Emotions have formed an integral part of rhetorical education at least since Aristotle, and community engagement has re-established itself as vital to that education over the last few decades. Yet with few exceptions (DeGenaro 2010; Langstraat and Bowdon 2011), scholars have not theorized the emotional components of community-engaged rhetorical education. This website, “Feeling Engaged: An Audio Archive,” begins to fill that gap by archiving and commenting upon seven audio presentations made at the 2014 CCCC conference that address emotions.
Of the seven files in this audio archive, the first few address only the public sphere and the last few only university spaces, with the intervening files bridging the two topics. The first to appear is Steve Parks, with whom this writer had the pleasure of speaking in the weeks following the CCCC conference; he explains the title of a publication he oversaw on the Arab Spring: Revolution by Love. Next is Sonia Orellana's incisive analysis of hate and fear as spread by Jan Brewer on the Arizona-Mexico border. The third presentation finds Candice Rai describing blog spaces in which fear also spreads even as hope remains for citizens' civic participation. The fourth presentation, by Jill Belli, moves to a college campus in New York, one that freshman writers inventory and analyze as they compile their own happiness archive. The fifth recording addresses work in the writing center, in which, Daniel Lawson argues, emotion is increasingly acknowledged as central. In the sixth presentation, Tim Jensen focuses our attention squarely on the teaching of emotions in rhetoric handbooks and in the classroom. Finally, in the seventh and final presentation, Whitney Douglas and Kelli Prejean move out from individual writing classrooms to flesh out the emotional labor of the WPAs who coordinate their efforts.
Assembled together in this archive, these presentations provide a preliminary sketch of the large body of contemporary scholarship in rhetorics of the emotions. These speakers remind us that emotions are central to how citizens form publics and to how they engage in politics. They show us that emotions guide students as they think through ideas and that they shape the relationships those students have with their tutors and teachers. And they argue that emotions are vital to the morale of the faculty and administrators program-wide. Listeners who make time to listen to each of the presentations and to explore the bibliography that follows them will come to see, as I have, that emotions are central to how we think and why we act, crucial to our understanding of public debates and our participation in them. For a time, emotion was severed from rhetorical education, and it has often been impugned in civic discourse. These recordings urge us to reconsider. Growing from a strong base in scholarship, they stand as a marker of how far the field has come regarding emotions, and they point to the large amount of work we have yet to do.
Of the seven files in this audio archive, the first few address only the public sphere and the last few only university spaces, with the intervening files bridging the two topics. The first to appear is Steve Parks, with whom this writer had the pleasure of speaking in the weeks following the CCCC conference; he explains the title of a publication he oversaw on the Arab Spring: Revolution by Love. Next is Sonia Orellana's incisive analysis of hate and fear as spread by Jan Brewer on the Arizona-Mexico border. The third presentation finds Candice Rai describing blog spaces in which fear also spreads even as hope remains for citizens' civic participation. The fourth presentation, by Jill Belli, moves to a college campus in New York, one that freshman writers inventory and analyze as they compile their own happiness archive. The fifth recording addresses work in the writing center, in which, Daniel Lawson argues, emotion is increasingly acknowledged as central. In the sixth presentation, Tim Jensen focuses our attention squarely on the teaching of emotions in rhetoric handbooks and in the classroom. Finally, in the seventh and final presentation, Whitney Douglas and Kelli Prejean move out from individual writing classrooms to flesh out the emotional labor of the WPAs who coordinate their efforts.
Assembled together in this archive, these presentations provide a preliminary sketch of the large body of contemporary scholarship in rhetorics of the emotions. These speakers remind us that emotions are central to how citizens form publics and to how they engage in politics. They show us that emotions guide students as they think through ideas and that they shape the relationships those students have with their tutors and teachers. And they argue that emotions are vital to the morale of the faculty and administrators program-wide. Listeners who make time to listen to each of the presentations and to explore the bibliography that follows them will come to see, as I have, that emotions are central to how we think and why we act, crucial to our understanding of public debates and our participation in them. For a time, emotion was severed from rhetorical education, and it has often been impugned in civic discourse. These recordings urge us to reconsider. Growing from a strong base in scholarship, they stand as a marker of how far the field has come regarding emotions, and they point to the large amount of work we have yet to do.
Steve Parks:
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Whitney Douglas
and Kelli Prejean: |
A list of the authors cited by these speakers is offered in the BIBLIOGRAPHY.
I argue that emotions shape the performance and reception of rhet-comp scholarship in the ANALYSIS.
I argue that emotions shape the performance and reception of rhet-comp scholarship in the ANALYSIS.