has more control. Cleanliness was also a performance of this control because, as Cintron notes, “Clean display within public space acts to hide the raggedy or the decay in private space” (118).

Chapter 5, “The Logic of Violence/The Logic of Trust,” takes an interesting turn in terms of methodological self-reflexivity because Cintron asks, “What was I to make of values and beliefs that seemed to run contrary to my own?”, questioning how we can fairly and ethically textualize these encounters and people (130). This chapter, then, is an attempt to identify complex inner lives and inner struggles as sharply influenced and driven by ideological forces (131). More specifically, Cintron identifies how a macroworld of humiliation and microworld of fear are reinforced and reinscribed by shared ideologies. To do so, Cintron turns to María and Alberto Juárez, whose relationship is grounded in both private and socioeconomic power imbalances (140). In what might ordinarily be written off as matters of (verbal) domestic abuse, Cintron very carefully dissects their interactions in order to locate how power manifested within their struggles to communicate with and be heard by the other, illustrating how the injustices they faced externally influenced their ability to communicate. Cintron also analyzes Martín’s story of vengeance (connected to a crime involving his friends), situating it within a framework named “the logic of violence and the logic of trust” (146). I find this part fascinating because Cintron describes the experience as a “mini-crisis” in terms of both his values as an individual and as a researcher, yet he very carefully analyzes the way external pain manifests within internal struggles of fear and violence (147) that become embodied “felt truths” (162) of the community itself.

Similar to the chapter focused on Don Angel, chapter 6—“Gangs and Their Walls”—offers insight into a space that the researcher isn’t ordinarily granted access: gangs. Specifically, Cintron focuses on both the syntactical elements of the graffiti of the Almighty Latin King Nation and the appropriation of mainstream materials in order to show how gang members create respect under conditions of little/no respect. Cintron focuses on both their appropriation of mainstream symbols (and how these are recontextualized with new meanings through graffiti) and the rhetoric of gangs as Other and beyond the values of society in order to show how “street gangs for very understandable reasons sometimes played with this very rhetoric creating from it hyperbolized images in which the mainstream could witness its deepest fears” (167). This is where de Certeau enters the scene as Cintron spins a narrative of how graffiti is used to “enact a degree of violence against another gang or to implicitly do so by celebrating the power of one’s own gang” (170). That is, graffiti becomes a channel for reclaiming control and property and thus functions as both a tactic of action and tactic of language (176). These tactics are performances within a restricted public sphere that denies gang members access, so these tactics become opportunities to create (and perform) public expressions (176). Graffiti, then, is the result of “an intense need to acquire power and voice,” (186) and it is here that Cintron questions the boundary of how we label and respect some subaltern groups as legitimate counterpublics and how others lose the respect of the community and are denied access to their participatory privileges (186). This loss, Cintron argues, is a result of the public sphere’s anxiety (echoing the logic of violence)—a sphere that “cannot ‘think’ beyond what terrifies it” (194)—which of course, relates back to how we treat and sort disabled and otherwise marked bodies in our educational, social, and economic systems of power.

Concluding Thoughts

In the final chapter, “Blacktop,” Cintron returns to the making of order, attempting to reconcile ethnographic research through a lens of neat/clean, disorder/order, and a final exploration of the “discourses of measurement” (199). Here he actually defines discourse of measurement as “a set of historical processes that might allow one to understand the emergence of modern, professional life as a set of pervasive practices, styles of thought, and ways of speaking” (209). He also describes it as “the ways by which a precise order (or the fiction of a precise order) gets made (210). One way this is contextualized is the example of cleanliness and the way folks in the town placed themselves and their belongings behind a façade of cleanliness to create and perform a sense of order. Contextualized within a larger history, discourses of measurement present ways “of speaking and thinking that create order, coherence, and sets of rules to organize the otherwise random motions of daily life” (211).

This focus on daily life also circles back to Cintron’s methodology and his ethnography/rhetorics of everyday life. He describes writing as one discourse of measurement in the sense that we write in order to sort and make sense of what’s around us—to take control over the many different pieces we see and create a narrative about them. Like Cintron’s own book shows us, though, it’s difficult (and contrived) to try to sort those things neatly, to make order from disorder, which is why we see so many overlapping metaphors and narratives and cautious representations people and communities and methods. Critiquing himself, though, he also argues that even when we show the disorder, writing can only ever highlight “the appearance of disorder, rather than the being of disorder” (229). This leads to a final reflection on the making of ethnographies:

This way of imagining ethnography—as something that tries so hard to be exact and complete but remains always a failed expectation and a target for the sweetness of critique—is very humbling, yet it contains, finally, so very much that is worthwhile. 232

Beautiful.

Cintron, Ralph. Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Print.

Critical imagination.

Critical imagination is “a critical skill in questioning a viewpoint, an experience, an event, and so on, and in remaking interpretive frameworks based on that questioning” (19). That is, critical imagination is an “inquiry tool” (20) for speculating about what we know and how we came to know it. It provides an opportunity to rethink and reexamine people who have gone unnoticed, places that have not been seriously explored, practices and conditions that have been overlooked, and genres that have not received careful consideration (72). This remaking presents a number of new opportunities for inquiry:

When we study women of the past, especially those whose voices have rarely been heard or studied by rhetoricians, how do we render their work and lives meaningfully? How do we honor their traditions? How do we transport ourselves back to the time and context in which they lived, knowing full well that is not possible to see things from their vantage point? How did they frame (rather than we frame) the questions by which they navigated their own lives? What more lingers in what we know about them that would suggest that we need to think again, to think more deeply, to think more broadly? How do we make what was going on in their context relevant or illuminating for the contemporary context? (20)

Critical imagination also presents opportunities for the classroom. When learning academic discourse, students are eager to gain traction in any way they can, which is often evident through hasty claims, opinions, and evidence. Kirsch describes critical imagination as a way to “encourage students to go out into the world, explore unlikely sources, be open to chance discoveries, and consider the relevance of seemingly irrelevant documents, artifacts, and encounters” (79). Similarly, Royster explains that critical imagination encourages students to set aside assumptions, to delay judgments, and “to engage in their inquiries fully but courteously and respectfully—even when they disagreed with or became uncomfortable with something that they were seeing or hearing” (80).

Strategic contemplation.

Strategic contemplation overlaps with critical imagination as it, too, focuses on withholding judgment and resisting hasty conclusions (85). Strategic contemplation differs from critical imagination, though, with its overt connections to both the body and to time. Strategic contemplation reclaims meditation, which requires “taking the time, space, and resources to think about, through, and around our work as an important meditative dimension of scholarly productivity” (21). It also splits the research process into two parts (or journeys). One is the journey in real-time, real-space, which involves going into a field site to see where the research subject lived (85). The second journey is more internal and reflexive, providing space for the researcher to engage with her own embodied experiences in order to reimagine rhetorical situations and events (89). By focusing on lived or embodied experiences, strategic contemplation moves toward a politics of location that accounts for sociohistorical contexts, cultural traditions, and the lived experiences of both research subject and researcher. This methodological concept presents the following lines of inquiry:

What do we notice when we stand back and observe? How do we imagine, connect with, and open up a space for the women—and others—we study? How does their work speak to our minds, our hearts, and our ethos? What is most prominent? What lingers at the margins? What can our own lived experience teach us? How do we respond to—and represent—historical subjects when we discover that we may not share their values or beliefs? How do we honor, or do justice to, those who no longer can speak back to us? How can an ethos of humility, respect, and care shape our research? How do past and present merge to suggest new possibilities for the future when we create time and space for contemplation, reflection, and meditation? (22)

In terms of the classroom, strategic contemplation has a lot to offer in terms of both reflection and embodiment. Kirsch asks her students “to be mindful, to pause, to reflect, to pay attention to the world around them without rushing to judgment, to be open to chance discoveries, to new ways of seeing the world” (93), which overlaps with her approach to critical imagination. Royster, on the hand, moves closer to the embodied aspect of strategic contemplation, asking her students to imagine rhetoric as a “whole-body experience” (95). In this way, rhetoric becomes something more than disembodied academic practices: “I asked them to think about their bodily responses to what they were reading and writing, the part of the body to which they thought a text was connecting or trying to connect: the head (logos), the heart (pathos), the backbone (ethos—as related to beliefs), or the stomach (ethos—as related to aesthetic pleasure or revulsion)” (95).

Social circulation.

Social circulation is a point of departure from the previous two methods. This concept centers on “connections among past, present, and futures in the sense that the overlapping social circles in which women travel, live, and work are carried on or modified [generationally] and can lead to changed rhetorical practices” (23). Part of what social circulation seeks to do is disrupt the dichotomy of the public domain of men versus the private domain of women (98). Instead of focusing on how women participated in either the public or the private domain, social circulation works as a metaphor “to indicate the social networks in which women connect and interact with others and use language with intention” (101). Influenced by Stuart Hall’s ideas of language as a privileged medium for creating circles of shared meanings, social circulation presents new questions about women’s use of language in social situations:

Where were the spaces in which women chose/were permitted to speak? What were their fora, their platforms, the contexts of their rhetorical performances? Who were their audiences? What were their concerns? What tools for interaction did they use? How did they construct their arguments? What were the impacts and consequences of their rhetorical performances? How were they trained? How did they convey legacies of action? 100-01

Social circulation also prompts us to imagine new ways of positioning the reader in relation to new forms of texts as rhetorical sites, subjects, contexts, and practices  shift (108). Kirsch argues that this is an important opportunity to pay attention to, and appreciate, different reading practices (108). Royster argues that this is an opportunity to reflect on how place literacy and rhetorical education in social circulation within our classrooms: “We have the privilege and power of helping our students to liberate themselves as thinkers and self-defined users of language in full understanding that a liberation process does indeed mean, in effect, that we set in motion a process of casting “bread on the water” and creating circles of response—social circulations—the outcomes of which we might never be able to imagine—nor should be able to” (109).

Globalization.

Lastly, globalization differs most from the other methodological concepts, not necessarily because it’s underdeveloped so much as it isn’t developed quite as clearly—maybe because it is the one they suggest needs the most attention. Royster & Kirsch argue that feminist rhetorical scholars are actively moving toward “better-informed perspectives of rhetoric and writing as global enterprise; rescuing, recovering, and (re)inscribing women rhetors both distinctively in locations around the world and across national boundaries; and participating in the effort to recast perspectives of rhetoric as a transnational, global phenomenon rather than a Western one” (25). Though this movement doesn’t reflect intellectual dominance in the field, Royster & Kirsch argue that it does reflect presence (121). That is, people are interested in engaging with global feminist rhetorical studies, and scholars are using frameworks that connect feminist, rhetorical, and global studies (125). The challenge, then, is not necessarily a lack of research interest, but perhaps a lack of classroom application and an uncertainty of how to measure and value global knowledge:

How then do we explore the experiences of others without the encumbrances of our own cultural and linguistic prisms? How do we recast what we know in the face of the expanded scope of the unknown terrains before us? How do we create linkages between local and global points of view, knowledge, experience, achievement? Do the shifting paradigms of feminist rhetorical studies offer more-generative springboards as we search for new questions, gather data that may look different and actually be different, search for other ways to consider these data, and pursue an enhanced sense of rhetorical value? 127

Royster & Kirsch optimistically look toward the classroom, as part of the “world in us,” to think about some of these questions. They suggest trying to recognize and respect the globality that exists within our classrooms, “seeking more deliberately to gain experience in connecting internal globality (the world in us) to external globality (us in the world), as we tack out to other geopolitical locations” (128).

Questions

• Were there particular methodological concepts that y’all were more or less drawn to? that you see yourself enacting or engaging with in your own research or teaching? Were there (aspects of) any that seemed impractical or more difficult to incorporate into our research or classroom practices?

• When discussing strategic contemplation, Royster & Kirsch write, “In more recent years, any considerations of deliberately taking time away from the relentless march of making progress in the completion of a scholarly project—short of dramatic and often traumatic life experiences—have not been viewed as strength moves for serious scholars” (86). In the beginning, Royster writes that Traces of a Stream took 17 (!) years to complete. How do we find time to take on these types of projects? As graduate students, how can we engage with strategic contemplation in our own work? Or, how can we incorporate it into the 15-week space of a writing classroom?

• For each methodological concept, Royster & Kirsch graciously give us some insight into their own pedagogical practices. We don’t really see that same attention in the globalization chapter, though. Does that just speak to the difficulties of bringing global practices into Western classrooms?

• This is only slightly related, but how did y’all see their organizational framework of rhetorical assaying relating to, or departing from, these methodological concepts? How important was the geographical metaphor for the methodological discussion?

 
 
Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2012. Print.

1) Metaphor (or Topos) of Disorder.

Like the first four chapters, metaphors continue to play a pervasive role in Cintron’s analyses. One that I thought might be useful to examine a little more closely was framed as a rhetorical theme, a topos: “that of madness, disorder, and irrationality” (182). Cintron argues that gang members use madness to “create a ‘rep’ that no one wanted to ‘mess with’” (183), which is a way to create respect under conditions of little or no respect. Thus, disorder became a tool for power, a “kind of freedom” (183). Like he does with all points, though, Cintron provides a counter: “Instability, whose metaphor is rampant disease, whether in the physical body or social body, is not allowed its full power to destroy” (210). This occurs in his discussion of instrumental rationality and shows the limitations of “power” through disorder.

Generally, madness/disorder is constructed in opposition to social order, but it has larger connections to disability. Harkening back to Valerio, for example, disorder (e.g. LD) is prominent in the lives of these Mexican males. Because they seem to struggle with reading and writing, it seems likely that the LD label is racially motivated, that it’s a matter of not knowing enough white, middle-class English rather than not being intellectually “up to par.” This resonates with the Juárez family narrative, too, as we read about Alberto’s feelings about his own education and discrimination and how it has disabled him economically.

Taking this one step further, moving into “quicksand” (195) as Cintron might say, the theme of disorder has more explicit implications for the gang members as a disabled group. Cintron writes, “The reaction against the topos of madness/disorder, particularly when it becomes embodied in gang-related shootings, is that it represents both a threat to life as well as a withering away of the social controls that shore up the strongholds of the system world” (185). The gangs are abnormalized through a refusal to adhere to social norms; their physical bodies (their clothing, jewelry, performative characteristics) are marked differently from other Angelstown inhabitants; and they are literally disabled through physical violence.

2) Metacommentary on Ethnography.

From the first page, Cintron tells us that we will be getting a different kind of ethnography: “At one level, I critique the making of ethnographic texts, this book in particular” (ix). And Cintron holds true to this, dropping in questions and comments about ethnographic methods and practices as he explores various themes.

These are just a few that I think are worth revisiting:

• “What was I to make of values and beliefs that seemed to run contrary to my own?” (130)
• “How does one textualize such encounters, such people? How do I render the density and subtlety of life lived if, as the observer, I felt that mostly nastiness and short-sightedness were to be found there?” (130)
• “What is this ethnography, or, as I prefer to call it, this project in the rhetorics of public culture or the rhetorics of everyday life?” (228)
• “Like other ethnographies exposed, [this one] would reveal how innumerable particulars were sifted through, leaving most behind, and how the ones that remained were denuded of their contexts so that they could be distilled into a set of tenuous generalities.” (231-32)
• “Can we ask ethnography to be more exact or more complete or more faithful to the fieldsite? Other than demanding honesty and hard work of any fieldworker, I do not think that more can be asked.” (232)

3) The “E” Word.

It almost makes me cringe, but I’ll address it anyway: ethics. Cintron’s book has a different flavor than others we have read: it is poetic, sometime painful, and very personal (don’t ask me how I only chose “p” words). He constantly gives us both sides of the story and of his own claims, never settling for one true answer. For someone who argues the importance of ethos, he constructs a mighty trustworthy and honest ethos himself. In many ways, then, I want to say that he addresses ethical issues virtuously—that he is an ethical superhero ethnographer, but there were a few places that raised red flags for me that I want to share.

a. “Yeah, I was being judgmental, but the Juárez family had always summarized for me a certain innocence and trouble whose points of origin were deeply embedded in the larger social system” (133). He also discussed the family giving him headaches. It’s a side of the researcher that I’ve never seen, and I appreciate it. At the some time, it makes me question how the Juárez family functions in this book. I keep thinking back to our discussions about representing research participants and what to do when your analysis negatively portrays them. It’s difficult here, though, because these people aren’t just participants for Cintron; they are a family, a group of friends. It makes me wonder, how would the Juárez family feel about these brief, intimate snippets about their family dynamic?

b. “I was in a kind of mini-crisis. On the one hand, listening to stories of vengeance with a supposedly neutral ear seemed morally bankrupt; on the other hand, since I had never articulated a system that both understood vengeance and opposed it, I didn’t know how to reply to such stories” (146). Here, Cintron is struggling as he listens to Martín’s story of vengeance. To me, this is similar to the Juárez family narrative (to me) and the division between friend and researcher. Cintron, however, is so deeply affected by these stories of vengeance that the situation moves beyond a researcher/friend dilemma and moves to a deeper, personal dilemma about moral consciousness itself. What can we make of this moment and others like it? What does it show us about the level of engagement involved in a research project that spans nearly a decade?

c. “We interviewed those individuals who accepted us and became friends with a few, and occasionally we stumbled onto caches of information that we had no right to see” (164). This excerpt is part of a discussion about becoming part of a research project about gangs without having any personal experiences with gangs. It follows a quotation from Sanyika Shakur: “There are no other gang experts except participants” (163). And though Cintron claims that he doesn’t want to be a gang expert (164), the fact remains that he is researching gangs.This brings up a question that we’ve tossed around a few times: How do you research and become part of a community to which you have no personal ties?

This question gains speed when you factor in the high privacy of gang activity (from graffiti to physical acts of violence). Cintron argues that gang members are an important part of determining how people with no respect can gain respect, but beyond that, what are the benefits of studying gangs and their particular members in this chapter or in any context? Who benefits from this study?

Cintron, Ralph. Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Print.

In Chapter 1, David Barton and Uta Papen seek to map out the anthropology of writing—what it is and does, what methods it uses, and its scope. They argue that writing, though traditionally ignored by anthropologists for oral and more “exotic” forms of communication, is an important topic of study: “It was created by people and is passed on culturally; it has symbolic value and material aspects; and it is crucial to interaction between people and central to knowledge creation” (5). By examining writing through an anthropological lens, we can gain a better sense of how societies operate, how institutions interact with the public, and how social groups organize their experiences (5). A growing research interest in writing is seen through discourse analysis, literacy research, historical studies of writing, and educational research. Barton and Papen seem to favor the latter, which values writing as “more than skills,” positioning writing as an activity (8).

Because of this focus of writing as an activity, studying written texts is highly dependent on social and cultural contexts, which privileges research methods that account for these specific contexts. The methods favored are ethnographic and, sometimes, historical (9). These methods highlight the “users and producers of texts” and how they “engage with the broader social practices and discourses their actions are part of” (9). Typically, these texts fall into the category of the marginalized, which we have discussed throughout the semester: “incipient and ordinary, often invisible and hardly known, frequently ignored or mistakenly taken for irrelevant” (10).

Barton and Papen briefly outline the differences between the English and French writing research traditions. In the English tradition, for example, texts are often studied within a “literacy event” or “literacy practices,” which locate writing in social practices (11). Barton and Papen argue that texts must be studied beyond these categories, placed within contexts, spaces, and places that both differ and overlap (13). In France, however, researchers focus on the microprocesses of writing in relation to how they accomplish work-related tasks (22). Whereas an English writing tradition may focus on everyday life, multilingual contexts, or religion, French writing traditions may focus more on writing in the workplace and in public spaces.

In the second chapter, “Writing Acts: When Writing is Done,” Béatrice Fraenkel complicates these differences, showing both extraordinary and ordinary acts of writing. She begins by looking at revolutionary graffiti slogans and how they follow syntactic and rhetorical norms that are structured from other familiar graffiti models (33). Fraenkel argues that these graffiti slogans are “linguistic acts: orders, claims, exhortations, protests, denunciations, etc.” that are performative acts of writing (34). Then, when someone passes by the graffiti and reads the slogans, they participate in the public writing act through reading (36). What this shows is that the writing and reading acts (or processes) have value as a larger part of language and that they also have value specifically from being written, an act more permanent than speech.

Though Fraenkel describes political graffiti as an example of extraordinary writing, she argues that we can also find value in more ordinary public writing, such as signposts, notices, and road signs that both perform writing and modify the places where they appear. Her example, a “Beware of Dog” sign, warns us and labels the house as a forbidden space. I’m not entirely sure why the term label is so clearly defined here, but Fraenkel emphasizes that “labeling” refers to all acts that attach something written to a place, object, or person (38). So with the example of graffiti, labeling asks us to consider the performative uses of the written act of graffiti (39).

Fraenkel also briefly offers the example of post-9/11 memorial public acts of writing, which she designates as “writing events” that together create a collective writing act yet remain individual acts of writing. She asks, “How can we characterize these acts? How can we explain the new forms taken by reactions to such catastrophic events and their commemorations, involving writing practices which are still emerging, and writing actions which are difficult to explain?” (40). I don’t have answers for those questions, and she doesn’t really, either, but they are interesting for thinking about new and emergent forms of writing and how different elements from both the French and English writing traditions break down and rebuild within different contexts. Ultimately, Fraenkel herself makes this point, arguing that writing acts draw our attention as researchers to “the written elements of our environment, and the way in which inscriptions constitute it, manage it and disrupt it” (42).

I’m interested in hearing how other chapters in the book continue to disrupt these two research traditions, how authors use and blend research methods, and how they (and we) study these writing acts, practices, and events within their own contexts. Also, these beginning chapters really pushed the importance of context, reminding me of our heated discussion of the Purcell-Gates article “Analyzing Literacy Practice: Grounded Theory to Model” and how some of us seemed a bit…miffed by the isolation of context within the larger project. I was also reminded of an archive panel that I attended at CCCC last week, “Storying the Archive: Narrative, History, and Identity.” In the panel, Madhu Narayan argued that literacy narratives need to emphasize the historical and rhetorical exigences that allow these narratives to emerge, prompting criticism of The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) for stripping the stories away from their very specific, individual contexts.

Questions:

• We’ve brought this up before, but what are the values of studying writing on its own vs. researching writing as an activity within specific contexts?
• How do the other chapters work toward bridging the anthropology of writing and New Literacy Studies?
• What research methods are used by other authors in this collection that either support or work against these different research traditions? Barton and Papen mention ethnography and historical research—do any authors branch beyond these two? If not, are there other methods that we think could do this contextual work?

Barton, David, and Uta Papen, eds. The Anthropology of Writing: Understanding Textually-Mediated Worlds. NY: Continuum, 2010. Print.

In what contexts do we construct arguments about our research? In what contexts do we conduct research in the first place? Which contexts demand certain research methods more than other methods? In what ways does the current research debate in composition decontextualize the problems we debate? (1)

Specifically, Johanek develops a Contextualist Research Paradigm that prompts us to focus on “the contexts in which we and our students need to explore fully the nature of composing, learning, and teaching” (7).

We only had to read select chapters, but I saw some “guiding assertions” while skimming the other chapters that seemed useful for grounding a discussion of context—assertions that contextualize the need for a new research paradigm. Johanek makes six major claims that are woven throughout this text:

1. Comp theorists blame a scientific epistemology for the current-traditional paradigm.
2. The field’s social-constructivist interests have shifted focus away from contexts that could benefit from scientific inquiry.
3. This shift has resulted in newly valued research methods. [Here, I assume Johanek is referencing the influx of narrative and anecdote-as-research.]
4. Humanities training does not prepare us for scientific inquiry, which means we tend to construct and value non-scientific knowledge.
5. Most of the available (comp) research guides are inadequate in their articulation of design, sample choices, and statistical gathering and analysis.
6. All research methods are limited in what questions they can answer within particular contexts. Also, all research methods are valuable within particular contexts. (27-28)

The crux of Johanek’s argument emerges in Chapter 4, “From Epistemology to Epistemic Justification: Toward a Contextualist Research Paradigm.” Here, she directly addresses some of the issues we have discussed in class: the troubles with arguing which research methods are “good” (ethical) and which are “bad” (unethical), our preferences toward narrative, and—most controversially—our inattention to context. Johanek writes, “To argue instead that narratives, anecdotes, and stories are always more true than numbers, that numbers are always for some reason out of context and narratives are not, that it is always appropriate to share a researcher’s personal voice ignores the very thing to which we claim to be rhetorically most sensitive: context” (88). I feel like this is a moment (among others) where Johanek is really calling out compositionists, challenging us to reframe our epistemological stances. In many ways, she’s calling out some of our readings for this class that try to argue which methods are sensitive to context (thus “othering” those that are not). In place of this discussion, Johanek offers a new set of questions:

“In what context does that sort of argument make sense? In what context does such division naturally occur? In what contexts do divided ways of knowing serve us well? In what contexts in other areas of our lives do we make such distinctions?” (90)

With these questions, we don’t limit ourselves to sweeping arguments about whether narrative research is better than numerical; instead, we refocus on the goals, values, and needs of the research itself. We move from Is narrative better? to Is narrative more appropriate in this particular context? This reframing challenges what Johanek defines as the “truth” of our discipline: “we live in all words, in all modes of knowing, but we are trained to understand only some, unable to discuss the ‘other,’ and unwilling to see the narrow channels of scholarship we have imposed upon ourselves” (97).

Contextualist Research Paradigm for Rhetoric & Composition (Johanek 112)

Moving beyond some disciplinary shaming (reading this book stings a little!), Johanek develops a Contextualist Theory of Epistemic Justification [CTEJ], which “is grounded in the assertion that all justification of beliefs is a social act” (105). This is valuable to our research because it emphasizes the context. A CTEJ “forces us to focus not on numbers vs. narratives, but on the questions that motivate us to learn in the first place” (109). Johanek argues that is we adopt a CTEJ and begin (again) to value diverse research methods, we can better understand “why researchers make the decisions they do” (114), an understanding that would allow us to reflect on our research choices and whether they sync up the rhetorical context of our research.

Though Johanek provides some examples of this kind of work in subsequent chapters, what I found most valuable was the matrix she provided for how a Contextualist Research Paradigm applies to Rhet/Comp specifically (pictured above). I could see this being really useful to apply to any research project, and I appreciate that it covers all stages of the research process.

Finally, Johanek concludes with one last push toward a Contextualist Research Paradigm (“In a Contextualist Research Paradigm, one kind of research is not automatically more valuable than another, and one kind of evidence does not guide our quests” [207]) and one last reminder: “Numbers alone won’t reveal everything we need to know. Stories alone can’t do it, either” (209).

Questions:

1. Johanek is direct, blunt, and—at times—scolding, which, for me, was a reflection of how urgent she sees the research situation in comp. This book was published in 2000 and awarded an NWCA Outstanding Scholarship Award, which (I assume) means that this book has had some type of impact on the field. Do we know of other notable research in the field that makes the types of research moves that she advocates? Do we still see a lot of examples of the research that she reacts against, that relies on narrative and storytelling when a scientific inquiry is more appropriate?
2. What did you all make of her mixing of research methods within this book? She provided a lot of examples of quantitative research and data, and—somewhat ironically—I found myself skimming over those examples. Does our training continue to devalue quantitative research methods?
3. This book has interesting pedagogical implications. Johanek discusses this briefly in references to how we need to refocus both our own and our students’ research practices. With the time constraints of a semester, how could we productively adopt a Contextualist Research Paradigm in a class like WRT 205? It seems like the matrix she provides would be a good starting place…

Johanek, Cindy. Composing Research: A Contextualist Paradigm for Rhetoric and Composition. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2000. Print.

Broadening what counts as archival work.

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

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

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

Considering our researcher positionalities.

"Archives Shaping Man" via Randolph County Archives

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

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

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

Recognizing the human impact. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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