Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion

by Candice Rai (Editor), Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (Editor), Candice Rai (Introduction), Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (Introduction), Phaedra Carmen Pezzullo (Afterword)

Overview

A survey of the innovative scholarship emerging at the intersections of rhetoric, and fieldwork

A variety of research areas within rhetorical studies—including everyday and public rhetorics, space and place-based work, material and ecological approaches, environmental communication, technical communication, and critical and participatory action research, among others—have increasingly called for ethnographic fieldwork that grounds the study of rhetoric within the contexts of its use and circulation. Employing field methods more commonly used by ethnographers allows researchers to capture rhetoric in action and to observe the dynamic circumstances that shape persuasion in ordinary life.

Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion gathers new essays that describe and theorize this burgeoning transdisciplinary mode of field-based scholarship. Contributors document and support this ethnographic turn in rhetorical studies through sustained examination of the diverse trends, methods, tools, theories, practices, and possibilities for engaging in rhetorical field research.

This fascinating volume offers an introduction to these inquiries and serves as both a practical resource and theoretical foundation for scholars, teachers, and students interested in the intersection of rhetoric and field studies. Editors Candice Rai and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke have assembled scholars working in diverse field sites to map and initiate key debates on the practices, limitations, and value of rhetorical field methods and research. Working synthetically at the junction of rhetorical theory and field practices, the contributors to this collection build from myriad field-based cases to examine diverse theoretical and methodological considerations. The volume also serves as a useful reference for interdisciplinary qualitative researchers interested in doing research from a rhetorical or discursive perspective in various disciplines and fields, such as English, composition, communication, natural resources, geography, sociology, urban planning, anthropology, and more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817319953
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	08/28/2018
Series:	Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique
Edition description:	First Edition, First Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Candice Rai is an associate professor of English at the University of Washington. She is the author of Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention.

Caroline Gottschalk Druschke is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Agonistic Methodology

A Rhetorical Case Study in Agricultural Stewardship

CAROLINE GOTTSCHALK DRUSCHKE

Rhetoric of science scholars have increasingly called for a turn toward practical engagement. This so-called applied rhetoric of science would connect critical theorizing with creative intervention by, as Carl Herndl and Lauren Cutlip describe, "mov[ing] us from a focus on saying and representing to a concern for doing and intervening." In this vision, which I share, the embedded rhetorician would find ways to do and intervene in scientific research and practice in theoretically informed and consequential ways. But this shift toward consequential intervention demands a methodology that illuminates how competing rhetorics are called on, created, and enacted in everyday life.

To address that demand, I employ the ancient Greek notion of agôn, or productive struggle, as both subject matter and methodology. Focusing on the rhetoric, science, and practice of agricultural conservation, I build on three years of fieldwork with farmers, agricultural landowners, and conservation staff in an eastern Iowa watershed to identify material and symbolic points of tension in subjects' descriptions of their beliefs and practices. Attending to rhetorical commonplaces within agricultural discourses like "stewardship," "feeding the world," and "cheap food," I mark the friction that emerges when universalizing rhetorics of stewardship, independence, and heroism, in Anna Tsing's phrase, "enter the fray." In so doing, I argue that rhetorical fieldwork is itself an agonistic encounter: bursting with the sorts of discomforts and tensions that make researchers sensitive to those that emerge in the lives and words of their research subjects. The agonistic encounter of rhetorical fieldwork shines a light on the lived experience of discontinuity and potentially irresolvable contradiction, expanding disciplinary understandings of rhetoric and generating significant insights for intervention. Agonistic methodology illuminates targets for critique, attunement, identification, and intervention.

Discomfort as Methodology

This chapter emerges from three years of living in and studying my field site: a smallish, predominantly agricultural watershed in eastern Iowa. After spending several years in the area as a college student, I returned as a graduate student intern with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship (IDALS). There, I worked with the Clear Creek Watershed Enhancement Project, an organization composed of municipal government representatives, farmers and agricultural landowners, state and federal conservation outreach staff, and environmental consultants. Through research, education, and advocacy, the group works to improve water quality in Clear Creek, a twenty-five-mile-long stream in eastern Iowa that drains a sixty-four thousand–acre watershed and flows into the Iowa River and the Mississippi River beyond.

In Clear Creek, I engaged in participant observation at the county conservation office, board meetings, field days, and farmers markets; conducted semistructured interviews with eighteen agricultural landowners and conservation staff; and distributed a survey on conservation attitudes and practices to about one thousand agricultural landowners and operators in the watershed. Broadly, I took a rhetorical-ecological systems perspective that tethered global and local rhetorics and policies of agriculture to related socioeconomic and biophysical systems to better understand the connections and feedbacks between the changing landscape and the changing discourses of agriculture. My central questions included: How do farmers and agricultural landowners come to identify with the watershed?How do gender and land tenure impact conservation knowledge, attitudes, and communication? What forms do global commonplaces of agricultural stewardship take in everyday discourse, and what impacts do they have? And what consequences can this critical work have for intervention and action in environmental problems with no easy solutions?

The ideas and experiences of agôn, tension, and discomfort were central to my time in Clear Creek, some of the most productive and most uncomfortable years of my life. My work with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship began as an internship in the Landscape, Ecological and Anthropogenic Processes (LEAP) National Science Foundation IGERT training program at University of Illinois at Chicago. Because I had deep experience in the realm of small-scale, hyper-local, sustainable agriculture and advocacy prior to LEAP, I assumed my required internship would follow suit. But the LEAP director pushed me to do something that would be, in her words, "uncomfortable." That meant fulfilling an internship with a large state agency that worked primarily with large-scale corn and soy growers. While I was familiar with the rhetorics, material conditions, and practices of sustainable agriculture and local food in the Midwest, industrial agriculture was a foreign world I knew only enough about to abstractly disdain. I hesitantly joined the project only after realizing that I would not be able to engage with the rhetorics of small-scale growers until I understood, intimately and materially, what (and whom) they were arguing against.

But to engage with a group that I then thought of as the enemy challenged me to embrace cognitive dissonance as I had never experienced. If, as Debra Hawhee suggests, "the word agôn suggests movement through struggle, a productive training practice wherein subjective production takes place through the encounter itself," then my "movement through struggle" did not so much produce subjectivity as spark a sort of attunement to vital materialism, a materialism that includes people and socioeconomic structures as well as soil, microbes, rocks, seeds, and hydrologic processes. In other words, my experiences in Clear Creek, and the productive movement through struggle they demanded, brought me to some cascading realizations. Namely, I discovered

• Exploring the fluidity and power of language in environmental issues suggests an important role for rhetoricians and rhetoric in holding together, framing, and mediating within that system;

• Examining the interconnections between organic and inorganic things is key to more fully understanding rhetorical critique and intervention; and

• Attending and attuning to the insights of agonistic struggles offers points of tension and possibility that provide an orientation for rhetoric scholars interested in understanding and intervening in complex, politically charged, public issues.

Crucially, these rhetorical conclusions emerged only from long-term immersion in my field site, and their discovery demanded an agonistic methodology oriented toward rhetoric, tension, and the lived ecologies of which humans are but one small part.

Attunement through Discomfort

But what does this immersion look like? What forms does it take? How can agonistic struggle lead to this sort of attunement with bodies, policies, arguments, and soil, among other things? And how can deep, extended engagement in and with the field engender deep discomfort and insight for intervention? I address those questions, first, with a brief, but hopefully illuminative, example in the constellation that was my time in Clear Creek.

On an early September evening in 2008, having just abandoned my life in Chicago to relocate to Iowa City, Iowa, I took a seat at one of about twenty tables at the Annual Meeting of the Johnson County Iowa Farm Bureau. Despite my best efforts to cloak my presence by dressing cautiously in jeans and a black sweater, the disguise didn't work. From the moment I walked into the South Slope Cooperative Community Building, I felt like all eyes were on me. It wasn't just what I was wearing: I couldn't yet embody Iowanness in the way I felt I needed to, and wanted to, for this crowd; my ethos was all wrong. My height (a bit too tall at 5'8"), my gender (female), my hair (both too blonde to go unnoticed and not Scandinavian-blonde enough to fit in; thick, long, messy, sans hairspray), and, most of all, the fact that I hadn't attended this Annual Meeting numerous times all conspired against me.

I tried to lose myself in my placemat, on which was printed a facts-and-fallacies-style primer about American farming. Before I had time to consider the Farm Bureau's answer to question number five ["Due to the push in ethanol, there isn't enough corn to go around. False."], the sixty-year-old gentleman next to me spoke up, shattering my solitude: "Who are YOU?" The question was delivered in a tone that implied not a friendly query, but a deep question of belonging: an accusation of trespass. I stammered something between uncomfortable laughs: "Well, I'm here with Laura ... She's over there [gesturing desperately toward a group of about ten people across the room] ... We buy produce from local farmers and give it to low-income families in Johnson County." "Okay," he replied, followed by a pause. And then, he delivered the second half of the one-two punch: "So why are you here?" It turns out that my dinner companion, Clint, was actually a friendly enough guy, and by the time we parted that evening after the Pledge of Allegiance, singing the National Anthem, dinner (green bean casserole, hash brown casserole, pork tenderloin, lemonade, cheesecake), a slideshow (images of a recent visit by Russian farmers ["I don't know where they got those people!" Clint laughed], of the Johnson County Future Farmers' second-place finish in the Farm Bowl at the Iowa State Fair, and of last year's Annual Meeting), an introduction to the elected officials in attendance ("I'm a FIFTH generation farmer from such-and-such county and I sure do hope you'll vote for me!"), a "brief" speech from Johnson County's Iowa Farm Bureau representative ("Brief, my ass!" again, Clint), the actual agenda items, a keynote address from the Executive Director of the Iowa Biodiesel Board (fighting what he called the media "propaganda," the "15 million dollar smear campaign" against the biodiesel industry), and the door prize raffle, we exchanged a warm handshake, and Clint made me promise I'd see him again at the next Annual Meeting, which meant that I was now expected to attend.

So concluded my first contact with the Johnson County Farm Bureau (a group whose slogan is "People. Progress. Pride.") and one of the most uncomfortable evenings of my life. That's not to say that the members of the Johnson County Farm Bureau are an unwelcoming crowd, simply that they are a group with good reason to be suspicious of outsiders and a group with which I was (and mostly still am) entirely unfamiliar. In Johnson County, in particular, the Farm Bureau is charged with protecting the interests of the county farmers in the face of increasing development (as Clint explained of developers and eager suburban and exurban homebuyers: "They're ruining a lot of good farmland") and from the left-leaning and largely urban-centric demands of the University of Iowa population in Iowa City (of which I had long been a member).

The president-elect of the all-male board of directors repeatedly stressed that the Farm Bureau sees itself as a "grassroots" organization and that this connection to their grassroots constituents is key to the Farm Bureau's continued power as an advocate for American farmers. During the "Issues" section of the meeting, then, the board invited Farm Bureau members to set the agenda for the County Bureau. Members raised concerns over the County Agricultural Land Use Ordinance and its effect on sustainable agriculture events, over the possibility of growing hemp as a cash crop, over the county's $20 million conservation bond issue, over property taxes and real estate taxes, over the need for infrastructure improvements postflooding. In short, questions of policy, politics, land use, governance, government, gender, economics, organic and inorganic things coalesced.

What began to sink in as I sat through the meeting, looking at and listening to the mostly cowboy boot and starched-shirt-clad middle-aged men (what one farmer friend refers to as "the polyester crowd"), is that at stake in the Farm Bureau Annual Meeting was a public, civic argument about the future of food, of land use, and, ultimately, of something like an equitable political life. The Johnson County Farm Bureau, and the wider agricultural community it represented, was an assemblage of publics that coalesced around arguments related to agriculture, conservation, production, and stewardship. At stake in the meeting were competing rhetorics that shaped and were shaped by federal subsidies, media messages, agricultural markets, political views, religious backgrounds, gender assumptions, and land use policies, not to mention eroding topsoil, flooding, and Roundup Ready seed. Arguments for increased production, debt, synthetic fertilizer, federal subsidies, biofuels crashed into and layered onto arguments for diversified production, agritourism, sustainable food systems. And all of that was haunted by the specters of increased seasonal flooding, fluctuating corn prices, drought, an exodus of young farmers to urban areas, impaired waterways, Gulf of Mexico hypoxia. At the center was anxiety: anxiety about, as many farmer friends put it, "doing the right thing," about protecting farmland and farmers (in financial, spiritual, ideological ways), about protecting masculinity, farm life, topsoil, family inheritances, labor, God. But how would you know that without sitting there with Clint, listening, sweating, worrying, stammering, deciding whether to set aside fifteen years of vegetarianism to take a bite of that Iowa grown pork chop?

These are connections I would never have seen or felt or begun to understand without placing myself physically, awkwardly, painfully into the situation: opening myself to criticism, and surprising kindness, to understand what impacts the practices and rhetorics of urban sprawl, biodiesel, nationhood, and drought had on the everyday perspectives, discourses, and actions of a group of farmers, and, in turn, to understand the feedbacks of those perspectives, discourses, and actions on interrelated material and ideological landscapes.

Rhetoric <-> Ethnography: A Primer

To hone in on those tensions, my primary approach involved what Ralph Cintron frequently refers to as "the sort of ethnography that rhetorical people do." As Paul Willis and Mats Trondman describe, ethnography is "a family of methods involving direct and sustained social contact with agents, and of richly writing up the encounter, respecting, recording, representing at least partly in its own terms, the irreducibility of human experience ... the disciplined and deliberate witness-cum-recording of human events."

Rhetoricians can take lessons from ethnographers like Johan Pottier, who uses ethnography to provide access to the tools and evidence to critique "expert" policies and their failures to solve lived problems, and Anna Tsing, who mobilizes friction as both heuristic and methodology. Through a method she refers to as "patchwork ethnographic fieldwork," moving from place to place and scene to scene, Tsing focuses on universals like "rights" and "justice," using friction as a heuristic for understanding how universals "enter the fray," to see how "heterogenous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power." Tsing attempts to highlight how global policies and local responses shape each other, and argues for the need to situate oneself in a given place to better understand how global policies and practices are resisted or adapted in local settings. If agonistic tension conjures a sense of movement through struggle, friction becomes a lens for theorizing that movement, and rhetorical ethnography offers a methodology for witnessing and participating in the struggle.

Building from this important orientation toward participation, friction, and critique, "the sort of ethnography that rhetorical people do," as Cintron puts it, involves disciplined and deliberate attention to the shaping power of language, energies, symbols, objects, discourses, and bodies. Rhetoricians inclined toward ethnographic methodologies embed themselves in real-time unfolding situations: recording what they see and participate in; working to unpack and theorize from the phrases, ideas, ecologies, desires, assemblages, and commonplaces that have purchase in place; and attending to the lives of humans and other-than-humans. Through field methods, ethnographers embed themselves within what Michael Carrithers refers to as "the micropolitics of everyday life" and, at least for my own work, we do and intervene, as Herndl and Cutlip describe, based on those findings. For me, that intervention is rooted in sites of contestation and struggle: actual places and lived arguments where I observe and engage with people and things that clash and contest. And this orientation toward intervention is a distinct ethical stance. Simply, ethnography emerges as the best tool I have found to perform this sort of deep analysis — sensitive to global structures, local experiences, and vibrant matter — and to engage in action and intervention.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

On Being There: An Introduction to Studying Rhetoric in the Field

Candice Rai and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke

1. Agonistic Methodology: A Rhetorical Case Study in Agricultural Stewardship

Caroline Gottschalk Druschke

2. Historiographic Remembering and Emotional Encounters: Possibilities for Field-Based Rhetorical Research

Heather Brook Adams

3. What’s a Farm? The Languages of Space and Place

Carl G. Herndl, Sarah Beth Hopton, Lauren Cutlip, Elena Yu Polush, Rick Cruse, Mack Shelley

4. Rhetorical Cartographies: (Counter)Mapping Urban Spaces

Samantha Senda-Cook, Michael K. Middleton, and Danielle Endres

5. Bus Trip Named Desire: Doing Fieldwork in the Balkans

Ralph Cintron

6. Belonging to the World: Rhetorical Fieldwork as Mundane Aesthetic

Bridie McGreavy, Emma Fox, Jane Disney, Chris Petersen, and Laura Lindenfeld

7. Rhetorical Life among the Ruins

John M. Ackerman

8. Fieldwork and the Identification and Assembling of Agencies

Jeffrey T. Grabill, Kendall Leon, and Stacey Pigg

9. Rhetoric(s) of Urban Public Life

erin daina mcclellan

10. Rhetoric, Ethnography, and the Machine: Technological Reflexivity and the Participatory Critic

Aaron Hess

Afterword: Traveling Worlds to Engage Rhetoric’s Perennial Questions

Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Gerard A. Hauser

Bibliography

Contributor Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Rhetoric, says Aristotle famously, is the art of “finding all the available means of persuasion.” In contrast to poetics, rhetoric is characterized by its situatedness or entanglement in contexts constitutive of what is called polis. Taking as its starting point the idea that the study of rhetoric 'is both enriched and perplexed by being present, being there, in places where rhetoric does its work,' Field Rhetoric collects 10 essays addressing various aspects central to the practice of rhetoric as a goal-oriented verbal art in situ. Divided into three parts—field methodologies, field ontologies, field interventions—these essays offer “related but varying visions, methods, and theoretical underpinnings for rhetorical fieldwork,” displaying the possibility of a coherent research program capable of ranging over multiple issues essential to civic life. The volume provides an unblinking glimpse into what can rightly be described as a field study of live engagements in the living space of persuasion. Field Rhetoric belongs in the bookcase of anyone who believes in the power and importance of an ancient art as it is made to return to its original vocation, revived by contemporary methods and their distinctly modern, ecological point of view. Highly recommended."
—CHOICE

“Rai and Druschke have brought together an outstanding group of scholars to address an important and increasing area of concern for rhetorical scholars: How may we incorporate field methods into our research to study a wider range of rhetorical practices? This volume will appeal to rhetoric faculty and graduate students in both communication and English, as well as scholars in related disciplines who may be interested in a rhetorical approach to studying culture and society.”
—Robert Asen, author of Democracy, Deliberation, and Education

From the Publisher