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About the Interviewee

Cheryl Ball is the director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University Libraries. Since 2006, Ball has been editor of the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy which is the longest continuously publishing digital journal focusing exclusively on digital media scholarship. She is also the project director for Vega, an open-access, multimedia academic publishing platform due to be released in 2019. Ball also serves as the executive director of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

About the Interviewer

Elizabeth Barnett is an MA candidate in Rhetoric and Writing in the University of New Mexico's Department of English Language and Literature. Her interests lie in the pedagogy of multimodal digital composition and technical writing.

Contents

An Evolution of Scholarly Multimedia

Teaching Decoloniality & Multimodality

The Rigor of Digital Scholarship

Issues in Open Access

Toward a True OA Publishing Platform: Vega

As an exclusively digital publisher, we are naturally subject to and keenly interested in the practical issues surrounding the future and preservation of digital scholarly work. In the exploration of issues surrounding digital scholarship, we’ve produced a series of three interviews with prominent academic scholars and editors whose work spans the intersections of rhetoric, pedagogy, publishing, and technology. We hope that Xchanges readers enjoy the viewpoints looking both back at what’s happened in the field of digital publishing and pedagogy over recent decades and forward to what lies ahead. 

Here, in the final installment of this series, University of New Mexico English Master’s student, Elizabeth Barnett, conducted a video interview with Dr. Cheryl Ball, of Wayne State University. In addition to shepherding authors and reviewers through the digital publishing process as the editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/), Ball also works tirelessly on content management software development and evangelizing best practices in editorial systems and processes in the field of digital publishing. Their discussion of issues in digital scholarship in the 21st century began with an exploration of scholarly multimedia work.

An Evolution of Scholarly Multimedia

Xchanges: In your 2009 tenure application materials (http://ceball.com/research/tenure-letter/), you stated that your research and teaching is guided by the statement: “Digital media asks us to constantly re-evaluate what a text is, how it works, to whom it speaks, and why.”

Does this statement still guide you? Has it changed in 10 years? If so, how? Is new media still new? 

CB: It's funny to me looking back on that statement that I used the phrase “digital media” and not “new media,” but I think that that was because I was trying to signal at the time, 2009, that shift away from the verbiage of new media into something slightly broader. I certainly would still believe that something we used to call “new media” or “emerging media” does still ask us to reevaluate what a text is and how it works. Even more specifically, maybe I would replace the term “digital media” with the term “webtext” or “scholarly multimedia.” Then, I think scholarly multimedia does ask us to constantly reevaluate what a scholarly text is and how it works; typically, not necessarily to whom it speaks, because scholarly multimedia or web texts almost always have some sort of academic audience. The phrase “digital media” is purposefully broad, and too broad maybe to allow that statement to exist 10 years later because I think that digital media as a whole has become so ingrained in what we do. 2009 was a year after YouTube launched. We're in a radically different digital environment now than we were 10 years ago. I think that it is still true within scholarly publishing realms that digital media asked us to reevaluate what texts are but not necessarily digital media in itself, writ large.

For me at the time, it was trying to get at that issue of constantly reevaluating what a text is, and that was the newness of it. Again, I think that still applies in some ways to scholarly publishing, and less so to other forms of digital media texts just because that work has become so transparent to us in a way that we have established genres in digital environments now that we didn't have 10 or even 5 years ago.

In terms of an established realm of study, I think new media has been supplanted by all sorts of other things. Multimodal composition being one of them, just one of probably a dozen different terms. I do think that we're heavily into production, certainly in rhetoric and composition. When we talk about production, we're almost always talking about multimodal composition in some way or multimedia authoring. 

Xchanges: Your life’s work has been centered in what you call editorial pedagogy and what might be called more generally digital literacies pedagogy: educating authors, tenure reviewers, composition instructors and students, journal juries, and new journal editors about digital production, its rigor, and its focus on rhetorical choices. 

What place does multimodality have in the college composition classroom today? Has it expanded in the ways you would have liked or expected in the 20+ years you’ve participated in this composition ecosystem? And does the rigor of digital scholarly publishing still need explaining/justification? 

CB: It's great to see how much it has expanded over the last near 20 years. When we were working on this stuff in the early 2000s, it did seem so new and so radical. As I go around now and talk to people at different universities and hear what they're doing, schools where I wouldn't necessarily have expected them to have a multimodal curriculum have adopted one, and everyone is still interested in hearing definitions and descriptions and seeing examples of this kind of work. Of course, the mantra is that every text is multimodal, because there is no such thing as a monomodal text. How can we then help the production of this kind of work in composition writing classes and in other types of classes too to make it more interesting and innovative? I really like some of the work that's happening with folks like Laura Gonzales (http://www.gonzlaur.com/about/) and other scholars who are bringing an intersectionality, if you will, to multimodal composition. The work those scholars are doing allows it to flourish and thrive in some ways that get us out of reproducing some of the base genres and allow even more genres of multimodal composition. It's good that we've gotten a depth to the field, and it's been really surprising that it's happened over a short amount of time. 

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About the Author

Rachel Casey is an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. Her academic interests include the analyses of rhetorics involved in critical thinking, civic engagement, and feminist theory.

Contents

Introduction

Review of Literature on Creativity

Method and Approach

The Story

The Magazine

The Allegory

Conclusion

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

References

Introduction

I am eight years old. Outside scenery rushes past me through a car window—my first trip without my parents—but all I see on the drive from Florida to Missouri is my heart-printed journal. Inside, a story about a girl’s dedication to her family amid the Great Depression. Next, I am ten years old, and from where I sit at the school picnic tables, I listen to my fourth grade classmates engage in a high-stakes game of recess soccer, but my eyes remain trained on my faded blue notebook as I scribble a story about one boy’s quest to save the world. Then, I am eighteen, and after a long day at school, I climb into bed and pull out my laptop and continue to write a story about a made-up city, a girl’s journey, and a mysterious forest.

From an outsider’s perspective, it may appear that writing acts as a means of seclusion, and following along this same idea, the practices of creativity and the creative process have long been regarded as individual endeavors held to the extreme of being solely isolated in nature. Bearing this mindset, creativity then poses itself as an extremely unattainable end, the means to which can neither be planned nor practiced; further, in viewing the creative process as individual, one comes to the conclusion that creativity itself is of a divine nature (Howard, 55). In other words, anything marked “creative” also holds the stamps of “inspired” and, consequently, “unattainable.”

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About the Author

Matthew White is currently an undergraduate in the Biochemistry Department at Saint Mary’s College of California. He is an aspiring physician with interests in both clinical medicine and biomedical research.

Contents

Introduction

Literature Review

Methodology

Results

Conclusion

References

Introduction

In a country where about 70% of the population takes some form of prescription medication, issues and topics relating to the world of pharmaceuticals should be common knowledge (Mayo Clinic). Today, issues relating to high medication costs, the influences of big business, and drug regulations impact millions of patients who are prescribed medication (Wu).  In addition to these issues, many patients could be susceptible to the potential risks and effects of medications due to the lack of a more complete understanding of their prescription drugs (Prescription Labels – Consumer Reports Health).  In an attempt to mitigate this misunderstanding, prescription medications come with industry-developed and FDA-approved materials, such as medication guides, which are designed to be read by a patient prior to using the medication.  Moreover, these medication guides provide instructions surrounding the specific dosing administration to decrease the chances of serious side effects associated with using the medication, present the potential health risks that could contribute to one’s decision to take the medication, or highlight the benefit this medication has towards the patient’s well-being, and the necessity for proper compliance (Wolf et al., “A Critical Review”). 

While previous studies have determined the readability and suitability of medication guides as well as explored the communication between physicians and patients, few have connected the two in regard to the overall effect they have on a patient’s understanding of their prescribed medication (Britten et al.; Wolf et al., “Usability of FDA-Approved Medication Guides”).  Pharmaceutical representatives often play a substantial role in influencing a physician’s understanding of a medication, but it is questionable whether enough information is then conveyed to the patient regarding the medication they are being prescribed (Lexchin 664).  Without a general knowledge of the medications they are taking, patients are unaware of the effects and potential risks the medication may impose.  While it may be true, defining patients as being “unaware” does not directly associate to the literal sense of them being incognizant of the medication they are taking.  This idea of patients being “unaware” relates more to the idea of them being incognizant of why they are being prescribed certain medicine.  With a doctor being potentially manipulated by a pharmaceutical representative to push a certain medication, along with a patient’s possible aversion to medicine that is not discussed, the medication the patient is prescribed may not be the most beneficial for their particular illness or case (Lexchin 666; Britten et al. 1497).

My study, as discussed in this article, was conducted to see if patients understand their prescribed medication and the effects of using them, through communication with their physician and the use of patient information leaflets (Medication Guides) that come with the medication.  This research was of particular interest to me as I am studying to become a physician and majoring in biochemistry at a small liberal arts college.

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About the Author

Christopher Luis Shosted is a student at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. He will graduate in May of 2020 with a B.A. in English and a certification in writing arts. Since enrolling at Moravian College in 2018, Christopher has focused on understanding the drives behind rhetorics that harm marginalized groups. He plans to continue his education through a Master’s and Ph.D program where he wishes to put rhetorical theory in conversation with literary studies.

Contents

Introduction

Theories on Genre

PragerU’s Videos

Comparing PragerU to Academic Discourse

PragerU and Post-Truth

Conclusion

References

Introduction

PragerU is a website founded by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager. It features five-minute videos on a variety of topics such as immigration, criminal justice, and education. As demonstrated by its name, PragerU brands itself as a university but this branding is part of a larger trend of ideology-promoting discourse garbing itself in well-established genres. PragerU is a university in much the same way Fox News is news; while both use the style of the genre they are mimicking, the use of false information to reaffirm hegemonic ideologies belies the motivations that inspire these types of rhetoric.

As a system of genres, the social motivations and exigencies that propel PragerU’s rhetoric can be understood. That rhetoric may seem laughable due to how poorly it apes academic discourse, but its producers are keenly aware of the conventions they flout. Their videos less resemble the crackpot conspiracy videos of YouTube instead opting for slick visual graphics and simple, carefully chosen language. Their rhetoric is also demonstrably successful; their YouTube channel currently sits at 2.2 million subscribers and has garnered three-quarters of a billion cumulative views since 2009, yet the facts used to support the arguments in these videos are often cherry-picked, misrepresented, or wholly incorrect. It is not that PragerU succeeds despite its fallaciousness, but because of it. Their rhetoric preys upon the social anxieties endemic to modern life and lays them at the feet of a particular community: academics.

For the purposes of this article, three video from PragerU will be analyzed: Jordan Peterson’s “Dangerous People are Teaching Your Kids,” Heather Mac Donald’s “Who Killed the Liberal Arts?,” and George Will’s “The Speech Every 2015 Grad Needs to Hear.” These videos are just three in PragerU’s extensive catalogue but they demonstrate a pattern of rhetoric united in their goals. Each video discusses a different feature of college: professors, curricula, and tuition and degree marketability respectively, but each speaker addresses their topic with a layer of ridicule and disdain.

PragerU’s videos can be seen as a more palatable form of the discourse that has become common in online spaces, but there’s no denying that they attempt to garner credibility for some of the more problematic aspects of society. In short, they cloak rhetoric that promotes racism, misogyny, and social inequality under the banner of fact. There is a risk present in the wanton promotion of these videos even when the goal is to counter them. Engagement with these videos brings them into a conversation they otherwise may not have been a part of, but in the age of the internet inaction is a form of engagement as well.

The intent here is not to amplify this rhetoric; rather, the exigence is to warn. The rhetorical studies community is uniquely equipped to understand the larger implications behind problematic rhetorics such as those promoted by PragerU. Yet understanding requires engagement and unfortunately promotion of these regressive ideals. The issue is that PragerU and rhetors who will adopt PragerU’s strategies in the future will continue to see success independently of scholarly engagement with their rhetoric. That is unless that rhetoric can be understood in terms of a higher order.

What this analysis proposes is one of myriad potential lenses that might be used to understand this type of rhetoric. PragerU’s claims cannot be countered because they exist on an order beyond a true-false dichotomy. Instead, what is required is public education on the ways in which rhetors attempt to supersede truth. This analysis is one step toward that goal.

The three videos analyzed here are part of PragerU’s larger strategy to usurp the social role held by the mode of discourse it mimics: academia. By lowering the credibility of orthodox education PragerU bolsters its own authority to promote ideology that skews further and further right. PragerU operates within systems of genre, but the ways genres function and what epistemic roles they serve require definition.

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About the Author

Ross Fitzpatrick is an undergraduate student at the University of Kansas, double majoring in English and Political Science. He is also a member of the university’s policy debate team and the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.

Contents

Introduction

Methods: Rhetorical Analysis

Analysis/Results: Events Producing Speech

Analysis/Results: Speech Producing Action

Conclusion

References

Appendix A: Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework Graphic

Appendix B: Table of Speeches and Rhetorical Roles Identified

Introduction

Much has been said and even more written about the nature of the rhetorical situation and its connection to the “real” world. Going back as far as the late 1960s and early '70s, scholars embedded within a variety of disciplines have debated about the nature of what Lloyd Bitzer coined in his 1968 article as “the rhetorical situation” (1). Bitzer argued that certain material conditions or events necessitate a “fitting response” to the specific situation (5). Within half a decade another prominent scholar in the field of Rhetoric and Composition, Richard Vatz, responded directly with “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation.” In this aptly titled piece, Vatz claimed there is never one “fitting response” to any situation and that “no situation can have a nature independent of the rhetoric with which [the rhetor] chooses to characterize it” (154). For Vatz, unlike Bitzer, “meaning is not discovered in situation, but created by rhetors” (157). The arguments forwarded by both Vatz and Bitzer have been carried through in academic circles within and beyond the field of Rhetoric and Composition.

Perhaps the greatest trend within all forums interested in dissecting and understanding the rhetorical situation has been its application to specific “real world” concepts and events. Over time, a contextual approach has overshadowed the theoretical approach established by Vatz, Bitzer, and others. For example, genre studies has incorporated the rhetorical situation as a scholarly artifact and investigated popular culture, new media, and politics through rhetorical analysis (Bazerman; Devitt; Miller). This seemingly interdisciplinary approach has, however, ignored other disciplines and theories highly embedded in the discussion of rhetoric and communication. The goal of this paper, then, is to introduce a specific theoretical lens through which one can evaluate the complexities of the rhetorical situation.

Politics in many ways operates as a sort of rhetorical game, in which policy makers, analysts, and even citizen observers manipulate rhetoric to serve their own ideologies and justify their political agendas. Although Rhetoric and Composition, as a field, has had much to say about politics, it has had little to say about political theory. This analysis aims to combine Vatz and Bitzer’s discussion of the rhetorical situation with John Kingdon’s multiple-streams framework to understand the relationship between political speech and political action, maintaining the current trend towards contextual analysis while providing a new theoretical analysis based in political science.

Ideally my analysis will not only provide some isolated response to the early debate between Vatz and Bitzer but also bridge the fields of Rhetoric and Composition and Public Policy. Each field has much to contribute to the other in order to understand both why certain policies succeed and others fail, and to comprehend the power of rhetoric as a tool for change. As alluded to previously, this paper pulls from John Kingdon’s multiple-streams framework first introduced in his 1984 book Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, and a more modern analysis of this framework by Daniel Beland and Michael Howlett (Appendix A).

Kingdon argues that three separate “streams” existed within politics that intersect to open “windows of opportunity” that result in political change (222). The first stream is the problem stream which “is filled with perceptions of problems that are seen as public in the sense that government action is needed to resolve them” (222). It is important here to emphasize the “public” nature of the problem, which filters how the government chooses to prioritize certain problems over others. The second is the policy stream which contains all of the potential measures the government could take to address the problem. And the last stream is the politics stream which includes the daily political climate including public opinion, legislative turnover, and advocacy by nongovernmental interest groups. When the three streams intersect, they open a policy window that can be exploited by a policy entrepreneur—an individual or a group of individuals—to set the agenda and enact policies (222). Here’s where the interesting part comes in (and what makes this theory uniquely relevant to a discussion of the rhetorical situation). Kingdon argues that these streams intersect due to certain “focusing events” that direct the attention of actors within all three streams towards a specific issue (222). This would suggest events determine rhetorical responses, but the presence of the policy entrepreneur within the framework contradictorily seems to align more with Vatz’s theorization that rhetoric determines action. Kingdon’s public policy framework, then, seems particularly apt for combination with an analysis of the rhetorical situation.

In order to facilitate that combination, I have performed a rhetorical analysis of seventeen speeches delivered by President George W. Bush between September 11, 2001, to May 1, 2003. The text of all speeches, along with audio, is pulled from American Rhetoric, a database compiling transcriptions from many American presidencies. The goals of this analysis are twofold: to understand how Bush recognized the opening of a potential policy window and to understand the rhetorical strategies the President used to exploit those policy windows and determine the course of political action pursued during the first two years of the War on Terror. Unfortunately, the answers to the first question are not as clear as the answers to the second. There does not seem to be a clear correlation between specific military operations and international events prompting speech other than the obvious example of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. If there is no clear relationship between events and the prompting of speech, there does seem to be some relationship between speech and the development of policy and initiation of action.

Through my own analysis of Bush’s speeches, supported by others’ previous secondary analysis, I have identified three major ways in which President Bush rhetorically manipulated the policymaking process and the opening of policy windows in the broader context of the War on Terror, and specifically in the context of the 2003 War in Iraq. First, by linking Iraq to terrorist networks and Al-Qaeda, Bush framed the invasion of Iraq as an extension of the War on Terror. Second, by appealing to an American sense of identity grounded in the history of the Nation and a Christian American ideal, Bush used a perceived ideal “Americanness” to cut off democratic deliberation and limit the efficacy of opposing rhetoric. And lastly, by defining certain political speech as terrorism and by defining the response to 9/11 as a “War on Terror,” Bush determined not only what response was expected from Congresspeople and policymakers but also from the American public, which further strengthened Bush’s ability to control the decision-making process.

Perhaps one can imagine my theoretical approach, which is derived from the work of Vatz, Bitzer, and Kingdon, as existing more in line with Jenny Edbauer’s more recent conceptualization of “rhetorical ecologies.” The point is not to confirm or deny the findings of any of the three, but to understand the rhetorical and material forces that contributed to the enactment of policy in a specific era. The sheer volume of speeches delivered demonstrates that there is no single exigence or audience, and therefore no singular rhetorical situation. However, there are certain rhetorical themes and tropes that tie those plural situations together. The aim of this theoretical frame is to account “for the amalgamations and transformations – the spread – of a given rhetoric within its wider ecology,” to understand what about Bush’s interpretation of events was conducive to its spread through policy making circles and the public writ large (Edbauer 20).