Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Craft As A Memorializing Rhetoric, Maria Novotny

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This video essay functions as a reflective piece pondering the intersections between craft, family, and the act of memorializing. Specifically, this essay attempts to push beyond traditional assumptions of craft as a discourse related to home projects or food. Instead, suggesting that the craft is a practice that memorializes bodies that have passed away and/or pain and sorrow carried on our own bodies. To make these claims, the author narrates two personal stories of craft as a memorializing rhetoric. The first narrative recounts how she came to realize craft as an essential practice embedded in the passing away of relatives. …

Crafting A Music Community: Making Music And Musicians In Concert, Joyce Reenste Walker

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

In this webtext the author(s) will explore the process of writing, recording, and producing a song, within a group of musicians & sound engineers who have all be fostered/encouraged in some way through participation in a "music community" in Kalamazoo, MI. The goal of the project is threefold: (1) To actually explore the timeline of production (an EP-length set of songs) with the group, who are all working from "amateur" status -- learning the tools, practices, and skills as they compose; (2) to explore (through short video vignettes) how this particular production has been shaped by participation in the community …

The "Hatting" Of The Clock: Crafting Juniata's Knitting Community Through Yarn Bombing The Clock Tower, Hannah Bellwoar, Scarlett Berrones

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This piece explores how knitting creates community. We've found that the materiality of knitting, by which we mean the physical making of knitted objects, creates a feeling of community that connects people across physical and digital spaces. We discuss how the authors' personal knitting experiences with a college knitting club and yarn bombing the clock tower on campus relate to theory about the materiality of making knitted things. We argue that crafted rhetorical actions such as the yarn bomb enable knitters and non-knitters to connect more broadly around central community spaces.

Related videos on YouTube:
Connecting through Craft
Juanita College …

Call For Submissions: Craft Rhetorics, Amber Buck, Megan Condis, Kristen Prins, Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Martha Althea Webber

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

No abstract provided.

Harlot's Growing Community, Harlot Editors

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

No abstract provided.

#Definerhetoric 2014 Results, Harlot Editors

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

No abstract provided.

The Biopower Of Zombies: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Horde, Mary Hedengren

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

I like zombies. I really like zombies. But I'm not the only one: why do so many of us seem to be enjoying a zombie moment? What does it say about our fears of a decentralized government and the power of human bodies? And what is that faintly discernable groaning sound? In this article, I draw on the theories of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as well as Foucault's "biopower" concept to examine our collective fascination with a collective threat.

Super Mom In A Box, Lindsey Harding

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Super Mom in a Box examines how Pinterest influences identity formation in mothers who interact with the site. In the essay, I use my own extensive interactions on Pinterest to investigate how the site's postfeminist content and interaction design create a hypermaternal identity for maternal interactors. This piece suggests that the celebration of domesticity and femininity on Pinterest validates a mother's home-oriented interests and reinforces her commitment to family; at the same time, this celebration contributes to a limited online identity for mothers, which can produce stress and alienation in real-world experiences of motherhood. In other words, because I've scrolled …

#Definerhetoric 2015 Results, Harlot Editors

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Check out the winners from this year's contest!

Under The Mask: Creative Dis/Possessions Of Borderlands Remembrance Practices, Lizzy Bentley, Joanna Sanchez-Avila

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Each November, thousands of people gather in the small downtown of Tucson, Arizona, for a ritualistic and participatory event known as the All Souls Procession. While the Procession has drawn criticism for the cultural appropriation embedded in many of its crafting practices, its stakeholders are hesitant to acknowledge a meaningful connection to Dia de los Muertos as they frame the procession as an “authentic" multicultural event. Rather than flattening our engagement with the All Souls Procession into an either/or binary by solely condemning its problematic dimensions or praising its creativity, we choose to embrace the event's complexity by continuing a …

Crafting Malfunction: Rhetoric And Circuit-Bending, Steven Hammer, Aimée Knight

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Circuit-bending, an art practice developed in the 1960's, involves the creative short circuiting of battery-powered toys and instruments. Like many of its avant-garde precursors, circuit-bending is a composition practice that values access, chance, and indeterminacy. For this special issue of Harlot, we document our own circuit-bending process and make connections between the work of Qubais Reed Ghazala, the pioneer of circuit-bending, and rhetoric and writing. Specifically, we discuss the importance of access and creativity, invention and discovery, and the ways that composition is a collaborative performance between humans and nonhumans.

Crafting Change: Practicing Activism In Contemporary Australia, Tal Fitzpatrick, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This article brings together thoughts and practices of two Melbourne-based women working across the fields of craftivism, practice-led research and contemporary art history. While introducing and analysing Australian craft(ivist) projects, this article also suggests new concepts useful in tackling the contemporary phenomenon of craft activism.

"All The Lovely Ladies" And "Celestarium", Danika Paige Myers

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

These poems are part of a larger manuscript that explores the poet's lifelong engagement with knitting and sewing—and with the usually woman-centered communities that form around these crafts. The poems also respond to the cultural treatment of craft knowledge as frivolous or simple, highlighting the highly technical nature of such work and the mathematical, structural, and geometric knowledge required to successfully execute textile crafts. Densely referential, these poems invite the reader to play within their sounds and associations, making her own leaps and connections as she reads.

Buy-It-Yourself: How Diy Got Consumerized, Elizabeth Chamberlain

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Looking at do-it-yourself (DIY) fashion blogs as a test case, 'Buy-It-Yourself' considers some of the consumerizing pressures that can turn an anti-consumption movement into another tool of the corporate machine. I examine the punk roots of the DIY movement, the recent flurry of maker activity, and a sampling of DIY fashion blogs from their 2009 heyday through the present. Ultimately, I suggest that online activists consider DIY fashion blogs as a warning tale: as a counterculture movement begins to pick up steam, it can morph into something that betrays its original goals.

Original Webtext (WayBack Machine)

The Suicide Survivor's Guide To Crafts, Joshua Adair

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Written as a personal narrative, this essay explores the possibility of crafting as a coping mechanism of mourning by examining the relationship between the author and his mother-in-law after the suicide of his partner. Ultimately refusing to valorize crafting as a transformative or life-saving endeavor while still acknowledging its worth as a mode of living in times of trauma and otherwise, the author engages dark humor and sarcasm to look at how we craft our lives despite terrible loss.

The Liberal As An Enemy Of Queer Justice, Craig Schamel

Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum

Abstract

Liberalism as a historical mode of the political is the context in which the movement and ensuing struggle for queer justice emerged in most Western countries. The terminology, practices, tendencies, beliefs, ethics, laws, and patterns of political and social life which have been determined by this mode of the political, it is argued, are inimical to queer justice and render its achievement impossible. Liberalism as a mode of the political is approached from below, from knowledge gained in practical experience in queer groups which considered themselves revolutionary at least to some degree, and from the effects on such groups …

Ideographs And American Mass Media: Understanding The Narrative On The Israel-Palestine Conflict And Its Influence On Publics, Savanna Lynn Fowler

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the American mass media's narrative on the Israel-Palestine conflict to understand the power of ideographs and their influence on specific publics. I focus on two popular ideographs in mass media reporting,and, in order to examine how these ideographs are utilized to construct a narrative for the media's publics, the political ideologies they represent, the agendas they further, and the consequences their narrow use has on developing counterpublics and emerging alternative narratives around the conflict. I focus my attention on the mass media's coverage of a sixteen day Israeli shelling in Gaza and how public consent is acquired …

Fall 2015 Award Winner: The Power Of Novels, Huizi Hu

The Diana McDonald Writer's Challenge

As the saying goes, “A book holds a golden house.” This old Chinese proverb indicates that learning the wisdom that is shown in writing can lead to success. Therefore, in my home country, China, teachers always use this sentence to encourage students to study hard in order to achieve high scores. However, an interesting fact in the majority of families in my hometown is that only textbooks are considered to be useful while novels are considered to be unorthodox and a distraction to one’s studies. In most parents’ minds, reading novels is a waste of time so that they forbid …

50 Años De Evolución En Los Estudios Lingüísticos Transculturales: De La Retórica Contrastiva A La Retórica Intercultural, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Pedagogy At Play: Gamification And Gameful Design In The 21st-Century Writing Classroom, Danielle Roney Roach

English Theses & Dissertations

The language used to discuss play in current academic spaces tends to center around formal games (and computer games in particular in the 21st century classroom). Scholarly conversations tend to distort the actual practices that occur in classrooms and subsequently limit the scope of any investigation of the pedagogical function and outcomes of those practices. This project explores the use of play and games in the classrooms of nine composition instructors. From these stories, this project begins to map out a taxonomy in order to begin building toward a pedagogy of play for 21st century writing classrooms. Using a multiperspectival …