Unruly rhetorics: Protest, persuasion, and publics. Jonathan Alexander, Susan C. Jarratt, & Nancy Welch (Eds.). University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I read Unruly Rhetorics in the early months of 2021, while I watched a jury convict George Floyd's murderer, Laurentian University lay off tenured professors, and anti-mask and anti-lockdown protests flare up in my home province of Alberta.I was also teaching a rhetoric and writing course at the time, asking students to think strategically about how to reach audiences-academic and popular-who might be divided from them in identity position or political perspective.This volume resonated with me personally and professionally then as much as it will continue to influence my advocacy and teaching in years to come.This edited collection offers a strikingly (ha!) unified perspective, which I summarize as follows: the ideal of "civil" discourse-preached throughout centuries of Western education in rhetoric and composition; upheld by democratic governments, privileged elites, and corporate universities across the U.S. and Canada-is a problem.Powers-that-be exhort civil tones and reasoned argument as the best way to engage in democracy or undertake university governance.But civil discourse itself is an oppressive norm: it is complicit in racist, colonial, neoliberal power structures; accessible only to some; and deaf to other means and languages of engagement and resistance.And civil discourse is weak.It speaks only to the converted.To truly resist oppressive regimes, contributors argue, activists and allies must deploy "unruly" tactics, breaking the rules with noisy, ugly, indecorous, incoherent, sometimes inarticulate or selfcontradictory, and usually embodied performances.While professors of rhetoric and composition often align themselves politically with struggles for equity and inclusion, their teaching sometimes betrays that struggle, this volume points out, by encouraging reasoned, decorous, and respectful discourse.(I was guilty of this, I now see, in winter 2021.)Bracketing the collection with an introduction and afterword that propose the value of the unruly as a category of political action-indeed, as fundamentally "constitutive of the political" (Alexander & Jarratt p. 8)-and a focus of rhetorical scholarship and pedagogy, editors Alexander, Jarratt, and Welch organize the chapters into three sections.The first section, "Bringing Back the Body," establishes a theme that resounds elsewhere in the collection as well: an argument that the material, inescapably audible, spectacularly visible
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".