Reflection on my MEcology over this Semester

Reflection on my MEcology over this Semester
In hindsight of the course, what I realize now is that CCR 720 worked as a catalyst to bring about a change in my personality, attitude towards technology and day-to-day activities/ecology. It is, in fact, hard to believe that someone as good as me who had limited computer technology to typing and printing, email exchanges and basic internet search for years now uses different online tools, platforms and fora for social networking, multimedia exchanges and expressing private thoughts and ideas in addition to conducting various transactions/activities online . Similarly unbelievable thing that has happened over the semester is that my teaching approaches limited earlier to traditional print literacy are being increasingly informed by new media/digital technology. It is a miracle in fact that has happened. I now can recall how ignorant and dumb I was at the beginning of 720 class. I could hardly figure out what was going on in the class because everything was so new to me (Collin uses the term “brand new”). That’s the reason why I could not actively take part in the class discussion (for which I regret now) though I gradually got hang of the things. To my own surprise, I now know how to make IMovie, webpage (beyond my imagination earlier), use Photoshop, Flash and Power point which can come handy for so many purposes from pedagogical to professional, personal to institutional. I am now a technoman; this is CCR 720’s (Collin’s) gift.
I know I am supposed to talk here how my adoption of new media, digital platforms or fora this semester changed my day-to-day activities. I am sorry though I could not suppress my feel that I learned a lot from this course and my day-to-day professional and personal activities have been influenced greatly by my new understanding and knowledge of computer technology and their increasing use in composing practices. It seems that my digital literacy that spreads across divides makes a fascinating story. Before beginning this course I had virtually no idea of what blog was or Facebook, Twitter or Tagged accounts were let alone personal webpage and maintaining them was out of question. But now I have all of them and navigate, visit, update or use them regularly/periodically for various purposes. They have already been integral parts of my life.
I have maintained a personal blog. But unlike its typical use for commenting or describing events, uploading/sharing videos/audios or expressing personal ideas or feelings in the forms of poems or short narratives, I have used the space to store my notes and completed projects. In fact, since I was also required to maintain a blog with periodical entries of notes for Iswari’s class, I am now using the same blog to put notes for all the courses as well as store all my finished projects. This has totally changed my earlier habit of jotting notes on notebook and storing my completed projects in folders in my PC. Now I have also my webpage to store the finished projects though. But the advantage of storing them in blog is that they are ever available online and anybody can just access and use them. I am also thinking of using blog to compose poems or short stories or record my thoughts on just anything but I have yet to make that move.
My God!! Facebooking!! It has totally altered my ecology. Someone like me whose digital narrative spreads across divide and who was totally unaware that social networking sites like Facebook did exist few months back now spends hours facebooking—exchanging messages, photos and videos; commenting on status update, taking quizzes and doing so many other stuffs difficult even to name. After being in Facebook, I am using other media of communication like email, messenger and cell phone increasingly less on the one hand but on the other, and sadly, I feel that I am killing my invaluable time. The problem I am facing is that I just can’t restrain myself from checking who uploaded photos; what is going with whom; what comments someone passed on my stuffs and who added me as a friend. It is frustrating at times to know that my valuable time is being wasted for “academically less significant activities” but the moment of joy quickly returns when the thought that I am just a click away from hundreds of friends, that I can communicate with all of them at once and that I can exchange and store stuffs, and of course chat and do score of other things in one platform possesses me. Since it is an integration of multiple applications and programs, I console myself saying that I am performing multiple digital/online activities from one site and my time typically spent on messengers, email and other multimedia exchanges is being saved. Upon reflection, I also find that my feel that I am wasting time has root in my changed MEcology. New media was not a part of my life until fairly recently. May be they will start becoming integral to my life as my other cherished activities once I assimilate them and make them part of regular activities.
I am also regularly updating my status in Twitter and using Tagged for exchanging messages, photos, journals and videos. But I am yet to figure out the fundamental differences in social networking sites like Tagged, hi 5 and Facebook. Facebook seems to have combined all the features of Twitter, Tagged, hi5 and such other sites though there are some surface differences like in Twitter there are people following and being followed by one another. And status updates are immediately delivered to the other users who have signed up to receive them which does not happen in Facebook. But my perception now is that it is wise and time saving to use only one or two of such platforms regularly than to maintain a number of them spending a lot of time.
My final thoughts on these platforms: because blog is interactive and also because people can comment and share ideas, it has professional, scholarly or pedagogical potential. My professors at U of Louisiana and some even here required us to post on blogs regularly. They obviously saw and there obviously is pedagogical implication of this online forum. It can undoubtedly be used for scholarly exchanges of thoughts and ideas. This is the reason why there are types of blogs ranging from professional to corporate to personal. Likewise, Facebook, Twitter, Tagged and hi5 can be used for group activities and exchanges thus can be fora for networking, relation-building and information sharing. Since these activities are central to so many organizational and personal undertakings, they also have professional and corporate implications. I can see that our students can benefit by using these sites and platforms and I plan to encourage them towards that direction. At this point, I must also confess that I am still novice and have not yet reached the stage to be able to see for the unconventional use of these media and sites. But one thing now is uncontested: Santosh now is different Santosh few months back. Santosh is new media man, a techno friendly guy who successfully crossed and is on the other side of digital divide now.

Reflection: “What I learned in CCR 601 this fall”

Reflection: “What I learned in CCR 601 this fall”
Looking back at CCR 601, what flashes in my mind is Margaret’s ever smiling face and her brilliant moderation of class discussion. On top of that liveliness of the class, critical engagement with the “polemical” (Margaret’s word) texts carefully culled from the store of Rhet. Comp and thought sharing and interactions (though I was not as interactive as others in the class) are, I think, some of the things that have left indelible imprints in my mind. May be largely because this is the first time I had a full-fledged course on various issues of composition studies, I benefitted the most from this course. I had almost no idea of what composition or rhetoric was until I landed in US. First semester at U of Louisiana got spent on figuring out what rhetoric or composition as an area of study was. I got oriented towards the disciple nevertheless there. CCR 601 was thus the first course that truly introduced me to the key issues, debates, tenets and tropes of composition (studies). I must acknowledge that I learned whole bunch of things from this course. I also stole some of the teaching techniques from Margaret—particularly her way of initiating and sustaining class discussion. Similarly, I got struck by the fact that text selection makes a great difference in class activities and interactions. I obviously can not tell everything that I learned from CCR 601 here. Nevertheless I am attempting to articulate to the extent possible.
The best way to begin is to have a look at Margaret’s course plans, required readings and assignments for the course. Her plans and assignments were instituted around few distinct stages and there lay what she expected her students (us) learn from the course. She had two mappings, one each of interviewing, tracing and gesturing/locating in the disciplinary conversation, reviewing and final reflection as the activities as well as assignments for the course. I think these were also the skills she wanted us to learn. These activities and assignments accompanied by thought-provoking and controversial texts like The University in Ruins by Bill Readings, Rhetorics, Poetics, Cultures by James Berlin, Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays by Sharon Crowley, Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice ed by Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva, The End of Composition Studies by David W. Smit and couple of other contemporary and most cited articles from the field of composition not only made the class exciting but also made me aware of the ongoing debates and discussions in the discipline. They also taught me a number of skills as Margaret had ingeniously imagined her students learning from the course.
Course readings introduced and familiarized me with the key issues and debates in the field. I learned that freshman composition as required course is highly contested and that Rhetoric and Composition as an emerging discipline is defined by the centripetal and centrifugal forces. These ones are also the ones prompting the disciplinary and interdisciplinary moves in the field. For instance, Sharon Crowley’s call to abolish the freshman comp and develop a solid disciplinary composition program is undercut by David W. Smit’s call to eradicate the generic freshman comp and spread writing across disciplines as writing across curriculum or writing in disciplines. I understood that though these calls seem antithetical they are but the realities in Rhet. Comp. Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins compelled me to see how not only rhetoric or composition as a discipline but whole academia is increasingly becoming disconnected from the notion of nations and nationalism as the waves of globalization are rendering the traditional political, cultural, economic and other borders irrelevant. Thus, with the demise of nation states as the sovereign entities, Readings brought me home the state of “ruins” the postmodern universities are in. They have now been the bureaucratic corporations driven by capitalism and attendant ideologies and hardly ever concerned about the traditionally cherished ideals and values. His ideas on how we can rebuild productive academic culture even out of “ruins” if we just cast away our alibis and come to the class with open mind and heart for negotiation clicked my head. I was similarly awe-struck by Smitherman and Villanueva’s edited collection Language Diversity. I was shocked to know how complicated the issue of language diversity in composition classroom is and how something acknowledged and sanctioned as necessary and inevitable half a century ago is yet to be implemented due to the complicated nature of case at hand. I got totally divided over the issue (in fact I was divided over almost all the issues that came up in the class). At first, I was driven by the idea that students should have rights to their languages. They are to be given the liberty to use their languages (even mother tongues or English variants) in composition classroom and practices if they choose to do so. This is what democracy or equality is. This continued to be my conviction until I thought really hard the issue putting myself at times in the place of a teacher who is to handle the classroom situations with students who speak and compose in nobody knows how many languages. I could then see that the issue at hand is not as simple as thought and needs a lot of debate, discussion, exploration and research before any policy can be formulated.
Now again I am realizing that I won’t be able to tell everything I learned from this course here. Many of the things I learned are the things internalized, conceptualized or even assimilated and are therefore inarticulate. Still I can confidently say that skills I learned through activities, discussion and assignments have been invaluable. My interviewing of Iswari and reading of his scholarly projects and later reporting coupled with reading of other faculty works proved to me the most fruitful thing in this semester. I could learn from him how people pursue scholarly work/s and how much labor, devotion and perseverance such work/s demand/s from us. I also got inspired by his ongoing project of globalizing composition and composing globalisms. I could see some potential openings for my future projects in the areas he was exploring. I don’t mean that only Iswari’s projects triggered my interest. All CCR faculty’s projects provided greater insights and helped me see the range of areas they are involved in from computer technology to transnational feminism to federal coding. It was the time well spent, to be precise. Next, book review, in addition to providing me the opportunity to learn the genre, helped me see how scholars like A. Suresh Canagarajah are theorizing academic writing and composition in the context of globalization and plural Englishes. Here is where my interest to explore the issues at a little greater length was aroused which resulted into my writing a seminar paper on the same issues for Iswari’s course. In the same vein, with mapping essays, though I was little confused at the outset, I learned to look at the overarching argument/s or trope/s in the texts. These essays required of me a lot of readings and close attention to the texts. I nevertheless could produce good essays at the end.
I have not yet confessed that with Collin’s archival work and our reading of citation politics and top ten most cited articles from CCC plus one essay on discourse conventions, I learned how challenging it is to gesture to a discipline and get published in scholarly journals of our field. I also understood how important publication is to our career as writing professionals and how those most cited articles are most cited because majority of them added new dimensions to our disciple.
Thus, with all the activities, assignments, readings, research and discussions in and out of the class, I learned a lot of skills and ideas. Learned again to be patient, take challenge and see that way ahead is thorny but not depressing. Hopefully I can use these skills in my future endeavors or transfer them to my teaching career or professional life. My overall impression of the class: Margaret’s class was awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

James Berlin's Social-Epistemic Rhetoric, Ideology, and English Studies





Berlin defines social-epistemic rhetoric as "the study and citique of signifying practices in their relation to subject formation within the framework of economic, social, and political conditions." (83)





Ideology in Rhetoric





Berlin suggests us to examine the ideological predisposition while considering any rhetoric. His starting point is that "no set of signifying practices can lay claim to a disinterested pursuit of transcendental truth; all are engaged in the play of power and politics, regardless of their intentions." (83)



"Ideology interpellates subjects-that is, addresses and shapes them - through discourses that offer directives about three important domains of experience: what exists, what is good, and what is possible." (84)

"Ideology always brings with it strong social and cultural reinforcement, so that what we take to exist, to have value, to be possible seems necessary, normal, and inevitable- in the nature of things." (84)



Berlin finally claims that, "Ideology is minutely inscribed in the discourse of daily practice, where it emerges as pluralistic and conflicted. A given historical moment displays a wide variety of competing ideologies, and each subject displays permutations of these conflicts, although the overall effect is to support the hegemony of dominant group" (84)



An individual in such a situation is a site of a variety of significations, an intersection and influence of various conflicted discourses- discourses about class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, religion and the like.

An individual in addition to being a location is also "an agent of change, not simply an unwitting product of external discursive and material forces. The subject negotiates and resists codes rather than simply accomodating them" (85).

Social Constructionist Rhetoric

Social Constructionist Rhetoric position acknowledges the "influences of social forces in the formation of the individual" (85). This rhetoric sees the "critical examiation of the subtle effects of signifying practices as key to egalitarian decision making." (86)
example: communiction course after World War II, Rhetoric of public discourse during 1960s and 70s.

Social Constructionist Rhetoric is flawed if viewed from the postmodern perspective. "While this rhetorical approach emphasizes the communal and social constitution of subjectivity, it never abandons the notion of the individual as finally a sovereign free agent, capable of transcending material and social conditions." (Berlin 86).

In short the major flaw of this rhetoric is that "it is incapable of examining its own ideological commitments mistaking them for accurate reflections of eternal truths. It accepts its own signifying practices as finally indisputably representative if things-in-themselves." (86-7)

Social-Epistemic Rhetoric

Social-epistemic retains alot from earlier social rhetorics but its departures are not less significant.
The first is that it revived the process rhetoric that "writing is... discovery and invention, not mere reproduction and transmission" (87). The second departure is that this rhetoric used the postmodern critique of Enlightenment conceptions of signification, the subject, and foundational narratives. Poststructuralism provided a way to more adequately discuss fully the operative elements of social-epistemic rhetoric. In other words, social-epistemic rhetoric informs and is informed by the poststructuralism.

Another most important point about this rhetoric is that it is self-reflexive. It acknowledges "its own rhetoricity, its own discursive constitution and limitations. This means that it does not deny its inescapable ideological predispositions, its politicality and situated condition" (88). While it contains a "utopian moment, a conception of the good democratic society and good life for all of its members.. it is (also) aware of historical contingency, of its limitations adn incompleteness, remaining open to change and revision." (88)

This rhetoric does not hold as many other rhetorics do that "the subject of the rhetorical act is no the unified,coherent, autonomous, transcendent subject of liberal humanism. Instead for this rhetoric, the subject is "multiple and conflicted, composed of numerous subject formations and positions" (88). Similarly, a subject of a discourse is " a construction, a fabrication, established through the practices. This means that all of us have multiple selves as Berlin says, "Each of us has available a multiplicity of selves we might call on, but not all of which are appropriate for every discourse situation" (88). The point here is that we can have multiple positions and personas depending on situations and contigencies. "Each of us displays a measure of singualrity"(88), claims Berlin adding that "our own separate position in networks of intersecting discourses makes for differences among us as well as possibilities for political agency, for resistance and negotiation in responding to discursive appeals" (88). Thus "the subject is a construct of signifying practices, so are the material conditions to which the subject responds". (88). Since the reality as well as the self ar constructed in and through language, "the subject that experieces and the material and social conditions experienced are discursively constituted in historically specific terms" (89).

For social-epistemic rhetoric, language is the site of conflict and contention where different groups struggle to make certain meanings and certain ideological formulations.

so critique of ideology is at the center of this rhetoric.

Audiences are also discursive formations- formations that include race, class, gender, ethnic, sexual orientation and age designations belonging to different discourse communities. Thus, members of an audience are both members of communities and separate subject formations. That's why their responses are never predictable.

Berlin finally briefly summarizes the function of social-epistemic rhetoric as:
"The work of social-epistemic rhetoric, then, is to study the production and reception of these historically specific signifying practices to arrive at a rich formulation of the rhetorical context in any given discourse situation through an analysis of the signifying practices operating within it. Thus, in composing or in interpreting a text, a person engages in an analysis of the cultural codes operating in defining his or her subject position, the positions of the audience, and the constructions of the matter ti be considered." (90).

writing and reading, for social-epistemic rhetoric, are both acts of textual interpretation and construction, and both are central to social-epistemic rhetoric.

literary/rhetorcal binary

literary- imaginative, aesthetic, creation, indeterminate, open, sacred, priestly, beauty and truth


rhetorical- scientific, objective, practical, political, representation, determinate, profane, utiliarian, commonplace

"Language is a social construction that shapes us as much as we shape it".( 92)

Berlin blurs the rhetoric/poetic binary by saying that, "the signifying practices of a poetic or rhetoric are always historically conditioned, always responses to the material and social formations of a particular moment." (93) Berlin believes that there are no disinterested use of language as all signifying practices both reading and writing are imbricated in ideological predispositions.