Please note that this schedule is subject to change. I will announce any changes in class and in announcements through Canvas.

Week 1: Discipline and Metaphor

  • What do we mean by “rhetoric?”
  • What do we mean by “interdisciplinary?”
  • How does metaphor structure what we know and how we describe it?
  • How do we read academic work?

Wednesday, September 9

  • Syllabus Overview
  • Student needs assessment

Thursday, September 10

  • Introductions
  • Terms and definintions for multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity

Prep:

  • George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Ch 1-3 (pp. 3-13) from Metaphors We Live By (1980)
  • Cassidy Sugimoto and Scott Weingart, “Introduction” section (pp.775-777), “The Kaleidoscope of disciplinarity,” Journal of Documentation (2015)

Week 2: Disciplinary Histories and Frictions

  • Where do our current models for higher education come from?
  • How do institutions structure what we think of as valid knowledge, common sense, or “good” writing?
  • What’s thought of as universal? Where does that break down?

Monday, September 14

Prep:

  • Cathy Davidson, “Quarter Life Crisis” (pp. 17-46), from The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (2017)

Wednesday, September 16

Prep:

  • Norbert Elliot, “A World Where Something Was A-Doing, 1874–1917” (pp. 1-43), from On a scale: A social history of writing assessment in America (2005)

Thursday, September 17

Prep:

  • Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, excerpt (pp. 1-14) from Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005)

Week 3: Navigating Discipline

  • What are some reasons for interdisciplinary work?
  • What are some of our spatial metaphors for navigating the knowledge infrastructures that pre-exist us?

Monday, September 21

  • Introduction to Project 1

Prep:

  • George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Ch 4-6 (pp. 14-32) from Metaphors We Live By (1980)
  • Julie Thompson Klein, “The Rhetoric of Interdisciplinarity,” (pp. 77-84) and “Borrowing” (pp. 85-94), Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, & Practice (1991)

Wednesday, September 23

  • Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” from The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven F. Rendall (1984)

Thursday, September 24

Project 1 Ideas Due

Week 4: Disciplines as Cultures

Monday, September 28

Prep:

  • Ken Hyland, “The Importance of Academic Writing,” “The Social Creation of Knowledge,” and “Disciplinary Cultures,” (pp. 2-12) in “Disciplinary cultures, texts and interactions,” from, Disciplinary Discourses (2000)

Wednesday, September 30

Prep:

  • Nancy Sommers, “I Stand Here Writing,” College English (1993)

Thursday, October 1

Project 1 Draft Due Have some coded values ready in your example documents, since we’ll be talking through how to start using those to help us generate autoethnographic prose about our disciplinary writing experiences.

Prep:

  • Ronald J. Pelias, “The Academic Tourist: An Autoethnography,” Qualitative Inquiry (2003)

Week 5: Literacy, Expertise, and Knowledge Transfer

  • How do metaphors for knowledge-making shape our expectations for literacy and expertise?

Monday, October 5

Prep:

  • Paolo Freire, Chapter 2 (“banking concept of education”) of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)

Wednesday, October 7

Prep:

  • Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu, “Toward a Labor Economy of Literacy: Academic Frictions,” in John Duffy, et al., Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research After “Literacy in American Lives” (2013)

Thursday, October 8

  • Continued in-class workshopping of Project 1 drafts

Prep:

  • Richard Straub, “Responding — Really Responding — to Other Students’ Writing,” in Wendy Bishop, ed., The Subject is Writing (1999)

Week 6: Citation Practices

  • How does citation confer expertise in and across disciplines?

Monday, October 12

No Class: Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Wednesday, October 14

Project 1 Due

Prep:

  • Shirley Rose, “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Scholarly Citation Practices as Courtship Rituals,” Language and Learning across the Disciplines (1996)
  • Rigoberto Lara Guzmán and Sareeta Amrute, “How to Cite Like a Badass Tech Feminist Scholar of Color,” Data and Society: Points (2019)

Thursday, October 15

  • Introduction to Project 2
  • Zotero lab

Prep:

  • Please download and install Zotero — the standalone client for your OS, and the “Connector” for your browser of choice.

Week 7: Citation Landscapes

Monday, October 19

Prep:

  • Eugene Garfield et al., “Citation Data as Science Indicators,” in Yehuda Elkana, et al., eds., Toward a Metric of Science: The Advent of Science Indicators (1978)

Wednesday, October 21

Prep:

  • Shirley Rose, “The Role of Scholarly Citations in Disciplinary Economies,” in Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World (1999)

Thursday, October 22

Week 8: Disciplinary Maintenance

  • How do disciplines maintain themselves?
  • How do we maintain disciplines?

Monday, October 26

Prep:

  • Pierre Bourdieu, “Structures, habitus, and practices” section in “Structures and the Habitus,” from Outline of a Theory of Practice, Translated by Richard Nice (1977)

Wednesday, October 28

Prep:

  • Jacqueline Jones Royster, “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric (2003)

Thursday, October 29

Project 2 Annotated Bibliography Draft Due

Week 9: Crossing Disciplinary “Borders”; Catch-up/Election Week

Monday, November 2

Prep:

  • Ken Hyland, “Academic attribution: interaction through citation,” from, Disciplinary Discourses (2000)

Wednesday, November 4

No Class

Thursday, November 5

Prep: Project 2 Critical Review Draft Due

Week 10: Perspective and Standpoint

Monday, November 9

Prep:

  • Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies (1988)

Wednesday, November 11

No Class: Veterans’ Day

Thursday, November 12

Project 2 Due

Prep:

  • Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong Objectivity?’,” The Centennial Review (1992)

Week 11: Assemblages, Rhizomes, and Deterritorialization

Monday, November 16

  • Deleuze and Guattari, excerpt (TBD) of “Introduction: Rhizome,” from A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, Translated by Robert Massumi (1987)

Wednesday, November 18

Thursday, November 19

Project 3 Peer Review

Week 12: Pluriversality; Delinking

Monday, November 23

Prep:

  • Walter Mignolo, excerpt (pp. 459-460) from “DELINKING,” Cultural Studies (2007)
  • Angela Haas, “A Framework for a Decolonial Digital and Visual Rhetorics Pedagogy,” excerpt (p.190-192) from “Toward a Decolonial Digital and Visual American Indian Rhetorics Pedagogy,” in Lisa King, et al., eds., Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics (2015)

Wednesday, November 25

No Class: Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 26

No Class: Thanksgiving

Week 13: Decolonizing Discipline

Monday, November 30

Prep:

  • Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Research Through Imperial Eyes,” Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2013)

Wednesday, December 2

Project 3 Due

Prep:

  • Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigineity, Education, and Society (2012)

Thursday, December 3

  • Project 3 Peer-review Workshop

Prep:

  • Nancy Sommers, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” College Composition and Communication (1980)

Week 14: Catch-up Time and Final Project Work

Monday, December 7

Wednesday, December 9

** Last Day of Fall Classes**

Finals Week (Dec 11 - Dec 18)

Monday, December 14

  • Project 3 Due