Current Projects
Book Projects | Articles/Essay Projects | Book Chapters
“Following Mechanical Turks: Articulating the Human in ‘Human Intelligence Tasks.’” Co-PI with Jeremy Tirrell. Ongoing Research Project hosted through Intermezzo.
This Enculturation: Intermezzo research project is a content analysis of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) job posts—called Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs—to trace how they rhetorically depict human actants.
The project is an experiment in open, ad hoc scholarly collaboration among multiple humans and non-humans. It is unfolding through regularly scheduled public streaming video sessions as the principal investigators (Jeremy Tirrell and Nathaniel Rivers) move from initial concept to completed text. Anyone can participate in these discussions, and several of them include invited guests as the work uncovers issues that would benefit from particular expertise. Video sessions and associated materials—textual exchanges, research documents, relevant links, etc.—are archived here and publicly shared. The manuscript draft is available online during development and is open to in-progress annotations, with the hope that they will genuinely shape its direction, rather than function as post factum comments on a stable text.
Geocomposition (In Progress).
Geocomposition articulates a media practice that materially composes place through movement (drawing on the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold). Disciplinarily, Geocomposition engages the field of digital rhetoric, exploring (and exploiting) what’s collectively known as locative media: an assemblage of handheld smart-devices, GPS satellites, and location-aware applications that work in and through both locations and movements along those locations. The word locative, which suggests both location and locomotion, proffers a compelling point of departure. The merging or enmeshment of movement and place is central to Geocomposition, which simultaneously emphasizes both. Locative combines words for place and to call, suggesting a calling or a summoning of place: it is an active, evocative connotation. There is a link as well to locomotion, with loco being the ablation of locus. With the suffix motion, it means moving from a place. Moving from and summoning suggests a fruitful tension operating in Geocomposition’s employment of locative media.
Geocomposition forwards a rhetorical mode of composing locatively attuned and so inclined to its asignifying dimensions, which “[focus] on forces, actions, and effects” (Muckelbauer, 239). John Muckelbauer writes, “at least in its classical incarnations, rhetoric seems largely indifferent to signification and the process of either producing or interpreting a meaning” (239). When engaging in rhetorical activity, when trying “to persuade the polis of something,” the primary aim is “to get them to do something” (239). Rhetoric, first and foremost, addresses suasion. As rhetoric moves it bumps into things, modulating affects. Rhetoric shapes and becomes a part of locations. Geocomposition is moving rhetoric (mobile and mobilizing) composing the multiple layers of place. Not simply rhetoric about places (as either meaning making or analysis) but rhetoric moving to compose place.
The later half of Geocomposition traces geocaching as an exemplary practice of locatively mediated rhetoric. Geocaching is “an outdoor recreational activity,” wherein participants use GPS devices to “hide and seek containers, called ‘geocaches’ or ‘caches.’” Geocaching takes place in rural as well as urban locations: from a fake log hidden in a clump of tress to a small, magnetic container affixed to the underside of a bus stop bench. Geocachers use both paper logs and a mobile application to track their finds. Geocomposition argues that this mediated movement of people hiding and seeking composes the locations they are also moving through. A geocache does not merely add significance to a place; the cache makes the place as such, and that place is continually trans-formed by the iterative composing of geocaching. Geocaches—composed discursively, arbitrated collectively, and found through embodied, digital action—constitute a rhetorical practice that composes places by materially moving those who participate in it.
The seed article for this project was published in CCC. Here’s a short video trailer for that piece:
The Strange Defense of Rhetoric (In progress).
The argument of this book is rather a simple one. Taking the province and scope of rhetoric as its matter of concern, it builds from Richard Lanham’s articulation of a Strong Defense of rhetoric, developing what it humbly dubs a strange defense of rhetoric. This strange defense of rhetoric articulates work in rhetorical theory with the work of thinkers such as Bruno Latour in science studies, Tim Ingold in anthropology, and Andy Clark in cognitive science, in order to invite more actors into the continual composition of rhetoric. It argues that rhetoric and its key terms (e.g., kairos, attention, and agency) are always at stake in rhetorical interaction—they are effects rather than causes. In the strange defense, rhetoric is itself always at risk.
Article/Essay Projects
“The Santa Claus Problem” (in progress, 8,000 words).
Rhetoric’s relationship with the “real” has long been fraught. Indeed, “rhetoric” is a term that often designates a lack of reality or, more damning, a commitment to reality. This essay engages this question of the real and rhetoric’s relation to it by working through the “problem” of Santa Claus as posed by my son: “Is Santa Claus real?” For me, the answer to this question, which lies precariously at an ontological tipping point, can be found in William James’ work on radical empiricism. James argues, Everything real must be experienced, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real” (“The Experience of Activity” 3). The key linkage here is between the real and experience. Santa Claus is real—dependent upon experience. This experiential ontology—Santa Claus as experience—resonates with the rhetorical. Santa Claus is made real (somewhere, which isn’t to say everywhere) through experience, which is variable. Rhetoric, in this instance, can be taken as the art, the practice, that composes experience. Perhaps too provocatively, I argue that it is really only rhetoric, despite centuries of mistrust, cares about the real—is invested in reality. Or, to put it another way, there is no more empirical intellectual tradition than rhetoric.
"Big Data, A Rhetorical Thing." Co-authored with Lars Söderlund and Mark Hannah (Under review, 9,000 words).
This article treats large-scale data collection, or Big Data, not as an aspect of rhetoric or a proof within rhetoric, but as a rhetoric in and of itself: as a thing which shapes how we think about issues of the public, how we talk about the public, how we argue in and about the public, and finally, what that public looks like. To approach the rhetoricity of Big Data specifically and productively, this article examines the National Security Agency’s (NSA) enrollment of Big Data and the public rhetoric generated by it. The discourse around this manifestation of Big Data, this thing, presents a timely opportunity to both trace and intervene into this public rhetoric.
Book Chapter Projects
“Environmental Rhetoric.” Co-authored with Casey Boyle and Jenny Rice. For inclusion in CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF RHETORIC (DRAFTING).
In this essay, we seek to show how the narrative of environment as outside our bodies has been repeatedly reinforced by military, political, scholarly, and public rhetorical practices. We also explore some of the ways that environmental rhetoric scholarship has reinforced this narrative in certain ways, but has also offered fissure and possibilities for an alternative trope in which environments and bodies are immanent to one another. Ultimately, we argue that environmental rhetoric may be most productive in this moment by adopting the narrative that we cannot ever know what environment fully means, even as we have imperative to act on it now.
Our essay outlines a parallel perspective on what environmental rhetoric is or perhaps could be. Our parallel narrative offers a reorientation of rhetorical scholarship concerning the environment, a reorientation emphasizing the modes of possible dwelling for bodies now rather than as a corrective to damage from a previous state of conditions. Thus, the chapter is interested less in an environmental rhetoric that hinges upon restoration (of an ideal environment) and more in a rhetoric committed to acting as an immanent part of an environment, which is a process we are caught up in.