No More Learning

. . . This requires the introduction of explicit metalan- guages . . . It also requires introduction and ample opportunity for authentic multimedia and computer tool use.
Interpreting the social and cultural context of particular designs of meaning. This involves students becoming deeply, ethically, involved in what they are studying, having a stake in making new knowledge, and viewing it critical in relation to its context.
Transformed Practice
Ethical Practice
Transfer in meaning-making practice based on the real needs and purposes of communities, which puts the transformed meaning to work for real audiences in other contexts or cultural sites.
Praxis of new media and digital technology is learned as it is used in critical interpretation and production activities that increase students' civic participation and academic preparedness; and teaching and research are conducted with community members and students in collaborative inquiry for problem solving. Respecting boundaries set by stakeholders and adjusting work to suit the limits of representation they set are key.
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 183
A pedagogy of multiliteracies issues a call for transformative practice that scholars around the country are beginning to realize in their curricula. That is, the call for a pedagogy of multiliteracies needs to model ways in which it can be enacted both inside and outside the classroom. How might this model be adopted in and adapted to local purposes, knowledge, and activities? In what ways might rhetoricians and writing teachers and students work at the intersection of digital, critical, and community literacies to develop civically responsible research? We explore these questions below by revising the peda- gogies of multiliteracies in light of digital composing for public audiences and their rhetorical exigencies. In the remainder of this essay, we describe this framework, then apply it to the teaching, research, and service related to the Multimedia Writing class in order to demonstrate how a praxis of new media unfolds in the learning practices of students. We find that the learning prac- tices that take place in this particular partnership may well be unique to this project; however, the intellectual framework that guides the critical reflection on learning might well illuminate the work unfolding in other work in pub- lic rhetorics.
Situated Practice in a Praxis of New Media
Rather than simulating the relationships to be found in the workplace and the experiences of using available discourses as a pedagogy of multiliteracies might, the Multimedia Writing class actually immersed students in a process and knowledge base that created a workplace using an entirely new form of discourse related to Cherokee history. Students initially read, wrote reflections, and discussed hundreds of pages of primary and secondary readings about the allotment period in order to reach their first milestone: a compilation of "re- search papers" that were to become the content of the online materials.
At the start of the class, the members on this group project had very little knowledge about the allotment period or the Cherokee Nation, and so it was necessary for us to engage in what was described as an immersion process.
184 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
Using as many primary documents as possible, we spent the first few weeks of the semester in an intensive reading process where we tried to familiarize ourselves as completely yet efficiently as possible with the history, treaties, reactions, reasoning, and effects of the allotment period.
For Erik, although he had a vague knowledge of historical events like the Trail of Tears or of Native customs regarding land, he had no idea about all the intricacies and nuances of the time period or of the Cherokee way of life. However, he was able to quickly learn and absorb a lot of different ideas in those first few weeks--from understanding the ideas of communal land ownership, to exploring how advanced the cultures of the Five Civilized Tribes really were (in direct contrast to how they were characterized by white settlers), to seeing how important laws and treaties were in the allotment process (such as the infamous Dawes Act), to reading direct stories of people living in Indian Territory.
This immersion was a necessary step before we even began contemplating our project, since so many parts of it--not just the content, but also the de- sign and the way we framed the issue--were dependant on our understanding of the time period and the culture. It also set up a specific pedagogical move of giving our class--a group of white, privileged students with no experience working with the Cherokee Nation--a chance to move from being interested but uninformed students to being content managers who were experts in this historical period (relatively speaking). Aside from building our knowledge, this immersion process also built our confidence.
One of the difficulties with this immersion process, however, was that although we were situating ourselves directly in the written discourses of the time period, there was still the tendency for it to feel disconnected or unau- thentic. At this point in the course, our immediate goal was still an academic essay--something that, although required for the institution and useful for our work as university students, was hard to conceptualize as part of our final product. By attempting to break down the readings and responding with a very specific focus, we were able to successfully create a simulated situated practice--especially with the large number of primary documents--which helped to place us within the context of the allotment period. However, the authenticity of the work would not be apparent until later in the course, when we discovered that we could practically cut the content from one genre--our academic papers--and paste it into another--our Web site/CD-Rom, some- thing that felt much more authentic in its creation.
In this situated practice, then, the genre of academic research paper, at first, seemed extraneous, perhaps even arbitrary to students. Their sense of author- ship had not yet fully developed because it seemed to them that this paper was merely an exercise meant to prove to the professor they had done their readings or had explored something of interest to them, as is the case with many of the research papers. The practice of immersing in the historical
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 185
knowledge base still seemed simulated, a simulation that felt disconnected to the final project and the people it was meant to represent. This immersion also seemed to give some students the impression that they were learning about the culture of the tribe as opposed to the history of the Nation. Certainly our readings covered ways in which Cherokee culture changed as a result of allot- ment, but reading a text about the history of a culture does not translate into a license to represent cultural knowledge. This key difference in representa- tional authority would become more apparent to us as the semester progressed.
Overt Instruction in a Praxis of New Media
In a praxis of new media overt instruction includes a systematic, analytic, and conscious understanding and introduction of metalanguages related to soft- ware and means of production. It also requires introduction and ample oppor- tunity for authentic multimedia and computer tool use and is in line with an infrastructural approach to composing in new media. In community and institutional settings that rely on new media, infrastructural constraints both enable and limit the knowledge work possible. Unfortunately, these infra- structures remain largely invisible until they break or their limits have been reached. The when of new media composing came to the foreground as issues with accessibility and transportability of our work emerged. Here the immer- sion in the infrastructural limits and knowledge needed to circumvent these moved from being simulated to an actual exigency--our collaborators' needs became apparent at the receiving end. At the same time as we were determin- ing the naming conventions and boundaries of our file production, we were also determining the boundaries of our representational authority. While file- naming conventions might feel simply technical in nature, they were rhe- torical and had everything to do with our audience's goals for content and establishing the nature of our authoritative and representational limits.
Overt instruction in how to manage projects moved to the foreground as students began to see that they did not own this work, but were producing pages that would eventually be uploaded, changed, and resaved at the CN. File management lessons were crucial to this process as teams took these les- sons and developed naming protocols for the site's architecture. Their nam- ing protocols made explicit the ways that knowledge work must be handled within class and were created with an upstream audience in mind--the web- master and her team at the Cherokee Nation had to be able to make sense of the file structure and naming conventions. While instruction in file manage- ment came at the beginning of the semester, it was encountering infrastruc- tural constraints of having to transfer and reclaim so many files that made this a practice that took into consideration the transportability and life of the files outside of class.
File management is rhetorical at another level: we were developing and naming content areas, tracing out for our collaborators the scope and nature
186 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
of what we were to represent. Some students became uncomfortable with their lack of tribal knowledge as they were bringing together the content of the papers into what would become the files developed for content nodes. They were concerned that, as outsiders, they were not getting it right and worse that they had no right to be talking about how family structures changed, for instance, because they did not know what family structures were like before allotment and now.
By happy coincidence, we had a visit by Craig Howe, a speaker brought to campus and a new media developer who worked with the Lakota to create multimedia educational resources about their winter counts. When some stu- dents voiced their concerns about the limits of their knowledge of the tribe, he assured us all that we were representing the history of the Nation and not the tribe. He explained that he was not allowed to show many of his multi- media works outside of the Lakota tribe because they represented tribal knowl- edge. However, when a nation commissions a work, and much of that work is drawn from historical documents, it is not likely to be representing tribal knowledge so much as a nation's history. While Ellen had assumed students would inductively understand this distinction from the nature of the histor- ical documents we were using, Craig's explicit instruction put to rest students' initial concerns by pointing to the ways that indigenous peoples articulate a difference between nations and tribes.
In both their authoring of the content and saving it under conventional- ized file structures, students were developing their sense of authoring and ownership to include audiences and exigencies beyond this class. Importantly, this critical reflection would not have been prompted had the infrastructural constraints presented themselves and the rhetorical boundaries of their work became evident to them. In a praxis of new media, then, the technical is often rhetorical and the instrumental subject to exigencies of audiences.
Critical Framing in a Praxis of New Media
In a pedagogy of multiliteracies, critical framing results from interpreting the social and cultural context of particular designs of meaning. This interpreta- tion and critique means applying a critical theory to whatever problem, issue, or object is under study. Rather than asking students to enact disinterested critique of the content they were developing, as a pedagogy of multiliteracies might ask, a praxis of new media demands that students have deep immer- sion in and commitment to the products they are producing. Their analysis is done from the perspective of becoming ethically involved in what they are studying, having a stake in making new knowledge, and viewing it critically in relation to its context. For students, their positions as stakeholders in the project emerged in various instances of strong responses that they had when they increasingly took hold of the authoring responsibility, ownership of the structure of their learning, and initial representations of this learning.
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 187
One of the unexpected results of our work was the very emotional response that we had with the material. We remember one student in particular who broke into tears when we were sharing our research papers with each other. For the most part, no one in the class had any extensive background in Chero- kee history, but through our immersion process at the beginning of the class we were all situated as "experts" by the time our research papers were finished and we were preparing to create our multimedia project. Although no one in the class, outside of the instructor, was Cherokee, as a result of our immersion in the history, and as we prepared to try to tell that story through our proj- ect for others, there was a distinct emotional connection that was made--one that rarely happens with other traditional research assignments. This emo- tional connection to the work increased the sense of authorship we had as we moved from knowing little to being immersed in the topic enough to see our- selves as novice-experts.
Finally, after immersing ourselves in two very different discourses of learn- ing content, then the software to present this content, and becoming profi- cient in them (although it was to varying degrees how much the students personally felt like they had become "experts"), we were able to tackle the actual issue of creating our project. At first we had to consider the overall rep- resentation of the materials we thought would work best for the Nation and users who came to the site. We visually arranged the topics of our papers using Post-it notes on a whiteboard and as a class discussed the generalized topics and overarching areas we envisioned for the major categories of our project-- what we dubbed "nodes," which eventually became the hotlinks around the septagon as seen in the image that opens this essay. We presented a wire frame of the interface to the Cherokee Nation that included a node for reli- gious practices, among others, and they agreed that the design, potential con- tent, and navigational structure of the wire frame was strong.
We were simultaneously balancing ideas of organization, rhetoric, and design as we considered the ways that our categories could successfully cover all the topics we wanted to talk about, the ways that our written research papers could be the starting point for each of those topics, and the ways that our design would fit the rhetoric we designed for the project as a whole. As all of the pieces of the class came together then, the sense of being a stakeholder in the project emerged from immersion that went beyond disinterested cri- tique to a commitment to the purpose, content, and scope of the knowledge work. This critical framing of course included interpretation and analysis in the content of our papers, especially as we each tackled one aspect of Chero- kee history and culture and tried to reveal how the allotment process changed it, but it also included an ethical commitment to the ownership and author- ship of the work. One student in particular became deeply interested in the Cherokee stomp dance as a tradition that has been maintained despite allot- ment and the increased importance of the Cherokee Baptist church to the
188 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
tribe. He created a digital video describing the stomp dance, piecing together additional research on the Internet and books to describe the dance. Because the CN representatives had already endorsed the inclusion of religious prac- tices and the placeholder content that indicated we were going to talk about Cherokee Baptists as well as stomp dance, we thought it would be strong con- tent to add. However, as the next section shows, the critical framing and immersion in the project brought about thornier issues in representation.
Transformed and Ethical Praxis of New Media
Transfer in meaning-making practice is based on the experienced needs and purposes of communities. To this, a praxis of new media adds the component of public writing for purposes and within exigencies designated by stakehold- ers. New media and digital technology are learned as they are used in critical interpretation and production activities that increase students' civic partici- pation; and teaching and research are conducted with community members and students in collaborative inquiry for problem solving. The praxis of new media hit home for students how their authorship, ownership, and represen- tational practices were being changed as they engaged in this knowledge work.
The final challenge to our understandings of representation could not be foreseen in the content we developed. One of the surprising results of work- ing with a partner outside of our group and gifting them with a rhetorical cre- ation was some of the final content management that the Cherokee Nation did. In particular, we had a section outlining some of the religious practices of the Cherokees, especially in regards to the way these were used as a form of resistance. However, the Cherokee Nation decided that they did not want this sort of information published since it dealt a little too closely with prac- tices that they considered sacred and private, so whole pages of that subnode were removed--including the video file describing the stomp dance that one student had spent weeks developing. It was his main contribution to the en- tire node. Especially given the time and effort that the individual who created that subnode and video spent in making his section, it was tough to imagine having parts of it removed, but we realized that it was necessary to under- stand and respect the reasons for doing so.
In this way, even though we had taken pride in the work and our author- ing of the best site possible, we understood that our representations may not be as culturally relevant as they should have been, or in this case, that they were too culturally relevant and the CN did not want this tribal knowledge to be widely disseminated. 12 This became evident to Ellen as she worked with the CN collaborators in Tahlequah. They debated for some time the possible inclusion of this stomp dance video and the text surrounding it in this node. Recognizing the hard work the student had done, they still were not comfort- able with the level of nuance in the video--stomp dance differs from ground to ground, and it seemed that this representation was both revealing too much
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 189
and not enough. In the end, when the project was handed over to the Nation, our ownership of it ended though our responsibilities for representing their history did not. The historical representations were strong and accurately re- flected the immersion that students had in the history of the Nation, but the ways that the Nation articulated itself to us as a public face for the tribe had to be learned the hard way--by developing content that ultimately could not be included despite initial green lights for inclusion.
We learned firsthand and the hard way the difference that Howe explained: we were immersed in and representing the history of the Nation and the his- tory that the Nation wanted us to represent; we were not immersed in or representing the culture or the tribe's cultural practices. This rhetorical and ethical boundary emerged as the work progressed and the Cherokee Nation's representatives articulated the difference between the Nation's history and the tribe's cultural practices, a difference we were ethically bound to respect. While we had immersed ourselves in the historical representations of the Nation, we mistook this immersion as knowledge of cultural practices.
Implications
As these examples illustrate, students' previously held notions of authorship, ownership, and representation shifted as this course progressed and even after the final project had been delivered. All of these aspects of learning in a praxis of new media reveal the ways in which it is important to press boundaries of conventional writing classroom practice, but also point to the limits of knowl- edge work with community partners.
With so many shifts in learning contexts--from the content of the course, to the tools used to represent it, to the exigencies and purposes for learning, to the audiences who read this writing--the effect can cause strong emotional response and dissonance. If students and professors understand the ways in which a praxis of new media revises knowledge work, then perhaps some of the dissonance might be mitigated. In subsequent iterations of this course, the ways in which the work would unfold were expressed upfront, placed into the syllabus for the course, and repeated frequently so that students could at least anticipate the challenges this class content and tools present to their pre- vious forms of learning, writing, and reading. Ellen has been especially care- ful to make explicit for students how they will be immersing themselves in the history of the CN that is for the most part publicly available, as opposed to immersing themselves in the culture of the Cherokee tribe.
The lessons we learned are important for work that engages students in participating in public rhetorics. First, the technical is often rhetorical. Know- ing infrastructural limits and working within and against these is a rhetorical process that must take into account the needs, purposes, capacities, exigen- cies, and work activities of audiences beyond our classrooms. 13 Second, stake- holders in public writing collaborations set the representational boundaries
190 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
that often articulate the autonomy of themselves as a "we" that protects cul- tural knowledge while producing historically accurate materials. Students learn to compose the public face of an organization or tribe from historical texts and/or highly selected texts that the stakeholders want to be used. Their im- mersion in and with texts does not equate to immersion with a culture; writ- ing a valid history is powerful work that is quite different from writing a valid ethnographic representation.
The knowledge work taking place at the intersection of critical, digital, and community literacies is certainly complex and complicated, at times daunt- ingly so. A praxis of new media is an intellectual framework for scaffolding active work; rather than disappearing into the work once a project begins, the framework always allows one to see, critique, and adjust practice throughout the development and iterations of that work. This framework provides a metalanguage for learning how to learn, and may offer a buoy to help profes- sors and students understand the changing nature of the learning unfolding in the class. The intellectual framework of a praxis of new media will be use- ful to describe the knowledge work unfolding in public rhetorics.
Notes
1. Cherokee Nation, Allotment.
2. Ellen's family went through this process of allotment and enrolled on the Dawes roll, a kind of census for the Cherokee Nation and other tribes. Because they went through that seven-year-long process, today's generations of Drews (my Cherokee fam- ily's name) are able to maintain our citizenship with the tribe.
3. While helping the Cherokee Nation produce a counternarrative is an important topic that Ellen has explored elsewhere, this essay focuses more on the transformative learning for students understood within a praxis of new media. Cushman and Ghosh, "Mediation. "
4. To view the second installment, visit http://www. cherokee. org/cultures/treaties/ toc. htm.
5. See Deans, Writing Partnerships; Crooks and Watters, Writing in the Community; Flower, Long, and Higgins, Learning to Rival; Herzberg, "Community Service"; Flower "Partners in Inquiry"; Flower, Problem Solving; Peck, Flower, and Higgins, "Community Literacy"; Bacon, "Building a Swan's Nest"; Grabill, Community Literacy; Coogan, "Coun- terpublics"; Cushman, "Public Intellectual"; Cushman, Special Issue; Cushman, "Sus- tainable Service"; Cushman and Emmons, "Contact Zones"; Schutz and Gere, "Service Learning"; Carrick, Himley, and Jacobi, "Ruptura. "
6. Devoss, Cushman, and Grabill, "Infrastructure," 16. 7. Clifford, "Indigenous Articulations," 479.
8. Warry, quoted in Cushman, Struggle, 28.
9. Freire, Pedagogy.
10. Cushman, "Toward a Praxis"; Cazden et al. , "Pedagogy of Multiliteracies"; Cope and Kalantzis, Multiliteracies.
11. Cazden et al. , "Pedagogy of Multiliteracies," 88.
12. Cushman and Ghosh, "Mediation. "
13. See Grabill, Writing Community Change; Simmons and Grabill, "Toward a Civic
Rhetoric. "
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 191
Works Cited
Bacon, Nora. "Building a Swan's Nest for Instruction in Rhetoric. " College Composition and Communication 51 (2000): 589-609.
Carrick, Tracy, Margaret Himley, and Tobi Jacobi. "Ruptura: Acknowledging the Lost Subjects of the Service Learning Story. " Language and Learning across the Disciplines 14, no. 1 (2000): 56-75.
Cazden, Courtney, Bill Cope, Norman Fairclough, James Gee, Mary Kalantzis, Gunther Kress, Allan Luke, Carmen Luke, Sarah Michaels, and Martin Nakata (The New Lon- don Group). "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. " Harvard Edu- cational Review 66 (1996): 60-93.
Cherokee Nation. Allotment in Cherokee History 1887-1914. www. cherokee. org/allotment. Clifford, James. "Indigenous Articulations. " Contemporary Pacific 13 (2001): 468-90. Coogan, David. "Counterpublics in Public Housing: Reframing the Politics of Service
Learning. " College English 67 (2005): 461-82.
Cope, William, and Mary Kalantzis. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of
Social Futures. London: Routledge, 2000.
Crooks, Robert, and Ann Waters, eds. Writing the Community: Concepts and Models for
Service Learning in Composition. Washington, D. C. : American Association for Higher
Education, 1997.
Cushman, Ellen. "The Public Intellectual, Activist Research, and Service-Learning. " Col-
lege English 61 (1999): 68-76.
------. "Service Learning as the New English Studies. " In Beyond English Inc. , edited by
D. Downing, M. Hurlbert, and P. Mathieu, 204-18. Portsmouth, N. H. : Heinemann,
2002.
------, guest ed. Special Issue on Service Learning. Language and Learning Across the Dis-
ciplines 14 (2000).
------. The Struggle and the Tools. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.
------. "Sustainable Service Learning Programs.
" College Composition and Communica-
tion 64 (2002): 40-65.
------. "Toward a Praxis of New Media: The Allotment Period in Cherokee History. "
Reflections on Community-Based Writing Instruction 4, no. 3 (2006): 124-43. Cushman, Ellen, and Chalon Emmons. "Contact Zones Made Real. " In School's Out, edited by Glynda Hull and Katherine Shultz, 203-31. New York: Teachers College
Press, 2002.
Cushman, Ellen, and Shreelina Ghosh. "The Mediation of Cultural Memory: Digital
Preservation in the Cases of Classical Indian Dance and the Cherokee Stomp Dance. "
Journal of Popular Culture. Forthcoming Spring 2010.
Deans, Tom. Writing Partnerships: Service Learning in Composition. Urbana, Ill. : National
Council of Teachers of English, 2000.
DeVoss, Danielle Nicole, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill. "Infrastructure and Com-
posing: The When of New Media Writing. " College Composition and Communication 57
(2005): 14-31.
Flower, Linda. "Partners in Inquiry: A Logic for Community Outreach. " In Writing the
Community: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Composition, edited by Linda Adler-Kassner, Robert Crooks, and Ann Watters, 95-118. Urbana, Ill. : National Coun- cil of Teachers of English, 1997.
------. Problem Solving Strategies for Writing in College and Community. Fort Worth, Tex. : Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998.
192 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
Flower, Linda, Elenore Long, and Lorraine Higgins. Learning to Rival: A Literate Practice for Intercultural Inquiry. Mahwah, N. J. : LEA, 2000.
Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1972.
Grabill, Jeffrey T. Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change. Albany: SUNY
Press, 2001.
------. Writing Community Change. Creskill, N. J. : Hamptom, 2007.
Herzberg, Bruce. "Community Service and Critical Teaching. " College Composition and
Communication 45 (1994): 307-19.
Kassner, Linda Adler, Robert Crooks, and Ann Watters, eds. Writing the Community.
Urbana, Ill. : National Council of Teachers of English, 1997.
Peck, Wayne, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins. "Community Literacy. " College Com-
position and Communication 46 (1995): 199-222.
Schutz, Aaron, and Anne Gere. "Service Learning and English Studies: Rethinking Pub-
lic Service. " College English 60 (1998): 129-49.
Simmons, Michele, and Jeffrey T. Grabill. "Toward a Civic Rhetoric for Technologically
and Scientifically Complex Places: Invention, Performance, and Participation. " Col-
lege Composition and Communication 58 (2007): 486-99.
Wide Research Center Collective. "Why Teach Digital Writing. " Kairos 10 (2005),
http://English. ttu. edu/Kairos/10. 1/binder2. html? coverweb/wide/index. html (accessed March 26, 2009).
? On Being Useful
Rhetoric and the Work of Engagement
Jeffrey T. Grabill
It is commonplace to think that when we are doing the work of rhetoric, we are speaking or writing. Certainly when we teach students to be rhetors, we are teaching them to speak or write purposefully. The speaker, writer, com- poser, performer is the center of our attention. In similar fashion, it is com- mon to think about community engagement in terms of ourselves--the work that we are doing, the impact that we hope to have, and the way that our presence changes a community. As rhetors we speak; as engaged scholars we act. I begin this way to highlight the fact that the agencies with which we most concern ourselves are the agencies of writers, researchers, and activists, and that when we consider these agencies, we focus mostly on ourselves or those we train to be like us. In this essay, I want to take us in a somewhat dif- ferent direction. I want to explore the notion that the public work of rheto- ric might be to support the work of others--to help other people write, speak, and make new media and other material objects effectively. 1
To be able to support the work of others requires ways of researching, act- ing, and otherwise performing in communities that are carefully considered. My procedure in this essay, therefore, will be to outline elements of what I think of as a methodology of engagement, or elements of a theory of how to act that stands a good chance of being useful to others engaged in the "knowl- edge work of everyday life," a concept I develop in Writing Community Change. 2 I discuss two methods that are fundamental to rhetorical engagement. These are methods that are well known under a number of names, but they lack, in my view, the attention and visibility they deserve. These two methods-- assembling a public and supporting performances--are essential to effective public rhetoric and fundamental to the notion that rhetoric might more use- fully be understood as enabling the work of others.
194 Jeffrey T. Grabill
Assembling a Public, Community, Group, or Other Aggregate
I do not mean the title to this section to sound flippant. Scholars and activists argue passionately about the differences between these terms and their mean- ing for their work. And they should. Nor do I think that these terms are sub- stitutable. Rather, because I am trying to work at the level of methodology, I highlight the theoretical problem of assembly, a problem that is shared by those working with various forms of "groupness. "
The difficulty of understanding the public (or various publics) and locat- ing it with precision and usefulness is a common and recent concern. Even if we attempt to locate a rhetorical public instead of defining it, we are still left with multiple places and terms in the literature: public space, public sphere, civic/civil society (and space), and civic culture. 3 Each of these terms means something quite different, both in terms of what a rhetorical situation looks like and in terms of what a particular rhetoric looks like. While it is true that recent work in rhetoric theory on the problem of the public is full of possi- bility, it does not typically concern itself with what I understand to be empiri- cal questions of how people create public spaces, forums, or what I will soon call "things. "4 My purpose here is to focus on the activity of making a public, of understanding who we are together when we are doing rhetoric, because this type of activity is required for public engagement.
In his recent essay in Critical Inquiry, Bruno Latour argues for a new kind of criticism, one that is both closer to facts and positive--by which he means a criticism concerned with making. Latour wants criticism to be a "multifari- ous inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence. "5 What Latour understands as a "thing" is what I would like to understand first as both a group (including, conceivably, "a public") and the ideas and activity that give a group a reason to exist. Latour's project has a descriptive component to it ("to detect") but also a strategic component. The critic--the rhetor--offers participants places to gather and cares for gatherings. This essay by Latour provides something conceptually powerful given my experience helping to make things in com- munities: a purpose for contemporary public rhetorical work--to gather and care for things.
Based on my own experience as a community-based researcher, I have never found it useful, either empirically or conceptually, to understand the collectives with which I was working as fixed or in some cases preexisting entities. The implications of this sentence are significant, not obvious, and at the very heart of my argument. Latour is useful in helping to visualize these implications. In Reassembling the Social, Latour's most recent and explicit treat- ment of what is commonly known as actor-network theory, his target for criti- cism is social theory and the social sciences. 6 He writes that with normative
social science, the concept of "the social" is a domain asserted to exist and given, depending on the sociology, certain defining characteristics. Sociologists of the social are therefore able to use "the social" to explain other activity. The basic question for Latour is this: does the social exist or is it something that we create? Latour writes, "Whereas sociologists (or socio-economists, socio-linguists, social psychologists, etc. ) take social aggregates as the given that could shed some light on residual aspects of economics, linguistics, psy- chology, management, and so on, these other scholars [like Latour], on the contrary, consider social aggregates as what should be explained by the spe- cific associations provided by economics, linguistics, psychology, law, man- agement, etc. "7 Latour's point is that social aggregates must be explained and also that the social is "a type of connection between things that are not them- selves social. "8 The social, then, is not a domain or realm but a "very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling. "9
As a matter of methodology, Latour's assertion that the social is best under- stood as a type of connection that is visible because of movement (activity) is true as well for what we call "community" or "public," an argument that I have made in more detail elsewhere. 10 Each must be assembled and continu- ously reassembled. But Latour's claim is true for that which we call "the rhet- orical" as well. The study of the rhetorical, therefore, is the study of particular kinds of associations that are actively created and re-created. The rhetorical is and creates particular kinds of connections. Furthermore, to be useful as a public rhetorician or engaged researcher is to become one who understands associations and, in understanding them, becomes a creator of associations. To associate, therefore, becomes a method and strategy for a methodology of engagement. It is true that the sociologist and the rhetorical scholar study dif- ferent kinds of associations--or just as often make visible similar associations but understand them differently. But associations of what? If the work of the rhetor is to help gather and care for these gatherings, then what, exactly, is to be gathered and cared for--and in what ways?
To illustrate this methodological argument, let me turn to two examples from recent work that I have been a part of. The first example comes from a project Stuart Blythe and I worked on in a community we call "Harbor. "11 Stu- art and I were part of a Technical Outreach Services for Communities (TOSC) team, funded by an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant, to com- plete independent technical reviews of science and engineering and to con- duct community education workshops around those technical reviews. Our presence in Harbor was a function of a proposed U. S. Army Corps of Engi- neers plan to dredge a canal linking an industrial area with a large lake. The canal at Harbor is one of the oldest industrial corridors in the country. The canal was designed to service the petroleum-based and steel industries in the region. The canal must be dredged in order to enable heavier barge traffic to reach the industry along the canal. The Corps plans to scoop out millions
On Being Useful 195
196 Jeffrey T. Grabill
of cubic yards of sediment and deposit them in what is called a confined dis- posal facility (CDF), or a raised landfill, which is located near two schools and residential areas in this densely populated area.
This is a situation in which there is significant community concern. The industrial uses of the harbor and canal have left the waters heavily polluted. Some of the toxins found in the sediment include arsenic, cadmium, chro- mium, dioxin, toluene, lead, mercury, oil, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)--all bad stuff for plants, animals, and humans. Some stretches of the canal are so toxic that they cannot sustain life. Therefore, this navigational dredge is also necessarily an environmental cleanup project, but it is an environmental cleanup project that results in the deposit of toxic sediments in a landfill located in an urban area. Cleaning the canal therefore creates new risks as it mitigates existing risks. Some in Harbor are quite concerned about the dredging project; others are strongly opposed to it. Citizens have raised two concerns about the Corps' plans: whether the dredge will be characterized as an environmental or navigational project, a distinction governed by differing regulations and which type of dredge tech- nology will be used. The distinction between the two dredging characteriza- tions is meaningful. To call the dredge "environmental" means the ability to tap into new sources of revenue to fund the project and being governed by regulations that some in the community thought more stringent. Naming the project "environmental" carries significant symbolic value as well as certain material changes in the project.
Stuart and I focused on trying to understand how people in Harbor con- ducted their own science (their inventional activities) and communicated those understandings to others. Our goals were to use these understandings to help TOSC with its work, and, if possible, enhance the capacities of the community to do its work. To this point I have left a number of loaded terms scattered throughout my description, and it is precisely the danger of these loaded terms that occupied much of our work in Harbor. If we were to be of use to "the community"--indeed, if we were to conduct "community-based" research--what, exactly, does this mean, and who, precisely, constitutes "the community" with which we were engaged? Figure 1 is a figure from our field notes of April 2004, and in reproducing this figure here, I mean to signify a number of things: it is one of many such maps that we created (though a rela- tively stable one); it is an artifact of our research and not "true" in any other sense; and in publishing this map (now twice), we have given the public space of Harbor a type of rhetorical stability with respect to our work there that is both useful and also only one type of connection possible in that same geographi- cal, cultural, political, and social space at that time--or at any given time.
The community map of Harbor, then, is an answer to the question "who/ what is the community" in Harbor. In terms of the functional details, there are two significant issues represented by this map. The first is that the community
is a collection of organizations, institutions, and individuals. Some of these organizations are large and highly structured, like a government agency, while others are more loosely structured, such as a neighborhood association. The second issue is the connection between groups. Some groups have more for- mal associations by way of funding or people who are members of multiple organizations. Some groups are networked by their communication practices. If we return to Latour and to my methodological argument that to engage is to assemble, then the activity of assembling this map is a key engagement activity opening up a range of agencies. We were able to assemble this map by paying attention to activity; that is, the connections between organizations and the relative positioning of organizations are a function of those organi- zations doing things: meeting, writing, collaborating, coordinating, and so on. Of course, the activity that enables this map is the activity generated by the dredging project itself, so if we were following different work, then we would see different activity, alternative connections, and therefore new groupings at this same time and in this same space. In other words, a different map, a dif- ferent community.
A map like this yields patterns that are actionable. The community organ- ization with which we worked most closely is labeled "CEC" on this map. It was not the first organization that TOSC worked with, nor was it the only organization with which TOSC sought to work. But it emerged as the most important organization because it was often at the very center of citizen- driven activity in Harbor. For our work in Harbor to have an impact, there- fore, it was clear that we needed to learn from CEC and support its work as best we could. While the organization is small and relatively unstructured, its members are highly effective communicators: they write frequently and with impact; they have multiple, effective communication channels; and they use these to share what they learn and to hear from others what they are learn- ing. In methodological terms, to be useful in Harbor as an engaged partner, we had to assemble--from the first to the last moment of our time there--a "public," which in this case we understood as a "community. " There is no question that there was a spatial and political entity known as Harbor before we arrived on the scene. The organizations existed. The people were there. The ideas and issues, for the most part, were surely in evidence. But in arriving on the scene, we changed things, and so there existed in that time and space a new community dynamic, which we systematically tried to account for from our point of view. We assembled the community of Harbor with respect to this project as a way to account for possible agencies. For us, this work was called "research," but it is no different as an issue of methodology if the work is called "community organizing" and the agents called "activists" or "rhetori- cians. " In identifying CEC as important, therefore, we were also locating finer-grained patterns of activity that we thought mattered, and so we sought to support that activity (more on this in the next section). The map, then, is
On Being Useful 197
198 Jeffrey T. Grabill
simply a research artifact, but it represents the more complex work of assem-
bling and caring for that assembly.
A community map of "Harbor"
Example two comes from work I have been doing to help build a community media center in Lansing, Michigan. The original story for me goes back to the Capital Area Community Information research project, an action research proj- ect funded by Michigan State University's University Outreach and Engage- ment. 12 This three-year effort focused on understanding how people used information technologies to do the work of community organizations, and on the Capital Area Community Voices Web site as a key resource for this knowl- edge work. One outcome of this project is a newly redesigned Capital Area Community Voices Web site. As a part of that project, we began to think about the larger community infrastructure supporting community computing, and through this conversation I ended up as part of a small, ad hoc group of peo- ple who have now incorporated and are making progress in terms of building this media center. Nearly three years ago, while sitting in an early meeting of this group, one of our graduate students turned to me and said that we really needed to read Aramis because she thought that we were engaged in making a sociotechnical system. 13 She was correct, and as I have always understood making a media center as a project of assembly, let me unpack the example of the media center in these terms. Let me pull two threads to follow: the making of the media center as the making of a thing; and the (re)making of a research center (WIDE) into a community media center (or: when activity is what is required to be real, how to act like a media center).
? The first of these threads is more abstract. There is no reason why Lansing must have a community media center. The Lansing area functions today with- out one, and most people in the Lansing area, it is fair to say, have no idea what a media center is and what it affords to those who may use it. To make a media center, therefore, requires argument, the establishment of an exigency in "the community. " In other words, while folks get along just fine now, cur- rent work could be facilitated by a media center, new work could be imag- ined, and that which is impossible now might be possible with a media center (and so: perhaps we are not getting along very well at all). 14 The most persist- ent activity that we have engaged in as part of making a media center is rhet- orical. It is also mundane: community groups, neighborhood organizations, issue groups, and others must always and persistently make arguments through activities like writing letters, holding meetings, and proposing ideas, and in making these arguments, gather participants in what Latour would call a "thing. "
Like many who work with "thing theory," Latour works through Heideg- ger to derive basic concepts of a thing. 15 A "Thing," in this view, is a certain type of assembly and could refer to a meeting as much as to an object. As an assembly, one of Latour's references is the old Icelandic assembly called a "Ding" (thing). 16 In Latour's resurrected Ding, people assemble not because they are like each other or agree but because they share matters of concern about which they do not agree. A "Thing" is the issue--the matter of concern-- that brings people together and also the assembly itself.