Text + Field

Rhetorical critics have long had a troubled relationship with method, viewing it as at times opening up provocative avenues of inquiry, and at other times as closing off paths toward meaningful engagement with texts. Text + Field shifts scholarly attention from this conflicted history, looking instead to the growing number of scholars who are supplementing text-based scholarship by venturing out into the field, where rhetoric is produced, enacted, and consumed.

These field-based practices involve observation, ethnographic interviews, and performance. They are not intended to displace text-based approaches; rather, they expand the idea of method by helping rhetorical scholars arrive at new and complementary answers to long-standing disciplinary questions about text, context, audience, judgment, and ethics.

The first volume in rhetoric and communication to directly address the relevance, processes, and implications of using field methods to augment traditional scholarship, Text + Field provides a framework for adapting these new tools to traditional rhetorical inquiry.

Aside from the editors, the contributors are Roberta Chevrette, Kathleen M. de Onís, Danielle Endres, Joshua P. Ewalt, Alina Haliliuc, Aaron Hess, Jamie Landau, Michael Middleton, Tiara R. Na’puti, Jessy J. Ohl, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Damien Smith Pfister, Samantha Senda-Cook, Lisa Silvestri, and Valerie Thatcher.

“Text + Field productively emphasizes the praxis of methodology, augmenting and amplifying the innovative possibilities available to students and scholars researching the rhetoric of everyday life. The collection advocates methods that are ethically responsive as well as intellectually insightful, looking to embodied approaches such as interviewing, critical ethnography, participant-observation, and personal narrative.”—Jeffrey Bennett, Vanderbilt University

“This exceptional editorial collective, themselves ethnographic rhetorical critics, here assemble gifted critical travelers who venture from Omaha to Guåhan to challenge and entice us to reconsider method, context, textuality, embodiment, judgment, and ethics by means of innovative movement in rhetorical research. This volume will inspire all those who dream of new critical destinations.”—Charles E. Morris III, coeditor of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking

“Reinforces an interdisciplinary, synergistic approach to the field that allows critical ethnographic research and gives greater attention to bodies, nonhuman elements, and everyday technologies to deeply inform rhetorical theory. This book is an essential read for courses in ethnography as well as a useful supplemental text for undergraduate and graduate-level courses in rhetoric.”—K. L. Majocha, Choice

“It should be required reading for all of us working at the nexus of politics, rhetoric, and ethics.”—Heather Ashley Hayes, Rhetoric & Public Affairs

Sara L. McKinnon is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Robert Asen is Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Karma R. Chávez is Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Robert Glenn Howard is Professor of Communication Arts and the chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Articulating Text and Field in the Nodes of Rhetorical Scholarship

by Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard

1. Interrogating the “Field”

by Samantha Senda-Cook, Michael Middleton, and Danielle Endres

2. Rhetorical Field Methods in the Tradition of Imitatio

by Joshua P. Ewalt, Jessy J. Ohl, and Damien Smith Pfister

3. From Guåhan and Back: Navigating a “Both/Neither” Analytic for Rhetorical Field Methods

by Tiara R. Na'puti

4. Feeling Rhetorical Critics: Another Affective-Emotional Field Method for Rhetorical Studies

by Jamie Landau

5. Embodied Judgment: A Call for a Phronetic Orientation in Rhetorical Ethnography

by Aaron Hess

6. “Pa’ Que Tú Lo Sepas”: Experiences with Co-presence in Puerto Rico

by Kathleen M. de Onís

7. It’s Like a Prairie Fire! Rhetorics of Trust and Reciprocity in the Texas Coal Plant Opposition Movement

by Valerie Thatcher

8. Being, Evoking, and Reflecting from the Field: A Case for Critical Ethnography in Audience-Centered Rhetorical Criticism

by Alina Haliliuc

9. Holographic Rhetoric: De/Colonizing Public Memory at Pueblo Grande

by Roberta Chevrette

10. Context Drives Method: Studying Social Media Use in a Warzone

by Lisa Silvestri

Afterword: Decentralizing and Regenerating the Field

by Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Notes

Index

Communication Studies

           Rhetorical Studies

Rhetoric