Progress on the dissertation front (a very long post)

On Wednesday, I finally got the email from the director telling me that my draft with feedback was in my mailbox up at school.  It was a pretty short email, suggesting that we need to “talk” about “conceptual issues.”  I did know that my draft had “issues,” (I had my own beefs with it), but, as anyone would be, I was pretty curious to see the specifics from the director.  Afterall, even though we’ve talked about this project several times, this was the first time we’ve exchanged writing about it.  Quite a bit different. 

Anyway, on that day, Rachel was out of town, and I had JD at home.  I was trying to get him to take a nap, and he was resisting taking a nap.  I rarely go up to school with him, and I’ve never brought him up there at a time that a lot of people would be around, just because there are so many potential “situations” that can arise with him and his various agendas.  He loves TCU; you could even say he’s obsessed with it–the logo, the campus, frogbites, you name it.  So, my first thought was that since I’d already waited two and half weeks, I could wait until the morning when JD was in school to go get it. 

Yeah.  That idea lasted for all of three minutes.  I decided it was going to drive me crazy not to have the feedback ASAP, so we got in the car and headed up to campus.  There was no close place to park, so once we got there we had to walk across campus, which is pretty far for a 4 year old, but JD did great.  We made it up the elevator, I snagged the draft and couldn’t resist flipping through it immediately.  When we got to the end of the hall, JD wanted to take the stairs.  Immediately as we walked through the doors that separated the hallway from the stairwell, JD burst into an enthusiastic rendition of the ABC song.  . . . There was no stopping it.  He was going to finish, regardless of my protests, so I gave up.  Around the second floor, another person entered the stairwell and joined in as she passed us on the stairs.  I hurried JD ought of the building, and started to make my way back to the car, or so I thought.  JD insisted on going to frogbites, and that wasn’t a battle I wanted to fight, so we did. He meticulously looked at everything in the store, weighing and considering his options, before deciding on a bottle of Ozarka water.  Then, he insisted on sitting in the cafeteria to drink it.  So we did, and I was able to get through most of the comments on my draft.

Overall, the comments are good.  They get me down the road a lot.  I’m excited about the next draft, and I have my work cut out for me.  Here’s the main revisions I need to make:
1) I need to streamline the document a little more by drastically condensing my opening narrative.  Because this project grew out of my personal encounter with autism, I open that way, trying to give my reader a sense of the vertigo that caused my personal and professional/academic life to converge.  It’s a necessary move for me to make as I work out my ideas.  But, I think “for me” is the main part of that last sentence.  Working through that narrative helped me move forward.  It’s a little long for a document that’s supposed to explain my project to my committee.  As of now, I really don’t get to my “here’s what this project will do” statement until page 8.  The director wants that move to happen by page 3.  I agree.  I was uneasy with it before.  I’d like to condense it down to two or three solid paragraphs.

2) I need to cut out the repetition.  I am the epitome of a multi-drafter.  I need to write a lot of pages to produce a few good ones.  When I read Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers during my masters program, it was one of those “a-ha moments” because Elbow described in black and white the way I think and write.  I don’t exactly transpose Elbowian pedagogy to my writing classrooms, but I’ve always known that, for me, it’s what makes the most sense.  All that to say, I think on the page.  It’s how I write.  For me, revising means cutting out the metanarratives, the thinking aloud on paper. 

I’ve done plenty of outloud thinking in my draft.  The director noted five or six times where I explictly say something like “There are many diverse/polemical/different stakeholders in the discourses of autism.”  That is, absolutely, one of the most important points for me.  As I was conceiving this project by looking at the things I was experiencing in my personal life, that’s what I kept noticing.  Most of what was really going on was, and still is, quite ineffable to me, but that was one thing I could say for sure.  That comes out a lot in my draft.  I’m too repetitive.  I need to make the point once and make it strongly.

3) The director and I had a meeting on Friday, and, together, we decided that I’m changing my approach in a number of great ways that I’m really excited about.  These changes, I want to emphasize, are decisions we made together, and now we both feel really, really good about the direction of the project.  Here’s the changes I’m making:

A. I’m cutting the previous plan for chapter five, which was to do a classroom study.  This was the Composition Studies leg of the project, as I had it conceived (i.e. entry points from various sub-disciplines of Rhetoric and Composition).  The idea of that section was cool, but the more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I was with it.  I think it would complicate my timeline and be really really stressful.  But more than that, I just didn’t seem like it fit as well with what I want to accomplish in this project.  By cutting this section, I can also eliminate parts of the lit review and just focus more.  This is a good thing that the director and I both feel really good about.

B. I’m reconceiving thie project as a rhetoric project.  This suggestion came from the director and feels really really good to me for a couple reasons.  The reason she made this suggestion is because that is the tenor of my project, despite claims I try to make about what I’m going to do in different chapters. If you’ve read the blurb below, my original plan was to approach the discourses of autism from not only a rhetorical criticism point of view, but also from a literacy studies angle (very appropriate, I think, and it was an exam area of mine), from writing studies (as articulated by Susan Miller), from New Media Theory, and from Composition Theory.   I still think that’s a pretty good ideas, but perhaps a little unwieldy for a dissertation.  I was hard to convey (and to wrap my own mind around) what exactly I was going to do with the data.

But more importantly, the project felt to the director, and feels to me, like a rhetoric project.  I’m studying discourses and how they impact different people in different places at different times.  I’m studying a different group of people and type of writing in each chapter and they are groups of people and rhetorical situations that lend themselves pretty well to the different sub-disciplines of rhet/comp, but what if there was a way that I didn’t have to just around like that and change theoretical frameworks?  Would it serve the project better?  Would it, ultimately, help me understand the discourses of autism better?  Would it help the reader more? . . . . I’m thinking it would.

But how do I make that move?  How do I find one anchor point for a project of this size?  A few weeks ago, over lunch, Kurk and I discussed George Steiner’s theory of difficulty.  He had recently discussed it in a blogpost, and I thought it was brilliant in the way it broke down the disconnects that people sometimes have when they approach new discourses.  They can have contigent, modal, tactical, or ontological difficulties.  I thought that parallelled the divergences and convergences within autism discourses beautifully, so I spent the next weekend reading Steiner’s essay, writing about it, and charting things out.  I did some good solid work I think, and it will be useful to me.  The director agrees, but she thought it would be particularly useful for my chapter on parents.  And, if you look at the chart I made, it’s true that most of the connections I make suggest as much.  So, conclusion is: Steiner is useful for me, and it’s clearly marking a (rhetorical theory) direction I’m trying to go, but it’s probably not the best rhetoric-anchor for my project.  The director and I are agreed on that one. 

So, I thought about this for about five minutes, and it occurred to me that I had already flirted with an excellent framework.  So, I can’t really call this an epiphany or the eureka, because I thought about a lot in the past few months, it just never made it into draft.  I didn’t have the clarity to see all the ways it could be useful to me.  But, with time away from the draft and with some feedback from the director, it occurred to me as clearly as anything ever has.  My project is about Rhetorical Listening.

Many of you are probably familiar with Krista Ratcliffe’s excellent book Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender and Whiteness. I read this book in a seminar I took in the Spring of 2006, and it was, without a doubt, one of the two best books I read in grad school (the other being Catherine Prendergast’s Literacy and Racial Justice).  I later read the book for my comps, and then I’ve read it again over the past few days. In the book, Ratcliffe develops listening a trope of interpretive invention, i.e. a method of understanding discourses across cultures and communities.  She interrogates the idea of identification and disidentification: what happens when people agree or disagree with each other?  But Ratcliffe goes further, complicating what is often a simple notion of identification (represented by overlapping circles).  She recognizes that identification is not always a “clean” process.  There are often troubled identification and disidentifications, marked by power differentials, troubled histories, and ignorance. Often, differences are subsumed for the sake of commonality, which opens up possibilities for injustices, hegemony, and perpetuations of status quos.  Identification, as we (with the help of Burke) have conceived it, causes us to foreground commonality and background differences. 

But what if we could foster solidarity and understanding without backgrounding differences?  What if we could understand both commonalities and differences?  What if we could be concious enough to forge some conscious identifications, even in the face of great differences? Ratcliffe argues that Rhetorical Listening is what must precede conscious identifications.  In this way rhetorical listening moves us toward “a code of cross cultural conduct.”

Those of you who know my project might already see the ways I might use this trope throughout my project.  In any event, I’ll explain my understanding of Rhetorical Listening and how it applies to my project more throughly in the next post. 

In a meeting I had with the director on Friday, I told her that I wanted to use Rhetorical Listening as my method to reframe this proejct as a rhetoric project.  She was thrilled.  She thought it was a perfect idea, and that makes me happy.  I’ve been re-energized by this development.