Workshop Leaders
Sonia Arellano, University of Central Florida
Dustin Edwards, San Diego State University
Material rhetoric is not settled. It restlessly sits within a big tent, which is stitched together by a large, sometimes cacophonous set of projects, theories, questions, commitments, and presuppositions that challenge what rhetoric is or can be. Material rhetorics open rhetorical studies to artifacts, sites, technologies, fields, and environments that have perhaps been unacknowledged or underappreciated in certain paradigmatic scenes of rhetoric. And yet, not all material rhetoric projects aim to work beyond the human; some, aligning with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s work, aim to work through the human and its violent categorical making. Material rhetorics take flight in and through interdisciplinary conversations, only to be articulated in tentative and partial theoretical turns/terms: ecological frameworks, new materialism, rhetorical ontologies, infrastructure studies, among others. Thus, those “doing” material rhetorics projects are faced with ethical complexities and epistemological tensions. This workshop considers how to make material rhetorics projects legible, but it also encourages participants to further unsettle the trajectory of material rhetorics.
To do so, this workshop will center narrative and story-based methods. Such methods are generative for material rhetorics projects because they refuse to reduce relational complexity, and instead affirm embedded and embodied perspectives that tell us something about the troubled times in which we live and activate openings that attempt to think the world anew. Although scholars in our field already use narrative methods for various research projects (Garcia; King, Gubele, and Anderson; Legg and Sullivan; Maraj; Martinez; Medina; Powell; Riley-Mukavetz), this workshop focuses on what narrative methods offer material rhetorics research projects.
Collectively, we will engage a range of story-based approaches—from Indigenous rhetorics perspectives centering land, relationality, and ethical making to Black studies traditions where stories are often theorized as a praxis for living, sharing, and plotting otherwise worlds. In doing so, we will aim to carefully and accountably consider how various approaches to narrative can facilitate material rhetoric projects. Based on common readings, participants will discuss 1) key terms/concepts in narrative methods and material rhetorics, 2) ethical complexities and issues related to accountability when engaging story-based work, and 3) a few case studies of various narrative methods in material rhetorics. Two of these case studies will be informed by the facilitators’ own work: how storying the material consequences of digital infrastructure can provide a narrative counter to the common stories from big tech and how the process of quilting can facilitate tactile meaning-making to better understand complex phenomena such as migrant deaths.
The readings and discussions will allow attendees to understand how these narrative methods function, what types of projects narrative methods might facilitate, and how narrative methods push the boundaries of traditional rhetorics and facilitate material rhetorics. Attendees will then workshop their own material rhetorics projects to consider how these methods may facilitate their own research.
Guiding questions of the workshop include the following: How do we articulate our work within the broader conversation of material rhetorics? How do our methods facilitate and/or reflect our political commitments? How do we determine and practice ethical approaches to working with and writing about vulnerable communities? What do narrative methods necessitate in our research? What can narrative methods offer that other methods do not? What methodologies always already use narrative as part of their methods?
Note: This workshop has limited space for remote participation.
Sonia C. Arellano is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida where she teaches about visual/material rhetorics and gendered rhetorics. Her scholarship broadly engages social justice issues through textiles, tactile methods and rhetorics, and mentoring of BIPOC students and faculty. You can see her scholarship in journals such as Peitho, Rhetoric Review, Compositions Studies and College Composition and Communication. Sonia was awarded the 2022 CCCC Richard Braddock Award for her research quilt and article titled “Sexual Violences Traveling to El Norte: An Example of Quilting as Method.”
Dustin Edwards works as an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at San Diego State University. His research attends to the material, ecological, and infrastructural dimensions of digital rhetoric and engages story-based methodologies to emphasize how particular lands, waterways, and communities are affected by planetary digital networks. His work has been published in Computers and Composition, enculturation, Present Tense, and Rhetoric Review, as well as numerous edited collections including the forthcoming The Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics, and Resistance Online.