Carolyn Ostrander

Note:
Except for a few edits to reflect the dissertation’s completion, this draft discussion of my research interests was written in 2011. An update is pending.

Research Interests : the rhetorical “extracurriculum”, rural rhetorics, and feminist rhetorical historiography;language and identity in d/Deaf communities; orality, “signality” and literacy; rhetoric and ritual; queer and disability rhetorics; rhetorics of activism; performed rhetorics of poetry; access to venues; visual rhetorics and performance; modalities of expression (spoken, signed, written) and orthographies of performance; data literacies in workplace discourse.

Education in America sets future academics and future street people side by side in classes, at least in theory. We can point to schools of privilege or neglect, but we can also point to students within any classroom from K-12 to graduate school who will ultimately find themselves welcomed or barred from the academic enclave by some accident of identification. Access to higher education, access to publication and access to economic support for intellectual pursuits are rare rewards for the urge to self-expression. I’m very interested in the cultural and political sources of this privilege. This may, in turn, be the source of my fascination with the rhetorical practices of those who receive no formal recognition for their persistent intellectual, creative, and political pursuits.

My research activities in graduate school reflected this fascination:

• a dissertation on the extracurricular rhetorical practices of a rural organization, the Patrons of Husbandry (the Grange)
• a chapter based on preliminary research for the dissertation topic in an edited collection,
• conference presentations on identity/ability activism and Postidentity theory,
• a presentation on mediated communication and the interpreter role,
• conference presentation on Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (Chaim Perelman’s often forgotten collaborator on The New Rhetoric), as well as
• my ongoing search for flexible and reliable interdisciplinary methodologies.

“Rural Rhetorics and Ritual Practices: Gender, Labor and Cultural Literacies as Mutual Rhetorical Education in the Early Grange” was submitted in 2019. This dissertation extended understanding of rhetorical practices in the 19th century in three overlapping areas: rural literacies and rhetorics, rhetorical arguments about and by women entering the “public sphere,” and the transmission of informal or vernacular rhetorics through mutual education, which I defined as extracurricular (Gere) peer-to-peer shared instruction in which the roles of teacher and student are interchangeable. The site of inquiry, the Grange (also known as the Patrons of Husbandry) was founded in 1867 as a national secret agricultural fraternity. The Grange (which is still active today) has several unusual features which I argued would be of interest to scholars of the history of rhetoric. First, its rhetorical practices have helped sustain a particular discourse about membership in rural communities, and offer an important counterweight to the assumption that rhetoric is an urbane – and urban – phenomenon. Second, the Grange in the late nineteenth century earned a reputation as a breeding ground for a particular mode of platform speaking and public advocacy for the agricultural sector during the historical period known as the “Progressive Era.” The mechanisms by which this sponsorship (Brandt) of oratory, composition, debate and general advocacy was carried out externally to traditional institutional sites of rhetorical training (that is, schools and colleges) add to the list of known tools and sites of extracurricular (Gere) rhetorical practices. Third, the Grange was structured to admit both men and women as full voting members and officers, an unusual characteristic for fraternal organizations of the time. The complex interplay between these elements created unexpected extensions of rhetorical training and access to platforms for rhetorical self-representation for a significant number of rural inhabitants. This included a large number of women in an era when women’s right to address a public audience was still hotly debated, offering a new site in which to explore the rhetoric of women’s rights and women’s roles. Fourth, the study of ritual performances in the Grange offers insights into the construction of public memory and sensus communis (common-sense or shared cultural knowledge) through repeated actions and discourse. Finally, because the Grange’s discursive patterns construct particular views of agricultural labor, of gendered roles and of rural life they offer important insights into a cultural discourse that has not received much attention [cite Donehower, Schell & Hogg].

The initial questions which prompted my research exploration are related to these overlaps but are focused by a gendered lens: 1) Why did the Grange founders admit women, and what kind of membership was offered to them? 2) Why was mutual education emphasized in the Grange, and what kinds of opportunities did this emphasis afford women? 3) How did the Grange’s sponsorship of rhetorical training affect women’s agency and negotiation of roles, and how was that sponsorship affected in turn? 4) How were the rural nature of the organization and the social construction of men and women within the wider culture reflected in rhetorical strategies embedded in Grange rituals and Grange discourses?

Because I am drawn to research projects that lie slightly beyond the bounds of the mainstream rhetorical tradition, I believe that my work needs to be readable as solid research, but also needs to push at the boundaries of what counts as “solid” – that it needs to be both open to and capable of introducing new subject matter, new points of view, and also new kinds of evidence and new ways of assessing that evidence. I am particularly interested in methodologies that expand my ability to work within intersectional as well as interdisciplinary frameworks. I seek to incorporate the insights of disability studies, of critical race theory, of class studies and queer and crip theory – but also the glimpses of new frameworks made possible by placing diverse methodological practices from the social sciences and technical/information fields as well as from the humanities into conversation with each other.

I see it as my responsibility to make sense of the wide array of tools in my toolkit, and to learn to use them productively in the service of good scholarship. It is not enough to be “creative” or “experimental” in my approach: I have to demonstrate the value of such experimentation – for example, to show how a disability studies critique provides important insights into the rhetorical construction of gendered nineteenth-century “separate spheres,” to know when and why a quantitative demographic survey can be useful in constructing an argument about rhetorical practices, and to demonstrate the relevance of analyzing old ritual performances in the context of new technologies for creating and disseminating visual rhetorics.

Finally, I feel compelled to return continually to the problem of how we recognize the “tactical,” untrained and unsanctioned use of these methodologies, the theories behind them, and the rhetorical practices that they bring into focus outside the specialized laboratories of the academy and carefully preserved official archives. This aspect of my research is particularly visible in the dissertation, which explores the Grange’s development as a sponsor of vernacular rhetorical practices and extracurricular rhetorical training, both as oratory and composition and as ritual practice.

The varied methods and genres employed by Grange “lecturers” to recruit and train participants for educational, entertainment, and advocacy roles have played a continuing role in the organizations survival, and demonstrate the robust potential of rhetorical teaching and learning outside the academy. This, in turn, has implications for composition, communication and rhetorical pedagogy within the academy, particularly in regard to the role of peer tutoring and peer review in Writing Centers and classrooms. I hope to contribute to the field of Composition/Rhetoric by enlarging our appreciation of students’ potential to join actively in their own educations, as well as contributing to a more general understanding of rhetorical practices in a particular time and place.