In response to Stacey Pigg’s reflections on the 2007 RSA Summer Institute in the previous blog entry, as an attendee in the “Rhetoric in the World” seminar, I completely agree with Stacey’s suggestion that dialogue between the two sessions would have been productive, if not necessary.  Coming at this seminar as a research assistant at this research center, I was amazed that technologies, technological innovations in relation to research, theory, methodology, the role of rhetoric and sites of rhetorical education was never discussed.  It seems strange to excise the methodological concerns and questions of access (circulated in Rhetoric in the World) from technology and culture. 

Ralph Cintron, Sharon Crowley, Nan Johnson, Gwendolyn Pough, and Susan Romano led the “Rhetoric in the World” seminar.  The above-mentioned topics seemed to be the guiding topics of the seminar, with particular attention paid to exclusion and inclusion in regards to the practice, education, and definitions of rhetoric and rhetoricians. 

Ralph Cintron presented on his current work on the rhetoric of democracy itself.  Cintron is currently interviewing a group of Minute Men about their arguments surrounding immigration rights.  Cintron also covered his understanding of the relationship between anthropology and rhetoric, specifically addressing what each field can learn from the other.  His discussion was provocative and seemed to push at the core of democratic beliefs—or indeed, argued that democracy itself exists only in rhetorical topoi that have lost their effectiveness.  

Gwendolyn Pough discussed her past work on Hip Hop culture and black feminism, while also presenting her current research on the current literacy practices of African American women’s book clubs.  The seminarians’ conversation about her work seemed to focus on the relationship between “wreck” (a concept employed in hip hop culture) and public sphere(s). 

Susan Romano and Nan Johnson’s presentations foregrounded their methodologies for doing rhetoric research—historiography.  Romano is working on a “fragmentary” historiography on Catalina Hernández, a woman in sixteenth century Mexico.  Romano asked us to consider the challenges in looking at different geographical and cultural rhetorical spaces in regards to historiographical “evidence” and the methods we can use to attempt to imagine the rhetorical situation.  Nan Johnson ended the seminar on her research on exemplary models in rhetorical education, specifically tracing how the Gettysburg Address came to be understood and circulated as the “exemplary model” of oration (and Lincoln himself as a great orator); with its tropes and topoi being re-used throughout historical and in response to varying exigencies.  Johnson’s argument, which I think sums up the seminar pretty well, is by looking at exemplary models in rhetorical education, we are necessarily excluding other ways of practicing rhetoric, and thusly, other rhetoricians and sites of education.