494 W19 Condon

494

ENGL 494: Special Topics:

Media and Critical Analysis

Professor Frankie Condon

Hagey Hall 147

MW 11:00-12:30 (Funcken Café)

Contact Information fcondon@uwaterloo.edu 416.768.4253 (text or call)

Texts preferred; 24 hour response time for emails M-F; 48 hour on weekends

Mobilizing Hate

This project-based course will focus on the use of media including film, print and social media to influence, organize, and mobilize hate movements in the United States and Canada. We will trace the rhetorical genealogies of present-day white nationalist political discourse paying particular attention to the revitalization of anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism, racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamaphobia in 21st century political rhetoric. You will have the opportunity to develop, research, and produce narrative, critical analysis, and researched argument projects in braided, maker, or traditional genres.

NOTE: This course will expose students to opinions, images, words, and discourses that are violent and troubling for the purposes of study, analysis, and critique. We will make efforts for the duration of the term to provide support to one another. Please contact me immediately if you are struggling with the impact of your work in the course on your wellbeing.

Course Readings

Duchesne, Ricardo. Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians. Black House Publishing, 2017. [This book will be made available to you in PDF form on Learn.]

Additional Readings as Assigned by Dr. Frankie or by one of you.

Course Assignments

• Attendance and Participation: The success of this course (and your success in it) depend upon your consistent attendance and participation. These are both mandatory. Attendance will be taken at each class meeting. You should expect to spend thirty minutes or more of class time during nearly every meeting researching, writing, and discussing your work. You should also expect active small group and large group dialogues and class activities.
  • Responsibility to a collective
  • Shared responsibility for perceiving, naming, learning o Self-determination in learning
• Provisional Project Outline: this writing may be completed in bullet-point format., in 10 point font, using 1½ line spacing, and should be roughly one page in length. Your outline should include a concisely phrased research question; keywords for your project; and a summary that describes why this project is important to you as well as why and how the project is significant to an understanding of the rhetoric of the extreme or Alt-Right and/or to their exploitation of digital or other media. Your Outline will be posted in a Dropbox folder where it will be visible to other students and available to be read by them. You will all be assigned to read and give feedback on one another’s Outlines and we will use them to aid in organizing further class discussion and your teach-ins (see below).
  • Recognize rhetorical moves associated with ideological positioning o Recognize linkages between those rhetorical moves and social discourses: the production of sticky stories
• Teach-In: with a partner or in a group of three (maximum), you will lead a class discussion related to the project or projects of your group members. That is, your teach-in should be designed to lay the historical, theoretical, and critical groundwork for us to provide knowledgeable and informed feedback on your project(s) as the term unfolds. You should plan to use fifteen to twenty minutes of class time for your teach-in and your teach-in should include at least one object text to aid your audience in understanding your focus and/or to engage critically with the question/problem your project addresses and your teach-in takes up. You should assign one “reading” to the rest of us, one week before your teach-in is scheduled to prepare us for the discussion. This “reading” may be a podcast, vlog, website, Facebook page, Twitter stream, documentary, article or series of articles, cartoon or series of cartoons or graphics, a creative fiction, non-fiction, or poetry or a more traditional academic text.
  • Collaboration and leadership skills
  • Communication in politically and ideologically charged contexts o Creating conditions for rhetorical listening and productive difficult dialogue
• Midterm Conference with Dr. Frankie: you will meet with me for a twenty-minute (minimum) conversation about your work in the course and your project prior to mid-term. It will be your responsibility to schedule this meeting with me and you will need to communicate with me should you need to reschedule for any reason. Prior to our conference, you should upload a note outlining questions and concerns you want to be sure to discuss with me.

• Project Draft for Workshopping: you will need to complete a full, rich draft of your project prior to March 13 at midnight for in-class workshops. Your draft will be uploaded to a Dropbox folder available to your classmates and all of us will read your draft prior to your workshop date.
  • Sustained engagement with critical work
  • Re-envisionment and revision of work that matters
  • The labour of preparing work that matters for publication
• Final Project: You may choose to work on an individual project or with a small team (one to two other students). If you are working on a team project, the size and scope of that project must be sufficient to equal the work required of those students working on individual projects. Please plan to meet with me within the first three weeks of the term if you are designing a team project to ensure that your project is designed to meet this requirement. You may choose a written, maker, or media design project (scholarly essay, non-fiction prose or braided essay, activist campaign plan using digital media, App, website, work of art including painting, sculpture, printmaking, textile design, or poetry or music collection, for example). Because this project constitutes the primary work of the course, your project must be significant in depth and breadth. The nature of the project you choose is quite open but must include (if not built into the main project), an essay addressing the following:
  • Focused research question or problem relevant to the subject matter of the course
  • Historical address of your primary subject
  • Critical rhetorical/theoretical address of your subject
  • Account of the significance of the central problem or question as well as of your analysis and critique of it.
  • Address of the implications of your analysis and critique for future scholar-activists.
  • If you are producing a text to accompany a maker , design, activist, or creative project, your companion essay should be three to four pages in length. Use 10 or 11 point font and 1½ line spacing. Your essay should include both in-text citations and works cited information. You may choose the citation style most familiar to you or appropriate to your primary field of study but be sure to be accurate and consistent in your use of your chosen style. If your primary project is a more traditional scholarly essay, you may build the above requirements into your text, which should be fifteen to twenty pages in length and follow the above directions for font, type size, line spacing, and citations.

1. Participating mindfully in high-stakes political discourse
2. Moving with fluency between conceptual or theoretical knowledge, analyses and critique, and future imagining or hope-writing (active resistance)

• Final Conference with Dr. Frankie: you will meet with me for a twenty-minute (minimum) conversation about your work in the course and your project prior to the final project due date. It will be your responsibility to schedule this meeting with me and you will need to communicate with me should you need to reschedule for any reason. Prior to our conference, you should upload a note outlining questions and concerns you want to be sure to discuss with me.

Course Grading

In this course, you and I will jointly grade all of your work. You will assign yourself a use-value grade for each assignment. Your use-value grade should signify the value of the learning you have accomplished to your needs, interests, and aims. I will assign an exchange-value grade for each of your assignments. This mark will signify the value of your work relative to the learning goals of the assignment, the content of the course, and the effectiveness of your work in a public sense; in other words, I will speak for readers or audiences in the assignation of exchange-value. You will not need to mark your work for conferences with me; in the case of conferences, you will receive full marks for scheduling and attending your conferences and zero marks if you do not schedule and attend your conferences.

For each assignment, you will need to compose a use-value reflection in which you discuss the following:

1. What you did
2. What worked well
3. What you struggled with
4. What you learned
5. What you take away with you from the work you accomplished: the learning that will last and serve you beyond the bounds of this course

Your reflective essay should be at least one paragraph and no longer than a page, single spaced. Please use 10 or 11 point font. You should upload your use-value statement to the designated Dropbox folder on the course Learn site for your assignment.

Assignments and Points Value

Course Schedule (Tentative)

Course Policies

Attendance: Your presence in this class is required. In order to be excused, every absence must be documented. Missing four or more classes will result in a failing grade for the course. This policy begins on the first day of class. If you transfer into the class after the first class meeting, the classes you’ve missed will be included in your collected absences. If you must miss a class due to illness, you may mitigate the consequences of your absence by emailing me in advance of the class you will be missing. If you do email me in advance, I will count the absence but there will be no penalty to your participation grade. A class missed in order to finish an assignment for another class will not be excused. If you do miss a class, please do not ask me if you have missed anything. Assume that you have missed important material and reach out to your classmates for notes. Complete the course reading for the day you have missed. Read the PowerPoints that are posted to Learn after class. Once you have taken these steps, you are most welcome to visit my office hours to follow up on any questions or to share your insights and ideas.

Academic Integrity: Take the time to familiarize yourself with the summary of Policy #71. In order to avoid offences such as plagiarism, cheating, and double submission, consult “How to Avoid Plagiarism and Other Written Offences: A Guide for Students and Instructors”. Consult Academic Integrity at UW for more information. Visit this link to learn about the University of Waterloo’s expectations and policies regarding Academic Integrity.

Accommodations: The University of Waterloo has a long-standing commitment to support the participation and access to university programs, services, and facilities by persons with disabilities. Students who have a permanent disability as well as those with a temporary disability get AccessAbility Services. To register for services, you must provide documentation from a qualified professional to verify your disability. Please contact them at 519-888-4567 ext. 35082 or drop into Needles Hall 1132 to book an appointment to meet with an advisor to discuss their services and supports.

Grievances: In case that a decision affecting some aspect of a student’s university life has been unfair or unreasonable, they may have grounds for initiating a grievance according to Policy 70, Student Petitions and Grievances, Section 4, https://uwaterloo.ca/secretariat/policies-procedures-guidelines/policy-70. When in doubt, please be certain to contact the department’s administrative assistant who will provide further assistance.

Discipline: Familiarize yourself with “academic integrity” to avoid committing an academic offence, and to take responsibility for your actions. Consult Policy 71 for all categories of offences and types of penalties.

Appeals: A decision made or penalty imposed under Policy 70 (Student Petitions and Grievances) (other than a petition) or Policy 71 (Student Discipline) may be appealed if there is aground. A student who believes he/she has a ground for an appeal should refer to Policy 72 (Student Appeals)http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infosec/Policies/policy72.htm

Statement Of Teaching Philosophy

Frankie Condon

Revised Fall 2016

For many years, I have been both moved and inspired by a question posed to Mary Rose O’Reilly by one of her professors, Ihab Hassan: “Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?” (The Peaceable Classroom 9). Removed from the social and educational context in which the question was originally posed, however - a widespread, collective recognition of the brutality and senselessness of war during the Vietnam era - the pairing of the teaching of English with peacemaking is more likely to provoke confusion than insight among readers of a statement of teaching philosophy such as this one. To understand whether or how there might be any sort of intersection between the study of English - of rhetoric and writing in particular - and the transformation of human relations requires something more than allowing the query to stand, functionally, as a rhetorical question.

In his book, The Geometry of Violence, criminologist Harold Pepinsky, argues that violence plays out along a spectrum of human relations ranging from the least affiliative and most violent to the most affiliative and least violent. Societies and cultures with expansive definitions of affiliation and higher valuations of affinity, care, contingency and mutuality are less likely to be riven by either systemic violence (e.g. political or social violence) or by widespread patterns of individual violence. The study of rhetoric and writing, it seems to me, constitutes one means by which we may examine, engage, and extend the critical, analytical, interpretive, performative and communicative means by which we have historically made and continue to make our relations: preserving and reproducing conditions produced by existing or inherited relations or, alternatively, creatively resisting and shifting or transforming those relations.

That the process of insertion into existing social relations and, by extension, into particular perspectival horizons begins at birth and continues throughout our lives is true. It does not necessarily follow, however, that we possess no agency within those relations; we can, in fact, shift, alter or even transform those relations. How we do this work, by what means, within what limits, for what purposes, and to what effect are questions with which I am most concerned both as a scholar and as a teacher.

There are, Linda Alcoff notes, two aspects to what we might understand as social identity:

“our socially perceived self within the systems of perception and classification and the networks of community in which we live;” and our lived subjectivity or who we understand and experiences ourselves as being (Visible Identities 93). Rather than representing these two aspects of social identity in binary terms (exterior and interior or embodied and felt, for example), Alcoff asks us to consider the ways and degrees to which disparate experiences of being a self and of being called to perform as if one is a particular sort of self fail to map neatly onto one another. She asks readers to notice and make sense of the discontinuities among and between the range of experiences that constitute our being in and of the world. While we cannot possess objective understanding of our lives as we live them, as Gadamer points out, our situatedness in place, time, and experience do enable ways of knowing. We are capable of what Gadamer terms effective historical consciousness: capable, in other words, of “reflective awareness of the horizon of our situation.” We are capable of recognizing that horizon as fluid and dynamic rather than static and given, and capable of recognizing that this horizon is not the only determinant of our understanding and our ability to make meaning. (Alcoff 95)

My aim in the classroom is to invite students to notice, wonder at, and engage critically the power not only of language, itself, but of particular rhetorical modes and strategies for communicating (and performing) the known and the production of new knowledge. I challenge students to question and critique representations of social relations as natural and given and to recognize the ways and degrees to which these relations are, in fact, the products of human labour. I want students to recognize the ways in which they are always, already knowledge producers and rhetorical agents in the construction of meaning. I want also to support and sustain students as they recognize the degree to which as they exercise rhetorical agency they are in fact participating in the reproduction or potentially at least the struggle to transform social relations. I want to support and sustain students, providing them with appropriate conceptual and practical scaffolding as they acquire broader and deeper fluencies in the range of analytical, interpretive, performative and communicative modes of engagement or acts that constitute the means by which individual and collective perspectival horizons are recognized and shifted for themselves and others. I hope to teach my students also to recognize the degree to which these modes of engagement are constituted by complex, ongoing processes of affiliation and disaffiliation or the making and unmaking, creating, inhabiting, and destroying or transforming of human relations. In other words, the study of rhetoric is also necessarily the study of how human relations are forged in and through language: shaped, enabled, and constrained through our representations of ourselves, of others, and of that which constitutes knowledge within particular contexts or communities. The study of rhetoric should engage all of us in the study not only of what is said and how, but also toward what ends and for whose benefit. We make and claim our relations as we compose across a wide variety of contexts asserting the legitimacy of our presence as rhetors and knowledge producers within communities to which we do or hope to belong. We may pass on the ideological as well as the intellectual legacies of our forebears, but we may also transform those legacies as we compose. I hope students leave my courses with an expanded sense of their intellectual and rhetorical antecedents as well as with a much greater sense of their own contingency, their interdependence and the mutuality of their needs and interests across disparate visible and invisible identities and social and lived subjectivities. Furthermore, I hope that students leave my courses with a greatly enlarged sense of their capability and responsibility as scholars, rhetoricians and writers, as citizens of the world, to those who will come after us.

I recognize the political and hence contested nature of the work I aim to do as a teacher. I believe that the purpose of critical theory is not only to explain the world, but also to change it. By extension, I believe that the purpose of writing as an activity central to higher education curricula is not merely to prove that one has learned, but to contribute meaningfully to the conditions in which learning is possible: to participate in the collective creation and sustenance of learningful relations as well as in the making of meaning and the production of new and usable knowledge.

Often, I believe, critical pedagogy is misunderstood and misrepresented as being inherently coercive and critical teachers as being engaged in the political inculcation of their students. These misconstruals are, I believe, an effect of an inadequate understanding of the range of conceptions of change and change-agency that inform the theory and practice of critical pedagogy. While I am not dismissive of the power of the agon in the cultivation of rhetorical agency or of oppositional pedagogy (a praxis distinct from the tradition of critical pedagogy) per se, these are not modes or approaches that play a significant role in my own teaching. I tend to see both oppositional pedagogy and the agon as being tactically useful on occasion, but more generally ineffective (and often dishonest) in argument, persuasion, as well as in teaching and learning. Neither am I terribly interested in the pedagogical potential of traditional practices of negotiation, which I believe preserve the status quo by, in effect, purchasing or manufacturing consent. Instead, as a teacher I labour to both enact and teach an array of interconnected intellectual and rhetorical processes that, taken together, constitute both a rhetorical appeal and a rhetorical means by which shifts in perspectival horizon and, consequently, in the character and quality of human relations might be initiated.

In brief, these processes might be categorized into four types: those associated with decentering; those associated with nuancing; those associated with kairotic engagement; and those associated with readiness. Decentering is the ongoing process of listening (recognizing and acknowledging) to the meaning-making practices of others while, simultaneously recognizing and honouring difference by dis-placing one’s self (social and lived subjectivities) from the center of meaning. I understand the process of decentering as a continuous revisioning of the quality of one’s presence with/for and attentiveness to the other. Nuancing is the ongoing process of transmemoration and witness: of situating one’s own story of being and becoming - of social and lived subjectivity - in relationship to the histories, epistemologies, and rhetorical traditions of others without privileging one’s own story or using that story to overwrite, subvert, or appropriate the stories others might tell. Kairotic engagement is the ongoing process of recognizing, articulating, revising, and re-articulating the rhetorical exigence that attends analysis, interpretation, critique, creative intervention, and the making of meaning or new knowledge; that is, of continual engagement with the ways and degrees to which problems, contradictions, or questions are amenable to address (or redress) through discourse. Readiness is the ongoing process of cultivating and sustaining a mindscape capable of wonderment: capable of being surprised by and interested in the world, in why the world is as it is and how it came to be so, and in the marvellous variety of ways in which the world might be created, inhabited, and represented by others. Here I understand “interest” in the double sense of being both intrigued by others - by what others say and know and do - and being needful of affiliation and of the recognition and care co-created through affiliative relationships with others. Finally, however, none of these processes taken singly or together nor the variety of in-class discussions and activities and writing assignments that I might engage in any given course seem sufficient to me to justify a claim that mine is a critical praxis absent an ongoing, reflective consciousness of the constancy of failure to the endeavours of teaching and learning and a shared commitment to learn from failure. That is, humility is central to any meaningful practice of critical pedagogy and integral to humility is the recognition that failure is inevitable. I strive for willingness to learn from failure and, when appropriate and ethical, to make pedagogical failures visible to students such that they might engage reflectively and learningfully with them as well.

Frequently, critics of critical pedagogy assert that the greatest risks associated with this approach to teaching are that students will feel pressured to adopt the politics of their teachers in order to succeed in the course or, alternatively, be so alienated by the fact of their political differences with their teacher that learning becomes impossible. My own experience suggests a different kind of risk or challenge altogether. To engage - to really engage - critically in the study of writing as a communicative act requires that we study the epistemological and rhetorical means by which knowledge is produced and disseminated. To engage - to really engage - critically in the study of writing as a communicative act requires that we study public rhetorics that, by design, shape how we think, perform ourselves, and act in relation to others. But to engage - to really engage - at all in any of these studies requires both interest and a sense of need for learning. The greatest challenge I face in the classroom is the extent to which students tend to confuse exchange-value and use-value or, more frequently, to believe that the only thing to be gained from any given writing assignment or any writing course is the exchange-value represented by a grade. My challenge is not that students adopt my politics in service of achieving a good grade; they just don’t nor do I require or expect them to. My challenge is that some of my students have learned too well the lesson that school is boring; that the subjects about which one might write as well as the activity of writing are boring; that being curious is boring; that the only knowledge worth acquiring in school are the usable skills that might be associated with workplace competencies and that learning those is boring. Too many of my students have been schooled for years by the ringing of bells that not only tell them it’s time to move from one classroom to another, but also to shut off the past moment from the current one--that there are no integral or fruitful intersections, continuities, or intriguing discontinuities between the subjects that they study (Gatto 1-5). The interferences of an audit culture in public education seem to have had the prevailing effect of teaching students that the value of learning and the quality of one’s education is measured by the number and range of information bytes emptied of nuance and complexity one might acquire that can be easily and quickly performed and judged.

And so perhaps it is most accurate to say that my greatest challenge as a teacher is to create and sustain conditions in which joy is possible in the classrooms I share with students and to help students recognize the necessity of joy to learning well and deeply. I am speaking less here of fun - though, of course, I think having fun is good - than of the affective dimensions of learning at the conjoinment of interest and pleasure, seriousness and absurdity. These are the intellectual and creative intersections where learners discover in themselves and one another the strange and unfamiliar and find it good; where laughter fractures totalities; where the possibility exists for both gentle and exuberant celebrations of the miracle of our collective presence on this earth, at this place - together at the interstices of learning and knowing, being and becoming, of self and other (Ehrenreich 261). The value of joy to learning is not the degree to which momentary pleasure releases us from labour, from pressure, anxiety, or loss. I do not think of joy as a safety valve, for example (Ehrenreich 257). Rather, I think the value of joy derives from the ways in which the experience of joy releases us from bondage to the expected and the familiar - from rigid adherence to rules and compulsive adherence to social constraints. To experience joy in learning is to experience, even momentarily and provisionally, a release into creative intellectualism - into the as-if, the what-if, and the whys of matters that viewed without joy seem either exceptionally mundane or so permanent, so fixed as to be beyond question. In some sense, I suppose I am suggesting that learning - really learning - constitutes an act of misbehaviour in relation to the familiar and the known and that, similarly, writing well demands a certain mischievousness - the willingness to play the trickster as well as an openness to being tricked and making sense of that. I am interested and, I’ll admit, invested as a teacher, a co-learner, and as a writer in the ebullient joy that erupts among students as they learn to collude in the making of mischief as well as in the gentler joy that emerges in moments of recognition and acknowledgement of mutuality, contingency, interdependence, for it is in such moments that I am most convinced that not only are we all learning, but that our lives as learners and as writers are and will be changed for the better by having learned together.