A Responsive Rhetorical Art: Artistic Methods for Contemporary Public Life (Composition, Literacy, and Culture)

A Responsive Rhetorical Art explores the risk-ridden realm of wise if always also fallible rhetorical action—the productive knowledge building required to compose and to leverage texts, broadly construed, for the purposes of public life marked by shrinking public resources, cultural conflict, and deferred hope. Here, composition and literacy learning hold an important and distinctive cultural promise: the capacity to invent with other people new ways forward in light of their own interests and values and in the face of obstacles that could not have otherwise been predicted. Distributed across publicly situated strangers, including citizen-educators, this work engages a persistent challenge of early rhetorical uptake in public life: that what might become public and shared is often tacit and contested. The book's approach combines attention to local cases (with a transnational student organization, the Nipmuck Chaubunagungamaug, and the South Sudanese diaspora in Phoenix) with a revisable guide for taking up wise action and methods for uncovering elusive institutional logics. Contents......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 12 Introduction: Enlivening Early Rhetorical Uptake alongside Others......Page 16 Part 1: Situating A Responsive Rhetorical Art......Page 24 Chapter 1: Tensions and Challenges Inherent in the Early Uptake of Public Life......Page 26 Chapter 2: Defining a Responsive Rhetorical Art......Page 34 Part 2: Actors Taking Up A Responsive Rhetorical Art......Page 56 Chapter 3: A Rhetorical Approach to Publicly Responsive Research Methods......Page 58 Chapter 4: Community Actors Taking Up a Responsive Rhetorical Art......Page 68 Chapter 5: Supporting Rhetoricity in the Face of a Stalled Project......Page 82 Part 3: A Responsive Rhetorical Art: Why Now?......Page 108 Chapter 6: Gambian American College Activists Conjure an Alternative to Aid-to-Africa Discourse / Elenore Long, Nyillan Fye, and John Jarvis......Page 110 Chapter 7: Disciplinary Arguments That Test a Responsive Rhetorical Art......Page 132 Part 4: Educators Helping Students And Institutions Support A Responsive Rhetorical Art......Page 158 Chapter 8: Can We Make Inquiry Professional? Responsive Arts and the Rhetorical Education of Future Public Workers......Page 160 Chapter 9: The Nipmuck Chaubunagungamaug People Do Exist: Imagining the What Next—An Experimental Alternative to Evidentiary Legal Discourse / Elenore Long, John Jarvis, and D. Deerheart Shaughnessy......Page 181 Chapter 10: Untangling Empowerment Knots: Tooling a Responsive Rhetoric / Elenore Long, Roda Nyapuot Kuek, and Jennifer Clifton......Page 206 Part 5: A Practical Guide......Page 238 Chapter 11: Enacting a Responsive Rhetorical Art......Page 240 Appendix 1: Phase 1: Hillary’s Inquiry into Institutional Logics......Page 260 Appendix 2: Sample What-if Module for Interns’ Website......Page 264 Notes......Page 266 Works Cited......Page 282 Index......Page 304