John T. Warren

“You Get Pushed Back”: the strategic rhetoric of educational success and failure in higher education

We explored Nakayama and Krizeks (1995) notion of strategic rhetorics—i.e., the persuasive discourses that function hegemonically to continually re-secure the power of institutions by permeating the mundane talk of individuals—in relation to a series of focus group interviews with university undergraduates and instructors about the nature of success and failure in education. Our analysis revealed three strategic rhetorics: (1) individualism, or the notion that it is only, or primarily, through individual action or choice that one might succeed or fail in schools; (2) victimization, the abjection of individualism, which suggests that one is at the mercy of social systems for assessments of success or failure; and (3) authenticity, in which students and teachers gauge success or failure by how ones intentions measure up to some idealized other. Although students and teachers both expressed frustration with aspects of the educational system, we found that these strategic rhetorics functioned to reassert the dominance of existing educational practices, eliding the role language plays in re-imagining possibilities of educational change.

The materiality of bodies: Critical reflections on pedagogy, politics and positionality

This aesthetic essay is concerned with the notion of democratization and the ways in which policies and “practiced orientations “ to inclusiveness and diversity, effect colorized and racialized bodies in traditional educational spaces. The essay uses the critical autopoietic narratives of a Black male scholar and a White male scholar set within a dialogue as a communicative and intercultural approach of influence and cooperation. The authors suggest that this method is the sin quo non of the democratic ideal and resides at the core of collaborative research.

The Strategic Rhetoric of an “At-Risk” Educational Identity: Interviewing Jane

This essay explores how communication research on “at-risk” students relies on under-theorized understandings of identity as seemingly stable traits and characteristics. In this sense, “at-riskness,” as a cultural identity, is dangerous precisely because it encourages researchers to link identity difference with failure, rather than to explore the presence and perpetuation of particular ideologies. We illuminate such ideological tensions through our analysis of a complex educational identity—an in-depth interview with an “at-risk” student—where we locate strategic rhetorics (i.e., discursive constructions that reify normalized assumptions about educational success and failure) that demonstrate how ideology constitutes the phenomenon of educational risk.

Subverting Whiteness: Pedagogy at the Crossroads of Performance, Culture, and Politics

Students in our classes, which focus on communication and cultural/sexual difference, performance studies, and communication and the classroom, often ask about the end of political critique—that is, to what future do we do this critical work? For instance, when we talk to our students about current events in class (i.e., the lynching-style murder of James Byrd, Jr., the beating-execution of Matthew Shepard, or the shooting death of Amadou Diallo on the streets of New York by police), we try to understand not only the effects of these instances of cultural violence (how it shapes and produces a public), but to also ask questions about the contexts that breed these tragedies. Thus, our effort is to locate the specific events within larger, more systemic social systems. For instance, can we understand the Matthew Shepard incident as a result of a social system of heterosexism, homophobia, and straight supremacy? Can we see the death of Diallo not as an isolated instance of racial violence, but as part of a larger social system that has produced deaths in places like Cincinnati and Los Angeles?