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I’ve returned from ATTW and CCCC and while trying to recover from my usual post-air-travel illness I’ve been reading some of my colleagues’ thoughtful blog posts wherein they reflect upon their experiences.

I have a lot to say about ATTW and CCCC, but I’ll keep this brief.

First, I was pleased to have a student, Amanda Haruch, accompany me for both conferences. I’m beginning to understand how important it is to generate interest in rhetoric and writing studies as a life cause if we plan to sustain our field.

Second, ATTW is my conference home. The panels, papers, and presentations were engaging, thoughtful, well-prepared, and the audience members were truly present. I wish ATTW were longer than a single day. I’m also very pleased to see the number of medical and scientific rhetoric related panels represented at ATTW this year.

Finally, I can’t help but feel like I could have done a better job at both of my talks. In particular, I had the privilege to be a part of two really smart panels–the latter (at C’s) was on “Contesting Methodological Boundaries in Rhetoric and Writing.” Brian McNely, Scott Graham, John Monberg, and I designed this panel based on our interest in expanding our field’s investigative gaze beyond talk and text.

In his thoughtful post about C’s, Derek Mueller articulates the following questions he was left with after our panel’s presentation:

What makes surfacing decidable for a researcher? And, How much context is enough (when enlarging contexts)? And, To what extent is correctable black-boxing turning to verbal references for relief from self-evidentiary or natural-appearing visuals?

These are some really excellent questions. I can’t quite wrap my head around the last one, but I feel a tug to respond to the first two.

We always “surface” things as researchers. And we’re always making (sometimes implicit) decisions as researchers about what gets surfaced. And this is perhaps the point: it has become almost over determined in our field that talk and text are the most important “surfaceable” phenomena. I’d like to part ways with this assumption. And if we doubt that this is not a prevailing perspective, then I will have to take some time to quantify how many sessions I went to where analyses of websites and documents were the primary means by which researchers made claims about writing and rhetoric.

One researcher in particular analyzed the ways farmers deployed “organic,” “all natural,” and “pesticide free,” but her claims were rooted only in how that language was deployed on farmers’ websites. It was not evident she’d ever asked farmers about what kind of farming they were actually doing in order to assert themselves (via their website) as organic, all natural, or pesticide free farmers. Her research is full of potential were she to step outside the text.

Another researcher whose work was also full of potential involved interviewing a midwife and the ways she negotiated the complexity of doing her job, caring for mothers and their babies, while having to work within a traditional western medical hospital system. Here no texts were surfaced in this research.

In both cases, the research seemed to be lopsided in some way. I longed to better understand how and why the researcher decided to focus on what she decided to focus on.

I’m proposing not that we have more context or more surfaces, but that the contexts and traces we do report on can be reviewed. It’s not that there is an a priori truth out there that we’re seeking to represent through complicated and rigorous research methods, but that we have to substantiate our claims to audiences beyond rhetoric and writing studies and that might mean we adopt and adapt methodological devices and analytic tools that attend to more than one or two data points and pet theories. I’m also wondering if our voices might be marginalized because of the assumptions outsiders might make about the political positions motivating our research. Let’s at least be honest about those positions up front by surfacing the ways we came to know what it is we say we’ve come to know.

I propose that specific grounded researcher writing practices might better facilitate this aim. These artifacts might be published alongside our data or at least in appendices and then be available for review by readers. We might not always have quantitative data, therefore. And we might not always be performing discourse analyses. But we will have observational traces, heuristics, dimmensionalizations, and theoretical memos that yield an archive of reviewable research practices that lend us credibility.

1. Create, refine, and publish samples of the various observational heuristics used to capture the complexity of a researched situation.

2. Engage in dimmensionalization activities wherein the bounding off of one code from another is traceable–visually and textually.

3. Continuous theoretical memoing. These theoretical memos become a kind of therapeutic space wherein the researcher might vent their theoretical predispositions or preoccupations, place them on a kind of digital bookshelf, revisit them later, but at least dump whatever kind of Foucaultian, Deweyan, Blablablaian philosophy runs the risk of dominating the investigative gaze at the beginning or midway through the collection and analysis of data.

This is what gets surfaced. It’s a kind of admitting, confessing, acquiescing to the reality that the very lens through which we look shapes what it is we see. So. Let’s show folks our lenses.

Does that make sense? My slides are here, by the way.