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Introducing the Notation in Cultural Rhetorics

words reading cultural rhetorics

By Tessa Brown and Kevin Moore

The Cultural Rhetorics Notation is finally up and running. At PWR’s first program meeting of academic year 2019-2020, Faculty Director Adam Banks formally launched the new notation, which promises to be about “more than inquiry into rhetorical productions.” In Professor Banks’s words, the field of cultural rhetorics is a pertinent attempt to send a “signal” about what higher education should do, providing an important complement to the work of area studies by refiguring “how and what” knowledge matters in undergraduate research at Stanford. Lecturers from across the program will be invited to propose courses related to their interests, including courses in specific traditions and practices, courses that create intersections between traditions, as well as courses that open whole new spaces for cultural rhetorics.

As Banks put it, the notation expands PWR’s longstanding commitment to help “build students’ capacities for communicating across wide ranging cultural contexts.” Course design in cultural rhetorics also has inherent challenges. As Hume Center Director Zandra Jordan reminded instructors, a key consideration involves avoiding reductive representations. “How do you promote inclusivity,” Dr. Jordan invited lecturers to reflect, “but avoid tokenism?” There is also the risk of “appropriation,” said lecturer Cassie Wright, and a necessity to avoid privileging comparisons with American and Western traditions. With these concerns in full view, lecturers teaching in the notation have the opportunity to, as Professor Banks put it, “center traditions and practices” that have been marginalized historically, “creating space for exploration [of cultural rhetorics] on their own terms.”

Following the format of the successful Notation in Science Communication, students will apply for admission to the new Notation in Cultural Rhetoric. To receive the Notation, students will take two advanced PWR courses, including a new Gateway course, as well as the two existing ePortfolio courses, PWR 99A and B, in which they will learn alongside students in the Science Communication program.

The Gateway course, which will be offered for the first time in Spring 2020, was collaboratively designed during summer 2019 by an invited team comprising Hume Director Jordan and PWR Lecturers Tessa Brown, Ashley Newby (on leave), and Cassie Wright. To design the course, the collaborators began by studying how cultural rhetorics is taught across the country, especially at the undergraduate level. They found that the diversity of cultures’ rhetorical and communicative practices manifests in syllabi and programs through differential focus on unique rhetorical traditions.  These traditions include ethnic, racial, and national communities, as well as communities shaped by ability, interest, and varying levels of attention to rhetorical diversity determined by history and geography.

Dr. Newby described the collaboration as “a process rooted in centering student voice, and the voices that have too often been marginalized from academic spaces.” She added that, “while I believe that our students will gain from this notation, working on it was also full of great lessons for me; I learned so much from being able to work on and engage with the development of the notation.” Dr. Wright echoed these sentiments, telling us that “It was a rich and rewarding experience working with smart people on a timely project." Calling the collaboration a “delightful challenge,” Dr. Jordan affirmed that the course’s “complex topic…means a lot to us and the program. It required and was worthy of our vulnerability and commitment.” And I (Tessa) certainly feel the same way—although collaboration was complex, it also invited us to put the ethos of cultural rhetorics into practice, challenging us to dialogue with one another about our assumptions and goals in creating a curriculum that would be accessible and enlightening for different kinds of students.

In designing the Gateway curriculum, the team had to balance attention to different traditions; theories and methods; and reading and practice. They ultimately created a reading and writing heavy course that will introduce students to major theoretical discussions across cultural and comparative rhetorical study while also pausing on the rhetorical theories and practices of Black women, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian and Asian-American, queer, and activist communities. Balancing attention to their own and other traditions, students will be asked to complete weekly writing assignments as well as reflexive and outward-facing rhetorical study, culminating in a final creative project. The course is WAYS certified for both Engaging Diversity (ED) and Aesthetic and Interpretive Inquiry (AII). PWR looks forward to welcoming its first NCR cohort this Winter.

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