citizenship and charity

Projects on tap right now: CCS Conference paper on the impaired citizenship of women. Proposal for paper for the Thomas Watson Conference. Reworking chapter on Arab Spring for publication. Charity and Citizenship paper.

What I Did Today/Recently

This is predominantly about the Charity piece, so I'm not going to worry about bolding it every time.

I did finally look at my feedback on the rejected Charity piece. The comments were generous - my article is well written and well organized, as well as interesting. However, all my reviewers note, I'm not clearly explaining how my project is situated in the field of rhetoric. Which is no surprise - I felt when I was writing the end of it that I hit a wall where I ought to be answering "So what?" and didn't have much to say.

The last couple days I have been looking up potential sources to help me situate the piece. I read Foss and Griffin's "Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric," and then Lozano-Reich and Cloud's response to it, "The Uncivil Tongue." Neither is especially useful for the Charity project, although they actually might be useful for some of my other citizenship-oriented pieces. In short, Invitational Rhetoric is a type of rhetoric based not on a dominance model of persuasion, but a model of understanding that draws on feminist ideas of equality and immanent worth. The Cloud response essentially says that's all well and good when we're in a safe place, but invitational rhetoric works best with equal parties, which rarely occur. Further, they point out that the idea of being "civil" that's part of invitational rhetoric has been used to silence groups in the past. (I am thinking here of my own upbringing in the South, with comments about how ladies should act.) So, not helpful for this project, but perhaps for some of the work on protest as citizenship.

I also read "Invitational Rhetoric and the Case for Service Learning." I'm not thrilled about this, but I'm going to hold on to it anyway. I really DON'T want to situate this piece by saying rhet/comp should care about charity because of service learning. I'm not a compositionist, so this isn't my field of expertise (or, frankly, interest), and if at all possible, I want to avoid doing all the reading this move would involve. But I'll hold on to the piece. It has info on how service learning builds/fosters citizenship.

Finally, I read Kirk's "Beyond Charity" on helping NGOs change the frame they use for discussing their work. This, finally, seems useful. He has information on how the dominant ideas about charity are moralistic and built on an unequal relationship. He talks about how the consumer strategy route also fails to promote ideas that lead to lasting cultural change. It's not, unfortunately, a piece in my discipline (ethics, instead of rhetoric), but it's still something I'll be leaning on.

Found a piece called "Pedagogy of Charity," but haven't read it yet. I'm also trying to get my hands on a piece called "Citizen Bodies," for the Citizenship project, but neither Kettering nor Wayne has a subscription to the journal it's in. I spent an hour or so tracking down potentially useful texts on Amazon, most of which are explicitly rhetorical approaches to citizenship, publics, etc. So even though I have a dozen other books to read, a stack of 6 journals to glance through, and papers to grade in two classes, I suppose I need to buy those and start reading...

Next Steps

1. (STILL) Re-read Chapter 1 of Azoulay. 
2. Finish The Regime of the Brother 
3. Finish reading Women & Citizenship for Citizenship
4. Sort through my various internet sources for Citizenship
5. Keep thinking about how to approach the Thomas Watson panel. 
6. (STILL) Print the Arab Spring chapter and do a markup of what's worth keeping and what has to be fixed. 
7. Talk with Student Life about Citizenship
8. Look at my feedback on the Charity piece 
9. Finish reading new sources
10. Buy all the books I tracked down on Amazon