Justine Wells | New Mexico State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Justine Wells

Western Journal of Communication (forthcoming)

ABSTRACT: This essay examines memorial style as a rhetorical milieu in which geographies of race ... more ABSTRACT: This essay examines memorial style as a rhetorical milieu in which geographies of race and racism are constructed. To do so I trace W. E. B. Du Bois’s turn-of-the-century encounter with antebellum plantation ruin as an instance of historic and still ongoing Black resistance to monumental stylistics that have long dominated Western memory. Situating Du Bois’s encounter with ruin in this lineage illuminates how monumentality can undergird supremacist modes of inhabiting space and race, and opens onto alternative, ecological styles of memorial dwelling enabled and called for by Black experiences of the ruinous wake of slavery.

KEYWORDS: W. E. B. Du Bois, Black memory, monumentality, ruins, racial stylistics

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2019

This essay examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for the “conservation of races” as an instance of an ... more This essay examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for the “conservation of races” as an instance of an ecological legacy in African American thought that challenged traditional divisions between humans and nonhumans. Evoking contemporary models of rhetoric, I show, Du Bois implicitly figured blackness as an inventive rhetorical ecology that was distributed through material things and environments. Promoting the conservation of that ecology, his sociological work gestured toward a worldly, more-than-human ideal of justice. I explore how his ecological articulation of conservation resonated with Progressive Era environmental conservation in its rejection of ideals of purity but pressed beyond its economic materialism and human essentialism. Ultimately, I argue, Du Bois leaves us with a unique picture of conservation as a cooperative practice of identification in which both human and nonhuman participants come to articulate as interdependent parts of a larger ecology, a process that involves memory at a lived, material level.

Keywords: African American identity, conservation of races, Du Bois, W. E. B., ecological approaches to rhetoric, environmental justice, Progressive Era, race, United States

This chapter introduces the edited collection Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Appr... more This chapter introduces the edited collection Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, which draws together work in rhetoric, communication, composition, environmental communication, and environmental studies to advance a rhetorical approach to ecological care. To set the stage for this project, this introduction takes a moment to look back at the recent history of rhetorical studies and environmental communication, tracing the emergence of several complementary but fairly disparate ecological “turns.” The ecological turns identified coincide with a larger turning in recent interdisciplinary work that embraces ecology as distinct from environment. Thus, it first explores this distinctive sense of the ecological via recent “new materialisms.” Next, and for the bulk of the chapter, it traces the emergence of resonant ecological approaches to rhetoric that largely predate discussions of new materialism, including discussions of constitutive rhetorics among communication and environmental communication scholars, ecological models of composition and invention among writing scholars, and practices of in situ methods among rhetorical scholar-practitioners and their objects. As the final section notes, the chapters in Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life intensify those shifts, ultimately cultivating ecological care in three arenas of rhetorical being, those of change, ethics, and justice.

Cognitive Psychology, 2009

Many explanations of the difficulties associated with interpreting object relative clauses appeal... more Many explanations of the difficulties associated with interpreting object relative clauses appeal to the demands that object relatives make on working memory. MacDonald and Christiansen [MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109, 35–54] pointed to variations in reading experience as a source of differences, arguing
that the unique word order of object relatives makes their processing more difficult and more sensitive to the effects of previous experience than the processing of subject relatives. This hypothesis was tested in a large-scale study manipulating reading experiences of adults over several weeks. The group receiving relative clause experience increased reading speeds for object relatives more than
for subject relatives, whereas a control experience group did not. The reading time data were compared to performance of a computational model given different amounts of experience. The results support claims for experience-based individual differences and an important role for statistical learning in sentence comprehension processes.

Behavior Research Methods, 2008

The relationship between print exposure and measures of reading skill was examined in college stu... more The relationship between print exposure and measures of reading skill was examined in college students (N = 99, 58 female; mean age = 20.3 years). Print exposure was measured with several new self-reports of reading and writing habits, as well as updated versions of the Author Recognition Test and the Magazine Recognition Test (Stanovich & West, 1989). Participants completed a sentence comprehension task with syntactically complex sentences, and reading times and comprehension accuracy were measured. An additional measure of reading skill was provided by participants’ scores on the verbal portions of the ACT, a standardized achievement test. Higher levels of print exposure were associated with higher sentence processing abilities and superior verbal ACT performance. The relative merits of different print exposure assessments are discussed.

ABSTRACT: Over the past several decades, numerous case studies of monuments, memorials, and museu... more ABSTRACT: Over the past several decades, numerous case studies of monuments, memorials, and museums have offered nuanced insight on the rhetorical powers of nonhuman objects in public remembrance. As rhetoric scholars of memory now call for more politically attuned analyses, attention to the rhetorical forces of broader forms of memory objects is crucial. This essay thus analyzes not a single monument, but a particular class of monuments in American history: those erected by white Southerners for many decades following the Civil War, commemorating the Confederate soldier and the cause of the Confederacy. I argue that the Confederate monument was a key rhetorical participant in a style of public remembrance characterized by preservation, celebration, and resurrection. This monumental style invited elision, authoritarianism, and exclusion, and inhibited more inventive relations to the future. As such, the Confederate monument informs the material politics of Lost Cause remembrance, but also gestures toward the rhetorical dangers posed by the monument and monumental styles of remembrance in general

White Paper presented at RSA 2015

Environmental Communication 8.3, 2014

Rhetorical theory since the affect turn has developed something of an environmentalist sensibilit... more Rhetorical theory since the affect turn has developed something of an environmentalist sensibility: the nonhuman world has acquired persuasive energy; agency has been dispersed across individuals, environments, and things; and invention has been characterized by all the contagious resonance, feedback, and unpredictability of ecologies themselves (for select components of this turn, see

ABSTRACT: Many have characterized rhetoric’s Enlightenment turn to taste as an elitist moment tha... more ABSTRACT: Many have characterized rhetoric’s Enlightenment turn to taste as an elitist moment that marked an aesthetic narrowing of rhetoric and a retreat from its public function. This essay joins efforts to complicate that picture by mobilizing the perspective of contemporary affect theory, which itself borrows from Enlightenment empiricism. After outlining affect theory, I explicate David Hume’s theory of taste, which, anchoring a rich, affective theory of ethical communication, deserves more attention as a part of the rhetorical tradition. I then argue that the integration of Hume’s affective model of taste into rhetorical education expanded rhetorical invention to involve a capacity for sensory and emotional response that was neither fully conscious, entirely individual, nor exclusively human. Although the Scottish enthusiasm for taste was undeniably elitist, I conclude, these sensory reformulations of rhetoric and civic life were in tension with that elitism.

KEYWORDS: Scottish Enlightenment; Belletristic Rhetoric; Taste; Hume, David; Affect Theory

NCA 2014, RCT/EC Panel, "Rehistoricizing New Materialist Methodologies"

Human Factors in Information Technology, 1999

ABSTRACT This chapter reviews recent findings about the ways palmtop reminding devices remind peo... more ABSTRACT This chapter reviews recent findings about the ways palmtop reminding devices remind people of their intentions and presents a theoretical examination of the fundamental cognitive processes involved in the use of these devices. There are two kinds of reminding processes: spontaneous and prearranged. For a person to spontaneously recall an intended act, a memory of the intention must emerge from unconsciousness to consciousness. A striking feature of the reminding devices is that they differ considerably in the way they display information about the scheduled events to be accessed. Prospective memory performance has been conceptualized as involving different information processing stages. These stages include encoding the intention, specifying the retention interval, deploying a response to occur within the response interval (which may be at a precise time or within an interval), observing the outcome of the act, and finally evaluating the effect of the intended act.

Ai & Society, 1996

An intention requires us to carry out an action at a certain time or in an unscheduled time frame... more An intention requires us to carry out an action at a certain time or in an unscheduled time frame. In recent years, palmtop computerized devices with special functions have been developed that enable individuals to better remember their intentions. People record their intention in the device and are later reminded of their intention by a warning signal, such as an audible beep, that is presented along with a message about what is to be done. The present research investigated the psychological effects of the warning signals provided by palmtop reminding devices. Four experiments demonstrated that the effectiveness of an audible warning signal in the form of a signal was greatest early in the day. The interval between the signal and time to carry out the act, called here the anticipatory lag, did not significantly influence the timeliness of responses and remembering.

Syllabi by Justine Wells

Welcome to Critical Conversations in Technical and Professional Communication! This course will i... more Welcome to Critical Conversations in Technical and Professional Communication! This course will introduce you to Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) through the "critical conversations" that have defined its histories, practices, and contemporary iterations. We will approach TPC as both a "real-world" practice and as a scholarly discipline concerning that practice…and work together to establish what each entails. We will approach TPC critically by considering established histories (and missing histories) of its practice and study, significant scholarship (and needed scholarship) about TPC, and key concepts and questions that have been explored in that scholarship. As we will see, to approach TPC critically also means learning to ask and respond to difficult questions about the stakes, aims, and effects of TPC, as well as the contexts, technologies, and infrastructures that shape its impacts. As you will learn, critical scholarship in TPC is often a place where the scholarly field of TPC and rhetorical studies overlap. As we convene this seminar, technical communicators struggle to seek varying outcomes in the context of a worldwide pandemic that continues to deliver suffering and death counts at staggering rates, with inequitable impacts to underprivileged communities, racial groups, and countries. Alongside this pandemic, Black Lives Matter protestors and immigration advocates in the US and beyond are increasingly highlighting another: that of racism and racist violence that is official, systematic, and state-sponsored-supported in no small part by the technical, legal, and economic communicative frameworks that compose the state. Meanwhile, even as climate change denial still defies countervailing efforts by many technical communicators, the UN has concluded that the harmful effects of climate change can no longer be fully checked, as record fires, storms, droughts, and temperatures result in unjustly distributed death, displacement, and poverty across the globe.

For those in 4/597, this course is an accompaniment to your internship placement with the English... more For those in 4/597, this course is an accompaniment to your internship placement with the English department this semester. For those in 577, it is an accompaniment to the Publishing and Professionalization Workshop in TPC that I will be running with you.
While you will each be completing very different tasks in your internships and workshops this semester, we will come together on this Canvas site to do weekly posts and assignments that will make those tasks into a broader professionalization experience tailored to your career path.
In particular, the activities you complete on this Canvas site will equip you to:
• Establish your vision for one of your planned professions: its identity; its value; its standards of excellence; and its past, present, and future
• Seek jobs and evaluate potential workplaces with a critical eye toward how organizational identity is articulated
• Develop a considered view of how you will articulate your own professional identity
• Contribute to a supportive online professionalization community
While these are lofty goals, the majority of your learning in this course will come from the hands-on work you do in your internship or workshop. For that reason, your weekly work on this Canvas site should require only about 1 hour/week this semester, with 597 students to expect to spend a little more time as they compose an annotated bibliography and prepare to write a final scholarly essay (this should average out to about 2 hours/week over the course of the semester).

This workshop supports publishing and professionalization goals for students considering scholarl... more This workshop supports publishing and professionalization goals for students considering scholarly and academic careers in Rhetoric and Professional Communication. Students should enroll with a specific writing project in RPC conceived or underway--it could be an article, conference paper, writing sample for a PhD application, or even a certain dissertation chapter or master's thesis chapter that you and your advisor agree would benefit from some more formal development and workshopping. The project could be in any stage of development, from an abstract or outline of what you plan to write to a full working draft.

Goals of the course will include the following:

to form a supportive community as you research and write
to learn about publishing conventions, processes, and venues in RPC and related target fields
to find models and learn about writing conventions in RPC and your specific areas
to acquaint you with topical/conceptual histories and methods relevant to your specific project
to gain practice presenting your work
to learn about professionalizing for the job market
to research, write, and revise work based on feedback from peers and myself
to meet some formal deadlines for researching and writing to help you move your project to completion
The class will include asynchronous online assignments synched with ENGL 4/597, and will also meet synchronously for some time each week to workshop student writing and pursue the above goals. This course would be well-suited for students in their second year of coursework and for those who have completed coursework and could use a formal, motivating community space to produce writing. Feel free to contact Dr. Justine Wells (jbwells@nmsu.edu) with any questions, including questions about the synchronous meeting time if the currently listed time is a challenge for you.

Welcome to Professional and Technical Communication! This course will teach you about how to attu... more Welcome to Professional and Technical Communication! This course will teach you about how to attune to the power of communication in your profession, and how to use that power thoughtfully and successfully.
The basic assumption of this course is that every act of communication is an act of articulation. When you communicate in your profession, you are articulating who you are as a professional in your field, the character of the organization of which you are a part, and even what your profession is on the whole. That means that every act of communication is an ethical and a political act—an act that matters and has consequences for people, cultures, animals, the natural environment, and the world at large, because it is an act of inventing the world. Even the most mundane communicative acts in your profession, like sending an email or composing your resume, either reproduce or reinvent what your profession is, what your organization is, and who you are as a professional.
This course will encourage you to consider what kinds of worlds are being invented by the communicative practices in your profession, and what kinds of worlds you want to contribute to. It will equip you to research, critique, and decide how to emulate or innovate on prevailing communicative standards in your field. You will leave this course having built a specific sense of what your profession is, why it is important, and your own personal vision for its future and your contributions to that future. Likewise you will leave with a considered sense of how you want to present yourself as a professional in your field, and how to approach and participate in the organizations that make it up.

Western Journal of Communication (forthcoming)

KEYWORDS: W. E. B. Du Bois, Black memory, monumentality, ruins, racial stylistics

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2019

Keywords: African American identity, conservation of races, Du Bois, W. E. B., ecological approaches to rhetoric, environmental justice, Progressive Era, race, United States

Cognitive Psychology, 2009

Behavior Research Methods, 2008

White Paper presented at RSA 2015

Environmental Communication 8.3, 2014

KEYWORDS: Scottish Enlightenment; Belletristic Rhetoric; Taste; Hume, David; Affect Theory

NCA 2014, RCT/EC Panel, "Rehistoricizing New Materialist Methodologies"

Human Factors in Information Technology, 1999

Ai & Society, 1996

Goals of the course will include the following:

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary area of inquiry into culture as a site of power. Work in... more Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary area of inquiry into culture as a site of power. Work in cultural studies asks how cultural objects and cultural practices articulate and rearticulate the particular agencies, affects, ideologies, spaces, and possibilities that make (up) our worlds. Since cultural studies was established as a formal discipline, it has been pursued with a keen commitment to engagement, activism, and change that reaches beyond the academy. Rhetorical studies, also invested in the nexus of theory and practice, offers a rich arena for the engaged study of culture as a site of power. In particular, rhetoric opens onto such work via focal points such as persuasion, representation, voice, identification, performance, communication, invention, and composition. And indeed, there is a long tradition of entwined scholarship in both rhetorical and cultural studies.

This course traces key concepts in cultural studies, particularly as they have evolved with increased attention to affect, sensation, materiality, and geography within and beyond rhetorical studies. The overall aim of this course is to provide conceptual resources for students to develop rhetorical inquiry into the aspects of culture as a site of power that most interest you. Upon completing the course, you should have a solid sense of several concepts that have been important in both the institutional histories of British and U.S Cultural Studies, and concepts that have developed far beyond those institutional sites.

This course, titled "The History of Rhetoric," will not teach you the history of rhetoric. Rather... more This course, titled "The History of Rhetoric," will not teach you the history of rhetoric. Rather it will do other things. It will acquaint you with several of rhetoric's pasts and locales (while leaving out countless others). It will model and experiment with how rhetorical history might be done, highlighting the political stakes of that work. It will also teach you how to critically engage and complicate "The History of Rhetoric"-that is, the dominant, rather singular tradition that has been forwarded as "The" authoritative history of the study and practice of rhetoric in the West.

Over the past several decades, the study of memory has proliferated across the humanities in gene... more Over the past several decades, the study of memory has proliferated across the humanities in general and rhetorical studies in particular. One of the five classic canons of rhetoric, memory has served a fruitful site for understanding rhetoric and its functions. At the same time, rhetorical approaches have produced rich and distinctive ways of conceptualizing memory. With a focus on texts of classic and contemporary rhetoric, this class will explore that rich territory. In what ways is the practice of memory rhetorical, and what does a rhetorical perspective tell us about memory? Is memory best understood as an experience, an active practice, a passive process? If memory represents the past, in what ways does it do so? Is it fair to call memory to represent at all? How might it instead re-make the past, as well as the present and the future? In what ways does memory and its rhetorical power extend beyond the individual mind, to collective, cultural, material, and lived realms? How do objects, places, archives, technologies, and practices participate in remembrance? In addition to asking after the character and workings of memory, we will also, as rhetoricians, be concerned with its effects: How do memory practices create values, circulate affects, shape perceptions, provoke actions? In what ways does remembrance call publics, objects, and even worlds into being? How does it shape national, sexual, gendered, and cultural identities? On the other hand, how does memory move between and across the borders of those identities? Related to these questions, in what ways does memory proceed as an exercise of power, potentially colonizing or decolonizing, imperializing or democratizing, the spaces of our lives? How does memory work in intensely emotional ways, at the core of experiences of trauma, loss, mourning, and melancholy? Finally, as we will consider especially in the last week, what are the values and dangers of forgetting, forgiving, and reconciling? As we proceed through these questions, we will consider in tandem how rhetorical studies offers us a unique perspective on memory, as well as what the workings of memory tell us about the workings of rhetoric in general.

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary area of inquiry into how culture is produced, consumed, ... more Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary area of inquiry into how culture is produced, consumed, represented, performed, critiqued, and circulated. Work in cultural studies asks how cultural objects and cultural practices act in the world and are responded to; how they enable and partake in agencies, ideologies, places, and social structures; and how they act as potent sites of political power. These conceptual questions, historically, are posed with a keen interest in political engagement and political change. Rhetorical studies, also historically invested in the nexus of theory and practice, offers a rich arena inquiring into such concerns. This is especially so via its various foci on persuasion, representation, identification, performance, communication, criticism, invention, and composition. And indeed, there is a long and important tradition of entwined scholarship in both rhetorical and cultural studies. This class will trace the unfolding of cultural studies with a special focus on material culture, ultimately following out how cultural studies' treatments of material life, power, identities, bodies, places, and material things give way to so-called " new materialisms. " In the course of reading canonical work in cultural studies and new materialisms, we will read key scholarship in rhetoric and composition that engages and advances this work. COURSE PLAN Cultural studies has a dense conceptual and practical history, spanning some 60 years as a formal area of inquiry, with conceptual and political influences that reach back much further. Today the highly interdisciplinary field of cultural studies surfaces in various forms across the globe, and new areas of inquiry have also emerged out of " cultural studies " proper. No graduate seminar could possibly cover this enormous and rich arena of inquiry. In this seminar, we are further charged with considering the relationships between rhetoric and cultural studies, which can be done at disciplinary, conceptual, and practical levels. Given this (happy) predicament, the modest aims of this course will be: 1) To familiarize students with some of the key figures, texts, and concepts in primarily British and American cultural studies, especially those important for thinking about rhetoric. 2) To trace out some of the significant engagements of those figures, texts, and concepts in the field of rhetorical studies. 3) In the course of the above 2 aims, to understand how various materialisms have surfaced in rhetoric and cultural studies, and to trace out how these materialisms have developed in recent arenas of inquiry—particularly queer theories, affect theories, and new materialisms. Many of our weeks will pair key readings in cultural studies and humanities scholarship with work in rhetorical studies that engages the concepts of those texts. Several weeks we will just read the former, and one or two weeks, just the latter. READING LOAD The reading load in this course will be heavy and difficult. This is because the object of study is difficult and complex. As your seminar leader it is my job, as I see it, to offer you an archive of reading materials that reasonably surveys that difficult and complex object. However, not to fear: it is not your job to fully master that archive in a single semester. Rather, your job is to come to class with an overall sense of the week's readings as a whole, having engaged deeply and thoughtfully with certain parts of that reading. That will serve this semester's aim: to familiarize you with concepts, texts, and figures important to our topic, and to invite you toward particular styles of reading and thinking relevant to that topic. Beyond this semester, the reading list will be a resource you can return to again and again as you continue your intellectual journey. Syllabus modified 1/25/17

Rhetorical studies lays claim to a rich Western tradition older than most other academic fields t... more Rhetorical studies lays claim to a rich Western tradition older than most other academic fields that we recognize today, and at least as old as its fellow fields of philosophy and poetics. Rhetoric shares key figures and concerns with those fields, yet it tends to be far less familiar to the American student. This course is concerned to unpack some of the core themes of the Western rhetorical tradition—themes that overlap with other more familiar disciplines like literature and philosophy, but that can be approached in a unique way via the rhetorical canon.

If Empedecles embraced it en toto, Aristotle dissected and ranked it. If Descartes dismissed it a... more If Empedecles embraced it en toto, Aristotle dissected and ranked it. If Descartes dismissed it as untrustable, Hobbes acknowledged it as the foundation of all thought. And if Aquinas accused it of obscuring God, Marx praised it as a means to thriving. Whether celebrated or scorned, divided or merged, sensation has been acknowledged as a crucial and inescapable part of human life throughout Western history. This course is concerned to inquire into the many ways that sensation matters as a site of power and danger, stasis and change. Following recent conversations among philosophers, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, historians, and many others, we will take a second look at some long-held commonplaces about sensation: Are there really five senses as we so often assume, or could there be more? Is it useful to divide the senses up at all? Does sensory capacity vary across individuals, times, and cultures? As scholars increasingly answer this last question in the affirmative, sensation's connection to power and change is becoming increasingly apparent. Against our everyday assumptions, for instance, many argue that sensory practices and technologies don't simply connect us with the outside world, but help compose that world, bringing into being the subjects and objects, races and genders, activities and environments that populate it. And as many suggest, sensory practices also regulate the worlds they invent, determining who is valued or denigrated, recognized or ignored. Grounding the relations we enter with others, then, sensory practices are increasingly implicated in our ethics—whether they are critiqued for objectifying, subverting, and excluding or embraced as pathways to mutual wonder, respect, and entanglement. If it works as this growing body of research suggests—moving people to beliefs and actions, composing subjects and objects, grounding thought and meaning—then sensation is in many ways rhetorical. And yet the highly rhetorical perspective on sensation offered by recent scholarship has yet to be extensively explored in the field of rhetoric. This course invites you to do just that. Reading a variety of theories and debates about sensation, we will consider not only the many ways that sensation emerges as a site of power and change, but also what that means for our questions in the fields of rhetoric, composition, and communication. As we proceed through our reading, we will continually seek out connection points in these fields. This will eventually set you up for the seminar paper, where you will focus on a particular debate in RPC, asking how a sensory perspective can inform that debate. As a class, we will also speculate on what rhetorical studies can offer current understandings of sensation.

Like much in our lives, our understanding and experience of sensation has been "disciplined" by c... more Like much in our lives, our understanding and experience of sensation has been "disciplined" by common beliefs and practices. We tend to assume, for instance, that we have five discrete senses, that sensation represents "reality," and that sense experience doesn't vary much from one person to the next. This course will explore how scholars in the humanities and social sciences have challenged these assumptions, reimagining sensation through their own, distinctive disciplinary practices. Our readings will question how many senses we have, suggest how society and culture "discipline" sensation, and investigate how sensory habits themselves shape our worlds, impacting everything from our racial identities to our understanding of climate change.

This introductory course will prepare health science majors to participate in some of the key rhe... more This introductory course will prepare health science majors to participate in some of the key rhetorical practices of medical and health professions, while cultivating a critical perspective on the ethical stakes of these practices.

For Plato in the Gorgias, medicine is an art concerned with restoring health to the body, while r... more For Plato in the Gorgias, medicine is an art concerned with restoring health to the body, while rhetoric and sophistry are sham arts, concerned not with health and social well-being, but with creating the mere appearance of these things. This course takes its cue from Plato's paradigm in three main ways. First, and primarily, we will be concerned with the question of the purpose and performance of medicine: is medicine at core an art concerned with healing, as Plato suggests, or does it involve more? How has the concept and articulation of medicine evolved with the development of scientific knowledge and medical technology? What is at stake? Second, we will consider the hierarchy Plato is building in his comparison. How are medicine and its supposed "sham" arts distinguished from one another, and how legitimate are those distinctions (conceptually and politically)? Finally, as students of rhetoric, we will take up Plato's comparison of medicine and rhetoric and ask how we might theorize rhetoric by analogy with medicine, particularly in light of medicine's evolving identities and technicities.

A growing body of scholars in disciplines from history to geography to architecture are attending... more A growing body of scholars in disciplines from history to geography to architecture are attending to sensation in a new way. While a long tradition of thought has cast sensation as a natural, unvarying human experience, contemporary work in "sensory studies" increasingly suggests that sensation is an historically variant phenomenon. For these scholars and theorists, our sensory abilities and sensory habits are produced by and productive of our social worlds-our cultural conventions and artifacts, our technologies and customs, our modes of gender, race, and national identification. The senses, in other words, are rhetorical, shaping the worlds of which we are a part. And yet the highly rhetorical perspective on sensation offered by sensory studies, and the interdisciplinary collaboration it affords, has yet to be taken up in the field of rhetoric and composition. This course invites you to do just this. I ask that you bring to the course an area that interests you in rhetoric and composition. As we read both within and beyond our field, your job is to ask how the perspective of sensory studies might inform a problem in your area of interest. As a class, we will also speculate on what rhetoric and composition studies might have to offer existing work in sensory studies.

Our public words are a source of vulnerability and power. For many, standing and speaking in publ... more Our public words are a source of vulnerability and power. For many, standing and speaking in public is an anxious event. And yet, the words that we offer to others bear directly on our sense of well-being. As we find and invent the potential to speak and listen together, we discover the potential to create relationships, express interest, undertake collective action, and foster productive dissent. Neither a simple tool nor an innate capacity, public speaking is an art that calls us to reflect on the possibilities of language and the ways in which our words compose, sustain, and complicate the world.