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Papers by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan
Journal of technical writing and communication, Jun 11, 2024
Journal of College Literacy and Learning, 2019
Pedagogy, 2015
English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars’ and students’ unfam... more English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars’ and students’ unfamiliarity with geography and its precepts, or “immappancy.” This article explores the problems presented by immappancy, traces its consequences for scholarly rhetoric, and proposes two pedagogical models that can help us develop our students’ geographical knowledge.
Utah State University Press eBooks, Apr 15, 2024
College English, 2015
We was taught there's so many different ways to build a quilt. It's like building a house... more We was taught there's so many different ways to build a quilt. It's like building a house. You can start with a bedroom over there, or a den over here, and just add on until you get what you want. Ought not two quilts ever be the same. You might use exactly the same material, but you would do it different. A lot of people make quilts just for your bed for to keep you warm. But a quilt is more. It represents safekeeping, it represents beauty, and you could say it represents family history.Mensie Lee Pettway, qtd. in ArnettSometimes I don't know my color. Sometimes it don't matter what color it is, I just feel that it will fit. When I hold it up and look at it, if it don't look right in there, I take it out. Sometimes it looks good, and sometimes it don't look right or it don't look the way I want it to be, so I take it out. Sometimes I let it stay in there. If I let it stay in there, it is a challenge to me. Then I try another piece to get it to work out. ...
WPA-CompPile.org, 2011
This annotated bibliography is intended to provide WPAs with an overview of scholarship and debat... more This annotated bibliography is intended to provide WPAs with an overview of scholarship and debate on two related issues: 1) the global spread and, consequently, differentiation of English into world Englishes; and 2) more general perspectives on language difference. Insofar as there is growing linguistic heterogeneity both among the population of students enrolling in composition curricula and among the readers, including faculty, for whom these students write, it’s imperative that composition curricula and composition teaching and courses be designed to acknowledge and make productive use of this changed linguistic landscape.
Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition: Global Interrogations, Local Interventions (SIUP), 2014
In this chapter, I demonstrate that the Translingual approach can be applied to monolingual and m... more In this chapter, I demonstrate that the Translingual approach can be applied to monolingual and multilingual students. My analysis of a text written by a "mainstream" student in response to an "alternative" text ("How to Tame a Wild Tongue") demonstrates the possibilities (and challenges) of working from a translingual starting point when responding to all student texts, including texts written by so-called monolingual as well as multilingual students. I propose relocalized listening as a way to rhetorically listen to all student texts.
JAC, 2009
A response to the Watson Conference Symposium papers in which I call for rhetorically listening t... more A response to the Watson Conference Symposium papers in which I call for rhetorically listening to texts which employ visual rhetorics and multilingual conventions. I argue that such texts challenge the traditional expectations of the role of the reader/listener of a text and require the kind of active negotiation that disrupts traditional active/passive conceptions of the producer and receiver of texts.
Pedagogy, 2015
English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars' and students' unfam... more English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars' and students' unfamiliarity with geography and its precepts, or 'immappancy.' This article explores the problems presented by immappancy, traces its consequences for scholarly rhetoric, and proposes two pedagogical models that can help us develop our students' geographical knowledge.
College English, 2015
I analyze the discussions surrounding the Gee’s Bend quilts—beautiful, abstract, work-clothes qui... more I analyze the discussions surrounding the Gee’s Bend quilts—beautiful, abstract, work-clothes quilts created by African American women in rural Alabama in conditions of extreme poverty. Originally created for everyday use, the quilts incorporate irregularities and deviations in pattern, design, stitching, and technique that speak to the material conditions in which they were produced. The “high-art” world has come to celebrate the quilts for their modernist aesthetic and in the process has attempted to redefine the Gee’s Bend tradition in particular ways. My study of the quilts builds on the move toward recognizing the multiple media, modes, and literacies in which transnational actors compose. Moreover, I argue that we should view quilting as a technology for communicating African American female literacies. The Gee’s Bend quilters employ quiltmaking as a vehicle to construct their own discourse(s)—a way to (re)write the material conditions of their lives. I argue that the quilters challenge the field’s understanding of what and who counts in the production of writing and how we think about difference and repetition in writing.
Book Reviews by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan
Journal of College Literacy and Learning, 2019
Books by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan
University of Alabama Press, 2020
How writers, activists, and artists without power resist dominant social, cultural, and political... more How writers, activists, and artists without power resist dominant social, cultural, and political structures through the deployment of unconventional means and materials.
In Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan applies a translingual and transmodal framework informed by feminist rhetorical practice to three distinct case studies that demonstrate women using unique and effective rhetorical strategies in political, religious, and artistic contexts. These case studies highlight a diverse set of actors uniquely situated by their race, gender, class, or religion, but who are nevertheless connected by their capacity to envision and recontextualize the seemingly ordinary means and materials available to them in order to effectively persuade others.
The Great Depression provides the backdrop for the first case study, a movement whereby thousands of elderly citizens proselytized and fundraised for a monthly pension plan dreamt up by a California doctor in the hopes of lifting themselves out of poverty. Sohan investigates how the Townsend Plan’s elderly supporters—the Townsendites—worked within and across language, genre, mode, and media to enable them for the first time to be recognized by others, and themselves, as a viable political constituency.
Next, Sohan recounts the story of Quaker minister Eliza P. Kirkbride Gurney who met President Abraham Lincoln in 1862. Their subsequent epistolary exchanges concerning conscientious objectors made such an impression on him that one of her letters was rumored to be in his pocket the night of his assassination. Their exchanges and Gurney’s own accounts of her transnational ministry in her memoir provide useful examples of how, throughout history, women rhetors have adopted and transformed typically underappreciated forms of rhetoric—such as the epideictic—for their particular purposes.
The final example focuses on the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers—a group of African American women living in rural Alabama who repurpose discarded work clothes and other cast-off fabrics into the extraordinary quilts for which they are known. By drawing on the means and materials at hand to create celebrated works of art in conditions of extreme poverty, these women show how marginalized artisans can operate both within and outside the bounds of established aesthetic traditions and communicate the particulars of their experience across cultural and economic divides.
Journal of technical writing and communication, Jun 11, 2024
Journal of College Literacy and Learning, 2019
Pedagogy, 2015
English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars’ and students’ unfam... more English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars’ and students’ unfamiliarity with geography and its precepts, or “immappancy.” This article explores the problems presented by immappancy, traces its consequences for scholarly rhetoric, and proposes two pedagogical models that can help us develop our students’ geographical knowledge.
Utah State University Press eBooks, Apr 15, 2024
College English, 2015
We was taught there's so many different ways to build a quilt. It's like building a house... more We was taught there's so many different ways to build a quilt. It's like building a house. You can start with a bedroom over there, or a den over here, and just add on until you get what you want. Ought not two quilts ever be the same. You might use exactly the same material, but you would do it different. A lot of people make quilts just for your bed for to keep you warm. But a quilt is more. It represents safekeeping, it represents beauty, and you could say it represents family history.Mensie Lee Pettway, qtd. in ArnettSometimes I don't know my color. Sometimes it don't matter what color it is, I just feel that it will fit. When I hold it up and look at it, if it don't look right in there, I take it out. Sometimes it looks good, and sometimes it don't look right or it don't look the way I want it to be, so I take it out. Sometimes I let it stay in there. If I let it stay in there, it is a challenge to me. Then I try another piece to get it to work out. ...
WPA-CompPile.org, 2011
This annotated bibliography is intended to provide WPAs with an overview of scholarship and debat... more This annotated bibliography is intended to provide WPAs with an overview of scholarship and debate on two related issues: 1) the global spread and, consequently, differentiation of English into world Englishes; and 2) more general perspectives on language difference. Insofar as there is growing linguistic heterogeneity both among the population of students enrolling in composition curricula and among the readers, including faculty, for whom these students write, it’s imperative that composition curricula and composition teaching and courses be designed to acknowledge and make productive use of this changed linguistic landscape.
Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition: Global Interrogations, Local Interventions (SIUP), 2014
In this chapter, I demonstrate that the Translingual approach can be applied to monolingual and m... more In this chapter, I demonstrate that the Translingual approach can be applied to monolingual and multilingual students. My analysis of a text written by a "mainstream" student in response to an "alternative" text ("How to Tame a Wild Tongue") demonstrates the possibilities (and challenges) of working from a translingual starting point when responding to all student texts, including texts written by so-called monolingual as well as multilingual students. I propose relocalized listening as a way to rhetorically listen to all student texts.
JAC, 2009
A response to the Watson Conference Symposium papers in which I call for rhetorically listening t... more A response to the Watson Conference Symposium papers in which I call for rhetorically listening to texts which employ visual rhetorics and multilingual conventions. I argue that such texts challenge the traditional expectations of the role of the reader/listener of a text and require the kind of active negotiation that disrupts traditional active/passive conceptions of the producer and receiver of texts.
Pedagogy, 2015
English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars' and students' unfam... more English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars' and students' unfamiliarity with geography and its precepts, or 'immappancy.' This article explores the problems presented by immappancy, traces its consequences for scholarly rhetoric, and proposes two pedagogical models that can help us develop our students' geographical knowledge.
College English, 2015
I analyze the discussions surrounding the Gee’s Bend quilts—beautiful, abstract, work-clothes qui... more I analyze the discussions surrounding the Gee’s Bend quilts—beautiful, abstract, work-clothes quilts created by African American women in rural Alabama in conditions of extreme poverty. Originally created for everyday use, the quilts incorporate irregularities and deviations in pattern, design, stitching, and technique that speak to the material conditions in which they were produced. The “high-art” world has come to celebrate the quilts for their modernist aesthetic and in the process has attempted to redefine the Gee’s Bend tradition in particular ways. My study of the quilts builds on the move toward recognizing the multiple media, modes, and literacies in which transnational actors compose. Moreover, I argue that we should view quilting as a technology for communicating African American female literacies. The Gee’s Bend quilters employ quiltmaking as a vehicle to construct their own discourse(s)—a way to (re)write the material conditions of their lives. I argue that the quilters challenge the field’s understanding of what and who counts in the production of writing and how we think about difference and repetition in writing.
Journal of College Literacy and Learning, 2019
University of Alabama Press, 2020
How writers, activists, and artists without power resist dominant social, cultural, and political... more How writers, activists, and artists without power resist dominant social, cultural, and political structures through the deployment of unconventional means and materials.
In Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan applies a translingual and transmodal framework informed by feminist rhetorical practice to three distinct case studies that demonstrate women using unique and effective rhetorical strategies in political, religious, and artistic contexts. These case studies highlight a diverse set of actors uniquely situated by their race, gender, class, or religion, but who are nevertheless connected by their capacity to envision and recontextualize the seemingly ordinary means and materials available to them in order to effectively persuade others.
The Great Depression provides the backdrop for the first case study, a movement whereby thousands of elderly citizens proselytized and fundraised for a monthly pension plan dreamt up by a California doctor in the hopes of lifting themselves out of poverty. Sohan investigates how the Townsend Plan’s elderly supporters—the Townsendites—worked within and across language, genre, mode, and media to enable them for the first time to be recognized by others, and themselves, as a viable political constituency.
Next, Sohan recounts the story of Quaker minister Eliza P. Kirkbride Gurney who met President Abraham Lincoln in 1862. Their subsequent epistolary exchanges concerning conscientious objectors made such an impression on him that one of her letters was rumored to be in his pocket the night of his assassination. Their exchanges and Gurney’s own accounts of her transnational ministry in her memoir provide useful examples of how, throughout history, women rhetors have adopted and transformed typically underappreciated forms of rhetoric—such as the epideictic—for their particular purposes.
The final example focuses on the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers—a group of African American women living in rural Alabama who repurpose discarded work clothes and other cast-off fabrics into the extraordinary quilts for which they are known. By drawing on the means and materials at hand to create celebrated works of art in conditions of extreme poverty, these women show how marginalized artisans can operate both within and outside the bounds of established aesthetic traditions and communicate the particulars of their experience across cultural and economic divides.