Digital Ethical Dilemmas

Gesa Kirsch's _Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research_ brought us the term "ethical dilemmas" earlier in the semester. Those moments/challenges researchers face where they are faced with a knotty problem of "what to do" in a situation involving a participant and questions of representation, participation, and ethics.

Some of the ethical dilemmas and/or challenges to method we are seeing in this week's readings;

--how to deal with the fact that virtual communities (if they are open) can be studied without the participants even knowing there is a researcher present or that the researcher is deploying "publicly" available information. The big question here is what is private and what is public. As this collection points out, many online writers see themselves as writing to a private audience or partially private audience when the work they produce is fully and publicly available.

--This raises the question of how to participate in a community in which you are a researcher? And what do you do when you are already a participant and decide to study a community? Do you announce your new status? How do you negotiate the interpersonal relations and questions of trust and proximity that such a move makes?

--How to involve participants in the study--there are a number of strategies mentioned in the article by DePew on triangulating data. DePew wants us to consider how we might move beyond textual analysis and complicate our understandings through interviews and other kinds of actions. Scott Dewitt had participants give him virtual tours of their websites as a way of seeing how they interpreted their web work and also a way to include them in the process of interpreting their texts.

--That online communities are not necessarily face-to-face (although they can be) in the way that other communities are changes the relationship. So there can be an element of play and mythification in the circulation of representations online. So how to sort through and interpret that is a dilemma. That is where the triangulation that DePew calls for can come in as a way to understand what might be going on. But this raises questions as well about intentionality, and DePew gets into that as well as a problem.

--The other piece of this is what one can find out online about particular individuals or groups. Sidler discusses the role of the online researcher studying scientific communities as that of the "scavenger." As she points out, the "scavenger" is looking at multiple sources and sometimes discovers in the online meeting rooms or spaces that she is confronted with "too much information" (77). What do we do with that information? How does knowing "too much" affect the way we address the other information we are privy to in our research.

--"Digital artifacts pose interesting coding-related issues b/c they are less stable than print artifacts, alter relations between creator and audience, and can incorporate multiple media" (Blythe 203). This happens all the time for many of us who teach. A student consults a web-based resource. He/she goes back later to work with it again, and it is gone. Sure, there are online archives, but this is essentially a set of materials that have been pulled from "view." So what to do about that? If it's an archive where there has been no permission, what should the researcher do?

These are samples of the kinds of dilemmas posed by the authors in _Digital Writing Research_ that I hope we can work with some today. I wonder, too, how we address such dilemmas in our own research, but also as we teach students to engage in digital research as well.

Going digital

It's that time of the semester when I find myself doing things like starting a facebook group for people who want to run or walk 100 miles in 30 days. OK, so I'm in a manic phase right now. It happens every year! The most "wonderful time of the year" is also the most challenging time of the year for all of us who are academics with project deadlines and grading to do, etc. My response is to take the excess energy generated and run and (walk) 100 miles. So.....

This week's readings in 691 are really useful. I'm glad we are ending our spate of reading for 91 with the collection _Digital Writing Research_. I think the framing of this project by McKee and DeVoss is really important. Their introduction is extremely useful, and I found Porter's preface helpful as well. I like that Porter does not let readers off the hook--he demands that the digital be given its due inside the field and outside as well. I will do some hopping and skipping around to try to touch on some key points.

I also want to point out that as we search for an Asst Professor in composition that Porter's preface to the book reminded me of all that the terms and expectations that composition carries with it and also how that is shifting:

"The term 'composition' signifies our particular interest in composing processes and also our affiliation with composition studies; it identifies what has long been a primary research locale for the field--the first-year college composition course. But the shift to he word 'writing' (which has been happening for some time now) reflects more accurately what our field has actually been doing: examining writing practices across numerous academic, public, and professional spaces, not just college classrooms. The ambiguity of the term 'writing' is also an advantage: it could refer to the text itself, or tot he process of creating the text" (xviii).

He goes on to point out that writing is an "action." We write to" do something." So the field's research explores all of these dimensions. Then he goes on to discuss the shift that "digital" brings, a "dramatic shift from the analog and print world to a new kind of writing space altogether" (xviii).

What is included in the digital:

"computer mediated technology" but also "technology--as cultural space" and as "technology-as production-space" (xviii). Porter wants readers to think beyond technology as a "tool," which is the language that is deployed far too often when describing digital work.

McKee and DeVoss in their introduction lay out a definition of digital writing research that demonstrates the array of spaces and actions that are being referred to:

1) "computer-generated, computer-based, and/or computer-delivered documents;

2) computer-based text production practices" (text is referred to broadly and includes a variety of artifacts;

3) "the interactions of people using digital technologies (communities and spaces)" (3).

These venues incite us to think through the methodological challenges and ethical dilemmas (Kirsch) that we might face Their list of eight bulleted sets of questions on p. 4 are particularly insightful. I find myself trying to answer each question in light of the rest of the book.

I'll have more to say, but this is a start for now to get me into the swim of laying out some of the conceptual shifts and methodological challenges this book is posing.

What strikes me as I reread the essays for this week is how much our field has made some of these questions invisible as well as visible. What have we taken for granted as we "move around" in digital spaces and yet don't always account for those spaces as spaces?

We've spent a lot of time talking about communities and concerns about research ethics? But how do digital communities pose similar and different challenges?

Spinning with Spinuzzi

One question I wanted to raise today is not only the question of researching networks in our field, but researching organizations and also how to situate Spinuzzi's work not only in ANT and AT, but also in the field of professional and technical communication. What questions are considered, and how do those questions compare/connect to questions asked in rhetorical studies and composition studies? I think one interesting challenge to consider today for discussion is simply trying to define as well as work through the vocabulary of ANT and AT--Spinuzzi is shot through with a all kinds of terms and definition work. So not only do we have his definitions of them, but his application of them as he studies Telecorps. I found this an interesting study for consideration of how one applies complex dense theory work to ethnographic/qualitative work and also historical work (his chapter on the history of the telecommunications industry). That's a combination that you don't always see in our field.

ANT, AT, and Dead Dogs

Rereading Spinuzzi was a reminder and remix for me of some of the work I studied when I took at a tech comm course at Milwaukee. I feel like I've been learning a lot about Actor-Network theory and Activity Theory already from reading Justin's blog notes, but it was good to revisit Spinuzzi and have his definitions.

"Activity theory is primarily a theory of distributed cognition and focuses on issues of labor, learning, and concept formation; it is used in fields such as educational, cognitive, and cultural psychology, although it is making inroads in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, communication, and anthropology" (62).

"Actor-network theory is primarily an ontology-an account of existence--and focuses on issues of power in science and politics, rhetoric, production of facts, agreements, and knowledge. It's used in science and technology studies, philosophy, and sociology" (62).

Both are expanding and beginning, in Spinuzzi's words, "to grapple with" one another and "have sharp confrontations" (63). Bring it on baby! Who doesn't love a good fight. But Spinuzzi's argument is that both sides "just don't get it" and resort to "mischaracterization," which he says is a shame because both ANT and AT have a lot in common (63).

Activity theory is weaving, and ANT is splicing as noted in Ch 2. Spinuzzi goes on to discuss AT's formation in Marx/Engels/Vygotsky and dialectical materialism and ANT's location/connection in Deleuze and Guattari and Latour. It was interesting to read more about the origins of each. It's interesting as well to see how Spinuzzi unfurls these theories in sort of a spiral fashion, moving back and forth between them, drawing lines of differences and connections.

One of the repeated tropes in this study is "Rex," the dead dog, who is the result of "blackboxing" in organizational communication. Because someone down the line doesn't communicate adequately about Rex's presence in the yard, Rex ends up dead in the street, at the border of a neighbor's yard--a metaphor for what happened in this communicative situation within the network. The customer who has the problem with the telephone line told the customer service agent about Rex and warned about him going out the gate, but the phone tech, who works for a different connected branch of Telecorps and a ways down the line does not hear about Rex. He opens the gate in a customer's yard and frightens the dog who runs into the street and is killed by a car. Then the chain of addressing Rex's death begins. Where to lay blame? Where was the communicative break-down or omission in the network? Knottworking? Net work? I want to keep thinking about Rex, too, as "canary in the mine" to test out ANT vs. AT. More to come, but these are some preliminary thoughts for now!

General Impressionism

I visited the Turner to Cezanne exhibit at the Everson Art Museum on Sunday. As I rocketed through the exhibit with my 7 1/2 year old (she doesn't go at my pace at all and was in a hurry to get to her favorite art forms--ceramics--in the basement), I thought of how like blogging can be like impressionistic painting at times. The outlines, contours, suggestion of light and shadow, but not the full representation of what one has encountered. This is the state I find myself in tonight as I try to think through all the complexities of what we've been reading this week.

Missy has wondered aloud on her blog about why Logan doesn't do much to describe her approach to doing history (her methodology and methods), nor offer a meta-reading of her sources. That's a good question, and it's one that Barb L'Eplattanier takes up in her recent _College English_ piece about archival research and the missing methodologies sections in most historians' accounts. I like the points made by Missy and L'Eplattanier. But let me play the Melvin Tolson's devil's advocate here. The story of Logan's research methodology and methods is, in part, in the endnotes in Logan's book, though, and that's an interesting factor to consider as we read historical research. What functions to notes play in the books/articles? There are 23 pages of end notes in this 134 page book. So we can track the origins and pathways of her reading and interaction with texts beyond the ones she can cite directly in the text itself. What I notice is that most of what she researches is availabe online in electronic archives or in published accounts, not necessarily in archives. This was interesting to see--how much can be found online--at Duke and Springarn. This is part of the changing face of archives and original materials-so many can be found online (not all, but a significant amount).

In Gold's study, we have a lengthy introduction that describes his take on the field's work with disciplinary and instituional histories, and he squarely locates himself in the tradition of revisionist history or third-wave history (6). He is a proponent of the microhistory, coming out of Levi who defines it as a "belief that microscopic obervation will reveal factors previously unobserved (95, 97)" (Gold 7). He argues that small scale histories can inform large scale histories in refreshing ways. He takes aim at the work of Berlin and others who wrote our histories of the field from the standpoint of "elite theorists" and "institutional artifacts" (6). In many ways, Berlin was doing a monumental history (term from Nietzsche) that had the overtones of critical history.

Given this description, I think we can see that Logan is also writing microhistories as well. The key diffference is that she is concerned with the community and self-sponsorship of literacy and rhetorical education in non-school sites. Gold is more interested in Chapter 1 in African American students and teachers engaging the curriculum in educational institutions. We see Enoch taking a similar microhistorical approach. This is a way to deal with scope and scale in historical research.

I wondered as I read this week about further connections to be drawn across Gold’s study and Logan's study. Did you notice how Logan mentioned Gold's study early on? I think we can draw a continuum of literacy practices across Gold and Logan's studies and perhaps even Enoch’s. What are those literacy and rhetorical practices? How do they choose to study them, and why do they pick these specific sites and locations to study? What rationales are we provided? How does the historian's own location fuel the selection of sites?

What methodological and methods-based considerations and challenges are these three authors facing as they strive to represent historical “others” and their pedagogies and literacy practices?

What do historical studies like these microhistories (Gold's term) yield? What do we gain as we read them? What kind of renewed understanding of our field?

Maybe I'll have more questions to add in the clear light of morning. But let me end with a paragraph from one of my favorite pieces by Nietzsche about the "services" that history provides (from "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" 1873):

"These are the services which history can carry out for living. Every person and every people, according to its goals, forces, and needs, uses a certain knowledge of the past, sometimes as monumental history, sometimes as antiquarian history, and sometimes as critical history, but not as a crowd of pure thinkers merely peering at life, not as people eager for knowledge, individuals only satisfied by knowledge, for whom an increase of understanding is the goal itself, but always only for the purpose of living and, in addition, under the command and the highest guidance of this purpose. This is the natural relationship to history of an age, a culture, and a people: summoned up by hunger, regulated by the degree of the need, held to limits by the plastic power within, the fact that the understanding of the past is desired at all times only to serve the future and the present, not to weaken the present, not to uproot a forceful living future."

Follow-ups on feminist historiography and materialism

Missy asked in class on Thursday about feminist historiography in rhetoric. I’ve included below a segment from the introduction to my forthcoming co-edited book with K.J. Rawson _Rhetorica in Motion_ where I describe feminist research principles in general and in feminist comp and rhetoric studies. I also mention the Susan Jarratt article I was describing in class where she addresses two types of feminist historiography.

In “Sappho’s Memory,” Susan Jarratt divides the work in feminist historiography into two areas: “recovery of female rhetors and gendered analysis of both traditional and newly discovered sources” (11). As I noted in class, VTB is doing both in her study—recovering women rhetors and also doing a gendered analysis of traditional sources (Wesley). Jarratt has a number of articles on feminist historiography that range from 1992-2002. A particularly insightful look at feminist historiography is in the 2002 special issue of feminist historiography in RSQ. I think there is a good summary of feminist research principles in Gesa Kirsch’s work as well for anyone who wants to follow up on that.

Santosh wondered why VTB didn’t take up Marx or historical materialism or even Marxist feminisms when she talked about material rhetoric. That’s a really good question. I think she is talking about materiality and material culture (the culture of the book), but not historical materialism as in Marx or Marxist or materialist feminisms. If there is any interest from members of the class, I will post an essay I wrote on blackboard about how we use the concept of the “material” in rhet/comp that addresses a version of this question that Santosh poses . I’ve long been interested in why we “skip over Marx” and materialist feminism in our field when many of us talk about materiality. What I found when I researched the article is how differently people use the term “material,” and I look at how the term has been used in feminist rhetoric and others areas. Laurie Gries, in her dissertation, has also mapping discussions about material rhetoric across multiple areas of the field.


From Schell, Introduction to Rhetorica in Motion
What are the key principles of feminist research?

While feminist scholars across the social science and humanities have usually eschewed the identification of a unitary feminist method and methodology, they have often agreed upon a set of general principles that guide feminist research practices. Mary Fonow and Judith Cook summarize five main principles of social science feminist research:

· first, the necessity of continuously and reflexively attending to the significance of gender and gender asymmetry as a basic feature of all social life, including the conduct of research;

· second, the centrality of consciousness-raising or debunking as a specific methodological tool and as a general orientation or way of seeing;

· third, challenging the norm of objectivity that assumes that the subject and object of research can be separated from each other and that personal and/or grounded experiences are unscientific;

· fourth, concern for the ethical implications of feminist research and recognition of the exploitation of women as objects of knowledge;

· and, finally, emphasis on the empowerment of women and transformation of patriarchal social institutions through research and research results. (Fonow and Cook 2213) [i]

As Fonow and Cook argue, epistemology—who can know and how one comes to know—was and is a central framework in feminist studies through which to consider existing terminologies for discussing knowledge and research approaches, “including agency, cognitive authority, objectivity, methods of validation, fairness, standpoint, and context of discovery” (2212).

Yet even as they summarize these five areas, drawn from their earlier 1991 anthology Beyond Methodology, they argue that the “spectrum of epistemological and methodological positions among feminists is much broader” (2213). In their review essay, they define newer trends, debates, and dilemmas in feminist research, including “the epistemic and ontological turn to the body,” (2215), the conception and practice of “reflexivity” (2218), “the crisis in representation” brought on by postmodern theory, the implications of feminist research for social action and policy” (2223), and “new advances and insights into applying quantitative analysis as a feminist method” (2226).[ii] They call for feminist researchers to “continue to critique, expand, and invent new ways of doing feminist research and theorizing about feminist critique” (2230)–a goal that Kelly and I share with the contributors of this volume.

Attempts to synthesize, present, and critique principles of feminist research also have a pronounced history in rhetoric and composition studies over the last decade and a half. Of particular importance is Gesa Kirsch’s Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication, a 1999 monograph that analyzes the “methodological and ethical implications of feminist research for composition studies” (x), especially with respect to qualitative inquiry. In her overview of feminist principles for research drawn from a wide swath of feminist literature on method and methodology across the disciplines, Kirsch identifies seven principles for feminist research; she characterizes these principles as specific commitments feminist scholars make to:

· Ask research questions which acknowledge and validate women’s experiences;

· Collaborate with participants as much as possible to show that growth and learning can be mutually beneficial, interactive and cooperative;

· Analyze how social, historical, and cultural factors shape the research site as well as participants’ goals, values, and experiences;

· Analyze how the researchers’ identity, experience, training and theoretical framework shape the research agenda, data analysis, and findings;

· Correct androcentric norms by calling into question what has been considered ‘normal’ and what has been regarded as ‘deviant;

· Take responsibility for the representations of others in research reports by assessing probable and actual effects on different audiences; and

· Acknowledge the limitations of and contradictions inherent in research data as well as alternative interpretations of that data. (5)

While Kirsch’s exploration of feminist principles of research and ethical dilemmas are applied specifically to composition studies, her work is significant for feminist rhetorical scholars. Indeed, she characterizes feminist research in rhetoric and composition as taking three major paths: “recovering the contributions of women rhetoricians”; “studying women’s contributions to the history and development of writing studies”; “studying how gender inequity effects women professionals in composition” (22). This overview parallels the view of feminist methodology offered by Patricia Sullivan in her 1992 article “Feminism and Methodology in Composition Studies,” where she notes that “feminist scholarship in composition” has been “reactive” and “proactive”:

It [feminist scholarship] focuses on received knowledge—as the existing studies, canons, discourse, theories, assumptions, and practices of our discipline—and reexamines them in light of feminist theory to uncover male biases and androcentrism; and it recuperates and constitutes distinctively feminine modes of thinking and expression by taking gender, and in particular women’s experiences, perceptions, and meanings as the starting point of inquiry as the key datum for analysis. (126)

While many feminist researchers have problematized the universal category of “woman” and the idea of uncovering “feminine modes of thinking and expression,” Sullivan’s concern is with theorizing how feminist research might proceed. To do this research, scholars have approached “two general strategies or approaches, one derived from the historical, critical, and interpretive practices of humanistic inquiry, the other from experimental and field-research models of the social sciences” (126).

The first branch of inquiry—“historical, critical and interpretive practices of humanistic inquiry”—has produced a rich network of “recovery and reclamation” scholarship in feminist literary studies and rhetorical studies. Second wave feminist literary scholars were particularly engaged in a significant project of recovering the texts of women authors who were lost or neglected in literary history, a massive archival recovery project sparked by second wave feminism that involved, in the words of 18th century literary scholar Jean Marsden, the twin challenge of “unearthing forgotten literature,” much of it out-of-print, and “uncovering as much information as possible about the women behind the texts” (657). The goal of this work was threefold: “to bring long-lost women writers and their work to light, to bring them into scholarly discourse, and to make their work available to students and scholars” (657). This groundbreaking work indelibly altered the literary canon.

Scholars in feminist rhetorical studies have followed a similar trajectory as their counterparts in literary studies by undertaking a massive recovery project to bring women rhetors to light. Much of this important work in feminist rhetorical studies has addressed rhetorical recovery guided by feminist historiography in rhetoric. In “Sappho’s Memory,” Susan Jarratt divides the work in feminist historiography into two areas: “recovery of female rhetors and gendered analysis of both traditional and newly discovered sources” (11). Jarratt notes that these two areas of rhetorical research have led us to reconsider and reconfigure “traditional rhetorical categories [the three proofs, five canons, topoi, tropes and figures], and along with them the relationships between past and present” (11). The intensive recovery efforts launched by feminist rhetoricians have produced a flurry of books and collections that uncover, collect, and analyze examples of women’s rhetorical practices and theories, thus contributing to the larger historical recovery project of feminist rhetorical histories. For instance, Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric edited by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald, provides a wonderful sourcebook of women’s primary rhetorical texts and practices across the span of several centuries and continents. Likewise, a series of edited collections have provided a useful selection of essays assessing the contributions of various women rhetoricians: Andrea Lunsford’s Reclaiming Rhetorica mentioned at the start of this introduction, Molly Meijer Wertheimer’s Listening to Their Voices: Essays on the Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women, and Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe’s The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric. Shirley Wilson Logan offers ground-breaking work with the publication of the anthology With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women, which provides a set of speeches and writings by African American women rhetors, which she analyzes in further detail in her single-authored book “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women (see also Royster).[iii] Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald’s edited collection Teaching Rhetorica has framed the ways that the reclamation of women’s rhetorics has contributed to new understandings of the ways we teaching writing and rhetoric. As they put it succinctly: “In other words, how are scholars teaching Rhetorica, and what is Rhetorica teaching them?” (2).

At the same time that the reclamation and recovery work in feminist rhetorics has been incredibly generative, it continues to be fraught with particular challenges and debates over the potential normativizing effects of scholarship based on the category of woman (see Rawson, Leweicki Wilson and Dolmage this volume), over the proper approaches and body of evidence that can be gathered and assessed about women’s contributions (see Gale, Glenn, and Jarratt), over the need to account for the way gender intersects with race, class and culture (see Royster and Simpkins), and over ethics and embodiment in feminist research (see Kirsch). Another key question posed by feminist researchers concerns the following: “How can feminist research come to terms with the complexity of gender and other categories of social difference and lived experience?”


[i]See also the introduction to Feminism and Methodology where Sandra Harding argues that there is not a “distinctive feminist method of research,” but three distinctive features of feminist research: 1) a “[r]ecognition of the importance of using women’s experience as resources for ‘social analysis” with the proviso that there is no universal woman and that “class, race, and culture” are “always categories within gender” (7); 2) a focus on the idea that feminist inquiry has the goal of “provid[ing] for women explanations of social phenomena that they want and need” (8); 3) the idea that the researcher “must be placed in the same critical plane as the subject matter, thereby recovering the entire research process for scrutiny in the results of the research” (9).

[ii] For more on debates and discussion of feminist research in the social sciences, see Marge DeVault’s Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research and Nancy A. Naples’ Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research

[iii] For a useful bibliographic essay on feminist research methodologies that address historical rhetoric, see Elizabeth Tasker and Frances B. Holt-Underwood’s bibliographic essay “Feminist Research Methodologies in Historic Rhetoric: An Overview of Scholarship from the 1970s to the Present.”


Works Cited from above as well as some helpful references


Biesecker, Barbara. “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25.2 (1992): 140-161.

Bizzell, Patricia. "Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?" Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30.4 (Fall 2000): 5-18.

---. “Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 11.1 (1992): 50-58.

--- ed. Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric. Special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.1 (Winter 2002).

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. 2 vols. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

---. “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either.” Philosophy and Rhetoric. 26.2 (1993): 153-59.

DeVault, Marge. Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999.


Fonow, Mary Margaret, and Judith A. Cook. “Feminist Methodology: New Applications in the Academy and Public Policy.” Signs 30.4 (2005): 2211-2236.

Foss, Sonja. Rhetorical Criticism. 3rd ed. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2004.

Foss, Karen A., Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy L. Griffin. Feminist Rhetorical Theories. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999.

---. “Feminist Perspectives in Rhetorical Studies.” Feminist Rhetorical Theories Foss, Foss, and Griffin 14-32.

---. Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2004.


Glenn, Cheryl. “Comment: Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62 (January 2000): 387-9.

Glenn, Cheryl. “Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62.3 (January 2000): 387-389.

Harding, Sandra. “Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?” Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues. Ed. Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 1-14.

Hesford, Wendy S. and Eileen E. Schell. “Configurations of Transnationality: Locating Feminist Rhetorics.” College English 70.5 (2008): 461-471.

Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Women’s Work: The Feminizing of Composition.” Rhetoric Review 9.2 (1991): 201-29.

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. 2nd ed. Pluto Press, 2000.

Jarratt, Susan. “Comment: Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” College English. 62 (January 2000): 390-3.

---. “Performing Feminisms, Histories, Rhetorics.” Feminist Rereadings in the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22.1 (1992): 1-6.

---. “Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” 62.3 (January 2000): 390-93.

---. "Sappho's Memory." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32. 1 (Winter 2002): 11-43.

Jarratt, Susan, and Lynn Worsham, eds.. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. New York: Modern Language Association, 1998.

Kirsch, Gesa E. Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999.

Kirsch, Gesa E., Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan –Rabideau, eds. Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003.

---. Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority and Transformation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.

Kirsch, Gesa E and Liz Rohan, eds. Beyond the Archives: Research as Lived Process. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univeristy Press, 2008.

Kirsch, Gesa E., and Patricia A. Sullivan, eds. Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.

Lauer, Janice. "Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline." Rhetoric Review 3.1 (1984): 20-28.

Logan, Shirley Wilson. "We Are Coming": Nineteenth-Century Black Women's Persuasive Discourse. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999.

---. With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995.

Looser, Devoney. “Composing as an ‘Essentialist?’: New Directions for Feminist Composition Theories.” Rhetoric Review 12.1 (1993): 54-69.

Lunsford, Andrea, ed. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995.

Lunsford, Andrea and Lisa Ede. “Crimes of Writing and Reading.” Ronald and Ritchie 13-30.

Lu, Min-Zhuan. “Review: Knowledge Making within Transnational Connectivities.” College English 70.5 (May 2008): 529-534.

Marsden, Jean I. “Beyond Recovery: Feminism and the Future of Eighteenth Century Literary Studies.” Feminist Studies 28.3 (Fall 2002): 657-62.

Miller, Susan. “The Feminization of Composition.” The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed. Richard Bullock and John Trimbur. Gen. Ed. Charles Schuster. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1991. 39-53.

Mohanty, Chandra. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

Naples, Nancy A. Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Plain, Gill and Susan Sellers. “Introduction.” A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Gill Plain and Susan Sellers. Cambridge University Press, 2007. 1-4.

Queen, Mary. “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World.” 70.5 (May 2008): 471-489.

Rich, Adrienne. “Notes Toward a Politics of Location.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986. 210-231.

Ritchie, Joy, and Kate Ronald, eds. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2001.

Ritchie, Joy S. “Confronting the ‘Essential’ Problem: Reconnecting Feminist Theory and Pedagogy.” Kirsch, Maor, Massey, Nickoson-Massey, Sheridan-Rabideau 79-102.

Ritchie, Joy S. and Kathleen Boardman. “Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption.” Kirsch, Maor, Massey, Nickoson-Massey, and Sheridan-Rabideau 7-26.

Ronald, Kate. “Feminist Perspectives on the History of Rhetoric.” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies. Ed. Andrea Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, and Rosa Eberly. SAGE, 2008. 139- 152.

Ronald, Kate and Joy Ritchie, eds. Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2006.

---. “Introduction: Asking ‘So What?’: Expansive Pedagogies of Experience and Action.” Ronald and Ritchie 1-12.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Ann Marie Mann Simpkins, eds. Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

---. “Marking Trails in the Studies of Race, Gender, and Culture.” Jones and Simpkins 1-14.

Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Methuen, 1987.

Sullivan, Patricia A. “Feminism and Methodology in Composition Studies.” Kirsch, Maor, Massey, Nickoson-Massey, Sheridan-Rabideau 124-39.

Sutherland, Christine Mason, and Rebecca Sutcliffe, eds. The Changing Tradition:Women in the History of Rhetoric. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1999.

Tasker, Elizabeth and France B. Holt-Underwood. “Feminist Research Methodologies in Historic Rhetoric: An Overview of Scholarship from the 1970s to Present.” Rhetoric Review. 27.1 (January 2008): 54-71.

Wertheimer, Molly Meijer, ed. Listening to Their Voices: Essays on the Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1997.

some basic historical research questions--feel free to add on to as we read

-What role and purpose does history serve in rhetorical studies? In composition studies?
--From your perspective, what has been the primary benefit of historical research in our field?
--What are the major methods and methodologies for conducting historical research? Archival research for instance? Social histories? Feminist histories?
--How do such methods vary based on what kind of history one is writing?
-- In what ways do historians have to confront the challenge of historiography—the writing of history?
--What role does ethics and affect play in historical research?

--What are some of the common biases or problems historical researchers have to constantly battle?
--Some argue that all research is historical in one way or another--how is your work historical?