- Digital collection of assorted readings in Canvas Course Library (CL) and (web)
- Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics (Carol S. Lipson and Roberta Binkley, eds., Parlor 2009) (ANGR)
- Managing Vulnerability: South Africa’s Struggle for a Democratic Rhetoric (Richard C. Marback, U South Carolina P 2012) (MV)
- Rhetorics of the Americas, 3114 BCE to 2012 CE (Damián Baca and Victor Villanueva, eds., Palgrave Macmillan 2010) (ROTA)
Distribution of Assignments
60% 8 Short Assignments
- 4 Exploratories
- 2 Article Assessments
- 1 Topical Bibliography
- 1 Backgrounder
25% Research Network Forum Project (Proposal, Critical Form + Symposium)
Active intellectual participation is required and expected; in fact, it will underlie my evaluation of most other work that you do. Please be prepared to read with rigor (~75 pages most weeks), allowing yourself plenty of time to grapple with varied and complicated perspectives, making reading the active process that it is. While you are in class, please do what you must and whatever is in your power to make our discussion accessible, productive and useful to everyone. This takes a great deal of energy, I realize. Some of the texts we read will seem impenetrable at first, either because the writing is dense or because the ideas are challenging of your worldview, or because you are unfamiliar with some cultural or historical (or even linguistic) context. Do not despair in those moments of (perceived) non-comprehension. Observe them, speak out about them, and lean into them. Grappling is encouraged in this course, as I am not promoting a single ideology. Where possible, I will gloss our readings, provide supplemental schema to help ground us, or ask us to explore multimodal case studies to improve our understanding. However, I will also expect you to spend time with the material and work through it, using the supplementary readings I provide and you create in order to situate yourself and the reading.
Attend Class and Submit Work On Time
All assignments must be submitted by their due date. Much of your work will consist of building intellectual community through discussion, presentations, and collective knowledge-making, and this will absolutely factor into my evaluation of your work. Thus, although you don’t need me to tell you that regular attendance is absolutely necessary, it bears repeating so that you know this is my expectation. You should not miss any class, excepting the rare occasion of a conference presentation, illness, religious holy day, or family emergency. On that rare occasion—should it arise—I expect you to contact me ahead of time with appropriate written documentation of the reason you may be away so that I can determine what action to take, if action is warranted.
Exercise Academic Integrity in Everything You Do
It may seem redundant for me to articulate a statement on academic integrity for savvy scholars and teachers of information and text, but you should know that I expect you to maintain this, without fail. You are responsible for reading and abiding by the FSU Academic Honor Policy, and for living up to your pledge to “… be honest and truthful and … [to] strive for personal and institutional integrity” in all things. All of your work for this class should be authentic and specific to the tasks I have assigned, rather than recycled from another class. Cheating and all forms of misrepresentation (including plagiarism, which I understand to be more a violation of trust than a particular set of textual behaviors) can result in automatic failure of the course. Basically, you want to not do anything that will violate trust. If ever you have a question about whether you are using a source fairly, accurately, or well, please speak out and ask—either in class or in my office hours. It is always a topic worth discussing.
Seek Accommodations If You Need Them
The Student Disability Resource Center (SDRC) can arrange for assistance, auxiliary aids, or related services if you think a temporary or permanent disability will prevent you from fully participating in class, or if you need our course materials in an alternative format. Contact them online or at (850) 644-9566 (voice), (850) 644-8504 (TDD), with your individual concerns. You must be registered with the SDRC before classroom accommodations can be provided, and you should ideally bring a letter to me requesting accommodations in the first week of class.
