Main Claims
In her introduction to Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, Nancy Welch seeks to combine conversations about public writing and rhetorical history (with emphasis on the canons of delivery and memory) to understand how people have in the past and can continue to be successful in helping to shape the course of world events in the face of increasing privatization and constraint (1-6).
She targets neoliberalism as the enemy, noting how the combination of free-market ideology and social darwinism contribute to the eroding of public spaces for dissent and aid in the private sector's mission to repeal public programs and federal regulation that protect public interests (7). She spends quite a bit of time explicating the correlations between the aims of her own work and that of June Jordan's, from whom the title is borrowed, tracing the events and milieus through changing administrations from 1985 on to further detail the dramatic imapact of privatization on possibilities for public writing and individual liberties (7-13).
In the concluding part of the chapter "A Public World is Possible," Welch notes that though the complex nature of these power structures and hegemony-reinforcing events might seem overwhelming to the small acts of individual civilian writers, still there is hope (14-19). She marches us through examples like the the rallies of Latino workers in Spring 2006, or the setting up of a tent city on the UVM campus by conscientious students in protest of an expensive new building project. These examples, she asserts, "are genuinely grassroots. They are also remarkably, and necessarily, inventive as individuals and groups come together not only to raise good slogans but also to figure out how, through mainstream and alternative channels, to make their slogans heard while facing multiple foils" (17).
In the interlude that accompanies this first chapter is interesting in it's use of Gee's C's talk in which he advocates teaching (D)iscourses that have power in students' lives, as well as the languages of power as tools students can use to navigate within them towards their specific rhetorical (and frequently material) goals (21) She comments that though this is a "nice" thing for a bunch of comp teachers to hear, as it helps validate their daily and lifetime work, but often the reader/author/audience just doesn't care and come armed with prewritten dismissive responses. For her, the benefit of teaching these languages (or rather, for employing them) is so unlikely that it may not be worth it at all and students may come to internalize that failure, thinking that their efforts weren't enough. She advocates that we need to teach more comprehensive "rhetorics of power."
Assumptions about Method/ologies
I'm really not sure what to put here, honestly. I think it's clear from her introduction that Welch advocates the combination of valuable lived experience from people in all positionalities, as well as an incorporation of public memory, or history for evidence. Past that, I'm not sure how to categorize her methodology or her views on methodology based on this chapter.
Key Words: Public Writing, Protest, Globalization, Neoliberalism, Grassroots, Critical Literacy
Key Texts: June Jordan, Harriet Malinowitz, Susan Wells, Kieth Gilyard
Questions/Challenges
The weight of evidence Welch gives us in this chapter for all the ways public writing is in trouble seems to leave little room for hope, and yet she clearly retains some. I wonder how it is that Welch evaluates the good of public writing. In other words, is it enough that public writing happens at all, or do we need to see some real change come from the work we do in order to count it as a win?
In her introduction to Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, Nancy Welch seeks to combine conversations about public writing and rhetorical history (with emphasis on the canons of delivery and memory) to understand how people have in the past and can continue to be successful in helping to shape the course of world events in the face of increasing privatization and constraint (1-6).
She targets neoliberalism as the enemy, noting how the combination of free-market ideology and social darwinism contribute to the eroding of public spaces for dissent and aid in the private sector's mission to repeal public programs and federal regulation that protect public interests (7). She spends quite a bit of time explicating the correlations between the aims of her own work and that of June Jordan's, from whom the title is borrowed, tracing the events and milieus through changing administrations from 1985 on to further detail the dramatic imapact of privatization on possibilities for public writing and individual liberties (7-13).
In the concluding part of the chapter "A Public World is Possible," Welch notes that though the complex nature of these power structures and hegemony-reinforcing events might seem overwhelming to the small acts of individual civilian writers, still there is hope (14-19). She marches us through examples like the the rallies of Latino workers in Spring 2006, or the setting up of a tent city on the UVM campus by conscientious students in protest of an expensive new building project. These examples, she asserts, "are genuinely grassroots. They are also remarkably, and necessarily, inventive as individuals and groups come together not only to raise good slogans but also to figure out how, through mainstream and alternative channels, to make their slogans heard while facing multiple foils" (17).
In the interlude that accompanies this first chapter is interesting in it's use of Gee's C's talk in which he advocates teaching (D)iscourses that have power in students' lives, as well as the languages of power as tools students can use to navigate within them towards their specific rhetorical (and frequently material) goals (21) She comments that though this is a "nice" thing for a bunch of comp teachers to hear, as it helps validate their daily and lifetime work, but often the reader/author/audience just doesn't care and come armed with prewritten dismissive responses. For her, the benefit of teaching these languages (or rather, for employing them) is so unlikely that it may not be worth it at all and students may come to internalize that failure, thinking that their efforts weren't enough. She advocates that we need to teach more comprehensive "rhetorics of power."
Assumptions about Method/ologies
I'm really not sure what to put here, honestly. I think it's clear from her introduction that Welch advocates the combination of valuable lived experience from people in all positionalities, as well as an incorporation of public memory, or history for evidence. Past that, I'm not sure how to categorize her methodology or her views on methodology based on this chapter.
Key Words: Public Writing, Protest, Globalization, Neoliberalism, Grassroots, Critical Literacy
Key Texts: June Jordan, Harriet Malinowitz, Susan Wells, Kieth Gilyard
Questions/Challenges
The weight of evidence Welch gives us in this chapter for all the ways public writing is in trouble seems to leave little room for hope, and yet she clearly retains some. I wonder how it is that Welch evaluates the good of public writing. In other words, is it enough that public writing happens at all, or do we need to see some real change come from the work we do in order to count it as a win?
Good question and good overview of the opening ch.
I tried in my blog entry to come up with a way to characterize her methodology and methods. See what you think. You're right that it's hard to extract that b/c there isn't much meta language about it.
What is a win? Good question. She gives quite a few examples of struggles that result in organized resistance and change, but are these wins? Yes and no. The anti-apartheid/divestment movements in universities were a win and did make a difference. We know the automotive industry gets largely jettisoned in spite of valiant worker efforts and actions to create workplace equity around race. So it's a mixed bag in the book and also just in general....gains can dematerialize quickly. Part of what Welch values is the struggle itself and tactical organization.
The student examples are more ambiguous and harder to unpack. The narratives of students are presented less in terms of victories or losses and more as "puzzlings," musings, and attempts. Welch knows her students are bound for the service sector, as she notes, but she wants them to have survival strategies and tactics for resistance. She wants them to have "living room."
I think your use of the word "hope" is important here. There's a radical hope at base here as well as a sense of how difficult the odds are for tranformation.
It seems like another thing Welch is interested in doing methodologically speaking is drawing on points of tension as potentially productive spaces. So instead of accepting seemingly binary, seemingly fixed oppositions between the public and the private, the mass and the individual, sanctioned and unauthorized public forums, it seems like she would want us to investigate for ourselves and with our students the tensions that arise from these distinctions as a way of furthering critical thinking about who these distinctions serve and how best to respond.
In light of your question about whether or not Welch would only value public writing that "wins," then, I think that she would want to trouble the very notion of what constitutes a win. I think that part of what makes activism and civic participation often seem so alienating and not-worthwhile for people is an emphasis on winning as the ability to secure sweeping change or, at the very least, bringing about major shifts in public opinion. It seems like for Welch, the very act of working to establish some kind of public voice--especially a collective public voice--in the face of pointed privitization would constitute something worth celebrating. I think she would probably also add to that concerns about finding a means of delivery that draws or speaks to some kind of audience. But it seems like Welch would also want us to recognize that even acts that we might consider successful along these lines are always going to be fraught with ongoing tensions and that they might be policed to the point of not even getting off the ground. Really, there seems to be a two-fold value to acts of public speaking--both the degree to which it speaks passionately to an audience and what it potentially teaches us about the state of "public writing in a privatized world."
Interesting questions and reflections! Like Rachael, I was also wondering what her methodology/es is/are in this book. May be because this is a course on research methods and methodologies, I was more focused on 'how' than 'what' while going through the book though 'what' seems to overshadow 'how' here. The very idea of students involved/engaged in local/national/global affairs or issues is an exciting idea whether their participation enacts a visible change. Individual consciousness/awareness of how the conglomerares or transnational corporations are sucking blood out of people from around the world could at least save him/her from overt exploitation even though everyone is too helpless to act effectively before these giants.
This aside,she uses personal anecdotes and private experiences as proof of what she claims or feels about the phenomena around her. This may seem to fit her purpose or even claim that there in fact is no clear boundary between the private and public. Private/personal is as valuable as public and sometimes personal stories or suffering need to be debated publicly.
Another method she seems to resort to is attempting to bring memory of historical rhetorical cases/activism to bear upon and inform the current activities.....