Abstracts 2008:

Kelly Cooper, Women in and Beyond the Global, GWU
Annie Lipsitz, Arca Foundation, Washington, DC

“Deconstructing Transnations”

We examine representations of Hurricane Katrina "refugees" in New Orleans, Louisiana, in fall 2005, Rigoberta Menchú of the social movements in Guatemala in the 1980s, and Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos of the Zapatista uprising in Mexico in the 1990s. These contextualized cases demonstrate how discriminatory practices of representation are produced through and maintain economic, gendered, racial and cultural power hierarchies that direct processes of Western/Northern imperialism and colonialism. Using transnational feminist cultural theory—interdisciplinary research about historical, cultural, economic, and political articulations of gender, class, race and ethnicity—we deconstruct representational practices, their motivating power structures, and emergent knowledges and examine how these representations circulate transnationally.

Doug Eyman, Department of English, George Mason University

“Digital Games: Engaging Critical Pedagogy at the Intersections of Cultural Studies and Digital Rhetoric”

The goal of this project is to examine the way that three distinct approaches--critical pedagogy, cultural studies, and digital rhetoric--can be brought into conversation within the context of teaching and research with digital games. Computer games have traditionally been taught and researched from a cultural studies perspective: they are read as texts that can be critiqued in terms of class, race, and gender and can be analyzed from a broad range of critical theories. My work in digital rhetoric seeks to push the methods and approaches to include more rhetorically-oriented analyses as well as production-oriented approaches to writing in digital game spaces. When used pedagogically, digital games represent a nearly ideal context for blending rhetorical analysis, cultural studies approaches, and the praxis of critical pedagogy.

Cathy Eisenhower, Gelman Library, GWU

“Women in and Beyond the Global”

This presentation discusses the current status and challenges surrounding the Women in and Beyond the Global project organized by the George Washington University's Women's Studies Program and The Gelman Library. The project is an ever-expanding group of feminist scholars, librarians, and activists that aim to break down barriers between academic and activist knowledge by fueling activist scholarship, encouraging collective reflection on feminist movement-building, and documenting and preserving these activities through digital media—all critical actions in the global struggles for women’s equality and the promotion of democracy.

Byron Hawk, Department of English, George Mason University

“Toward a 'New Cultural Studies': From Disciplines to Networks”

In their edited collection New Cultural Studies, Gary Hall and Clare Birchall work to define the next wave of cultural theory in the new century, a situation that has seen a change in media and a shift in rhetorical context. Such a post-Birmingham, post-Frankfurt School cultural studies has to find new models for dealing with disorganized, decentralized, multitudinous forms. Responding to their call to (re)invent the idea of cultural studies for a new generation, I look at two of the articles in the collection more closely and examine how their perspectives on cultural studies and the humanities can have implications for the ways we think about rhetorical studies. Their technology/culture and human/animal divisions mirror the language/world division in rhetoric and need to be replaced by images of the network if we want our rhetorical and political acts to be effective.

David Johnson, University Writing Program, GWU

“The Colonizing Word: Rhetoric and Other Folklore”

This paper examines theoretical expositions about agency and polemical discourses against colonization, namely how critical scholars whose writings attempt to save or even grant agency to the unheard subalterns, nevertheless persuasively misidentify these philosophical others as constituted entities, and thereby effectively accomplish fictitious agency through their texts and perhaps fail to avoid hegemony even in their alleged transgressive rhetoric. As a corrective inquiry, this essay will then posit an organic parallel between the elitist vernacular and colonial tropes in order to signal the hereditary rhetorical colonialism that permeates even postructuralist and postcolonial discourses. Mythic and folkloric utterances will be offered as discursive ways to playfully express the vital complexities of ambiguous lived experiences. The trick will be to come to some understanding of subaltern discourse not as champertous advocacy, but as kairotic appeal.

Randi Gray Kristensen, University Writing Program, GWU

“Translations of Freedom: Marronage in Atlantic Discourses”

This presentation proposes to review the deployments of marronage—a term initially applied to cattle but later to Native and African American slaves who fled captivity—in African Diasporic Atlantic circulations over the last 50 years, tracking the migration of the concept from the historical to multiple disciplines and purposes. The purpose of such a review is not to coalesce a single “correct” use of marronage, but rather to interrogate the renewed, dispersed, and disparate recuperation and reinvention of a 500-year old signifier in the last half-century. For whom has this concept become important? For what ends? What does such an analysis reveal about continuities and discontinuities in African Diasporic Atlantic discourses? And what is its significance for contemporary Maroons?

Eric G. Lorentzen, Department of English, Linguistics, and Speech, University of Mary Washington

“Cultural Studies and the Senior Seminar in Literature”

In this talk, I will argue for adopting a cultural studies methodology in the university literature classroom by detailing the ways I transformed a senior seminar in Charles Dickens from a “straight” literature course into a course in which students “did” Dickens through multi-disciplinary cultural studies lenses. In an academic era in which we find increasingly frequent hostile workplace restrictions that discipline what may, and may not, be taught, the practice of reading literature alongside interdisciplinary texts and popular texts from beyond university walls becomes crucial in maintaining the democratic mission of truly liberating education. These cultural studies methodologies and praxes result in just the kind of “only connect” moments between literature and lives that a critical anti-disciplinarity pedagogy must embrace.

Andrew Noel, American Studies, GWU

“Writing from the Ghost-State: Emerging Rhetorics of Liberation and their Social Manifestations”

David Graeber has argued that contemporary notions of anarchism are emerging everywhere, except for the academy. To counter this claim, this paper discusses the role of the “ghost-state” in critical pedagogy and how writing from within its illusive borders offers possibilities for new modes of counteracting dominant social hierarchies, which anarchists conceive as illegitimate, contrived and, thus, repressive. Two examples of the ghost-state's manifestation are presented: first, Latin American comunidades de basis, or “basic Christian communities,” which have adopted principles of autonomy and justice from liberation theology; and second, the emergence of what Graeber terms “provisional autonomous zones” in rural Madagascar.

Pam Presser, University Writing Program, GWU

“Mr. Data's Neurotic Nightmare: Using Star Trek to Explore Learning Outcome One”

This presentation represents my attempt to re-imagine my teaching in accordance with the findings from UW20's recent assessment project. I use a clip featuring Mr. Data being analyzed by Freud in order to encourage students to raise questions about Freud's canonical status.

Todd Ramlow, Women’s Studies Program, GWU

“Spectacles of Neoliberalism: Queer Returns in/and US Media”

In Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal argues that neoliberalism produces and extends itself through mass mediated, globally circulated images and ideas/ideals/ideologies of U.S. exceptionalism; it "sells" not just or primarily "American" products, but the very idea of an "American way of life" that is promised by submission to neoliberal economic, cultural and political protocols. However, I examine the ways neoliberal ideologies return, or flow back, transnationally to the U.S. scene of their production and are transformed. Through the examples of "torture-porn" horror movies, Abu Ghraib, the "global food crisis," anti-sweatshop activism, lesbian and gay marriage politics, and "The L Word," I consider what these queer ghosts of neoliberalism suggest about current globalizing trajectories.

Rachel Riedner, University Writing Program, GWU

“Transnational Rhetorics”

The recent edition of College English edited by Wendy Hesford and Eileen Schell bring a transnational analytic to the field of rhetoric and composition. Hesford and Schell press the field to interrogate its ties to US nationalism and imperialism and to question the field’s assumption of the nation-state as a “unit of analysis” and disciplinary formations that are linked to US imperialism (463). Extending a discussion of representation and translation within and across borders of global capital to transnational rhetoric, the paper argues for transnational rhetorics that critique neoliberal state power and, at the same time, creates affective openness to heterogeneous cultural activity. Building on the work of Gayatri Spivak and Jaqui Alexander, the paper argues for transnational rhetorical reading practices that create radical openness, expansiveness, and different cultural and political capacities.

Dolsy Smith, Gelman Library, GWU

“Are You Thinking Critically?”

This presentation reflects on an apparently widespread consensus about the importance of critical thinking to the cultivation of good citizens and decent human beings. What does this idea require of us? What do we expect from it? How does it inform writing and pedagogy? Has it been doomed to polysemous limbo, another shape in the canon of the clouds, or is it possible—or perhaps necessary—to preserve a distinctly critical notion of critical thinking? In modernity the term “critical” announces a special case of the Western ethical ideal. In the light shed by this ideal, writing—of the right sort—looks like the crucible of praxis and the lamp of community. But from the point of view, impossible to generalize, of the practical moments of composition, the lamp may be an unsteady demand, and the crucible may tip over into something from which the critical is eager to distinguish itself.

Chris Venner, Department of Philosophy, GWU

“Of Folds and Farmhouses: Deleuze, Heidegger, and Serres on Dwelling”

In this essay, I argue for a reading of Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque as an implicit critique of Heidegger’s concept of dwelling. To make this case, I first explore a number of key themes from Heidegger’s “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” his major statement on the topic. I then turn to Michel Serres, taking The Parasite as an interlocutor critical of Heidegger that highlights often-ignored issues of hierarchy and exploitation in Heidegger’s text. Finally, I read Deleuze’s Fold as a re-deployment of Heidegger’s idea of the fourfold, a re-projection that offers suggestions for dwelling otherwise in today’s era of globalization.

Christy Zink, University Writing Program, GWU

“Critical Pedagogy and Fictive Necessity at Odds: Teaching and Writing Oddity in the Age of the Presumptive Global Community”

Abstract