Matching Items (3)
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- All Subjects: Immigrants
- Creators: Long, Elenore
Description
This project draws on sociocognitive rhetoric to ask, How, in complex situations not of our making, do we determine what needs to be done and how to leverage available means for the health of our communities and institutions? The project pulls together rhetorical concepts of the stochastic arts (those that demand the most precise, careful planning in the least predictable places) and techne (problem-solving tools that transform limits and barriers into possibilities) to forward a stochastic techne that grounds contemplative social action at the intersection of invention and intervention and mastery and failure in real time, under constraints we can't control and outcomes we can't predict. Based on 18 months of fieldwork with the Sudanese refugee diaspora in Phoenix, I offer a method for engaging in postmodern phronesis with community partners in four ways: 1) Explanations and examples of public listening and situational mapping 2) Narratives that elucidate the stochastic techne, a heuristic for determining and testing wise rhetorical action 3) Principles for constructing mutually collaborative, mutually beneficial community-university/ community-school partnerships for jointly addressing real-world issues that matter in the places where we live 4) Descriptions and explanations that ground the hard rhetorical work of inventing new paths and destinations as some of the Sudanese women construct hybridized identities and models of social entrepreneurship that resist aid-to-Africa discourse based on American paternalism and humanitarianism and re-cast themselves as micro-financers of innovative work here and in Southern Sudan. Finally, the project pulls back from the Sudanese to consider implications for re-figuring secondary English education around phronesis. Here, I offer a framework for teachers to engage in the real work of problem-posing that aims - as Django Paris calls us - to get something done by confronting the issues that confront our communities. Grounded in classroom instruction, the chapter provides tools for scaffolding public listening, multi-voiced inquiries, and phronesis with and for local publics. I conclude by calling for English education to abandon all pretense of being a predictive science and to instead embrace productive knowledge-making and the rhetorical work of phronesis as the heart of secondary English studies.
ContributorsClifton, Jennifer (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Gee, James Paul (Committee member) / Paris, Django (Committee member) / Warriner, Doris (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation examines collaborative inquiry as a form of graduate mentoring. To investigate this issue, I analyze the research and writing process of a team of five multilingual graduate students and their mentor as they collaboratively design, implement, and report a study based in their local writing program over the course of two years. Through a qualitative activity analysis of team meetings, participant interviews, and the team’s written drafts and email correspondence, I investigate the ways in which self-sponsored, team-based collaborative research and writing supports participants’ learning and development of a professional identity.
Key findings show that unanticipated obstacles in the research context present participants with “real-world” dilemmas that call forth disciplinary alignments, reinforce existing disciplinary practices, and, most importantly, generate new practices altogether. An example of this process is reflected in the research team's frequent need to adjust their research design as a result of constraints within the research environment. The team's ability to pivot in response to such constraints encouraged individual members to view the research enterprise as dynamic and fluid, leading ultimately to a heightened sense of agency and stronger awareness of the rhetorical challenges and opportunities posed by empirical research. Similarly, participants’ demonstrated an ability to recognize and resolve tensions stemming from competing demands on their time and attention during the course of their graduate study. Actively constructing resonances across various domains of their graduate worlds—coursework, teaching, and non-curricular research and professionalization activities—served to clarify purposes and increase motivation.
An additional aspect of this study is the way graduate students leverage their language resources in the collaborative process. This dissertation extends the disciplinary conversation by investigating ways in which language resources function as rhetorical tools within the research context. This focus on language, in concert with collaboration and rhetorical stances to inquiry, challenges persistent views of authorship, apprenticeship, and language norms, while simultaneously lending insight into how graduate students invent new ways of participating in their professional worlds.
Key findings show that unanticipated obstacles in the research context present participants with “real-world” dilemmas that call forth disciplinary alignments, reinforce existing disciplinary practices, and, most importantly, generate new practices altogether. An example of this process is reflected in the research team's frequent need to adjust their research design as a result of constraints within the research environment. The team's ability to pivot in response to such constraints encouraged individual members to view the research enterprise as dynamic and fluid, leading ultimately to a heightened sense of agency and stronger awareness of the rhetorical challenges and opportunities posed by empirical research. Similarly, participants’ demonstrated an ability to recognize and resolve tensions stemming from competing demands on their time and attention during the course of their graduate study. Actively constructing resonances across various domains of their graduate worlds—coursework, teaching, and non-curricular research and professionalization activities—served to clarify purposes and increase motivation.
An additional aspect of this study is the way graduate students leverage their language resources in the collaborative process. This dissertation extends the disciplinary conversation by investigating ways in which language resources function as rhetorical tools within the research context. This focus on language, in concert with collaboration and rhetorical stances to inquiry, challenges persistent views of authorship, apprenticeship, and language norms, while simultaneously lending insight into how graduate students invent new ways of participating in their professional worlds.
ContributorsBommarito, Daniel Vincent (Author) / Matsuda, Paul Kei (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Rose, Shirley K. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Ethos or credibility of a speaker is often defined as the speaker's character (Aristotle). Contemporary scholars however, have contended that ethos lies with the audience because while the speaker may efficiently persuade, the audience will decide if it wants to be persuaded (Farrell). Missing from the scholarly conversation is attention to how ethos is performed between speaker and audience under institutional structures that produce inequitable power relations subject to changing political contexts over time. In this dissertation I analyze how ethos is performed that is a function of a specific social and political environment.
My grandfather, Al Foon Lai, was a paper son. As an adult, I learned that paper sons were members of paper families that may or may not actually exist except on paper; furthermore paper immigration was the way many Chinese entered the United States to get around the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Grandfather held legal status, but grandfather's name was fictitious and thus his entry to the United States in 1920 was illegal. Today by some authorities he would be classified as an illegal immigrant. As Grandfather's status as a paper son suggest, Grandfather's credibility as someone with the legal prerogative to reside in the U.S. was a dynamic construct that was negotiated in light of the changing cultural norms encoded in shifting immigration policies. Grandfather constructed his ethos "to do persuasion" in administrative hearings mandated under the Chinese Exclusion Act that produced asymmetrical power relations. By asymmetrical power relations I mean the unequal status between the administrator overseeing the hearing and Lai the immigrant. The unequal status was manifest in the techniques and procedures employed by the administrative body empowered to implement the Chinese Exclusion Act and subsequent laws that affected Chinese immigrants. Combining tools from narrative analysis and feminists rhetorical methods I analyze excerpts from Al Foon Lai's transcripts from three administrative hearings between 1926 and 1965. It finds that Grandfather employed narrative strategies that show the nature of negotiating ethos in asymmetrical power situations and the link between the performance of ethos and the political and social context.
My grandfather, Al Foon Lai, was a paper son. As an adult, I learned that paper sons were members of paper families that may or may not actually exist except on paper; furthermore paper immigration was the way many Chinese entered the United States to get around the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Grandfather held legal status, but grandfather's name was fictitious and thus his entry to the United States in 1920 was illegal. Today by some authorities he would be classified as an illegal immigrant. As Grandfather's status as a paper son suggest, Grandfather's credibility as someone with the legal prerogative to reside in the U.S. was a dynamic construct that was negotiated in light of the changing cultural norms encoded in shifting immigration policies. Grandfather constructed his ethos "to do persuasion" in administrative hearings mandated under the Chinese Exclusion Act that produced asymmetrical power relations. By asymmetrical power relations I mean the unequal status between the administrator overseeing the hearing and Lai the immigrant. The unequal status was manifest in the techniques and procedures employed by the administrative body empowered to implement the Chinese Exclusion Act and subsequent laws that affected Chinese immigrants. Combining tools from narrative analysis and feminists rhetorical methods I analyze excerpts from Al Foon Lai's transcripts from three administrative hearings between 1926 and 1965. It finds that Grandfather employed narrative strategies that show the nature of negotiating ethos in asymmetrical power situations and the link between the performance of ethos and the political and social context.
ContributorsCarter, Karen Lynn Ching (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / Warriner, Doris (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016