Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric for Social Movements

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ACTIVE VOICES

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ACTIVE VOICES Composing a Rhetoric of Social Movements

Edited by

Sharon McKenzie Stevens and Patricia Malesh

SUNY P R E S S

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Active voices : composing a rhetoric for social movements / edited by Sharon Stevens and Patricia M. Malesh. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-2627-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Rhetoric—Social aspects. 2. Rhetoric—Political aspects. I. Stevens, Sharon McKenzie. II. Malesh, Patricia M. P301.5.S63A28 2009 808—dc22 2008036387 10

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Since changes are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires. Conditions and events are neither to be fled from nor passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed. —John Dewey, American philosopher and education reformer (1859–1952)

 We dedicate this to our readers.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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1. Introduction: Active Voices Patricia Malesh and Sharon McKenzie Stevens

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PART I A New Rhetoric for Social Change: Theories

2. Vernacular Rhetoric and Social Movements: Performances of Resistance in the Rhetoric of the Everyday Gerard A. Hauser and erin daina mcclellan

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3. Dreaming to Change Our Situation: Reconfiguring the Exigence for Student Writing Sharon McKenzie Stevens

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PART II Public Rhetorics: Analyses

4. Disorderly Women: Appropriating the Power Tools in Civic Discourses Moira K. Amado-Miller

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5. The Progressive Education Movement: A Case Study in Coalition Politics Brian Jackson and Thomas P. Miller

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6. Giving Voice to a Movement: Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” and the Potential of History Thomas Rosteck

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7. Sharing Our Recipes: Vegan Conversion Narratives as Social Praxis Patricia Malesh

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PART III Changing Spaces for Learning: Actions

8. Moving Students into Social Movements: Prisoner Reentry and the Research Paper David Coogan

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9. Engaging Globalization through Local Community Activism: A Model for Activist Pedagogical Practice Anne Marie Todd

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10. “Creating Space” for Community: Radical Identities and Collective Praxis Mary Ann Cain

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Response Essay 11. Politics, Class, and Social Movement People: Continuing the Conversation William DeGenaro

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Notes on Contributors

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References

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Our personal interests in social movement scholarship—and in the active pursuit of social justice—came together over Sharon’s kitchen table in 2003, and the ongoing dialogue has shaped both of our subjectivities ever since. When we agreed, early in 2005, to begin the work of expanding our kitchen collective into this scholarly collection, it was because we wanted to more directly contribute to and extend the conversations that were shaping our personal and scholarly trajectories. Not surprisingly, this collection is shaped by such conversations, written and oral, and by conversation partners—more than we can adequately trace. By necessity, we can only acknowledge a small number of our debts. First, we wish to thank our contributors, whose commitments, insights, and patience with our many revision requests have strengthened this collection. We particularly thank Gerard Hauser and erin daina mcclellan for their early, practical support, and William DeGenaro for adding a third editorial perspective when necessary. Second, we wish to acknowledge Tilly Warnock and Roxanne Mountford for their useful and timely revision advice, as well as our two anonymous SUNY reviewers for their targeted comments and suggestions. Finally, we wish to thank the University of Colorado’s Communication Department and the Program for Writing and Rhetoric for providing fiscal support for our editorial work; Larin McLaughlin from SUNY Press, who has encouraged and supported this work from our first proposal through to publication; and SUNY’s production staff, in general, for their time.

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CHAPTER

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Introduction: Active Voices PATRICIA MALESH and SHARON McKENZIE STEVENS

Discourse and system produce each other—and conjointly—only at the crest of this immense reserve. What are being analyzed here are certainly not the terminal states of discourse; they are the preterminal regularities in relation to which the ultimate state, far from constituting the birth-place of a system, is defined by its variants. Behind the completed system, what is discovered by analysis of formation is not the bubbling source of life itself, life in an as yet uncaptured state; it is an immense density of systematicities, a tight group of multiple relations. Moreover, these relations cannot be the very web of the text—they are not by nature foreign to discourse. . . . One is not seeking, therefore, to pass from the text to thought, from talk to silence, from the exterior to the interior, from spatial dispersion to the pure recollection of the moment, from superficial multiplicity to profound unity. One remains within the dimension of discourse. —Foucault (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge Human experience is never just “discourse,” and never just “acts,” but is some inextricably interwoven fabric of images and practices, conceptions and actions in which history constructs both people and the games that they play, and in which people make history by enacting, reproducing, and transforming those games. —Sherry Ortner (1999), Life and Death on Mt. Everest

For those who study social change by interrogating the relationships between structure, culture, and agency, by analyzing the ways in which power is maintained and transformed, and by theorizing social movement

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activity and participation, post-9/11 America has resembled all-too-familiar wartime scenarios. In a climate of heightened national (in)security, individual freedoms and domestic conflicts often fade from focus while a nation and its citizens rally together to protect the values that define it. Examples of this are plenty. A presidential order signed in 2002 expanded the National Security Agency’s authority to include what has now become the highly challenged “warrantless wiretapping surveillance program.” Through this program, government officials have the authority to eavesdrop on transnational telephone and e-mail communications without obtaining court-sanctioned approval that traditionally outlines the case for overriding a citizen’s civil rights. On August 1, 2006, video blogger and freelance journalist Josh Wolf spent a total of 225 days in “coercive custody” in a federal retention facility in California for refusing to turn over unedited footage that revealed the identity of protesters at an anti-G8 demonstration in San Francisco. Wolf ’s imprisonment, although much less publicized, followed on the heels of New York Times journalist Judith Miller’s eighty-five day detention for refusing to reveal her source in the Valerie Plame leak investigation. Though controversy surrounds their retention, foreign combatants held since 2001 at the U.S. military compound in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been denied protections of the Geneva Convention. Labeled by the U.S. military as “unlawful enemy combatants” rather than “prisoners of war,” they are not guaranteed such protections. In a democracy, however, enactments of government power like the ones listed above rarely go unnoticed and uncontested. When civil liberties and national security collide under a government bound to the will of “the people,” friction invariably results. As the definition of “domestic terrorism” has expanded, it has come to include those acts of civil disobedience and advocacy work, areas of civic engagement usually protected under the Constitution. In December 2005, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released FBI documents confirming that the government organization’s “counterterrorist” division had been “spying” on domestic advocacy groups by infiltrating organizations and community events, monitoring electronic communication, accessing bank records as well as tracing financial transactions, and collecting information about their members. Targeted “domestic terrorist” organizations included the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA); the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace; the peace, justice, and poverty-relief organization Catholic Workers Group; the civil rights organization American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee; and countless local and less established groups and events. Amidst large blocks of white space, which are the result of the heavy editing of the pre-public disclosure, slivers of prose in the FBI documents released by the ACLU detail the extent of the FBI’s activities. One document includes a blocked-out “contact list for

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the ‘Attendees of the Third National Organizing Conference on Iraq,’ Stanford, CA: May 25–26, 2002.” Another similarly edited document released from the “counterterrorist” division of the FBI speaks to general intelligence regarding [section blocked out] [the] upcoming “Vegan Community Project,” scheduled to occur on 04/02/03 . . . on the Bloomington, In., campus at Indiana University Memorial Union, Maple Room, from 7–10 pm. A surveillance is planned [section blocked out] Occasional spot checks and surveillances are being conducted. (FBI as cited in ACLU n.d.)

As these documents illustrate, enactments of government power often illustrate the ways in which the public work of civic engagement and the less public, voluntarily assumed features of identity, such as what we choose to eat and why, are becoming increasingly less distinct from one another as indicators of nationalist allegiance. These government-sanctioned “domestic spying” initiatives, and others like them, are not the only contributors to what is widely understood as “the end of privacy.” After acquiring the popular social networking site “MySpace,” Rupert Murdock “hired a high-tech ad firm to mine user profiles, blog posts, and bulletins to ‘allow for highly refined audience segmentation and contextual microtargeting,’” a tactic already practiced regularly by corporations such as AOL and MSN, who run Web-based search engines (Schimke 2007:16). Beginning in January 2005, visitors to any of the Walt Disney World theme parks in Orlando, Florida, no longer need to show ID and bar-coded tickets upon entering. Instead, visitors are required to submit to a fingerprint scan that records patrons’ “finger geometry,” which is then uploaded into the Disney network and serves as each patron’s “ticket tag” for entry and reentry into the parks. Universal Studios and SeaWorld in Orlando also plan to follow suit (Local6.com 2005). Despite discomfort with this trend toward the dissolution of boundaries between public and private discourses and the actions that include them, the malevolence of this emerging reality is not guaranteed. Notions of “public” and “private” have long been understood as existing in a changing relationship to one another. Formed through “social action and dialogue even as collectively held conceptions of each shape the conditions of their emergence,” such categories are fragile and bound to the agency of those who craft them (Asen and Brouwer 2001:10). Many scholars have long held the belief that these calculated delineations between private and public serve to further marginalize and disenfranchise subordinate populations. According to these scholars, designating discourses and subjects as “private” removes them from productive arenas of critique. Not surprisingly, then, these same scholars claim that “all struggles against oppression in the modern world begin by redefining what

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has previously been considered ‘private,’ non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power which need discursive legitimation” (Benhabib as cited in Asen and Brouwer 2001:10). In the above examples, however, it is not the disenfranchised who are “publifying” the private to expose power imbalances and fight hegemonic reproduction. Rather, the dissolution of “the private” is being enacted by already dominant political and economic institutions that more likely benefit from inegalitarian norms than suffer from them. Despite the oppressive potential of labeling content “private,” evocations of the “private,” when materialized from within a disempowered community, can also offer members of this community “freedom from official intrusion as well as decision-making autonomy,” especially over constructions of identity (Asen and Brouwer 2001:11). According to Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer (2001), in their synthesis of recent scholarship on the public sphere, calls for “privacy” can but should not be quickly dismissed despite the shifting and complicated relationship between “public,” “publics,” and “privacy.” They highlight the recuperative nature of claiming privacy as “respite from the public glare” and as a space from which disparate, emerging, and fractured communities can craft the types of collective identities that are necessary to any sincere challenges to inequality (see also Fraser 1992). The phenomenon we now face, one in which notions of privacy and “publics” are morphing yet again, leaves us with important questions about how agency and agenda impact the degree to which dissolving public/private boundaries benefit or confine possibilities for social reconstruction, personal autonomy, and collective identity. This metamorphosis, brought about as government agencies and corporations continue to mine areas of personal identity such as shopping habits, eating habits, and spiritual/ethical affiliations, is often understood by social theorists as a consequence of advanced capitalism (see Touraine 1981, 1995; Melucci 1980, 1985, 1989, 1994, 1996; Garner 1997), a facet of postindustrial society through which symbolic systems and information technologies join economic and material structures as vehicles for social reproduction. In this climate, characterized by postmodern fragmentation, nation-state distinctions fade in the shadow of growing globalized networks while boundaries between economic, political, and cultural structures lose rigidity. As these “social conflicts move from the traditional economic/industrial system to cultural ones,” they are characterized by contestations about “personal identity, the time and the space in everyday life, the motivation and the cultural patterns of individual action” (Melucci 1985:795–96). Such changes in the ways that power and social/political/cultural norms are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed result from and evoke changes in the ways that structures of meaning-making are resisted. More importantly, perhaps, these changes affect who is doing the resisting and how we perceive these persons and communities. In our postindustrial

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society, this dissolution of boundaries between who we are, what we do, and how we make meaning (especially when these differ from dominant social norms) requires activist academics to reconsider the way we theorize and participate in social change and the types of movements that manifest it. It is to this task that Active Voices attends by addressing academics as whole persons: as theorists, as researchers, as educators, as analysts, and as agents of change. Though sociologists have primarily undertaken the study of social change and of the movements that evoke it, rhetoricians—those who study the art and practice of communication and persuasion—also have much to offer such inquiry. The authors and scholarship gathered in this collection represent what interdisciplinary, rhetorical approaches can contribute to the study of social movements. By studying interaction and communication as ingredients of change, these authors posit challenges to common perceptions of audience. They do so by interrogating the complexities of personal and collective agency and identity; by examining the transformative power of narrative and reflection; by contributing to and expanding our understanding of historical, familiar movements; and by offering a language and lens for analyzing contemporary, unconventional ones. In order to understand what this collection offers that others have not, we call on rhetoric as a way of locating our language within a cross-disciplinary framework of meaning, which necessarily involves defining ourselves, our terms, and our audiences. It involves relinquishing disciplinary claims to knowledge and deconstructing the jargoned dialogues accompanying these claims. It involves crafting an analytical lens that is inclusive rather than exclusive, one that hunts for connections instead of fissures, welcomes critique as an organic part of evolution, and examines lifecycles of change against one another to prioritize in new ways postdisciplinary interaction and partnerships. To help orient readers to this type of community building and to ground the scholarly work that follows, we use this introduction to attend to the following questions: What is rhetoric and who studies it? What is a social movement? How are social movements usually studied and by whom? How and why is this changing? How can rhetorical approaches contribute meaningfully to the way we perceive, study, and teach social movements? Whom does such scholarship benefit? Ultimately, these questions are at the center of scholarly efforts to further our understanding of the relationship between social movements, identity, and social change.

Rhetoric as Action Rhetoric has had many definitions throughout history. Aristotle’s widely referenced version—the available means of persuasion—is bound by the scope of

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classical democracy and its citizenry. Updating Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric for modern and postmodern considerations, many contemporary rhetoricians emphasize the symbolic nature of rhetoric by more inclusively framing it as a product of and a force for situated, interactive meaning-making. This is most apparent in Kenneth Burke’s (1950:41) definition of rhetoric as “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents” and Lloyd Bitzer’s (1968:4) characterization of rhetoric as “a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.” By defining rhetoric in these ways, as symbolic and ultimately transformative action, Burke and Bitzer carve academic space for the study of rhetoric and for those who pursue it by shifting the contemporary focus away from what rhetoric is toward what it can do. More recent definitions not only show the widespread impact of Burke’s and Bitzer’s contributions; they also illustrate the way contemporary rhetoricians are adapting them for interdisciplinary scholarship and analysis. Through his definition of rhetoric as “the study of how people use language and other symbols to realize human goals and carry out human activities,” Charles Bazerman (1988:6) retains rhetoric’s classical association with purposive activity. Historian George Kennedy (1992) likewise pulls from rhetoric’s classical past to make sense of the present, but also indicates that, for him, rhetoric is a force that requires the investment of its users. He emphasizes the communicative aspect of rhetoric, defining it as “the energy inherent in communication: the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expended in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message” (2). In contrast, Sonja Foss, Karen Foss, and Cindy Griffin (1999:11) link performance to communicative action, defining rhetoric as “an action human beings perform when they use symbols for the purpose of communicating with one another.” Andrea Lunsford (2002:n.p.) takes an even more encompassing approach, defining rhetoric, simply, as “the art, practice, and study of human communication,” suggesting that rhetoric is indistinguishable from interaction. Broadening the scope of rhetoric to explicitly include social movements indicates that rhetoric is not only interactive and situated, but also transformative and material. Recognizing that rhetoric is ubiquitous, encompassing all manners of interactive praxis, emphasizes the materiality of rhetoric in a way that is tied to the many modern realities that melt divisions between our theory and our practice, our lives and our classrooms, our citizenry and our identity. For the purposes of this collection and the interdisciplinary conversations we hope it facilitates, we have developed a situated definition of rhetoric that, like those above, highlights the elements that make it useful for the study of social change—its symbolic value, its materiality, and its conse-

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quences. To these emphases, however, we add another we think is especially important—the agency of its users. Like Gerard Hauser (1986), we believe that a definition of rhetoric includes not only what rhetoric is but also what it does and why it does it. In his Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, Hauser writes, “Rhetorical communication is explicitly pragmatic. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention” (11). This exigency to which rhetoric attends is similar to that which motivates agents to form collectivities and intentionally participate in social movements aimed at evoking social change. Any comprehensive definition of rhetoric, then, must speak to the agency of those who employ it, consciously or otherwise. It must also examine these agents in relation to their purposes, their audiences, and their contexts. In other words, the study of rhetoric, especially rhetoric aimed at social change, is really the study of who is trying to do what to whom, with particular emphasis on how and why they are doing it. A rhetorical approach to the study of social movements, then, asks and attempts to answer these questions as they pertain to the persuasive tactics of agents for change. Such inquiry is comfortable for rhetoricians. As a tradition—or a network of related traditions—the study of rhetoric examines transformation. Social movements, as quantifiable and distinct patterns of transformation (albeit complicated ones), represent one possible area of scholarly inquiry that rhetoricians are poised to study. In the next section, we detail trends in social movements and the way they have been/are being studied. We infuse this discussion with visions of how rhetoricians can and are contributing to this growing body of knowledge. In doing so, we hope both to highlight synergistic insights and to complicate paradigmatic perceptions.

Social Movements as Theory and Practice A variety of social actors and collectivities participate in the complex activity of defining social movements, each speaking from different subject positions with distinct motives and aims. Most noticeably, movement constituencies and their affiliated organizations engage in self-definition. Outsiders, such as media sources and countermovement participants, also craft visible and interactive definitions. As this happens, those who study movements attempt to define them theoretically, sometimes acting as ethnographers by attempting to navigate their murky identities as researcher-participants. These active forces— movement organizers/participants, outsiders, and scholars—may adjust their definitions according to the audiences they hope to reach so that they also indirectly influence how movements are understood and distinguished from one another. As scholars have attempted to unpack the evolution of influential

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movements ranging from the civil rights movement to white pride countermovements, from feminisms to The Promise Keepers, and preservationism to Wise Use, they have modified their definitions to attend to emerging variations in movement structures, participants, and aims. For more than sixty years, scholars have attempted to understand contemporary social movements. Much of this work has been done by sociologists who employ social psychology to study collective behavior, its motives, its organization, and its consequences. These researchers have also explored how individual movements attempt to recruit and mobilize growing numbers of active participants in order to provoke political and social transformation. According to American sociologist Roberta Garner (1997), “social movements are usually defined as collectivities engaged in non-institutionalized discourses and practices aimed at changing the existing condition of society” (1). Italian sociologist and new social movement theorist Alberto Melucci (1985:795) emphasizes the disruptive qualities of movements when he writes that movements are “collective action[s] based on solidarity, carrying a conflict, and breaking the limits of the system in which action occurs.” In order to understand the relationship between definitions of social movements— where they overlap, where they diverge, and why—we briefly detail the ways in which such movements have been studied historically and by whom. Historically, social movement scholarship has been the domain of social psychology and sociology; the ways sociologists have approached social movement scholarship, however, has shifted dramatically over time. Garner (1997) traces the evolution of modern social movement theory as understood within sociology. She identifies major paradigm shifts, which she attributes to internal developments in the field, shifting intellectual currents in larger culture, and changes in the nature of movements themselves. Initially, according to Garner, theorists developed and employed theories of collective behavior and mass society to account for the seemingly irrational and unexpected movements that characterized modern social change prior to 1960. The collective behavior or structural strain approach, characterized in the post–World War II era scholarship of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, and Sanford, was used to interpret how cultural forces were transformed into individual motivations, predispositions, and propensities. Theorists developed this approach to account for the rise of Nazism in Europe and the willingness of German citizens to subscribe to it, the equally forceful communist revolution in Cuba, and the rise of fascist dictatorships around the globe. During this time, scholars employed social psychology and psychoanalytic theory to argue that acts of collective behavior—ranging from crazed mobs to social movements—were relatively patternless, unpredictable, intoxicating, unexpected, and irrational psychological acts that responded to large-scale social breakdown and strain. As such, theorists argue, collective

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behavior was extremely noninstitutional and separate from the “patterns and rhythms of normal daily life and caused by societal stress” that could not be contained by rational response (Buechler 2000:20). Because these forms of frustration and anxiety seemed to be located within the individual, social psychology and ideological analysis became the main tools for theorists examining and explaining “the translation of individual discontent into genuinely collective action” (Buechler 2000:20). In other words, theorists employed these analytical lenses to explain how fissures in mass society affected individual behavior and led groups to act in concert. The limits of this model of analysis became apparent when the liberatory movements of the 1960s began to emerge. Many sociologists were sympathetic toward, and even participants in, these movements. They disagreed with the collective behavior model’s presumption that movement participants were irrational, and they argued that the model could not explain goal-oriented, strategic, and ethically consistent movements, such as “rights” movements, that sought to transform the political system. As a result, social movement scholars developed a new approach that assumed movement participants were rational individuals making committed ethical choices. One consequence of this new assumption was that individual behavior was no longer problematic and, therefore, did not require explanation. Consequently, scholars replaced the study of individual psychology with the study of structure as “the patterning of activities and relationships, abstracted from and existing independently of individual motivation” that imposed “a set of limiting conditions on individual action” (Garner 1997:19). Scholars shifted their analysis from people to organizations, with the latter serving as tangible representations of the aims and means of a movement. Adherents to this new scholarly approach, dubbed the resource mobilization paradigm, focused on understanding how organizations recruit and mobilize members and utilize other resources (such as money, politicians, and media access) in order to challenge institutional norms. During this time, scholars also started studying the impact of particular movement tactics, often using statistical analyses to determine which organizational strategies are most effective at meeting movement goals under particular conditions. This shift away from individuals and toward organizational structure and action indicates a sea change in which scholars abandoned efforts to explain why movements came into being for the study of how they functioned once they existed. In this respect, resource mobilization scholars contribute greatly to how we understand the impact of large-scale, civic-centric movements that employ public displays of civil disobedience, such as boycotts and protests. They also help future movement organizers make decisions about which tactics to employ under what circumstances. Though many American sociologists still adhere to the resource mobilization paradigm, others have begun to modify it in two substantial ways.

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First, David Snow et al. (1986) launched an internal critique of resource mobilization, citing scholars’ neglect of interpretation and meaning. Drawing on Erving Goffman (1974) and the associated symbolic interactionist tradition, these scholars proposed studying movement frames, which they define as “schemata of interpretation” that “organize experience and guide action, whether individual or collective,” to account for how individuals come to align their often apparently divergent understandings into shared interpretations that can support collective action (Benford and Snow 2000:614). They also promote studying framing processes to understand how activists interpret experience as grievances (or exigencies for change), build responses to those grievances, and develop motives for action (Snow and Benford 1988). Because framing studies emphasize the importance of meaning to action, they offer an interdisciplinary portal through which rhetoricians can engage social movement scholarship (Stevens 2006; see also Jackson and Miller, this volume). Framing theorists’ focus on meaning marks a return to the study of why movements form, not just how they pursue their goals. Simultaneously, and independently of framing studies, several European scholars were developing another strand of social movement scholarship known as new social movement studies. These scholars—namely, Alberto Melucci, Alain Touraine, Jürgen Habermas, and Manuel Castells—prioritize the study of meaning, agency, and socially embedded actors over organizational structure. In mass, they tend to examine movements that are less inclined to agitate directly for political transformation than to challenge cultural norms and hegemonic practices that influence identity formation. On a practical level, scholars argue that movements based on class identity are giving way to the emergence of a “new” type of movement, exemplified by native pride movements, transgender movements, and vegetarian/vegan movements, in which participants are driven more and more by a desire to transform perceptions of identity and challenge cultural codes, rather than by (or in addition to) their fervor for political upheaval and public policy reformation. These new movements are also characterized by a shift in tactics that blur the boundaries between public collective action and interpersonal persuasion, between a priori and personally evoked (or chosen) claims to identity, and between civic and cultural arenas as targets of transformation. Attending specifically to concerns about why movements form as well as how they function, new social movement scholars have widened our understanding of what constitutes a social movement and retheorized identity as not simply a product of structural determination, but as fluid, voluntary, and flexible.1 Because both new social movement and rhetorical studies attend to the interactive construction of politically consequential meanings and identities, scholars of rhetoric have productively engaged this branch of social movement studies (Hauser and Whalen 1997; see also Stevens, Cain, and DeGenaro, this volume).

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Beginning in the late 1980s, amidst messy postmodern currents of fragmentation as a means of amalgamation, new social movement studies also began to influence sociologists in America. Although political and social differences in the historical realities of Europe and the United States undoubtedly complicated attempts to integrate and advance these competing paradigms,2 productive hybridizations of resource mobilization, framing, and new social movement studies have begun to emerge (see, for example, Morris and Mueller 1992; Johnston and Klandermans 1995b). It is at this juncture that we still find ourselves as we ask what rhetoricians have contributed, and what they can and should contribute, to the inquiry into movement formation and persistence.

Rhetoricians as Activist Academics These recent fusions indicate more than simply a shift in focus and scope; they also create new avenues for dialogue and discovery. As theorists’ understandings of what actually constitutes a social movement evolve, the field of study, as a whole, is becoming more multidisciplinary. This trend has the potential to further splinter research into how and why social change happens as scholars face competing assumptions and struggle to translate jargoned, disciplinebound analytical approaches. But it also offers scholars a chance to look beyond familiar worldviews and identify commonalities across discourse communities. The study of rhetoric is well suited to such meta-inquiry, especially when this inquiry is distinctly grounded in persuasion, discourse, and interaction, as is the case with social movements. Despite this organic relationship between the study of social change and of persuasion, scholars of rhetoric have a spotty history of theorizing the former, with many of their most direct contributions residing in a strand of communication scholarship from the 1970s. During this time, several rhetoric scholars engaged one another in dialogue to understand the rhetorical attributes of organized movements and the interactive proclivities of participants who employ persuasive tactics. To this end, scholars defined social movements as distinctly rhetorical by highlighting the importance of situated discourse and interaction as propellants of change. Following sociological norms of the time, communication scholar Herbert Simons (1970) focused on the rhetoric of movement leaders as he argued for a theory of persuasion for social movements. Of such persuasion, he writes: Any movement, it is argued, must fulfill the same functional requirements as more formal collectivities. These imperatives constitute rhetorical requirements for the leadership of the movement. Conflicts among requirements create rhetorical problems which in turn affect decisions on rhetorical strategy.

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Patricia Malesh and Sharon McKenzie Stevens The primary rhetorical test of the leader—and, indirectly, of the strategies he [sic] employs—is his capacity to fulfill the requirements of his movement by resolving or reducing rhetorical problems. (2, emphasis in the original)

For Simons, the primary task of social movement leaders (and other members aiming to mobilize future constituencies) is to create avenues for persuasion by being aware of and manipulating or reducing rhetorical constraints. Robert Cathcart (1978), a contemporary of Simons, expands this analysis to include not just movement leaders, but also movement participants of every ilk. Cathcart interprets movement discourses, both verbal and nonverbal, as forms of collective action that confront dominant cultural practices. He defines social movements as “primarily . . . symbolic or rhetorical act[s]” or “rhetorical transactions of a special type, distinguishable by the peculiar reciprocal rhetorical acts set off by the movement on one hand and the established system or controlling agency on the other” (233). For Cathcart, then, “to study a movement is to study its form” since meaning is inseparable from the form that embodies it (233). Although scholars of rhetoric migrated away from theorizing social movement rhetorics as such in the 1980s—just as important breakthroughs were being made by sociologists—this act of defining social movements rhetorically to identify the distinctiveness of particular movements is especially important for our understanding of contemporary movements. According to Melucci (1989), such movements act more like “movement networks” that are less stable, more integrated with one another, more likely to share constituencies, and less civic-centric than the class- and race-based liberatory movements of the 1960s. In this contemporary landscape, theorists have become agents capable of, perhaps even responsible for—to some degree— crafting movement boundaries and articulating the distinct characteristics of participants as a way of defining movements theoretically and materially. The role of the scholar, then, is generative as well as analytical. Rhetorician Malcolm Sillars (1980:31, emphasis in the original) elaborates on the generative role of the movement scholar when he defines social movements as: collective actions which are perceived by a critic. They are defined by that critic in terms of the most useful rhetorical events, conflicts, or strategies which will best explain the critic’s view of the movement. The critic may accept the limits of the movement provided by someone else or may “create” the movement.

This definition underscores the importance of studying the rhetoric of a movement as a heuristic that provides insight into the movement itself. It reinforces Michael McGee’s earlier, unpublished claim that a movement is

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defined not by innate qualities, but by a scholarly interpretation of it as rhetorically distinct (as cited in Sillars 1980). By determining the important defining features of a movement—its goals, constituency, scope, and methods of persuasion—scholars are better equipped to understand the intersections between these features and, ultimately, the nature of the movements themselves. They are also imbued with the spirit of activism. As an activity that rhetorically, interactively, and materially shapes a movement, the scholarly act of defining a movement advances it, making those who define it active participants in this process. Emerging trends toward civic engagement suggest rhetoricians are indeed returning to the study of social movements. This work can inform and support the work of sociologists. One of these trends is the study of publics and counterpublics, which found foothold in communication in the 1990s. Grounded in the work of Jürgen Habermas and in Nancy Fraser’s (1992) well-known critical response, public sphere theorists interrogate the formation and efficacy of nonpolitical communities, who, in varying degrees of capacity and suppression, struggle to disrupt, rearrange, or dismantle the civic and cultural norms of the nation-states to which they belong. Counterpublic studies are not bound exclusively to the study of social movements so much as to social change, for they often focus on coalitions and associations that engage in dialogue with political structures, adding to instead of confronting these structures. Yet this scholarship nonetheless provides one possible approach to social movement studies, and it is particularly well developed by rhetoricians in communications (see Hauser and mcclellan, this volume; see also Fraser 1992, 1997; Goodnight 1997; Hauser 1999). By broadening perceptions of what constitutes a forum for discursive deliberation and prioritizing the formation of personal and collective identity as public-minded endeavors, such scholarship intersects and overlaps with both traditional resource mobilization scholarship and new social movement studies, thereby offering up one potential way to overcome the rigid distinctions between them. In this respect, counterpublic studies serve as a key and productive intersection between rhetoric and sociology. Drawing on cultural/performative, literary, and composition studies, scholars of rhetoric explicate the persuasive power of visual, virtual, and embodied rhetorics as well as that of narrative as important sites of social movement activity. Graffiti as dissent, transgender as transpersonal, flash mobs as a product of text messaging, wikis/blogging as interactive new media, and vegan conversion narratives as action-oriented testimonials all exemplify the ways we employ our rhetoric materially. More importantly, these examples—and the theoretical tools we use to illuminate their meaning—illustrate the importance of interaction and context. Whether we term them systemic vs. individual, structural vs. cultural, personal vs. political, public vs. private, or civic

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vs. aesthetic, the decay of these already tenuous boundaries forces those who study them to think less in terms of specific events and actions as signifiers of individual movements and more in terms of the relationships between movements (and between the scholarly paradigms through which they are studied). In this regard, “the end of privacy” might rightly (and theoretically) be reframed as “the end of a priori.” Twenty-first century scholars of meaning understand it as constantly fluctuating because the contexts from which meaning arises—perceptions and enactments of identity, agency, power, adversity, allegiance, alliance, possibility—are also in states of perpetual change. If we hope to give meaning to meaning, a desire that pollinates scholars of all persuasions, we need to focus our scholarly gaze on the rhetorical situations that momentarily and repeatedly shape understanding and action. Although historically peripheral to social movement studies, scholars of rhetoric ply their trade by doing such pointed inquiry, and they are valuable companions for others who seek to do the same. These goals, of course, are politically interested, and vehemently attacked by the likes of Stanley Fish, David Horowitz, and others, sometimes including our students and their families. Though manifestations of this critique vary, it is based in the belief that learning can and should be apolitical, free from partisanship, and that academic knowledge can and should be neutral—distanced from immediate social and political action. In contrast, as activist educators, we claim that knowledge, and the ways we acquire it, is always interested and, as such, rhetorical. We further contend that participants in knowledge making who obscure their own rhetoricity, and those who defend them, are often those most emotionally and materially invested in the status quo with its structural, partisan inequities. By owning up to our desire for theory and praxis that are connected to and that matter in our world, we do not become more political or ideological; we simply expose our subjectivity so that we can become reflexive about the consequences of our scholarship and encourage more discussion about the transformative nature of learning. As more academics engage in interdisciplinary social movement scholarship, we build a new collective that can incrementally change rhetoric’s identity and aims. Rhetoric’s classical association with elite pedagogy has been difficult to shake from its location within our ivory towers, but as academics engage in movements and allow movements to engage us, we develop new repertoires for democratic participation, inclusion, and transformation. By expanding our attention to varieties of civic, political, and cultural change, we become more capable of actively engaging with one another, with our readers, and with our students in ways that support the emergence of collectives that can build a more just society. Until now, we have focused on what the study of rhetoric can bring to the study of social movements. We have yet to entertain an equally valuable

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question: What can the study of social movements bring to rhetoric? Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the trend toward interdisciplinarity is that it not only encourages rhetoricians and sociologists to engage one another in dialogue; it also encourages rhetoricians in communication to reconnect with their doppelgangers in English and Composition Studies, and vice versa. This disconnect is evidenced by similar ones in the scholarly communities and the products of these communities—such as conferences, journals, professional organizations—with which each community aligns itself. Since rhetoricians in English often align themselves with the humanities while those in communication align themselves with social sciences, differences in disciplinary perceptions of canonical texts and scholars reflect tangential academic traditions rather than overlapping ones. Social movement studies, as it is beginning to emerge within rhetoric, has the power to bridge these chasms and reunite rhetoricians in both theory and praxis. The pieces in this collection encourage such cross-disciplinary community-building dialogues, which not only nourish our scholarship, but also attend to our whole identity as scholar/teachers. These dialogues also have powerful implications for student learning. In the next section, we examine these implications.

Teaching as Civic Praxis One key aim of this collection is to fuse disciplinary divisions and highlight the relationship between our scholarship and our teaching as civic praxis. After all, the classroom is not unlike the world in which it is embedded. The classroom, and the inquiry that takes place there, simultaneously mirror and challenge the social structures that hold them in place. Like civic arenas, the classroom is a place of possibility and resistance, a place where conflict encourages transformation. It embodies the dialectical relationship between theory and practice— theory informs practice, practice restructures theory, and theory crafts future practice. As facilitators in the classroom, teacher/scholars have long held the charge of preparing students to assume agency in the challenges and realities they will face once they leave it. But, just as citizens do not always act in their own best interest and assert their agency productively, student resistance and the insecurities that underscore this resistance can interrupt learning. Sometimes, these disruptions take the form of passivity and disengagement as students find themselves in unfamiliar learning environments. Sometimes, these disruptions are more overt when the knowledge that students bring into the classroom begins to clash with the knowledge they invariably create as they reflect on their experiences through writing. Still other times, it moves from resignation to rage as students struggle with their dissolving and morphing notions of identity and ability. In the best of times, however, students and

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teachers engage both struggles and resistance thoughtfully to create new ways of grounding learning in the situated experiences of our lives. Like the social landscape both students and teachers encounter in other facets of their daily lives, the classroom is not always a safe place, or a comfortable one. Learning is often violent because it forces students to move out of their comfort zones and into a sort of philosophical upheaval. In this sense, the classroom can be an arena for intense confrontation; however, it should not be a place for conversion. As activist academics, our charge involves exposing students to their own potential agency and encouraging them to assert it by helping them learn to use intersecting tools of analysis, critique, and action. After all, if our students leave our classrooms unchanged, we have failed. However, if they leave our classrooms parroting our system of understanding instead of discovering and developing their own as a means of engaging in structural transformation, we have also failed. In the classroom, as in society, communities and collectivities emerge as building blocks of power and knowledge. In her book The Struggle for Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourses as Regimes of Truth, Jennifer Gore (1993) defines a critical pedagogy as one that includes both elements of instruction and social vision. For her, “how one teaches becomes inseparable from what is taught and how one learns” (14). Throughout her work, Gore encourages educators to promote dialogues with students that investigate conceptions of authority, power, and knowledge in order to redefine them and create spaces for voices that are often silenced by dominant ideology. By exploring these ideas with our students, the classroom becomes a place where learning is not only a means of empowerment, but of emancipation and liberation as well because students see themselves as contributors to knowledge rather than mere recipients of it. In this respect, classroom praxis incubates social, civic, and personal agency that in turn sponsors—creates space for—social change. In its simplest form, change is a product, albeit an unstable one. It is enacted. Our task as scholars is to work with others, whether they are colleagues, students, community members, lawmakers, or others, by creating spaces—both material and discursive—for transformative dialogue and action.

Rhetoricians as Activist Intellectuals Each of the three parts of this collection attends to the various roles that rhetoricians play as social movement scholars—as theorists, as critics, and as teachers. Chapters in Part I, “A New Rhetoric for Social Change: Theories,” draw on a range of movements to remake productively the way we develop core theories that guide critical and pedagogical practice. Chapters in Part II, “Public Rhetorics: Analyses,” analyze particular social movements to elucidate

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how social movement actors effectively develop and deploy rhetorical strategies that promote social change, reflexively charging readers to consider how they too might participate in the constitution of publics that promote more egalitarian social relationships. Chapters in Part III, “Changing Spaces for Learning: Actions,” detail contemporary, movement-based learning situations to indicate how changing the way students learn can change society more broadly. Throughout, chapter authors consistently use their chosen research project to pro-ject rhetorically how readers might embody intellectual work through praxis in their teaching, scholarship, and citizenship. In the opening chapter of Part I, Gerard Hauser and erin mcclellan develop a powerful analytic framework by fusing Hauser’s (1999) concept vernacular rhetoric to Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogism and polyvocality to correct a leader-centered bias in social movement studies. Next, by considering how social movements highlight the importance of collective action and the indeterminancy of the future, Sharon Stevens remakes Bitzer’s (1968) concept of “the rhetorical situation” to alter student-teacher relations and support student agency. Both chapters in Part I urge rhetoricians to actively reconstruct theory in response to the rhetorical practices of movement participants. As an exemplar of this sort of move, the first chapter of Part II offers a feminist reshaping of neoclassical rhetorical theory. In this chapter, Moira Amado-Miller examines the rhetoric of the early twentieth century’s radical feminist activists (especially suffragettes) through the lens of the classical rhetorical trope antistrephon. She argues that activists can appropriate mainstream rhetorical strategies (“the master’s tools”) to introduce disorder into hegemonic ideologies and to articulate alternative views and social relations. Implicitly, Amado-Miller’s argument participates in calls from cultural studies for academics to articulate alternatives to hegemonic understandings. In the next chapter, Brian Jackson and Thomas P. Miller are more explicit in their challenge to readers. These authors examine how the leadership of John Dewey and other university-based “experts” is in dialectic tension with the vernacular voices of the progressive movement, thereby exemplifying Hauser and mcclellan’s call for a bottom-up movement analysis without losing the benefit of analyzing the rhetoric of movement leaders. As they draw conclusions from their analysis, Jackson and Miller call on readers to build coalitions that include teachers from all educational levels and to construct rhetorical frames that respond to a range of participant voices. In the next chapter of Part II, Thomas Rosteck shows how Charles Mills, a paradigmatic public intellectual, uses a rhetorical letter to constitute an audience capable of acting for progressive social change. Rosteck’s chapter highlights a decisive point in social movement history, for Mills’s letter participates in a general historical turn from class-based movements to movements

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grounded in other forms of collective identity. In the final chapter of Part II, Patricia Malesh advances our understanding of the relationship between personal and collective identity by examining how these are formed, supported, and reshaped over time through the practice of narrativity. She analyzes the conversation narratives or “stories of becoming” of vegetarians/vegans as “verisimilitudes” ( J. Bruner 1991) that narrators use to give meaning to experience and sponsor social change. Ultimately, she argues that such narratives highlight personal agency as movement activity, evoke cultural norms as a prerequisite for dismantling them, and, in doing so, reenact and re-envision experience to justify and provoke transformation. This emphasis on personal agency and in manifesting cultural change is further developed in Part III, in which contributors all write from the position that local and culture-oriented rhetorical action are indispensable components of broader systemic and historic change. These writers underscore the importance of interpersonal and transformative action, potentially including the transformation of classroom learning. First, David Coogan discusses how students involved in a service learning project develop a new understanding of how prisoners are located within a disempowering system, yet these students also learn that local activism and interpersonal action have the potential to create more just social relations. Discussing another service learning project, Anne Marie Todd details some of the ways her students learn about particular relationships between local practice and global systems, as well as about the possibilities for changing both through activist rhetoric. Finally, Mary Ann Cain witnesses how a learning community based on an alternative black culture uses performative rhetoric to invite new participants into relationships that challenge hegemonic education practices, practices that are based on transience and the erasure of bodily presence within space. In a way that resonates with the premises of the progressive education movement, all these chapters indicate how the relationships we develop while learning inform the way we more broadly participate in society, the way we understand our own agency, and the way we envision possibilities for historical development. As with most collections, these chapters offer readers the most insight when read in dialogue with one another. Rosteck’s analysis of Mills’s audience-evoking “Letter to the New Left,” Jackson and Miller’s rhetorical history of the progressive education movement, and Hauser and mcclellan’s call for more emphasis on the transformative power of vernacular voices challenge one another with their different emphases on leaders and the rank-and-file in movement formation. Amado-Miller breaks down these distinctions between the rhetoric of the powerful and that of the masses by chronicling the spaces for dialogue created when advocates for change co-opt the language and logic of those against it. Stevens, Coogan, Todd, and Cain all argue we need to

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employ our scholarly work in pedagogy if we hope to create avenues for our students to make learning material through civic engagement, and Malesh enacts such change in her praxis-oriented analysis of vegan rhetorics. In the collection’s response chapter, William DeGenaro explores some of these convergences and tensions, challenging and extending other contributors’ insights by considering the role of class and religion in the shifting politics of identity formation and solidarity building. In sum, contributors to Active Voices showcase what rhetorical scholarship can add to social movement studies. By asking us to recognize and engage the activist dimension of our teaching, criticism, and theory, however, they also evoke future action by calling for changes in what we do, not just how we think.

Conclusion In 1991, European poli-sociologist Margit Mayer called for a more complicated and integrated approach to the study of social movements. She called for social movement theorists to develop an approach through which they: emphasiz[e] cultural and symbolic dimensions and the construction of meaning, thereby making it possible to also capture those current social movements or aspects of movements, which are not about participation in the American mainstream, either economically or politically, but rather challenge the validity and hegemony of the dominant power structures and cultural systems. (1991:49)

Her charge gives us much to think about. Our understanding of social movements is bound to our perceptions of civic participation, and these perceptions are changing as distinctions between cultural and political exertions of power and control collapse, prompting unexpected relationships to emerge and, in the process, throwing distinctions between individual movements into shadow. Since Mayer issued her charge, the ways in which power and culture are disseminated, digested, regurgitated, and challenged have responded to the ever-increasing pressures of globalizing forces as manifested in rapidly evolving information and production technologies. In such a climate, our scholarship’s value hinges on our willingness to entertain the instability of our work and accept how isolated insights are incomplete. Brenton Faber (2002) articulates this incompleteness as the tendency to divorce scholarly from community work. He recognizes that “although humanities scholars have a strong tradition of social and political critique, and although we have been able to build social awareness, community building, and critique into our teaching, we have thus far been less able

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to form a theoretically rich tradition of research based on our community activism” (6). If we hope to attend to this deficit, we need to approach both scholarship and civic engagement in relation to one another. In other words, just as movements are becoming less distinct from one another, so must become the scholarship that analyzes them. And just as communities for social change continue to overlap, learn from one another, and draw power from this process, so must communities of scholars who study them. Throughout this chapter, as an introduction to the philosophy of the collection as a whole, we have highlighted, complicated, and sought to reshape dialectics of discourse and action, theory and practice, publics and private, politics and culture, recipiency and agency, and others. We have done so to dissolve other distinctions—namely, those that create wedges between disciplines and disciplinary knowledge, those that isolate classroom praxis from scholarly inquiry, and those that obscure intersections between the various roles we occupy as activist intellectuals. We now encourage our readers to engage the following authors, and one another, in dialogues—and activities—that further this aim. For it is not solely in our parlors, where we dine on our assertions and satisfy our sweet tooth for reflection and critique, that our passion for participating in social change is sated. Nor will it be by this collection. Both are just a beginning.

Notes 1. Within social movement studies, debates remain unresolved as to whether the “newness” of “new social movements” speaks to: (1) a change in movements themselves—a dwindling of transparent class-based movements dependent on a priori acknowledgments of identity and solidarity combined with a surge in movements that understand identity as flexible and fluctuating and movements themselves as decentralized and overlapping; or (2) a shift in scholastic understanding, approaches, and foci in which scholars dedicate inquiry to theorizing and categorizing as movements existing phenomena that previous approaches precluded. 2. Margit Mayer (1991) claims America’s longstanding tradition of civil disobedience illustrates a historical relationship between civic and cultural domains; this tradition did not exist in Europe where sharp distinctions between civic and cultural agendas encouraged the formation of political parties as opposed to cultural movements. According to Mayer, differences between European and U.S. political establishments have historically dictated differences in how social movements form as well as in how scholars theorize them, which explains why American scholars have repeatedly challenged the novelty of new social movements.

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A New Rhetoric for Social Change: Theories

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Vernacular Rhetoric and Social Movements: Performances of Resistance in the Rhetoric of the Everyday GERARD A. HAUSER and ERIN DAINA MC CLELLAN

Introduction There is a story about human polity that portrays democracy—or better, representative democracy—as the ideal form of governance because it gives all citizens an equal voice in determining the course of the state. In this story, democracy is understood to center on three fundamental elements: the right to deliberate, the right to vote (or express one’s opinion), and the expectation that the majority will prevail. Deliberation allows all citizens to state their views, to hear and respond to those of others, and, thereby, to persuade one another about the better course of action. Voting (or expressing one’s opinion) serves as the method to settle questions of contingency on which opinions differ. And the expectation that the majority will prevail ensures that its opinion will matter in setting public policy and state action. In this way, the apparent fairness of permitting all a voice and vote and of guaranteeing majority rule secures citizens against the rule of autocrats and subjugation by an authoritarian state. This is a powerful story. It appeals to the cultural biases of free citizens because its narrative portrays a world in which they can chart their own destiny. And because it frames humans as having a fundamental right to such agency, the story provides justification for taking necessary measures to defend democracy from attack. It also can justify state action, such as diplomacy, wars, and boycotts, to export democracy to nondemocratic states in the name of a fundamental human right to agency. This story is a fable. It constructs a fantasy world removed from the political reality of representative democracy. Without constitutional protections, “one

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person, one vote” inevitably leads to tyranny of the majority, as James Madison warned framers of the U.S. Constitution in Federalist Paper 10. It ignores power differentials of birth, wealth, position, or knowledge, which often instantiate tacit rules of exclusion that sublimate differences of class, religion, and identity. Those without the political franchise—foreigners, women, the racial or ethnic other, slaves, or the unconfessed, for instance—have no say in their destiny. Sometimes this fable creates the illusion of representation, as when nineteenth-century ward bosses increased their power in American urban politics by preying on the tribal loyalties of recent émigrés with false promises of goods and services in return for their vote. Although these immigrants voted, their elected representatives did not make them part of a political dialogue. Instead, their participation in elections increased the political clout of ward bosses who delivered their votes (Piven and Cloward 1988:35–41). By itself, moreover, representative democracy reduces citizenship to the vote without corresponding duties and/or opportunities to build community or advance the commonwealth (Boyte 1999). In addition, it ignores the essential ambiguity of “democracy,” since not all states that call themselves democratic are predicated on executing the will of a people understood as autonomous agents, to which the communist regimes of the last century testify. There is another view of society that considers political relations in less idealized and more dynamic terms. It regards society, whether democratic or authoritarian, as engaged in the ongoing activity of its own self-production. This view depicts society as a continuous struggle over resources, including symbolic resources, between those in and those out of power. The work of Giddens (1979), Etzioni (1968), J. Scott (1990), and Touraine (1981), among others, rejects the position that social actors are social dopes unaware of the operations of institutions that produce and reproduce society. Instead, they argue, “only dominant class groups have ever been strongly committed to dominant ideologies” (Giddens 1979:72).1 These portrayals of the contest between society’s “ins” and “outs” find their most evident manifestation in social movements that seek control of society’s resources. These struggles have taken a variety of forms, ranging from members of the Women’s Christian Temperance movement marching into taverns to embarrass men into forsaking the “evils” of alcohol, through the freedom marches of the civil rights movement and economic boycotts in support of the United Farm Workers, to the dramatic and sometimes violent modes of resistance in liberatory movements opposing colonial and postcolonial powers. At the center of all resistance movements lie rhetorical resources and forces that express opposition, agitate for change, inspire and signal cohesion, and project visions of a transformed social order. Often these resources are found in the speeches and writings of leaders, such as Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1997), Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” (1986),

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Nelson Mandela’s “The Struggle is My Life” (1961), Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1963), and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” (1963). Sometimes, they take the form of public declarations, such as Czechoslovakia’s opposition leaders issuing the founding statement of Charter 77 or South Africa’s African National Congress issuing its Freedom Charter. At times, they appear in public events that are transformed into statements of opposition, for example the unexpected size of crowds at the 1979 visit of John Paul II to Poland or the funeral of Enrico Berlinguer, National Secretary of Italy’s Communist Party, in 1984. Each in its own way manifested the publicity principle2 to give resistance a public face in order to provide direction and inspire solidarity among the masses and to explain the conditions of oppression to an external world of readers and listeners so that they might better understand the underlying causes of resistance and lend their support. In the communication tradition of rhetoric, studies of social movements mostly have focused on the discourse of leaders, on single events, or on movement strategies. Although leader rhetoric is significant in shaping a movement and explaining its causes and objectives to an observing public, it provides a specific interpretation of what caused the movement, what it means to those involved, and what it aspires to achieve. As Touraine (1983) has shown, when the movement’s rank-and-file is invited to explain it, they often give different accounts once the leader leaves the room. Ignoring rank-and-file voices in the rhetorical criticism of social movements is problematic. It leads to a skewed picture of the public sphere by defining it in terms of privileged voices. Even in social movements, leaders have greater access to the podium, press, and public attention than those whose resistance is expressed in rhetorical exchanges of the everyday. Second, it misses resistance found in seemingly mundane expressions, such as modes of politeness that, to the knowing eye of the oppressed, convey an ironic critique of domination but, to the blind eye of the censor, evade detection. Third, they ignore Bakhtinean-like dialogizing exchanges between the dominant and dominated within and across classes. Fourth, a focus on leader statements interprets bodily displays of opposition through the filter of a movement’s formal rhetoric rather than regarding them as rhetorical performances in their own right. Finally, ignoring rank-and-file voices deflects attention from the hidden transcripts of resistance developed in hush harbors and the underground that later puncture the patina of the official realm as public expressions of discontent. Here we wish to clarify that our point is not to dismiss leader-focused studies of movements, but rather to indicate the need for greater attention to the vernacular rhetoric that occurs among social actors who are part of a movement. In this chapter, we argue that a mature understanding of movement rhetoric must take into account the nature and persuasive powers of its vernacular rhetoric. We begin with a brief overview of the origins of movement

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studies in the communication tradition and argue that these early studies set a tone that focused on leader rhetoric, significant events, and efficacious rhetorical strategies intended to advance the movement while largely ignoring vernacular rhetoric. Next, we develop a theoretical perspective toward vernacular rhetoric. We argue that an adequate theory of the vernacular as it relates to social movements has at least four necessary characteristics: it is polyvocal, evades detection, interrogates authority, and performs power. In the third section, we consider discourse of the everyday as a social enactment. Our contention is that a mature theory of social movements must account for resistance performed in the intertextual symbolic exchanges of everyday discourse. The dramaturgy of vernacular exchange offers deep insight into the rhetorical performance of a movement that is missed in studies focused exclusively on the formal rhetoric of leaders. Finally, we consider how vernacular rhetoric is concretely manifested and contend that its performances of resistance are a (mostly) subtle means to denaturalize power’s symbolic representations of social relations.

Social Movements, Rhetoric, and Intimations of the Vernacular The study of movements within the communication tradition was instigated by the work of Leland Griffin (1952, 1958, 1964). In “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements,” Griffin (1952) referenced Herbert Wichelns’s foundational essay, “Literary Criticism of Oratory” (1925), which called for critics to turn from the study of great orators to other rhetorical forms. Wichelns had identified movements as among those modes of rhetoric that should receive greater attention, and Griffin took up his call. Griffin conceptualized movements as consisting of three stages: historical moments of dissatisfaction with the current environment, followed by citizen action to change this environment, which finally eventuated in some degree of success or failure. Within this frame, Griffin argued that an account of rhetoric’s influence on the movement required broadening the materials to be examined from oratory to all forms of prose and poetry addressed to the locus of desired change. These were to be studied as they aggregated around the issues in question and as they moved opinion through three stages: inception, crisis, and consummation. Griffin redeemed his call for movement studies in his influential essay, “The Rhetorical Structure of the Antimasonic Movement” (1958). This work, which set the tone for a decade or more of movement studies, still centered the critic’s attention on the discourse of leaders, whether they were the voices of institutional power or those outside the halls of power who were seeking change. Its broadening of relevant discursive forms for the critic’s attention and its call for moving beyond analysis of singular addresses, nonetheless

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pointed to traditional modes of discourse—the speech, the editorial, the essay, and so forth—as the primary evidence for tracking a movement’s course. Griffin’s essay was original in its perspective toward the mobility of rhetoric as a consequential discursive mode for changing the social environment and in capturing the rhetorical environment’s dynamism by conceptualizing it within the cycle of inception, crisis, and consummation. However, once the critic allowed for these factors, Griffin’s model did not advance tools for rhetorical analysis that were significantly different from those of the prevailing neo-Aristotelian model. The efficacy of Griffin’s approach was called into question by events of the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, when the United States was rocked by the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s movement, and the student movement. Each relied on modes of influence beyond those in canonical rhetorical theory. A radical, such as Eugene Debs, may have participated in a labor action that precipitated violence, such as the Pullman strike, and may have been sent to jail for his role in such a conflict, but these events were mostly of interest as background to contextualize his calls for change. And his oratory may have advanced extreme claims with a jeremiad’s zeal for vituperation, but his mode of appeal was still the public address and was assessed with an eye toward rhetorical norms of civility and decorum appropriate to the podium (see Darsey 1997). Street rhetoric that typified mid-twentieth-century movements then shaking the United States not only violated these norms; it made them appear as tools of an establishment intent on perpetuating its lock on power. Calculated modes of confrontation, such as freedom marches, sit-ins, use of vulgarity, provocations by agitators seeking melees to guarantee televised images of armed police manhandling unarmed protestors, and the like, were exerting influence through nonformal and decidedly nontraditional forms of symbolic appeal. If the lived experience of social protest in the mid-century increased interest in movement rhetoric, it also pointed to inadequacies in Griffin’s conceptual framework. First, he pointed to the need to study historical data, but scholars were drawn to movements-of-the-moment begging analysis of the unconventional discursive modes changing the American political landscape.3 Further, Griffin’s model privileged traditional modes of discourse, whereas movements of the contemporary scene, in addition to traditional rhetorical genres, were making novel use of nontraditional symbolic forms to influence public perception and action. Also, social movements exaggerated asymmetries of power and exposed imperatives for control beneath the state’s patina of benevolence. Street rhetoric placed greater stress on the drama of dissident performance to provide radical and radicalizing critiques of power. However, Griffin’s model, and rhetorical theory generally, had few conceptual resources to account for rhetoric in the streets.

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Kenneth Burke’s corpus was a notable exception. Burke considered all human symbolic action as rhetorical all the way down. His dramatistic theory (1945, 1950, 1966) addressed scholarly unease about the adequacy of traditional models for examining nontraditional discursive forms manifested in the radical rhetoric of the time (See Benson and Johnson 1968; Bosmajian 1970; Chesebro 1972; Gregg 1971; Haiman 1967; R. Scott 1973; R. Scott and Smith 1969; Simons 1970). Conceptually and methodologically, Burke focused on form as the grey eminence behind the throne of symbols. The widespread adoption of his view fostered rhetorical criticism of the street scene as an instantiation of power. Burke’s theory of form (1941, 1950, 1953), although suggestive for accounts of symbolic action, was less sensitive to ongoing processes whose fluidity of fits, starts, and unanticipated turns defied clear classification. More formally, the discipline of rhetoric in the United States changed radically in the last half of the 1960s. Edwin Black’s Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (1965) tolled the death knell for neo-Aristotelianism, which had been the dominant methodology for critics of public address. Also, the works of philosophers in the United States and Europe were instrumental in inaugurating the journal Philosophy & Rhetoric, which brought rhetorical theory out from the study of historical texts dealing with the production of speeches and essays and encouraged original arguments about the nature of rhetoric. Lloyd Bitzer’s (1968) influential paper, “The Rhetorical Situation,” which appeared in its first issue, launched the enterprise with a bang. Equally important, movements of this period were a significant instigating force behind the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences, held in 1970. At these gatherings, scholars from different disciplines and traditions developed position papers and wrote committee reports intended to set a new research and teaching agenda for rhetoric studies (Bitzer and Black 1971). The defining theme of these conferences focused on reconceptualizing what counted as an appropriate object for study and mode of analysis for rhetoric as a discipline. Importantly, it held that whatever exerted symbolic influence was fair game, and asserted that the disciplinary interest of rhetoric was less tied to criticism of rhetorical artifacts than to explaining rhetorical processes.4 Within the communication tradition, these early concerns for moving beyond analyses of set rhetorical forms laid a basis for two radical changes in the study of rhetoric that are particularly important for theorizing the rhetoric of movements. First, they instigated a turn from studying rhetoric as an art of persuasion, with its emphasis on rhetoric as a mode of production, to a focus on rhetoric as a social practice (see McGee 1990). Criticism, in turn, took a decidedly sociological turn. Burke’s influence encouraged rhetorical critics in communication to consider a more global array of genres and forms beyond oratory and to be more attentive to how multiple forms of human symbolic

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action contributed to the ongoing process of producing and reproducing social reality. Second, although much later to develop, these changes italicized the need to consider the role of vernacular rhetoric in shaping social will and social reality. The second theme will be our concern for the remainder of this chapter as we consider preliminary strands of thought on the role of the everyday in shaping the social agon of dissidence and implications of the vernacular for the study of social movements.

A Theorizing of Vernacular Rhetoric A recent and noticeable trend in the development of rhetorical theory is a general move away from leader-focused, formal oratorical models of rhetoric and toward a rhetoric “of the people” that centers on more informal, and perhaps “fragmented” understandings of discourse (see Brummett 2004; Charland 1987; Eberly 2000; Hauser 1998, 1999; McGee 1975, 1990; Ono and Sloop 1995). The movement toward investigating the power of rhetoric in everyday discourse has eventuated in critical and theoretical work that approaches discourse in ways designed to illumine issues of oppression, dissidence, and power differentials. Rather than primarily examining formal oratorical or written discourse, rhetoricians now include letters to the editor and op-ed pieces (Eberly 2000), rhetoric of the everyday (Nystrand and Duffy 2003), graffiti (M. Bruner 2005), bodily displays (Harold 1999), music (Sanger 1997), and visual representations (Finnegan 2004; Hariman and Lucaites 2001) among meaningful discourses of critical and theoretical interest. National and international discourse communities, and—more importantly for movement studies—counterpublic and subaltern spheres, all speak a distinct language and perform a specific cultural inscription in their everyday interactions: this is what we refer to as a community’s vernacular rhetoric. Vis-à-vis social movements, the rationale for developing a theory of vernacular rhetoric lies in its dialectic with official discourses. There is an agonistic zone between official and mundane communication in which the established and the marginalized vie for power. Their struggle is enacted through contrasting rhetorical modalities seeking public allegiance and legitimation. Hauser’s (1999) model of vernacular rhetoric focuses on four dimensions of the social quotidian that provide a more sensitive rhetorical calibration of public opinion formation: it widens the scope of rhetoric to include instances of vernacular exchange, directs attention to collective reasoning processes as they are disclosed in vernacular exchanges, locates public opinion in processes of creating common understanding, and regards the dialogue of vernacular talk as a significant way by which public opinion is developed (85). These four assertions about the importance of vernacular rhetoric in public

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opinion formation set the background for a more general model of vernacular rhetoric. An adequate theory of vernacular rhetoric must address not only public opinion formation, but also speak to issues of meaning formation capable of upholding the status quo while allowing for resistant rhetorics to emerge. Such a theory must include four major characteristics to account for the production of rhetorically salient meaning: (1) polyvocality, which makes it possible for vernacular discourse to (2) appear under the surface—not always in full view of the “official” discourse, where it can (3) perform an interrogation of “official” discourse in ways that challenge or resist it, and thus (4) perform power in mundane, often unnoticed, ways. Everyday discourse, as all discourse, is inherently polyvocal. The polysemic character of language makes vernacular rhetoric necessarily dynamic, socially constituted, and power-laden. It reflects a variety of voices that enter a discourse in which everyday objects, acts, and expression, such as food we eat, markets where we shop, greetings we exchange, clothes we wear, dialects we speak, and idioms we share are symbolic re-presentations of social reality. Each of these presentations is freighted with particular authorial intention, situated in the present as symbols of the past, and able to communicate messages open to varied interpretations and reinterpretations by social actors themselves and rhetorical critics. These different interpretations allow for meaning to be both constructed in vernacular discourse and socially constitutive of a dynamic and ever-shifting social reality. This multilayered notion of voice and interpretation is reminiscent of Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of heteroglossia, in which the multivocality of a discourse determines the variety of interpretations that such a discourse is capable of achieving. Discrepancies among possible meanings create a series of dialectical moments in which the powerful and the powerless contest for relational position and voice. A power structure’s surface assertion of superiority is homologous, whereby the repetition of relationships of one structure in another becomes a form of control (Bourdieu 1991:214–15). Because homologous structures seem to differ from one another, their repetition of what is accepted (or obeyed) can go unnoticed and, therefore, accepted (or obeyed) without resistance. For example, Brummett’s (2004) study of the acclaimed film The Horse Whisperer examines how its homologous structure mimics the structure of white supremacy, whispering reminders of America’s racist past without audience detection. In the hands of power, homology performs a gentle violence, a “symbolic violence, gentle, invisible violence, unrecognized as such, chosen as much as undergone” (Bourdieu 1990:127) that induces compliance with a pattern of relationships to naturalize its inherent asymmetry of power. The dominant do not have a monopoly on the use of homologous structures; their ways of asserting control do not necessarily carry over into the ver-

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nacular. Insofar as resistance is expressed in the social quotidian, resistant acts often appear as counterideology transferences that go unnoticed by those who adhere to a dominant discourse but whose consciousness resistors wish to change. Resistant rhetorics can appropriate the very structures that dominant discourses have used to oppress a marginalized group, adapting and adopting them for their own purposes. Slaves in the U.S. South (Evans and Boyte 1992), Hull House in Chicago (Knight 2005), and African National Congress prisoners in Robben Island Prison (Buntman 2003; Hauser 2004) point to the possibility of creating resistant vernacular rhetorics that go undetected.5 The polyvocality of vernacular discourse allows it to appear under the surface—not always in full view of the “official” discourse. Discourses of the everyday often appear in juxtaposition to their “official” counterparts, but not necessarily in ways that are recognized as contrary or resistant by those in power. Parody, mimicry, caricature, language games, irony, graffiti, bodily display, and the like participate in dialectical struggles given a public face through dramaturgical performances of resistance. Their utterly unremarkable character makes the eye and ear detect what it is prepared to detect. An expression of respect is heard as respect by the person addressed, while those who are subordinate hear the sarcasm lurking at the compliment’s edges (Evans and Boyte 1992; J. Scott 1990). Their enactment provides those out of power with political joy by evading authority’s censor while disclosing a shared sense of an alternative reality. They provide a legible language of relationship that, moment by moment, rubs against the taken-for-granted and makes use of ideological friction to interrogate the “official” in ways that move beyond the dialectic of opposing the status quo and toward kairotic moments with inventional capacity to propose something not yet considered.6 Here vernacular rhetoric encounters a conundrum. By participating as a subordinate in a power relation, the act of participation contributes to the power structure’s resilience. Not all subordinates are consciously aware that the vernacular of deference contributes to their own subjugation. At the same time, knowing participation in the vernacular of deference can keep the oppressor off guard and allow an undetected critique of power. As dissidents in Central Europe have noted, the disaffection of laborers did not always reflect consciousness of being oppressed. In the post-totalitarian state, as Havel (1986) describes it, the state no longer has to exert overt oppression; citizens live in fear of one another if they do not conform, so they conform for their own safety. Being separated from one’s own impulses for individual expression is living a lie; but conscious awareness may be no more radical than melancholy over the dreariness of life. Still, a rhetoric of contempt may bubble “under the surface” until its weight or some signal event triggers a new, more radical consciousness and it “breaks the surface” in an overt performance of resistance, much as Bakhtin

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(1981:342) describes the internally persuasive discourse of the son finally rebelling against the discourse of the father. By looking to discourses that originate under the surface of an “official” discourse, as well as overt discourses of resistance, a model of vernacular rhetoric may detect spontaneous moments of an alternative consciousness of reality as they form and emerge. In these ways, a vernacular of resistance positions itself in opposition to the “official” without expressing itself as directly resistant. While circulating under the surface, vernacular interrogates “official” discourse as a way of performing resistance. This is its third major characteristic. Dissident discourse requires tension with an existing order. For readers to make sense of their calls for a new social order, Gandhi required colonial Britain, Havel required Husák’s Czechoslovakia, and Mandela required South Africa’s Apartheid policy. Vernacular rhetoric shares this dialectical dimension, and it always already dialogizes authority (see Bakhtin 1981). Official discourse seeks to center its authority while marginalizing its subordinates by drawing social meaning to its ideological core where its logic of power solidifies existing power relations. The centrifugal force of official discourse is countered by the decentering rhetoric of the everyday that pushes everything to the edges where power can be denaturalized and contested. Mandela’s use of South Africa’s laws to force its courts to abide by the court’s own rules of evidence and procedure allowed him to flip Afrikaner racist assumptions of superiority and exclusion by bringing black men and women under the law’s umbrella. Vernacular rhetoric’s inherent capacity to challenge the “official” enables us to break with Foucault’s (1977) notion of the panoptic society and begin to theorize the space where discourses rub up against one another in fundamentally different ways that can produce genuinely new alternatives to existing power structures. Understanding how such propositions of alterity emerge may be the most important component of a model of vernacular rhetoric. Finally, an adequate model of vernacular rhetoric is sensitive to the performance of power in mundane ways. Our daily practices embody power to guide actions by socially shared meanings of propriety. De Certeau (1984:46), for instance, sees the very understanding of space and place as inherently appearing in everyday practices that occur within them: “What goes on in the kitchen is quite different from what happens in the parlor. . . . [We must] find in the institution itself both the seriousness of a real, and the mockery of the truth it displays.” By the very way we move through the city—walking in crosswalks and on sidewalks, avoiding “touristy” areas when we are “locals,” and generally following the “official” discourse on how to properly move through a landscaped area—we enact vernacular performances that either uphold the status quo or blatantly disregard it (de Certeau 1986; underwood 2006). Such performances necessarily impact larger understandings of how to interact with

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strangers (Sennett 1976, 1994), how particular discourse communities are able to communicate both with one another and “outsiders” (Conquergood 1994; Ono and Sloop 1995; underwood 2005), and the possibility to engage difference in an increasingly fractured society (Benhabib 1986, 1992, 1996; Young 1996, 2000). As such, everyday performances are continually connected to our larger social, political, and communal understandings of how we create and sustain meaning. Vernacular rhetorics offer insight into how such understandings continually shape power structures as we know them. The ability of vernacular rhetoric to affect existing power structures with consequences for a diverse population of marginalized and oppressed peoples is undeniable. The ways in which such discourses take effect, however, are directly tied to a vernacular rhetoric’s interpretation by a particular discourse community as both meaningful and salient. Vernacular rhetoric, therefore, must presuppose some form of literacy; what is meaningful must be spoken and/or understood by a particular group in a particular way. At the level of participant discourse, social movements have precise habits of speaking that utilize a vernacular for understanding the reference world and framing meaningful identification with those in it. This rhetorical form, at once liberating and constraining, inclusive and exclusive, accepting and rejecting, defines those who participate in it as a community whose vernacular discourse expresses bonds of affiliation and aspiration. It also excludes those who do not understand from participating in the discourse community that defines their dissident social imaginary. This poses a problem of translation and, ultimately, transformation. If different discourse communities are not able to understand one another’s vernacular rhetoric, an “official” discourse is able to position itself as continually oppositional but never displaceable. Alternative (often vernacular) discourses are not able to transform themselves into the “official” unless those who employ “official” rhetoric choose to adopt instances of a community’s vernacular rhetoric into their own. This is a viable choice for those in power to close a perceived gap between politicians and their constituencies, identify with an audience during formal oratorical engagements, and even uphold a popular way of understanding the world by replacing a more antiquated “official” version. Nonetheless, the power of vernacular rhetoric to transcend its place in a particular discourse community is often limited at best and most often quite impossible. The danger for social movements exists when the “official” absorbs their vernacular rhetoric as part of the existing dominant discourse.7 By way of appropriating a discourse community’s vernacular of resistance and transforming it into one of admiration for the existing power structure, those outside power no longer can claim to be “alternative” in their conception. This forces vernacular rhetoric once again to return to its action-oriented roots.

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We take as a given that the critique of power is an inherent goal of all social movements. Although the state often is its target, private sector power, such as local movements opposed to abortion clinics, PETA protests against animal experimentation by the cosmetics industry, or hacker “invasions” in support of open source development of information technology, is fair game. Axiomatically, movement success requires effective means of recruiting and organizing members, coordinating actions, and publicizing objectives to capture public attention and instigate awareness of how a public’s interests are at stake. Certainly formal statements by leaders are one means for achieving these ends, especially as they require attracting attention and making arguments. However, formal rhetoric seldom has the radicalizing effect of dramaturgical performance (Goffman 1959), the cult of personality notwithstanding, whereby dissident presentations of self have the theatrical effect, from the immediate scene of being presented, of moving the audience to undergo fundamental change.8 As we maintained above, by deploying a tacit logic of the political order homologous with that of the symbolic order, the subordinate constructs a tacit critique whose meaning evades censorship. Consequently, under conditions of repression, the homology of vernacular rhetoric within social life and the movement community—a covert rhetoric of the everyday—performs a spectacle of conflict and resistance. The backstage/front stage, hidden transcript/public transcript, polyphonous homology of the political and the symbolic we have been tracing has deep significance for the rhetoric of social movements. We argued that although a movement’s publicized rhetoric is most frequently the literary and oratorical productions of its leaders, the movement spreads, acquires, and establishes social meaning, then circulates that meaning through its vernacular rhetoric. Next, we contended that its polyvocality enables vernacular discourse to appear beneath the surface of public sociality while interrogating “official” discourse, thereby transforming the mundane into a performance of subversive power. Now, we will argue that multivocality performs difference in ways that are peculiar to everyday modes of symbolic exchange and the status of reality these modes ascribe or claim. Insofar as all rhetorical analysis investigates the text’s capacity to exert influence, the rhetorician regards movements as equally textual. However, the multimodality of vernacular rhetoric indicates that the influence of movement discourse, in actuality, lies in its intertextual performances, which rhetorical analysis is particularly suited to disclose. We acknowledge the power of street rhetoric to interpellate power. Displays of opposition provide social movements riveting moments of dramaturgical spectacle. Since illegal or confrontational performances of opposition

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attract media coverage, provoking police or military response provides free publicity to the movement’s cause within a frame of state violence. One need look no farther than the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s selection of Selma, Alabama, in 1965 as the site for a major civil rights protest because its police chief, “Bull” Connor, was known to have a short fuse. When Connor took the bait, Americans saw television images of unarmed African American protestors being subjected to the untrammeled violence of fire hose and police dog attacks (McAdam 2000). When the spectacle of dissident performance met with official acts of retaliation to curtail freedoms of assembly and speech, it became a dramaturgical unmasking of power’s underlying dissociation from society’s background understanding of power’s relationship with “the people” (McGee 1975). However, the force of spectacle depends on its ability to interpellate the text of state power. Moreover, such interpellations seldom have singular power to sustain a movement. Their success requires ongoing acts of opposition to advance the movement incrementally. Sometimes dramaturgical performances of difference take such intertextual forms as parody, scapegoating, debunking, and other forms of expression long part of the rhetorical tradition. These more studied rhetorical forms are repeated and reinforced in equally powerful street codes not typically part of the rhetorical canon but capable of gaining and mobilizing public sentiment. Gossip, rumor, euphemism, grumbling, and the like evade the censor’s grasp through the shield of anonymity, polysemy, or stopping short of overt insubordination. They are framing devices for ideological critique. Their performative openness as speech acts depends on where the power structure falls along a continuum from the democratic to the authoritarian. Regardless, as modes of circulating information, expressing solidarity, and dialogizing the prevailing official ideology, they are emblematic of an alternative consciousness of social, political, and economic organization. As powerful as these speech acts are as framing devices, their impact is magnified when their critique is performed in the dramaturgy of otherwise common and permissible collective actions that serve as overt ridicule and expose power’s hypocrisy. Performances of ironic role playing (e.g., the dialectical inversion of subordinate South African prisoners assisting their white warders to pass high school exams as demonstrations of their own superiority); deviant acts, often intended to inflict ritual shaming (e.g., Poles forming a queue in front of an empty warehouse next to the state-run grocery store to expose the sham of the state’s empty promise to provide food); the body employed as a mannequin (e.g., dressing in ways that signify opposition to and critique of the existing order); public gatherings at sites of opposition (e.g., Poles in communist Poland attending Mass), or in ways and at times that make the ordinary into a display of opposition (e.g., Belgrade’s citizens strolling when state-run television broadcasts the news); as well as protest

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marches, sit-ins, placards conveying dissent, and other more common modes of everyday actions transform the seeming vernacular into powerful dramaturgical interrogations of power. They attract media attention, are intelligible signs of dissent, are more memorable than all but the most eloquent oratory and prose, are participatory, challenge authority, can be fun to watch or to join, and can provoke authority into acts that unmask the democratic appearances of state actors. From the perspective of state actors, difference can work to their advantage as a source of disempowerment. They often interpret vernacular rhetoric as a sign of Otherness in ways that invite systematic distortion. Mechanisms of female identity are illustrative of this tendency. To discredit women’s calls for equality in the military, they are sexualized. Giving them a sexual identity—the “weaker sex”—provides the means to discount their fitness for military combat roles. As the “weaker sex,” they cannot be relied upon to meet demands of the battlefield, which places their lives and the lives of those in their units at risk. Mechanisms of erotification (Lynndie England), sexualization (Tailhook sex scandal), feminization ( Jessica Lynch), and so forth eradicate ideological differences instantiated in a movement’s vernacular rhetoric by interpreting it through power’s definition of difference (Hauser and Sanprie 2007). Rather than engage the dramaturgy of vernacular performances as expressions of ideological differences, it redefines them as beyond public norms for reasonable expression of differences and reduces them to objects of power’s gaze. For those who identify with resistors, examining vernacular rhetoric discloses at least three defining characteristics. First, the vernacular is a performance of solidarity that constitutes the movement as a liberatory social organization. Solidarity creates group identity as a community apart and its own (Charland 1987), as we would expect. Studies of Northern African (Bourdieu 1990), Southeast Asian ( J. Scott 1990), Central European (Touraine 1983), and South African (Buntman 2003) societies also reveal that rhetoric of the everyday among those outside of and in agonistic relations with power are constituted by their own norms of propriety and bonds of solidarity. However, participants in a movement do not always agree on what stand as norms. For example, South Africa had several resistance movements dedicated to overturning the Afrikaner regime. They were divided, however, not only on tactics but also on outcomes. For the African National Congress, founded by Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo, victory was framed in terms of a multiracial South Africa for all South Africans. The Pan African Congress, founded by Robert Subokwe, sought to liberate South Africa without the help of white South Africans and envisioned a liberated state for South Africans of color in which Afrikaners would either be executed or deported (Mandela 1994:227–29). Equally, they have their own terms of

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cleavage from the dominant power, as one finds, for example, in the writings of Frantz Fanon (1963, 1965, 1967). Second, vernacular rhetoric also reveals those in movements sometimes have negative bonding with authority (Sennett 1980). Negative bonding, or a bond of rejection, commonly refers to the need of those with less power to have authorities that cannot be accepted safely. The bond manifests itself in the weaker needing the stronger to define itself. Sennett (1980:28) says, “A bond is built to people we are rejecting; they are the point of departure. By knowing them, we know what we want.” For instance, the use of vulgarity by antiwar protestors during the 1960s and 1970s violated mainstream American norms of civility and decorum to express disagreement. Flaunting what youth of that era were instructed not to do, their verbal transgressions violated the language of official authority. However, the meaning of such language and its social impact as a statement of alternative consciousness depended on the constancy of an existing norm. Much as a parent might temper a child’s untoward behavior by ignoring it, resistance defined by gaining the attention of authority is bonded to a consciousness and ideology it wishes to displace in order to define its own identity rather than advancing an identity directed at others it wishes to attract. For example, student militants opposed to the Vietnam War staged protests intended to provoke local, state, and national officials to call out the police or National Guard to restore order. State violence against nonviolent protestors was integral to defining a political identity in terms of what it was not. When officials appeared to acknowledge student concerns with expressions of desire to enter into open discussion as an alternative to opposing demonstrations with police action, resistance subsided and the movement found itself co-opted. For instance, following the April 1970 U.S. military incursion into Cambodia, students went to Washington to protest. President Nixon countered with an invitation to students opposed to the Vietnam War to return to Washington to discuss their differences. That summer the students accepted President Nixon’s invitation only to find themselves stonewalled by government officials (Hall and Hewitt 1970). On the other hand, negative bonding can be broken, as is illustrated in the declaration by Polish dissident Adam Michnik (1981) that the state was incorrigible and not worth addressing. This view was then formalized in terms of everyday conduct among those in the movement seeking a bloodless revolution (Schell 1985; Hauser 2001). Third, vernacular rhetoric contains markers of positionality. Differences between self and other, between those in and out of a movement, are performed in codes of language, dress, and public behavior. Each signifies affiliation and division, in degrees of openness commensurate with authority’s tolerance of free expression. This feature is illustrated in Frances Wright’s performances of feminist and antislavery identity during the early to mid-nineteenth century. When Frances Wright established Nashoba, she

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encouraged sexual freedom within the community. Wright thought miscegenation was the ultimate solution to racial relations, while she opposed marriage as an inequitable institution and advocated free love. She also created a stir by developing her own dress code, with ankle-length pantaloons, dresses cut above the knee, and bodices. To say that these performances of positionality marked her as apart from mainstream nineteenth-century society is obvious (G. King 1992). More importantly, she expressed her positionality in vernacular place and space. Her position in the place of Nashoba or the place of her public apparel opened a space for alternative relationships to form (see underwood 2006). Her body rhetoric was not only an expression of her situatedness but also opened an arena for vernacular performances that explored alternative meanings for conjugal and gender identity. Vernacular performances of positionality by a movement’s actors carry rich implications for the layering of social meaning among those who are part of the movement and for the ways they appropriate the discursive space in a situated place to construct the movement’s meaning. A movement’s dramaturgical possibilities and constraints do more than perform an ongoing critique of an existing power structure. In the process of interrogating it and creating alternative meanings among its members and the larger society whose allegiance it seeks, performances of vernacular rhetoric contain inherent pressure to conform, as we indicated earlier. So long as overt violence is not an option, whether because the power differential makes it suicidal (Czech declaration of independence from the U.S.S.R. invites military response) or meets with collective disapproval (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee violation of nonviolent commitments of the civil rights movement), conflict moves to the domain of symbolic action. Simple acts of everyday communication can be expressions of solidarity that chip away at state actors’ façade of power. But at the same time, affiliation with a movement entails relationships with comrades that exert “gentle violence” to conform. Those in the movement are expected to display trust, meet their obligations, and show loyalty to those in the movement. In short, when they perform the virtues of honor recognized by the movement’s ethical code, they conform without consciously recognizing that they have been pushed to do so. “Gentle violence” becomes “the most economical mode of human domination because it best corresponds to the economy of the [movement’s] system” (Bourdieu 1990:127).

Discernable Characteristics of Vernacular Rhetoric as a Mode of Resistance We have contended that centering vernacular rhetoric in movement studies indicates that the influence of movement discourse lies in its intertextual per-

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formances. These performances are powerful framing devices for ideological critique whose impact is magnified when they are expressed dramaturgically. We then argued that the dramaturgy of vernacular rhetoric has three defining consequences for resisters: it is a performance of solidarity that constitutes a movement as a liberatory social organization, it reveals that those in movements sometimes have negative bonding with authority, and it provides resistors with markers of positionality. Finally, we maintained that in the process of interrogating an existing power structure and creating alternative meanings among its members and in the larger society whose allegiance it seeks, performances of vernacular rhetoric also contain inherent pressure to conform. In this section, we will argue that vernacular performances of resistance are a (mostly) subtle means to denaturalize power’s symbolic representations of social relations. These means of denaturalizing the status quo of power occur in at least three rhetorical modalities: indirection, confrontation, and subversion. Vernacular rhetoric invites identification in terms reminiscent of Burke’s (1950) theory of rhetoric by focusing on the mechanisms of language and appeal that establish identification. Burke contended that we persuade an audience by establishing an identification of motives inherent in shared vocabularies. Obviously, vernacular rhetoric partakes in this process, but we must differentiate the ideologically inscribed vernacular that is molded by the gentle violence of state actors from that molded by the gentle violence of the social movement. Insofar as rhetoric is addressed to an audience, movements reconfigure the modes of address to dislodge the taken-for-granted relationships reinforced by everyday symbolic exchanges. Bodily displays, modes of dress, provocative use of language, or protest action focus attention on previously undisputed elements of the political, economic, or social order. Insofar as dramaturgy can force a wedge between the naturalization of the symbolic, it can perform an unmasking function that rearranges the prevailing social structure from a seamless and consistent rhetoric of power into currents of competing discourses laying claim to historicity. These competing claims that challenge a view of the social field as always already determined lie at the core of social movements. These competing rhetorics are manifestations of the ongoing conflict through which society produces itself. As Touraine has argued, this is society’s principal activity (Touraine 1981:1–29). Hauser (2005) has argued that social movements embrace vernacular rhetoric as integral to resistance of a dominant order. A movement’s struggle against naturalizing the dominant order’s field of social relations problematizes situation as the defining condition of rhetoric. Situation is but an element, albeit an important one, in the larger concern with rhetoric’s centrality to relationship.9 Social movements are, at their core, contests over establishing and reestablishing societal relationships because societal relationships reflect the complexity of power relationships. Situations do not define rhetoric with

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the positivity of objective situational features calling for the actors’ responses, nor is social will the product of individuals’ marching to the beat of necessity. Rhetorical practices and social will are the outcomes of groups and classes that share a social field, both attempting to define that field’s nature and meaning. The drama of alternative modes of identification, as reflected in vernacular expressions of alterity, can capture society’s attention and refocus it by dislodging the social field as state actors define it. Vernacular rhetoric aimed at resistance seldom is intended to persuade its apparent target. More realistically, those with power do not relinquish it willingly. To dislodge them, short of violence, requires gaining majority support in order to create a legitimation crisis (Habermas 1973) or to set the penalties high enough for authority to consider a change of relationship to be in its best interests (Taylor 1986). The rhetoric of indirection serves an important function in this regard by addressing power in a manner intended more to move an audience of onlookers than authority itself. Displaying alternative sources of power is limited only by the imagination of the movement’s actors. Sometimes direct address uses its declared audience as a foil to make a point about the foil (or the dissident) to an audience of onlookers. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (16 April 1963) is written as a reply to a statement issued by eight Alabama clergymen but is intended to alter consciousness of racism in the larger United States by dramatizing the consequences of the clergymen’s call for gradualism (Leff 2003). Sometimes indirection occurs in the drama of extreme public displays, such as ACT UP using outlandish performances to publicize political ends. Interrupting the New York Stock Exchange, disrupting services in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, or staging costumed parades that are marked with barbs aimed at heterosexual onlookers (Brouwer 2001) intend to make a point about practices of targeted “others” to an audience drawn to staged spectacles of protest. Sometimes political prisoners who use their bodies to confront prison authorities, such as in the IRA hunger strikes in 1980 at Northern Ireland’s Long Kesh prison, have little hope of changing their warders’ minds through bodily displays, but have great hope that an external public of observers will bring pressure to initiate change (Hauser 2001). And sometimes movements use extreme tactics to provoke authorities to respond. Picketing alone, for instance, may call attention but lacks dramaturgical power to goad the opponent into self-indicting acts (McAdam 2000; Simons 1970). Many people might disagree with the specific agenda of a movement, but by goading authority to use power to suppress them—putting them in jail, subjecting them to pain, not intervening to stop inhumane practices, using violence—the dissident group uses formal and vernacular modes of address to engage an opponent in a spectacle of dissent and repression performed before a witnessing audience whose sentiments it hopes to engage.

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When covert resistance breaks through the surface and becomes blatantly overt, it functions as a mode of confrontation. In the modality of confrontation, speakers display their dissent in a way that explicitly opposes a dominant discourse, reminiscent of Scott’s notion of a “public discourse” (1990:13–14). Because this rhetoric is open in its display of opposition, it necessarily also reveals the movement’s awareness of possible consequences for acts of defiance. Overt modes of vernacular resistance often goad established authority to respond in ways that can be interpreted as defensive. For instance, when covert resistance transforms into mass protests and public rallies, official power must recognize that the sheer number of protesters could adversely undermine the legitimacy of official discourse. The rhetoric of confrontation is marked by three major characteristics: a reaction to existing circumstances, a provocation by (lack of ) action of those in power, and a proactive means of precipitating confrontation with power structures by a larger movement. Movements are intensely sensitive to the necessity of invoking the publicity principle to raise conscious awareness that there is a public problem and that its character is other than what authorities or those in power allege (Gusfield 1981:1–27). Transgressing officially approved behaviors in ways that provoke reaction to existing circumstances are often the most effective uses of publicizing a public problem to spark conscious awareness and contest its official definition. Sometimes these transgressions are subtle, as in Havel’s (1986:41–86) parable of the greengrocer. Havel portrays a fruit and vegetable vendor who is delivered a flier from the “enterprise headquarters” to place in his window along with his carrots and onions. The flyer reads, “Workers of the world, unite!” The grocer, who does not support this cause, and is in fact quite indifferent to its contents, nonetheless wishes to avoid trouble. So he posts the flyer. Havel’s parable discusses the everyday implications and consequences that a society faces when, against the programmatic background of the dominant power—in his case the post-totalitarian state—each act of submission is a vernacular legitimation of the state’s game. When the grocer decides participation carries worse consequences than complicity, he removes the sign. The countervernacular of not displaying the sign symbolizes withdrawing support for the game’s legitimacy and of opting, as Havel puts it, to “live within the truth” (55). Havel’s parable illustrates how seemingly mundane actions, such as removing the flyer, are a subtle mode of confrontation that breaks the surface of sociality with overt opposition to the “official” stance. More dramatically, the modality of confrontation can exhibit proactive means of precipitating confrontation with power structures by a larger movement in the form of mass rallies or protests. As is well known, confrontation exhibits characteristics that are a result of both strategic design and spontaneous displays. Denunciations of the dominant discourse in especially organized rallies and mass protests make full use of rhetoric’s

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multifaceted possibilities for creating social meaning. All rhetoric has consequences, but mass rallies can carry particularly painful ones. The realistic consequences for participants of association, individual visibility, and threat of arrest inflicted by those in power intersect the modes of confrontation and indirection in riveting performances of resistance. Certainly vernacular displays of protest—chants, placards, dress, heckling, etc.—are a significant part of rhetorical power generated by mass rallies. However, there is another, less obvious dimension of conflict we wish to highlight. In addition to mass rallies making overt the always ongoing covert resistance of the marginalized to dominant power structures, they also project the homology of vernacular rhetoric and the political field. The multidimensionality of vernacular instantiations of resistance, such as colloquialisms, new appropriations of existing words, ironic acts of deference, and the like, reflect an inherent need of the dominated to respond to action, or lack thereof, by those in power. The structure of everyday work life, social gatherings, and individual displays presents modes of resistance in performances of protest that can be adopted by the masses. In these ways, confrontation resists power structures in a comprehensive and versatile manner. In democratic states, the rhetoric of confrontation can both bring people together with a commanding display of resistance and perform solidarity through massive support of reality claims existing power would prefer to depict as isolated. Nondemocratic states often prevent such support through forceful policing and the threat of authoritarian-implemented consequences such as deportation, exile, labor camp internment, or disappearance. However, even in such states, vernacular rhetoric displays overtly resistant strands of discourse that may not be recognizable by, or even accessible to, those in power. Although they may appear overtly, rhetorics of subversion more often present themselves in the subtleties of the vernacular. In “policing the social” (see Donzelot 1979), dominant discourses often become publicly imposed performances that, in turn, can be subjected to parody, derision, and even complete subjugation as a way of efficiently undermining Foucault’s “panoptic society” (1977). Further, through imposition of the hyper-real (Baudrillard 1975, 1983, 2001) and rejection of the panopticon, theoretical notions of subversive resistance can develop. But in hush harbors and underground movements such as the circulation of samizdat, discursive resistance did exist. On the other hand, the danger for subversive rhetorics usually is not that they are snuffed out, but that they are discovered and subsequently co-opted by those in power. Sometimes those in power have notably shifted tactics when faced with alternative discourses that display resistance to their elevated status. Instead of smothering the rhetoric of subversion, undermining its credibility, or forcefully

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forbidding its display, some dominant discourses have adopted the vernacular as the official, albeit for different purposes. For instance, rather than appropriating terms such as “terror” to mean “fear,” as was first associated with the attacks of 9/11, President George W. Bush reappropriated the vernacular discourse surrounding the events of September 11, 2001, to include a “war on terror” as the official discourse of response to these events. However, his use transformed “terror” from “fear” of terrorism to a proactive discourse against “terrorism.” This meaning switch, in turn, gave Bush a handy enthymeme for disabling the arguments of a nascent antiwar movement, which, as of this writing, has not been able to mobilize significant public displays of opposition. The modality of subversion has real consequences for the expression of protest albeit often in ways that are difficult to avoid. Rhetorics of subversion are able to mark notable differences between vernacular or marginalized discourses and official or dominant discourses. Such rhetorics also are able to organize a collective consciousness under the surface before they rupture the surface and confront authority directly. In these ways, rhetorics of subversion are capable of manifesting themselves in overt and self-identified social movements without wholly identifying themselves as threats to “official” discourse. The danger in this subversive, yet not always confrontational, mode of resistance is that it can be co-opted with ease by those in power with no efficient way to reclaim the vernacular appropriation from where it originated.

Conclusions The implications of theorizing Vernacular Rhetoric are complicated because “officially” articulating a framework for studying and utilizing the vernacular must be malleable and able to change as conventions of the everyday are also continually changing. The vernacular of social movements has changed from early-twentieth-century organization and agitation on issues of race and class to now include such matters as identity, the environment, and capitalist exploitation of third world labor. These changes underscore the need for sensitivity to the multiple modes of expression ordinary citizens employ to dissent and agitate for change. The vernaculars associated with, say, a theory of civil rights cannot possibly be the same as those associated with a theory of globalization. For this reason, among others, a theory of Vernacular Rhetoric must look to characteristics and parts of a larger whole that are able to capture the dynamic aspects of its form and practice. Extending rhetorical study beyond the confinement of libraries and classrooms to the streets where vernacular rhetoric is practiced every day requires a new vision. In order to observe social movements in close relation to their vernaculars it is necessary to study their modes of composition and artistry. These modes are not traditional or unified

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in a way that can easily be recorded in libraries. They occur in the streets and must be studied in the streets, where they are produced and reproduced in everyday social interactions. If we are to study displays of resistance by anti-fur activists (see Olson and Goodnight 1994), for instance, we must go beyond studying the rhetoric that is produced about the activists in newspapers and other media, as well as the formal rhetoric that the activists produce about themselves. We must take into consideration the rhetoric produced and reproduced by a movement’s rank-and-file members in the enactment of their resistance. To whom do they communicate their message? What are the implications of these messages? Is the activists’ performative symbolic rhetoric contradictory or complementary to their written and spoken rhetoric? How does the vernacular engage us in a way that differs from official and leader movement discourse? All of these questions must be addressed in order to approach comprehensively the study of vernacular rhetoric, at times with the crucial aid of ethnographic methods. The rhetorical needs of participants in social movements to build and sustain community are very real, as is their need to perform solidarity in the face of official power structures. As official power structures intersect with collective instantiations of vernacular rhetorics, such as those of social movements, the triad of practice/theory/research method must be taken into account. Failure to connect their dynamic interactions misses the unique domain of rhetorical exchange where the ordinary citizen enacts resistance and engages in concerted action to bring about change; it treats the mundane as merely mundane. Focusing on the vernacular intensifies our sense of the dialogical character of social movements, both within movements’ discourse communities as well as at various levels where movements interact with power. Vernacular rhetorics inherently displace the movement leader’s monopoly on authority. Their constitutive nature is directly tied to the agency of a movement’s rank-and-file by repositioning them from followers into agents actively involved in constructing social meaning apart from the leader. Symbolic performance in social movements, as in all communication, is determined dynamically through active participation in vernacular rhetorics. Agency is a central component to this discussion but also problematic from a critical perspective. Studying vernacular rhetoric defies the typical neo-Marxist analysis of (1) the social world in terms of economic analysis and responses of the masses, and (2) the masses as captive to the ideological domination of hegemonic power. It discloses a social world as multidimensional, and it is capable of displaying exquisite sensitivity to the ongoing struggle, between those in and out of power, for society’s resources, including its symbolic resources. The human aversion to being treated as “robots” who can always be controlled and maintained reflects a basic sensibility of being both

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outside of and resistant to power. This sensibility is manifested in the ways that people embrace the vernacular and is most evident in the complex rhetoric of social movements, including (we believe most especially) its vernacular rhetoric. Looking to the dialogic nature of social movements opens the study of movement rhetoric to an ongoing interrogation of the official, of how agents empower themselves as agents of change, and it enables the possibility for new vernaculars—and resulting meaning—to emerge. At the same time, we must acknowledge the dangers of pitting the “official” and “antiofficial” in movements against one another. These are not the only ways in which we can understand social movements; a dialogic view allows us to investigate the gradations that may occur in how social movements emerge, are shaped by internal and external dynamics, gain force, and eventually result in change or die of their own impotence. The inherent dialogism of vernacular rhetorics is always bringing about alternative meanings to those of the “official” and, as such, always offers the hope that new social realities ultimately will emerge. This hope is the raison d’être for social movements, and a mature understanding of movement rhetoric must take into account how that hope is performed persuasively in its vernacular rhetoric. Such a turn to the momentous rhetorical power of vernacular performances as an embodiment and engagement of resistance will deepen our understanding of how rhetoric effects social change. Notes 1. For an extended discussion of this view, see Giddens (1979:1–73). 2. The publicity principle holds that there are reasons to doubt that representatives, on average, are wiser, or more committed to the common good than the ordinary citizen. Luban (1996:193) explains as follows: “The empirical validity of the publicity principle turns not on whether the Many are ignorant or wrong-headed, but on whether their leaders are less ignorant or less wrong-headed. No doubt the Wise are few; and the leaders are few; but it hardly follows that the leaders are wise. Before we reject the publicity principle because the leaders know best, we must have reason to believe that the leaders know better. And to find that out, we must look carefully at the variety of mechanisms by which decision-making elites are actually selected. If actual selection mechanisms choose randomly between the Many and the Wise, or affirmatively disfavor the Wise, then the foolishness of the many is irrelevant: the Few in official positions have no reason to suppose that their policy brainstorms are any less foolish.” 3. Griffin (1964) himself turned to a more contemporary movement in his study of the “New Left.” However, his method remained historical. His abstract reads as follows: “Part I. Discusses a historical outlook on the rhetorical structure of the New Left

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movement. Details on the initiating terminus of the New Left Movement during the inauguration of the Dissent project in the fall of 1953; Information on the publicized emergence of civil rights and peace movements by the fall of 1961; Death of New Left rhetorical theorist C. Wright Mills in the spring of 1962.” 4. The Report of the Committee on the Advancement and Refinement of Rhetorical Criticism stated: “We shall no longer assume that the subject of rhetorical criticism is only discourse or that any critic studying discourse is ipso facto a rhetorical critic. The critic becomes rhetorical to the extent that he [sic] studies his [sic] subject in terms of its suasory potential or persuasive effect. So identified, rhetorical criticism may be applied to any human act, process, product, or artifact which, in the critic’s view, may formulate, sustain, or modify attention, perceptions, attitudes, or behavior” (Sloan et al. 1971). 5. More often than even adopting rhetorical structures from the dominant discourse in their entirety, contemporary resistant rhetoric often speaks to the complex and multifaceted cultural world in which such rhetorics are emerging (see Anzaldúa 1987 on “mestiza rhetoric”) by genre mixing that combines extant structures in both “official” and vernacular forms. 6. Warner (2002) presents a discussion of the varied ways by which the gay community engages straight society to open spaces for inventing public styles of sexuality. 7. In his discussion of Latin American Indians, de Certeau (1986) details the danger of those in power co-opting the marginalized through strategies of colonialism and implementation of coercive forms of power. 8. We wish to extend the link of dramaturgy, as developed by Goffman (1959) to include both the obvious spectacle of street performance and those moment-bymoment displays of everyday life that involve the social actor performing in a particular place with situated action before an observing audience. Insofar as social actors in social movements are able to interact with their audiences intertextually, so that their interactions constitute both appearing before an audience and being audience for their own performances, these interactions serve as both individual and collective displays of agency. This mode of mundane performance has an obvious corollary with the spectacle of overt displays of resistance. 9. This view challenges Bitzer’s (1968) influential article on situation, in which he argues that situation calls rhetorical performance into being. See also Bitzer (1981) and McHugh (1968) for discussions that place situation at the center of social action.

CHAPTER

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Dreaming to Change Our Situation: Reconfiguring the Exigence for Student Writing SHARON McKENZIE STEVENS

Traditional writing classrooms appear to contain student composition both temporally and spatially, creating a double bind. On the one hand, students come to these classrooms to learn writing practices that will support their participation in the academy. On the other hand, classroom boundaries perpetually locate students at the margins of the university community, so that, by definition, classroom writing can never fully participate in academic activities.1 Instructors work this double bind in a number of ways: some champion critical pedagogy despite its regular assimilation into status quo practices associated with professional literacy; some teach students about generic change but grade writing in ways that create pressures toward generic reification; some embrace their roles as facilitators for students who seek to learn academic conventions but punish students when they fail to learn those conventions.2 Such are the tensions inherent in composition’s gatekeeper role, teaching at the margins of the academy. Many social movements respond to similarly marginal situations. Collective identities form as marginalized people (women, minorities, homosexuals, for example) advocate for more substantial civic, economic, and political participation. Alternatively (or simultaneously), collectives form to advocate for purposes (environmentalism, holistic health, universal children’s rights) that are inadequately attended to in mainstream decision making. Faced with the double bind of not having the political voice necessary to demand political voice, members of social movements dream up new ways to embody collective strategies for social action.3 Composition instructors have something to learn from the collectives that emerge in movements, but not through a straightforward imitation of particular rhetorical strategies. Instead, by studying movements, teachers can remake core rhetorical theories to alter classroom praxis. I will develop this

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encompassing claim by theoretically reconstructing one concept that is central to both rhetorical scholarship and rhetorical instruction, the rhetorical situation. My endeavor has precedent. Over recent years, a number of scholars in English and communications have used social movement rhetorics to indicate shortcomings of prior ways of theorizing the rhetorical situation. This is the case in articles that are explicitly framed as social movement studies (Ervin 2006) as well as in articles that simply draw on movement rhetorics as key exemplars for more general discussions of social change (Edbauer 2005; Rude 2004). These studies are typically grounded in Bitzer’s (1968:6) foundational definition of a rhetorical situation as a combination of audience, constraints, and exigence, where an exigence is in turn defined as an “imperfection marked by urgency”—something that calls out for change. Yet, these studies share a concern that Bitzer’s model has led to unnecessarily limited notions of the rhetorical situation, and they collectively argue that an overly fixed understanding of the rhetorical situation, which Jenny Edbauer (2005) has called the container model, cannot adequately account for rhetorical action that aims to change systemic relations. These studies also imply that pedagogies derived from the container model significantly undercut opportunities for students to exercise rhetorical agency. By limiting the way that students and others understand any particular rhetorical situation, the container model also limits acceptable persuasive strategies and their potential outcomes.4 Students and teachers need a better—more inventive—guide for invention, something that can help us respond to imperfection in previously undreamt-of ways, something to help us respond to urgency with immediate action rather than the deferred action of students waiting to move through the university’s gates. By studying movement rhetorics, rather than by remaining exclusively within Bitzer’s emphasis on mainstream politics, we can develop this more inventive theory of the rhetorical situation. In the next two sections of this article, I participate in the reconstruction of theory by drawing on recent studies’ movement-based adjustments to Bitzer’s (1968) article “The Rhetorical Situation” and, even more fundamentally, by building on Kenneth Burke’s (1973) alternative “The Rhetorical Situation,” which takes collective action as its foundational concern, providing a radical contrast to Bitzer. Burke situates rhetorical action as a response to large-scale exigencies such as war, global climate change, and gross inequities, daring to hope that rhetoric might make a difference. This, clearly, is a rhetoric of invention. In particular, this retheorized rhetorical situation calls for the invention of collective, activist identities. The rhetorical formation of collective identities is essential to projects aimed at social change, as are the concomitant reconstruction of culture and discourse. In fact, as I argue in the subsequent section of this chapter, these constructive processes themselves constitute one significant type of social change while participating in other changes (such as

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the reallocation of resources, the development of new technologies, and changes in legal, political, and economic systems). Universities are particularly well situated to foster the emergence of new collectives because they can serve as a site for social reflexivity, which, as new social movement studies make clear, promotes identity change. When the container view of the rhetorical situation is rejected and a more inventive alternative is joined to an emphasis on reflexivity, classroom writing matters to long-term processes of social development, even when that writing’s circulation appears to be contained by the classroom. I devote the last section of my chapter to discussing classroom praxis in ways that would not be possible without theorizing the rhetorical situation through the lens of social movement rhetorics.

Rethinking the Constraining Audience of the Bitzerian Tradition Contemporary mainstream politics is full of examples of rhetoric that accommodates its audience. In U.S. presidential primaries, for example, voters and pundits deliberate as much on which candidate can win an election as on who promotes the best policies. Politicians in democracies everywhere lean on opinion polls to help decide campaign messages. In these examples, Bitzer (1968) appears correct in his insistence that the rhetorical situation, together with its constituent component the audience, determines the range of fitting rhetorical responses. Like all foundational ideas important enough to engage substantively their readers, Bitzer’s understanding of the rhetorical situation has been widely critiqued, not least for his constraining understanding of audience. In an influential article, Barbara Biesecker (1989:126) argues that the identities of rhetor and audience are at play in any utterance, leading her to redefine “the rhetorical situation as an event that makes possible the production of identities and social relations.” The insight that writers can persuade readers to take on new identities and develop new social practices poses a significant challenge to pedagogies that define good writing in reference to any reified audience, such as a disciplinary audience. Composition theorists commonly recognize historical change and cultural difference by eschewing assessments grounded in universal norms for writing, but even this move neglects the possibility that the future might change, in part through student activity. Instead, it simply resituates formal concerns within a communal context that students are presumed to participate in only marginally. This leaves students as constrained as before to write to norms best understood by the teacher and to write using rhetorical strategies directed at social reproduction understood in reified terms. The constraining result is evident in some well-known writer’s handbooks. The Bedford Guide for College Writers (Kennedy et al. 2005), for example, makes

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“writing situations” and rhetorical strategies synonymous. It lists eight so-called “situations” that are no more than an expanded list of the modes of discourse (Connors 1981), including “recalling an experience,” “comparing and contrasting,” and “explaining causes and effects” (Kennedy et al. 2005:45–46). While Bedford, despite its widespread use, may appear to be a straw man for so obviously collapsing situations into strategies, the same cannot be said for The St. Martin’s Handbook (Lunsford 2003), which is much more in tune with contemporary scholarship. In her second and framing handbook chapter, “Considering Rhetorical Situations,” handbook author Andrea Lunsford also presents the rhetorical situation as a constraint by urging students to analyze writing assignments to discern audience and expectations, arguing that understanding the rhetorical situation is necessary for writing appropriately (43–46). Certainly, not everything Lunsford writes presents this standard, yet nonetheless confining, approach to rhetoric. In the final section of this chapter, I will discuss how Lunsford works within the handbook genre, writing for teaching contexts over which she has no direct influence, to suggest ways that students might negotiate assignments and discover possibilities rather than constraints (or “expectations”). At this point, however, I simply wish to give these two indices of how ubiquitous it is to develop pedagogies where the teacher-given assignment defines the rhetorical situation and defines appropriate rhetorical strategies in the process. Scholars who build pedagogies around social movements have developed alternatives. Elizabeth Ervin (2006), for example, discusses the rhetoric of the French Situationist International movement and the Yes Men, pointing out that, when rhetors seek change rather than social reproduction, they may choose inappropriateness as a rhetorical strategy in a way that both confounds Bitzer’s insistence on the fitting response and confounds the common pedagogical imperative to accommodate the audience. When Ervin turns to her classroom, she powerfully suggests why choosing to disturb audience expectations should not be confined to anomaly studies. As teachers and critics, she implies, we have a moral imperative to remember that inappropriate strategies are sometimes preferable: From a Situationist vantage point, rhetors who accept that their role is to “complete” rhetorical situations via a limited range of acceptable “responses” simultaneously oblige and abet those situations, thus tacitly legitimizing and, according to Vatz, evading moral responsibility for them. In short, they are quintessential (and unironic) “yes men.” (322)

In other words, rhetors have a responsibility to choose between social reproduction and change, and part of this responsibility is to choose whether or not to accept rhetorical situations, and the social relations that construct them, as presented.

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Inappropriate strategies may be not only moral, as Ervin stresses, but also effective. I argue this elsewhere with Lachy Paterson (forthcoming), contending that the performative rhetoric of 1970s-era Ma\ori youth activists shocked its audience, leading to immediate hostility, in some, and outright confusion, in many. Nonetheless, these strategies were effective in putting race relations on Aotearoa/New Zealand’s national agenda and thereby supporting long-term processes of social change. Overturning the aesthetics of situational appropriateness, then, can support rhetorical strategies that effectively change social relations. In sum, contemporary theorists offer multiple reasons to let go of a constraining view of audience: this view ignores the possibility that audiences may change, it evades moral responsibility, and it places unnecessary limits on what might be judged rhetorically effective. Accepting these critiques shifts the source of invention, on a continuum, away from the audience and toward the rhetor. In pedagogy, this means that control over writing shifts, again on a continuum, away from the teacher (as the representative of an audience) and toward the student. Suddenly, the student writer has a less marginal place in the university. This is even more true once the meaning of exigence is reconfigured.

Rethinking Exigence with Burke’s Rhetoric of Identification It is now commonplace to object that, contrary to Bitzer’s claims, exigence is neither natural nor objective (Vatz 1973; Biesecker 1989). Accepting the basic tenets of this critique, I see no reason to comment further on it. Instead, my concern with Bitzer is that he draws his examples of exigence from mainstream politics and individual rhetors, thereby shaping how we imagine rhetorical exigencies and limiting how we theorize them. If we start with social movements, our theory and praxis are likely to change. For this purpose, Kenneth Burke provides assistance. After Bitzer, Burke (1973) also published an article titled “The Rhetorical Situation,” without explicit reference to its precedent. While Burke’s apparent aim is to define the rhetorical situation, his article simultaneously participates in protests against the Vietnam War. Given this beginning and this end (telos), it is not surprising that Burke’s definition is well suited to understanding movement rhetorics. One key feature of social movement rhetoric is that it promotes the emergence of new collectives. Collective identity formation is also central to Burke’s concerns, in a way consonant with his famous argument: “[P]ut identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic

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invitation to rhetoric” (1950:25). In “The Rhetorical Situation,” Burke (1973) begins his discussion of collective identities by noting the ambiguity of the signifier “we.” He points out that “when the Dodgers won a ball game, all Brooklyn proudly proclaimed that ‘we’ had won” in spite of the Dodgers being a “private corporation . . . in Los Angeles, operating on a quite different identification” (271–72). From here, Burke proceeds to discuss more sinister identifications, examining, for example, how the construction of national identities supports international finances and the Vietnam War. In these examples, Burke emphasizes that identifications are made, not found, and they are made rhetorically. Because he is considering highly contested social issues, it does not surprise that Burke (1973) is ironically aware that any definition of a particular rhetorical situation is likely to be contested. Yet, he nonetheless offers such a particular definition. After arguing that “observations of the Rhetorical Situation should change with the times,” Burke suggests that the military-industrial complex is a good starting point for describing his contemporary rhetorical situation (273). Cast in Bitzerian terms, Burke’s argument is that the military-industrial complex is an exigence, a social imperfection that requires an urgent response. An exigence of this scale demands for its redress collective, rather than individual, rhetorical action. Socially complex, macro-level exigencies also demand long-term rhetorical strategies, rather than individual, ephemeral acts. In a superb article on kairos and the rhetorical situation, Carolyn Rude (2004) makes this point explicit by examining how information made accessible by technical reports on global warming circulates within environmental groups, governments, and other organizations. She concludes that these reports, despite their nominally informative rather than persuasive purpose, are effective within a long-term kairos and exigence. In response to growing social complexity, Rude offers the “extended rhetorical situation” (280) as a more realistic way to understand processes of social change, noting that rhetoric itself may expand beyond the usual classroom focus on individual instances (the document, the speech) to accommodate persuasion over time: delivering a message repeatedly and in different media, actively seeking out audiences, and promoting action in response to the message. The publication is not an end in itself. (272)

In this complex world, rhetoric becomes a connective tissue, one that binds individuals together in collectives and binds otherwise disparate acts together in collaborative responses to a shared exigency. Student writing ceases to need an end in itself (an end that would most typically be getting a grade, although many alternatives exist). It is thereby freed to participate in a collective

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endeavor to shape society, which is already one key goal of academic activity, but one that students often participate in only marginally. The collectives and exigencies that are key to an extended rhetorical situation are co-constituted. Environmentalists are born from concerns about human effects on nature. Chicanos, feminists, and others create their identities through consciousness-raising about oppression. Burke (1973) recognizes this, integrally connecting the process of constructing collective identities (such as “we war protesters”) to the process of interpreting exigencies. For example, while tracing the economic consequences of armament, involvement in an overseas war, and monetary measures of production, Burke suggests all these have something essential to do with “the Rhetorical Situation in which we find ourselves” (275, emphasis added), a comment that must be read in the context of his earlier, sustained critique of what it means to say “we.” That is, the exigence for rhetoric and the collective facing that exigence are co-constituted whenever members of a collective are persuaded that they are called to act within a particular situation.5 The activist foundation of Burke’s approach indicates how productive it is to turn to movement rhetorics, not only to better understand agency, but also to revise our basic concept of exigence, the “invitation to rhetoric” (Burke 1950:25). Even as he reflexively indicates his perspective is constructed, Burke (1973) underscores the praxis of theory by attempting to persuade readers to accept his particular, antiwar definition of the rhetorical situation and to join him in an active, rhetorical response to the collective and large-scale problems of his time. Arguing that war is the exemplar of basic human division and rhetoric is the characteristic way of transcending that division, Burke implies that rhetoric is a desire for peace, and that understanding the rhetorical situation means recognizing the social relations that continue to divide us. As Cynthia Sheard (1993:307) writes in an analysis of Burke’s corpus, “the source of Burke’s cynicism [division] is, paradoxically, also the source of his hope for the future because such separation, as a source of potential conflict, provides the very exigence for rhetoric.” Collective identity formation is a basic response to the hope for a better future, and while Burke is well aware his hope is utopian—that, around the edges of identity, division is always found—he nonetheless holds out that rhetoric can be a humanizing corrective for the divisive conditions of our lives. Perhaps, then, Burke can point a way to a pedagogy based in hope.

Rethinking Rhetoric That Matters through the Lens of New Social Movement Studies A key way that collective identities promote social change is by fostering a more reflexive society. Below, I develop this argument by drawing on social

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movement scholarship, which shares Kenneth Burke’s (1973) recognition that symbolically constituted collective identities matter for social action.6 The insights of new social movement scholars indicate ways that, by facilitating social reflexivity, teachers and students can co-construct rhetorical situations whose impact is felt far beyond the classroom. When reflexivity becomes the goal of rhetorical education, even the apparently traditional classroom becomes but one vital element in an extended rhetorical situation that calls for a long-term and collective response. One of the big questions raised by new social movement scholarship is the relationship between cultural and structural change, identity formation and direct political action. New social movement theory is often critiqued for overemphasizing cultural change at the expense of “real” social action. Such critiques resonate with concerns that classroom writing and rhetoric are also not “real.” The work of Alberto Melucci, a leading theorist of new social movements, provides a hard case for considering whether incremental cultural change makes a significant difference because, according to Steven Buechler (1995), Melucci represents an extreme form of a cultural (as opposed to a political) understanding of new social movements. Buechler argues that Melucci believes that new social movements are explicitly apolitical in order to sidestep conventional power games, meaning that new movements seek to “[render] power visible and [repudiate] the instrumental rationality of the dominant society” in order to “[break] the limits of compatibility of the system” (452). Buechler is concerned that Melucci’s emphasis on culture supports a general tendency to study newly constructed identities (for example, environmentalist, pacifist, queer) and overlook traditional identities grounded in class affiliation, which are deemed to be based on material relations (458). Following Buechler’s critique to its parallel classroom application, it is reasonable to ask to what extent changes in pedagogical relations obscure important questions about institutional structures, which are similarly deemed less malleable.7 The best way to answer these questions, many movement scholars suggest, is not to choose between structural and cultural theories, but to examine their interplay. It is all too easy for critiques of culture-oriented theories (and resulting pedagogical praxes) to rely on false dichotomies between class and other identities, culture and structure, symbolic and political action (Polletta 1997). Even when researchers attempt to address both ends of these dichotomies, they often hierarchically order them, underestimating the significance of culture. Noting that many researchers8 suggest that culture becomes an important way to mobilize protesters during historically settled moments (that culture matters only when it supports direct action), Francesca Polletta (1997:433) dissents from this narrow view and instead asks, “[C]an’t social movements themselves contribute to destabilizing the institutional logics that inform everyday life?” It would seem that Melucci would agree with the basic

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impulse of this question and that his interest in culture, like Polletta’s, is actually not a disinterest in politics and direct action as Buechler might suggest. Instead, Melucci (1994) argues that it is precisely because social control is taking on new forms that creating new collective identities is a direct form of resistance and social change (see also Malesh and Stevens, this volume). Similarly, as the educational sphere becomes increasingly colonized by corporate and other interests, maintaining a noneconomic justification for teaching becomes increasingly difficult, and increasingly important. In composition theory, tension between structure- and culture-oriented praxes often appears as resistance to a straightforward assimilation of students into a pre-given understanding of the university and its writing. Compare, for example, Donna LeCourt’s (2006) culture-oriented “Performing Working-Class Identity” to Sharon O’Dair’s (2003) structure-oriented “Class Work.” LeCourt is attracted to—and recognizes her prior implication in—a binary concern motivating O’Dair: the Hobson’s choice between assimilating working-class students into middle-class culture, or, alternatively, validating working-class culture while denying students assistance in pursuing their own economic mobility. LeCourt rejects this choice, arguing instead for a more constructed, processual, and performative understanding of identity. She argues working-class students can reconfigure their identities to participate in both working- and middle-class cultures without experiencing alienation, a common trope of working-class literacy narratives. Working from a more savvy identity theory than does O’Dair, LeCourt is able to develop a pedagogy that supports more routes to individual rhetorical agency. In rejecting O’Dair’s (2003) binary, however, LeCourt (2006:31) also rejects, in full, O’Dair’s conclusions, calling O’Dair’s belief that universities are unchangeably identified with middle-class culture simply “indefensible.” LeCourt does not engage most of O’Dair’s calls for social change, all of which involve direct political action that might change how members of the working class relate to power, for example by strengthening unions, developing managerial and promotion structures that value working-class knowledge, experience, and achievement, seeking higher incomes through politics rather education, and developing separate forms of working-class higher education while “[facing] the fact that college is not for everyone” (603). This final suggestion is the only structural suggestion to which LeCourt directly refers, and likely the one she finds most troubling. I, too, am concerned by O’Dair’s argument that some do not belong in college, which could easily be co-opted to deny working-class access to the university while also budgeting and legislating against working-class efforts to mobilize in their own interests. I am also concerned, however, with how LeCourt, with her emphasis on discursive change, dismisses O’Dair’s emphasis on structural change.9 Many of O’Dair’s suggestions are beyond classroom pedagogy, but her suggestion to

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engage “frank [classroom] talk” about class values and the university’s role in middle-class assimilation can support the political process of revaluing working-class contributions to society. Both this frank talk, which relies on stable understandings of class difference, and O’Dair’s structural aims coincide with traditional forms of class solidarity building that have proven effective historically (especially in Europe) for mobilizing workers for political change. These forms of solidarity are potentially undermined by LeCourt’s pedagogy and, especially, by the priority LeCourt gives to the economic mobility of her individual students (although, notably, LeCourt simultaneously seeks institutional reform by changing academic discourse to better accommodate hybridized working-class subjectivities). Rather than choose between LeCourt’s and O’Dair’s emphases, then, I prefer to consider how pedagogy might support the interplay of culture and structure, which, as an example, might engage students in the reflexive reconstruction of “traditional” solidarity-oriented collective identities, drawing on working-class cultural resources to renew and/or reshape forms of political action that can promote social equality and collective economic opportunity. As new social movement scholars argue, already-shifting identities, such as those encountered by crossing between work or home and the university, can enable conscious reflexivity, and this reflexivity in turn matters on both a structural and a cultural level by changing how people act, how they relate to one another, to institutions, to technologies, and to political processes. The idea that even collective identities develop through reflexive processes (as opposed to arising ready-made through structure) suggests ways that O’Dair’s “frank talk” and LeCourt’s performative identities might have a chance to meet where the individual is articulated to the collective without reifying that collective. Reflexivity arises through collective identity formation because this latter requires identity contestation, making life choices openly negotiable and meaningful (Gusfield 1994). Melucci (1994) locates the cause of reflexivity within systemic changes in social structure. Seeing a shift from industrial capitalism to an information society, combined with new technologies, Melucci argues that the experience of processing symbolic resources is one component of newness that “seems to multiply the reflexiveness of social action” (110). In other words, changes in society have led to increased reflexivity in ways that are characteristic of new social movements. While students may not identify with these movements, these social changes form the context of their experience long before they arrive at the university. Students are therefore likely to share, to differing degrees, the contemporary sense that there are gaps in meaning, and they may have also engaged these gaps reflexively. A movement-based rhetoric offers the possibility to identify oneself as a cause of further change and reflexivity, to move out of a reactionary to a more

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participatory role in shaping a shifting society. Melucci (1994) argues the importance of new movements is that, while they may not be primarily defined by direct action in the way of, say, the Wobblies (though this is but a difference in degree), they are nonetheless antagonistic toward dominant systems and, therefore, a cause of further reflexivity and an inducement to social change. He defines collective identities as “interactive and shared definition[s] produced by several individuals (or groups at a more complex level) and concerned with the orientations of action and the field of opportunities and constraints in which the actions take place” (Melucci, cited in Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield 1994:15). This resonates with similar definitions of the rhetorical situation, as is apparent in the phrase “opportunities and constraints,” as well as in the suggestion that symbolic identities are oriented toward and constitutive of action (that is, rhetorical). As Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield (1994:15) argue, collective identity is constantly negotiated through action and in response to its environment and, “[b]y this process of interaction, negotiation and conflict over the definition of the situation, and the movement’s reference frame, members construct the collective ‘we’.” Out of social, rhetorical situations—situations defined through interactive interpretations—collective identities are created as active responses oriented to changing the situation. This returns us to Burke’s (1973) understanding of the rhetorical situation, but in the process it clarifies processes (namely, the development of reflexivity through identity contestation and the use of collective identities to induce and sustain action) that directly support structural change as well. To my mind, noting the interplay of structure and culture provides a way to focus on either of these terms as a starting point for changing classroom pedagogies. When the material relations of the classroom seem more difficult to change, focusing on reflexive approaches to the rhetorical situation and the integrally connected role of identity formation provides an alternative that does not replace, but does complement, other types of change processes, such as direct political action, public protest, and civic participation. Pursuing reflexivity through constructing complex exigencies and their accompanying Burkean “we” is a crucial component of an extended rhetorical situation.

Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation of the Classroom A common suggestion for changing the classroom situation is to move student writing into relations and circulations involving audiences other than teachers. Edbauer (2005), for example, argues that blogs circulate student texts in ways that better recognize rhetoric as an ecological process. In other words, the audience for blogs is difficult to control, but precisely for this reason blogs (and, by extension, other forms of Web writing) can change the exclusivity of

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the teacher-as-audience, giving student writing a (potentially) more public audience and, therefore, a more active purpose. Advocates of service learning and civic action pedagogies often similarly justify changing traditional classroom relations by noting the value of expanded audiences and the value of what Edbauer calls the praxis of “thinking/doing” (23, emphasis in the original). Such pedagogies are often directly aligned with the goals of social movements in the particular sites chosen for classroom activity (see Todd and, especially, Coogan, this volume). While explicitly valuing such approaches, here I consider how pedagogies operating in the traditional time/space of the face-to-face enclosed classroom can still not only support but also directly participate in social change by refusing traditional understandings of enclosed rhetorical situations. My choice is partially prompted by the conditions of my teaching: relatively short twelve-week semesters, a campus with a significant number of commuters and workers,10 and a scarcity of networked teaching facilities. My affective response to these material conditions includes resistance to overworking my students or myself combined with my belief that sustainability in teaching11 means providing some resistance to the logic of expansion, even expansion into public, civic, and virtual spaces. In response to these combined factors, I find myself readily accepting the superficial appearance of a pedagogy that contains student writing. Nonetheless, I recognize many teachers are developing innovative approaches to respond to concerns with sustainability while nonetheless refiguring classroom situations through technology, service learning, and other forms of movement beyond classroom walls. My acceptance of the material conditions of my teaching as constraining, therefore, also depends on my sense that these same conditions also provide an opportunity. Edbauer (2005:22) is concerned about the deferral of action in pedagogies that depend on the idea that research (and learning more generally, I would add) is “a personal process that only later leads to a public text.” I agree but wish to stress that Edbauer’s focus on Web-based pedagogies is not essential to this aim: new social movement scholarship’s understanding that identity formation depends on the articulation of the personal to the collective, thereby participating in the breakdown of private/public dichotomies and inducing social movement, suggests an opportunity to change classroom cultures of learning in ways that complement approaches, such as Edbauer’s, whose focus is instead on changing the material relations and circulations of learning. My sense that the classroom provides this opportunity is furthered by my belief that supporting an educational sphere with goals and justifications that are both connected to and distinct from those of the civic sphere is valuable, just as I believe that a distinction between education and corporate economics is valuable. By refusing to be the direct servant of any other form of

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activity, education provides an opportunity for reflexivity. It even creates that reflexivity by embedding different assumptions than do other spheres, rubbing against other values and ends and thereby creating the friction necessary for movement. In particular, the educational sphere’s distinctiveness can support reflection, critique, exploration, and experimentation by being both separate from and connected to (via the movement of students and ideas, identities and meanings) other social spaces. These already existing possibilities are expanded by a reconfigured rhetorical situation that supports students in constructing exigencies beyond those dreamed of by instructors and traditional audience analyses, exigencies that cannot be addressed by an individual in a semester. By focusing on opportunity more than constraint, this reconfigured situation suggests rhetoric itself needs to be imagined more broadly, beyond publications (or student essays), as Rude (2004) has argued; and that a rhetorical education will benefit from opportunities to take reflexively the long and broad view rather than only plunging students into the midst of specific, ongoing practices. By rethinking the classroom’s rhetorical situation as a point of focused reflexivity that participates in social change, and by then offering this newly understood situation as an exigence for student writing, teachers can make the most of convergences between the classroom as a reflexive space and what Gusfield (1994) has called the naturally reflexive nature of social movements. In this refigured view, the exigency for a rhetorical education is hope that students might actively embrace the process of becoming deliberate actors, aware of the power of collective action and capable of constructing a society with vision. In this final section of the chapter, I survey a few classroom pedagogies that make central the concept of the rhetorical situation and use these as the basis for suggesting an additional pedagogical approach. I begin with my promised return to Lunsford’s (2003) handbook, which valuably exemplifies resistance to teaching the rhetorical situation in ways that close down possibility and assimilate students to teacher purposes. As previously discussed, Lunsford typically takes the assignment as setting up students’ rhetorical situation. Further, she generally adopts an approach to rhetorical strategy that emphasizes the “appropriate” response to the assignment, an approach whose limits are apparent from Ervin’s (2006) study. Nonetheless, Lunsford’s accommodation (as I see it) of the typified social relations of the classroom (e.g., teacher authority and the grading economy) is not total. She urges students to consider how they might make an assigned topic their own and suggests they might wish to negotiate assignments with their teachers. Both approaches imply much more than assimilation in the quest for appropriateness. Negotiation, in particular, also suggests the possibility of changing social relations and thereby changing the rhetorical situation set up by the assignment and assessment.

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Yet, the constraining aspects of students writing in instructional settings and Lunsford’s marginal position (as handbook writer) in the social relations of the classroom are nonetheless palpable, and these relations support Lunsford’s (2003:44) quite typical suggestion that students would do better with a topic such as “The use of special forces in the Kabul area” instead of “The war in Afghanistan.” The advice is practical and realistic, and unlikely to mislead students into dreaming of too much within classroom confines. Nonetheless, there have been biting critiques of this sort of advice. In English and America, in a section titled “English 101 and the Military-Industrial Complex,” Richard Ohmann (1996) rails against a system that alienates students from their identities, from society, and from historical processes by accommodating the pragmatic needs of a system that resists social change. In another chapter, he argues that narrowing student topics in English 101 is guiltily resonant with the narrow purposes of the war memos anthologized in The Pentagon Papers.12 For Ohmann, deciding an appropriate strategy (whether in education, war, or writing) is not a good enough justification for action (rhetorical or otherwise), and his pages practically weep for greater social imagination and an expanded sense of possibility. The urgency of Ohmann’s pedagogical concerns are as fully informed by Vietnam War protest as are Burke’s (1973) critical reflections, and his argument fits the call to reconfigure pedagogical understandings of the rhetorical situation to authorize long-term, collective, and, potentially, even disruptive, inappropriate rhetorical strategies. This type of rhetorical pedagogy requires reflexivity as its cornerstone, and this reflexivity must consider exigency as well as strategy. LeCourt (2006:48) argues that conversation about writing can help students recognize the fluid, processual nature of the rhetorical situation, including the potential for “exigencies [to be] created for an audience.” As an example, she notes students have challenged her understanding of the best rhetorical strategies for particular assignments (48). Ervin (2006) also offers a pedagogy grounded in reflexivity by asking students to practice detournement within the classroom and then to reflect on both the goals and strategies of feminist activism. Ervin’s approach significantly expands the rhetorical strategies students are typically taught, yet even more importantly, the fact that detournement is socially inappropriate makes it easier for students to see its social consequences and moral commitments. By extension, students can more readily understand that choosing any rhetorical strategy is moral and consequential. Ervin’s pedagogy thereby enables critical reflection in ways that help her students seriously consider whether particular rhetorical strategies might effectively subvert active and symbolic aspects of oppression or whether they might, instead, enable hostile audiences easily to dismiss activist goals. The assignment sequence I offer below draws on the insights of LeCourt, Ervin, and others to suggest how the classroom can become a site

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for potentially radical cultural change by: (1) supporting students in the development of their own understanding of the collective “Rhetorical Situation in which we find ourselves” (Burke 1973:275) and, hence, their own exigence for writing; (2) understanding individual rhetorical acts as participating in long-term collective action and thereby having a place within historical processes of change; (3) recognizing that students’ efforts to craft their own identities and to identify a collective that can respond to an exigence is a culture-making activity that participates in social movement; and (4) providing space for students to reflect on their rhetorical choices in ways that challenge teacher understandings of what is appropriate. This last point is essential, for while an aspect of teachers’ authority stems from their knowledge of, and hence their ability to represent, authorizing communities (such as the academic community), teachers are unable to represent authoritatively the future and are therefore unable to adjudicate solely what sort of rhetorical strategies best serve processes of long-term change. And, ultimately, if teachers are unable to imagine change in the company of students, and if they are unable to see discursive action as possibility, then they are not teaching rhetoric when they teach writing. The assignments below, which are articulated together in a portfolio, offer one (of many possible) ways to open up pedagogy to possibility.13 The first is a research assignment that asks students to define a significant exigence for rhetoric, one that requires a systemic analysis of social relations. This exigence should demand change but be admittedly difficult to resolve, therefore requiring complex, expansive rhetorical processes. This assignment requires an inquiry that traces a complex and varied ecology of relationships, through multiple forms of direct (i.e., “personal”) experience, through a range of secondary sources, through conversations with multiple others in class and in their lives. Although each relationship informing student understanding can be documented as in traditional research projects, students’ goals in this project should not include presenting a polished, traditional argument that persuades readers to understanding and action, but instead to construct an exigence worth changing—a motive to act—and, second, to construct their own understanding of their social location in relation to that exigence. The finished project might be quite informal and still meet these goals. The next portion of the course is then devoted to two types of work: the construction of (possibly generic) forms of symbolic action (texts), combined with preparation for reflective writing that projects potential circulations for such texts in a long-term process of addressing that exigence. Students might choose to write a technical report, such as those discussed by Rude (2004), to provide information that might be useful down the road for more direct mobilization or technical persuasion. Other students, or the same ones, might choose to write personal essays, consciously situating themselves in relation to

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experiences, others, and information to craft reflexively an identity that can support further action in response to the constructed exigence. While such texts might circulate, for example in Web space, as information sources and points of identifications for others, their meanings certainly do circulate simply through the embodiment of understanding in the evolving identities of student writers, who themselves participate in society in other modes. In short, the goal of this sort of writing might simply be for the writer to take conscious ownership of the classroom’s potential for reflexivity, thereby providing space for the sort of cultural change and identity negotiation typical of new social movements. The final assignment, a portfolio of prior work collected with a new cover essay, is the only assignment directly addressed to the teacher as audience, but it assumes teachers might change as a result of that address. In calling for a portfolio, my goal is to make use of this assessment type’s recognized role in facilitating a shift to process over product. The process I am concerned with, though, is the process of participating in social change, rather than the process of revising better to suit a pre-defined genre. To this end, reflective essays should argue that students’ rhetorical choices are fitting (though not necessarily socially acceptable) responses to their own constructions of exigencies. These reflections thereby serve a purpose different from the more typical process-oriented portfolio cover letter or essay that discusses revision decisions.14 Additionally, while students need not argue that their rhetoric is sufficient to resolve the exigence, they should be able to contextualize their work within a more expanded understanding of collective action. These essays, then, while clearly serving the institutional will to assess, also have an immediate persuasive purpose. The essays, however, should not be students’ last word on their work, but instead an invitation for teacher-student and teacher-student-peer dialogue15 to discuss whether writers have made persuasive cases for particular genres and rhetorical strategies. A mismatch between reviewer and writer perceptions would require the writer to consider whether to revise the reflective essay to make a stronger case for the rest of the portfolio, to experiment with different rhetorical strategies, in particular portfolio texts, to clarify the exigence leading to those texts, or to combine these types of revision. Students’ goal would be to convince readers that the rhetorical strategies they adopt are plausibly effective contributions to a collective and long-term pursuit of social change. Students’ ability to engage effectively in this task depends, in large part, on a shared belief that students’ classroom activities can realistically inform teachers’ understanding of good writing once it is freed from its reference to preexisting discourse communities and their typical genres, which too often are formalized when practiced at the margins of the university. It depends on the belief that students are not marginal to the future.

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The politics of this pedagogy are not necessarily progressive with respect to the topics students write about. The exigencies defined by students might be similar to those of Burke’s (1973:275) nationalist accountants who see their exigence as a call for economic expansion. Nonetheless, this pedagogy supports student agency to the extent that it provides an opening for change within teacher-student relationships. It additionally supports student agency by emphasizing writing that serves historical, collective change processes as opposed to assimilation into teacher-represented discourses (such as disciplinary discourses). In sum, this pedagogy rejects the idea that audience can be collapsed into a constraint on student writing, for the teacher-assessor audience is open to persuasion with regard to strategy, and other social relations may also change over time. It rejects the idea that exigence is discovered and limited in time and space, for it asks students to invent their own understanding of a particular exigence in broad terms that require social vision for an effective response. And it rejects the idea that classroom learning defers real rhetorical action, for it highlights the reflexivity and identity negotiation that are central to movement activities oriented toward cultural changes and recognizes that these changes already participate in larger, interactive processes of social movement. Therefore, by drawing on movement-inspired reconfigurations of the concept “rhetorical situation,” classroom instructors can develop a set of practices that enact, as Biesecker (1989:127) theorized years ago, a rhetoric that serves as “radical possibility.” The heart of this rhetorical practice is not “how-to” or simple matching of strategy to found exigence. It is instead a substantial process of invention, a way of creating an understanding of what might matter in the world and an opportunity to dream up ways to become the sort of person who acts with others to make the future.

Notes 1. See Gail Stygall (1988) for a version of this argument as applied to basic writers. 2. For an instance of this final claim, see Rebecca Moore Howard’s (1999) discussion of “soft” responses to plagiarism that nonetheless serve a gatekeeping function. 3. My use of “double bind” and my association of the term with collective activism are drawn from Kim Fortun (2001). In her work with activists responding to the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, Fortun theorized a double bind as a situation whose complexities and irresolvable contradictions require activists to “‘dream up’ new ways of understanding and engaging the world” (13). Newly forming and morphing collectives, which Fortun calls “enunciatory communities,” are key to activists’

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“advocacy” for a better future. Enunciatory communities, then, are all about invention: the invention of new collectives, new strategies, and a new future with possibilities that cannot exist within the status quo. Steve Rayner’s (2003) concept of “emergent solidarities” also influences my thought here. 4. Bitzer (1968:10) puts this constraining view most strongly: “A situation which is strong and clear dictates the purpose, theme, matter, and style of the response which fits.” 5. Burke (1973:275) indicates that defining a particular rhetorical situation can be activist and progressive, but his examples suggest this is not necessarily so: he writes that accountants who manipulate monetary transactions are “among the most influential rhetoricians of our world.” 6. New social movement studies offer a wealth of empirical social and historical sources useful for understanding society, its complexity, and its change processes. By attending to social relations, identification, and interpretation, new social movement studies integrate well with contemporary rhetorical theory (Hauser and Whalen 1997). It is worth noting that leading sociologist Joseph Gusfield is influenced by Burke (see, for example, Gusfield 1989). 7. See Richard Miller (1981) for a thoughtful discussion of the tension between liberatory classroom pedagogies and status quo institutional structures. 8. Polletta (1997) particularly targets researchers who seek to reform only moderately the resource mobilization approach to social movement studies. To locate resource mobilization in relation to other traditions of movement research, see Garner (1997) and Mueller (1992). 9. LeCourt (2006:32) erroneously claims that O’Dair provides only two options: “assimilate working-class students or give up.” 10. Massey University also specializes in distance education to serve nontraditional students such as farmers, full-time employees, homemakers, and others who might otherwise not seek a college education. To be concise, I address only the face-to-face classroom. 11. Sustainable teaching is also promoted by Derek Owens (2001). 12. Ohmann (1996:137, emphasis in the original) complains: “The student has to write something, and, out of a storehouse of subjects, he will presumably pick one, rather than making one or making something of one that he already has. . . . All four rhetorics [under review] tell him that his ready-made subject should be of the right scope . . . and, especially, not too broad.” 13. In 2000, in collaboration with Richard Hansberger and MJ Braun, I developed the “rough draft” of this assignment sequence for an Advanced Composition course. I have since developed my approach, adapting it to first-year and technical writing courses while stretching assignment boundaries toward rhetorical possibility and student choice, away from teacher-audience-assessor constraints. I have not (yet) taught these assignments exactly as presented here.

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14. See Glenda Conway (1994) for a comparison. Conway presents a sound traditional portfolio pedagogy, one that relies on reflective essays to document writing processes, thereby illustrating how traditional portfolios enact a very different understanding of process than I invoke here. 15. Following Amy Lee (2000), LeCourt (2006) also recommends strategyoriented peer review.

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PART

II

Public Rhetorics: Analyses

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CHAPTER

4

Disorderly Women: Appropriating the Power Tools in Civic Discourses MOIRA K. AMADO-MILLER

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text— as into the world and into history—by her own movement. —H. Cixous (1983), “The Laugh of the Medusa”

Introduction: Disorderly Women—Speaking Out of Turn In 1987, Gerda Lerner reviewed three books about women of the nineteenth century who subverted the social and political status quo by way of an ideologically radical and therefore supremely “disorderly” choice: to remain unmarried.1 In addition to a common interest in the socially subversive nature of rejecting marriage as a defining life choice, the books under review also share a conceptual framework provided by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s (1975) article “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” in which she locates and describes women-only organizations that were not only separate from, but acted to transform, dominant social ideologies. This essay and Smith-Rosenberg’s (1986) subsequent book, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, inspired and informed much scholarship related to the subversive choices of women-centered organization, whether formally organized or the result of individual women’s lifestyle choices. Studies such as Smith-Rosenberg’s attest to the ways women are perceived as “radical,” “deviant,” even sinister when they actively choose against the grain of socially imposed standards of intimate behavior. This idea of “disorderly conduct” also informs the investigation of what I call “disorderly

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women” in the present essay. The current work, however, examines the quality and texture of some of the public spaces women have created for social activism by exploiting this culturally constructed perception of the “rebellious” and “deviant” behavior of women. Specifically, I examine the ways women have challenged and successfully undermined the patriarchal social order by quite literally meeting it on its own turf and on its own terms through what I’ll argue amounts to a strong reading of the rhetorical figure antistrephon. The causal relationship between women choosing against the status quo and the fear and anger that this nonconformity raises in the larger community is so well documented by women-centered historical studies that the violent reaction to nonconformity is now largely taken for granted in feminist scholarship. Any feminist theorist knows in her bones the coterminous relationship between social codes of identity formation—what Kenneth Burke (1950) called “magical thinking” as early as 1950—and fear. Burke rightly realized that according to the terms of “primitive magic,” “any breach of identification with the tribal norms [is considered] sinister” (40). As Smith-Rosenberg and others remind us, however, this threat of social isolation, banishment, and even violence has not prevented all women from making choices that place them in direct and dangerous opposition to power ideologies (indeed, Burke himself was writing about the ways “tribal thinking” is often disturbed by the “individualist motive”). Further, women often fight the misogyny of the social order precisely by using the imbedded values of the androcentric community against the oppressive use of these values. It is to this ideological performance, this “disorderly” behavior at the level of language, that I attend in this essay. I argue that a specific sort of rhetorical and epistemological “disorder” characterized by rhetorical moves that may at first glance appear nonintuitive or even contradictory has been forcefully deployed by women to alter their material and political oppression. I’ll begin by locating this orderly disorder in a figure of thought that can be identified as an act of rhetorical antistrephon (the combative “boomerang figure” wherein an interlocutor’s own words are used against him). I then argue that feminist uses of this trope have created a subtle, yet importantly different, carefully articulated, and insistent quality to this classical martial figure—a “way in” that Sharon Crowley (2006) might call a “discursive pathway.” Finally, I suggest several other contemporary theoretical frames that help to illustrate the feminist use of this figure, or what I call a “strong reading” of antistrephon. My analysis of a “classical rhetorical trope” is taken on within a decidedly postmodern sensibility insofar as both the rhetorical study of language and the postmodern imperative rely upon epistemologies of flexibility and movement, identity and opportunity, contingency and context, and the making of meaning in public spaces. This focus on experience and effect—or what the Classical American Pragmatists perhaps more accurately term contin-

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gency and consequence—is prominently evident in most definitions of the work of rhetoric and rhetorical analysis. Lloyd Bitzer (1968:4) argues, for instance, that the rhetor actually “alters reality” by creating new ways of thinking so that the audience itself “becomes a mediator of change,” and Wayne Booth (2003:vii) stresses that this change takes place because good reasons are supplied for such change in both “beliefs and practices.” Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (2001:16) define rhetoric as the space wherein theory intersects with practice most manifestly and stress that these antiessentialist and activist values are historically inscribed: “The history of rhetoric is the story of a long struggle to understand the relationships between discourse and knowledge, communication and its effects, language and experience.” This constitutive relationship between language and consequence, far from reckoning rhetoric as “mere persuasion,” provides that the rhetorical study of language is a study of ethical responsibility and social amelioration. This is true to such a degree that the literary critic Terry Eagleton (2003:179) could famously argue that methods of language inquiry concerned with “situated, contingent, and dissident political unrest and social change” can simply be understood as rhetorical criticism. My methodology is rhetorical and pragmatic, then, especially as these two theoretical lenses help to define each other: ultimate recourse to truth can only be located in consequence; culture and value are socially constructed and historically contingent (and therefore contain specific and definable metaphysics); language is a series of identifiable and definable “games” that always imply recourse to power and therefore require analysis of ethical and civil responsibility; and philosophical theorizing must be invigorated by praxis given that ideology has a material existence. Studying language through a rhetorical-pragmatic lens is to study language as it symbolically mediates ideological spaces. Rhetorical-pragmatic criticism analyzes the relationship between knowledge and power by examining how both hegemonic and liberatory discourses are produced, the sorts of effects these discourses produce on human agents, and the ways these relationships define order and rebellion, sanity and derangement, and justice and violence. Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald (2001), in their pivotal and now indispensable contribution toward expanding the textual resources and evidences of women’s rhetorical traditions, Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s), remind scholars that the relationships between rhetoric, power, and ideology have been historically—and remain—especially relevant to feminist theorists. The women’s texts and women’s voices collected by Ritchie and Ronald attest to the fact that the work of women’s rhetoric is tied in complex yet unequivocal ways to rebellion and social change.2 Because women have had to negotiate particularly complex terrain due to their disenfranchised relationship to the civic order, they write, women’s voices must

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invigorate the historiography of rhetoric (must be “located squarely within rhetoric”), but women’s very presence within that history also “demands that rhetoric be reconceived” (Ritchie and Ronald 2001:xvii). As Ritchie and Ronald write, “The discovery of the available means was for Aristotle an act of invention that always assumed the right to speak in the first place. . . . The act of invention for women, then, begins in a different place . . . women must first invent a way to speak in the context of being silenced and rendered invisible as persons” (xvii). Available Mean, then, while providing an invaluable collection of documents for students and scholars, also functions to issue a subtle call for further feminist analysis in the pursuit of redefinitions. Likewise, in her book, Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, Sharon Crowley (2006:201) focuses her analysis of a possible “civil discourse” on the idea of rhetorical invention, importantly defining focused subversion as “disarticulations” of “ideologic.” While acknowledging that rhetorical invention is “no magic bullet,” Crowley argues that “a more comprehensive approach to argument in America” requires that “the conceptual vocabulary of rhetoric must be rethought,” and that rhetorical argumentation might help end some of the “repetition and vituperation” that characterize the standoff of political (dis)engagement today (4, 3).3 If we are to account for what women do with language, it is not just the canon of rhetoric and its history that must be rethought, but we must look to the scope, texture, vigor, profit, and prospect of women’s rhetoric. As the histories of women’s rhetorical traditions emerge, we certainly discover histories of subjugation and civic change, but we also find histories of the subversion of the ideologies of subjugation. Such subversion can be seen in the way suffragists adapted a “classical” figure of speech/thought for purposes explicitly subversive, disarticulating both tradition and ideology, or rearticulat[ing] the ideologic. Specifically, these disorderly women used the figure antistrephon to create a connection between language, experience, and consequence. Such careful articulation calls attention to systematic evasion of social responsibility, demands full application of shared values, and appraises and pursues reasons for changing beliefs and ethical practice. Women’s use of antistrephon for subversive purposes supplies a heartier and more complex understanding of the figure than is allowed by traditional definitions.

Figures of Thought: Reading Antistrephon as Subversive Practice Antistrephon or antistrophe is a figure of speech/thought classified in the classical Greek tradition as a rhetorical trope (or language device) one might think of as “declaiming the opposition.” Most definitions of antistrephon say something about “using an opponent’s argument against him,” and this is why

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it is most commonly understood as the “boomerang figure.” In their introduction to the medieval polemical writer Rachel Speght, Ritchie and Ronald (2001:60) name one of the “host of stylistic devices” Speght uses as antistrephon, defined as a device “in which the rhetor counters an argument by using the same evidence as the rhetor’s opponent.” In both its scholarly and pedestrian uses, this “boomerang figure” is most often understood as ad hominem: it is a weapon—a tool which first flung outward is intended to return forcefully for the purpose of knocking out or killing an opponent. Rhetorical “tropes” themselves are generally thought of as language use in which a word or phrase includes deviations from its usual significance in order to appeal to a specific audience. Although these tropes are most commonly referred to as “figures of speech” (recalling the oral tradition in which classical rhetoric took root), recent work in the philosophy of language, sociolinguistics, comparative rhetorics, and metaphor theory suggest that “figures of thought” may be a more accurate and helpful way to understand this special use of language.4 Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969: 167, 169–70), for instance, explain that such figures are classically rhetorical or “argumentative” as opposed to the more ornamental notion implied by “figures of speech,” because besides having a discernable structure and “a use that is different from the normal manner of expression,” rhetorical figures are definable by the effect they have and the fact that their use aims to “bring about a change of perspective.” Understanding such special uses of language as “figures of thought” also highlights the central assumptions of contemporary language study: (1) that language, thought, cultural orientation, and personal identity are intimately bound, (2) that cultural values are imbedded in figures, (3) that these values make the figures possible and control their use, and (4) that figures, in turn, inscribe these values or ideologies. As Dona Hickey (1999:vii) makes clear, not only are figures basic to human cognition but “we act according to the way we perceive and conceive things.”5 Let me quickly review common understandings of the figure before considering ways women’s use of antistrephon may alter this definition. Traditionally defined as “using the opponent’s words against him,” antistrephon sometimes takes on flavors of related figures, as was the case in one recent and perhaps quirky example, which saw Brett Zimmerman (2003), in his review of Gerald Graff ’s (2003) Clueless in Academe, claiming Graff uses antistrephon as a persuasive strategy and a persuasive “style.” Zimmerman describes Graff as “anticipat[ing] objections, often using them cleverly to advance his point when they were intended to do the opposite” (38). Read this way, antistrephon seems to be a sign of mature reasoning, carefully attending to anticipated arguments. It is also, as Zimmerman points out, a use of prolepsis. Why does Zimmerman conflate these tropes? I think a clue can be found in the aggressive bifurcation of anticipating objections “cleverly” to advance an opposite

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point—here is the primary engagement in warfare and defeat. Prolepsis, for example, is included on one professional Web site, “Figaro,” with figures that count as “Rhetorical Jiu-Jitsu,” or those figures used to “attack” and “strike the opponent dumb” (Heinrichs 2005).6 Though antistrephon to prolepsis is surely related, conflating them strikes me as something of a misreading of antistrephon. When considering a possible link between prolepsis and antistrephon, however, an important distinction arises that may help us determine antistrephon’s most salient characteristic. Prolepsis is an issue clearly defined by anticipation.7 Antistrephon always occurs after the fact, after the action—the “happening”—relying, in fact, upon the assertions of the past for its own success. Instead of preempting an event or shortening the time before events, antistrephon relies upon past knowledge and events to answer for something yet to come or to argue for something hoped for. For antistrephon to have its powerful effects, a certain kind of knowledge, behavior, or event has come before and represents something that one—tacitly or otherwise—admires and/or takes for granted when forwarding one’s own agenda. This quality of tacit agreement, and the possibilities and problems in drawing attention to this unity, will be expanded in the following section. For now, let me borrow another contemporary example to illustrate both the “after the fact” and “agreement” qualities of the figure of thought we know as antistrephon. Traditionally, antistrephon would seem to be a priori ad hominem. In one recent example borrowed again from Heinrichs’s (2006) “Figaro” Web site, antistrephon is illustrated via Peter Schweizer’s attempt to take Al Gore to task for “flying in a corporate jet to preach the carbon-neutral lifestyle.” As a punchy “live” example of contemporary antistrephon, the “Figaro” site uses Schweizer’s laconic attack: “Talk about inconvenient truths” (Schweizer 2006, as cited in Heinrichs 2006).8 Here, Schweizer attempts to paint Gore’s travel as an inconsistency devastating to his arguments about carbon emissions and global warming. Though it is certainly arguable whether Schweizer aims for change here or just disparagement, a crucial quality in any argument aimed at social change and/or amelioration—perhaps especially in the case of a charge of hypocrisy—is a subtle, but crucial, suggestion of agreement. Practicing the opposite of what one preaches, after all, should not be a problem for an interlocutor, as this opposite action would then stand as something that an interlocutor would theoretically desire. Rather, a charge of hypocrisy implies that the interlocutors agree in some fundamental sense, to a degree. In the Schweizer example, it’s difficult to tell whether there is general agreement on Gore’s environmental agenda or not; the critique seems merely ad hominem in tone (or comical? One can’t help hearing the W. C. Fields delivery: “Talk about ya inconvenient truths!”). On the other hand, it would be difficult to find someone who claims to be against keeping an environmentally safer and cleaner world but not horribly difficult to find someone

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who disagrees with Gore on specific aspects of his argument. What makes it difficult to unravel Schweizer’s use of the logic of antistrephon is that he never bothers to say anything about protecting the environment except to claim that Al Gore, as a person, isn’t doing enough, apparently, to protect the environment on his own. But, Schweizer’s remarks do take for granted that flying in a “corporate jet” contributes to the damage that Gore describes and that this is a bad thing, exactly as Gore asserts. The charge of hypocrisy assumes that there is another, apparently “greener” way for Gore to accomplish the international travel that is necessary for his work. Understood this way, Schweizer’s use of antistrephon is less like a merely ad hominem attack and more like a stasis point for common dialogue masquerading as an ad hominem attack. It is precisely this underlying but ignored agreement (an agreement that Schweizer, rather immodestly and even disingenuously, embodies but does not admit) that women’s use of antistrephon makes very clear—counts on, in fact. It is by way of this agreement paired with an insistence upon dialogue that women have altered the character of the figure. Such alteration suggests that strong arguments of this nature can be made without a requirement to knock out the opponent, or silence him, but, rather, with a contribution to “saving face.” In any case, there seems to be a significant difference between antistrephon and a simple charge of inconsistency or hypocrisy; perhaps the traditional reading of antistrephon is merely the weak version of the figure. To understand the real strength of the move is first to understand that its use and power absolutely depend upon a very basic and vital agreement between interlocutors. To find the strong version of this figure, then, I’d like to look at the ways women have pressed rhetorical invention to its tautest—the ways they have used the figure to demand engagement and dialogue with opponents in order to negotiate the particularly complex political terrain they must traverse on their way toward making significant contributions to the social order.

Subversive Practice: Coming to Terms At the beginning of the twentieth century, American women had been working for the vote—for full political enfranchisement—for a full century. The debate had reached its boiling point. Frustrated by the unjustifiably slow progress made by the state-by-state strategy practiced by Carrie Chapman Catt and the National American Women’s Suffrage Association and having experienced the more radical methods of the English “suffragettes,” Alice Paul and a few other women broke with NAWSA to form the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage (CUWS). The rebellious women of CUWS (the organization that evolved into the National Woman’s Party (NWP) by March 1917) believed that the time was right to take a chance to lobby for bipartisan

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support for a Constitutional amendment. Aileen Kraditor (1965:230) demonstrates that the CUWS was understood to have adopted “militant strategies,” strategies and arguments its more “genteel” sisters in the American suffrage movement could not have invented given self-imposed “antipartisan” self-regulation. The “militancy” practiced by women of CUWS—picketing, parades, pageants, demonstrations, and hunger strikes—might more accurately be understood as nonviolent protest, of course, but when such practices are engaged by women they offend and effectively threaten the status quo so thoroughly that the women of CUWS/NWP were attacked as sexually perverse, treated as national traitors (“anti-American”), and tried as common criminals. One of the particularly subversive practices enacted by the “militant” suffragists was their use of antistrephon in 1917 for thoroughly transformative purposes. On the eve of World War I, critics were outraged that the suffragists would dare to demonstrate against a wartime president. The radical suffragists knew that they would be strongly socially censured for picketing the Wilson White House, but the stakes were high, and circumstances called for sophisticated and powerful arguments. Instead of deferring to the wartime president, the suffragists first compared the U.S. government’s policy of inaction in relation to Germany to its inaction on the issue of the political enfranchisement of women: they likened Woodrow Wilson’s inaction to hostility.9 Then, once the United States had joined the war, the National Woman’s Party, led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, charged the Wilson administration with inconsistency and hypocrisy. But what set this argument against a charge of mere hypocrisy was that the NWP realized an opportunity to use the arguments of the power elite as their own, inventing what we might consider the strong version of antistrephon. The picketing suffragists launched a figure of thought that implicitly begins by agreeing with the interlocutor’s most basic principles, proceeds by holding those same words up as a mirror, thereby challenging the interlocutor into dialogue and full compliance. For instance, on June 20, 1917, picketers held a banner outside the White House that accused the government of duplicity. This famous banner read: To the Russian Envoys: President Wilson and Envoy Root are deceiving Russia when they say “We are a democracy, help us win the war so that democracy may survive.” We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote. . . . Tell our government that it must liberate its people before it can claim free Russia as an ally. (cited in Frost and Cullen-DuPont 1992:322)

It was torn apart by the angry crowd. Perhaps the charge of duplicity—the hypocrisy of preaching for democracy while not practicing it at home—is

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what I have called using antistrephon in its weak sense: using an interlocutor’s words against him. What then distinguishes the strong version of antistrephon? The strong version requires that, first, the thing alluded to has occurred in the past (in this case, that “free Russia” has been asked to back the allied cause in the name of democracy), and that, second, the interlocutors’ own words and ideas are transported into a subversive space wherein the “author” of the language becomes multiple. This co-optation of language highlights, in action and spirit, the point(s) of ideological agreement (in this case, that the basic principles of democracy are good and desirable). This common ground opens up a space for dialogue. In the perfected sense of antistrephon, specific reform can then be invoked (that full and equal representation is legislated and enforced). The full figure is embodied in this clever and nuanced bit of theatrical role-play and identity swapping: by altering speaker, venue, and audience, while simultaneously maintaining the administration’s words and ideas, the strong version of antistrephon emerges. The American suffragists invented a perfected sense of the figure when they invoked, or even transcribed, the power discourse’s own words into their own spaces. Two further examples will help to illustrate the subtle differences between invoked and transcribed cases. In both cases the disorderly women of the NWP sewed Wilson’s own words onto banners and picketed the White House. An invoked version was supplied in a banner that invoked the president’s own words: “Mr. President, you say Liberty is the Fundamental Demand of the Human Spirit” (see photograph in Jeff Hill [2006:76]).10 The powerful transcribed version of the figure can be seen in a devastating mimetic use of language. In his address to the Joint Session of Congress on April 2, 1917, Wilson argued for a declaration of war in Europe based primarily in an argument for the full enfranchisement of the oppressed. In a highly dramatic moment in the docudrama Iron Jawed Angels (2004), one of the picketer’s banners unfurls to reveal exact language from this famous speech: “We shall fight for the things we have always claimed nearest to our hearts. We shall fight for Democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government.” Though this exact passage from Wilson’s speech may or may not have actually been sewn onto one of the banners as the movie suggests, it appears that this language was certainly transcribed by the picketing suffragists in equally dramatic protests. Aileen Kraditor (1965:239–40) describes one protest: Later, after Wilson had gone abroad, they lettered excerpts from his European speeches on large sheets of paper and publicly dropped them into a large urn, symbolically burning his impassioned declarations on democracy which, they said, he refused to apply to American women.

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(Dis)Placed within feminists’ protest spaces, these words are at once static and radically transformed, demonstrating the crucial nature of identity and the contradictory nature of politics based in essentialist notions of identity. The words and ideas are at once those of Woodrow Wilson (the American political sensibility) and Alice Paul (the National Woman’s Party). In another powerful sequence in the film representing this historical moment, images of (the actor playing) Inez Milholland, one of the most striking historical figures in the fight for the Constitutional amendment, are juxtaposed with images of (the actor playing) Wilson, in a kind of historicdramatic montage.11 Both Wilson and Milholland speak before crowds in different parts of the country. When Wilson is seen hammering home the idea of justice and America’s special place in standing up for the oppressed, Milholland is overlaid doing the same: “We ask of our rulers no special favors, no special privileges, no special legislation; we ask for justice, we ask for equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights for all citizens of the U.S. be granted to us.” When Wilson demands liberty, so too Milholland: “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” When Wilson praises the very nature of constitutional democracy, Milholland endorses not only American democracy but also the idea of democracy itself: “We declare our faith in the principles of self government. . . . [W]e shall fight for democracy.” In relying upon the commonplaces of freedom and democracy, the suffragists simultaneously located and enforced a common ground while radically subverting the patriarchal order that valorized those ideas and demanded dialogue on those very terms. By holding up an antistrephonic mirror to the face of American representational democracy, the suffragists transformed the language of war into powerful and successful tools to demand the enfranchisement of women. They extracted and magnified the idea of equality from the principles of already valorized democracy. The discourse of democracy, one might say, warranted the application of ideals of equality. Women’s use of antistrephon points out the contradictions, slippages, or gaps in men’s use of the public realm to enforce hegemonic ideologies and then co-opts the division itself—adopting and transforming the founding principle to unravel the restrictions of a repressive system. In this way, feminists have been able to transform power-saturated ideological discourses into a sense of vision as opposed to the merely visible and into discernment as opposed to the merely discriminatory. As the administration and the American voting constituency gave glory to the ideas of Justice and Liberty and Democracy, these disorderly women—speaking out of turn, speaking loudly, and co-opting the very language of the oppressor—could use the power and momentum of their interlocutor, their oppressor himself, to argue successfully their own case.

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A Particular Inclination: Recognizing Each Other Historically, women seem to have understood that, while commonplaces represent ideas that may or may not be myths (or “magical thinking”), they nevertheless make public discourse possible especially in the very process of (dis)articulation. Olympe de Gouges’s eighteenth-century (1791) response to the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” her “Declaration of the Rights of Woman,” challenges the assumed inferiority of women primarily by disputing the veracity and authority of the androcentric marriage contract to determine the fate of women. But, de Gouges appeals to the “commonplaces” of the androcentric order (Burke [1966] rightly thought of these as “God-terms”)— rationality, natural order, law, democratic will, citizenship, virtue—to question the ethics of the contract. Though she disputes the very idea of a marriage contract by exposing it as an instrument of oppression, the most profound iteration of her full argument is, perhaps, the fact that she embeds her own version of a marriage contract within the “Declaration,” a genre that could itself be considered a masculine form. De Gouges titles the alternative marriage contract “Form for a Social Contract between Man and Woman,” and when she envisions such a contract between equal, willing, and fully enfranchised individuals, the vital issues of life, death, sex, and children are more vivid and accounted for than they ever have been (perhaps to this day): We . . . , moved by our own will, unite ourselves for the duration of our lives, and for the duration of our mutual inclinations, under the following conditions: We intend and wish to make our wealth communal, meanwhile reserving to ourselves the right to divide it in favor of our children and of those toward whom we might have a particular inclination, mutually recognizing that our property belongs directly to our children, from whatever bed they come, and that all of them without distinction have the right to bear the name of the fathers and mothers who have acknowledged them, and we are charged to subscribe to the law which punishes the renunciation of one’s own blood. (94, emphasis added)

The challenge in this social contract implicitly posits an entirely new social order, but one that is built upon the values of the old. De Gouges, a supremely disorderly woman who dared to use the God-terms of the patriarchy for her sex’s own purposes, was guillotined for her insolence in 1793. Her public death was a punishment and a warning against the heresy of asserting that men are agents in the reproductive process and that women are adult members of intimate, civil, and political society. She was also killed for daring to suggest the equality that is necessary for partners who engage in dialogue and for the aberrant behavior of a woman

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thinking for herself and speaking out in public. The following “report at the time of her death” is remarkable in the consistency across time in which the “unnatural” and “crazed” arguments against disorderly women are rehearsed. These are the same arguments that would be hissed at the suffragists more than one hundred years later and that continue to characterize complaints against disorderly women today: Olympe de Gouges, born with an exalted imagination, mistook her delirium for an inspiration of nature. She wanted to be a man of state. She took up the projects of the perfidious people who want to divide up France. It seems the law has punished this conspirator for having forgotten the virtues that belong to her sex. (cited in Lewis 2001:n.p.)

Civil rights activists of all stripes have often use the accepted discourses of the political economy, the very concepts most revered and most commonly deployed at any single historical moment, to launch what we might think of as the kairos of antistrephon. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ida B. Wells marshaled the “masculine” values of impartial journalistic reporting to create powerful public protest language about lynch law in the South. In a speech delivered in 1893 at the Tremont Temple in Boston, Wells “piled fact upon fact, narrating her own story and many other instances of horror,” always relying on the power of journalism and objectivity (and, ultimately, on the essential goodness of humankind), to bring to light facts that would “speak for themselves” (Ritchie and Ronald 2001:189, 188). As Ritchie and Ronald (2001:189) point out, this method of journalistic reporting about systematic lynching and mob rule demonstrated that Wells’s method of rhetorical invention was to “subtly indict her white audience by implying that if they knew about the horrible injustices of lynching, they would surely have acted to stop it.” Wells created a particularly profound and carefully articulated “discursive pathway” by holding up an antistrephonic mirror to imperatives to rationality and reflecting back agreement, application, and compliance with civil rights. Likewise, at the turn of the century, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, and many other women activists reported “facts” in much the same way as Wells, inevitably working within the space between public discourses and the symbolic mediation of language to challenge public sentiment and policy. Sanger believed “the dissemination of facts and information was the surest vehicle for social change” (Ritchie and Ronald 2001:223). Current versions of feminist activism also are based in “disarticulations of ideologic” (Crowley 2001:201) and/or exemplary of the strong version of antistrephon. I think of Gloria Steinem and others who have taught us to deploy powerfully ideas most valued by white male power discourses and, then, to demand full compliance. This disarticulation technique often stands well-worn arguments and

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anxieties on their heads, suggesting that an opposite action is at play when, in fact, it is the same action, merely inverted. In introducing Steinem, Richie and Ronald (2001:490) describe her as using “the rhetorical strategy of stating opposite cases,” which anticipates my previously described definition of antistrephon as declaiming the opposition. In this way, Steinem, for instance, can worry along with general society about “troubled teens,” “violent youth,” and “school shootings” after the Columbine tragedy, but she can then use that same righteous indignation to point to facts buried by the hegemony of ideology. In her startlingly important essay, “Supremacy Crimes,” Steinem (1991:491) wakes us up with a set of those obvious yet deeply embedded facts that only serious engagement with the problem can yield: I’ve been talking back to the television set, waiting for someone to tell us the obvious: it’s not “youth,” “our children,” or “our teens.” It’s our sons—and “our” can usually be read as “white, “middle class,” and “heterosexual.” We know that hate crimes, violent and otherwise, are overwhelmingly committed by white men who are apparently straight. . . . White males—usually intelligent, middle class, and heterosexual, or trying desperately to appear so— also account for virtually all the serial, sexually motivated, sadistic killings, those characterized by stalking, imprisoning, torturing, and “owning” victims in death.

Steinem knows, along with Davida Charney (1996:572), that “sexism and other injustices have often been most effectively exposed by quantitative studies that provide stronger evidence of the prevalence of a problem and its trends than can individual testimony.” Steinem’s use of the statistics and demographics of crimes of “supremacy” are startling, but startling in an obviousness that had previously gone unseen, and startling in their direct indictment of the white male status quo. Such audacity, of course, always signals the presence of the “disorderly woman,” and is inevitably received as a “breach of identification with the tribal norms” (Burke 1950:40). It’s safe enough to note inconsistencies, unless, as we’ve seen, one is too specific about how the really dangerous inconsistencies are produced by the power elite. I used Steinem’s passage about crimes of “supremacy” in a talk recently and was accused by a white male of being “merely divisive.” He said we didn’t need that sort of conflict anymore. It seemed to me strange, and sad, that even when facts of gender division help us understand the atrocities we all condemn, it would still matter so much who is pointing out those facts. If Steinem’s argument (correctly) displays a division crucial to our understanding—an understanding already saturated in conflict—it is only through a hegemonic lens that we could call reporting about it and asking for change divisive. Read as “disarticulation” and/or the strong version of antistrephon, Steinem’s marshaling of

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important facts is not ad hominem, but sound research from which one might pursue individual, real, and social change via hearty dialogue with others who want the same things. But, it turns out that it still matters very much when women speak out, speak loudly, and tell the truth. Women who do are still perceived to have “forgotten the virtues that belong to their sex.” We should, apparently, mourn our dead, crumple under the weight of “confusion” and “shock,” but not fight for our dead, not claim our right to the power tools, else our overstretching will be seen for an “exalted imagination,” and we will be seen to be mistaking our female bodies and minds for a “man of state.” Wells, Sanger, and Steinem use a “boomerang” technique here, certainly. But, in co-opting the methods and language of the power elite to argue against their hegemonic use, these women begin by agreeing with the interlocutor’s most basic principles, holding those ideas up to the mirror of lived experience, and thereby challenging the interlocutor to full compliance. It stands to reason, then, that the feminist/ feminine version of antistrephon needs to be coexistent with the imperative that truth be spoken to power. This is true whether that power is mob rule or social censure, or whether that power is in office by virtue of hegemonic political force or the plain intransigence of the status quo. One might still argue, however, that the sort of social change affected by Wells and Sanger and others doesn’t alter social consciousness at the level of ideology if it begins with an agreement at the level of values. Do not patriarchal, fundamentalist, even misogynist ideologies still hold sway regardless of changes in official policy? Contemporary women and sympathetic men often seem to be negotiating the same sort and level of bigotry and misogyny and xenophobia today as the civil community has been dealing with throughout history. In fact, the backlash of the “we don’t need to fight anymore”—“quit being so divisive”—arguments can certainly be considered even more insidious than outright aggression. But, could the practice of effectively co-opting the “master’s tools” be the very oversight that keeps change from reaching the level of ideology? In fact, couldn’t the “strong version” of antistrephon that I describe here be buying into the status quo in dangerous and ultimately unproductive ways? What might such a charge about a lack of ideological transformation mean about the sorts of crucial material change that Paul, Wells, Sanger, Steinem, and others have brought about? Up until now, I have been arguing that ideological commonplaces, while indeed acting as weapons of the oppressor, can also be used to challenge these values and boundaries. In fact, the work of political action is, precisely, to both define and challenge values and boundaries. Certainly, then, political activists cannot shirk before the public office of (dis)articulation; however, adopting dominant discourses for subversive means is not without risk.

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Ideology, Commonplaces, Language, and the Feminist Toolbox As Audre Lorde (1984:110) first warned in 1979, using the “the tools of a racist patriarchy . . . to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy” is a dangerous practice if one hopes for any substantive change.12 White, patriarchal, homophobic, and Christian cultural logics, undergirded by the androcentric symbolic and manifested in masculinist discourses, have determined the fabric of Western society and have simultaneously installed the means of reproducing these ideological fabrics. Lorde recognized that these xenophobic functions are language-bound in very important ways. Such claims make a great deal of sense to those of us who understand language not only as a reflection of ideology, but also as constitutive of ideology. It seems prudent, then, to consider the sorts of problems one might face when claiming to use masculinist concepts—the master’s tools—to further feminist causes. Could there be a devastating problem within the very fact that these “disorderly women” take for granted—even buy into—some of the basic ideological assumptions of the sociopolitical economy in which they live as oppressed members (that only “rational” adult citizens should have the right to vote, for instance)? Have these women co-opted the oppressive use of ideology, and transformed practice in the process, or have they been co-opted by language? Or, could it be that following the “master’s tools” warning too strictly may obscure the important subversive aspects of the constitutive relationship between ideology and language? A quick look at the sorts of hegemonic discourses that Lorde’s metaphor might be used to reject out of hand provides some answers. Such discourses, for instance, are those that insist upon a strict epistemological bifurcation between objectivity-rationality and subjectivity-creativity. This particular story about science and knowledge constitutes what Jean-François Lyotard (1984) would call a “grand narrative,” in which “objectivity” is the master trope and “rationality” a masculine trait, while “subjectivity” is inscribed as slavish and “creativity” gendered feminine. As most feminist critics acknowledge, these sorts of false dichotomies within language require that we discover new “languages” with which to talk about alternate values, discover the paths to these values, and devise the means for the enforcement of civil law that these new values demand. Such languages would then pay particular attention to the identity issues of class, race, nation, sexuality, and gender that Lorde champions. However, it is precisely at the junction where ideology, power, language, and the possibility for change come together that some of our most important claims may also be in need of bracketing. When grappling with the idea of science’s claims to objectivity and the scientific method’s claims to rationality, for example, Evelyn Fox Keller (1982) reminds us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is important, she

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writes, to make sure that women and girls (and people of color and other disenfranchised groups) are not only handling the tools in the scientific toolbox but also using the old tools (objectivity, rationality, method) in new and creative ways. If not, Fox Keller writes, we are in danger of transform[ing] the political spectrum into a circle . . . simultaneously lend[ing] its voice to an enemy chorus and doom[ing] women to residing outside of the realpolitik modern culture . . . nullify[ing] the radical potential of feminist criticism for our understanding of science. (593)

Davida Charney (1996), responding to debates among composition teachers (especially in the subfield of technical and professional communication) over ways to apply the postmodern critique of science to questions about what counts as legitimate in college writing courses, takes the defense of scientific methods one step farther. Charney argues that although “objective methods can become mechanical when they are removed from on-going refinement and critique” and such traditional methods in science may “diminish the scope for judgments based on experience and personal knowledge,” it is nonetheless also true that “indeterminacy does not vitiate rationality” (577, 574). As Charney, Fox Keller, and others remind us, women’s claims to status tools—claims to rationality, philosophic and religious right, scientific proof, empirical methods, dogged pursuit of truth—do not necessarily reinforce hegemonic ideologies. They can also work to transform them if we emphasize who is using the tools instead of the tools themselves. The destructive tool here is not the idea of objectivity (or democracy, or conservation, or even virtue), per se, but the ways ideas of objectivity are unevenly attributed or distributed. It could be that some tools may prove more useful to radical causes precisely because they have last been used to enforce a conservative position. I know my own extension of the metaphor here is also fraught—just as any good metaphor will be—but my point about Lorde’s (1984) worry about language is that positing perfect incommensurability does not work any better than demanding perfect correspondence. So, despite Lorde’s important warning, women’s use of antistrephon illiustrates that we can, and often do, use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. In the transition between ideological spaces, the tool itself is no longer the location of all agency; instead, agency is taken on by the one who wields it. The willingness to claim and/or recapture “tools” that have been used for the subjugation of women, people of color, gays, and other subjugated populations also answers directly to ideas most commonly associated with the French feminist critic Hélène Cixous’s (1983) call for a resistive language for women’s own use, a “language” that has come to be known as écriture féminine. Écriture, according to Roland Barthes (1953), resists and

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undermines the ultimately normative functions of language; écriture féminine not only acknowledges these normative functions in language but recognizes the danger inherent in this powerful function, making its use a subversive act.13 But, let us not forget that Cixous calls for a new language while succeeding at writing resistance within an androcentric system. Though importantly different, ideology and subversion are not mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed any more than the ideas of rationality and creativity are incommensurable. For sociologist Ann Swidler, in fact, the idea of a “tool kit” or “cultural repertoire” coincides with culture itself. In “Culture in Action,” Swidler suggests the malleability of values, beliefs, and ideologies, as she questions, “How do ideologies become tradition or common sense? . . . Is hegemony alone enough to soften the self-conscious boundaries of an ideology?” (284). Swidler argues the tool kit “limits the available range of strategies of action,” and the indeterminate contents of this tool kit can be used to discriminate between “settled” and “unsettled” communities in terms of ideological development (284). But this is not a dead end; indeed, Swidler takes the idea of the tool kit to suggest that an “unsettled community” is a bit like a community in the midst of what Thomas Kuhn (1996) calls a “crisis” wherein “paradigms” are under stress. In Lyotardian (1984) terms, Swidler’s unsettled community is under a “crisis of legitimization” wherein ideologies are less “highly articulate and explicit” because “model patterns of action” do not, anymore, seem to “come naturally.” These unsettled or less finely articulated communities, these historical moments in the life of any community, these communities in search of guiding ideologies are therefore open for intervention and (dis)articulation. Swidler finds that the cultural tool kit determines how tools are manipulated and which ideologies stick (284). In this sense, the content of the cultural toolbox paired with ideological indeterminacy invite, or at least allow, the move toward social action and change. In any case, we are not limited to one toolbox, nor would we want to be. Even if we have been limited in the past, and even if we are somewhat limited still, we nevertheless like having access to the power tools. In our own toolbox we would do well to take stock of those that are underused, rusty, or dull, and fix them up, sharpen them for our own use. We might find that we may have thrown away some useful tools in the struggle for mere survival or ideological fitness, but now that we have made some progress, sometimes a ratchet is exactly what is called for. If, on occasion, we find that a hammer (or scalpel, laser, or computer-driven router) is needed, it does not seem quite as important who used it last. We have women, and people of color, and the economically disenfranchised to thank for this insight, in fact. As David G. Holmes (1999:59) has written when considering the possibility of “fighting back” by “Writing Black,” history provides many examples of such appropriations:

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Moira K. Amado-Miller African American history is replete with individuals, from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X, who saw the appropriation of mainstream literacy as one of the most effective means of articulating one’s cultural values and defending oneself against the dominant culture.

Women and other oppressed groups have always known that they must forge shared beliefs into languages that become especially potent tools for social change. Claiming the power tools of a patriarchal economy and pressing them into service for liberatory means is precisely what subjugated populations have always done: use whatever is at hand as tools.14 Vital, material, progressive change is not cheapened or lessened as this happens; often, material change must precede ideological change; it is more important what people do than what they say. So the fact of women (largely) freely voting and (largely) having unrestricted access to contraception, and black men (largely) being free of the threat of mob rule are more important than the fact that cultural ideologies still consider women as they would chattels to be managed and still restrict the movement of black men. But, as with most chicken-before-the-egg questions, this one is not especially worth discovering finally and formally. Material and ideological change are both important and both could be considered the sine qua non of radical political and economic alteration. It seems to me, in fact, in reading about historic and current social activism and legislative change, that there is a distinct and sometimes nauseatingly long period of enacting the contemporary self-help mantra “fake it before you make it” variety of change. Women activists have used sophisticated rhetorical invention and tactics to take apart the master’s headquarters at the foundation and remake it as a feminist billet. Like the écriture itself, antistrephon actually, profoundly, and tacitly alters the face of the “given” social order, by pointing out how very poorly this order has lived up to its own promise. This sort of change seems to me “genuine” on the deepest level. When women use antistrephon to hold the language of cultural values up to the mirror of cultural practice in order to make full claim on human and cultural citizenship, social and political orders are transformed.

First Principles and Their Malcontents: Taking Exception to the Rule and Coming to Terms Examining instances of historical feminist discourse in action, I have begun to understand antistrephon as a radical use of language and, perhaps, even a powerful use of écriture. As we have seen, women’s use of antistrephon is certainly a tool that yields “radical” feminist agendas.15 It occurs to me that antistrephon

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may work in feminist discourses as a sort of écriture féminine in the same way that Slavoj Z+iz=ek (1989) describes kynicism (a “state of consciousness” he opposes to postmodern cynicism) in The Sublime Object of Ideology. Kynicism is, according to Z+iz=ek and summarizing the work of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, a resistive, subversive use of language, of a particular type: one that relies on the past for meaning, ridicules the hypocrite by holding up a mirror to an embedded belief and insisting on compliance. Sloterdijk (1987:29) writes not only that kynicism is “the popular, plebeian rejection of the official culture by means of irony and sarcasm,” but also that the classical kynical procedure is to confront the pathetic phrases of the ruling official ideology—its solemn, grave tonality—with everyday banality and to hold them up to ridicule, thus exposing behind the sublime noblesse of the ideological phrases the egotistical interests, the violence, the brutal claims to power.

The sarcasm within kynicism is subtle. In its “solemn, grave tonality” it purports to take very seriously the oppressor’s belief systems, using such beliefs for new or newly defined causes or purposes. Antistrephon, in the strong sense women have developed, is absolutely serious about the belief systems it relies upon for meaning, but it also holds up for ridicule those who misuse them. Decrying egotistical interests, violence, and unidirectional claims to power, the strong reading of antistrephon relies upon some of the aggressor’s values and demands they be put into practice. Antistrephon in the traditional sense may or may not “insist on compliance” (was Schweizer asking Al Gore to find a better way to travel, or was he merely attacking him?), but in the case of the strong version of antistrephon within a feminist noetic field, as is the case with kynicism, ideological hegemony is challenged and an answer is required. Perhaps women’s use of kynicism/antistrephon is an example of the ways the écriture féminine is written in Cixous’s “white ink”: the language and the tools are the same, but the application is radically life-giving. One could claim that the examples I provide are not really examples of what I have been calling “dominant discourses being put to use to undermine their own agendas,” but rather minority discourses mimicking, parodying, and even mocking, the dominant discourses. That is, even when precisely the same language is used by different folks for different purposes, a substantially, effectively, and immanently different discourse is produced. So, there is a claim to be made here that I am describing a “minor literature,” in the terms that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986:167) provide, the first characteristic of which is that “in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization.” Or, perhaps “disorderly women” practice a sort of civic heteroglossia— the critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) term to describe the diversity of “social

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voices” in literature and especially in the novel. Bakhtin contrasted the novel, primarily, with the epic (not with poetry), and claimed the novel the most fluid of genres, one associated with unofficial ideas, parody, diversity, the propensity for dialogue, and the confirmation of different views of the world. Disorderly women’s deployment of antistrephon functions similarly to Mary Louise Pratt’s (1991:34) characterization of autoethnographic texts, in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them. Thus, if ethnographic texts are those in which European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usually their conquered others), autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts.

In fact, to take my argument one possibly unnecessary, perhaps obvious, step farther: the use of antistrephon is deconstruction, two hundred years (in Olympe de Gouges’s case) before Derrida. Disorderly women—women using kynicism/antistrephon to pursue the social agendas of freedom and equality across sex, nation, class, and race barriers—are the first instances of deconstructive thinking, if, as Eagleton (2003:115–116) describes it, “deconstruction” is the name given to the critical operation by which such oppositions can be partly undermined, or by which they can be shown partly to undermine each other in the process of textual meaning. . . . The tactic of deconstructive criticism . . . is to show how texts come to embarrass their own ruling systems of logic; and deconstruction shows this by fastening on the “symptomatic” points, the aporia or impasses of meaning, where texts get into trouble, come unstuck, offer to contradict themselves.

Perhaps my ability to call rebellion by so many names means I have said rather little about antistrephon. On the other hand, this rhetorical trope, traditionally simply defined, becomes more complex, interesting, and useful when looked at through the lens of feminist social movements. A feminist reading of the figure brings to light the combination of a priori agreement and subversion, credits those who work(ed) within a phallocentric language in attempts to undermine this value system, and demands dialogue and social change. This seems a fuller reading of the figure. Women who redefine the terms of engagement via the major tenets of the hegemonic discourses themselves—by mounting an attack on the application or methodology of the interlocutor, not necessarily on the interlocutor himself—cross dangerous territory. But, by disrupting the social order and reordering power ideologies,

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these women become sublimely “disorderly”—a threat to the social order so profound that they can only be dismissed as heretical or, sometimes, perhaps, change the very face of the law and civil life.

Notes 1. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller’s (1984) Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s (1985) Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America; and Martha Vicinus’s (1985) Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women. 2. The collection offers scholars and students an extensive overview of women’s rhetorical traditions by providing full documents of women’s writing and speaking “not limited to a particular moment in history or a particular political/rhetorical purpose” (Richie and Donald 2001:xvi). 3. Crowley’s (2006:3) book, Toward a Civil Discourse, examines the possibilities for rhetorical invention to breach some of the impasses between the two “densely articulated belief systems” controlling American politics today—liberalism and Christian fundamentalism, and “forward[s] the ancient art of rhetoric as a possible anodyne to this situation.” 4. It is worth considering if any use of language is not “special” in this way, given that finding a “norm” by which deviations could be consistently measured would be both impossible and pointless, and that, therefore, all language is by definition “figurative” or metaphorical. 5. While Hickey (1999) points directly to the metaphor theorists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson here (1980; also Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Turner 1989), these claims, in turn, have been inspired by all language theory since Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or by whichever theorists, cultural moment, or “rupture” to which one might wish to attribute the moment when “language invaded the universal problematic” (Derrida 1966). 6. The site is self-proclaimed as a site that “rips the innards out of things people say and reveals the rhetorical tricks and pitfalls” by providing lists of terms, definitions, and examples. It is authored by “Figaro,” that is, by Jay Heinrichs, author of Thank You for Arguing (2007). 7. Definitions of prolepsis, whether taken from rhetoric, linguistics, or even medicine, invariably describe some sort of “preemptive action,” and the aggressive quality inherent in this military diction is perhaps that which ties the two figures together for Zimmerman (2003). But, in every case as I understand it, prolepsis refers to something that happens before expected or earlier than expected (a periodic disease returns before the expected time or in shorter intervals), in anticipation of something expected (a descriptive word is used in anticipation of its being accepted or applied), or to ward off something expected (beating the interlocutor to the punch).

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8. Schweizer is a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and the author of the book Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy (2005). 9. In the docudrama Iron Jawed Angels (2004), a line is read from The Suffragist, the periodical produced by the CUWS: “President Wilson’s inaction establishes just as clear a record as a policy of open hostility.” 10. This reference to the “fundamental demands of the human spirit” resonates strongly with Margaret Fuller’s (1845) language of “expansion” in her feminist manifesto Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Taking exception to the charge that women will abandon the home if they are given full emancipation and the encouragement to live complex lives, Fuller writes that “human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion . . . as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her” (128–29). 11. The degree to which this civic manipulation of language/ideas/power, which looks and feels like montage, can be explained by Bakhtinian (1986:266) notions of bricolage, heteroglossia, and “vernacular extraliterary narration” (skaz), is an important question. 12. Lorde’s (1984) essay was first presented as comments on “The Personal and the Political” panel at the Second Sex Conference in New York City in September 1979. 13. See Cixous (1983:283–85), where she writes about the libidinal economy of writing and the need for women to “write their own bodies”: I maintain unequivocally that there is such a thing as marked writing; that until now, far more extensively and repressively than is ever suspected or admitted, writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy; that this is a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated . . . where woman has never her turn to speak— this being all the more serious and unpardonable in that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought. . . . She must write her self . . . This need for a special economy of language outside the andocentric domain also seems to condemn my argument for using “the Master’s tools” to the place of being unwilling dupe to the powerful status quo. On the other hand, Cixous posits écriture féminine not as a new language, but as a resistive and subversive use of the language. 14. I cannot help but think here of Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1981:170) oblong answer to Virginia Woolf ’s inherent classism within her injunction to “3rd World Women Writers” to write regardless of what they have or what they do not have: Forget the room of one’s own—write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals, between sleeping or waking. I write while sitting on the john. No long stretches at the typewriter unless you’re wealthy or have a patron—you may not even own a typewriter. While you wash the floor or clothes listen to the words chanting in your body. 15. Looking at the idea of “radical” through the lens of its common definition within discourses of social activism—that of the “extreme”—is severely compromised.

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“Radical” here is an insistence upon the true application of first principles; that is, women’s “radical” use of antistrephon is more akin to the language of change as in “to the root” or “fundamental.” So, in one reading, perhaps this isn’t radical at all, if one must throw off all vestiges of the hated system to be set free. But, insisting that principles the community has either condemned or valorized should be applied equally across the community is certainly radical in that it goes to fundamental principles and fundamental change. See also note 4.

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CHAPTER

5

The Progressive Education Movement: A Case Study in Coalition Politics BRIAN JACKSON and THOMAS P. MILLER

On July 1, 1894, John Dewey was taking a train from the University of Michigan to Chicago, where he was to become the head of the department of philosophy and education at the newly established University of Chicago. Most of the railroads west of Chicago had been shut down by Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union, which had launched one of the largest strikes in U.S. history. On July 14, after Debs and others had been indicted for disrupting interstate commerce, Dewey wrote to his wife, Alice, with enthusiasm for what the strike had accomplished. Though labor had not achieved its ultimate goals, it got “the social organism thinking” (Dewey, as cited in Menand 2001:297). It also got Dewey thinking. His first weeks in Chicago were spent observing the overwhelming social problems in the Windy City at the turn of the century. While observing what he called “hell turned loose,” he was stimulated to see education as a means to address such problems: “[Y]ou can’t really get rid feeling here that there is a method and if you could only get hold of it things could be tremendously straightened out” (cited in Westbrook 2006:75). Dewey’s belief that the right method could straighten out society was fundamental to the impetus of the progressive movement in education, and perhaps to its limitations as well. Dewey and other progressives believed that the scientific method, broadly conceived, was instrumental to social progress. Such attitudes are evident in the “experimentalism” of the “pragmatic method.” However, pragmatism was more situated and provisional than its scientific pretensions may suggest, for it treated the conditions and consequences of inquiries as fundamental to assessing their merits. The tensions between scientism and pragmatism were integral to the ideological framework of the progressive movement, and also to the institutional politics that distanced the leadership of the profession from the vernacular of practitioners in the classroom. These tensions have been highlighted by Hauser and

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mcclellan (this volume:25) who argue that “ignoring rank-and-file voices deflects attention from the hidden transcripts of resistance.” In this chapter, we will explore these tensions as they served both to create methodologies and frames for creative social movement making and to complicate the relationship between a movement’s academic leadership and its rank-and-file base. The Progressive Era from the 1890s through the 1930s faced some of the same historic problems that we do today. In this era, as in recent decades, the gap between the wealthy few and the poor expanded dramatically, and the entanglement of business interests and government gave corporations unprecedented social power. The boom and bust cycles in industry compounded the effects of corporate exploitation, grinding poverty, intense urbanization, and an explosion in immigration. As the wealthy few consolidated corporate enterprises that straddled the nation, the country crept toward open class war. As wages were driven down to sustenance levels, around $400 a year (McGerr 2003:16), workers responded with some thiry-seven thousand strikes between 1881 and 1905, some of which were met with startlingly violent police actions (Schlereth 1991:33). In addition, the Progressive Era saw the most politically influential leftist movements in our history. Thirty-three cities had socialist mayors in 1912, when almost a million Americans voted for a socialist presidential candidate and again, two decades later, for socialist and communist presidential candidates (Leitch 1998:3). The upper classes responded by investing in public philanthropy and promoting the gospel of free enterprise, preached not only by such figures as Andrew Carnegie but also by ministers like Henry Ward Beecher. These deepening conflicts radicalized a cohort of the middle class, which organized itself in civic associations and expanding bureaucracies to promote progressive doctrines that were framed around critiques of rugged individualism and a shared faith that public agencies could alleviate conflict if civic-minded experts managed them. In addition, educators engaged in broad coalitions with journalists, activists, and reformers to change prevailing ideologies and institutional structures. Progressivism served as an inclusive ideological frame for coalitions of educators and ministers, bureaucrats and social workers, muckraking journalists and realist novelists, and community activists who ranged from socialists seeking to build a new order to reformers working to check the excesses of capitalism. The reformist ethos of progressivism influenced nearly every facet of public life, from gender relations through public works projects to the U.S. presidency, and it became particularly widespread among those who were working to professionalize education. The progressive movement in education drew much of its framing from the works of John Dewey. That framing, and the institutional politics that followed from it, provide a case study of considerable significance for those who want to advance broadly based changes in education today. Mayer Zald

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(1996:262) defines frames as “the specific metaphors, symbolic representations, and cognitive cues used to render or cast behavior and events in an evaluative mode and to suggest alternative modes of action.” Framing, then, is the creative and rhetorical process of constructing topoi that enable movements to articulate shared assumptions that can be translated into programs of collective action. The progressive framework was most prominently articulated by John Dewey’s (EW 5:93)1 vision of education as the “fundamental method of social progress and reform.” This democratic “way of life” was characterized by collaborative projects concerned with realizing the civic potentials of collective experience. In principle, if not always in practice, child-centered education shifted the focus of education away from the rote mastery of discrete disciplines toward programs of study organized around the learning processes and social experiences of students. Such methods were defined by the pragmatists’ distinctive concern for learning by doing that stressed collaborative inquiry and individuals’ transactions with their environments. In order to engage with the successes and failures of the progressive movement and to develop a sense of the historical forces, we will first review how progressivism functioned rhetorically as a social movement when heterogeneous groups coalesced around flexible ideological frames, such as anti-individualism. We will then examine how progressives in education were influenced in their framing activities by John Dewey. Dewey provided the movement with a pragmatic master frame that called for social reconstruction through progressive education and collective learning by doing. After examining this master frame, we will explore the ideological and institutional limits of the progressive educational movement through the rise and fall of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) as a case study in efforts to organize teachers around that shared professional frame articulated by Dewey and others. As the leading professional association in progressive education, the PEA can be criticized for providing a reformist politics based on a faith in scientifically trained professionals that failed to engage rank-and-file teachers, most of whom were women. Such limitations make the PEA a historical case in point for assessing the politics of accommodation, which can help us reflect on the institutional limits of our own disciplinary efforts, particularly our pressing need to develop coalitions with our coworkers in the schools (see Gallagher 2002). The framing work of education is critical to consider in a time such as ours when professors, teachers, and students need to work together to develop socially engaged programs of work against the market mentality that is being imposed upon institutions of public learning. For anyone concerned with addressing these forces at work, the progressive movement provides telling insights into how promising reforms become debilitated when generative frameworks are co-opted by professional hierarchies whose members assume

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leadership without addressing the vernacular rhetorics of practitioners at the base of the profession. For progressive education again to exert force for change, leaders and practitioners must work organically to articulate inclusive master frames that can provide broad-based collective action across professional boundaries.

Progressivism as a Social Movement? Individuals with common grievances organize themselves into social movements often by coalescing around a unifying ideology. Ideology, for Zald (1996:262), is “the set of beliefs that are used to justify or challenge a given social-political order and are used to interpret the political world.” Social movement theorists often use ideological analyses to account for the symbolic activities of social actors who engage in rhetorical activities to “emplot their worlds” and persuade an audience to engage their value systems (266). Such value hierarchies come up for renegotiation when historical changes call shared beliefs into question. As in other areas of civil society, most notably social work, progressives worked to reorganize the decentralized schooling systems into a buffered hierarchy that shifted the ideology and leadership of schooling from religion to professionalism. As Zald and others have pointed out, ideological framing is a rhetorical activity that draws upon dramatistic and persuasive strategies to recruit collaborators by setting out unifying purposes that make sense of changing needs. This rhetorical process needs to foster cohesion within the movement while at the same time providing broadly engaging justifications that expand support for the movement. As a historical movement and as an educational movement, progressivism proved to be quite adept at meeting both of these challenges, though, as we will see, it was not without its drawbacks. As a historical movement, progressivism is generally understood to be the bridge between the populist agrarian movements of the 1890s and the New Deal reforms of the 1930s. Yet scholars have contested the coherence of progressivism and the cohesion of the progressive movement ever since Richard Hofstadter’s (1955) Pulitzer Prize–winning The Age of Reform, From Bryan to FDR. Hoftstadter sought to characterize the historical development of progressivism not as a unified political philosophy advanced by leading figures but as the “broader impulse toward criticism and change that was everywhere so conspicuous after 1910”—a “kind of thinking that impinged most directly upon the ordinary politically conscious citizen,” as represented by “middlebrow writers,” muckraking journalists, reformist politicians, and community activists (5–6). Hofstadter’s approach was thus congruent with social movement studies, and with the broad reforms of the Progressive Era. Those

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reforms can be benchmarked by noting how the Constitution was amended to enact provisions supported by various elements in the progressive movement such as tax reform, senatorial direct elections, prohibition, and women’s suffrage. These issues were more interrelated than they may appear. The abuse of alcohol contributed to the abuse of women, and the extension of the vote was seen as a way to check the exploitation of female and child labor by breaking up corrupt political machines and implementing controls on business, including consumer measures such as food regulations. As Hofstadter discusses, these varied concerns were not part of an “altogether cohesive or consistent movement,” but they all turned upon a broad “status revolution” in which middle-class professionals carved out a role for themselves in managing socioeconomic institutions from which they moved to check the power of wealth and the control of party bosses, who often enlisted the support of immigrants and the urban underclasses (5). Many discussions of the progressive movement have used Hofstadter’s (1955) analyses as a point of departure—to be refuted if not refined. In “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,’” Peter Filene (1970:20) argues that progressivism cannot really be understood as a social movement if movement is defined as a group that acts in a “deliberate, self conscious way” to advance a program based on values explicitly professed by members. As we have come to understand social movements as something more or less than organized collectives, the shifting coalitions of the progressive movement serve as a model for the flexibility of ideological frameworks in social action. According to Scott Davies (2002:283), progressivism illustrates the way framing works insofar as it presented a relatively stable set of commonplace themes that enjoyed “narrative fidelity with diffuse societal values” and encapsulated accepted lines of reasoning that could be deployed to set out shifting purposes in changing situations. In Social Movements, 1768–2004, Charles Tilly (2004:7) makes it clear that social movements often do not evolve as organized collectives but as complex “ensemble[s] of elements” making “collective claims on target authorities” through “an array of claim-making performances.” Progressivism can clearly be seen as a social movement when such movements are defined as claim-making ensembles that foment historic changes in the midst of an often sluggish dominant culture ( Johnston and Klandermans 1995a:4). Though they did not share common rhetorical strategies or purposes, the individuals and organizations that history has labeled “progressive” shared in the feverish zeitgeist of reform with a distinctive emphasis on the interdependence of humanity, a focus Daniel Rogers (1982:124) calls “a rhetoric of social cohesion.” Education was just one of several nodes around which middle-class progressives congregated for its framing potential. As we will discuss in the next section, reformers often looked to education as a vehicle for social engineering.

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Education forms the critical nexus for the basic process of reinterpreting shared beliefs against changing needs—a process that is fundamental both to the general dynamics of social movements and to the specific transmission of social capital through schooling and other institutions that serve to perpetuate, and sometimes to transform, traditional assumptions and established social relations. This educational “meaning-work,” as Snow and Benford (1992:136) have termed it, involves the institutional and ideological “struggle over the production of ideas” through “the amplification and extension of extant meanings, the transformation of old meanings, and the generation of new meanings.” As such, the instructional work inherent in “framing” sets out the rhetorical possibilities for the programs of purposeful action undertaken by a social movement, or by society generally, insofar as schooling frames what is deemed reasonable and serves to instill those frames in the rising generation. The progressive movement might seem to be just an in-group project of the educated middle classes who formed a professional association to consolidate their institutional influence and social standing. However, teachers were a broad and heterogeneous class that included more women, minorities, and workers than more prestigious professions. Marginalized groups turned to teaching as a means to social advancement through education. Just as these groups were gaining expanded access to education, teaching was becoming distinguished from preaching and becoming identified with more instrumental social purposes. Viewed in this context, the progressive educational movement begins to look less like a professional elite and more like a grassroots movement organized to challenge formative institutional developments to articulate broader social aspirations. Within the conflicted gender and class politics of the progressive movement, one can see the sort of activities that Tilly (2004:3–4) and others have seen as distinctive of a social movement as a “sustained, organized public effort” that makes “collective claims on target authorities” by representing the group as internally coherent and worthy of broader support. This definition foregrounds the rhetorical dimensions of the symbolic strategies that a movement uses to persuade audiences to support its agenda. While all social movements are concerned with persuading individuals to join their cause, the progressive movement is a particularly telling case in point because it attempted to redefine prevailing conceptions of individual and collective identity. Within the commonsensical lexicon of American political thought, individualism was integrally identified with liberalism in ways that progressives attempted to rearticulate. In the absence of strong guild, class, or ethnic associations, Americans tended to see individualism as the clarion virtue of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. In practice, such assumptions often meant that social relations were defined by the competitive ethos manifested in the pursuit of wealth, with government serving to

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protect the workings and rewards of that competition (see Sellers 1991; Lukes 1973). Individualism was reframed by progressives to distinguish their position from traditional liberal doctrines by emphasizing the virtues of reciprocity in a complexly structured social economy. The slogan set out by the progressive educational journal The Social Frontier was that “the age of individualism and laissez faire in economy and government is closing and a new age of collectivism is emerging.” At its founding in 1934, The Social Frontier set out to remap the cultural landscape of education (see Bowers 1967). It grew to more than six thousand subscribers and gave rise to the John Dewey Society; however, the journal was too radical for the leadership of the Progressive Educational Association, which agreed to take over the lagging journal only after it moderated its stance and changed its title. Like later leftist journals such as Radical Teacher, The Social Frontier represents an important effort to articulate a broadly engaging vision of education as a transformative social movement. The limitations of the social vision of the progressive leadership are all the more instructive because the progressive movement was historically poised to have a formative impact on institutions of public learning, including not just schools and colleges but libraries, self-instruction works, voluntary associations, public health agencies, and community-based projects such as settlement houses. Progressives were rhetorically successful at composing topoi that proved effective in what Erving Goffman (1974:247) has called “the anchoring of activity”—the creation of engaging frameworks that brought people together to advance concerted social and institutional change. Through their work in varied educational and social institutions, progressive leaders marshaled considerable social capital. They invested that capital in the methods of the social sciences to challenge the commonsensical assumption that social Darwinism, the laws of supply and demand, and differences in individual abilities had fixed humanity into a stratified mass where the weak starved and the fit thrived—so long as public agencies did not meddle with the natural order. This “iron chain of ideas,” as Eric Goldman (1956:72) calls it, had enlisted the virtues of individualism in the project of legitimizing business as usual. Against the force of common sense, progressives engaged in the sort of “claim-making performances” that Tilly (2004) speaks of in his research on social movements. To characterize such performances, Michael McGerr (2003:73) uses the metaphor of jazz to explore how progressive leaders “improvised a unique melody on top of a shared set of chords.” A bass line for progressive medleys was provided by the sort of historic vision set out in Edward Bellamy’s socialist novel Looking Backward (1887), which imagined that in the year 2000 America would become an egalitarian society in which people looked back with shock on the barbarity of unbridled capitalism. Looking back now, it may be hard for us not to react with cynicism and dismiss such ideological visions as naïve and

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ill-founded. However, we need to assess how such ideological visions have played out in social movements in order to assess the pragmatic possibilities of developing education into a public works project that can inspire the hope needed to build a more equitable society.

The Progressive Educational Framework The progressive movement in education came together around an ideological frame that was advanced by the leading public intellectual of the time, John Dewey, whose writings on social ethics and educational democracy set out much of the master frame for the movement. As David Snow and Robert Benford (1992:143) have explained, social movements can fail to mobilize groups, even if historical conditions seem ripe (as they clearly were in the Progressive Era) unless “a resonant master frame” is developed “to provide the ideational and interpretive anchoring for subsequent movements.” Dewey understood that the doctrines of individualism fomented by capitalism and justified by liberalism had to be revised to address the complex social interdependencies of modern society. He believed that the construction of knowledge in educational institutions had to be reconceived in light of the social conditions and political challenges of the time. He adopted a phenomenological stance on experience that became known as “instrumentalism” or “experimentalism”—“a form of doing and making” in which knowing was a collaborative process of interacting with one’s experiential environment (LW 12:434). This “master frame” underlay many of the pragmatic strategies and institutional structures established by progressive education. Such unified and unifying frameworks are vital if a social movement is to articulate an engaging account of pressing social needs, but the limitations of such master frames can also incapacitate social movements. As Snow and Benford discuss, such limitations can reinforce established hierarchies to limit the courses of action undertaken by a particular social movement. Many of the institutional structures and ideological constructs that came to define the American educational system were established in the Progressive Era, and no figure was more instrumental in articulating a justification for those reforms than John Dewey. Dewey set out many of the guiding ideals of progressivism, and then he used them to critique public schools for valorizing method, vocation, and individualism at the expense of engaging in the broader project of social transformation. The benchmark study of this period is Lawrence Cremin’s The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (1961), which has served as a point of departure for later accounts, much as Hofstadter’s (1955) work has for research on progressivism. According to Cremin, the progressive movement in education

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shared a guiding ideology that assumed that schools needed to be expanded to address issues ranging from personal hygiene to urban crowding by creating vocational instruction, guidance counseling, and student-centered pedagogies. The developmental needs of varied classes of students would be accommodated by scientific methods drawn from the social sciences. This spirit of reform can be traced back to Horace Mann and the era of the fabled one-room schoolhouse, but antebellum schools outside New England were not part of unified state systems. In the postbellum period, a national consensus emerged that schools should not just preserve morality but contribute to social progress. Progressives persuasively argued that schools could not assimilate broader classes of students unless they improved through central planning, raising professional standards, and centering the educational enterprise on self-actualization. Such attitudes made sense to educators faced with dilapidated schoolhouses that could not accommodate skyrocketing enrollments or make sense of the needs of non-English speaking immigrants. The ballooning budgets, bureaucracy, and increasing professional stratification pressed teachers to seek more persuasive alternatives to rote methods of instruction and traditional conceptions of their own social functions. Progressivism came to provide, according to Davies (2002:269), a set of “policy frames” that showed a “strategic” flexibility that was “well suited to schools’ organizational realities” and “to shifting political and cultural climates.” In some ways, the loosely defined terminology of progressivism was one of its strengths, for progressive themes allowed “a range of different reforms to claim its banner” without “rigidly” getting locked into “concrete proposals” that would become outmoded as needs changed (283). While progressive doctrines showed the rhetorical flexibility of effective topoi, that flexibility meant that they could also be used to justify contradictory purposes. The contradictions contained within progressivism were enlisted by two competing factions: “administrative progressives” sought to centralize schools under trained professionals who had the expertise to assess students and efficiently track them according to their individual needs, while “pedagogical progressives” focused on developing child-centered and socially engaged modes of instruction. This distinction (which was first set out by David Tyack [1974]) has proved useful in examinations of the applications of progressive doctrines to formative developments in varied educational sectors, including general education programs, conflicts between administrators and teachers’ unions, and historic developments in rhetoric, composition, and creative writing (see Russell 2002; Labaree 2005; Urban 1976; and Gallagher 2002). In the next section, we will draw upon this distinction to explore how the professional leadership of the progressive movement failed to sustain the sort of organic relationship with teachers that was needed to maintain progressivism as a social

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movement. This relationship is critical to consider if those of us who teach at the college level are to have any hope of building the sort of coalitions with our coworkers in the schools that are needed to advance broader social reforms. In “The Ethics of Democracy,” Dewey established his ethics of social transformation by setting himself against the atomism posited by classical liberalism, which he critiqued in detail in works such as Liberalism and Social Action (1935). Dewey critiqued the limitations of equating democracy with ballot activity and freedom from governmental interventions. Rather than as a voter curtained into a booth, a citizen was to be seen as “a member of the organism” (EW 1:235, 239). “The moral end,” according to Dewey (EW 3:314–15), “is wholly social,” and the ultimate good of communal living is the “realization of a community of wills” in which each person develops talents and proclivities that help to expand and deepen the collective’s sense of its historical possibilities. Dewey’s social ethics spoke to a historical moment when class conflicts were entering a critical phase, as he came to appreciate on that train ride from Ann Arbor to Chicago in 1894 when he encountered the realities of labor disputes for the first time. He saw the Pullman strikes and the ensuing riots as an exigency that called upon educators to get “the social organism thinking” about the damaging effects of laissez-faire economics on social and individual developments (Dewey as cited in Menand 2001:297). At the time, Chicago had become a central locus for intellectual opposition to laissez-faire economics. Academic and community intellectuals such as Thorstein Veblen and Jane Addams had set out ideological and institutional critiques of the “hedonistic calculus” of market mentality (Menand 2001:300). Addams had a formative impact on Dewey’s understanding of ethical social transformation. Her work at Hull House among the working poor prompted Dewey to think through how class differences could be bridged by collaborative inquiries into cultural differences that were grounded in social conditions and oriented to collective action aimed at improving them (Westbrook 1991:85). Several of Dewey’s works are commonly cited by those who see him as a radical democrat engaged in bridging the gap between what is and what ought to be. Much of his early political thinking was invested in critiquing liberalism for its overemphasis on the natural rights of the individual. In The Public and Its Problems (1927) and Liberalism and Social Action (1935), Dewey argued that “liberalism” had been corrupted to mean independence from governmental constraint and had thereby served to justify the enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of a few (see LW 2: 319). Liberalism had helped persuade people to believe that their civic duties were limited to voting and behaving as caring individuals. According to Dewey, liberalism made collective actions difficult to imagine because it condemned outside influences as external controls on individuals and their economic incorporations. For Dewey, the “foundations of moral life” are not freedom from control but free-

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dom to collaborate as a means to “self-realization” (Westbrook 1991:48). “Liberty,” according to The Public and Its Problems, “is that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others” (LW 2:329). In this civic philosophy, people realize their potentials by working together to create a “corporate intelligence” capable of exercising “socially organized intelligent control” (LW 11:144, 137). This civic mindset centers on something akin to what Alexis de Tocqueville termed “habits of the heart,” a term that has more recently been invoked by like-minded scholars (see Bellah et al. 1985). In an address at a dinner in honor of his eightieth birthday, Dewey delivered “Creative Democracy—the Task Before Us,” which is one of his most eloquent statements of how those civic “habits” invest the ethos on individual experience in social transformation. According to Dewey, times of historic crisis open up shared assessments of civic potentials by making it clear that democracy is not simply “a personal way of individual life” but a “working faith in the possibilities of human nature” based on a belief that common people have the capacity for “intelligent judgment and action” (LW 14:226–27). Citizens cannot expect that capacity to lead to transformative experiences unless they participate in shared activities that lead to social knowledge, which is then applied to social experiments that can prompt further growth. “The task of democracy,” he concluded, “is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute” (230). Dewey maintained that democratic experiments in social change begin in the classroom, which is both the model and the means for “social reconstruction” (LW 9:205). Education was moving away from traditional, almost instinctive modes of schooling to develop more broadly engaging and engaged modes of collaborative inquiry. In a society advancing through industrialization, urbanization, and modernization, schools were challenged to address new social needs. The activities of the school had come to be considered “in their social significance, as types of the processes by which society keeps itself going” (MW 1:10). Dewey believed that vocational instruction should be part of the “liberal” education offered to the “cultured” and working classes alike (18). For Dewey, the distinction between the liberal and mechanical arts was one of the dichotomies that should be thrown out, along with the underlying dualisms of knowing and doing, thinking and working, theory and practice, tradition and experience, and the arts and sciences. Such disabling dualisms had demarcated literature and culture from everyday life in ways that incapacitated the civic imagination by divorcing artistic from practical experience in ways that distanced humanistic reflection from social action (MW 1:103). Instead, institutions of public learning needed to be oriented to “the fundamental principles of community life” in order to develop the “habits of social imagination” that sponsor social intelligence—“the power

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of observing and comprehending social situations”—that builds “social consciousness” (EW 5:63, 84). Dewey had a pragmatic vision of the civic project of social reconstruction that was based in the collaborative ethos of learning by doing. Dewey’s allegiance was not to the established political economy but to a learning society, broadly conceived as the network of individuals living and working together, with political activities being only one area of civic life. Public schooling was to bring children together from different social, ethnic, economic, and religious backgrounds to foster “socialism” (a term that Dewey chose with a full sense of its associations at the time). Dewey’s sense of “socialism” was vested in a curriculum that began with the experience of the student, rather than classical texts, sociological precepts, or even scientific principles. Studies were to be developed to provide students with a clear understanding of “the intellectual and social meaning” of the subjects and assignments carried out in the school (MW 2:93). For Dewey, the “fullness of sharing in the intellectual and spiritual resources of the community” was the essence of a civic vision that included literature, art, science, and technology as manifestations of social intelligence (MW 2:93). This civic vision forms the context for Dewey’s “experimentalism.” In How We Think (1933), he explained that the best route to social awareness was through the habit of mind he called “scientific.” A scientific stance on experience was not defined by methodical objectivity but by an “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends” (MW 6:185). Rather than being merely methodical, such “experimentation is a form of doing and making” (LW 12:434). Feinberg has argued that Dewey’s sense of science forms an elitist perspective in which rigorous proficiency is a requirement for democratic participation, but Westbrook and others have argued that Dewey viewed the logic of science as simply a “refinement of the ordinary procedures for fixing belief ” (Westbrook 1991:141). As such, “science” could be described as the learning process we go through when we carefully observe experience, reflect on how matters have played out in related situations, and communicate with others to predict and attempt to control outcomes. Rather than bracketing individual subjectivities, this method was undertaken as a means to enable students to bring their experiences together to question, corroborate, or revise their shared assessments of social problems. When Dewey used the word science, he was imagining an expansive human activity that covers all the disciplines, prompting students to inquire, question, collaborate, and then act, with more effective collaborative action as the primary goal. As a pragmatist, Dewey maintained that every idea should be assessed against the conditions that shaped it and the consequences to which it led (see, for example, LW 8:11). It is thus only appropriate to assess how his the-

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ories played into some of the very dichotomies that he critiqued and thereby created the tensions highlighted in the introduction. In his influential Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey set out a vision of education as the “continuous reconstruction of experience” that provided an engaging framework, but the institutionalization of that vision was undercut by the same historical forces contained within the progressive tradition (MW 9:86). In the next section, we analyze the Progressive Education Association (PEA) as a telling example of the tension between “frame makers”—the intellectuals responsible for providing master frames for social movements—and “frame receivers”— those potential constituents who do most of the actual work of putting frames into practice for social change (Noakes and Johnston 2005:12). The PEA demonstrates how educational movements flounder when professional leaders fail to sustain a practical engagement with the institutional conditions and social situations faced by practitioners at work in the classroom and in communities where vernacular rhetoric takes its polyvocal, muted, interrogating stance (Hauser and mcclellan, this volume).

The Professionalism of the Progressive Educational Association The progressive movement was both a vehicle and victim of professionalization. Professionalization had the same sort of conflicted impact on education as on other highly gendered “paraprofessions” such as nursing and social work (see Brumberg and Tomes 1982; Perlmann 2001). In each of these areas of public life, academically accredited professionals emerged to administer the services provided by practitioners who tended to be women with less specialized expertise. As in these other areas, education had traditionally been locally based and not professionally credentialed. The U.S. Department of Education had played but a marginal role, with only two employees on average in each state department of education (Tyack and Hansot 1982:297). Even by 1890, 70 percent of students were still attending rural schools, and the largest educational association, the National Educational Association, had only a few thousand members (as compared to more than one hundred thousand in 1922). Schooling instilled a “Protestant republican ideology” that came to seem narrow and outmoded as education became structured into “hierarchical and buffered systems” that culminated in “university departments of education” (Tyack and Hansot 1982:293). While it did not become a prestigious career, teaching at least became a lifetime occupation rather than just a sideline for a preacher, a stepping stone to a more lucrative job, or a “stopgap between family and marriage” for a schoolmarm (MacDonald 1999:427). From its origins in the Progressive Era, “professionalism” has been a highly gendered and raced construct because the

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specialized expertise of academics and “administrative progressives” marginalized the social roles that teachers had played in their communities, including ethnic communities where teachers were looked to as some of the few public representatives of the group. The dynamic interplay between progressive doctrines and the social process of professionalization was mediated by groups such as the Progressive Educational Association, which was founded in 1919. The case of PEA illustrates how professionalization shaped educators’ broader engagements in social movements. Such professional associations have often undermined the work of community educators by divorcing the intellectual capacities of individual disciplines from the social relations in which those capacities have historically exercised broader influences. The Progressive Educational Association emerged out of networks of reformers who tended to work in more prestigious schools. In 1919 Marietta Johnson, founder of the Organic School in Fairhope, Alabama, and Stanwood Cobb, an educator at the U.S. Naval Academy, agreed to establish an educational association that would publicize innovative experiments in education in mostly middle- and upper-middle-class suburban schools. Such pedagogical experimentation was integral to the progressive movement in education and to teachers’ efforts to improve their professional standing by establishing a research base for their work, as has been examined in Patricia Graham’s Progressive Education from Arcady to Academe: A History of the Progressive Education Association, 1919–1955 (1967). By 1920 the PEA had a name, a convention, and about five hundred members taken from the ranks of innovative teachers, administrators, and the parents of students in private experimental schools in the Midwest and in New England (with retired Harvard president Charles William Eliot serving as the first honorary president). The organization soon attracted a more diverse membership that was drawn by the expanding consensus that rote instruction in isolated disciplines had failed students and society. The group set out to build programmatically build a social movement, as evident in its professed purpose to spread reform through publications aimed at “educating the public to demand it” (Graham 1967:28). The early efforts of the PEA demonstrate the potentials of an educational movement informed by a progressive civic vision and committed to cross-disciplinary collaborations with rank-and-file teachers and their communities. The PEA succeeded in raising its membership to over six thousand by investing its intellectual energies and institutional resources in building a shared set of guiding principles and using them to recruit supporters in ways that are vital to a successful social movement, as has been discussed by Charles Stewart, Craig Smith, and Robert Denton (2001:77). As an educational movement, the PEA employed rhetorical tactics and institutional media that closely mirrored the sustaining activities that were helping to professionalize varied academic specializations; however, PEA’s workshops, publications, and

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study conferences were organized to be more broadly accessible than traditional academic lectures and journals (Redefer 1955). In the 1930s, the PEA organized dozens of commissions to study such issues as adult education, home-school relations, mass media, and the social problems that were vital to progressive reforms (Graham 1967:168). The PEA was also politically active in supporting New Deal–style policies that expanded the role of government in education (Graham 1967:94–96). Progressivism provided a broadly engaging ideology that was defined not by a specific set of institutional practices but as a general “spirit” or “attitude” of reform: “The Association is not an advocate of any one method or of any group of methods,” argued Eugene Randolph Smith in a PEA conference presentation in 1926. “It believes in giving publicity to everything that seems promising in education” (as cited in Graham 1967:199). Two loosely articulated principles held the movement together: (1) education should be concerned with the whole life of the child, and (2) the scientific method provided a pragmatic approach to curricular innovation that was consistent with the broader reforms that were being undertaken by those working in applying the social sciences to the problems of the time. The “experimentalist” ethos of progressives was translated into practice by organizing curricula not around the structures of distinct bodies of subject matter but around the evolving interests and needs of students, with a guiding concern for “active learning” from experience that served as an “integrative” principle for project-based learning as set out in Dewey’s own laboratory schools at the University of Chicago and then at Teachers College, Columbia University. These projects demonstrate the vitality and durability of Dewey’s framing, but they also illustrate what social movement scholars call frame amplification, extension, and transformation through institutional practice and publication (Noakes and Johnston 2005:12; see also Snow et al. 1986). Child-centered doctrines became the mainstay of many teacher education programs, and those doctrines provided the definitive focus of the PEA at its origins. In the early issues of Progressive Education, the PEA’s periodical launched in 1924, teachers and administrators submitted essays, speeches, and curricular designs that emphasized individual development, especially in the creative arts, including curricular innovations in art, poetry, and music. These efforts cut across the traditional boundaries of disciplines in ways that threatened to reshape their foundations. For example, progressives instituted creative writing courses and clubs that laid the institutional base upon which creative writing became established within college English departments (see Meyers 1996; Gallagher 2002). According to many commentators, the child-centered emphasis of the early progressive movement tended to valorize individual creativity in ways that suited a liberal spirit of reform, but in the 1930s that side of the progressive

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movement was challenged by a more politicized emphasis on social reconstructionism. Dewey soundly criticized the child-centered impetus in the progressive movement in a speech at the PEA convention after accepting the position of honorary president of the organization in 1928. Dewey argued that it was time to make progressive education a more overtly political enterprise. Dewey’s position emboldened the more politically engaged leaders of PEA, including George S. Counts and William H. Kilpatrick. Educators were called upon to help build a socialist society by Counts’s Dare the School Build a New Social Order? (1932a) and Kilpatrick’s Education and the Social Crisis (1932). The following year the PEA’s Committee on Social-Economic Problems published its Call to the Teachers of the Nation, which was an unqualified call to teachers to enlist on the side of the working classes against the “privileged minority” who controlled “the social means of production” (as cited in Bowers 1967:465). To advance this cause, the following year the PEA launched the Social Frontier. In the initial issue, Kilpatrick reiterated his call for educators to foment a “class mentality among workers” (as cited in Bowers 1967:466). Such calls to action were consistent with the New Deal politics of the time, but they created divisive conflicts within PEA between those who favored a child-centered focus and those who were engaged with the cause of social reconstruction. One of those who galvanized that division was the chair of the Committee on Social-Economic Problems, George Counts, a colleague of Dewey’s at Teachers College, Columbia. At the 1932 convention, Counts delivered a speech—“Dare Progressive Education Be Progressive?”—that served a prophetic role in offering a radical interpretation of Dewey’s social reconstructionist master frame. Counts acknowledged that the PEA had advanced significant educational reforms, but the word progressive, for Counts, implied a forward-looking orientation grounded in a “theory of social welfare” that went beyond the standard child-centered approaches (1932b:258). Progressive education had lost its political initiative as its ideological commitments came to reflect “the liberal-minded upper middle class” who supported mild reforms but who were, at bottom, ineffectual “romantic sentimentalists” (258). “If Progressive Education is to be genuinely progressive,” Counts argued, it must emancipate itself from the influence of this class, face squarely and courageously every social issue, come to grips with life in all of its stark reality, establish an organic relation with the community, develop a realistic and comprehensive theory of welfare, fashion a compelling and challenging vision of human destiny and become somewhat less frightened than it is today at the bogeys of imposition and indoctrination. (259)

After describing the dismal economic conditions of the 1930s, Counts promised his audience that they had “the power to usher in an age of plenty,

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to make secure the lives of all, and to banish poverty forever,” but to do so would require fundamental changes not only in the economic system but also in the prevailing ideology (260–61). The PEA could either advance these reforms, or it could serve to confirm the status quo. Though it was met with considerable resistance, Counts’s speech set the agenda for much of the activity of the PEA in the 1930s as the movement stepped away from the romantic individualism of child-centered education. The Committee on Social-Economic Problems’ A Call to the Teachers of the Nation concluded that teachers at all levels of education “cannot evade the responsibility of participating actively in the task of reconstituting the democratic tradition and of thus working positively toward a new society” (cited in Cremin 1961:263). Through the decade of the 1930s, liberal advocates of child-centered education challenged the reconstructionist wing for control of the direction of the PEA. At the national conference in 1938, the Resolutions Committee presented what seems to have been intended to provide a theme everyone could rally around: “schools for a democracy.” The report stated that “the common schools and teacher education institutions have not made adequate provisions for those learning experiences effective in developing insight, attitudes, and skills essential to directing the evolution of our democratic culture” (“Report of the Resolutions Committee” 1938:282). The vagueness of this position seemed calculated to keep the PEA’s master frame as broadly based as possible—a rhetorical strategy employed by movement framers in order to increase resonance among constituencies. However, within a year the report was tabled and forgotten (Graham 1967:84). In the 1940s, as war began and the economy rallied, public interest in progressive education began to lag, and progressivism went from a broadly engaging point of reference to a rallying cry for conservative attacks on schools. PEA membership dropped from a high of ten thousand in 1938 to around two thousand a decade later, ceasing operations altogether in 1955 (Nusser 1996). The reasons for this decline are instructive for those of us who are concerned with enlisting education in the cause of building a more just society through collective action. First, as Janie Nusser (1996) has pointed out, the contributions of women—who were vital to the rise of the Progressive Education Association—were undercut when professionals from colleges of education came to fill the ranks and leadership. The move to professionalize education through advanced credentialing alienated many elementary teachers, mostly women, who made up 86 percent of the teaching force in 1920. By undervaluing the contribution of innovative teachers intimately involved in the day-to-day challenges of public education, the movement cut off a significant source of energy and practical expertise. Counts’s call to teachers to serve as the vanguard of social reform was met with resistance by female contributors to Progressive Education, such as Elizabeth Moos and Elsie Ripley Clapp,

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who thought Counts’s speech had thrown out centuries of work on child development (Moos 1932; Clapp 1932). However, the resistance of such teachers was more complicated than it might appear. Teachers looked to child-centered doctrines to articulate the values of their work, and the teachers’ unions of the time were sometimes led by women who organized themselves in opposition to the administrative progressives who were working to reform schools into efficiently run enterprises based on scientific principles, thereby advancing a gendered model of professionalization at the expense of the more holistic and grounded educational philosophy identified with child-centered education (see Herbst 1989:8). In her studies of how such conflicts played out in urban schools, MacDonald (1999:427) found that female teachers often depended upon mutual support networks that were consistent with such a philosophy and resisted progressivism because it compounded “gendered hierarchies” that worked to deskill teachers’ classroom practices. In this sense, the master frame tended to create professional boundaries that excluded a significant potential force within the movement. Such assessments are consistent with Cremin’s (1961:273) argument that the PEA functioned primarily as a professional association in ways that combined with the gendered politics of professionalization to narrow the political base of the progressive movement. In the 1930s, the leadership and the most influential members of the PEA were faculty from schools of education, mostly in Midwestern state universities (Graham 1967:104). The progressive movement in education thus became organized in a form that was even more removed from political realities of the day than even critics such as Counts had suspected. By failing to attend to the need to organize educators as coworkers, such leaders’ calls to build alliances with the working classes may have compounded the divisions between administrative and pedagogical progressives that debilitated the progressive movement in education. In Cremin’s (1961:273) words, the professional hierarchies of the PEA caused it “to cut itself off from many of the most progressive elements of the time,” because its divisive political debates distracted the organization from “the arduous business of marshaling the diverse political forces that might have supported its cause.” Evident in professional associations such as the PEA, as well as in colleges of education and other structures that bridged the strata of our educational system, the conservative dynamics of credentialed professionalism kept the progressive movement from engaging its vernacular base in ways that might have sustained the social reconstructionist vision. The opposition of administrative and pedagogical progressives simultaneously undercut and divided the intellectual leadership of the movement by compounding the divisions between child-centered and social reconstructionist visions of pedagogy. These conflicts are vital to consider because they are also evident at other junctures where the educational dynamics of social movements have

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shaped interdisciplinary developments in education. The 1960s saw a historic resurgence of the progressives’ student-centered emphasis on collaborative learning. In English studies, for example, workshop methods of instruction were instrumental in the establishment of composition studies, creative writing, and reader-response methods of literary study. What came to be known as the “process movement” was subsequently challenged by social constructionists who advanced some of the same criticisms that had been made of the “child-centered” wing of the progressive movement (see Berlin 1984, 1987). These developments are familiar to most people working in rhetoric and composition, which is perhaps more indebted to the progressive movement than any area of study outside of colleges of education. As in the progressive movement, the process movement also gave rise to a sector of the field that is defined by its administrative expertise—a managerial sector that arguably includes not just writing program administration but also some of the work in business and technical writing as well as in computers and composition. As in the progressive movement, this sector of the field has been criticized for adopting a managerial stance on teaching and writing (see Bousquet 2004). This hierarchical division is compounded by oppositions between this sector and advocates of the social constructionist doctrines identified with critical pedagogy. As in the progressive movement, these internal divisions have undercut the critical potentials and social influence of the discipline in ways that can be redressed only if those of us who teach at the college level take up the project of investing our institutional capital in broadly engaged and responsive coalitions with our co-workers in public schools, as has been discussed, for example, by Gallagher (2002).

Conclusion: The Progressive Movement as a Case Study in Educational Coalition Building The rise and fall of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) provides a case study that can help us to assess how to use broadly based frameworks to build social movements that provide participants with a shared sense of their needs and aspirations. In the case of the PEA (as in the progressive education movement more generally), that frame drew upon the writings of John Dewey, including his critiques of how liberal individualism served as a laissez-faire justification for oppressive economic conditions. On that train ride to Chicago a century ago and in his visits to Chicago community centers such as Hull House, Dewey came to recognize how vital it is for educators to get the “social organism thinking” by helping students set out frames of reference that can enable them to reflect and act upon the problems facing their communities. Anyone interested in such movements in education can learn a great deal

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from studying the PEA. Educational movements need leaders such as Dewey to be able to articulate master frames that are politically engaged and broadly engaging. Social visionaries such as George Counts are needed to inspire a sense of the “righteousness” of the movement that can mobilize collective action by articulating a civic vision that calls members to act upon idealistic principles in the manner that Tilly (2004) has discussed. However, the PEA also provides a test case in assessing the need to maintain integral relations among the critical, administrative, and practical elements in a social movement. If any educational movement is to exercise the sort of historical agency that the progressive movement did, then educational leaders must develop dynamic relationships with the 6.1 million teachers in American schools, 71 percent of whom are women (U.S. Census 2004). Such coalition building will need to cut through the professional hierarchies that divide educators to provide a unifying vision of the challenges faced by those who work in public institutions of learning. The progressive movement in education provides the best historical example of how such a movement can be developed through informal gatherings and publications that craft master frames that energize practitioners to collaborate upon the mission of making education serve democracy and democracy serve all. The critical possibilities and practical limitations of the progressive movement in education challenge those of us who identify with “progressive” frameworks to attend to broader uses of the term—and to institutional hierarchies that limit our efforts to connect our work with those broader developments. As in the Progressive Era, “progressive” often distinguishes more collectivist and activist standpoints from liberal philosophies of education that have been complicit, as Dewey discussed, with the laissez-faire politics of liberal individualism. Dewey saw collaborative experience as active and creative, and he held that formalist distinctions between aesthetic and practical modes of experience can prevent us from envisioning collaborative inquiry as a means to empower the civic imagination. These aspects of Dewey’s framework proved to be quite engaging with teachers because the classroom is one place where the aesthetics and politics of experience take on practical import as students work to interpret texts, issues, and daily life. In such moments, experience achieves the “integration and fulfillment” of reflection and symbolic action that Dewey discussed in Art as Experience (LW 10:39). This engagement with the potentials of collaborative experience provides a baseline upon which to build a civic vision of education that includes community literacy and service learning, critical pedagogies and workshop methods, and action research and ethnography. As we have noted, each of these innovations had archetypes in the progressive movement, and that movement can help us to understand the forces that work against our being able to envision these varied emphases as part of

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a unified framework concerned with education as a means to civic engagement. Educational reformers from Horace Mann through John Dewey have looked to develop frameworks that they hoped would change basic educational practices, but, as Tyack and Hansot (1982:478, 476) note, it is also “important to recognize that schools change reforms” to adapt ideological frameworks to the “grammar of schooling”—the routines of bells, rows, grades, and diplomas that work to contain the creative capacities of critiques of prevailing assumptions. We have examined how the professionalization of schooling shaped the implementation of progressive frameworks, because we work in an area of study that has been shaped not only by those frameworks but also by the politics of professionalization. Composition studies has continued to be influenced by some of the same disabling dynamics that divided administrative and pedagogical progressives in a way that separated the intellectual leadership of the profession from rank-and-file teachers. These same broad dynamics have historically worked to incapacitate our entire educational system by positioning professors at a critical distance from teachers to demarcate content expertise from the teaching of “skills” and divorce the cultural capital generated by research from the practical work of teaching. The academic hierarchy of research, teaching, and service has begun to break down as the values of research have become calculated according to the logic of the market. At the same time, each has become seen as revenue generating, and educational institutions have become incorporated into the service economy. As we consider how best to respond to these trends, we need to acknowledge that those of us who are granted time to write scholarship such as this chapter are complicit with the very forces that have deprofessionalized teaching. If we are to build “progressive” coalitions to address these developments, we must begin by reflecting on how we frame practical experience and collaborative inquiry in our daily work—in the classroom and in the other public forums that we need to connect with to develop civic alternatives to the logic of market relations. In addition, we must continue to see the rhetorical work of creating master frames through scholarly publication as only half the work that is required to enact social transformation in the field of education; without teachers, social movements in education lack the vital practical wisdom and the operational base that is necessary for progressive change.

Note 1. Throughout, Dewey’s works are cited as EW for Early Works (1882–1898; reprinted 1967–1972), MW for Middle Works (1899–1924; reprinted 1981–1990), and LW for Later Works (1925–1953; reprinted 1976–1983), followed by the volume number, italicized, and page number: e.g., (EW 5:93).

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CHAPTER

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Giving Voice to a Movement: Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” and the Potential of History THOMAS ROSTECK

Published in the September 1960 issue of The New Left Review, C. Wright Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” has been celebrated as the founding statement of the New Left Movement, and Mills himself inscribed as one of its prophets.1 In the context of late-1950s social consensus, the “Letter” was a challenge to then-reigning ideas about the desirability of the status quo and the absence of social problems. In luminous language, Mills announces the promise and the openness of history, and the potential and necessity for social change. But less well studied has been the rhetorical action of the “Letter.” Two matters seem immediately paradoxical: First, Mills chose, it seems, to write to “members” of a social movement that essentially did not exist in 1960; Second, Mills uses the rhetorical form of the public letter to cast his message and to project a vision of the possibility of historical change in an era of complacency. Within the conventions of the public letter, Mills essentially proposes a new identity for the “the young intelligentsia”—one significant with the idea that they could be the vanguard of a new movement that would meld cultural critique and political action. Yet, beyond sheer historical interest in this document, its composition raises for us important questions about the relationship between discourses, ideologies, and their auditors. For some time, of course, communication theorists have assumed an essential connection between texts and their audiences. Kenneth Burke (1950:19–29, 55–59), for instance, considers that audience members “participate” in the symbolic discourses that seek to “persuade” them. Burke calls this coming together of discourse and audience identification—the complex process whereby audiences are “constructed” by their joining with an ideology inscribed in a message. Burke’s ideas have contemporary resonance: in the work of Louis Althusser (1971), according to whom individuals are subject to ideologies embodied in communication messages and institutional

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structures. These ideologies “hail” or address individuals, inviting them to take up an identity or “subject position” and to become what they are “summoned” or “interpellated” to be. This way of thinking about audiences raises some important questions for contemporary rhetoric. Rhetoric has traditionally projected the existence of free and independent subjects who affirm a common world of beliefs, values, and actions. But nowadays, scholars in diverse fields have begun to question this assumption by denying the autonomous individual and any collective identity that exists free and independent of discourse. From this view, the quest for identity is not the discovery of a preexisting self, but rather a process of formation, constituted by heeding the inherent call of rhetoric to “be” a subject of a certain type in a world that is discursively constituted and ordered. Instead of considering, as in the classic texts, audience as some sort of transcendent collective subject preexisting the message itself, rhetoricians must now consider the possibility that the very existence of social subjects (who would become audience “members”) is already a rhetorical effect (Charland 1987). I believe that Mills’s (1960) “Letter to the New Left” is a prescient rhetorical document that constitutes a movement as it addresses its potential members. As an instance of constitutive rhetoric, the “Letter” models a voice for the new movement and invites its audience to find themselves within the ideas and tone of the public letter. In this essay, I hope to make the case that attending to Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” increases our understanding about the power of discourse to “define” its audience and about how that definition may be focused politically.

Contexts of “Letter to the New Left” Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” appears before us fixed within a history and context. Numerous factors shaped the political and social climate of the 1950s in the United States and do not need to be exhaustively rehearsed here: the baby boom and the resulting postwar expansion of American higher education; the redistribution of the black population from the rural South to the urban South and North and the resulting increase in potential black voting strength; the general prosperity that prevailed in the early 1960s and the resulting willingness of politicians and opinion makers to consider the plight of what Michael Harrington called “the other America.” These factors combined and helped bring greater public willingness to question or at least to tolerate questions about the direction of American society and culture (Isserman 1987). In his study of the New Left Movement, rhetorical scholar Leland Griffin (1964) locates the rebirth of a radical Left perspective in the founding of the journal Dissent in the fall of 1953. The editors of Dissent felt that the

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“socialist movement had reached a nadir” and wanted instead to “make democratic-radicalism seem relevant.” In Griffin’s account, they tried to project themselves as “radical intellectuals,” and to make a “new start” (114). Freed, in the mid-fifties, from the stifling constraints of McCarthyism, these intellectuals consciously set their course in the direction of a democratic, socialist humanism. Charles Wright Mills was a central figure in this period of the Left. Called “the most inspiring sociologist of the second half of the twentieth century,” and an “inspiration and a guide” for the political generation trying to find bearings in the early sixties (Gitlin 2003:n.p.), Mills was born in 1916 near Waco, Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1939, and, in 1941, received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin. In 1946, he took a faculty position at Columbia University where he remained until his untimely death in 1962. As an academic sociologist, Mills is best remembered for influential studies investigating structures of power and class stratification in the United States (Tilman 1984). In the late 1940s and 1950s, Mills sorted through available agents of historical change–labor, in The New Men of Power (1948), the middle class, in White Collar (1951), and the chiefs of top institutions, in The Power Elite (1956). As Mills saw it, labor was not up to the challenge of structural reform, white-collar employees were confused and rearguard, and the power elite were irresponsible (Gitlin 2003). By 1958 Mills was arguing, as a contributor to the radical Liberation Magazine and in Causes of World War III, that radical thinking and action were essential to survival, since the policies of the power elite would inevitability result in nuclear holocaust (Griffin 1964:115). The main opposition to Mills and others in the Dissent group came from a key circle of respected and well-placed conservative, Right-leaning intellectuals. In the late 1950s there was, among them, a widespread belief that industrialized societies were harmonious social systems that, internally at least, contained no major oppositional forces. This so-called “end of ideology” was proclaimed in one form or another by Daniel Bell, Raymond Aron, and Seymour Martin Lipset (Katsiaficas 1987:5). In his book The End of Ideology (1960a), Bell wrote with the assumption that ideology, which he described as the conversion of ideas into social levers, had been exhausted as a way to spark social or political action. According to Bell, conservative theories of consensus democracy had won in the West because of the bankruptcy of the Left. In virtually every NATO country, leftist parties faced the threat of extinction, Bell argued; and, without practical opposition to conservative principles, he assumed the discussion about ideology as the organizing principle of society had ended (1960a:47–74). Mills recognized that this position demonstrated nothing so much as disillusionment toward any real commitment to change. As Mills saw it, the

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end of ideology was an ideology itself. And in the “Letter to the New Left,” Mills leaves little room for doubt about his response to “endism”: to build a movement directed to revitalizing American society, particularly its politics and culture (Aronowitz 2006).2 In the “Letter,” Mills (1960:251, 259) critiques the “rhetoric” of endism, begins to frame “an explicit political philosophy” in response, and attempts his answer to the question of “what we mean by the phrase ‘the New Left.’” The title “Letter to the New Left” may first seem strange because, as mentioned, there was no such actuality on the American scene in 1960 (Horowitz 1983:314). But a new radicalism was already a significant political factor, especially in Latin America, Asia, and Africa: the nascent third world. The fact that the United States and its persons of learning were so tardy in recognizing this world force only indicated to Mills a delinquency, an American failure of nerve. In Britain, some young intellectuals inaugurated a new journal of political and social criticism, which they called New Left Review (Horowitz 1983:314). Mills’s “Letter” appears in the first volume of this new journal, edited by Stuart Hall.3 Subsequently, the “Letter” was published in pamphlet form by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and reprinted in 1962 for American readers in the journal Studies on the Left (Geary 2004:244). Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” was immediately taken up by young students and professors seeking political change, and it was one of the linchpins of SDS ideology. Jack Newfield (1966:15), a former member of SDS, extolled Mills as one of the authors who nourished the growth of the New Left. C. Clark Kissinger (1968:20), first national secretary of SDS, claimed that more that two hundred young activists were attracted to the June 1963 convention of SDS by Mills’s writings. Jim Miller (1987:86) describes Mills as “a hero, an oracle, a model of the radical intellectual . . . almost immediately” after publication of the “Letter.” “Copies of this piece were circulated within SDS,” Miller recounts, and “it was one of the 38 titles on the recommended reading list that SDS distributed in the fall of 1961” (86). Later, in an interview with Miller (1987:79), Tom Hayden, president of SDS from 1962 to 1963, and author of its most famous work, The Port Huron Statement, admitted that “I was completely absorbed in [Mills’s] writing. He was the inspiration for what I was trying to do.” In his autobiography, Hayden (1988:81) says that “Mills validated us not only personally, but as a generation and as activist-organizers, the political identity we were beginning to adopt.” But in addition to social history, any interpretation of the “Letter to the New Left” takes place in another context as well—as part and parcel of an expanding literature on contemporary social movements. Scholarly thinking about movements has undergone a sea change in the last forty years. Prior to

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the mid-1960s, movement theorists focused on the common perceptions of economic inequality, social injustice, and perhaps, most importantly, the broad relationships of class and/or race as the grievances within which social movement activity was seemingly rooted. But in the late sixties, social theorists working in a variety of disciplines observed a new type of social movement arrive on the scene of social conflict in countries operating under conditions of advanced industrialism or late capitalism.4 These so-called “new social movements” (typically abbreviated to the acronym NSM) showed a tendency away from struggles of ideology or class and toward issues of identity and self-perception (Hauser and Whalen 1997:124). The appearance of these new social movements also spurred communication theorists into fresh speculation regarding the theoretical and empirical bases of their own work, prompting them to examine the rhetorical strategies through which common perceptions of grievance and injustice enter and then compel society. The most striking outcome, as Gerard Hauser and Susan Whalen (1997:132) have argued, is that the field has recognized that the rhetorical dynamics of NSMs are best understood as a struggle over identity and language. Investigating these NSMs, rhetoricians have come directly upon questions about the formation of identity in and through movement discourse. Further, NSMs seem to constitute each member’s awareness of their material conditions through a seemingly individualized, personalized, and moralized rhetoric. Often, as a consequence, NSMs offer to individuals a new way of thinking about themselves and their personal relationship to social problems. Thus, researchers now think that NSMs interpellate individuals as social actors through a rationalization that frames personal problems as symptomatic of social problems and, ultimately, offers a means of responding to and altering these problems. But a concomitant difficulty has been in understanding more precisely how NSMs, which seem to constitute themselves by offering a discursive identity to their members, might also be able to organize as collectives capable of sustained political action (Evans and Boyte 1986; Henry and Jensen 1991; Aronowitz 1992; Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield 1994; Gusfield 1994; Lipsitz 1998; Stewart 1999). I suggest that Mills’s “Letter” provides a case study of how the construction of personal identity and the collective search for change might be related. The “Letter” offers a chance to trace how discourse might constitute identity through example, extend this identity into the world of political action, and call a “new social movement” into being. Moreover, potential members of the “New Left” are invited to become part of the NSM by joining with and participating in a “new” rhetorical style, and this stylistic participation is the weld between identity and action. So, it is to understanding this style of the “Letter to the New Left” that we turn next.

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The “Letter to the New Left” begins with Mills’s (1960:247) exasperation at what he perceives to be the “intellectual celebration of apathy.” Such an “intellectual fashion” stands in the way, Mills says, of a “release of the imagination,” and this apathy has become part and parcel of the exhaustion of liberalism and of “many NATO intellectuals with what they call ‘ideology’ and their proclamations of the ‘end of ideology.’” But if endism is rhetorically and intellectually bankrupt, then what would be necessary, Mills speculates, to “advance” on the “major problem” we have (252)? His answer becomes the pivot point in the “Letter to the New Left” as Mills asks “who” should and could bring about the social and political programs necessary for change. For our interests, precisely who this group might be and, more importantly, how Mills chooses to address them is a rich and provocative question. On one hand, since Mills’s essay is addressed “to the New Left,” we might assume that definition of target audience is clear and unequivocal. Yet, any reference to “new left” is also peculiar, because its existence is, as we have seen, decidedly problematic. A way to begin to make sense of this apparent problem is to note that the “Letter to the New Left” is a public letter—a representative of an extremely flexible rhetorical genre that has a venerable tradition in Western culture. Dating from at least the Pauline epistles, the public letter draws on the paradox captured in its name: the public letter is a bifurcated form. As Richard Fulkerson (1979) has argued, neither solely “private” or “personal” as the signifier “letter” would suggest, nor wholly “public” as compared to the traditional platform oration, the public letter as a rhetorical form oscillates within the liminal space between public and private. Thus, because the letter has both an apparent real audience (the editors/readers of the journal New Left Review), and a larger, more diverse, and yet to be realized one (Mills’s public reader and potential member of a movement), the question of audience address is an interesting constraint that opens to our reframing it within the dynamics of its genre. Because it is a bifurcated form, the public letter is rich with suasory potential. When using it, for example, rhetors typically may draw on conventions associated more with the personal and might adopt a familiar tone–an introspective and confessional voice. In this mode, the public letter has the net effect of “sounding” as if it is meant for the ear of a solitary other—a private communication. In addition, this tone itself may establish a social relationship between rhetor and audience. Malinda Snow (1985:330) explains that the author of a public epistle often “defines the audience as people who are to be advised, guided, and convinced.” More importantly, Snow

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speculates that such auditors are persuaded not simply through logic, but also because the claims, as well as the character, of the writer are “in accord with the audience’s own beliefs.” Yet this multivocal tonality may be employed by rhetors who adopt the letter form knowing full well that the message will be “overheard” by a much larger public. In short, the conventions of the public letter as a rhetorical genre allow the rhetor to construct an address to the “imaginary” or “fictive” private auditor—to take, for instance, a speculative, even tentative, voice appropriate for offering advice in the terms of a “private” communication and use this tone as the means of a stylistic appeal to the public audience who is indeed the intended target. Literary and composition studies have long recognized a quite similar effect. For instance, Walter Ong (1975) has argued “the writer’s audience is always a fiction,” since no writer addresses the audience at the moment of writing but must imaginatively project both the audience and its potential response. The rhetorical form of the public letter—where Mills presupposes the identity of a select group of sympathetic readers but in reality is speaking also to a larger latent community of potential activists—offers a seamless means to meet his challenge of bringing an imaginary audience into being as an actual social force. Part of this challenge is that his rhetoric, paradoxically, must constitute the identity of its readers as it simultaneously appears to presume them to be pre-given and natural, existing outside of rhetoric and forming the basis for a rhetorical address. Mills’s “Letter,” in constructing an imaginary subject identity for its public audience offers its intended audience the opportunity to “become” the kind of auditor addressed in the discourse. So to attend to the problematic of agency in the “Letter,” Mills next offers a functional sketch of what these new “leftists” would/should do and be. To be “Left,” Mills (1960:253) stipulates, one must question the status quo. Moreover, “Left” involves “criticism . . . and theories of society, which at some point or another are focused politically as demands and programs. . . . [T]o be ‘Left’ means to connect up cultural with political criticism, and both with demands and programs” (253). This appeal, which directs attention to a social context, seems consistent with current theories on the functions of persuasion in social movements. Indeed, most movement scholars note that one crucial early requirement for leaders of movements in the initial or “genesis” stage is to reshape the way that potential followers see themselves, their opposition, the society around them, and their historical situation (Stewart, Smith, and Denton 2001:129–50; Griffin 1952; Simons 1970). In contrast to “endism,” Mills (1960:255) proposes that history is “open” and amenable to change: “The means of history-making,” he writes, “have

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never in world history been so enlarged and so available to such small circles of men on both sides of The Curtains as they now are.” But in offering this fresh prescription for historical change, Mills challenges, of course, some sacrosanct “Old Left” assumptions. Where this orthodoxy had held that the “working classes” would bring about the inevitable class revolution, Mills argues that this inevitability clearly has failed (256). But if that is so, who will bring about change, Mills plaintively asks (254). And following right on this, he proposes a hypothesis, which he admits he has “been studying for several years now.” Consider, he says, the “cultural apparatus, the intellectuals—as a possible, immediate radical agency of change” (256). There seem to be, Mills hurries on (1960:257), at least three “very good” reasons for considering this hypothesis. First, the matter of a presumed identity: “[T]hat is what we are, that is where we stand,” he says, acknowledging his intended audience. Second, the hypothesis itself needs study (and who better to do this “ideological analysis” than the intelligentsia) for “only by detailed comparative studies,” he says, “can we hope to understand.” And third, Mills notes that intellectuals are “getting fed up . . . who is it that is thinking and acting in radical ways? All over the world . . . the answer’s the same: it is the young intelligentsia.” Mills concludes this section of the “Letter” with a lengthy listing of examples demonstrating what he presumes is a new awareness and rising political action of students around the world: in South Korea causing the downfall of Syngman Rhee; in Turkey, student riots leading to a military coup d’état; massive student riots against the Japan-United States Security Treaty forcing the resignation of the Kishi government and compelling President Eisenhower to cancel his visit there; in Taiwan and Okinawa, Great Britain and the United States. In other words, students are showing the signs of becoming, as Mills puts it, “real live agencies of historic change” (258). At this juncture, Mills’s public letter is performing several rhetorical functions at once: let us take stock. First, the “Letter” offers an invitation to any potential New Left to alter self-perception. Mills hails them to realize a new sense of themselves and of their potential, motivated by a commitment to humane values and seeing themselves as able to influence history (Katsiaficas 1987:40). Second, Mills (1960:253) assigns a function for this potential young Left, calling for intellectual “work” (“critique that gets focused politically”) and a new kind of ideological analysis. Certainly, “intellectual work” such as this might seem congenial for a young, university-trained elite eager to exercise influence and frustrated by its perceived sense of powerlessness (McCann and Szalay 2005:440). In other words, if indeed Mills is attempting to offer a new sense of identity, the “Letter” links the young intelligentsia with familiar tactics and with a worldwide movement, projecting the obvious implication that they are not alone.

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This linking is accomplished in the main by the stylistics of the “Letter.” Considering first its syntax: personal pronouns dominate the text, and Mills adopts the first-person singular and plural pronouns as his preferred term of address. “Left,” he says, is not “business as usual.” Instead, it is what “we are doing.” As far as those advocates of endism who “use extremes” to caricature “us,” this, Mills (1960:252) says, is how “I think we should answer.” No matter what “they” say, “our utopianism” is “our strength” (254). Yet because “Letter to the New Left” is a public letter, it is not altogether surprising that the first-person singular occurs regularly in its seventy-six paragraphs—thirty-six times to be exact, twenty-seven times as the subject of a main clause. But there are also many examples of the first-person plural: forty-three uses of “we,” twenty-one of “us,” and twenty of “our.” Similarly, Mills often addresses his audience directly. There are nineteen appearances of “you” to refer to his audience, including other generic uses of the word, which also carry personal overtones. The net effect of “we/our/us” and “you” is an impression of direct address and personal communication on the part of the “I.” Subtler still is Mills’s (1960) manipulation of ambiguous first-person plural pronouns. Often “we” and “our” and “us” in the essay clearly refer to those actual readers of the journal. Yet frequently a “we,” “our,” or “us” seems to refer to the potential movement and others of like mind. This reinforces the frequent direct address by gathering Mills, his actual, and his imaginary audience into a unit who shares a single outlook and confronts a shared opposition. Mills describes the audience he is addressing as “we who have been consistently radical in the moral terms of our work” and later acknowledges that “alert men everywhere today feel the need for [an explicit political philosophy]” (251). In short, Mills’s use of the first-person plural lets him address two audiences simultaneously—the one that already exists and the one that he hopes to bring into being. I suggest that he uses the “we” in the first case in order to bring about the “we” in the second case. The whole of the “Letter” presumes to speak for the larger imaginary “we” of a young New Left by mimicking an address to a specific audience of continental leftist intellectuals. Inclusion within the syntactical structure of the personal pronouns invites inclusion within the movement. The rhetorical action of the letter form also enables Mills to meet his suasory challenges, I think, because as he presents his argument, Mills adapts to a “fictionalized” audience (a movement yet to exist) and creates for that audience not only a new image of themselves, but also a persona for himself. In classical terms, he creates his ethos. To extend Ong’s (1975) argument, in any instance of written communication, the rhetor—whether the image be true or false—is always also “a fiction created for the audience and based on the writer’s fictionalizing of them” (Fulkerson 1979:130, emphasis added). In the

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“Letter,” even as he discusses shared beliefs (what Mills [1960:253] calls the values of “the humanist and secular ideals of Western Civilization—reason and freedom and justice”), he also uses himself as an example—modeling for his intended audience a new sensibility. As Mills tentatively proposes ideas for consideration, as he sorts through alternatives, as he challenges “status quo” and “dead-end” ideas, his persona performs an oppositional subject-position for his readers. Persuasion results not only from the logos of the content, but also from the ethos created through the performance, since Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” presents an argument in and through the voice of its author (M. Snow 1985:330). This discursive persona offers a ready template for the identity Mills offers the young intelligentsia. Another way to understand this is to consider the audience whom Mills implies in the “Letter to the New Left.” In writing about the workings of political discourse, Edwin Black (1970), for example, notes that while scholars have long recognized that there was the voice of an imaginary author—a persona—within a text, there is also, especially in suasory texts, a lesser well-recognized figure. There is, Black says, a “second persona”: an “auditor implied by the discourse [who reveals] a model of what the rhetor would have his real auditor become” (113). This second persona is a representation of the values and perspective that the discourse coaxes its actual audience to adopt. Black continues, “[R]hetorical discourses, either singly or cumulatively in a persuasive movement, will imply an auditor, and . . . in most cases the implication will be sufficiently suggestive as to enable the critic to link this implied auditor to an ideology” (113). Moreover, Black says, the images of this second persona may be evident in the stylistic tokens of the discourse. When we examine the stylistics of the “Letter to the New Left,” several elements of this voice are immediately striking. Some have already commented how Mills fabricates his ethos and his persona as one of “us” through distinctive rhetorical choices. For instance, Todd Gitlin (2003:n.p.) has described Mills’s style as “hard-driving, not frail.” Calling it “vivid and moving, often pointedly colloquial,” Gitlin reads Mills’s style as driven by “polemical categories.” Gitlin concludes that “this style was, in the best sense of the word, ‘masculine.’” But, I believe that alongside this “muscular,” antithetical style Gitlin seems to privilege, there is also a temperate and confessional tone, which seems more typical of private than public argument. For instance, Mills (1960:255) admits that the world situation is complicated and not easily understood: “we” must go back to studying the basic assumptions and foundations of society. “I know,” Mills confesses, “this is a debatable point among us . . . I am myself by no means certain about it” (255). And while “many things” follow from this new call for action, of many of them, Mills warns, “I am sure, not you nor I are yet adequately aware” (256). Even when he auda-

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ciously proposes intellectuals as the “lever of social change,” for all the bravura of the idea, Mills immediately apologizes for its presumption: “[For] a long time, I was not much happier with this idea than were many of you; but it turns out now . . . that it may be a very relevant idea indeed” (257). In other words, while the content of his argument openly rejects the doctrinaire orthodoxy of the “old” Left, Mills also rejects its doctrinaire means of arriving at consensus solutions. The second persona Mills hails is modeled by a persona who continually questions, who challenges givens and refuses to accept the settledness, the closedness of anything—especially history. Unlike endism, for an imaginary New Left, everything, history included, is open to change and action and interrogation. We may say, then, that what is crafted in “Letter to the New Left” is a voice of circumspection and academic rigor melded to a vigorous and striking political refrain. To bring this about, I believe that Mills models a new sensibility for his intended audience in the manner of his discourse. His confessional tone and studied tentativeness reveals a willingness to consider alternatives, a resistance to easy solutions and pat conclusions. In other words, in the “Letter to the New Left,” the rhetorical form and style perfectly match the image of the intended second persona—and represents a truly new political ideology. In the dynamics of the rhetorical form of the public letter, Mills shows his implied audience how to bring together personal identity and public action by “being like” the persona depicted in the discourse of the “Letter.” And if this is so, then it suggests a way of illuminating the political ideology of the fledgling New Left Movement. Robert Hariman (1995) has analyzed the way political cultures are influenced by their dominant rhetorical styles. Those who share political relations within a culture understand and use manners, taste, charm, and charisma, as well as modes of reasoning and expression, as public performances that communicate their relations to power. He finds these forms of expression constitute a culture’s political style: its “coherent repertoire of rhetorical conventions depending on aesthetic reactions for political effect” (4). In structuring ideas, Hariman maintains, these styles also structure the orientation we bring to a rhetorical situation, the perceptions we frame of ourselves and our social realities, and our conceptions of power and our relation to it. Our ability to respond to form makes it possible for us to participate actively with the rhetor in the co-construction of our social worlds. For Hariman, style is a source of identification and power and establishes a particular form of the culture. It prepares an audience to receive ideas and participate in their development. Historians, in describing the ideology of the New Left some years later, often noted as one of its defining elements the way that the movement demonstrated “a fresh radical spirit that finds no rest in conclusions and in

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which answers are seen as provisional, to be discarded in the face of new evidence or changed conditions” (Ellis 1996:110). To others, the New Left seemed paradoxically both experiential and pragmatic, testing the value of its theoretic judgments in the real world (Katsiaficas 1987:23). These political themes that would become the moral underpinning of the New Left are often listed as “an emphasis upon values, decentralization, and discovering the link between personal life and the larger political order” (Isserman 1987:118). I argue that we have uncovered these very same ideological orientations prefigured in the rhetorical style of Mills’s “Letter to the New Left.” What this suggests is that a better way of understanding Mills’s formative influence on the New Left Movement is to see that his influence is modeled in the style and voice of the rhetoric as well as in the content of the argument. Mills’s rhetoric turns toward the performative and he enacts, for the potential members of a New Left, a new way of personal being as well as ideological action. Mills performs an act of ideological ventriloquism for his implied audience.

Implications Without question, the “Letter to the New Left” represents a strong break with 1950s attitudes of adjustment, acceptance, and moderation. As an instance of constitutive rhetoric, we might judge it as particularly effective, for within five years of the letter’s publication, the term and its implications were gaining currency among supporters of a “new America” (Griffin 1964:115–27). The paradox that defines Mills’s rhetorical challenge, of course, like those of all NSMs, is that the “revolution” begins with the individual: it is a matter of “thinking differently” and seeing oneself and one’s situation differently. In this regard, Mills’s “Letter” implicitly recognizes the link between the individual and the politics of action, thus articulating what would become the controlling values and ideology of the New Left Movement (McCann and Szalay 2005:444). I have argued that Mills’s rhetorical performance discursively develops an identity of the New Left. Exploiting the conventions of the public letter, Mills constructs an image of himself and develops his ethos as a model of the kind of imaginary open to members of the fledgling social movement. But more than that, it seems clear that the form of the public letter fits hand in glove with the new ideology Mills envisions for a young Left. Pushing together public and private, a common trope of the public letter, this rhetorical form models the political ideology of the potential movement that takes as an axiom the connection between private problems and political causes. Through the manipulation of syntax/pronoun usage, Mills addresses a “fictive” movement that his rhetoric seems to presuppose already “exists.”

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By implicitly recognizing, in its rhetorical form, the link between the individual and the politics of action, Mills’s “Letter” accomplishes many of the functions that Maurice Charland (1987) has identified with “constitutive rhetoric.” First, Mills reimagines the role of intellectuals in political change and shows examples of the “young intelligentsia” moving against the status quo. This process of defining a collective subject is vital; for if a “new Left” exists at all at the time of the publication of Mills’s “Letter,” it exists only in ideology (Charland 1987:139). To tell of the possibilities and, indeed, responsibilities of the “young intelligentsia” is implicitly to assert the existence of a collective subject who is the protagonist of history and change. As Mills sees it, of course, change is already happening. In offering examples of activities by students around the world, Mills (1960:258) notes that “this is by no means the complete list: that was yesterday; see today’s newspaper.” Thus does Mills invite his intended audience to see themselves as part of a transhistorical movement and to assume the roles of actors within that movement (Charland 1987:140). But this political action in the world is situated already within the commitment to analysis, critique, and programmatic change that Mills argues is definitive of “the Left.” This “ideological fiction” is what Althusser (1971:170) means when he writes that there is no practice except by and in an ideology. Political identity must begin as an ideological fiction, even though, as Michael McGee (1975) has noted, this fiction becomes historically material and of consequence as persons live it. Finally, Mills offers his imaginary audience the chance to “become” the second persona he describes for them. In an instance of Althusserian interpellation, Mills “summons” his audience to follow the logic of his construction of them and their situation. As he announces his vision for the movement, the implied subjects are invited to follow the logic of Mills’s inspirational vision and become what they are interpellated as, a new young Left inspired and capable of creating social and institutional change (Charland 1987:141). As Charland (1987:141) puts it: [T]his positioning of subjects as historical actors can be understood as a twostep process. First, audience members must be successfully interpellated. . . . Second, the tautological logic of constitutive rhetoric must necessitate action in the material world; constitutive rhetoric must require that its embodied subjects act freely in the social world to affirm their subject position.

Mills’s implicit appeal to intellectuals is a striving toward self-actualization mediated through collective activity. The potential members begin the process of identifying with the collective interests articulated through “membership” in a movement. Moreover, these characteristics, evident in the “Letter,” show a parallel with other new social movements that are grounded in

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the construction of personal identity. The movement becomes the focus for the individual’s definition of himself or herself, and action within the movement is a complex mix of the collective and individual confirmations of identity ( Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield 1994:7–10). Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” also articulates one linkage between rhetoric and politics. It suggests that our analysis of discourse, when focused through concepts of rhetorical style and audience address, has the potential to add to our understanding of identity and ideology. As Hariman proposes, the rhetorical style of political discourse is itself ideological. We have seen that what Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” offers its audience is a vision of the necessary relation between self-realization and revolutionary social transformation (McCann and Szalay 2005:445). And the persona of the “Letter” enacts this vision in the discursive style of the text. I believe our close reading of Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” traces the formation of subjectivity in and through identification offered in the discursive form of the public letter. As Burke (1950) and Althusser (1971) have argued, the relationship between discourses, their audiences, and the ideologies within which both are constituted is varied, complex, and may perhaps be best studied only by attention to specific cases. Moreover, the relation between ideology and identity through Mills at a moment that is sometimes seen as a turning point between these two modes of action can significantly add to existing scholarship. Our analysis suggests that these two constructs may be more complementary than the typical “old social movement model” versus NSM narrative might hold. What this example implies is that identity and collective action are not definitively separated in NSMs; they are co-dependent. Finally, as David Bromwich (2005:469) has argued, perhaps Mills’s most enduring trope is the radical sense that there are times when reimagining the reality of the self is itself a significant step toward political action. Indeed, some have suggested that it may well be that we are now living at another such moment; and, if that is so, then Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” is a text which may speak to us yet.

Notes 1. An oft-repeated piece of hagiography is that Mills was the founder of the New Left in America. This formulation offers the usual blend of myth and fact. The myth is that he was connected with the nascent Port Huron movement that led to the formation of Students for a Democratic Society. The fact is that he was casting about for new moorings to anchor the antinuclear movements in Europe and the revolutionary movements of the Caribbean (Horowitz 1983:191).

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2. Mills wrote his “Letter” in specific response to Bell’s (1960a) The End of Ideology. Mills and Bell had publicly disagreed for some time in an intellectual feud. The End of Ideology contained a scathing repudiation of Mills’s most famous work, The Power Elite (1956), and Bell more than once referred to Mills as a “vulgar sociologist” (Udick 1994:142). In turn, Mills’s “Letter” (1960:247) referred to Bell’s group and the end of ideology tagline as “cultural gossips [who] have taken it up as a posture and an unexamined slogan.” Sadly, Mills’s death in 1962 cut short the discourse (Horowitz 1983:194). With respect to Mills’s “Letter” urging a new moral crusade and utopian commitment, Daniel Bell wrote a response titled “Vulgar Sociology” (1960b). 3. According to Udick (1994:142), Mills also wrote the letter for another reason: he wished to praise E. P. Thompsons’s Out of Apathy (1960), a collection of essays that examined the alleged failure of socialists and other leftists to present the West with viable political solutions to postwar problems. Thompson hoped to dispel the fear caused by McCarthyism, thereby reinvigorating Western socialist inquiry, as well as providing good reading for future leaders of the Left during periods of conservative backlash. 4. These new social movements included such examples as spiritual/New Age religious movements (holistic health movement, scientology); movements based on gender; movements based on sexual orientation (Act Up! and eco-lesbian feminism); ethnic revivalist movements aimed at the reappropriation of ethnicity (Canadian Québécois, Spanish Catalan); nationalist movements, and environmental movements (Earth First!) (Hauser and Whalen 1997:134).

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CHAPTER

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Sharing Our Recipes: Vegan Conversion Narratives as Social Praxis PATRICIA MALESH

I became a vegetarian because of a chicken named Pandora and a girl named Carrie-Ann. As a child growing up in suburban Baltimore, all I knew about chicken was that I preferred dark meat. Until, that is, I inherited Pandora. I was twelve years old and she was six weeks old, rust-colored, and the quintessential pin-up girl for those calendars awash in snapshots of baby animals that adorn doctors offices and day care centers nationwide. The day that I brought Pandora home, we had barbecued chicken for dinner. It was late spring, and my father was tending to the grill as I sat playing with my first pet on the picnic table. When dinner was ready, my father set my food chicken down in front of me. And in front of my pet chicken. Pandora looked at my dinner, smelled it, and looked at me. I looked at her looking at my dinner and looking at me. My father looked at me, looked at her, looked at my dinner, and looked back at me. We were all silent for a moment. We never knew if she knew what was for dinner that night, but we did, and it was making us uncomfortable. This is my story. It changes a bit with each telling. I’ve told it time and again—sometimes I focus on Carrie-Ann, other times Pandora. I’ve told it to strangers who eye my hummus wrap suspiciously as we sit too close for comfort on a lunchtime flight. I’ve told it to family over cranberry relish and wrapping paper and to friends and suitors on six-hour hikes in the Rockies and two-hour coffeehouse conversations in Tucson. Lately, it has found an audience of scholars hungry for insight into the persuasory potential of storytelling as identity-forging social praxis. It is the story of my becoming and, like other such narratives, it breathes meaning into experience and blurs many boundaries—those between truth and fiction, past and present, personal and social, scholarly and colloquial. This chapter is also a story. It is many people’s story and the story of their stories. It, too, blurs those same boundaries as an act of resistance against

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scholarly norms and disembodied theory. However, no act of resistance is completely free of what it resists. As Jerome Bruner (1991:8) claims, “A breach presupposes a norm” and, in doing so, grants that norm legitimacy. Such is the plight of those who actively engage in social and cultural change and those who study it. In this chapter, I narrate this enigmatic struggle by analyzing the rhetorical dimensions of personal narrative. Specifically, I extend and theorize vegetarian and vegan “stories of becoming” as recipes for identity that individuals share to lace their experience with meaning and show others possibilities for resistance, defiance, and change. It has a happy ending.

Narrativity as Social Movement Praxis As interactive instruments for making and sharing meaning, narratives are constructive accounts that storytellers use to create experience rather than recount it. Episodic in nature, narratives are collections of befores and afters that foil one another in service of the motives of the storyteller. By linking strings of events with changes in perception, authors and their audiences use stories to wrestle with the sociocultural nature of meaning and to process the values and norms that influence identity formation. In this respect, stories are more than personal accounts; they are social tools that both reflect and break with cultural norms to help individuals and collectivities digest experience and dramatize processes of becoming. As such, stories, and their telling, are inherently rhetorical, contextualized, purposeful, and dialogic actions. Because narratives are both personal and social, normative and transformative, fact and fiction, temporal and timeless, scholars seek to understand how narratives function not only as texts but also as what Jerome Bruner (1991:6) calls “instrument[s] of mind.” Such inquiry into narrative construction examines how and why individuals and communities construct narratives by placing psychological and cognitive affect in dialogue with sociological, anthropological, linguistic, philosophical, educational, and literary theory (Watson 1973; Ricoeur 1980; Bruner 1990, 1991; Connelly and Clandinin 1990; Baumeister and Newman 1994; Braid 1996; MacLure 1996; Krantz 1998). By integrating these conversations with one another, cross-pollinating each with the discursive practices and canonical foci of the others, scholarship on narrativity promises to extend our understanding of human nature and interaction. This is especially valuable for the study of social change. When we infuse our study of social movements with cross-disciplinary scholarship on narrative, we uncover the ways stories, and storytelling, act rhetorically by influencing the formation, maintenance, and evolution of movements and their constituencies over time. This transformative potential of narrativity arises from its ability to sponsor adjustments in and claims to

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identity that take place both as collective identities form and as individuals subscribe to them. Not surprisingly, then, narrative variance affects how narratives function as social movement praxis. According to Robert Benford (2002:53) narrativization, as movement activity falls roughly into two categories: participant narratives (personal narratives)—those that describe individual, movement-related experiences and, when “bundled together,” help create group “ideoculture”—and, subsequently, movement narratives (controlling, overarching, or master narratives)—those shared tales that are “collectively constructed by participants about the movement and the domains of the world the movement seeks to change.” By examining how such master narratives are formed and disseminated, carving collective identities from shared experiences and reframing perception under social umbrellas as they are, social movement scholars theorize the ways that narratives function as tools for social change (O’Farrell and Kornbluh 1996; Peterson 1996; Kaplan 1997; Polletta 1998; Kane 2000; Vila 2000; Baxandall 2001; Kaplan 1997; Harper 2001; Ganz 2001; Louie 2001; Davis, 2002; Auyero 2003; Apostolidis 2005; Atkinson 2006). And like other rhetorical tools, they can build, dismantle, and creatively reassemble the houses of the masters depending on who wields them (see Amado-Miller, this volume). Since movement narratives are comprised of multiple participant narratives, and wielded by a variety of people in a variety of situations, master narratives are not always cohesive or self-contained. Borrowing from McGee (1999) and Ehrenhaus (1993), Joshua Atkinson (2006) describes master narratives as a collection of fragments whose disparateness contributes to their rhetorical value. In his research on anarchist resistance narratives, he describes movement master narratives as “dense reconstructions” that are formed from bits and pieces of other narratives that “exist as a fractured set of competing voices [that] contextualize one another” when they are gathered within a larger narrative (254–55). These fragments, or participant narratives, often recount personal experiences that are then woven into tales of collective experience as a means of defining and fortifying collective identity and reframing individual acts of dissent as collective sociopolitical resistance. Once they take shape, such fragments circulate in movement literature, float down from pulpits and podiums, and linger in the crowd at movement gatherings (virtual or actual). They are also shared interpersonally as storytellers harness the power of the intimate in both the stories they tell and the situations in which they tell them. In such cases, narrative fragments exert influence equal to, or greater than, the master narratives to which they often contribute. Testimonials and conversion narratives, as the stories of “How and why I became,” often evoke change in this way. As one subgenre of participant narratives, conversion narratives speak to a moment or event, or series of moments or events, that transform those who experience them and are most often associated

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with religious or spiritual awakenings. Like religious testimonials, vegetarian and vegan conversion narratives are not only tales of personal transformation and sources of comfort and support for fellow believers; they are also powerful tools for evoking such transformations in others—whether they are intentionally employed as such or manifest transformation organically. Vegetarian/vegan conversion narratives1 exemplify these rhetorical dimensions of storytelling and illustrate one way that participant narratives function as social movement praxis. In the rest of this chapter, I examine vegetarian/vegan conversion narratives as structured and purpose-driven “stories of becoming” whose meaning and influence are contingent upon the audiences and situations in which they are shared. Specifically, I argue that the transformative dialectic of personal interaction that characterizes many of these stories is retroactively fitted to experience, by storytellers, in order to claim agency over their decision making, justify personal beliefs as socially significant, build collective identities, and, ultimately, enact alternative realities as a means and vehicle for conversion.

Conversion Narratives and the Making of Reality By claiming that narrative construction and the storytelling that follows are activities that make meaning, cognitively and socially, scholars argue for an understanding of narrative in which the “action” of a narrative is not so much a recounting of events and realities as it is a selection and encoding of events. This process of selection involves not only choosing which events to include/exclude, but also determining their worth and relationship beyond temporal occurrence. Through these substantive and organizational choices, narrators give events their meaning and weave them into an interpretive frame—a story whose trajectories serve the needs of the narrator. In this respect, narrators who form stories to articulate personal experience do not pass along truths so much as craft what Jerome Bruner (1991) terms “verisimilitudes” that bear witness to the agency of the narrator. For Bruner, Narratives do not exist, as it were, in some real world, waiting there patiently and eternally to be vertically mirrored in a text. The act of constructing a narrative, moreover, is considerably more than “selecting” events either from real life, from memory, or from fantasy and then placing them in an appropriate order. The events themselves need to be construed in the light of the overall narrative. (8)

Following Bruner’s lead, Baumeister and Newman (1994:688) study narrative construction as “exercises in self-interpretation” and storytelling as a psycho-

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logical and sociological convention that serves to justify and/or legitimize our actions and beliefs. According to them, humans craft stories to satisfy four primary needs for meaning—for purpose, for value and justification, for efficacy, and for self-worth. All of these needs emerge as individuals attempt to navigate and understand the intersections of self and society that comprise identity. “Stories of becoming” in particular are burdened with articulating this intersection since the transformation they detail involves juxtaposing past and present versions of an eternal self whose transformation both “canonizes” and “breaches” cultural norms (Bruner 1991). Conversion narratives are, not surprisingly, among the most transparent in juxtaposing past/present/future versions of self. In her analysis of the “stories of becoming” of teachers turned action researchers, Maggie MacLure (1996) describes just how personal narratives bridge disparate, temporal versions of a more encompassing, static self. Of such narratives she writes: Life-stories are pre-eminently journeys of the self. They tend to be told from the inside out. But here too is the same paradox: the self undergoes changes; but it remains in some essential sense “itself.” The self (e.g. the teacher, the sociologist) becomes the Other (the academic, the non-specialist) against which it once, oppositionally, drew its definitional strength. But this leaves that (retrospectively recalled) prior self in the potentially uncomfortable ontological position of Other to itself. . . . Narrative structure offers, or seems to, a way out of that dilemma of living on both sides of that borderline between self and other, us and them, when the notion of a core or singular self requires that we reside unambiguously on one side. (1996:274–75)

The “sides” that differentiate past, present, and future self are produced by disruptions in the relationship between self and society. They occur when individuals stumble upon, or are led to, crossroads in which their claims to identity, and the actions that convey such claims, either include or exclude them from cultural and social norms. “Stories of becoming,” then, are more than vehicles or structures that alleviate the discomfort of personal transformation; they are opportunities for narrators to claim agency over this transformation and, by doing so, prove their autonomy over their identity to themselves and others. This is especially true of transformations that are culturally unpopular. For vegetarians/vegans, their past self is one who is bound to meat eating as a dominant culture of consumption and social norm while the present (and future) self is one who embodies an alternative to this norm. Because this change of heart, and identity, is not socially sanctioned by dominant culture, vegetarians/vegans craft stories that pinpoint and relate significant moments of reflection to one another in order to explain and justify their newly adopted,

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countercultural beliefs. Often, the story that emerges centers around a personal interaction between the past self of the narrator and a symbolic figure— a friend, a lover, a relative, a stranger—who represents her present/future self. My own narrative is no exception. Though I began this piece with the story of Pandora, my narrative would be incomplete without the story of Carrie-Ann. I met Carrie-Ann in college. It was 1991, and I was a few months into my freshman year at Salisbury State University, a small liberal arts institution on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. After meeting at our freshman orientation, Carrie-Ann and I became fast friends. We struggled together to understand our newfound freedom and responsibility and to take charge of our futures, all the while grappling with our emerging identities as we evolved awkwardly from adolescence into independence. Since Salisbury State had not yet adopted the food court paradigm, we dorm dwellers spent much of our time in the dining hall, long since torn down, where we served up large portions of social networking while being served equally large portions of oily Americana fare, fried foods, square desserts, and soft ice cream. The dining hall in those days was all-you-can eat, so I did. Although my dining posse included a number of characters—a skateboarding painter from England named Kingsley, a heavy metal–loving, black-clad chain smoker named Joe, and a private school princess named Kate who bore a striking resemblance to Cindy Crawford—it was Carrie-Ann who ultimately impacted me the most because, besides my elementary school music teacher, she was the only vegetarian I knew. As the semester wore on, and lessons from my “Philosophy of Ethics and Morality” class sank in, I spent more and more time asking Carrie-Ann questions about her choice to become a vegetarian: Why did she do it? Didn’t she miss meat? What did her parents think? Did she ever cheat? At first, I admired her choice but knew that I could never remove meat from my diet. It was too much a part of my daily routine, my upbringing, and my taste buds. Unlike vegetarians who never really liked the taste of “flesh,” I loved meat. I couldn’t imagine never again eating fried chicken or Maryland steamed crabs. Even after I became a vegetarian, I had dreams about cheese steaks for years. Eventually, however, the more time I spent with Carrie-Ann, the less meat seemed to be a part of my life. She lived as an example of the possibility of a meatless existence, and I began to understand my meat eating as a choice instead of a given, as a lifestyle instead of life-giving. For me, Carrie-Ann, a good friend and classmate, was a powerful symbol who embodied an alternative reality. And as such, she was my gateway into

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it. In sharing her narrative with me, she performed an act of what Barbara Laslett (1999:255) calls “emancipatory resistance,” a type of cultural resistance that “inform[s] audiences about systems of domination” and “create[s] a space that can cultivate an alternative ideology.” Undoubtedly, I was also influenced by other factors—Gandhi, my work with the Center for Conflict Resolution, local chicken processing plant workers in blood-encrusted knee-high boots en route to their bank on payday, Pandora on that spring morning in 1986. But, I’ve long held that the conversations I had with Carrie-Ann allowed me to reflect on these other experiences and visualize the possibility of a life without meat as well as own my decision to embrace it. Like my narrative about Carrie-Ann, many vegetarian/vegan conversion narratives emphasize personal interaction with another individual as a primary impetus for change. These narratives are commonplace in movement literature such as cookbooks, ‘zines, organization periodicals, and other collections.2 The conversion narratives of Sarah Kramer and Tanya Barnard (1999), which they share in their popular cookbook How It All Vegan!, exemplify this common vegan cookbook trait. In their narrative, Sarah and Tanya, respectively, write: “There are so many events that have brought me to this point. One of them is my best friend, Tanya”; and “I also had to convince my family and friends that my new lifestyle was a healthy one, and that I wouldn’t suffer for my choices. Luckily, I have Sarah” (14–15). Similarly, as part of her “coming to the light” narrative, vegan restaurateur Tanya Petrovna (2003) credits her housemate Joanie for opening her eyes. In the introduction to her Native Foods Restaurant Cookbook, she writes, At UC Santa Cruz I chose a major in biology and met my housemate Joanie Anderson. Joanie loved to cook French cuisine but went macrobiotic for health reasons and ate mostly vegetarian. It is here that the lights shone down from heaven and the dance began as Joanie introduced me to the crafts of making tempeh and seitan and the history of macrobiotics. (5)

In this account, Joanie is Petrovna’s catalyst for change. By exposing Petrovna to the raw materials, or building blocks, that characterize an alternative lifestyle, Joanie exemplifies the possibility of living such a lifestyle and, by doing so, sponsors a spiritual, personal, and activist awakening in Petrovna, who then shares her narrative in the hopes of doing the same for others. Though the above accounts reference specific names and moments, some narratives rely on anonymity to enforce the symbolic, more universal, role of “the other” (the present/future self ) and communities of “others” in fostering personal transformation. Isa Chandra Moskowitz, co-host of the cooking show Post Punk Kitchen and author of several popular vegan cookbooks,3 makes use of this technique in the “So Who Am I and How did I Come to

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Write this Cookbook” section of Vegan with a Vengeance (2005). For her, the anarchist culture and community in New York in the 1980s led to a synthesis of her desire to enact social change and her eating habits: I had been hanging out more and more on the Lower East Side and getting involved with the anarchist scene there. I was not yet sure where my political affinities lay, but I knew that I respected what the activists and punks were doing: taking old decrepit buildings and turning them into homes, creating community gardens, making their own newspapers and ‘zines, and just generally giving a damn. I had already been listening to punk and dying my hair purple and making my own clothes. Vegetarianism was not a new concept to me—at the age of eight I made the horrifying connection that Puff Kit, our cat, was an animal just like the cows we ate. Once I started meeting people who were vegetarian it felt like the most logical and ethical way to be. I already knew that I didn’t want to be part of a system of oppression; changing my diet was an easy and practical form of activism. (2)

Whether such accounts involve naming names or referencing more symbolic communities, as Moskowitz does, whether they live in the pages of cookbooks or my e-mail inbox, sent in response to a national query for such narratives I conducted in 2003, narrative after narrative reflects similar sentiments. One vegetarian claims he became such because of his sister and his (now ex-)girlfriend. Another attributes her transition to her mother, who, she claims, became “an ethical vegetarian” as a “personal protest against the war.” Yet another attributes her transformation, now twenty-five years later, to a couple of high school chums, and still another to Morrissey, the lead singer of The Smiths, who shared his narrative in the lyrics and liner notes of The Smiths’ album Meat is Murder. A college roommate, a co-worker, a man on an airplane, a teacher, an anarchist. The stories go on and on. What is most significant about these narratives, and the narratives that inspired them, is not that individual interaction is solely responsible for personal conversion. These interactions surely intersect with other experiences, experiences like mine with Pandora and Isa Moskowitz’s with Puff Kit, that are resurrected and colored with meaning after the fact. Such retroactive coloring is evidenced by descriptions of one-on-one encounters with animals in which narrators ascribe animals rhetorical agency. Tanya Petrovna made her first step toward vegetarianism as a teenager after a trip to a farm in France during which she discovered where veal came from. One survey respondent’s narrative included an encounter with a cow farther removed from field and farm. As the climax in her narrative, she describes this event:

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At a stoplight eating a BigMac, thinking of only my pleasure and not another’s suffering[,] a cattle truck pulled up next to me in the left turning lane. . . . Looking anyway, I saw noses out of all the available holes. . . . The steer 2 feet from my face put his face in and put his eye to the hole. He had a laceration above his eye and was bleeding down his face. He just stared while I stared back at him. . . . I never ate meat again.

Similar sentiments are echoed by another survey participant who shared her story: One day about 15 years ago, I had just left a burger king and was driving back to Pennsylvania from VA. I came around a curve and started to pass a truck loaded with cattle. One of the cows looked at me through the hole. I put the burger down, cried for miles, and have never eaten meat since.

Though these narratives do not include a character who symbolizes the current/future self of the narrator like the previous examples, they function similarly. Because these narrators begin their narratives as adherents to meat eating as a dominant culture of consumption and end with their transitions to vegetarianism, they embody—and by doing so offer and justify— an alternative to dominant cultural perceptions, making possible such a space for others to inhabit. Conversion narratives, then, are not only tales of becoming; they are tales that sponsor becoming. The rhetoricality of such narratives, their constructive rather than reflective constitution, is shaped by their audience and the contexts in which narrators engage them. Like other conversion narratives, vegetarian/vegan conversion narratives have three primary audiences—the narrator as audience, those who share the narrator’s beliefs and experiences as audience, and those whom the narrator wishes to convince to do so. When the audience of the narrative is the narrator herself, the act of constructing a story out of a sequence of events forges meaning in two primary ways—it helps narrators isolate or convince themselves that they have agency over their own decision making, and it helps them justify their beliefs (and their processes of adopting them) as socially significant and in line with the experiences of others. Stories, in general, are opportunities for narrators to affirm their own agency. Baumeister and Newman (1994: 686) unpack this rhetorical dimension of storytelling: [S]peakers share stories so as to maximize their own sense of control and efficacy. As acts of interpretation, stories themselves may contribute to a sense of control. More to the point, people construct stories in ways that seem designed to maintain and increase their sense of being in control over

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The tendency for vegetarians/vegans to isolate personal interactions with role models as the climax of their tale of conversion arises from this need to reinforce the power of personal agency. It also helps explain why so many of these narratives include an encounter between the narrator’s past self and a symbolic figure that acts as both role model and model and mirror of the narrator whose existence makes possible the narrator’s evolution from past to present self. Such accounts simultaneously testify to the agency of our mentor and to our ability to mentor others in kind. By doing so, conversion narratives are powerful tools for building collectivities. Since vegetarians/vegans come in all shapes and sizes, claim a variety of backgrounds and philosophical dispositions, cross political and geographic boundaries, and are not immediately recognizable by other vegetarians/ vegans, the need to establish a cohesive identity across difference is especially important. Marshall Ganz (2001) articulates storytelling’s potential for community building in “The Power of Story in Social Movements,” in which he analyzes the role of narrative in the farm workers’ movement of the 1960s. He writes, “When we tell our story we do identity work, reenacting who we have been and forging the persons we have become. As an interaction among speakers and listeners, story telling is culture forging activity” (2). Like race, class affiliation, gender, and sexual orientation, dietary practice is a marker of identity, one that can marginalize those who embrace it as such when their version is contrary to dominant norms. Such marginalized populations often seek out sources of support that reaffirm their beliefs, articulate shared experiences, and, in doing so, provide community and comfort. A common way this support system is developed is through the sharing of conversion and experiential narratives. These narratives, when exchanged, affirm that others share similar histories and have experienced similar paths toward a nondominant culture of consumption. They are crucial for acts of identity forging because although people may desire to regard themselves in certain ways, they do not feel that they completely hold these identities until their claims attain social reality by virtue of being recognized and accepted by other people. Telling stories about oneself to others may be a vital means of causing these other people to recognize and validate one’s identity claims. (Baumeister and Newman 1994:680)

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When conversion narratives are shared between insiders to build community, they highlight the patterns—roadside revelations, persuasory personal interactions, moments of spiritual and ethical awakening, trajectories of change— that justify their beliefs and their processes of adopting them. Conversion narratives that focus on dialectics of personal interaction as an impetus for conversion justify countercultural beliefs as socially sanctioned and reconfigure individual stories, or narrative fragments, into larger cultural and movement narratives. When these same narratives are shared with outsiders, they act quite differently. Instead of boiling shared perceptions into a flavorful stew of community and resistance that nourishes those who partake of it, storytelling aimed at outsiders is more like an hors d’oeuvre that prepares the palate for the main course yet to come. Such “stories of becoming” whet the appetite of outsiders by reconfiguring individual eating habits as cultures of consumption that we chose to subscribe to or abandon. The act of sharing a conversion narrative, then, is an opportunity for movement adherents and advocates to speak on behalf of their community and “show others the light” by replicating their own experience of conversion. In their sharing, such narratives are doubly conversionary—acting both as a tale of one’s own conversion and recreating that experience for listeners in the hopes of causing them to experience a conversion of their own. As a means of conversion in and of itself, both the narrative’s content and the narrator’s dramatization of it act rhetorically. The perceptual adjustment each narrator hopes to evoke in her audience begins with the character of “the mentor” and ends with the narrator’s actualization of this character. To justify their transformations as culturally sanctioned, narrators introduce their own version of Carrie-Ann, or Joanie, or Morrissey—a character who already subscribes to the belief the narrator adopts by the end of her narrative. This character, a mentor and metaphor for the present/future self of the narrator, acts as a representative of a community of individuals who have already, consciously, adopted the future beliefs of the narrator. The consciousness of this character is evidenced by the narrator, who positions this character as a mentor, recounts their conversation as an impetus for change, and then adopts this mentor role herself as she shares her narrative in the hopes that it will end in the conversion narratives of her listeners. Key to the conversionary potential that is unleashed as the narrator becomes “the mentor” is the subjectivity and accompanying agency of the narrator. When narrators share their stories in situations that mimic those they describe, they occupy two subject positions simultaneously. As the subject of the narrative, the narrator is the subject and agent of change who learns from a mentor and who evolves over the course of the narrative, moving from dominant cultural values and norms to the nondominant ones that the mentor

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embodies, literally. As the storyteller, the narrator is speaking as her own future self, the one that is symbolized in the narrative by the mentor figure. The storyteller, then, acts as a mentor to her listeners and as such places them into the role of the agent of change—the subject to undergo conversion. Just as the mentor in the narrative served to justify the narrator’s decision to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle, personally and socially, so can the narrator for her own listeners. If we think of conversion narratives in this way—as both tales of conversion and vehicles for conversion—and narrators as occupying dual subjectivities, then my own narrative, as you know it, is incomplete. In August 2004, as part of my research into how individuals become vegetarian and why, I spent time at PETA’s headquarters in Norfolk, VA. Located at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, overlooking one of the country’s largest naval installations and a center for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, PETA is a presence in the community. A five-story glass building, PETA’s headquarters houses hundreds of employees who work on a variety of organizational projects, including educational materials, grassroots organizing, activist campaigns, business relations, and undercover investigations. During my visit, I was given a tour of the building and the different departments within. Since food is such a large part of PETA culture, my tour necessarily included the kitchen. When I entered this small room on the second floor, my host introduced me to two women who were grabbing a quick cup of mid-day coffee. I immediately recognized one of them. As we shook hands, I struggled to make sense of my situation. Here I was, in Norfolk, Virginia (half a country away from Tucson, where I’d been living for the past four years and where I made the leap from vegetarian to vegan), face to face with a face I recognized. She recognized me as well. After several minutes of fruitless guessing on both our parts, she suddenly said, “Wait, did you work at ***** seafood house in Ocean City, Maryland, about ten years ago?!” I had. What followed is a testament to the power of narratives as movement activity. Without taking pause to consider the coincidence we found ourselves in, my former co-worker proclaimed, “Oh my God! You’re the reason I became a vegetarian! You changed my life!” She recounted the day I shared my conversion narrative with her as we folded napkins and waited for the dinner rush. The conversation my narrative led to left her thinking about meat in ways she hadn’t before. Eventually, she became a vegetarian, then vegan, as she developed a general interest in animal welfare, which in turn led her to apply for, and take, a job at PETA. At the time of our 2003 reunion, she had been

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working at PETA for five years and was currently heading up their campaign to end animal testing by cosmetic companies. Needless to say, both our days of serving seafood are now long behind us, though the narratives about them are still emerging.

The Happy Ending If vegetarian/vegan conversion narratives tell us anything, it is that stories are complex, versatile, and powerfully rhetorical tools that we use for constructing and demolishing claims to identity and culture. The ways in which narrators construct and then dramatize their stories evidence how storytellers in search of meaning retrofit incidents with isolate weight and significance that may or may not have been there in the original experiencing. They expose the role that less public, interpersonal exchanges play in manifesting higher-order social change. For scholars interested in such change, narratives are rich sites of movement activity that offer insight into the dependent and convoluted relationship between sociocultural norms and resistances. They also illustrate the multifaceted dimensions and rhetorical proclivities of collective identity as it emerges and evolves. The narratives that I’ve examined in this chapter are but a sliver of those that characterize vegetarianism/veganism as a social movement in the United States. They detail discrete interactions between peers in which the ethos and agency of the narrator propel the narrative, self-replicating with each telling and each generation. In limiting my scope to an analysis of such accounts, I necessarily had to forego an analysis of other influential types of narratives that populate the vegetarian/vegan movement literature. Movement narratives such as “the story of the cow” and other gory tales of rearing, rendering, and dismembering are regularly disseminated by movement organizations and also serve to inspire conversion. Since conversion narratives represent only one type of narrative that movement constituencies share, they are necessarily fragmentary in their offering. However, they help us understand social movements and movement narratives as colorful mosaics, ones that we, as scholars of change, help craft. In this chapter, I am the narrator, and the journey of discovery that I narrate is but a fragment itself. Though both movement narratives and conversion narratives (as fragments of the former) are without doubt influential, another type of narrative merits our attention. It is the narrative of change itself. As Brenton Faber (2002:21) points out, Change itself is a story, and stories are acts of change. The stories we read, watch, hear, create, and enact are powerful, interpretive acts. They provide

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Patricia Malesh security and continuity. They create resistance, opposition, and conflict. They provide a cultural record of who we are, where we have been, and what we hope to achieve. Stories document our habits, successes, failures, and lessons learned. They place our culture’s defining events, oddest moments, and strategic messages into common narratives we assimilate, refine, and then pass on to next generations.

Just as no act of resistance or narrative of change is free of what it resists, neither are approaches to scholarly writing that aim to transform the nature and norms of such writing as I have tried to do in this chapter by blurring the boundaries between civic self, cultural self, and scholarly self. Autoethnographic in nature, this chapter emerged out of my conflicted subjectivity as an embodied scholar and exemplifies why we, as theorists who study activism, must own our participatory influence and acknowledge that we, too, walk the line between reinforcing scholarly norms and reenvisioning them. We, too, pass our stories along to future generations. Our scholarship is always our story, and whether we tell these stories with words, with images, or with our bodies, they are the stories of our “becoming” and our inexhaustible potential to do so. Notes 1. On vegetarianism and veganism as a social movement: Vegetarians of all ilks participate in movement praxis. This includes vegetarians who consume different combinations of dairy, egg, and even fish, such as lacto-ovo vegetarians, lacto-vegetarians, ovo-vegetarians, and pesco-lacto-ovo-vegetarians. It also includes vegans or strict vegetarians (who exclude all animal flesh, dairy products, eggs, honey, and other animal derivatives such as wool, silk, leather, casein, and gelatin). However, not everyone who follows these practices identifies with or participates in the movement proper. Health vegetarians, those who follow a diet for health rather than lifestyle or ethical reasons, do not espouse the same rhetoric as ethical vegetarians, nor do they understand their dietary choices as a defining feature of their identity or as countercultural activity aimed at social transformation. For this reason, “health vegetarians” are not understood as participating in vegetarian social movements, although, by nature of their daily practice, they can and do advance the aims of the movement. This distinction between the testimonials of ethical vegetarians and the accounts of health vegetarians is important because the latter do not construct and use their conversion narratives to make sense of their experiences, build and take comfort from community, or convert others in the same ways as ethical vegetarians. My examples of vegetarian/vegan conversion narratives and storytelling come from ethical vegetarians who identify with the movement. Some are from movement literature including cookbooks, literary collections, ‘zines and magazines; others are from a national survey I conducted in 2003, primarily with members of VeganOutreach and PETA.

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2. See Living among Meat-Eaters (Adams 2001) and Voices from the Garden (Towns and Towns 2001). 3. Vegan with a Vengeance (Moskowitz 2005); Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World (Moskowitz, Romero, and Quin 2006); Veganomicon (Moskowitz and Romero 2007); and recipes on www.theppk.com (Post Punk Kitchen n.d.).

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Changing Spaces for Learning: Actions

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CHAPTER

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Moving Students into Social Movements: Prisoner Reentry and the Research Paper DAVID COOGAN

In “Critical Teaching and Dominant Culture,” Cy Knoblauch (1991) relayed a troubling experience teaching Toni Cade Bambara’s story “The Lesson” to mostly white middle-class students at SUNY Albany in the early 1990s. The students argued that the real lesson in Bambara’s story about inner city kids estranged at the decadent FAO Schwarz toy store in Manhattan is that no matter who you are or where you come from, you can get ahead in America and afford to buy whatever you want if you only work hard enough. Knoblauch, who had wanted his students to critique America’s cult of conspicuous consumption, lamented this reading about equal opportunity. But he asked us to see it productively, as a teachable moment, a Freirean opportunity to help students question those social arrangements that perpetuate inequality. As a graduate student of Knoblauch’s—not much older than the students he was writing about and not much different (white, middle class)—I identified with both the students and Knoblauch. I could see myself simultaneously as a part of the “dominant culture” that the students defended and of the university-led social movement resisting it: critical pedagogy. When I graduated from SUNY and began my first job at the Illinois Institute of Technology, on the south side of Chicago, I tried to address these competing identities head on, to resolve the tensions I felt as I rode the EL train south from my middle-class, north side neighborhood into the largely poor and black south side where I taught writing and literature to engineering majors, the people who would eventually take their place, as Knoblauch said of the undergraduates at SUNY Albany, in the “managerial” or professional classes. I taught Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in that same south side neighborhood in the 1930s, a man who can’t handle the pressures—real or imagined—of working in a rich, white household. He ends up killing their daughter, fleeing the scene, hiding from a lynch mob, and going to jail to await his trial and death. His lawyer, an outspoken, liberal Jew, tries to help Bigger see that the

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racism and classism he experiences—the forces that “force” him to kill—are experienced by working-class people everywhere. But having had little experience with people outside the black community, Bigger can’t easily see the point. Although Wright’s literary naturalism made this mutual ignorance across the races seem so absolute that it was, in some ways, implausible, I still wondered how much had changed since Wright wrote in 1940. I wondered if blacks and whites on the south side of Chicago saw each other much differently than Wright imagined they did in his time. On a whim one day I asked my students if they had seen any Biggers around campus lately. Some caught the hook and looked up. Others took the question more literally than I had meant it, straining to see the el stops, the housing projects, something or someone nearby. One guy said he had seen Bigger asking him for money that morning. Others wondered aloud about the ones they’d seen on the train. A conversation then unfolded about our insularity from the residents and how it was possible that we could share the same city space but not know each other beyond the abstractions of “race.” It wasn’t a bad way to teach Native Son, actually. But it wasn’t enough, at least not for me. Critical pedagogy had helped me “take up” the inner city in my teaching: to create critical consciousness in students and myself about racism and classism in America. But it had not elbowed me into enterprising partnerships with communities who wanted to do something about it. Though I continued to teach courses like the one described above and would argue they can play a crucial role in developing students’ abilities to link literacy with ethical living, I also began teaching upper-division community writing projects that made those links more explicit. In these projects, students advocated for increased parent involvement in the public schools (Coogan 2006b), documented community leadership practices in public housing (Coogan 2005), and created an oral history of Richard Wright’s old neighborhood, Bronzeville (Coogan 2006a). These projects took shape in postliberal Chicago: The Chicago Public Schools had derailed its decentralization movement from the 1980s (which had empowered parents as key decision makers). And the Chicago Housing Authority had embarked on a new era of slum clearance, closing high rise after high rise, giving only those residents meeting new qualifications the vouchers they needed for apartments in the private market. The watchword was gentrification. Moving students into this public sphere with hopeful visions of social change was like asking them to make out the shape of a ship through the foamy wake of more radical currents. Showing them how to engage the issues did not mean showing them how to fight the good fight—how to make the best case for the just cause—but rather showing them how to read public discourse critically and populate it productively, how to analyze the discursive history of a

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public with an eye toward compromise and kairos. What I learned from this is that we need more from social movements than the clarion call to fight. We need opportunities to organize inquiries into those social problems dividing us. Stumbling backward into social movements through service learning projects challenged me to see the rhetorical work of movements differently. Before I began partnering with nonprofit organizations with much more than an academic stake in a social issue such as school reform, I assumed social movements were always idea-driven, succeeding when they articulated arguments that compelled people to change. And while I encountered a bit of this from public housing’s staunch defenders, I mostly encountered people-driven movements: community organizers attempting to open up dialogue with their charges, to listen as much as to persuade. Because the organizers treated my students and me the same way, I came to see dialogue as the heart of it all. That social movements can sponsor dialogue across difference does not mean that they will. Students need more than a shove toward the street. They need task-oriented projects that center on writing and the relationships that writing can form with community partners. In what follows, I show how several of my students, enrolled in a required sophomore research-writing class—an Honors section I designated as service learning—did just that; how they found footing “out there” in the prisoner reentry movement, through a partnership that I set up with a nonprofit organization serving recently released prisoners, Offender Aid and Restoration of Richmond (OAR).1 Their charge was to help OAR on a fundraiser calendar project called the Faces of Reentry, to survey clients about experiences and record discursive fragments that could be used in the calendar. While they were learning how offenders struggled to reenter the American mainstream after prison, the students were developing arguments springing from their experience with the “reentry” movement: research papers on issues facing the offenders—in this case, homelessness and substance abuse. Before I discuss the students’ work and what it tells us about the rewards of dialogue, I’d like to say a bit more about the course and the materialist rhetoric that I used to help students appropriate a place for themselves in the rhetoric of reentry. From there I discuss how two students, Ryan Ally and Joel Basco, used it to find their footing in the reentry movement, both in their service and in their writing. I end by evaluating these outcomes in terms of what they can tell us about writing and social change.

The Rhetoric of Reentry A productive way to understand the reentry movement—and more broadly, the dialogic potential of social movements in the classroom—is to help students

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identify the key ideographs that have enabled agents to narrate social change and to characterize other agents (McGee 1999). Ideographs are rhetorical shorthands containing the commitments and beliefs of a public. In this, a materialist orientation, rhetoric is not the sum total of discourse but the creative attempt to control discourse and material conditions (McGee 1982). What one tracks when one tracks this form of power is not a history of ideas, a structural array of discourses, or even an individual will to power—intentions, psychology—but the way particular agents use words to claim resources, build coalitions, invent institutional roles, or generate controversy (Greene 1998). As shorthand, cultural commonplaces, then, ideographs coat the surface of ideological and material conditions, enabling elaborate justifications of “reality.” In the rhetoric of reentry, “the system” figures prominently as an ideograph, extending to offenders a vision of equal opportunity and personal responsibility. Reentry requires their active participation: ending substance abuse, getting a job, finding an apartment, getting a G.E.D., and so on. “The system” functions as an ideograph by warranting positive characterizations of offenders as capable citizens and rational actors, people who want to “reenter” the legitimate system they once resisted. Reentry also asks citizens, businesses, correctional institutions, voters, and politicians to fix “the system” that offenders struggle with once out of prison; to reduce recidivism and stem the costs of incarceration created by a generation of “tough on crime” policies. It is a movement, writes Chris Suellentrop (2006:46) in the New York Times Magazine, that has emerging bipartisan support in Congress in the form of the Second Chance Act. The exigency for such legislation really began in the 1980s when the prison population expanded to record high levels. Sinead Keegan and Amy Solomon (2004:1) of the Urban Institute Justice Policy Center have shown that “between 1980 and 2003, the Virginia prison population more than quadrupled, increasing from 8, 521 to 35, 429 people.” Not surprisingly, the reentry numbers have also increased: In Virginia, “10, 635 prisoners were . . . released in 2003, nearly three times the number released in 1980 (3,582).” Upon their release, most offenders tend to go back to their neighborhoods where “poverty is more than twice as high” as it is in other parts of the state; where crime and “unemployment rates are higher;” and where “the share of families that are headed by a single female is significantly higher than the state as a whole” (1). Half of the offenders in their study “had not graduated from high school,” and “a majority had a history of drug or alcohol abuse”—a staggering 78 percent. Of those released in Virginia, the majority were men, 63 percent of them black, a large percentage from Richmond and Norfolk, two of Virginia’s largest cities (Keegan and Solomon 2004:1, 20). If the state could claim that the fourfold increase in incarceration has effectively reduced crime and recidivism, the backchannel story these numbers

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tell of poor school performance, unemployment, inadequate parenting, and substance abuse might not be so alarming. But in Virginia, at least, crime rates have not plummeted and recidivism remains high, despite bold legislative moves in the 1990s, including the abolition of parole and Truth-in-Sentencing laws mandating longer sentences for violent and repeat offenders. Prison writer Dannie “Red Hog” Martin has long noted the problems with these laws and “the Mount Everest of time” they create: new family strains, increased violence, and substance abuse (Martin and Sussman 1995:255–260). Even the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs (OJP) (n.d.:n.p.) recognizes that this “tough on crime” attitude has created problems in prisons and in society: Some correctional officials—under pressure to cut costs—have curtailed prison programs and services that could ameliorate factors that place inmates at higher risk of recidivism after release. Tougher sentencing laws have, in some cases, removed or limited inmates’ incentives to enter available treatment programs. Long, fixed prison terms for serious offenders can sometimes have the perverse effect of returning the most risky offenders to the community with the least control and supervision.

What the OJP says about the lack of treatment programs and inadequate, post-release supervision seems especially relevant to Virginia, where only 17 percent “received formal, professional treatment” for substance abuse and “the average caseload size for supervision officers in 2003 was 77 per officer.” Not surprisingly, close to half of these offenders are reincarcerated within two years for breaking the terms of their probation or parole, either through technical violations or new offenses (Keegan and Solomon 2004:25–31). Those who do not go back to jail find their way to places like Offender Aid and Restoration. Some lack job skills. Some lack a work ethic. Some lack resumes, rides, or even the right clothes for the job. They struggle to make it in a system that discriminates against offenders on job applications. They need counseling, classes, and comfort. As Barbara Slayden, Executive Director at OAR put it in an interview with a local newspaper, “To many of these clients, incarceration is not punitive. They already have nothing.” She concedes that “[m]ost of the public often says, ‘Why should these people who’ve committed crimes be given anything?’ But the people who request our services do not have friends and family. If they did, they wouldn’t need us” (Waterfield 2006:1). The way Slayden sees it, a big challenge is to overcome public perceptions—to move past negative characterizations of offenders. When we consider these characterizations alongside the material conditions that they name—Keegan and Solomon’s (2004) portrait of reentry in Virginia—it seems clear that helping offenders contend with “the system” is in the public’s best interest, if that public wants to reduce crime, recidivism, and public spending on incarceration.

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That spirit of struggling to make it in the system engaged my students after they enrolled in the course. What they knew about English 200, beyond that it was required, was that it would teach them how to write a fifteen-page research paper on a topic of their own choosing. Theme-based sections of the course had been done before by other faculty, but this section was the first one designated as service learning and subnamed “Writing and Social Change in the City.” Students had their choice of organizations to work with, including OAR and others that served immigrants and inner city teens. I chose organizations that would help me foreground the role of “writing” in social change, just as I emphasized student writing as an instrument of social change. The course description linked the two together. This course teaches you how to write a substantial, well-researched argument about a social problem in Richmond. I start with the assumption that your writing can bring about social change, but it needs to be tied to community activity. Service learning enables that activity; research enables you to make sense of it. The goal is not to discover the truth— what’s true in all situations—but discover the right course of action: what’s true in this particular situation. If we knew how to “fix the schools” or “end homelessness” wouldn’t we have done it by now? When we don’t know what to do, we don’t need air-tight, academic analyses but well-reasoned arguments appropriately addressed to people who can actually do something. In that sense, the link between your serving and your writing will be incredibly important, because that is where you will find your focus and your audience.

Connecting “the truth” with “particular situations” and “to people who can actually do something” emphasized the inevitable sophistry of argument. I used Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee’s textbook, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (2004), to flesh out this rhetorical approach to research. I wanted to test the limits of what they call “dissoi logoi”—the idea that “at least two opposing and contradictory logoi (statements or accounts) exist in every experience” by asking students to generate “focus” and “audience” through their experiences in the community (28). This challenged them to seek out those contradictory logoi, both in themselves and in their community partners, and to cut a pathway through it. Research was reconfigured, then, as a rhetorical practice of intervening in the discursive history of a community and of constituting shared interests and responsibilities. The course goals made that connection more explicit, promising to teach students how to:

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define a research issue facing the community that you serve explore your experiences with the issue construct a paper trail of arguments about the issue evaluate the authority, the reasoning, or the visibility of the arguments in your paper trail identify opportunities for rhetorical intervention at the local level invent ideas and construct a discourse suitable to your projected audience test the discourse with community partners circulate the discourse in the right venues Where a traditional set of goals emphasizing research skills might emphasize the evaluation of credible sources, this set emphasized their placement within a particular discursive history; it emphasized judging sources “authority” and “visibility” in the “papertrail,” or what Crowley and Hawhee also describe as the “chronos” of public discourse. Clearly, rhetorical inquiry in the community had to fit students’ own histories and needs. But from a practical point of view, as the one who had to arrange with these organizations, I had to set some limits. I reasoned in the syllabus that “since this is a course in writing, I thought it might make sense if we worked with organizations that are also working with people on their writing.” OAR made the short list for that reason and was represented to students like this: “Clients at Offender Aid and Restoration of Richmond are learning how to become productive citizens. They need our help writing resumes and learning computers so they can get work when they get released.” This, anyway, was the plan. But scheduling difficulties made it hard for the students and staff to put it in motion. That’s when we hatched up a second plan with the staff, to generate text for a calendar, the proposed fundraising project called the Faces of Reentry. The students and I generated a survey for clients to fill out on a voluntary basis as they waited to attend other meetings. Ryan described the experience of administering the surveys in a reflective essay at the end of the semester. In his hands, “dissoi logoi” becomes, much more than a tool for invention, a catalyst for community building; Ryan found the material for his argument in the material conditions that he was exposed to at OAR. One man in particular was very hostile to us at first and was visibly disgusted when we told him we were VCU students. I think he expected us to get angry and blindly argue with him in defense of VCU. Instead we asked him why he doesn’t like VCU, and how he feels it has done him wrong. We admitted to him that we’ve only heard about the good things that VCU has accomplished in the city, and we asked him to show us the other side of the story. This led to one of the best conversations that we had at OAR. While

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In this scene, Ryan presents competing accounts of the same experience— what Linda Flower (2003) calls rival hypothesis making. He and his classmate took in the offender’s hypothesis about Virginia Commonwealth University’s negative role in the community and challenged him to take in theirs. Though they “did not necessarily agree,” their respectful disagreement made a difference, as Ryan puts it, because they helped the man “vent his frustrations” and become “less skeptical” of VCU students and possibly others, too. Ryan argues that “this in turn can lead to him having a more positive interaction with society”—a reasonable conjecture, in my view. At issue in that conversation was VCU’s treatment of the homeless in Monroe Park, a large public park that once was at the edge of the campus and is quickly becoming engulfed by new university construction. Though the homeless still use the park, it is unclear if they will be able to do so in the future, a problem that Joel took up in his paper, “Homelessness: Definitions, Images, Change.” Taking his cue from Randall Amster’s Street People and the Contested Realms of Public Space (2004), Joel began to see “public space” as an ideograph about who “we” are as a community. Using the common topic of “definition,” Joel scrutinized the way the park had been redefined as a privatized space, within “a larger class of things” that excludes the public and disadvantages the homeless (Crowley and Hawhee 2004:70). Joel argues below that it is unclear whose space the homeless now occupy: In relation to issues going on at VCU, it is well known that VCU has been handed the responsibility of maintaining Monroe Park. The park was public space, but now it is becoming increasingly privatized by VCU’s presence. It is a common occurrence to see homeless people being woken up from much needed sleep and thrown out of the park. If it is truly public space then nobody should have a say in who can and cannot be allowed to stay in that park.

Joel then locates himself in that same “contested realm” of public space, connecting Amster’s thesis to an experience he had near the park. I want to quote

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at length from this section of Joel’s paper to discuss the way he resists the ideograph of public/privatized space to invent an advocate’s ethos, both in discourse and in practice. I witnessed the new laws of public space at work within the Student Commons at VCU. It was a Tuesday morning. I was getting breakfast before going to volunteer for a couple hours at Offender Aid and Restoration. While I was eating, I saw an African American man, about mid 40s, sit down and start to eat his own breakfast at a table not even three yards away. We were both minding our own business just watching people as they passed by. Our only difference was our age and the way we dressed. I had clean clothes, and he had older looking, shabby clothes. A few minutes later I observed three VCU police officers approach the man and explain to him that this was private property. The police proceeded to ask him for identification and other personal information. They ran his name through a search in a criminal database system and began to profile him, asking him his age, weight, height, etc. They just about did everything they would do to an arrested criminal except read him his Miranda rights. In my opinion, it was unnecessary. They finally threw him out after a long deliberation of warning him and talking about VCU policy. I was disgusted by the whole thing and at the same time amazed to see my research unfolding before my very eyes. My reaction was to follow the man outside of the commons and offer to pay for his lunch in exchange for a little bit of his time for a quick interview and his thoughts on what he had just experienced. He introduced himself to me as “Barry.” He said that he did not understand why he had to be kicked out of the Student Commons because there were no “private property” signs anywhere. He expressed his concern about not having a place to stay especially in the coming winter. I asked him why he could not work, and he showed me his broken arm. He had no money to pay for health care and therefore no way out of his situation and no hope for employment. I feel ashamed, even now, that these circumstances exist. Barry had a broken arm, no home, and no work and in return, we threw him back out onto the streets (Barry, personal interview, November 1, 2005).

Joel’s empathy and inventiveness here—buying the guy lunch and listening to his side of the story—not only help them both save face but also help Joel form a dialogue between his research and his service. He is “disgusted” by the reaction of the VCU police and “amazed” to see his “research unfolding” before his eyes. What unfolds in his writing are these positive characterizations of himself and Barry, who together resist this part of “the system” that the homeless (including offenders) contend with. By engaging an “other” in dialogue, Joel resists the privatization of public

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space. By extending his research into another forum, he invents a plausible ethos, a proof that persuades in its activity as much as in the gloss on Amster. Crowley and Hawhee (2004), in their discussion of ethos, suggest why this kind of movement matters. They extrapolate from Aristotle’s distinction between “the way rhetors live” in private and “the appearance of character . . . presented within their discourse.” To focus on character, as opposed to personality or identity, is to focus a reader’s attention on those “moral practices” that are “habitually engaged” by rhetors in public (166–67). This proof from ethos, I should emphasize, was generated through his service work at OAR, where he first “got to know a homeless person,” an “African American man, worn and torn by age and what life had done to him.” This formative experience helped Joel develop a positive characterization of offenders who had become homeless, something he could carry with him back to campus. And while such movement hardly parallels ex-offenders’ moves back to society, it approximates that part of it that depends upon an encounter with difference. Of this experience at OAR, Joel writes: Frankly, I was expecting to get a complaining spirit and a “story” from just another person that would end up haggling me for money in the end. Chris was different from the start. He came into the room with bright eyes, and a firm, friendly handshake. I was taken aback. His character absolutely intrigued me.

What intrigued Joel was the man’s altruism—the very attribute that John Sloop (1996:131), in his exhaustive survey of twentieth-century discourse about prisoners, says we seldom see in public discourse about African American prisoners. Before Chris had been in jail, “he allowed homeless people to stay at his apartment” and “he had only been stolen from twice.” In the following passage, Chris narrates a process of social change to Joel that has its basis in that altruism. What surprises Chris so much is that people are not as willing to help others as he was before he went to jail. It is discouraging for him and makes him want to only look out for himself now. Chris shattered every stereotype of a homeless man. Even if he was poor and shabby-looking, he was not lazy, untrustworthy, or just looking for money or a free meal. He is one of the most selfless men I know. Most people I know do not even accommodate the homeless in half the ways he did. I was dumbfounded and ashamed of my attitudes and assumptions. It was my encounter with Chris that began to change my view of homeless people. In truth, every time I take the time to meet another homeless person, I learn something new and become more and more empathetic for their seemingly hopeless situations.

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In these encounters with Chris, Joel shatters his own stereotypes about “lazy, untrustworthy” homeless men “looking for money or a free meal.” Seeing Chris’s example gave Joel a new way to construct his “character.” It began, as it did for Ryan, when he opened himself to a stranger’s sophistry, in the best sense of that phrase—to an unfamiliar logic or teaching from an “other.” That practice, by the way, seems to be at the heart of reentry, too. This is what Ryan seemed to emphasize in his paper on substance abuse—the communal responsibility of reentry. The heart of his argument was about the process of receiving drug offenders back into public life. He made the case powerfully in his section about Michael, a man he met at OAR who was born and raised in Richmond and who “spent 20 years in jail on cocaine charges.” Michael told me he used drugs at first to impress people, a need which arose from failures in school. Michael believes that a lot of inner city youth, especially in Richmond, begin using drugs in order to impress others just like he did. One of the first things Michael told me in our conversation was that he would never again turn to drugs. He declared this with an air of confidence and passion, leaving no doubt in my mind that he would stay clean. He feels that the stability he has gained from having a place to live, having job training and the ability to get a decent job give a person hope and the ability to stay away from drugs. Most importantly being trusted by others and also being capable of meeting their needs and expectations serves as great motivation. Michael also feels that he has an important contribution to make to the community, by talking to troubled teens about drugs.

Michael’s story about using drugs to impress people begins with the instability of failing in school. It ends with the stability of trusting and being trusted, of “meeting” another’s “needs and expectations,” which he developed through “job training” and assistance finding a home. Like Joel, Ryan incorporates himself into this expansively humane vision of society where offenders “find purpose, a sense of stability” and “direction.” It is to his benefit that people such as Michael make it his responsibility, as much as his readers’, to help them do it. Of course, conclusions such as these—about the value of humane, interpersonal connections—risk obscuring the politics of identity in reentry rhetoric. This is what happened to Joel when he came to identify strongly with the plight of his informants and asked his readers to do so, as well. It is only because of our support systems like family and friends that we are able to get by. Just think. What would happen if those were suddenly taken from us? We would be in the same position as the homeless around VCU. Homeless individuals are no different from us apart from their lack of housing and employment.

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He added that first line about support systems after I argued with him during a conference that “we” were unlikely to become homeless or go to jail, because of where “we” come from and the resources “we” enjoy. In the first draft, the emphatic reasoning “what if we lost all?” was what he led with. And yet, this was an important passage for Joel, in both versions: writing it helped him form the audience he needed. It also helped him fashion a politics, as Kurt Spellmeyer (2003:9) says, “from wherever we find ourselves”: In a genuine democracy, all politics become local politics because the decision making that matters most occurs at the local levels. By the same token, a democratic culture will not teach us to look beyond our actual lives for the solution to our problems: it will remind us instead that solutions of some sort always lie at hand, even when our hands have been tied. Given the degree to which our hands have been tied, any discussion of genuine democracy may sound to many ears more fantastic than real, but the loss of faith in our own capacities for action keeps us locked in a vicious cycle of dependent thinking that only worsens our real dependency.

We have to begin with the language and convictions we have. This is how we break the “cycle of dependent thinking” that lets us imagine an ideal solution out there. In appropriating a place for himself in reentry, even in his blurry equality across difference where “anyone” can become homeless, Joel learns how to do “local politics,” however flawed.

The Anxiety of Outcomes What I say of Joel and Ryan I can say of myself and my effort here as the coordinator. Our activity took shape that semester as an inquiry—an attempt to tell the story of reentry to a public that, in our view, had not really heard it or understood it. And our work did not end, when the semester ended, with a finished calendar. In fact, the calendar did not get made. The students and staff and I met regularly to evaluate our progress, to see if we had enough material to tell the story of reentry in a calendar. We did not. Some of the clients had said very little in their surveys. Others had much more than a fragment to utter. In fact, they wanted to tell their stories and wanted help doing it. So we established a writing workshop in the hopes that we might generate enough material to make a small, self-published book about reentry. Although the writing workshop did not start until the next semester, Joel and Ryan followed the process along, at least until their prior commitments made it impossible. Later that summer in 2006 I took the next step, initiating a writing workshop at the Richmond City Jail, where OAR also has an

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office. I wanted to help offenders tap the discursive terrain of their experiences, articulate the limits they had constructed (or had been constructed by), and begin arguing alternatives, a process not without precedent (Novek and Sanford 2006; What I Want My Words to Do to You 1994; Salzman 2004; Tannenbaum 2000; Lamb 2004). Strip Poker: A Writing Workshop at the City Jail will tell the story of that workshop. The fourteen autobiographies that will appear in this book began with a workshop at the city jail and continued through the U.S. mail with prisoners throughout the state of Virginia; those life stories continue to this day in the English department at Virginia Commonwealth University, where I teach the men who have been released. These men, mostly African Americans between their thirties and early forties, enrolled voluntarily because they wanted to change their lives, and because they wanted to show fellow citizens that prisoners could change. They outpaced dozens of others who dropped out of the class after they found it too hard or too threatening to own up. As the workshop with offenders got underway, I also developed a new course in Prison Writing in the English department. While my students are studying the prison movement, the rise of the prison industrial complex, and contemporary narratives of prison and reentry, they are also helping inmate writers, typing up the drafts of their autobiographies, and meeting the ones who have been released. Though I do not have space to discuss fully the book project or the prison writing course, I wanted to mention them here to make a more general conclusion about the sorts of outcomes we might expect when we throw our weight behind social movements. When we see social movements as places to begin much-needed inquiries into social issues—as opposed to ready-made phenomena with the arguments worked out—they can become remarkably generative in the classroom. And while sustaining such inquiries is not the same thing as gaining ground, in the political sense of advancing a cause or winning resources, in some cases we need to till the soil before we can plant the seeds. And the rocky grounds of public discourse on prisons and prisoners in America are in serious need of tilling. Prisoners, “like most objects of discourse,” contends John Sloop (1996:194), “become familiar to the public through fragmented representations . . . from reading People magazine in the waiting room of the dentist’s office, from viewing CNN before supper, or from conversing with friends.” What is familiar from these fragments is not the fact that 50 percent of all prisoners are Caucasian, but that violent, irredeemable, minority prisoners dominate the system. For these reasons, we need activists, as Celeste Condit (1998:182–83) reminds us, to oppose “the discourses of the present.” But I believe we also need what she calls “politically progressive academics” to take up “larger time horizons and the formation (and/or formalization) of new ideologies.”

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Condit’s distinction between activists and politically progressive academics resonates with the historical development of social movements more generally, and with the prisoner reentry movement more particularly. Gerard Hauser and Susan Whalen (1997:130) have suggested that new social movements—and I would put reentry in this category—are not as easily perceived as “movements,” in the traditional sense: they do not have charismatic spokespersons, a hierarchical infrastructure, or even a clear set of grievances to mobilize the disempowered. This is because “mobilization is no longer wholly rooted in economic interest or grievance,” but in “the moment at which that movement extends a compelling attractive vision of the meaning of everyday life” (128). That these “choices” to self-identify with NSMs arise out of material conditions seems clear to Hauser and Whalen (1997). What troubles them is the disconnect between the “language” of NSMs and the “economic structures” that inform them. In their example, the language of political correctness flourished “as a political movement even as welfare mothers [were] demonized, union workers [were] de-unionized, the poor in America [grew] poorer” (139). The language of reentry, likewise, has flourished as our prisons have grown larger, more punitive, profitable, and, arguably, more racist. The activist responds by protesting prison construction, as Angela Davis’s organization, Critical Resistance, has done in California (Critical Resistance n.d.). Condit’s (1998) politically progressive academic, charged with forming new ideologies, responds by challenging people to question their commonplace thinking about crime; to cross psychological and rhetorical boundaries that make impossible reasonable dialogue across difference. Because it treads lightly on the less tangible terrain of ideology, seeking only those material conditions that make dialogue possible, politically progressive academic work does not necessarily deliver big rewards. Ryan and Joel may have changed their minds about offenders—may have challenged offenders, too, to see our university differently—but the system handling offenders would hardly know. My point is that idea-driven movements risk sacrificing the social, dialogic part of social movements. There are hazards in rhetorical activism that we should recall before we start placing it above politically progressive academic work. An ideographic analysis of reentry alongside its radical predecessor, the prison movement, will help me elaborate. Eric Cummins (1994) has shown in his critical analysis of the rise and fall of radical prison reform in California that the old prison movement succeeded through creative coalition building with the antiwar movement, radical black liberation movements, and the hippie counterculture. It functioned, rhetorically, as a synecdoche for cultural “imprisonment” and the white, middle-class ennui. It had charismatic spokespersons such as George Jackson and clear grievances to change prison labor practices and related restrictions on

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prisoner liberties. It was, as Hauser and Whalen (1997) would say, an “old social movement” premised on the class identity of a group. These material conditions in the old prison movement gave spokespersons a different rhetorical charge. For Eldridge Cleaver (1968), a former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army activist, “the system” became an ideological shorthand for the American “system” of racism, classism, sexual Puritanism, and political imperialism. In Soul on Ice (1968), he used it to identify prisons with other institutions that perpetuate inequality at home and abroad, to characterize prisoners as political victims, and to narrate change for prisoners and citizens in the free world in terms of political awakening (see also Jackson 1970; Shakur 1999). Cummins (1994), who has followed the prison movement’s rhetorical paper trail toward its apotheosis in the 1970s, has argued that radical excesses, both in prisons and in free society, fatally wounded what once were reasonable attempts to organize prison laborers and end inhumane punishment practices. George Jackson’s career, for Cummins, encapsulates that tragic undoing. Jackson travels a path from early incarceration as a teen to physical resistance with guards and inmates, new charges, an extended sentence, prisoner organizing, resistant writing, solitary confinement, an autobiography, Soledad Brother (which created in the editorial process a questionable “George Jackson” as a victim of “the system,” an ethos that even Jackson later disavowed in his second book advocating individual acts of violence), and finally, paranoia, which ended in a suicidal escape attempt with a gun widely believed to have been supplied by Angela Davis. Although Jackson’s story attracted much attention and, in the martyrdom phase, translated well into an ideograph of systematic inequality (Cummins 1994:171, 213),2 mainstream publics soon ran away from the radical prison movement and its “soft” approaches to incarceration. In a cynical and not entirely incorrect reading of this history, reentry has captured bipartisan support in Congress today because it has successfully muted those earlier critiques of a racist or classist American “system.” It has co-opted the once-potent protest ideograph—wrested it from narratives of collective struggle and positive characterizations of criminals as political prisoners—and reduced it to American commonplaces about personal transformation and equal opportunity. Reentry does not characterize offenders by their class: They are not comrades, black soldiers, victims of racism, or what George Jackson, in Soledad Brother (1970), named the “lumpen” proletariat. They are simply individual “offenders.” In these ways, reentry is a movement for its times, reflecting a broader shift away from the collective politics of the 1970s and toward the postmodern preoccupation with discursive identity. If this larger drift away from class politics truly belonged to politically progressive academics alone, I suppose I would be more anxious than I am about the sort of social change I seek in my work. In the conclusion to his

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book, Sloop (1996) also admits that the development of the modern gulag in America makes him wonder if criticism can really do anything to shape the world. But he presses on, as Condit (1998) suggests we should, by looking for new ways in which criticism can, as an act of criticism, help us construct that larger ideological horizon. The performative side of criticism, if it is going to have a significant influence culturally, must be highlighted in arenas that will heighten its strength . . . it must be my task, and the task of critics in general, to increase the impact of criticism by finding outlets that increase its prominence as a cultural fragment, that aim toward opening up possibilities for a creative imaginary for the future. (193)

What Sloop says of the critic we might just as well say of the student and teacher laboring with social movements in the classroom: both need to find ways of “increasing the impact” of their work and groping toward that “creative imaginary.” Our responsibility, as teachers, students, and scholars, is to form those publics that can perceive a more inclusive imaginary. One of the offenders who helped me value this kind of rhetorical work made the case for it best with two stories, her response to a survey question about her best and worst recent memories. One of my most recent, best memories was yesterday. A bird fell off an awning at 6th Street Market. Fell on its head, knocking it unconscious, bleeding. After about ten minutes of holding the sweet critter within the warmth of my hands and bosom, it took flight from my hands. It lived! One of the worst was being beaten and robbed of $12,000 life savings while walking across to my bank to make a deposit. It has left me with infected sores, broken ribs, hungry, without warm clothes and hungry. Police that investigated the incident has not gotten back in touch with me and I’ve called and mailed almost everyday the last three weeks. I’m being treated as victimizer instead of the victim of a broad daylight hideous, violent crime.

Though I know she did not mean to make an analogy about reentry (I talked with her about it after I drafted this essay), the stories seem to work that way, arguing the case beautifully. The “sweet critter” lived because she gave it “warmth.” She drew it close and it grew strong enough to fly. This woman, too, had fallen and was bleeding. She was hungry, cold, and alone. Tired of falling, she needed help reviving. She needed someone to suppose her story was true. And while supposing alone cannot change reality for offenders and free citizens, it clearly energizes them to imagine they can; to have some place to start, beginning with themselves.

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Notes 1. For more information, see Offender Aid and Restoration-Richmond (2007). 2. See also Evans Hopkins (2005), which traces its author’s attraction to the Black Panther Party and to George Jackson’s writings.

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CHAPTER

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Engaging Globalization through Local Community Activism: A Model for Activist Pedagogical Practice ANNE MARIE TODD

As technological advances increase the speed at which the globalizing influences of everyday life penetrate our college campuses, our students are quick to adjust. It is just as easy to make MySpace friends with someone from Asia as from Alaska and call cross-country while walking cross-campus. It is similarly simple for students to buy bananas from Brazil and Polo shirts from the Philippines within walking distance of their dorms. In addition to processes of globalization evident in the ubiquity of their personal media and consumer experiences, students also encounter sociocultural globalization on campus when they interact with classmates who are first- and second-generation immigrants, walk past student-run booths about global warming and sweatshops, and watch news coverage of the “War on Terror” from a treadmill at the Student Recreation Center. In addition, student perspectives on globalization are influenced by their backgrounds. While children of immigrant workers likely have a clearer perspective about the realities of NAFTA than their white-collar counterparts, children for whom the Internet has always been a reality are likely to view the global flow of information quite differently from those who hail from rural, “unconnected” backgrounds. Given the diverse demographic of our student body, including the manners in which they have been exposed to globalizing forces such as those mentioned above, one of the primary challenges faculty face is to help students make sense of these experiences and develop an awareness of how their experiences are similar to or different from the experiences of others. As scholars and educators, we help students examine their experiences and beliefs critically by introducing them to theoretical frameworks that help them see their daily experiences as tied to and indicative of this larger global restructuring. Scholars across disciplines note the importance of teaching our students how to understand and navigate globalization as part of their postsecondary learning

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(Bergeron 2004; Bryan and Vavrus 2005; Irving, Yeates, and Young 2005; Kasai and Merryfield 2004; Larner and Walters 2004; Lingard 2006; Jhaveri 2004; Tikly 2001). They also recognize, as part of this, that as students’ everyday practices globalize, so must their own teaching practices if they hope to help students see connections between what they learn in the classroom and what they experience outside of it (Rajan 2001). According to Suzanne Bergeron (2004:314), “students increasingly experience the effects of globalization in their everyday lives, the frameworks for understanding concepts such as multinational capital, international finance, global commodity chains, and structural adjustment.” Since this is the case, educators need to ask students to recognize and reflect on globalization in their own lives instead of “plac[ing] the focus on abstract narratives of global change,” since the latter separates conceptual discussions and theoretical frameworks from lived experience (314). To address this gap between classroom concepts and student experience, we need what Arjun Appadurai (2000:18) calls a “new architecture for producing and sharing knowledge about globalization . . . [that] helps to democratize the flow of knowledge about globalization itself.” Such an approach to teaching and learning must account for student perspectives and experiences of globalization to make theoretical explanations of globalization’s processes and effects more comprehensible. In this essay, I offer one possible answer to this call—activist learning as pedagogical praxis. By asking our students to participate in and reflect on community activism as part of their coursework, scholar/teachers can foster students’ awareness of themselves as global citizens and agents of change. In this chapter, I offer a model for getting students to engage globalization through local community activism. I argue that such an approach helps students come to understand the many ways their daily lived experiences are tied to larger socio-politico-economic forces. I begin by defining activist pedagogy and offering an example of what such a pedagogy might look like in the context of a communication course on social movements. I then define activist learning by detailing a case study project that solicited such learning. Ultimately, I argue that assignments that ask students to investigate and reflect on their activist experiences, and teaching practices that support them in their inquiries and efforts, no matter the discipline, encourage students to (1) engage theoretical concepts of globalization through practical experience and (2) recognize their abilities to be agents of social change.

COMM 130: Social Movement Communication One key component in developing a pedagogical praxis for activist learning is our awareness of our own context and student body. In my case, my context

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was an upper division elective course (COMM 130: Social Movement Communication) for Communication Studies majors at a large metropolitan university in California. The university’s student population of 28,000 is robustly diverse: many are first- and second-generation immigrants from Asia and Latin America, 80 percent of students work at least part time, and they carry a wide range of political and social opinions. Unlike a residential campus that is a focal point for student life, this commuter campus features students who are considerably engaged in their community beyond campus: their work communities and families play central roles in their sociocultural experiences. The students who take this upper-division elective choose to do so for a variety of reasons, including personal interest, schedule availability, nearness to graduation, etc. Thus, many students who choose to take the course are not already inclined toward activism as one might otherwise expect. COMM 130’s curriculum is premised on the idea that social activism is a part of the democratic process and thus incorporates historical and theoretical approaches, examining diverse perspectives on what constitutes a social movement, how movements organize, and what different tactics of protest are available to activists. Students in the course participate in community activist organizations, primarily through communication-based activities: e-mails, face-to-face group meetings, canvassing the local community with petitions and information, designing and distributing flyers, and marching in local rallies. The course curriculum is designed to promote student awareness of the role of communication in activism. The specific learning objectives for this course are as follows: (1) Students will be able to identify processes of globalization relevant in their own lives; (2) Students will be able to identify historical and contemporary social and institutional power relationships that spark activism; (3) Students will be able to identify diverse approaches to activism and evaluate the effectiveness of activist communication; (4) Students will reflect on their own role in civic engagement, with particular emphasis on their place in globalization. In order to meet these learning objectives, each semester students read and analyze theories of social change in class discussions and written assignments. Within this context, I incorporated a service and activist learning approach that is “rooted in social change movements, [and] combines community involvement with analytical reflection about the social context in which that experience occurs” (Goldstein 2004:307). According to Anderson, Levis-Fitzgerald, and Rhoads (2003:86), an “increased shift toward a more global society call[s] for particular forms of citizenship education”; democratic learning environments are “vital components in preparing students as active global citizens,” and faculty are “transformative agents” pushing for social change. Service learning integrates meaningful community participation with classroom instruction in order to foster students’ development of

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democratic values and their development of critical citizenship (see Anderson, Levis-Fitzgerald, and Rhoads 2003; Howard 1998; Saltmarsh 1996). For me, adopting an activist pedagogy meant changing not only how and what I taught, but also where I taught. For students to gain practical understanding of globalization, they must leave the classroom. Lectures about economic integration, global communication networks, or adaptive climate change teach students about globalization. However, true learning/teaching involves offering students a way to engage globalization beyond the lecture and after the midterm. It also means expanding our notion of community participation to include activist learning. Activist learning is a pedagogical practice that asks students to identify and engage concepts in their own communities (see Cushman 1999; Hamrick 1998; Lemisch 2003). Activist pedagogy is premised on the assumption that the activist experience can provide a perspective through which students may gain understanding of social and institutional power relationships. Like service learning, activist learning is considered to be engaged curriculum. Yet activist learning is distinct in its call for students to find their own mode of active civic engagement, and “to envision themselves as actors or agents in political arenas” (Bickford and Reynolds 2002:230). Activist learning employs social change as a lens through which students may see potential in their own lives. Scholarly research identifies two categories of learning outcomes in the engaged curriculum: student outcomes related to intellectual skills and student personal outcomes (see Dasaratha, Ravenscroft, Wolcott, and Zlotkowski 2000). As educators, therefore, we must evaluate the degree to which students become activist learners by their acquisition of knowledge and their engagement in reflection. Instructors across disciplines can integrate these skills by providing students opportunities to reflect on their learning through writing. Writing assignments that ask students to analyze the rhetorical situations facing activists and reflect on their own agency prepare them for such work in several ways. First, they require students to explore the communication skills necessary for civic engagement and evaluate their own communicative strategies accordingly. Second, such assignments combine action with reflective writing that facilitates students’ development of critical consciousness (McLaren and Farahmandpur 2001:136). Third, they help students apply theory to contemporary examples as they analyze “real rhetorical situations in which to understand writing as social action” (Heilker 1997:71). Such writing requires students to do more than reflect on rhetorical situations that they don’t or won’t relate to; it also asks them to delve into their own experiences and strive to understand their relationship to the community. Courses in communication can incorporate activist learning into the curriculum through focus on how activists incorporate oral tradition, interpersonal communication, and public campaigns, for example (see Droge and

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Murphy 1999). Throughout the semester, COMM 130 students become active learners by writing about their insights and experiences as activists. Over the course of the semester, students are to observe and analyze the activities of an advocacy group or organization of their choice, and write reflections about their community participation. As part of this, students keep personal journals in which they describe their experiences and engage in ongoing reflection about their participation. Each student turns in at least five journal entries in which they have documented their experiences and explored the connections to course learning objectives. Students also each write an integrative and analytical paper (five to six pages) in which they reflect upon their experience with their activist organization, and evaluate the effects of their participation. In this chapter, I analyze a representative sample of student writing as a case study to assess the course project and evaluate participation in local activist groups as a way for students to engage globalization.1 Written responses in journals and reflection papers demonstrate that this is a particularly salient example of activist learning, a permutation of service learning that has proven effective in getting students to engage globalization. In the following analysis, I incorporate quotations from student written responses as examples of and support for my findings.

Analysis of Student Writing The final project is premised on the assumption that participating in local activism offers a way for students to understand historical global processes that contribute to economic inequities, environmental destruction, or human rights abuses. Initially, student choice of an activist group provides insight into their own sociocultural experiences. Over three semesters, the majority of students gravitated toward several types of organizations: environmental groups (six students), labor unions (six), global justice organizations (eight), and international human rights projects with local chapters (twelve).2 For this case study, I randomly selected two student projects from each of these categories to create a representative sample of eight student projects in the three semesters surveyed. The variety of groups and activities in which students participate reflects the diversity of backgrounds that students bring to their activist groups. Furthermore, because of the diversity of activist groups, students engage in a variety of communication activities. The participation requirements of the project are twofold: (1) each student must participate in at least two different types of organization activity; and (2) students must provide a communication-related service that furthers the organization’s activist goals.

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The sampling of communication activities represented in the eight student projects analyzed here demonstrates the course’s broad conceptualization of activist: one student participated in two activities of a student environmental club, a project to raise awareness of disposable food storage and the circulation of a petition to have more recycling bins on campus; another student attended meetings of national environmental organizations and contributed to an e-mail listserv. Two students participated in organizing activities of a local labor union: one of them attended meetings and informational sessions, while another attended a picket and a planning meeting. Two students participated in the same global justice group in different semesters: one went to local film screenings and meetings, the other held events on campus to raise awareness. The two students who participated in an international human rights campaign both participated largely online: in e-mail recruitment activities such as forwarding electronic petitions and gathering news items to increase awareness. The course project asked students to describe their participation in local community activities and connect them to global processes. Students’ written responses to their activist experiences offer qualitative data on how these communication activities influenced their knowledge of globalization and perceptions of their own role as activists in their community. Journal entries and final reflection pieces about their community participation reveal student discoveries about the real rhetorical situations they participated in with their activist groups. Analysis of student writing in their final papers and in their reflective journals reveals two areas in which the course assignment was effective: in getting students to apply theoretical concepts of globalization to activist communication practices, and in getting them to recognize their own agency as community activists.

Globalization from the Student Perspective An overwhelmingly multidimensional concept, globalization may be understood as “a widening, deepening and speeding up of interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life from the cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual” (Held et al. 1999:2). How faculty choose to define globalization in the classroom influences how students understand their own role in globalization processes. Kasai and Merryfield (2004:1) articulate a definition of globalization that allows teachers to account for how our students experience globalization: Globalization is changing our lives. Global economic systems shape our job opportunities, consumer goods, investments, and quality of life. Global media and communication systems allow us to observe events as they happen around

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the world and discuss them across national boundaries. Americans are working with people around the world to address global issues of biodiversity, acid rain, and disposal of toxic wastes. Immigrants, refugees and guest workers have created an intermingling of diverse languages, religions, and cultures within our nation’s communities and schools. As youth culture absorbs fashions, ideas, and material culture from the global milieu, Korean pop stars borrow from American rap, and American children watch Japanese cartoons.

This definition can help teachers understand how activism can help students understand other ways to experience globalization. Incorporating global issues such as outsourcing, climate change, and human rights into the classroom broadens students’ knowledge of globalization beyond a myopic “first world” view of study abroad and cable news. Such classroom conversations allow students to “consider migration, resist state violence, seek social redress, and design new forms of civic association and collaboration, often across national boundaries” (Appadurai 2000:6). The course project in COMM 130 is designed as a means for students to understand the processes of globalization and their effects. The written portion of the project asks students to make connections between their work with an activist group and discussions of globalization in the classroom. Ultimately, students must understand globalization as more than the movement of goods and services; it is also the flow of people and ideas around the world. Integrating practical application into theoretical discussion can expand students’ understanding of the processes and connections of globalization. When asked to define globalization, one student who worked for a labor union identified it as “the crossing of borders” through the processes and flows of activism. His essay described globalization not only as economic flows of goods and services, but also as the uniting of workers behind a common cause. His written reflection demonstrates that through the course of his activist participation, this student has become aware of the relationship between global trade and workers’ rights. Furthermore, this comment illustrates an awareness that labor issues are not local; rather, global solidarity among workers is yet another process of globalization. When students act on local social problems with global causes, they gain awareness of the ways that globalization affects the local communities. Understanding and acting on social problems make the effects of globalization hard to avoid when teachers and students confront the issues affecting people in their communities: workers, women, minorities, and the poor. Hunger and the economic struggles of local farmers are both linked to the role of global agribusiness and highly selective trade liberalization. (Goldstein 2004:308)

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The reflective writing of the course project encouraged students to develop, articulate, and contemplate an awareness of globalization. In their reflective essays, students also demonstrated how they grew to understand the relationships between local trends and global forces: for instance, one student who staffed a table on campus for a student environmental group noted that globalization “indirectly impacts every sector of the planet.” She explained that decisions have global consequences and effects. She described her work on a project to build a wall of cups gathered from trashcans in the student union in order to publicize how much trash the campus generated each day. This student’s paper revealed an impressive awareness of processes of environmental globalization that connected the campus’ waste to its ecological footprint. Her paper described how her activist experience made her profoundly aware of how individual actions can make a world of difference. As students drew global significance from their local activities, a collective awareness of the importance of communication becomes evident in their papers. One student who worked the picket line for a trade union wrote in her final paper that globalization is a “structural shift,” a process that occurs through enhanced “abilities to communicate.” She connected the working conditions of sweatshops in developing countries to the plight of the local union. For this student, globalization took on a cultural and economic dimension as workers all over the globe communicated to the public about the common concern for labor rights. Another student who contributed to an e-mail campaign for a human rights group defined globalization as primarily found in “global communication.” She went on to describe the organizational qualities of her e-mail campaign as evidence of global “social and civil interconnectedness.” For a student who primarily communicates with her peers via text message and instant message (IM), participation in online forums about human rights broadened her understanding of technological globalization as a force for positive social change. Another student who participated in a global justice group defined globalization as the knowledge that we “share experiences” and have “common goals.” Her paper emphasized that local causes have global dimensions, and she concluded that “communication” was the “primary way” to disseminate her knowledge about social problems. She incorporated her group’s local experiences into her definition of globalization, making connections between her own activities and global processes. The common thread in these two students’ experiences is communication. Student responses indicate that they began to see the relevance of their communication studies major in a world increasingly characterized by communication networks. Reflection after reflection indicates that through their communication participation, students began to understand globalization as a process of communication. A student who participated in an online human rights campaign

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noted that ultimately globalization is a way that people “stay connected . . . through communication.” Their final papers show that when students were asked to engage the community, they expanded their perspectives to include a global community. Furthermore, when asked to write about globalization from their perspective, a majority of students demonstrated an understanding of their role in global change. Nearly all student papers in the sample make mention of the importance of communication in a global world, echoing the sentiments of a student who worked for the local branch of a trade union: “As a society we should be able to voice our opinion to make changes for ourselves and others . . . our voice should be heard in our workplace and in the workplaces across the globe.” What this and similar comments indicate is that by participating in activist groups, students saw globalization as it affected their local experience. Based on their community participation, students made connections between local causes and global effects. The intellectual challenge of globalization is to examine the consequences for people in different places— that is, how globalization is experienced locally (Larner and Walters 2004:1). Students’ written reflection reveals that their community participation made familiar processes and effects of globalization. Students’ analysis of their community participation demonstrate that they connected what they learned in the classroom to actions in their local and global community.

Students as Agents of Change The course project asked students to evaluate their community participation, particularly with respect to globalization. It is important for students to imagine the ways in which they are “economic, political and social actors . . . as consumers, workers, citizens, and members of social movements” (Bergeron 2004:315). Students’ written reflections of their experience with their activist organization reveal that through community participation, students became profoundly aware of their activist potential. “Students develop an understanding of the social relations of globalization and how they are grounded in our practices, emphasizing the connection between structure and agency in the analysis of social transformation” (Bergeron 2004:315). Activist learning curricula ask students to apply theoretical concepts in a way that enhances student understanding of their personal experience as a global citizen. Through participant observation of an activist group, students gain insight into the notion of civic responsibility from being themselves politically engaged (Moser, as cited in Reilly 2004:74). Such experiential learning makes the complexities of global activism accessible; without it, students do not see themselves as “potential actors in either local or larger arenas. They also cannot identify actions they take in their daily lives as activist, for example, their

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challenging a friend’s use of sexist language. Thus they need a broader understanding of activism to see both that they are often activists already, albeit unwittingly, and that they can decide to be activists” (Bickford and Reynolds 2002:238). For example, a student who worked with a social justice group made connections between theories of rights and justice and the aims of his local civic community: “Systematic oppression occurs in much more subtle ways, a revitalized movement needs to come back to fight the human quest for greed at all costs.” This student’s paper describes the rage he felt at learning of injustices endured by the world’s poor. Another student who worked for the same group in a different semester simply described the “need for a global movement.” These students’ written reflections demonstrate a profound shift in their awareness of global justice issues, and illustrate how knowledge of global issues combined with local activism can imbue students with a sense of personal responsibility to effect positive social change. In this way, activist learning is a deeply personal process. A fundamental principle of activist learning is that students may envision themselves as change agents. Community-based learning promotes students’ awareness of local issues and involvement with the community. When students impart their structured learning to their participation in their local community, they can develop a sense of belonging that can influence their daily decisions (Holland 2001). In their written reflection, students identified their own participation as part of “social change.” Students who participated in the global justice groups identified themselves as part of a “movement,” whereas other students used words such as “campaign” or “community action.” Student responses such as these demonstrate an awareness of their participation in a larger cause. By participating with activist groups, students are active themselves and gain “experiential understanding of the power of . . . social change” (Lemisch 2003:241). Activist learning asks students to identify social and institutional power relationships through the lens of civic engagement. Throughout the course, students were asked to identify causes and strategies of global activism. Their journals indicate that as they applied these concepts to practical situations in their activist groups, they developed a profound awareness of the need for global change. One student who worked with an international human rights group noted, “Many times, social movements are developed and created because human rights are not being given to everyone so there is a fight for social change. Through activism, we can achieve change and protect our rights.” The course project does not simply introduce students to processes of globalization, but asks them to address globalization’s local effects. Themes of equality and justice resonate throughout student journals. In this way, students connected the need for activism with the potential to achieve social change. Reflective writing exercises asked students to engage writing as a social practice. In their course projects, students were asked to evaluate their own

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activist communication. All students in the sample wrote about the importance of communication in activism. One student who participated in an international human rights campaign noted that our values are shaped by “rhetorical practices” as she described the importance of well-written e-mails in persuading people to sign the group’s petition. Her discussion of the role of emotion and empathy in connecting with people’s sense of justice demonstrates her personal connection to the victims of human rights abuse, and the need to develop global awareness of rights issues. She noted the power of communication to create such awareness and to persuade global citizens to join the fight to protect human rights. Another student who participated in meetings of a student environmental group noted that as a communication studies major, she had particular abilities to develop “a strategy to achieve change.” In their journal assignments, students frequently referred to communication as essential for social change and successful activism. Overwhelmingly, students wrote about their own communicative role in carrying out the mission of their activist group, and cited their own potential to achieve change. These writings illustrate that the importance of students’ communication skills is validated by their activist experience. Through community involvement, students recognize their own political agency and report a greater sense of the importance of political participation (Hillygus 2005). A majority of students wrote in their journals about the role of individual action in communicating for social change. A common theme in these student responses is—as wrote a student who worked with an environmental group—individual action is “essential for any change . . . the small ways of promoting change are full of possibility and human potential.” This student described feeling empowered by her community experience. Of the eight student papers in the sample, seven identified students as active participants. Indeed, for many students, participating in the community was seen as a positive contribution to global causes and movements. Five of the eight students identified “leadership” and “communication skills” as primary to their feelings of empowerment. In six of the eight final papers, students explicitly identified themselves as agents of change. One student who worked with an environmental group declared he wanted to create a “lasting impression for change.” Another student concluded her journal entries on her experience with a human rights group by noting, “As a global activist, I am trying to achieve change.” Still another student, who remained involved with a local union beyond the semester, concluded that as a result of participation in local community, “I’ve gained a deeper understanding and will use these tools to continue as an activist/actionist.” Communication was central to students’ activist experiences, and their responses reveal that they began to see activism as an essential process of globalization. Service learning can have a positive impact on civic engagement (see, e.g., Hunt and Brisbin 2000; Walker 2000; Mendel-Reyes 1998; Battistoni

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1997). One student explained her decision to remain committed to her activist group beyond the duration of the term: “It is necessary to maintain the right to demonstrate injustices through social movements. This is a necessary aspect of democracy for which this country is based upon. If we do not allow the will of the people to prevail, then democracy is lost and affects our human rights.” Another student demonstrated the ways that he planned to tell his family and friends how to promote justice: “Buy products and food locally the way you support local farmers and products helping support your own community by not giving your money to sweatshops and other unethical corporations.” As another student put it: “You can’t make someone listen or do anything, but you can give them the tools to help them make the right decision.” These written comments demonstrate that students recognized their own activist potential and that reflection on their community participation prompted a desire to continue to push for change.

Conclusion: Community Activism as Civic Responsibility As instructors seek methods of teaching students the importance of advocating for causes they believe in, we need “a critical story based on participatory action research to foster civic engagement and to raise awareness of social inequality and injustice” (Miskovic and Hoop 2006:269). Student responses to their experience with community activism suggest that one such story is one of global citizenship. Activist learning projects can help faculty develop ways to create a different type of pedagogical agenda. The student written reflections analyzed here demonstrate that after participating in such activist community organizations, students began to see activism as a fundamental part of democracy. Through the process of reflective writing, students recognized their own activist potential, and in this way students engaged in communication as a transformative practice. Students’ written responses demonstrate that activist participation fosters student understanding of how global processes influence local matters in their community. Furthermore, in seeing how a participant observation project is implemented in a social movements course, we see how an activist pedagogy can be employed to promote advocacy and social change. While the reflective writing students produced in this class is instructive for understanding student experiences in the community, in that it provides a means to assess student ability to meet learning objectives, the broader implication of this study is that course projects such as this open new pathways to learning. With its emphasis on social responsibility and community participation, activist pedagogy emphasizes learning as an ongoing process. Students who expressed their aspiration to continue working with their group

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to further social change best exemplify this. While all students do not remain as explicitly committed to their groups, the course project demonstrates the potential for curricula to expand students’ notions of citizenship to a more active role in civic life, one kindled by awareness of global issues and their local corollaries. When students step outside of the classroom to participate in groups of their choice, they can integrate theoretical and practical concepts in a way that resonates with their personal experience. The course project becomes their experience, and, as participant observers, they can discover new ways that globalization is relevant to their everyday lives. This course reveals that engaged projects can help faculty to understand the power of reaching outside the classroom to create a different type of pedagogical agenda. This project was described as part of a communication studies course. However, it can be adapted easily to courses in a variety of disciplines. Instructors can maintain a communication focus in a variety of disciplines, but might shift the focus of types of organizations in which they would like students to participate. Regardless of the types of groups faculty recommend, the flexibility for students to choose their own group is crucial to a successful project. This initial step requires them to assess their own interests. Social responsibility has values instilled in it, and students choose groups according to their values. Seeing activism and community participation as a choice—a decision to engage and push for social change—frames engaged civic activities as the way to explore the potential of responsible citizenship so that students can understand what it means to be globally active. In this way, activist learning is more than service: it is asking students to find their own mode of active civic engagement. Through engaged civic activities, students explore the potential of global citizenship to understand what it means to be globally active. Students need a broader understanding of activism as engagement. By establishing community connections, students gain a sense of civic responsibility within a global context. As I look forward to teaching this class next semester, a final student comment resonates: “We all have it in us to be a part of a social movement.”

Notes 1. For further resources on assessment of learning and activism in the field of communication studies see National Communication Association (n.d.). 2. The remaining students chose organizations that do not fit neatly into these categories.

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CHAPTER

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“Creating Space” for Community: Radical Identities and Collective Praxis MARY ANN CAIN

After an early hotel breakfast, twelve children (ages eight to fifteen) and six adult members of the Three Rivers Jenbé Ensemble (TRJE) of Fort Wayne, Indiana, enter a quiet lounge inside the University of Vermont’s Student Union. They have come to warm up, literally (it is already quite cold in early November, with snow the night before), and for their upcoming afternoon performance. Their West African–made drums, which were shipped separately by truck, have not yet arrived. No one knows if the instruments will arrive in time for the ensemble to perform. Ketu, the artistic director, directs the ensemble into a circle seated on the lounge floor, a form they use at the beginning and the end of rehearsals and meetings, one that Ketu explicitly connects to traditional West African Malinke culture. Such circles are used by the group to “create spaces” for reciprocity and mutual exchange. The lounge is long, with high ceilings. A wide space opens through the middle, with tables and chairs off to the sides. Across the corridor, at the lounge’s near end, Tibetan monks are chanting prayers while pouring sand mandalas, an unexpected cultural exchange that TRJE children and adults witness upon arrival and that continues in the background as they rehearse. As he distributes metal sticks around the circle, Ketu reminds the group of the sticks’ relevance to a character in the Old Mali epic, Sundiata (Niane 1965). Soumaoro was a dictator over the homelands of the hero, Sundiata. A blacksmith by training, Soumaoro was respected for his powers with metal and warfare. Ketu then invites twelve-year-old RasAmen to give the group a rhythm, and, one by one, everyone offers their own rhythms into the collective rhythms of the group. Improvising a cultural exchange between themselves and the physical spaces of the UVM lounge, TRJE makes space itself an instrument that becomes alive. The echoes in the high ceilings of the lounge, the vibrations of their voices, movements, and breath filling this large, unfamiliar

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Mary Ann Cain space become tangible evidence of how the physical space “speaks back” in dialogue. This space, and their own words, rhythms, movements, and bodies, are no longer transient or invisible to them as strangers. They negotiate their own forms of exchange with those of the new space they have entered. In this way they create a habitable space for themselves as well as the curious students scattered about the lounge and the diligent monks still chanting across the hall.

“Community” is a term that, as Joseph Harris has pointed out in his widely cited 1989 article, is often sentimentalized in the context of literacy education. Citing Raymond Williams, Harris (1989:13) observes that “community” as a concept lacks a “‘positive opposing’ term,” and thus risks becoming “an empty and sentimental word.” In a 2001 Journal of Basic Writing article, Harris (2001:14) continues his critique of “community” as a metaphor for writing classrooms as inescapably sentimentalized: “I know of few visions of community that also don’t seem to lapse at points into a nostalgia for the mutuality of family or the small town.” Nedra Reynolds (2004:135) echoes this concern when she writes, “Community remains a concept firmly attached to the ideologies of authenticity and nostalgia, and in that attachment, it becomes difficult to see the differences among residents or members, or points of contention.” Despite these cautions, however, community continues to hold sway as an organizing concept in many writing pedagogies, particularly those where peer-to-peer interaction (peer review of drafts, small group discussion, collaborative writing projects, etc.) is an essential component. More recently, however, compositionists have begun to rethink the problem of “difference” within and beyond the classroom in more nuanced ways. The differences students bring are not “problems” to be resolved through adaptation and accommodation to a presumably stable, normative discourse community. Instead, writing instruction is seen to facilitate active inquiry into the various identities students bring to bear in the classroom and the discursive spaces available to them, within and beyond the classroom. However, as Nancy Welch (2005:474) notes, the problem students and teachers face with addressing difference is not simply a matter of “discursive obstacles”—that is, learning the uses of language toward liberatory ends— but also “extradiscursive obstacles” that arise when students bring their writing into action (2005:474). “Extradiscursive obstacles” include any restrictions on embodied, active applications of discourse. In the case Welch describes, her student, Katie, was legally restricted from posting a protest poem on a municipal utility box. In addition, neoconservative governmental policies made words from her poem “We will contact you/Your time is up” (directed to Bush as president) potential cause for FBI action, as was the case with a local rap artist (473). While Welch focuses on legal and political

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obstacles, I am expanding the realm of extradiscursive obstacles to include institutionalized racism and bigotry. For example, in the narrative above, the Three Rivers Jenbé Ensemble confronted a history of institutionalized bigotry and racism at the University of Vermont, including an annual event performed in blackface called Cakewalk, curtailed only a few years before TRJE’s arrival on campus, as well as the eugenics movement. Both of these practices asserted the inherent social superiority and value of certain racial, ethnic, and physically able groups over others.1 More immediate, material obstacles include the portraits of exclusively white, upper-class men gazing down upon TRJE as they performed in one of the campus study lounges. Capitalist economics also presented a narrowly averted crisis caused by a shipping company that sought to abandon the promised delivery date of TRJE’s instruments to avoid a financial loss from a partially empty truck. These “extradiscursive obstacles” stem from what Welch (2005:474) claims is a phenomenon in which the locations where we may exercise our liberalized speech and assembly rights have been “greatly reduced.” As a result, the spaces available for enacting critical literacy are shrinking, and academics, “under the thrall of postmodernists who would teach us to see horizontal and scattered pockets of domination and resistance,” are missing the larger picture, namely, “the all-too-real consolidation and application of state-backed corporate power” (Welch 2005:474). In other words, for educators to simply assume that institutional structures, practices, and regulations are not subject to the same forces of “state-backed corporate power,” forces that make it illegal to post a poem on a utility box but also have historically supported research that justifies racist and bigoted social policy and practice, is to not see their own collusion with such forces. This raises the question of what role teacher/scholars in writing can play to help create spaces for critical literacy to be exercised. If it is not possible to reclaim “community” as an organizing concept for writing instruction, then how might we address the need to create a different kind of space, both within and beyond the classroom? Perhaps it is no coincidence that community-sponsored groups such as the Three Rivers Jenbé Ensemble are embracing the term community at a time when academics are occupied with critiquing it. In contrast to academia, TRJE neither sentimentalizes community nor gazes nostalgically upon West African culture and history to reproduce its social relations. Instead, TRJE consciously and repeatedly uses terms such as “community,” “family,” and “ancestors” to convey their purpose and identity to themselves and to others. Such terms help make visible the material conditions of their collective struggle against Western values and identities that oppress and at times destroy crucial historical, social, and spatial understandings of human interdependence. Thus, while academics such as Harris (1989; 2001) and Reynolds (2004) offer important critiques of community, they also overlook how groups

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such as TRJE draw upon more radical views of community, views that I would argue are not typically sustainable within conventional academic spaces. Throughout this chapter, I juxtapose narratives of TRJE “creating space” for radical identities and community with analysis and theory about how and why such spaces (what I refer to as “habitable space”) are created and how conventional academic classrooms (what I call “transient spaces”) often fall short. While both TRJE and academia draw upon “community” as a principal concept for creating spaces for learning and teaching, TRJE continues to adhere to socially transformative democratic purposes articulated in radical social movements of the 1960s and ’70s (Black Power and Black Nationalism, specifically). In contrast, academia has, indeed, often sentimentalized and even subsumed community largely for its own reproduction, as opposed to sustaining a coherent commitment to social justice and change within and beyond the institution. In this respect, we as academics have much to learn from groups such as TRJE, including how to create habitable spaces within and beyond academia, but also how to articulate its material constraints. In other words, we must make visible the limits of what it is possible to do and who it is possible to be within conventional institutional spaces, to then move more consciously within and against those limits.

Extradiscursive Contexts of Language Use The next morning, as kids, parents, staff, and guests of the King Street Youth Center in Burlington, Vermont, stream into the gym, TRJE members stand in lines on either side of the door, welcoming each person to their workshop. Various drums (dununs and jenbes) and hand-held yabaras have been placed around the gym. An embroidered cloth at the gym’s back wall puts a name to the group whose scattered members, dressed in colorful tie-dyed T-shirts and African garb, now mingle with the growing circle of people seated on the floor. For King Street kids, this is not the usual Saturday, with a menu of activities to choose from—or opt out of. Today, the gym is a focal point, full of kids of all ages, parents, staff, and teachers. The atmosphere slowly intensifies and anticipation mounts as Akin, a TRJE adult, gathers a pile of drum sticks from the gym floor and Ketu warms up on the jenbe. A few beats and the rhythm changes from light, striding slaps to a deeper bass beat; a few more and another change as the rhythm smoothes out and lengthens. The drum reaches everyone’s ears, weaving an invisible container of sound to embrace the chaotic fervor of so many different voices, so many kinds of bodies funneled into this crowded and typically transient space.

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Against this backdrop of drumming, the newcomers in tie-dyed T-shirts sit facing the King Street kids, for whom this gym is quite familiar. The roles are reversed; it is the newcomers, smiling and relaxed, who welcome the locals to their own center. Earlier this afternoon, although many had never set foot on a college campus, the TRJE kids performed for well over an hour to an enthusiastic audience of UVM students and faculty. Now, as the hosts to the King Street kids, the TRJE kids’ smiles and bright eyes speak of ease and familiarity even in this most unfamiliar place, to kids for whom Burlington is home but not necessarily a habitable space. The drumming is more than a backdrop; it amplifies the connections being created even as it subtly shifts the conversations’ tones, tempos, and rhythms like a heartbeat or a breath. As he warms up on the jenbe, Ketu tests the space for what it can hold, how it responds, and how he needs to respond in kind. His drumming sideshadows the kids’ own efforts to call and respond to each other in search of connection, varying their tones, tempos, and rhythms as the moment requires. Founded in 2000 by local American-born artist-educators, TRJE acts as a “cultural education forum” for young people and their families in Fort Wayne, Indiana, focusing on “cultural and artistic development through the study and performance of traditional Malinke music, dance, and culture” (Fort Wayne Dance Collective n.d.). As Ketu Oladuwa, the artistic director, writes, “Exercising the principle of collective work and responsibility, we help young people to find the balance between individual aspirations and obligation to family” (as cited in Fort Wayne Dance Collective n.d.). Since TRJE’s stated goals include collective work, a balance between individuals and families, as well as community outreach through music and dance education and performance, it seemed to me a rich site for learning how to create the kinds of social, discursive, and material spaces typically unavailable within the classroom. My experiences in these alternative spaces, as a result, provide a contrast to the typical academic spaces students occupy and, thus, make the extradiscursive spaces of the academy more available for inquiry and action. TRJE also holds the further attraction of highlighting extradiscursive contexts of language use. Historically in West Africa and, later, in the Black Nationalist and Black Power movements of the 1960s and ’70s, drumming and dance were considered not only aesthetically expressive but also an important means by which to help focus and organize resistance to hegemonic values within dominant cultures. Such values tend to pit individual achievement against collective responsibility and action, a binary opposition that TRJE actively seeks to re-envision. Furthermore, within this extradiscursive context, language, including speaking and listening, and writing and reading, is not the dominant mode of expression and communication; instead, it takes its place

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as interdependent with other, ancient forms. While the spoken and written word is valued by TRJE, it does not occupy the privileged place it does within academic settings. As a result, within the various social, physical, and discursive spaces created by TRJE, language functions as a means of generating a sense of social interdependence by maintaining specific relationships, both within the ensemble and in its relationship to communities beyond. In contrast to TRJE’s interdependent relationship between the discursive and extradiscursive, one of the biggest obstacles that compositionists face is the subordination of the extradiscursive to the discursive within institutional spaces. As Welch (1997:62) notes, institutions typically foster the formation of social relationships that “we tend to think of in twos—student and teacher, apprentice and master, scholar and discipline.” Binary pairings such as these construct social relationships around the transference of a dominant identity to that of a subordinate. Feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff (2002:106–107) describes the hazards of this transference in regard to women’s subordination within philosophical thought, arguing that “a dual relationship does not produce the dynamics that enable one to leave it.” Dual relationships, rather than offering a means to transform the hegemonic relationships that maintain them, instead reinforce those relationships. Because students are seen as “lacking” in such relationships, teachers (and by extension, the institutions they serve) need not consider their own “lack” since, through the subordinate’s eyes, they are complete—stable, apprehensible, and “clear.” As Le Doeuff (2002:107) comments, the “devotion of a woman is very comforting for someone experiencing his own lack.” The “lack” with regards to teachers and students is the lack of difference cited by Harris (1989; 2001), Reynolds (2004), Trimbur (1989), and others regarding constructs of community. The “woman” (or “other”) maintains her “comforting” difference, at the expense of her remaining subordinate within the dominant community. What is lacking in institutional relations, then, are the forms of relationships that, as Welch (1997:62) says, “[place] particular systems and particular philosophers, mentors, or teachers in historically interdependent relationships with others.” Instead, binary social relations serve to reinforce rather than challenge the hegemonic relationships that institutions depend upon for their authority and agency. As a result, institutions tend not only to reproduce hegemonic social relations that run counter to those of interdependence, but also to absorb and thus neutralize the radical identities, transformative aims, and egalitarian ideals of social movements such as Black Power, movements that scholars such as Carmen Kynard (2005) argue were essential to achieving educational reforms in the 1960s and ’70s. Le Doeuff (2002), however, offers a solution to institutional “thinking in twos” that allows for the development of alternative spaces. She calls upon the introduction of a “third factor” which “does not

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claim to reconstruct and explain everything, which slides along the verge of unthought, develops only by grafting itself on to another discourse, and consents to be its tributary” (127). In this way, the third factor serves to develop identities of “interdependence” that recognize “that ‘I do not do everything on my own,’ that I am a tributary to a collective discourse and knowledge, which have done more toward producing me than I shall contribute in continuing to produce them; and replace[s] the mystery [of unknowing] with a recognition of the necessarily incomplete character of all theorization” (127). The third factor I am using here, then, to interrupt the dualistic and hierarchical relations between my position as educator and the academic institution in which I am situated, is TRJE.

TRJE as a “Third Factor” Using TRJE as a third factor, it becomes possible to identify the “interdependent relationships” within more familiar, albeit transient, spaces of the college classroom, as well as the “lack” resulting from binary relationships that dominate the purposes and effects of language in those spaces. For example, in contrast to TRJE’s uses of language as interdependent with “extradiscursive” contexts, the dominant binary opposition of language within college classrooms (in other words, its “lack”) is to relate to words as ideas, as opposed to words as actions or even things. The symbolic values of language (words as ideas) dominate awareness of the materiality of language (words as actions or things), including its physical, sensory dimensions. Furthermore, experience of the classroom’s physical space (the material realm) is subordinated to that of discursive space (the symbolic realm). As a result, the materiality of existing social relationships in the classroom is overshadowed by students’ anticipated, and as yet unrealized, future relationship to the “normal” discourses of scholarly and professional life. This domination of the symbolic dimensions of language over its material, extradiscursive effects has a great impact on one’s ability to access the material realities of the classroom. As a result, an individual’s experience of the classroom’s materiality often remains private, unarticulated as an experience, and thus unavailable for reflection and action. Yet it is difficult for many teachers of writing to grasp this underlying assumption, in part because our primary purpose as educators is to instruct students in how to write, think, listen, speak, and act through language. Our own experiences of the materiality of the classroom are often as subordinated as those of our students. For instance, while physical space holds a powerful place in the academic imagination, as symbols of education—orderly rows (or these days, somewhat less orderly, but equally recognizable, circles), blackboards, stages, and screens

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that signal the front of the room—it is, ironically, valued primarily for how such symbols ultimately “liberate” teachers and students from having to attend to them in the first place. Even the physical spaces of discourse (including orderly prose with a beginning, middle, and end; a point made; clear and concise styles; standard fonts, spaces, and margins; standardized spelling and punctuation; names and dates in the upper corner; titles at the beginning; and so forth) take on a “transparency,” transformed into a commonplace “reality” that provides a window into the symbolic realm. Such “liberation” into the symbolic realms of discourse, however, is a means by which to restrict or even deny access to the material realities of the classroom, including the lived experience of each participant. The “lack” generated in this binary relationship between words as ideas versus words as things or actions is a collective lack of responsiveness to the transience that permeates most classroom spaces: the scuffed floors, the leftover writing on the chalkboard, the constantly changing rooms, as well as the dizzying changes in faces and names each semester. To teach students to be more fully responsive, to words as both actions or things and ideas, is to help them create more choices for how to draw from and reflect upon their experiences critically and purposefully. As Reynolds (2004:157) notes, “One of the problems of university teaching is that classrooms are not easily inhabited; they tend to look alike, cool and sterile.” This unresponsiveness to physical space carries over into a “lack” in reading the social spaces that physical spaces construct. Rather than “liberating” teachers and students from their material experiences in order to focus on the presumably more important symbolic experiences of the classroom, this “lack” in the binary relationship (i.e., the “transparency” of physical space) ensures that neither teachers nor students will attempt to imagine alternative, habitable spaces since the existing ones are invisible to them as a collective experience and thus unavailable for reflection and action. Ultimately, the physical and social spaces of the classroom shape the discursive spaces available as well. Just as the materiality of physical space is made transparent by the symbolic order of classrooms, the materiality of discursive space is rendered similarly transparent and thus unavailable for revision. For instance, the movements, sounds, and rhythms of discourse (in other words, the materiality of discourse that resonates through our bodies as well as our minds, through our physical, emotional, and psychological beings), as well as the visual design of a page, including spacing, fonts, page size, margins, and other aspects of graphic design—are often treated as “transparent,” mere containers for the more important “content” that gives them meaning and purpose. Thus, the physical spaces of discourse are often maintained as private, invisible, and thus unavailable for collective reflection and action.

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This subordination of the material to the symbolic realm, of physical to discursive space, is one way dominant cultures retain power over others by keeping invisible what Lisa Delpit (1988) refers to as the culture of power, the discursive forms through which power is exercised. The necessary “negotiation, innovation, and . . . exploration” (Pough 2002:468) between diverse discursive forms cannot occur when forms of power remain invisible to those subject to them. As David Bleich (2001:117) has noted, it is through exchanging forms of language that teaching and learning take place: “[T]he teaching and learning of language is mutual, collective, and reciprocal, as well as individual. It is neither just reciprocal nor just individual but both.” Without such mutuality and reciprocity, the teaching and learning of language serves the primary purpose of maintaining existing power relations within social spaces of dominance, of “thinking in twos” rather than in the pluralities of experience, language, and identity brought to bear in the classroom. The variations in how points are actually made, the multivocality of all texts, the sounds and rhythms and shapes that work with and against emergent meanings are lost without awareness of the materiality of space—physical, discursive, and social.

Habitable Versus Transient Spaces The chaotic rise and fall of voices is interrupted by Akin’s sharp slaps of the jenbe—ta-dat-ta-dat-ta-da-DAT—which then erupts into trills. Voices quiet to listen. Ketu stands, raising one arm into the air, asking for attention. Akin plays harder and faster, his eyes following Ketu, who traces a circle in the air with his hand. As he lowers his arm, Akin’s drumming returns to the original break, ta-dat-ta-dat-ta-dat-DAT, to signal the end of this run. Ketu moves around the circle, claiming the space as his, but also claiming it as theirs, this group that until now has not been a group. Now he connects them, just as he and Akin have connected with each other, using their bodies, gestures, and movements to create a habitable space, one that gives form and meaning to all the diverse gestures, movements, sounds, and expressions that are exchanged among and between them. The drumming is not only a musical exchange but also an exchange of learning. As my “third factor,” TRJE made visible to me the ways that the language practices of the writing classroom tend to suppress engagement with the material spaces of schooling. In contrast, the interactions between TRJE drummers and dancers, and between performers and the locations they share with their audiences, is guided primarily by attention to sound, rhythm, tempo, gesture, facial expressions, movements, and eye contact, to name a few elements. As described in the narratives above, it is not simply what TRJE

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members say to one another, but their responsiveness to these extradiscursive elements that shapes their interactions and gives meaning and purpose to their relationships. These extradiscursive elements, in turn, make the materiality of the groups’ discourse practices all the more visible and available for reflection and action, while the discursive elements similarly enable the group to reflect and act upon the extradiscursive ones. For instance, when Ketu draws a circle in the air as he prepares to speak, he creates a direct connection between what he wants his words to do—create a space for mutual exchange—and what they may offer symbolically by bringing everyone into contact with unfamiliar ways of being in the world—in other words, cultural, discursive, and social exchange. This “interdependent relationship” between the material and symbolic realms helps transform binary social relationships within the group and between the group and the larger communities with which it seeks to connect. As a third factor, TRJE brings me into contact with the extradiscursive contexts of how language works in the world, restoring a sense of words as actions and things, not simply ideas, by creating habitable spaces where words and actions meet. In Geographies of Writing, Reynolds (2004:2) asks, “How do people experience space, and what might that tell us about how they experience other forms of the social world? How do students, writers, or learners experience spaces and places in the everyday, and how might this inform cultural and material theories of discourse?” Reynolds refers to Edward Soja’s Thirdspace theory, which describes spaces “common to all of us yet never able to be completely seen and understood, an ‘unimaginable universe’” (Soja 1996:56). Just as Le Doeuff (2002) turns to what Soja calls a “thirding” of binary oppositions in Western philosophical discourse to interrupt and ultimately reconstruct social relationships along more egalitarian lines, Soja (1996:60), drawing from Henri LeFebvre’s concepts of spatiality, introduces “Thirding-as-Othering” in relation to the construction of social spaces. Soja, following LeFebvre’s lead, explains how conventional Hegelian or Marxist understandings of dialectical synthesis are limited, fixed in a linear temporal sequence that subsequently points to a false sense of completeness in the resulting synthesis rather than an openness to the unknown. As Soja explains, Thirding introduces a critical “other than” choice that speaks and critiques through its otherness. That is to say, it does not derive simply from an additive combination of its binary antecedents but rather from a disordering, deconstruction, and tentative reconstitution of their presumed totalization, producing an open alternative that is both similar and strikingly different. (61)

The “ThirdSpaces” that Soja thus describes are social spaces in which binary oppositions collapse, or are joined, not in dialectical synthesis, but into spaces

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that “[envision] a complex totality of potential knowledges but rejects any totalization that finitely encloses knowledge production in ‘permanent structure’ or specialized compartments or disciplines” (57). In this regard, Soja is helpful in describing the kinds of social spaces that TRJE actively constructs and also how institutional spaces are challenged to do the same, since the very foundations of academe depend upon the “specialized compartment or disciplines” that ThirdSpace eschews. With a nod to Soja’s ThirdSpace, but also crediting TRJE’s own particular uses of the phrase “creating space,” I have thus coined the term habitable space to describe those kinds of spaces that invite discursive, cultural, physical, and social exchange. Such spaces ultimately lead to the creation of interdependent relationships, as described by Le Doeuff (2002), necessary for identifying material conditions of shared experience and for developing a collective sense of agency. I have also coined the term transient space to describe those spaces that construct relations based on separation, disconnection, and invisibility within larger power structures, spaces that far too often resemble the college classrooms where I am accustomed to teaching.

ThirdSpace: Reimagining Collective Identity Efforts to establish ThirdSpaces within the academy are already underway. Scholar/teachers such as Gwendolyn D. Pough (2002) have described some success in creating spaces for more interdependent relations between the university classroom and communities beyond the academy. Pough (2002:458) describes how she used Black Panther Party (BPP) documents to “open a space for the . . . ‘negotiation, innovation, and the exploration of political views’” in a class comprised of primarily (fifteen of eighteen) African American students. These documents, I would suggest, served as a “third factor” in interrupting the binary relationships between students, teacher, and the institution, and instead open up new, habitable spaces for alternative identifications with “communities outside of the academy” (469). Pough’s (2002) call for alternative and multiple identifications beyond the academy were similarly a part of many literacy education efforts of the civil rights movement, which sought to develop a sense of collective identity and common purpose for the goal of social change. For instance, grassroots literacy projects that helped create and sustain the Black Power and Black Nationalist movements of the 1950s and ’60s, such as the Freedom Schools in Mississippi, “[built] [their] pedagogies out of the historical conditions, students, and language” within specific locations (Schneider 2006:65). Such schools formed an “organic relationship” (Schneider 2006:49) between the local community and the larger civil rights movement. As Stephen Schneider

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(2006:50) points out, in the case of Stokely Carmichael’s Freedom School Speech class in 1965, alternative pedagogies that “focused on the link between critical rhetorical pedagogy and community action” were at the heart of the movement. “Community,” in such contexts, was a word that, on one hand, focused participants’ awareness on the specific, material conditions of their common struggle, and, on the other, constructed a collective identity that facilitated organized resistance and action for change. This was evident in original Black Power rhetorics, whose call was for collective identification of black Americans as a response to racist white America. In what Carmichael and Hamilton (1967:48, 49) claim as “the first call for Black Power,” a committee of “influential black churchmen affiliated with the National Council of Churches” argued what they saw as the crux of the issue that prevented all blacks, not just a select few, from having real opportunities: “America has asked its Negro citizens to fight for opportunity as individuals, whereas at certain points in our history what we have needed most has been opportunity for the whole group, not just for selected and approved Negroes. . . . We must not apologize for the existence of this form of group power, for we have been oppressed as a group and not as individuals.” In contrast to largely transient academic spaces, the habitable spaces constructed by Carmichael and others were concerned with cultivating and sustaining transformative social relations, including the construction of collective identities that work to counter the effects of the socially imposed transience that exists in most, if not all, educational institutions today. Their rhetoric linked their identity as “historically interdependent with” larger social justice movements, including Black Power, civil rights, and Black Nationalism. Carmichael and Hamilton (1967:vii) describe such a project in Black Power: [B]lack people in America must get themselves together. . . . The stakes are really very simple: if we fail to do this, we face continued subjection to a white society that has no intention of giving up willingly or easily its position of priority and authority. If we succeed, we will exercise control over our lives, politically, economically, and psychically. We will also contribute to the development of a viable larger society; in terms of ultimate social benefit, there is nothing unilateral about the movement to free black people.

The “we” here is not the dominant authority of the academy in relation to its students but rather one that claims a collective identity as “black people” with a shared project of social transformation, namely, to eradicate racism. This “we” also positions itself as capable of “contribut[ing] to the development of a viable larger society.” Thus this “we” sees itself as ultimately connected to lib-

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eration; black people’s liberation will liberate all people. As a result, such pedagogies were concerned with cultivating and sustaining social relations that work to counter the effects of the socially imposed transience that, in most classrooms today, remains unexamined and thus unchallenged, largely accepted as simply “reality.”

Radical Re-visionings of Community: Toward Collective Praxis In Malinke cultures, proper greetings are important to establish who one is, including where one comes from, especially in terms of family. Knowing the names of one’s ancestors is expected, as everyone is typically in some way related to one another. To begin the greeting, Ketu calls out “Good afternoon,” circling within the circle to include everyone in his greeting. He waits for their response. Some respond, Good afternoon, while other voices buzz like static in the air. He repeats his greeting, Good afternoon, until he receives a response with equal volume and enthusiasm. He adds a second, less familiar greeting, Peace and blessings to you. The circle is slower to respond to this strange call. Ketu repeats, and they follow his lead. Next, Ketu introduces himself. A name is something everyone has that is theirs, and that they can share with others. Saying one’s name is an offering to the group by way of greeting. Ketu tells the group his name. Of course, names are words, and words are made up of letters. Such letters have a definite shape; they shape our sense of self even as we shape them. Ketu demonstrates this as he uses his arms and his body to shape the letters that form his name, a name he expects is unfamiliar, a name he wants them to remember for its strangeness. It is an African-derived name, and he invites everyone to join him inside its shaping power as he forms the letters in the air with his body, in the middle of the circle they now share. For the K and E, he pronounces the letters as he draws them. But for the T and U, he waits for the group to say them, inviting them to share what they know, to participate in the spelling. He then leads them to repeat his name with energy that matches his own. And they do, embodying it with their voices, giving it a weight, resonance, and power that just knowing one’s name, or hearing it through only one voice, cannot. As TRJE leaders see it, drumming and dance provide alternative forms of communication that don’t simply support conventional forms of communication but also seek to transform them, challenging dominant cultural forms and values and the binary social relations that maintain them. Such activities foster collective identities, values and practices similar to those expressed by Carmichael and

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Hamilton (1967) in Black Power, functioning as a third factor that interrupts the conventional thinking in twos that the dominant culture seeks to impose, specifically in the binary relations of parent-child, teacher-student, old-young, native-foreign—binary relationships through which TRJE was formed and which it seeks to transform. Finally, the emphasis on long-term relationships echoes the aims and practices of literacy projects such as the Freedom Schools, which sought to develop long-term identifications with the collective struggle for social justice. For TRJE, their “we” organizes itself around cultural exchange between families as well as cultures, specifically between contemporary American culture and West African traditions dating back to the ancient times of the Old Mali epic, The Sundiata, a classic tale often compared to the Odyssey. Generations of griots (musician-storytellers) have preserved this epic tale orally, from the hero Sundiata’s time, and to this day continue to perform it. By adapting West African cultural forms of drumming, dance, and singing rooted in ancient traditions, TRJE creates habitable spaces for exchange to occur, both between themselves and West African culture as well as between themselves and their audiences. The relationships fostered in such exchanges are not simply a means to an end but an end in themselves, enabling the construction of habitable spaces where new collective identities may form and where long-term relationships around a common social project may be sustained. Like a tribal shaman, Ketu moves through the circle, ankle bells and shells ringing, long beaded braids swaying. He is a formative shaping force, offering forms through which the group can identify with each other. He becomes a metonym, one singular, partial, particular figure who stands for the whole, providing a model for how they can be their own shaping forces, for themselves and for each other. “Now, what I need to find out is who you are,” he says, brandishing a drumstick like a wand. As he spins around, drumstick pointed at the circle, he says, “Now, we’re going to start right here,” stopping as if by some force greater than himself, by chance or by the presence of unseen others such as the ancestors who, in Malinke culture, are present whenever their names are invoked and the proper libations and ablutions are made. When the drumstick singles out one boy from the group, Ketu kneels to explain how the greetings will continue. As each person calls out her or his name, Ketu uses the drumstick alternately as a pointer, a microphone, and a touchstone, leading the group in its response, correcting errant individuals like Myla who have hung back outside the circle, the correction giving rise to giggles from the group. After Josie, the oldest TRJE kid, models a confident, clear, and well-projected greeting, Ketu’s response takes on the qualities of a chant,

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emphasizing the rhythmic aspects of each name’s syllables: Hel-lo Jo-sie, Hel-lo Su-sie, Hel-lo Jade. Ketu models how each name can be brought into a shared rhythm and tempo, despite variations of syllables, sounds, and accents. Thus, in a very tangible way, he also models how each of them as individuals are being brought into the rhythms of the whole group through his shamanic intervention. Ketu himself has to stand out, act as the Other, be the individual to show them all how they are all individuals within this shared space. Through his voice, body, and actions, he tells them, “We are creating for ourselves a community; I am showing you how that is done.” The binary oppositions students experience between home and school inform classroom spaces, heightening their sense of the transience of such spaces, where schooling is less about who they are now than who they hope (and what the institution wants them) to be. But instead of connecting them to their local communities, the transient spaces of the classroom highlight their separateness from them. As a result, their sense of their own agency, as well as the agency of words, becomes difficult to grasp, let alone act upon. The largely symbolic realm of academia and the material realities of their present lives pull apart. Yet in order to “get ahead,” they often find they must identify with academia, at the expense of who they are and what they know from their lived experiences. They often construct their choices as either to simply submit to or to rebel against this hierarchy. For TRJE kids, this false binary is in many ways what has steered them toward participation in the ensemble. For those who see themselves as submitting to the transient spaces of schooling, they nonetheless keep searching for habitable spaces. For those who rebel, the habitable spaces of TRJE teach them new ways of relating to the domination of what appears to be the merely symbolic, and thus ineffectual, uses of academic ways of knowing and the discourses that support it. For them, the TRJE “community” is far from “an empty and sentimental word.” Instead, it is the basis of both their individuality as well as their connection to the world beyond. “Community” may, in fact, be a term that has been exhausted within academia, exploited as it has been for purposes that reinforce, rather than challenge, dominant social relations. However, one need only look beyond transient classroom spaces to realize that community, in the sense of collective purpose and action for the sake of creating space for difference, is alive and well. We academics can learn much from groups outside classroom walls about how to create spaces that enable discursive, social, physical, and cultural exchanges. Such exchanges, so vital to enabling social action and change, must come not simply from the symbolism of some future place, but from where we each now stand, connected through our differences.

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1. The Cakewalk was a minstrel show that reproduced dances originally performed by slaves for masters. From the 1880s until well into the twentieth century, the University of Vermont sponsored this event with the support of both university officials and private donors. This modern-day dance was done in blackface by white performers. UVM was also the home of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont from 1925–1936. During its tenure, the survey influenced Vermont legislators to pass a bill in 1931 that permitted the sexual sterilization of “feebleminded and insane” persons (“Vermont Eugenics” n.d.).

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CHAPTER

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Politics, Class, and Social Movement People: Continuing the Conversation WILLIAM DeGENARO

During sixteen years of Catholic schools I heard time and again that “church” means people. According to the Jesuits, Franciscans, and elderly Italian nuns who taught me, church does not refer to a building, abstraction, or hierarchy; church has the democratic denotation of “the people.” Reflecting on the implications of Active Voices, it occurs to me that the contributors tell us something quite similar about social movements, urging scholars to treat social movements as fallible, human, dynamic collectives of people. Hauser and mcclellan, for instance, point us toward the productive uses we might make of the rhetoric of rank-and-file members of social movements. Jackson and Miller argue that the most successful social movements are those that value practitioner contributions. Service learning advocates Coogan and Todd as well as Stevens suggest ways that students of social movements can contribute to movement objectives while analyzing the rhetoric of those same movements and involving themselves in the creation of exigencies. These voices impart on readers the importance of attending to people in ways that are inclusive, creative, and open to new possibilities. Just as Catholicism—and organized religion in general—has not always lived up to the inclusive definition of the word church, scholarly representations of social movements have not always foregrounded them as human. At times we have treated movement rhetoric as monolithic, fixed, or unified, betraying the multivalent, contested nature of movement objectives and the articulations thereof. We have constructed “great man” narratives that focus on leaders and elites. We have omitted the human face, eschewing the ethnographic and deep archival methods necessary for uncovering street-level interactions and performances. The active voices in this book ask us to problematize and complicate our understanding of social movements by delving into the individual and collective identities of both social movements and social movement people.

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Further, they ask us to intervene and effect positive social change by reinterpreting and re-narrating in ways that matter, practically and ethically, to real people. For instance, through her work with vegetarian/vegan conversion narratives, Malesh teases out how the stories we tell and the ways we share them shape meaning and create possibilities for personal and sociocultural transformation. Amado-Miller’s reenvisioning of the notion of antistrophe also expands the scope of rhetoric as symbolic action, reminding us that the “boomerang” trope has effects. She pushes us to emphasize lived experience, saying, “[P]hilosophical theorizing must be invigorated by praxis given that ideology has a material existence” (71). Likewise, Coogan’s critique of popular, mythic conceptions of reentry ex-convicts is one representation of how ideological analysis can lead to ethical and/or humane interaction. Malesh, Amado-Miller, and Coogan are not the only instances of person-centered critique. Other voices in this collection ask us to consider ways to engage our students in the work (not just the analysis) of social movements, involving more people in social change. Critique and practical action mingle. Stevens in particular gives readers a model of a progressive pedagogy that enacts collective identity construction and action within a traditional classroom. I see in this pedagogy a humane emphasis on members and students of social movements as equal agents involved in critical inquiry into the rhetoric of civic life. Active Voices’ emphasis on the personal-cum-social and social-cum-personal begs the question of what to do as we move forward focused anew on social movement people. A critical and dynamic focus on movement people has the potential to reveal a more sophisticated, inclusive, broad-based, and, yes, humane understanding of what social movements are and how they are changing. Active Voices has begun this important scholarly endeavor but more work needs to be done. Responding to the “what to do” query revolves around looking at just who social movement people are at our historical moment. I want to suggest we read Active Voices as a call to re-humanize new social movement studies. So, how do we attend to the imperative to analyze critically identity markers that help define social movement people (both rank-and-file as well as movement leaders) while at the same time attending to theoretically engaged social movement scholarship that problematizes structural categories that mark human identity? Happily, this quandary presents a contradiction, a tension, an ambivalence: social movement scholarship as work that is about and beyond identity. That contradiction provides the nuanced places where we can map evolution in both individual social movements as well as the larger culture. Listen to David Coogan: “When we see social movements as places to begin much-needed inquiries into social issues—as opposed to ready-made phenomena with the arguments worked out—they can become remarkably gen-

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erative” (161). Coogan points us toward an open-ended, change-oriented focus on movements. He sees his students’ rehearsal of dominant cultural myths of equality (we’re all the same and any of us could experience homelessness) not as a failure to resist ideographic thinking but rather evidence of negotiating a “local politics.” In Coogan’s example lie the contradictions of identity; his student articulates a rhetoric of mythic and critical thinking. In this paradox Coogan finds the beginning of a personal and public identity that might be put to use in social change work. Contradictions such as the one Coogan presents reveal multiple tensions. A personal sentiment that rehearses dominant cultural myths becomes praxis for transformative social movement work. A private sentiment leads to “critical” public action. These contradictions—what Malesh and Stevens in this collection’s introduction frame as the “changing relationship” between public and private discourses (3)—abound in Active Voices. Foregrounding these contradictions reflects a larger transition happening in the culture. Just as contributors to this volume are complicating and challenging our conception of what constitutes a “critical” consciousness and a “public” utterance, real social movements are challenging our scholarly conceptions of “critical,” “public,” and “progressive.” Politically, for instance, some social movements on the Right are organizing for structural change. The movement to privatize education, for example, represents a potentially sweeping, macro-level departure from the way that the nation has schooled its youth. Elsewhere on the Right is civic discourse that challenges long-held beliefs about how liberal societies organize themselves, advancing arguments, for example, about how both faith-based and for-profit institutions can provide basic services more efficiently and effectively than the state. As Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield (1994:3) point out, Christian fundamentalism is undeniably a part of new social movements. Subcultures advocating home schooling, school choice, constitutional bans on same-sex marriage, and the privatization of social security have become full-fledged movements, employing rhetorics that appeal to fundamentalists, libertarians, or both. Many conservatives who are part of these movements are not conservatives at all, as they do not wish to conserve basic tenets of liberal democracy. Rather, they advocate radical departures. These social movements on the Right cry out for analysis and Sharon Crowley’s (2006) recent book is a useful analysis of the implications of conservative organizing. Yet we need more of this kind of work, and we need scholarship more focused on the people of these movements themselves, given that academics have often “marginalized social movements that do not originate from the left” (Pichardo 1997:413). These Right movements, for all their cultural impact, are largely absent from the pages of Active Voices, illustrating the need for more scholarship. In what ways are social movements on the Right working in tandem with the electoral

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system? How do we distinguish between right-wing social movement organizing and political lobbying? How might these conservative movements challenge current scholarly conceptions of social movements? These are just a few questions we ought to address. On what has traditionally been called the Left, in the meantime, social movement people find themselves making more conservative claims. Peace movements in the United States, for example, have argued in recent years that we ought to maintain membership and faith in the United Nations and, more broadly, in the notion of international alliances and diplomacy. Further, the antiwar movement has made claims about holding on to—conserving—the traditional ban on preemptive military action. Social movements on the Left find themselves fighting to conserve New Deal and Great Society institutions. Consider the image of college students and senior citizens organizing together to preserve Social Security. In terms of civic engagement, the Left also finds itself making conservative claims. For instance, at a recent meeting of the Rhetoricians for Peace—a social movement organization comprised of antiwar academics including myself—participants discussed strategies for convincing undergraduates to return to traditional ways of following current events (read the daily newspaper instead of engaging the blogosphere or watching cable news and Jon Stewart) and entering into the agora (make rational arguments instead of invoking neoconservative pathos or “truthiness”). The Left sometimes sounds curmudgeonly and that is a rhetoric that needs parsing, especially since the stakes are so high. A curmudgeonly rhetoric, after all, reflects static techniques and strategies. A recent Utne Reader report on the future of protest suggests that the peace movement has been largely ineffectual in recent years precisely because its rhetoric and tactics have not changed. A social movement that hangs on to “a default tactic” cannot sustain itself (Hart 2007b:39). None of the aforementioned alliances are surprising; the notion, for example, that Left-leaning social movements advocate social programming is not news. What is noteworthy, though, is the distinction between fighting for outcomes that conserve familiar structures and advocating that we depart from the status quo. Social movements on the Left are increasingly taking part in the former while movements on the Right are increasingly taking part in the latter. Now both the Right and Left, of course, continue to make claims and advocate for outcomes using social movements in tandem with electoral politics, one of the hallmarks of social movement activity in the United States (Flacks 1994:340). Though there are exceptions, however, the Right increasingly takes radical stands that involve progressing into new modes of civic life. Conversely, the Left oftentimes attempts to conserve particular values and traditions. We are at a confusing moment, a moment that Sharon Crowley (2006:2) suggests has resulted in a “stall[ed] . . . discursive climate.”

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This political moment has a great deal of relevance for scholars who study social movements. Because rhetoricians are uniquely qualified to examine the intersection of discourse, politics, and social action, Active Voices arrives at an opportune moment. If one of the premises of this book is that rhetoric has a great deal to offer social movement scholarship, then students and scholars of social movements with diverse disciplinary affiliations ought to consider the productive possibilities of rhetorical analysis, as the contributors to this collection effectively model. Understanding the import of electoral politics on social movement organizing and vice versa is as important now as it ever has been. What does Active Voices contribute to understanding this cultural shift? Above all, a reminder that the categories are inherently messy. Looking more closely at even the so-called “Right” movements that are largely absent from this collection reminds us that movements that go against mythic thinking regarding political affiliation offer a chance to push at boundaries, to challenge definitions of identity markers such as “Right” and “Left.” Active Voices also challenges us to rethink what constitutes materiality. The introduction emphasizes that materiality is fundamental to any understanding of rhetoric—as important as symbolic action. This framing of social movement rhetoric as “interactive and situated, but also transformative and material” (6) gives us a more critical way to talk about persons-within-social movements. Malesh illustrates our inescapable materiality through her embodied scholarship and autoethnography. Coogan’s personal experience also led him to such self-awareness: I assumed social movements were always idea-driven, succeeding when they articulated arguments that compelled people to change. And while I encountered a bit of this from public housing’s staunch defenders, I mostly encountered people-driven movements: community organizers attempting to open up dialogue with their charges, to listen as much as to persuade. Because the organizers treated my students and me the same way, I came to see dialogue as the heart of it all. (151).

Coogan focuses our attention on empathy, human contact, interaction, and dialogue between real, material persons with conflicted and conflicting identities. Privileged students. Recent reentry convicts. These personal interactions foster critical awareness that transcends feelings, sentiments, and notions of individuality. Instead, the human, the focus on persons, provides a chance for contextual understandings of social change—and also for involvement in the process of making social change happen. The emphasis on the human, the personal, helps various agents imagine a transformed future. Students of social movement rhetoric can take part in imagining alternatives and working toward social change. In her chapter, Stevens discusses a

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pedagogy that allows students to develop exigencies that transcend teacherly purposes, recasting classroom purposes using detournement and remixing prefabricated expectations. Stevens’s pedagogy provides students with radical and subversive agency. Both Coogan and Stevens invite students into the process of producing texts. They both acknowledge the materiality of rhetorical situations and students by inviting them to produce social change, culturally, rhetorically, and materially. Coogan’s students dialogue about their own relationships to the lived experiences of social movements. Stevens’s students create rhetorical exigencies, purposes, and audiences in order to intervene, echoing scholars of writing who ask us to let go of a view of the rhetorical situation that limits responses by seeking “appropriate” (decorous, nonradical, liberal) approaches and utterances. In this way, Active Voices shows us how the cultural and rhetorical intersect with the material. In fact, rejecting the cultural-material binary is a dominant theme in the book, from Rosteck’s analysis of the impetus behind “New Left” activism to Malesh’s exploration of vegan narratives that at once reflect personal ideology and provoke practical action. It is Active Voices’ break with cultural-material binaries that leads readers toward the imperative to pay closer attention to social class as another identity marker. For theorized understandings of social class both facilitate and complicate our notions of how the cultural and the material intersect. Class is an identity marker that invokes both the cultural and the material, referring at once to a particular cultural affiliation (the working class as a group united by common practices) and material reality (the working class as a group united by a particular set of economic realities). For this reason and at the risk of unfairly privileging one identity marker, class affiliation stands out as a marker that social movement scholars need to study with particularly close attention due to our current moment of transition—a moment of transition highlighted in this collection. Indeed a significant part of what academics invested in understanding social movements need to grapple with is how the aforementioned shift has also been a shift in terms of which classes are involved in social movements. Despite the professed dismissal of structural markers, many academics seem most comfortable situating social movements as movements of working-class people who are socially liberal. Labor movements, for example, are comfortable social movements to many academics because the politics are reassuring. These are movements led by working people to benefit working people. There is an affective dimension; liberal scholars can feel as if by virtue of their scholarly gaze they are somehow taking common cause with a movement they feel is just. Again, Active Voices illustrates this trend by using examples such as the construction of the New Left (Rosteck), the Congressional Union for Women’s Suffrage (Amado-Miller), and convict reentry programs (Coogan).

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Social movement scholars might have different affective responses to examinations of contemporary social movements of elites. How might it feel, for example, to analyze CEOs, shareholders, and other capitalists who organize, for example, a social movement to privatize social security or restrict trade regulations? Do we even consider such organizing to be examples of social movements as opposed to, say, lobbying? If wealthy elites organize social networks that serve to construct their group identity and work toward political ends, their action seems to constitute a new social movement. This is a shift, a shift in terms of understanding who social movement people are. Potentially, it is a shift, too, in the affective dimension of our relationship with objects of study. Of course many theorists have abandoned categories such as class and political affiliation altogether, finding identity markers to be inadequate ways to understand social change and community affiliation. So-called structural categories always necessarily intersect and interact with other less monolithic signifiers including hobbies and habits, lifestyle choices and commitments. Further, an identity marker such as class or political belief is, to be sure, situated and socially constructed, relying on a particular social context for its unstable, shifting, contested meaning. Despite these now dominant critiques of identity within social movement theory, I rely heavily on social class as a feature of social movements because, culturally and materially, class continues to have a profound impact on the image, identity, and credibility of groups working for social change, as well as on the lived experiences of group members. This is due to the fact that class is a marker that takes up the intersection of materiality and culture. In this collection, both Stevens and Cain point us toward the productive possibility of this very culture-materiality intersection. Drawing on—and critiquing—the work of Buechler (1995), Melucci (1994), and Polletta (1997), Stevens locates a theory and a pedagogy that rejects the problem of choosing between critical lenses that unequally emphasize structure and culture. Stevens offers a corrective to the culture-structure dichotomy and instead advocates the use and the acknowledgment of dynamic interplay between both. Cain uses her engaging analysis of the drum circle to illustrate how a broad awareness of material space and material context can mediate the binary “between words as ideas versus words as things or actions” (188). Cain argues that theorists can follow the lead of the drum circle and mediate cultural issues such as personal identity and self-actualization with issues of praxis such as political action. If we move beyond class as a fixed reality rooted solely in economics, then the notion of class can help us to theorize the intersection that Stevens and Cain describe. Class references the amount of cultural and/or material capital that a given individual and/or collective possesses. As we think about the individuals and collectives involved in social movements, we need to attend to how persons-in-movements negotiate power and lack thereof. I am

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arguing that as we look broadly at social movements including those comprised of elites we need to understand how they use power and capital to advance causes and complement electoral processes. Class provides a lens to do just that. Class helps us theorize and complicate issues such as access, cultural capital, power, hegemony, and conflict—all issues that are important to understanding social movements, especially during our current time of flux. In addition to the elite movements, some of the other new, politically conservative social movements (the anti–gay marriage movement, for instance) do indeed involve substantial numbers of working-class people. Many working people in the so-called red states are involved in organizing some of the Right-leaning Christian social movements. But, like the CEOs, they do not generally make many liberal academics feel good. These are working-class individuals, not unlike those involved in labor movements during past decades. Yet they are socially conservative and they fail to garner empathy or affective connections among many Left academics. Both the fiscally conservative elites and the socially conservative working class challenge social movement academics to broaden our understanding of the complexities and contradictions and shifting political alliances of class. They challenge academics to bring humanity to our representations of the persons involved in movements and avoid setting ourselves up as authoritative, enlightened scholars “studying down.” Ethically, we must avoid the attitude of superiority, whether looking at elites (who we may feel are part of an unethical or oppressive regime) or looking at working-class persons involved with socially conservative movements (who we may feel are promoting a prejudiced agenda). While tuning in to the diverse politics of class cultures, academics invested in social movements also need to note in what ways movement members build alliances. We ought to study the extent to which those with greater capital are or are not taking common cause with a broad constituency of movement members. In Rhetoric & Marxism, James Art Aune (1994) points out that some in the United States are more comfortable identifying and forming coalitions with more affluent classes. And using examples from an array of movements including the peace movement, Fred Rose (2000) shows how productive such diverse coalitions can be. In this volume, Hauser and mcclellan highlight the rank-and-file and Miller and Jackson critique divisions between university professors and K-12 teachers, divisions rooted in both gender and class. These are but two examples of how close analysis of class can yield productive data. Despite the persistence of class as a dynamic feature of social movements, the literature has not engaged the complexities of social class as intensely as it might. The work of Aldon Morris (1992:366) is an exception, particularly in his useful framework for understanding how class works in tandem with other markers such as race to construct a “hegemonic consciousness”

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among agents of social movements. Yet often the literature on class and social movements underestimates the pervasive influence of social class in our postindustrial age. Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield (1994:6) note the “tendency for the social base of new social movements to transcend class structure.” This is true insomuch as the West no longer lives in an industrial society where social movements represent easy-to-recognize class divisions. Organized labor looked like organized labor during the 1930s. Consider a social movement of fundamentalists in the Midwest. In economic terms, this movement will “transcend class structure” as Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield suggest. Yet, culturally, this movement is united by a common social class. Members of this movement, socially, lack particular kinds of cultural capital and agency. In this sense, they are working class. Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield suggest that in place of class interests, many of these social movements are united by other markers, including “professions that do not correspond with structural explanations” (6). Again, this distinction is helpful in contextualizing new social movements in a postindustrial culture, but professions, even in our information age, are always necessarily part of a class structure. As Zweig (2000) argues, line of work dictates social class on the basis of how much agency one has in the workplace. This is not a structural explanation but rather a material class division involving choice and power. As Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield (1994:7) suggest, “The grievances and mobilizing factors tend to focus on cultural and symbolic issues that are linked with issues of identity rather than on economic grievances that characterized the working-class movement.” I would add, though, that cultural issues are issues of class. A group that mobilizes due to a perceived lack of cultural agency is uniting on the basis of its class identity. Right-leaning Christians whose ideology is systematically excluded from, say, a school curriculum and mocked by those with more cultural capital are united by class standing, even if the social movement finds fiscal backing from economic elites. Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield (1994) suggest that new social movements are no longer working class by virtue of the tendency among new social movements to foreground the self. They find that “material affluence” (11) has made room for social movements to advocate for actualization instead of, say, a living wage. Pichardo (1997:414) concurs, stating that “NSMs emphasize quality of life and life-style concerns” instead of concerns about wealth distribution. I would argue that in this case, too, the imperative for these social movements stems from class conflict. We may be postindustrial, but that doesn’t mean that the alienating effects of capitalism have disappeared. There is an imperative for self-actualization in the postindustrial age, but those esoteric needs result from alienation of workers overwhelmed by pushes for efficiency and productivity. The fat-acceptance movement shows how social movements are foregrounding economics (workplace

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discrimination, the imperative for industries such as airlines to pay for infrastructures that aid access) and culture (representations of persons of size in pop culture); this particular movement often foregrounds the economic and the cultural in ways that attend to social class as both an economic reality and a cultural reality. Pichardo (1997:412) situates the notion that new social movements are not “working class” within the scholarly emphasis on student protests in the 1960s. This new locus focused critics of social movements on a middle-class milieu: higher education. Pichardo points out that members of these movements tended to come from the new middle class—“highly educated” folks in universities and human services (416–17). As I reflect on Active Voices, I sense that contributors nudge us away from a limited view of social movements in which we look at movements as expressions of a particular set of interests but in which we also complicate the agents who might share those interests. For instance, student movements that made universities more diverse places served the interests of multiple groups: persons of color who were grossly underrepresented on campuses, members of the white working class who were also excluded from university life, privileged students who for a variety of reasons (personal, political, public, private, ideological, ideographic, performative) wished to increase access to higher education. Active Voices wants us to reckon with this complicated portrait of material identity. The kinds of rank-and-file bodily resistance that Hauser and mcclellan analyze occur among groups that assert collective power. Tattoo culture, for example, does not draw on members from a single racial or ethnic or socioeconomic category. Tattoo culture encompasses an array of embodied movements whose performances involve acting out socioeconomic identities, that is, wearing working-class uniforms. When some rank-and-file members of the tattoo community take off business suits and put on jeans and leather accessories, that performance speaks to complex issues of identity construction and subversion. These embodied performances of class are about the self, which is consistent with new social movement rhetoric as defined by Pichardo (1997) and Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield (1994), but they are also about collective subversions of class. And while the members of tattoo culture represents various points on the socioeconomic spectrum, class—by virtue of their embodied performances—remains a fundamental feature of movement activity. I suggest we approach Active Voices with these issues in mind. In the United States in particular, we find ourselves at a fascinating transitional moment in terms of studying social movements. Although I worry a great deal about the gains made by Right-leaning movements, I take heart in the fact that the Right is making use of collectivity. For instance, conservatives have become masters of grassroots methods of claims-making, organizing, and

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community building. Richard Flacks (1994:337) writes, “The dominant culture encourages Americans to place their hopes for fulfillment, not on collective action in the public sphere, but on the results of their individual efforts within the spheres of work, education, and family.” While we suffer in the United States due to the polarized political climate in which we live, it may bode well for the future of the democracy that both the Left and the Right recognize the power of social movements, which, at their heart, are democratic vehicles for change. Given the democratic nature of social movement activity, Charles Tilly (2004:14) worries, “The social movement, as an invented institution, could disappear or mutate into some quite different form of politics.” Tilly points out that trends such as globalization, which disempower action at the local level, threaten the future of social movements, yet, in the United States, the “all politics is local” cliché continues to hold true as groups representing a fairly wide range (given the limits imposed by the dominant, two-party system) of political ideologies use social movement strategies. As academics, we need to contend with the uncomfortable nature of many new social movements—one of the by-products of that diversity of value systems presently using the strategies of social movements. How do we contend with this new diversity? Again, this volume offers some answers—or at the very least some starting points—that are rooted in creativity and coalition building. In her chapter “Engaging Globalization through Local Community Activism: A Model for Activist Pedagogical Practice,” Anne-Marie Todd, for instance, engages globalization directly. Whereas Tilly worries that globalization threatens democracy, Todd tackles the trend head-on by fostering connectedness through community and technology. She not only teaches about social movements and globalization; rather, both social movements and globalization become methods and methodologies that she uses pedagogically. Todd describes her own social movement communication course, which includes a service-learning component that helps students recognize the presence of globalization in their own lives. She finds that her students are able to recognize power structures and situate themselves within those structures. Most importantly, perhaps, many of the students came to see the power of coalition building to intervene in the ongoing processes of globalization. At once Todd offers students the opportunity to critique the material effects of globalization while also partaking in some of its tropes. This middle-ground approach allows students to be agents as well as critics, actors as well as analysts. They become practitioners and collaborators. In the aforementioned Utne Reader report, Joseph Hart (2007a:42) suggests that social action relies upon a search for “solutions that arise from collaboration.” The students in Todd’s course become practitioners as well as knowledge-makers, breaking down the barrier that Jackson and Miller, writing in this very volume, find to be problematic and detrimental to coalition politics.

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If we can take heart from the facts that (1) a diverse spectrum of political and class groups are using social movement organizing as a device for social change, and (2) we have opportunities to involve our students in these processes, then we can also look positively on the fact that social movement scholarship itself is thriving, as evidenced by this collection. Social movement scholarship that foregrounds the human involved in a collective—the person within a movement—is an optimistic endeavor, believing social action matters, culturally and materially and all points in between. Looking at texts and phenomena through a movement lens grounded in rhetoric is more proactive and optimistic than, say, pure critique. While I appreciate the contributions made by ideological critique (and frequently use that very lens in my own scholarly work), in our own divisive times social movement theory and analysis seems especially suited for analyzing the world in such a way as to foreground reality as an evolving concept. Reality is not fixed, and social movement scholarship uncovers how organizations use collective action to change social life. My students sometimes accuse the critical writers we study of “complaining.” Likewise, the Alicia Silverstone character in the Jane Austen–inspired film Clueless (1995) calls the earnest, socially conscious pop music her brother listens to “complaint rock.” The contributors to Active Voices transcend complaint by optimistically contemplating the dynamic ways that social movement people enter into dialectic with social life. Effective social movements allow for dynamic interaction among multiple perspectives. With the rise of Web 2.0, in particular, the culture no longer accepts grand pronouncements and static statements of critique. The responses to such pronouncements will likely echo the “complaint rock” statement from Clueless. In lieu of fixed utterances, social movements can benefit from interactive, collaboratively constructed utterances. Hart (2007b:39) offers examples such as the Bubble Project, which involved the culture jamming of advertisements to include dialogue bubbles next to images of people. These dialogue bubbles allowed passersby to write their own messages next to the faces of supermodels and celebrities and others imagined in public advertisements. Unlike a fixed message on a placard, these critical utterances allowed multiple agents to take part in writing the message. Social movements might follow suit and perform social actions in ways that allow for multiple individuals with multiple perspectives to take part in the composing process, so to speak. But Hart points out these actions need to be more than just performances—what activist Jack DuVall calls “political exhibitionism” (as cited in Hart 2007b:39). Given the dynamic nature of the process of social change, and given the challenges of the diversity of value systems currently organizing, the humanized social movement lens that Active Voices advocates offers a corrective to a troubling narrative. According to Hart (2007a), that narrative goes something

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like this: a special class of Organizers, acting on behalf of the Have-Nots, attempts to take power from the Haves. The problem with that narrative, Hart writes, is that the “Have-Nots . . . basically become extras in this drama” (42). What I read in Active Voices is more than complaint and more than a heroic narrative that marginalizes and strips agency from the powerless. Instead, I see the contributors to this volume suggesting creative social change via collaboration and acknowledgment of a new and challenging diversity of value systems. By virtue of new, shifting class politics, social movements are oftentimes aligned with causes we may find unjust or unethical, requiring we take a new stance. In a recent Rhetoric Review essay, Richard J. Jensen (2006) suggests that the great challenge for scholars interested in social movement rhetoric revolves around synthesizing “the rich legacy” of social movement scholarship with new theories that can account for the broad cultural shifts that surround us. Looking at Right social movements, for instance, has a different affective dimension. This is a complicated rhetorical moment and I hope that this collection’s contributions can inform discussions that seek to sort out the new politics of many contemporary social movements.

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Contributors

MOIRA AMADO-MILLER—Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Alabama. Her research and teaching reflect an avid interest in the ways language connects with power, leading her to study textual representations of race, gender, sex, and sexuality. She is currently at work on a book about the many ways an “ideology of purity” controls representations of the feminine. MARY ANN CAIN—Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. Her recent publications include Revisioning Writers’ Talk: Gender and Culture in Acts of Composing (SUNY, 1995), articles in College English, JAEPL, and College Composition and Communication, and chapters in several edited collections. Her fiction, nonfiction, and blurred genre work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. DAVID COOGAN—Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has published in College Composition and Communication, Community Literacy, and College English. He is writing about the rhetoric of prisoner rehabilitation and the politics of public teaching, a book about teaching men to write life stories at the Richmond City Jail. He is editing Rhetoric and Social Change: The Public Work of Scholars and Students, with John Ackerman. WILLIAM DEGENARO—Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Michigan Dearborn. His scholarship on working-class culture and open-access education has appeared in Rhetoric Review, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, JAC, Open Words, and the Community College Journal of Research and Practice. He is editor of Who Says? Working-Class Rhetoric, Class Consciousness, and Community (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). GERARD A. HAUSER—College Professor of Distinction on the faculty of the Communication Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His publications include Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, 2nd ed. (Waveland Press, 2002) and Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (University of South Carolina Press, 1999). He is a Rhetoric Society of America Fellow and a National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar.

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BRIAN JACKSON—Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University. His writing has appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, and Composition Studies. His research interests include civic education, John Dewey, deliberation, and prophetic rhetoric. PATRICIA MALESH—Assistant Professor of Communication and the Associate Director of the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her scholarship is interdisciplinary and examines knowledge-making as civic praxis. She received the Rhetoric Society of America’s 2005 dissertation of the year award for “Rhetorics of Consumption: Identity, Confrontation, and Corporatization in the American Vegetarian Movement.” ERIN DAINA MC CLELLAN—Assistant Professor of Communication at Denison

University. She has received the American Academy of Political and Social Science Graduate Fellowship (2007) and the Best Should Teach Award from the University of Colorado Graduate Teacher Program (2006). Her research and teaching interests include how rhetorics of place relate to vernacular and official discourses; ancient and modern rhetorical theory; city as text; and rhetoric, culture, and urban life. THOMAS P. MILLER—Professor in the University of Arizona Rhetoric, Composition, and Teaching of English Program. He received the Modern Language Association’s Mina Shaughnessy Prize for the first part of his history of college English studies, The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), and he is now working on a second volume on the progressive movement in education. THOMAS ROSTECK—Associate Professor in Communication and adjunct in the Program for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville. He has authored two award-winning books: “See It Now” Confronts McCarthyism: Television Documentary and the Politics of Representation (University of Alabama Press, 1994) and At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies (Guilford, 1999). SHARON MCKENZIE STEVENS—Lecturer in English and Media Studies at Massey University (Aotearoa/New Zealand). Her publications include A Place for Dialogue: Language, Land Use, and Politics in Southern Arizona (University of Iowa Press, 2007), articles in Rhetoric Review and Science, Technology, & Human Values, and chapters in collections. She is the 2007 recipient of Massey University’s Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in First-Year Teaching.

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ANNE MARIE TODD—Associate Professor of Public Communication in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University. She has published in the areas of social movement rhetoric, environmental communication, and popular culture. Her research and teaching interests also include political communication and argumentation.

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Index

activist communication, 177 activist learning, 170, 175, 176, 178–79 Addams, Jane, 102 administrative progressives, 101, 106 African American women. See disorderly women; women African Americans, 191. See also black liberation movements; prisoner reentry; racism; Three Rivers Jenbé Ensemble agency, 207. See also under students antistrephon and, 84 developing a collective sense of, 191 fundamental right to, 23 groups mobilizing due to perceived lack of cultural, 207 of narrators, 134, 135, 139–41, 143 rhetorical, 48, 55, 112, 138 of users of rhetoric, 7 in workplace, 207 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 2–3 Anderson, J. L., 169–70 animal rights activism, 44. See also People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; vegetarian/vegan conversion narratives antistrephon, 70, 72, 77, 80, 88 definitions, 72–73, 77, 81 feminist/feminine version of, 82 prolepsis and, 74 reading “strong reading,” 70 as subversive practice, 72–75 strong vs. weak versions, 77, 80–82, 87 suffragists’ use of, 76 women’s use of, 78, 84, 86–88, 91n15

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 90n13 Apartheid. See South Africa Appadurai, Arjun, 168, 173 Aristotle, 5–6 Atkinson, Joshua, 133 audience identification, 115 audience of the Bitzerian tradition, rethinking the constraining, 49–51 authority, negative bonding with, 37 autoethnographic texts, 88 Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s) (Ritchie and Ronald), 71–72 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 25, 87–88 Barnard, Tanya, 137 Baumeister, Roy F., 134–35, 138–39 Bazerman, Charles, 6 Bell, Daniel, 117, 129n2 Bellamy, Edward, 99 Benford, Robert, 133 Benhabib, Seyla, 4 Bergeron, S., 175 Bickford, D. M., 176 Biesecker, Barbara, 49 binary relations/oppositions, 186–91, 194, 195 Bitzer, Lloyd, 6, 28, 48–51, 64n4, 71 Bitzerian tradition, rethinking the constraining audience of the, 49–51 Black, Edwin, 28, 124 Black Liberation Army, 163 black liberation movements, 162–63, 192–93. See also specific movements Black Nationalist movement, 184, 185, 191, 192 Black Panther Party (BPP), 163, 191

241

242

Index

Black Power (Carmichael and Hamilton), 192–94 Black Power movement, 184–86, 191, 192 blogs, 57–58 “boomerang figure,” 73. See also antistrephon “boomerang technique,” 82 Bourdieu, Pierre, 30, 38 Bruner, Jerome, 132, 134, 135 Buechler, Steven M., 9, 54 Burke, Kenneth, 57, 61, 81 on audience identification, 115 definition of rhetoric, 6 on magical thinking, 70 rhetoric of identification, 51–53 on rhetorical action, 48 “The Rhetorical Situation,” 48, 51–54, 57, 60, 61 on symbolic action, 28 theory of form, 28 theory of rhetoric, 39 Bush, George W., 43 Cakewalk, 183, 196n1 capitalism, 99, 100 Carmichael, Stokely, 192–94 Cathcart, Robert, 12 Certeau, Michel de, 32 change cultural and structural, 54–55 narratives of, 143–44 vs. social reproduction, 50 students as agents of, 175–78 Charland, Maurice, 127 Charney, Davida, 84 civil disobedience labeled as “domestic terrorism,” 2 Cixous, Hélène, 69, 84, 85, 90n13 “claim-making performances,” 99 class, social, 204–8. See also prisoner reentry classroom spaces, 188. See also space(s) classroom(s), 47–50, 56–57. See also education; pedagogy(ies) becoming site for radical cultural change, 60–61

and the problem of “difference,” 182 rethinking the rhetorical situation of the, 57–63 social movements in, 151–52 Cleaver, Eldridge, 163 collective behavior approach, 8 collective identity(ies) of black people, 192, 194. See also black liberation movements defined, 57 formation, 47, 51–53, 58 fostering a more reflexive society, 53–57 reimagining, 191–93 collective praxis, toward, 193–95 collectives, 52–53 communication activist, 177 global, 174–75. See also globalization; Internet communications courses, 170. See also Social Movement Communication course community. See also collective identity(ies) conceptions and connotations of the term, 182–84, 192, 195 “creating space” for, 191, 195. See also ThirdSpace(s); Three Rivers Jenbé Ensemble radical re-visionings of, 193–95 community activism, 192. See also Social Movement Communication course; students, as agents of change as civic responsibility, 178–79 engaging globalization through, 173. See also globalization community writing projects, 150. See also Social Movement Communication course composition theory, 55 Condit, Celeste, 161–62, 164 confrontation, rhetoric of, 39, 41–42 characteristics of, 41

Index Congressional Union for Women Suffrage (CUWS), 75–76 Connor, “Bull,” 35 conservatism, 201 container model, 48, 49 conversion narratives, 132–34 and the making of reality, 134–43 Conway, Glenda, 65n14 Counts, George S., 108–9 creativity, 83, 209 Cremin, Lawrence, 100, 110 criticism. See rhetorical criticism Crowley, Sharon, 72, 89n3, 154–56, 158, 201, 202 cultural repertoire, 85. See also feminist toolbox cultural theories, cultural change, and political action, 54–55 Cummins, Eric, 162, 163 Davies, Scott, 97, 101 de certeau, Michel. See Certeau, Michel de de Gouges, Olympe. See Gouges, Olympe de Debs, Eugene, 93 “Declaration of the Rights of Woman” (de Gouges), 79 deconstruction, 88 deliberation, 23 democracy, 23, 42, 77, 78, 160 Dewey on, 100, 102–5 education and, 105, 109 elements, 23 representative, 23–24 deviant behavior. See disorderly women Dewey, John, 105, 108, 111, 112 on democracy, 100, 102–5 on education, 93–95, 100, 103, 105, 107–8, 112 on liberalism, 102 pragmatism, 95, 104–5 on science and experimentalism, 93, 104 on social change, 103–4 social ethics, 100, 102–3

243

social reconstructionist master frame, 108 on “socialism,” 104 dialectical synthesis, 190 dialogism, 32, 35, 44–45, 132, 151, 162 difference, 182 disempowerment and, 36 discourse and system, 1 discursive space, 187–89. See also symbolic realms of discourse “discursive” vs. “extradiscursive” obstacles. See “extradiscursive obstacles” “disorder,” rhetorical and epistemological, 70 “disorderly conduct,” 69–70 Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (SmithRosenberg), 69 disorderly women, 78, 79, 81, 83, 87–89. See also women speaking out of turn, 69–72 dissident discourse, 32. See also resistance movements; vernacular “dissoi logoi,” 154, 155 “domestic spying” initiatives, 2–3 “domestic terrorist” organizations, 2 double bind, 47, 63n3 dramatistic theory of Burke, 28 Eagleton, Terry, 71, 88 écriture féminine, 84–87 Edbauer, Jenny, 57, 58 education. See also classroom; pedagogy(ies); Progressive Education Association child-focused, 107–11 Dewey’s vision of, 95. See also under Dewey progressive movement in, 93–98. See also progressivism as case study in educational coalition building, 111–13 educational framework, progressive, 100–105 emancipatory resistance, 137 End of Ideology, The (Bell), 117, 129n2

244

Index

“endism,” rhetoric of, 118, 121. See also ideology, end of enunciatory communities, 63n3 environmentalism, 74–75 equality, 78 Ervin, Elizabeth, 50, 60 ethics of social transformation, 102. See also under Dewey experimentalism, 93, 100, 104, 107 extradiscursive contexts of language use, 184–87, 189–90 “extradiscursive obstacles,” 182–83 Faber, Brenton, 19–20, 143–44 Faces of Reentry, 151 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), “counterterrorist” division of, 2–3 female identity, 36 feminist discourse, 86–87. See also women feminist identity, 37–38 feminist scholarship, 70, 186 feminist toolbox. See also disorderly women ideology, commonplaces, language, and, 83–86 Filene, Peter, 97 Flacks, Richard, 209 flexibility, rhetorical, 101 form, Burke’s theory of, 28 Fortun, Kim, 63n3 Foss, Karen, 6 Foss, Sonja, 6 Foucault, Michel, 1 “frame makers” vs. “frame receivers,” 105. See also Progressive Education Association frames defined, 95 master, 100 framing (processes), 10, 94–95, 98. See also progressive educational framework freedom, 102–3 Fulkerson, Richard, 120 Fuller, Margaret, 90n10

Gandhi, Mahatma, 137 Ganz, Marshall, 140 Garner, Roberta, 8, 9 gender division, 81 gentle violence, 30, 38, 39 Gitlin, Todd, 124 globalization definitions and conceptions of, 172–75 from the student perspective, 167–70, 172–75 Goffman, Erving, 10, 99 Goldstein, D., 173 Gore, Al, 74–75 Gore, Jennifer, 16 Gouges, Olympe de, 79–80 Graff, Gerald, 73 greengrocer, parable of the, 41 Griffin, Cindy, 6 Griffin, Leland, 26–27, 116–17 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 2 Gusfield, Joseph R., 207, 208 habitable space, 184, 191 Hamilton, Charles V., 192–94 Hariman, Robert, 125 Harris, Joseph, 182 Hart, Joseph, 209–11 Hauser, Gerard A., 7, 29, 39, 119, 162, 163 Havel, Vacláv, 41 Hawhee, Debra, 154–56, 158 Hayden, Tom, 118 Heinrichs, Jay, 74 heteroglossia, 30, 87 Hickey, Dona, 73, 89n5 history-making, 121–22 Hofstadter, Richard, 96–97 Holmes, David G., 85–86 homelessness, 156. See also prisoner reentry homologous structures, 30–31 housing, public, 150, 151. See also prisoner reentry human rights, 177, 178. See also “rights” movements

Index hypocrisy, 74–77 hypothesis making, rival, 156 idea-driven movements, 162 identification, 39, 115 rethinking exigence with Burke’s rhetoric of, 51–53 identity formation, 70, 116, 140, 186–87. See also collective identity(ies), formation and political action, 54 identity markers, 200, 203–5 ideographs, 152 ideology, 96 end of, 117–18, 120. See also “endism” inappropriate strategies and inappropriateness as a rhetorical strategy, 50–51 indirection, rhetoric of, 39, 40 individualism, 98–100 instrumentalism, 100 intelligentsia, 122, 127 interdependence, 187, 190 identities of, 187 interdisciplinary social movement scholarship, 14, 15 Internet, 58. See also blogs privacy on, 3 invention rhetoric of, 48 rhetorical, 72, 80 “invitation to rhetoric,” 53 “iron chain of ideas,” 99 Iron Jawed Angels (film), 77, 90n9 Jackson, George, 163 Jensen, Richard J., 211 Johnston, Hank, 207, 208 journalistic reporting, “masculine” values of, 80 kairos, 52, 80 Kasai, M., 172–73 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 83–84 Kennedy, George, 6 Ketu. See Oladuwa, Ketu

245

Kilpatrick, William H., 108 Knoblauch, Cy, 149 Kraditor, Aileen, 76, 77 Kramer, Sarah, 137 kynicism, 87, 88 labor movements, 93, 204, 207 language, 71, 78, 83, 89nn3–5, 187, 189. See also under feminist toolbox and consequence, 71 language use, extradiscursive contexts of, 184–87 Laraña, Enrique, 207, 208 Laslett, Barbara, 137 Le Doeuff, Michèle, 186–87 leaders of social movement discourse of, 25 primary task of, 12 learning. See also service learning activist, 170, 175, 176, 178–79 LeCourt, Donna, 55, 60, 64n9 Left-leaning social movements, 202. See also “Letter to the New Left” (Mills) Lerner, Gerda, 69 “Letter to the New Left” (Mills), 115, 116 audience of, 124 contexts of, 116–19 implications of, 126–28 purposes of, 129nn2–3 reading, 120–26 rhetorical functions of, 122 Levis-Fitzgerald, M. R., 169–70 “liberal” education, 103 liberatory movements of 1960s, 9 liberty, 102–3 life-stories, 135 “Literary Criticisms of Oratory” (Griffin), 26 local community activism. See community activism Lorde, Audre, 83 Luban, David, 45n2 Lunsford, Andrea, 50, 59, 60 lynching, 80 Lyotard, Jean-François, 83, 85

246

Index

MacLure, Maggie, 135 magical thinking, 70 Mandela, Nelson, 32 marriage contract, 79 Martin, Dannie “Red Hog,” 153 master narratives, 133 materiality, 6, 187–90. See also physical space culture and, 205 rethinking what constitutes, 203 Mayer, Margit, 19, 20n2 McGee, Michael, 12–13, 127, 133 McGerr, Michael, 99 “meaning work,” educational, 98 Melucci, Alberto, 8, 12, 54–57 mentors, 140–42 Merryfield, M. M., 172–73 Milholland, Inez, 78 Miller, Jim, 118 Mills, Charles Wright. See also “Letter to the New Left” life history, 117–18 mobilization, 162 Morris, Aldon, 206 Moskowitz, Isa Chandra, 137–38 movement frames, defined, 10 movement narratives, 133 multivocality, 34. See also polyvocality of vernacular discourse Murdock, Rupert, 3 narratives of change, 143–44 power of, as movement activity, 142–43 narrativity as social movement praxis, 132–34 transformational potential, 132–33 National Security Agency, 2 National Women’s Party (NWP), 75–77 Native Son (Wright), 149–50 negative bonding with authority, 37 New Left, 45n3. See also “Letter to the New Left” (Mills) New Left Review (journal), 115, 118, 120

“new” rhetorical style, 119 new social movement studies, 9–11, 54, 58, 64n6 rethinking rhetoric with matters through the lens of, 53–57 new social movements (NSM), 20n1, 119, 128, 129n4, 162, 207–8 Newman, Leonard S., 134–35, 138–39 Nixon, Richard M., 37 nonconformity. See disorderly women nonviolence, 38 Nusser, Janie, 109 objectivity, 80, 83, 84 O’Dair, Sharon, 55–56, 64n9 Offender Aid and Restoration of Richmond (OAR), 151, 155–56, 158 Ohmann, Richard, 60, 64n9 Oladuwa, Ketu, 181, 184, 185, 189, 190, 193–95 Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie, 73 Ong, Walter, 121, 123 Ortner, Sherry, 1 “other.” See ThirdSpace(s) panoptic society, 42 Paterson, Lachy, 51 pedagogical progressives, 101 pedagogy(ies), 50, 51, 58, 60, 63, 192. See also classroom; education activist, 178–79. See also activist learning adopting an, 170 critical, 16, 149, 150 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 2, 34, 142–43 Perelman, Chaim, 73 persuasion for social movements, 11–12 Petrovna, Tanya, 137 Philosophy & Rhetoric (journal), 28 physical space (material realm), 187–90 Pichardo, Nelson, 207, 208 picketing, 40 political action. See also specific topics cultural theories, cultural change, and, 54–55

Index political cultures, influence of rhetorical styles on, 125 Polletta, Francesca, 54, 64n8 polyvocality of vernacular discourse, 30, 31, 34 portfolios, student, 62 positionality, markers of, 37 Pough, Gwendolyn D., 191 power, 34–35, 39–41, 189 performance of, 32 pragmatism, 93 of Dewey, 95, 104–5 Pratt, Mary Louise, 88 prisoner reentry, 151, 159 and the anxiety of outcomes, 160–64 finding footing in, 154–60 rhetoric of, 151–53 “privacy,” 2–3 calls for, 4 “private” vs. “public,” 121, 126, 157–58 notions of, 3–4 process movement, 111 professionalism, 105–6 Progressive Education Association (PEA), 95, 105, 111 professionalism, 105–11 Progressive Education (PEA), 107, 109 progressive educational framework, 100–105. See also education, progressive movement in Progressive Era, 94, 100 progressivism, 94 historical perspective on, 96, 107 as social movement, 96–100 prolepsis, 74 defined, 74, 89n7 pronouns, 123 psychoanalytic theory and social movement studies, 8–9 psychology, individual and social movement studies, 8–9 public discourse, 41. See also “private” vs. “public” publicity principle, 41, 45n2

247

racism, 30, 37–38, 80, 83, 150, 163. See also black liberation movements; South Africa radical identities, 184 radical re-visionings of community, 193–95 radicalism, 90n15. See also “Letter to the New Left” (Mills) rationality, 83, 84 rebellious behavior. See disorderly women reflexive nature of social movements, 59 reflexivity, 59, 60 collective identities and, 53–57 relationships, social, 186–87 representation, political, 23–24 resistance movements, 24–25. See also vernacular resource mobilization paradigm, 9 modifications, 9–10 resources of society, movements that seek control of, 24 Reynolds, Nedra, 176, 182, 188, 190 rhetoric, 5. See also specific topics as action, 5–7 definitions and scope of the term, 5–7, 71 history, 71 ways of studying, 28 rhetorical criticism, 28–29, 46n4, 71 rhetorical modalities, 39 rhetorical-pragmatic criticism, 71 rhetorical situation, 48, 50, 51. See also under classroom defined, 48, 49, 51, 52 inventive theory of, 48 “Rhetorical Situation, The” (Bitzer), 28, 46n9, 48 “Rhetorical Situation, The” (Burke), 48, 51–54, 57, 60–61 “Rhetorical Structure of the Antimasonic Movement, The” (Griffin), 26–27 rhetoricians as activist academics, 11–15 as activist intellectuals, 16–19

248 Rhoads, R. A., 169–70 Right, social movements on the, 201–3 “rights” movements, 9, 79, 177. See also animal rights activism Ritchie, Joy, 71–73, 80, 81 rival hypothesis making, 156 Ronald, Kate, 71–73, 80, 81 Rude, Carolyn, 52 Sanger, Margaret, 80, 82 sarcasm, 87 Schneider, Stephen, 191–92 Schweizer, Peter, 74, 75 science, 104. See also objectivity scientism, 93 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 43 and post-9/11 America, 2, 43 service learning, 58, 169–70, 177–78 service learning projects, 151. See also community activism; prisoner reentry; students Sheard, Cynthia, 53 Sillars, Malcolm, 12 Simons, Herbert, 11–12 Slayden, Barbara, 153 Sloop, John, 158, 161, 163–64 Sloterdijk, Peter, 87 Smith, Eugene Randolph, 107 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 69 Snow, David, 10 Snow, Malinda, 120–21 social class, 204–8. See also prisoner reentry social cohesion, rhetoric of, 97 Social Frontier, The (journal), 99 social intelligence, 103–4 Social Movement Communication course (COMM 130), 168–73, 178–79 analysis of student writing, 171–72 social movement studies, 7–10. See also new social movement studies social movements. See also new social movements; specific topics defining, 7, 8, 11–13, 97

Index integrated approach to the study of, 19 nature of, 97, 98 as rhetorical performances, 34–38 that fail to mobilize groups, 100 as theory and practice, 7–11 trends in, 7–11 social psychology and social movement studies, 8–9 social reflexivity. See reflexivity social reproduction vs. change, 50 social space. See space(s) “socialism,” 104. See also “Letter to the New Left” (Mills) Soja, Edward, 190–91 solidarity, 36 South Africa, 32, 36 space(s), 187–90 “creating,” 191, 195. See also ThirdSpace(s) how people experience, 190 transient, 184, 191 Spellmeyer, Kurt, 160 Steinem, Gloria, 80–82 “stories of becoming,” 134, 135, 139, 141, 144 storytelling. See also conversion narratives; narrativity rhetorical dimension, 139–40 street rhetoric. See also vernacular rhetoric power to interpellate power, 34–35 structural strain approach, 8 structural theories, structural change, and political action, 54–55 student perspective, globalization from the, 167–70, 172–75 students. See also classroom; pedagogy(ies); specific topics agency, 15, 16, 48, 63, 170, 172, 175, 177, 195, 204 as agents of change, 175–78 Students for a Democratic Society (journal), 118 subjectivity, 83 subjugation, subversion of the ideologies of, 72

Index subversion focused, 72 rhetorics of, 39, 42–43 subversive practice coming to terms, 75–78 reading antistrephon as, 72–75 suffragists and “suffragettes,” 75–78, 80. See also voting (rights) “Supremacy Crimes” (Steinem), 81 Swidler, Ann, 85 symbolic action, 28 symbolic interactionism, 10 symbolic realms of discourse, 187, 188, 190 “system,” American, 163 tattoo culture, 208 teacher-student-peer dialogue, 62–63 teaching, 55. See also classroom; education; pedagogy(ies) as civic praxis, 15–16 terrorism, 167 advocacy work labeled as, 2 fear of, 43 testimonials, 133 “third factor,” 186–87. See also Three Rivers Jenbé Ensemble “thirding” of binary oppositions. See binary relations/oppositions Thirdspace theory, 190 ThirdSpace(s), 190–91 reimagining collective identity, 191–93 Three Rivers Jenbé Ensemble (TRJE), 181, 183–87, 193–95 as a “third factor,” 187–91 Tilly, Charles, 97–99, 112, 209 “tool kit.” See feminist toolbox transient spaces, 184, 191 “transparency” of physical space, 188 “tropes,” rhetorical, 73 University of Vermont (UVM). See Three Rivers Jenbé Ensemble value hierarchies, 96 vegan activism, 3. See also animal rights activism

249

vegetarian/vegan conversion narratives, 135–39, 142–43. See also conversion narratives audiences, 139 as social praxis, 132, 134 vegetarianism/veganism as a social movement, 144n1 vegetarians, types of, 144n1 verisimilitudes, 134 vernacular, the adopted as the official, 43 interrogates “official” discourse, 32 multimodality, 34 social movements, rhetoric, and intimations of, 26–29 vernacular discourse, polyvocality of, 30, 31 vernacular rhetoric, 25–26, 43–45. See also social movements, as rhetorical performances defining characteristics of, 36–39 Hauser’s model of, 29 as mode of resistance, discernible characteristics of, 38–43 a theorizing of, 29–33 Vietnam War protests, 37 violence, 80–82. See also gentle violence Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), 155–57, 161. See also prisoner reentry, finding footing in vocational instruction, 103 voice and interpretation, 30 voting (rights), 23–24, 75–77. See also suffragists and “suffragettes” Walt Disney World theme parks, 3 “war on terror,” 43, 167 warrantless wiretapping surveillance program, 2 “we,” 52, 53. See also collective identity(ies) Welch, Nancy, 182–83 Wells, Ida B., 80, 82 West Africa. See Three Rivers Jenbé Ensemble Whalen, Susan, 119, 162, 163

250 Wichelns, Herbert, 26 Wilson, Woodrow, 76–78 Wolf, Joseph, 2 women choosing against the status quo. See disorderly women claims to status tools, 84 need to “write their own bodies,” 90n13 need to write themselves, 69 recognizing each other, 79–82 resistive language, 84–85 rights, 79. See also voting (rights) subordination within philosophical thought, 186

Index of 19th century who remained unmarried, 69–70 as “weaker sex,” 36 Women in the Nineteenth Century (Fuller), 90n10 working-class people, 204, 207, 208 Wright, Frances, 37–38 Wright, Richard, 149–50 writing situations, 50. See also community writing projects; rhetorical situation; Social Movement Communication course Zald, Mayer, 94–96 Zimmerman, Brett, 73