In this episode, B. López interviews the award-winning scholar Eric Darnell Pritchard about his book Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and The Politics of Literacy. They also talk about Dr. Pritchard’s past and future scholarship, and about how to survive and thrive in academic spaces that are too often unkind, especially for queer students of color.

Fashion was one of the ways that I was insisting upon my own selfhood, right? And what I got from my mom and her sisters and my uncles and cousins was, you know, that this could be an instrument. This could be something that I could use as a way to own myself, right? To belong to myself. -Eric Darnell Pritchard

You don’t have to earn the right to serenity. Right? You don’t have to earn the right to be able to take a full breath. You don’t have to earn the right to have a moment of quiet or just something that acknowledges the fact that you’re human. Right? That’s not something that graduate students have to earn. You’re earning a degree. You’re not earning the right to be human, and a whole person in the classroom. That doesn’t have to be earned. -Eric Darnell Pritchard

For a transcript of the episode, click here.

Music in this episode is “RSPN” by Blank & Kytt (CC 3.0) and “Bass and Drum” by OLC.

After two and a half years away, This Rhetorical Life is back with a second season and a new chapter for the podcast. B. López joins Ben Kuebrich in exploring politics and pedagogy, and the rhetoric of our daily lives. Listen to our first episode below and stay tuned the 2nd Monday of each month for new content. For a transcript of the episode, click here.

Music in this episode is “RSPN” by Blank & Kytt (CC 3.0) and “Bass and Drum” by OLC.

This summer, Cruz Medina reached out to This Rhetorical Life to share an interview he had done with Ana Castillo. As Medina states in this episode:

As a writer, Ana Castillo’s work is the art that identifies subject matter before those of us who are academics and scholars are able to apply lenses or qualify and quantify these rich sites of inquiry. And this is so important because there are still folks doing research on Latinas/os who bring in very little or no Latina/o scholarship, reaffirming what Jacqueline Jones Royster said in “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own,” that we are once again told that Columbus discovered America.

The intersections of Xicana feminism and Latinx literature addressing structured oppression are certainly not new, but in this contemporary political moment, it’s important to reaffirm a sense of survival. As Ana Castillo states:

We have to think about the people we have marginalized and disenfranchised most—and everybody in society at some point or another is. So it’s a fallacy to think that we have democracy and that everybody has the same opportunity. But, in terms of patriarchy, you know, women for eons have been kept in a secondary place. In terms of race issues in this country, which is only over 200 years old, but if we include the Americas, we’re talking about the conquest of Mexico and Peru and so on, so over half a millennium ago, here, of colonialism here. If we talk about other places in the world, it’s been going on for a very, very long time. Twenty or thirty years is just a drop in the bucket as far as some of the things that we’re addressing.

Read the transcript, or listen to the episode below. Featuring music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Homonormativity has had two kind of strains of theoretical emphasis, one of which has been the focus on neoliberal prerogatives and priorities into institutions and everyday life, and gay and lesbian formations in particular, and I say gay and lesbian for a reason. And the development of a prescriptive set of social codes that define what it means to be a cosmopolitan queer. And I think that, some people would say the movement has been hijacked, and I don’t disagree with those folks who make those arguments, but I don’t want to be so fatalistic about it. There is always time and space to rethink and remobilize along different lines and priorities.” “And so I’m saying the word ‘sodomy’ I’m saying ‘queer,’ and this museum group, all heads turn at once away from their tour group, and they start listening to me and kind of following me around, right. And so this completely different history that was unexpected to them, to the person interviewing me, and to this random tour group, but they wanted to know, right? So there are all of these different histories that we can tell about these objects when we look through the lens of queer curatorship, when we look through the lens of all museums are sex museums.”

Today we’ll be talking about queer cultures, the rhetoricity of museum space, what role museums play in the formation of sexual subjectivities and national sexual cultures.

Download full episode transcript here.

Music from Otis McDonald: “Behind Closed Doors” and “Other Way”

In any event, first [thing] we have to make contact with is the situation that we are entering and what kind of context we are teaching in, and for. And we have to then educate ourselves into the context.

In addition, the other thing is, the political conditions not only change from place to place; that is, some places are more open to allowing teachers to experiment, some places are very rigid and very punitive and repressive—so that we had to adjust to the political climate or the political profile around us. But that political climate was not only a function of place of where we were teaching, it is also a function of time.

Part two of the interview focuses on updates to critical pedagogy,

including some of Shor’s more recent experiments in the classroom. We

also talk a lot about movement work, about the pedagogies of movements,

about the role that educators play and might play, and about what Shor

has been doing inside and outside of formal academic institutions.

Once again, we let the tape run and give you a largely unedited interview. We have in mind an audience who is familiar with Shor and critical pedagogy but who may be interested in some of the personal details and specific points that Shor raises here that may not be available elsewhere.

And once again, a tiny chorus of Zebra finches make up the background noise for our conversation.

We hope you enjoy it.

Download the full transcript for the episode here.

Music sampled in this episode is “Night Owl” from Broke For Free.

I just don’t understand why we have to talk about every mode of belonging as some kind of citizenship. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m interested in people’s practices of resistance. I’m interested in people’s practices of belonging. […] I’m interested in people’s practices of world-making.  — Karma Chavez

I’m increasingly persuaded by those who argue citizenship is a toxic concept and a toxic term. When I do talk about folks who appeal to citizenship, I’m very aware of how often those appeals to citizenship are built on the constitutive exclusions of others, and that if we really want to mobilize a productive, an emancipatory sense of civic obligation and of civic duty, we’ve got to figure out a way to do it without buying into a privileging conception of citizenship.  — Cate Palczewski

In Episode 29, we extend a conversation from the 2015 RSA Summer Inst-itute Seminar on Rhetorics of Citizenship. Karrieann Soto and Kate Siegfried host the discussion with co-seminarians Karma Chavez and Cate Palczewski. The episode asks that we critically question rhetorics of citizenship in our scholarship and in daily life. For a full transcript, click here.

We tend to assume that captioning is objective. It’s

just copying down. We tend to privilege speech sounds, and there’s just

something about speech that sort of makes it seem easier to transcribe.

It’s straightforward and objective, but it’s so much more complex than

that—especially when you add in non-speech sounds, especially when you

consider that everybody has a different way of speaking. —Sean Zdenek

In our field even though composition and communication

get hinged together, we have always talked about speech and writing as

two different things, and they are and they will be, but I think

captioning has this uncanny ability to merge those two back again to

turn speech into writing and vice versa. —Brenda Brueggemann

I think at the core of what I’m thinking about is how our

technologies and tools and then everything else like this room…which

then you have to start thinking about architecture and especially

modernist architecture, which was really meant to blockade the public

and the private and noise and signal and everything like that. So that’s

where maybe the work of Rickert and ambient rhetoric comes in, right?

That there are all of these factors in terms of the way that we produce.

It’s not, “I have an idea,” and I turn it into this thing. It’s all of

these things from the file format to the bugs of the recorder we’re

using to construction sounds in the background. I think it’s really just

taking an approach and saying, there are all these other things that

we’re playing with, not on. —Steven Hammer

Sometimes words are not adequate to describe music. And I

think we all know that from listening to music—that music is

extra-discursive at times. It’s felt in your body. It’s what Steph

Ceraso calls “a multimodal event” where you’re feeling it physically and

mentally feeling it. And it is logical and emotional and

bodily. —Crystal VanKooten

For our 25th episode, we talked with other academic podcasters about the process and practice of podcasting and about sound production more generally. So for this episode, we were interested in thinking again about what it means to produce sound, to manipulate it through editing, to use it to craft logical and ethical and emotional arguments, to translate that meaning into words through transcribing, captioning, or asking students to critically reflect on their rhetorical aural choices. Episode 28 features interviews with Sean Zdenek, Brenda Brueggemann, Steven Hammer, and Crystal VanKooten that took place at this year’s CCCC in Tampa. In some clips, you may hear wind on the water, academic conversations echoing up from the lobby of the convention center, people clapping at the end of presentations. How do those ambient sounds complement or interfere with the content of the interviews? What are the implications of removing all the background sound from these clips, to make the audio as “polished” as possible? How do non-speech sounds contribute to how we make meaning?

To access a PDF of the full transcript of this episode, please click here.The songs sampled in this episode are all by Podington Bear: “Crunk in the Trunk,” “Alien Language,” “Human Transition,” and “Old Skin.

I started the research really struggling to understand how seemingly good people could say such awful things, and that’s really what I wanted to understand. I think what I found is that people are not all one thing or another. They aren’t as awful as they seem in a particular moment. Our students are struggling I think to make sense of the world. –Jennifer Trainor

As educators, we ought to discuss issues of racism and structural inequality in our classes. How do we do this with students who are in the process of forming their identities, beliefs, and values? Episode 27 features an interview with Jennifer Seibel Trainor, author of Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School. In this episode, Trainor addresses anti-racist pedagogies and how we can talk about racism productively with students in the classroom, particularly when students may feel defensive about these issues. Trainor argues that we need to read deeper into the racist comments students make in the classroom to try to understand why they’re saying what they’re saying. You can read a review of Trainor’s book in Composition Forum here: http://compositionforum.com/issue/19/rethinking-racism-review.phpTo access a PDF of the full transcript of this episode, please click here.The songs sampled in this episode are “Biomythos” by Revolution Void and “From Stardust to Sentience” by High Places.