Stuart Blythe

Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change

We offer institutional critique as an activist methodology for changing institutions. Since institutions are rhetorical entities, rhetoric can be deployed to change them. In its effort to counter oppressive institutional structures, the field of rhetoric and composition has focused its attention chiefly on the composition classroom, on the department of English, and on disciplinary forms of critique. Our focus shifts the scene of action and argument to professional writing and to public discourse, using spatial methods adapted from postmodern geography and critical theory.

Designing Online Courses: User-Centered Practices

Abstract Teachers who develop Web-based courses must learn to act like designers; however, the type of design practice one undertakes has more than pedagogical implications. It can have political and ethical implications as well. In this article, I compare two models for design—systems and user-centered—each of which embodies different values. I argue that models of technology design can be applied to the development of Web-based courses and that various forms of user-centered design embody the values most compatible with writing instruction. While acknowledging the difficulties of enacting such models when developing Web-based courses, I present strategies for adopting a user-centered design paradigm in distance learning.

Action Research and Wicked Environmental Problems: Exploring Appropriate Roles for Researchers in Professional Communication

The authors report on a 3-year action-research project designed to facilitate public involvement in the planned dredging of a canal and subsequent disposal of the dredged sediments. Their study reveals ways that community members struggle to define the problem and work together as they gather, share, and understand data relevant to that problem. The authors argue that the primary goal of action research related to environmental risk should be to identify and support the strategies used by community members rather than to educate the public. The authors maintain that this approach must be supported by a thorough investigation of basic rhetorical issues (audience, genre, stases, invention), and they illustrate how they used this approach in their study.

Professional and Technical Communication in a Web 2.0 World

This article reports on results of a nationwide survey of alumni in professional and technical communication. It presents a series of snapshots from the results, including the types of texts written and valued, where those types are written, with and for whom, and with what technologies. A range of implications are explored.

Wrestling With Proteus Tales of Communication Managers in a Changing Economy

Because communication specialists often lack the power and prestige of other knowledge workers, such as engineers and product designers, managers who direct the work of communication specialists face unique challenges. This study, based on interviews with 11 communication managers, found that their agency and identity were determined both by the structure of the organizations in which they worked and by their use of genres, technologies, and regulatory techniques. With their work undergoing transition because of globalization, outsourcing, and rapid technological change, the stories that these managers tell demonstrate the importance of studying management as it specifically applies to communication specialists.

Exploring Uses of IText in Campus-Community Partnerships

Many colleges and universities have begun to create structures that foster sustainable partnerships with neighboring communities. As part of such efforts, these institutions often use IText—written texts mediated by information technologies such as the World Wide Web, e-mail, databases, and online bulletin board systems. Using content analysis and interviews, the author explores the ways that IText is used in campus-community partnerships. The author concludes that at this early point in partnership efforts, the best uses for IText are to build trust and share information, even though such uses raise questions about the egalitarian potential of partnership efforts.

Online Survey Design and Development: A Janus-Faced Approach

In this article we propose a Janus-faced approach to survey design—an approach that encourages researchers to consider how they can design and implement surveys more effectively using the latest web and database tools. Specifically, this approach encourages researchers to look two ways at once; attending to both the survey interface (client side; what users see) and the database design (server side; what researchers collect) so that researchers can pursue the most dynamic and layered data collection possible while ensuring greater participation and completion rates from respondents. We illustrate the potentials of a Janus-faced approach using a successfully designed and implemented nationwide survey on the writing lives of professional writing alumni. We offer up a series of questions that a researcher will want to consider during each stage of survey development.

Dynamic system models and the construction of complexity

Humans routinely fail to comprehend complexity and anticipate long-term consequences. Systems dynamicists try to overcome these weaknesses by developing computer-supported models that can account for multiple variables in non-linear relationships. Using programs such as STELLA and Vensim, systems dynamicists create stock-and-flow diagrams, equations, and, ultimately, interfaces that enable others to interact with the model. This paper describes how one such model was developed and speculates on roles that technical communicators might play in future projects.

Citizens doing science in public spaces: Rhetorical invention, semiotic remediation, and simple little texts

In this chapter, we explore relationships between two issues. The first is the place of semiotic remediation in the discursive work of a community environmental organization. More specifically, we are interested in describing this organization’s inventional work as it attempted to influence the public discourse of an environmental problem in their community. The second issue is the role of rhetorical activity in the formation and maintenance of organizations themselves, which is a part of a larger chain of agencies required to make and maintain issues of public concern. We understand our work to be concerned with problems of public rhetoric more generally and risk communication more particularly. By ‘public rhetoric,’ we are referring to work in rhetorical theory explicitly concerned with the definition and function of a public in relation to issues of concern (for example, Ackerman and Coogan, forthcoming; Asen and Brouwer, 2001; Banning, 2005). What is meant by public and what counts as a public issue is complex. It is not unreasonable to suggest that these problems are central to the enterprise of rhetorical inquiry and theory itself. Public typically refers to either a forum of deliberation (such as a publication or venue like a legislature) or those groups and individuals who can speak and write in that forum. Or public refers to both. What counts as a public issue of concern can be a matter of philosophical debate (What are proper public issues?’) or rhetorical pragmatism (What can we make a public issue?’).