Transfigurative Access and Journal-Keeping Practice: Theorizing Anti-Oppressive Rhetorical Scholarship

Abstract

This dissertation theorizes practices of personal writing and reflection—specifically, journal-keeping—within the context of college writing classrooms. Journal-keeping enables practitioners to understand and shift relations of power and oppression that are forged through everyday habits of meaning-making. Journal-keeping theory addresses the need for college writing instruction to better support the difficult and vulnerable self-investigative work of anti-racism, feminism, disability justice, climate justice, and/or decolonization. Emerging from reflection on the author’s own teaching and journal-keeping practices, the project offers a theoretical approach to these questions: what if college writing pedagogies held personal writing practice as a core component of anti-oppressive teaching and learning? How would it work in college classrooms? What kinds of transformations could it make more possible? Closely reading work by Sara Ahmed, adrienne maree brown, Jay Dolmage, Tanya Titchkosky, and others, the four main essays here present a theoretical approach to journal-keeping by leveraging tropes, practice, and figurative access. As methodological concepts, tropes and practice each refer to different yet interdependent ways of thinking about what we’re doing in rhetorical scholarship. “Methodology of Tropes,” a study of scholarly work on tropes and rhetorical figures as key resources of meaning-making, identifies some critical methods of troping, or intentional ways of exploiting the functions of tropes to engage in critical analysis and action upon social and cultural discourses. “Methodology of Practice” draws from Buddhist and Black Feminist teachings to understand practice as a framework for critical reflection on meaning-making that accounts for both personal intentions and larger systems of value. Figurative access and journal-keeping can each be thought of as different practical combinations of the methodologies of tropes and practice. “The Question of Figurative Access” asks how metaphors and other rhetorical figures can affect access and accessibility. Figurative access deepens both discursive and material dimensions of access and accessibility by building on the work of disability theorists and rhetorical theorists. Figurative access also helps make sense of how the methodologies of tropes and practice come together in the concept of practice-tropes: figures that organize patterned ways of doing things. “A Constellation of Practice-Tropes for Journal-Keeping Pedagogy” recognizes the difficulty of incorporating vulnerable personal material in classroom contexts and explores this difficulty using figurative access and practice-tropes. Reviewing literatures of therapeutic journaling and artist sketchbooks, and reflecting on the author’s own personal and pedagogical practices, the essay looks closely at eight interrelated practice-tropes for using journals: Keeping, Sharing, Devices, Experiment, Expression, Exercise, Containment, and Return—to explore how practitioners can use such concepts to reflect on and organize journal-keeping practices in their own particular learning contexts.