This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
INTRODUCTION
Introduction
At the beginning of the semester, I wrote that my goal for this directed reading project was to read from various subfields within my discipline and to “synthesize and connect various subfields to create a foundation for future scholarly work.” While at times the readings that I have done this semester have felt somewhat disparate (e.g. wading through A Thousand Plateaus just a couple weeks after reading Matheiu’s straight-forward advice on crafting community-engaged course structures), I am excited with the way that this project has ultimately come together. In particular, using Scalar to organize my reading has been helpful for finding connections that I did not see before, and overall, help me meet my goal.In particular, it has been useful to rely on the tagging feature within Scalar to create this book, which made me think about how to connect and summarize key ideas in new ways. I am also really pleased with the results of the Content Visualization seen above. Moving the pages (represented as dots) around the visualization helps me see what keywords are connected in my readings (or at least in my interpretations of the readings), and which texts support each other.
Some clear connections helped me discover this trend. For example, within the visualization, I noticed that Composition, Ecology, and Pedagogy, tend to sit close to each other, no matter how much I try to pull them apart. While creating my exams reading list, I focused my Composition Studies on theories of place-based pedagogy and eco-composition, so it makes sense that these texts connect through those keywords. However, other connections, like the way that Methodology and Epistemology, and Rhetoric and Modernity like to stick together in the visualization offer some insights into the themes of the readings that I likely would not have spotted on my own.
Defining Keywords
The practice of tagging was actually fairly challenging. I aimed to come up with keywords that would be broad enough to encompass several texts, but not so broad that they became meaningless. You can view all the tags I have used through the visualization on the Navigate by Keyword page. Some tags, like Feminism and Digital Humanities, are fairly self explanatory, but others may be somewhat idiosyncratic. What follows is a brief explanation of how I chose some of the keywords, and what I mean by them.Epistemology was a term that I almost cut from my keyword list for being too broad, but decided to keep with the caveat that texts tagged with this term should discuss the nature of knowledge fairly explicitly. Still, this was my most-used tag, with 11 connections (just over half of the texts). Several of my epistemological texts deal with themes of different ways of knowing and categorizing/sharing knowledge (Wemigwans; Mignolo and Walsh; Basso). Others explore what it means to know something, especially as truth has been decentralized through postmodernism or late capitalism (Foucault; Jameson; Deleuze and Guattari).
By Institutional Criticism I mean that the text makes some sort of critique of the ways that universities organize, interact with communities, teach students, and/or interact with research subjects. In other words, how universities work. For example, in Tactics of Hope, Paula Mathieu criticizes university attempts to connect with and ‘serve’ their outer community, showing the way that ‘service’ can often mask extraction of community members’ time and resources for the purpose of publicity, tenure & promotion, and personal gratification. Similarly, in On Decoloniality, Mignolo and Walsh criticize the way that Western researchers have (and continue to) extract and objectify Indigenous knowledge.
I distinguish Institutional Criticism from Disciplinarity, where authors make an argument about the bounds of a particular discipline or field. Like Epistemology, Disciplinarity could easily become an unwieldy keyword, because, by definition, any scholarly work is arguing for some sort of change or addition to its field. So, again like Epistemology, I set the bounds of this keyword around explicit discussions of what it means to work within a discipline, and clear calls for inclusion or exclusion of knowledge (often beyond work itself). Examples include Latour’s call to reimagine the meaning of society within sociology in Reassembling the Social, and Spivak’s admonitions in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to forget Foucault and Deleuze and cite Derrida instead.
Finally, given that space & place are central to my research topic in general, I attempted to use more particular terms to convey those themes via keywords. I decided on Geography to reflect texts that are dealing explicitly with material spaces -- actual in-the-dirt topography. An example of Geography would be Basso’s exploration of Western Apache place-making practices, how narrative instills significance in particular trees, creeks, etc. Or, perhaps, more abstractly, Massey’s point that capitalist ‘time-space compression’ may not be experienced as ‘progress’ by people in all places, like the folks who live on islands that no longer have air traffic because technological progress means that there is less need to refuel. I also selected Ecology instead of ‘environment’ to create a more precise category for texts that deal with environmentalism and/or ecological approaches to writing.
Implications
All in all, I find it very encouraging that the keywords and texts in my Connections Visualization reflect a very tangled jumble. Even though I pulled texts from three distinct reading areas on my qualifying exam list, there are very few thematic outliers in this book. While most keywords are used several times, I also found it illuminating to look at the words that tend to be in the center of this web: Epistemology, Methodology, Disciplinarity, Institutional Criticism, Alterity.Before working through this project, I did not realize that I was so interested in methods or the relationship between researcher and researched. However, some of the texts that I thought were most paradigm-shifting, for me at least, were pretty explicit methodological texts: Wemigwans’ call to create knowledge “bundles,” which are by definition contextualized and presented within the knowledge’s own cultural protocol; Stewart’s ethnography, which, while rooted in narratives about place, makes a case for pausing before interpretation, for not creating totalizing narratives of the people and places you research; Latour’s suggestion that scholars sometimes just describe and to let writing be a “laboratory” (149).
As I continue to reflect, though, it makes more sense that this is a central interest. Taking the terms broadly, I think about how my core research question really is a question about methods and knowledge: By what means (method) are places (ideas) created? Beyond this, I now also plan to roll with this interest more literally, and include an explicit methodology chapter in my dissertation.
The relationship between methodology and epistemology is where my interest in digital humanities intersects. After reading Latour’s point that “writing texts has everything to do with the method” (148), I was disappointed to learn via Google search that I was not the first person to come up with the McLuhan-variant “the medium is the method.” Academic ways of knowing and studying are bound up with the tools that we use -- and those tools have more of an active role than we have traditionally liked to admit. The digital humanities provides a useful avenue for exploring that relationship. As I continue working on this project, I would like to continue acknowledging my work with digital tools and exploring their role (perhaps as ‘actants’) in my methods.
Another central theme that I discovered through this process was the way that universities function within structures of power, knowledge-making, and partitioning. I appreciate the way that Mignolo and Walsh, Stewart, and others who write about this history of research and the misuse of power in the academy do offer some perspectives on how to behave responsibly as a researcher. Others, like Fairclough, discuss the importance of exploring and disclosing one’s own positionality in academic writing. Overall, through these works, I have learned the importance of embodied research; given Western research traditions, it could be easy to present myself as a ‘neutral’ party. Instead, I want to consider the way my position impacts the research practice and results.
Finally, though Alterity was not my most-used tag, I do think that this idea is central to my readings as a whole. What most these texts get at is the way that others are created, be that ‘other’ a people, place, knowledge system, Nature, a non-human, etc. I believe this question about alterity ties in with my original research question about borders: how are we convinced that a space should be excluded from a place? I plan to continue exploring how theories of alterity can be applied to place-making practices.
Lingering Questions
As I continue researching, both for exams, and for my dissertation, I plan to continue exploring these themes. One thing I will continue to consider is how to apply methodologies. Even though I really liked the methodological texts, I do not anticipate adopting one of them wholesale. So my question will be: How can I learn from methods like critical discourse analysis (Fairclough), actor-network theory (Latour), "archaeology"(Foucault), digital bundles (Wemigwans), decolonial methods (Mignolo and Walsh), and ethnography (Basso; Stewart; Tsing), and use those skills and theories to match my research question and materials?Another question is my reliance on words and symbols in my research. Absent from my keywords are terms like “language” or “discourse” -- mostly because, as I am situated in an English department, those seem extremely broad. I will need to continue considering how literally I want to incorporate theories about language into my analysis.
Navigating This Book
This book is almost entirely organized through tags. There is no real linear way to work through it. You can see and access all work via the visualization above. Also, every page is linked to at least one other, so you can wander around. But there are also other methods.Perhaps the most straight-forward way to find texts is the Navigate by Exam Area page, which will direct you to texts sorted out by their respective subjects: Rhetoric, Composition, and my special area, Rhetorics of Material & Digital Spaces.
To look up texts by theme, head to the Navigate by Keyword page. The tag cloud contains all of the keywords I have used (you may need to open the visualization to full screen to see all of them).
Finally, you can head to the Works Cited page, where all texts have been hyperlinked. You can quickly navigate to this page through the Table of Contents above.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Kim Christen, Ashley Boyd, and Julie Staggers for chatting with me, helping me make sense of these works, and facilitating a very useful (and fun!) English 590 course.Also I really appreciate Annie Tucker’s work assembling so many resources and helping me determine how to make the most of Scalar for this project. Thank you!
