Meta: possible method?

I just read Marlia Banning's "Truth floats: Reflexivity in the shifting public and epistemological terrain" Rhetoric Society Quarterly (35) 3, Summer 2005. pp. 75-99. I'm not thrilled with the article; it seems to claim that self-awareness about the creation of texts erodes publics' confidence in texts. It seems to cling a little too tightly to the myth of objective reporting. For example, she says: "As shifts in information increasingly obscure the purpose, source, and status of any given communication, and reflexive representations highlight the constructed nature of any account, however, the information and common reference world so central to the possibilities of conversation in public life is diminishing" (p. 92). I would argue instead of "obscuring" communication, they're simply upending our previous ways of understanding communication. I would also argue that the "common reference world" was always a convenient fiction; recognizing that not every public was the object of address in the past forces us to realize the need to (and difficulties of ) address(ing) them now.

I'd argue that it doesn't erode publics' confidence, so much as educate publics to the fact that objectivity is a myth to be resisted and interrogated. It educates publics to be smarter about the information they're consuming. And I don't feel the "natural risks" section is particularly convincing (i.e., there's nothing particularly enlightening about 'natural risks' than about any other type of story--it seems that she's generalizing 'natural risks' as a way to highlight the controversy over the science behind global warming--but without ever saying that. While it might serve as a relevant example, one could also point to the administration's parsing of the definition of "torture" as another example where the arguments over definition define the debate and divide the public).

I have to say that I do love the method she uses: "My method catalogues events across media and genres. As Michael McGee has delineated, any 'apparently finished discourse is in fact a dense reconstruction of all the bits of other discourses from which it is made.' ('Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture' 279). Thus one of the primary jobs for rhetoricians in a fragmented cultural context, is 'inventing a text suitable for criticism' (288). I watched, read, or listened to public news just as anyone of my socioeconomic status and rhetorical training might do and then actively selected and catalogued the 'scraps and pieces of evidence' that I present here (279). That I catalog events in this manner is significant; it is this kind of cataloguing that eventually produces the density and compression of facts in daily living that form the information necessary for deliberation of public affairs. My methodology in this article--aside from my training and particular expertise--is a rhetoric of the everyday. It is a public method available to all, though circumscribed by the degree to which various publics are aware of the representation practices of the media and the state, and the kind of cataloging that is involved in producing the information that they use in their deliberation on public matters" (p. 79).

However, does the method of "I collected a bunch of stories I thought were relevant" have sufficient legitimacy? Is there a richer tradition that this is drawing on that can build enough to make a dissertation from? Or is it legitimate enough to go with based on just this article's reading of an article?

Tangent: politics, narrative, and statistics

I've previously talked about how the most important thing to winning an argument is not having the facts on your side, but having a compelling narrative that makes "the facts" make sense to the audience. We seem to be seeing that develop even more in national politics of late:
From Salon.com:
"It is striking how Obama's rhetoric differs from standard political oratory by being a statistic-free zone. In the closing days in Iowa, Obama might talk for 40 minutes in a tiny town like Perry while citing only one or two numbers. In contrast, Clinton on the stump is a human pocket calculator, constantly telling voters how much purchasing power they have lost under Bush (about $1,000) and how many jobs were created under Bill Clinton (lots!). Even Edwards spices his talks with a burst of numbers about the extent of poverty in America." (Shapiro, W. Barack Obama's breakthrough victory. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/04/iowa_dems/)

Dan Schorr (Schorr, D. The politics of truth and celebrity. All Things Considered, Jan. 2, 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17790148) connects this phenomenon to "celebrity worship"; which, though I think it does provide some insight, unduly temporizes the phenomenon with a kind of presentism that probably wouldn't hold up under scrutiny. (i.e., while the trope that "America is celebrity obsessed, to the point of neglecting important issues" is everywhere today, I think the phenomenon of being more taken with the narrative than the data predates our collective obsession with Britney.)

Tangent: intellectual detritus

1) Citizenship rhetoric & education (continued): As previously discussed, schools are about creating the next batch of citizens; thinking about that in light of other previous thoughts about immigration, made me start to play the analogy out (something I do lots of; hence my interest in "reframings" and other ways to further inform the debate through tilting it on its side)...does this then make home schooling the equivalent reaction of the xenophobe? (We can't control the larger world, and it's all going to ruin, so we have to "seal the borders" and only deal with taking care of our own.) Is home schooling essentially the paleo-con position? If that's true, is public schooling essentially a neo-con construction? I suppose it could be, or it could be a liberal construction (if education is conceived as creating a new collaborative culture rather than imperially imposing culture upon the next generation--a la the neocons).

2) The rhetoric of NAR takes on media consolidation: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre [media environment] that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in [media diversity] made in the wake of the [the advent of public broadcasting in the US]. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral [intellectual] disarmament." Does saying it that way make my thesis more compelling?

3) Motivation & GEC: In my day job as a marketer, I got a copy of Motivation Strategies, a trade publication about using promotional items to motivate sales teams, etc. I found this interesting:

Including luxury brands in an incentive program can be a great way to dress it up and give participants something to stretch for--believing that if they just work a little harder they might have a shot at earning that high-quality, luxury item. But incentive end-users should also make sure the luxury item fits the demographics and profile of participants.
But don't let your luxury item become the be-all and end-all of your program, says Dana Slockbower, Director of Marketing for Rymax. 'You need to have quality branded products at price points for everyone,' she says. 'Some people will be driven by that aspirational luxury item they can work towards, but others need to feel they can actually achieve their goals and get something of value in return.'
It becomes demotivating, in fact, 'to offer rewards that cannot be reached,' says Norma Jean Knollenberg of Top Brands, 'regardless of the brand or the perceived luxury value of the brand.' ("Living in the Lap of Luxury (Brands)", Motivation Strategies, Vol. 11, Issue 4, Fall 2007. p. 22)

So why is this interesting? Not because it's particularly insightful--if one remembers the chapter from high school psychology class, one can probably resurrect that page about the rats in the cage with the electrified floor and learned helplessness. What's interesting is that it's coming from what can only be called "the heart of the GEC beast"--capitalism at its finest, where competition is celebrated, and good citizenship is a PR strategy, not a responsibility (previous issues have talked about how companies perceived as "green" are rising in popularity without any need to address the issue of being green vs. being perceived as green).
Yet even here, there's a recognition that "offering rewards that cannot be reached" can be demotivating. Yet the quintessence of the GEC paradigm is the understanding that education serves the purpose of increasing one's success in the marketplace. It has no "backup plan", no "quality branded products at price points for everyone" for someone who looks around h/erself and doesn't see people succeeding in the marketplace; it has nothing to say to someone who recognizes that h/er job opportunities are limited by factors that have little to do with education. It has only that dream to sell; anyone who doesn't believe is accused of not dreaming hard enough. There is no recognition (in the education policies proposed in the GEC paradigm) that there needs to be a reason to attend school that helps students "feel they can actually achieve their goals and get something of value in return."

And nevermind the idea of being first in the world in all subjects and all elements of the global economy is to offer "rewards that cannot be reached", no matter how "luxury" such an idea might seem. From reading articles like this, it seems apparent that even the business community (which educationists are supposed to be falling over themselves to emulate) recognizes that not everyone is the top salesperson; motivation strategies exist to help improve the overall efforts and effects of the sales staff, but not everyone can (or wants to) "achieve at world-class levels". Yet, to point out such a fact in education policy is complete heresy--seen as proof that one recognizes others as categorically inferior, rather than proof that one recognizes the belief that "everyone wants a Rolex" is a categorically inferior belief.

meta: automatic writing; topic: book pitch

As an eighth-grade teacher, I used to have students practice their writing skills by doing timed writings. I would give them a length of time (generally short--five or ten minutes most times) and tell them that they had to be writing that entire time. If I saw them stop writing, I would tell them to write anything, even if it was "I don't know what to write" or their name over and over again, and (with the exception of the students who thought it the greatest act of rebellion to spend the entire time writing their name for the entire time) for all students, even the most stuck, the simple act of forcing something out would eventually bring them around to writing something; so much so that at the end of the time I would tell students to put their pencils down and they would continue to write, begging me for long enough to finish the sentence, or for one more minute.

You would think that I would be smart enough to recognize that the same technique can work for dissertations; but you'd be wrong. For some reason, even though I can pitch a pretty convincing argument in the paragraph above for just sitting down to write, I can't seem to actually sit myself in front of any verbal recording apparatus long enough, or with enough consistency, to actually write something. So this post is an attempt to force myself to practice this art--what Jack Kerouac called "automatic writing" (though for him, it was more a Zen-like experience about creating a narrative without using the conscious mind).

I don't know what to write; I don't know what to write; I don't know what to write (I have to admit, there is a certain, perhaps Zen-like, beauty to just repeating that sentence.) I feel like my thoughts about the dissertation have been a more elaborate variation on that exercise--"reformulating my question" again and again, but essentially, each time coming out with another version of "I don't know what to write." So in attempting to try to get out of the trap I think I'm setting for myself, I'm trying to think of the dissertation, not as a "research question" or "what I want to learn" but as a book proposal: what am I trying to pitch to my committee (as a "publisher") to convince them that there's an audience for.

In that spirit, Ch. 1 would be about "who cares" or "why does this matter", where I would talk about how 1) most policymakers haven't studied education; 2) most people feel that because they experienced education, they're qualified to make judgments about its proper execution (ignoring the concept that things may have changed in the thirty years since they experienced it); 3) most people's experience with education policy is through the media; 4) that most journalists are more concerned with fulfilling the norms of journalism than with explicating the philosophical worldviews inherent in different policy prescriptions; 5) [note how I'm focusing on just keeping writing--this would be a rather unwieldy first chapter, no matter how structured] 6) there is no six; 7) therefore, the way media talk about education matters.

Ch. 2 would talk about how the way we talk about things matters (either the theoretical orientation, or maybe the lit review--since it's about who's involved in this conversation). So there I'd want to cover some of the basic stuff like Frank Luntz's points, as well as some of the more abstract philosophizing like Gramsci.

Ch. 3 would then try to show how what's out there in the media is presenting an inadequate version of education policy: one way (maybe in a chapter all to itself) could be to do "reframings" (something I've done a time or two before where I try to basically adhere to the tone of a typical newspaper story and cover the same event from various perspectives--highlighting some things and minimizing others). Another way could be to show how the same perspectives keep getting all the play and how competing perspectives are silenced (either "quantitatively" by pointing out the number of times and ways a given perspective shows up, or "qualitatively" by talking about what rhetorical structurings make it more powerful in the debate or less so--or both...but how much is too much to bite off here?) Another way could be to do a different type of "reframing", one where I take a current, non-education issue, and I frame it in the terms of current education debates (ex., a parallel to NCLB's achievement testing in the medical field would determine if the hospital was a good one by the state of all the patients on a given Tuesday in March at 10:14a.m. Hospitals with too many patients in the ICU would be seen as not working hard enough to get those patients well--"because all patients can recover", and anyone who doesn't believe that is simply abandoning hope on our most vulnerable patients and causing them to lose out on the "high standards" of care that they deserve. To prevent that, we would strip hospital funding if everyone in the hospital wasn't healthy by 2014. And so on...). These "thought experiments" (if you will) can help non-policymakers understand the issues policymakers are really facing without forcing them to follow an elaborate constructivist worldview argument.

OK, time's up...how's that?

Meta: Humanities Lit Reviews

My current dilemma of living between two worlds (humanities and social sciences) centers on the lit review. Because the social scientists are all hung up about causality and other quantitative issues, they're having a hard time with questions I'm asking about what counts as a lit review....How would you define a lit review in the humanities? In the social sciences, the definition of a good literature review is supposed to be a narrative that tells the story of who's talking about what (in the field as you conceive of it), but there's an argument that says that such work doesn't count as research (though some are willing enough to substitute the term "scholarship"). But as I think about most of the papers I wrote for two different literature degrees, they start to sound pretty close to their definition of literature reviews. Is this a function of the fallacy where high school teachers talk about "research papers" but really mean lit reviews (since the quality and quantity of original thinking required is pretty much nil)? Is this a snobbery about how much "original thinking" is required (or what counts as original thinking--i.e., if one can't make causal claims one is simply describing the world as we already know it)?
So I've been trying to make sense of what differentiates a literature review in English (or the humanities generally) from "original research"...is it just the lit review is the narrative of what's missing and the original research is where you fill the gaps with your own interpretations?
If one rejects the attempt to make the dissertation resemble the hard sciences' lab report (where great attention is paid to describing how the "experiment" is put together so that it can be reproduced to gather--ostensibly--the same data), how does one define the section that represents original research without positing a collection of data and interpretation of that dataset. In other words, if I don't count something (quantitative), or at least interview someone (to go the qualitative route), and I just make a list of thinkers that I'm going to apply to this given situation (phenomenon, if you like), and then make sense of how these different thinkers inform our understanding of that situation (and give us a new understanding of that situation--hence creating original scholarship?), is that act of gathering the thinkers a lit review or a description of the experiment? Is the description of the situation the declaration of the parameters of the dataset?
How do I map these required concepts (that don't really fit the experience of working in the humanities) onto what I'm looking to do?

Topic: immigration and education

I’m beginning to think that I need to figure out how to integrate these two parallel tracks about rhetoric: on the one hand, public education is about what sort of citizens we want other people’s children to be. On the other, the current anti-immigrant rhetoric has defined citizenship to the level of taxpayer (“I work hard and pay my taxes, and these immigrants come and use all the services”). But when you point out that immigrants actually pay more in taxes than they use in services (through Social Security taxes they won’t collect, sales taxes, etc. they pay, and through their reluctance to use services for fear of deportation), the argument doesn’t go away. The rhetoric is more powerful than the data. In the same way, the Global Economic Competitiveness narrative (promulgated by Nation at Risk) defines education as the task of creating good employees who become good taxpayers. (See the connection to the immigration narrative?) And, as in the immigration narrative, when you point out that there’s no evidence of a connection between education and economic development, the rhetoric still doesn’t go away.

So my challenge is how to create a “research question” that shows that no matter what data you have, if you don’t have a driving metanarrative it can fit into, it doesn’t change the argument. I think of it as a problem of making a humanities argument to a social scientist. Since social science tries to make predictions about the empirical world, it’s inherently quantitative (though it is becoming receptive to the need for qualitative analysis). In one way, I think that the humanities are like the “reality based media” of the Bush administration source in Ron Suskind’s article; they’re about making sense of world, while the social sciences are “an empire” attempting to “make reality” (bow to their will). So I’m trying to reconcile myself to the idea of a dissertation that doesn’t “solve a problem” but one that creates a compelling narrative (which I think is actually solving a problem, since really a dissertation is the act of creating a narrative that compels people to believe that you’ve actually defined the problem appropriately and that your solution solves the problem).

One solution a member of my committee suggested was to view it as a “translation equation” (those formulae that help people understand ideas that come from other disciplines). The act of putting various thinkers together is a creative act that can help others understand ideas they haven’t encountered in their discipline previously. That sounds convincing to me, but of course it would, wouldn’t it?

Topic: citizenship rhetoric

OK, as I think about this some more I'm thinking about based on the following thoughts:
1) Lisa Delpit's assertion that schooling (as an institution) is always about "other people's children". The premise inherent in this is that "we can raise our kids right, but we can't trust those people to do it right." (Which ties nicely into my previous post about the trope of threat as a driving force for education--see below.) 2) Especially since we're talking about publicly funded schooling, we're talking about what sort of future citizens are creating?

So my topic is really about what definition of citizenship (i.e., what sort of citizens) are we calling forth in the rhetoric of our education policy?

So what intrigues me about A Nation At Risk, is that it calls forth citizens who are conceived of as contributors to a global economy (or more accurately, contributors to American supremacy in the global economy)--and really little else. This is important in that it marks a move away from rhetorics that define a citizen's duty as more than a taxpayer--from ones that conceive of the duty as a citizen to create social justice, extend democracy, etc.

This is important on one hand because (one of) the inherent premise(s) in NAR's rhetoric, is that the competition in this global economy is fundamentally fair, and it elides any critiques (thereby obviating the citizen's need to address them as well) of the system as a way to maintain economic inequality.

But I think one my most vexing problems is how to help the reader of it (who will presumably be coming from an education background--how many other folks do you suppose will pick up a dissertation about education policy?) will see it as talking about rhetoric (first and foremost), rather than talking about a particular policy, or as an argument for a certain type of citizenship, etc.--since that's what I'm really most interested in.