During the fall and winter of AY 2019–20, our group considered the theme “Borders and Belonging,” which aligned with the UCI Humanities Center’s plans for events and programming during this school year. We felt that the theme was especially timely as continued immigration debates contrasted the 150th and 100th anniversaries of the 15th Amendment and 19th Amendment that, together, granted all citizens the right to vote, and therefore belonging in the political sphere, regardless of race or gender. For our reading group, we were interested in the ways that rhetoric interacts with cultural, political, and educational borders.

Our fall quarter meeting convened on Mon., Nov. 4th. We selected readings that would help us begin to think about what “Borders and Belonging” means in rhetorical studies:

• Diane Davis, Introduction from Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (U of Pittsburgh P, 2010)
• Karma Chávez, “Border (In)Securities: Normative and Differential Belonging in the LGBTQ and Immigrants Rights Discourse” (Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010)
• Linda Flower, “Difference-Driven Inquiry: A Working Theory of Local Public Deliberation” (Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 4, 2016)

Our discussion considered how these three pieces, which come from different corners of the field, treat their subjects and what different levels of perspective they provide (i.e., philosophical, transnational, local/institutional). We spent some time unpacking Davis’s theories, parsing terms such as rhetoricity versus rhetoricality, and discussing what makes her work particularly appealing in current rhetorical scholarship. We examined Chávez’s use of differential belonging (à la Chela Sandoval and Aimee Carrillo Rowe) and how this concept relates to and complicates Davis’s definition of belonging. For Flower’s piece, we reflected on the meanings of belonging in institutional and community contexts and how these meanings affect rhetorical approaches. Our conversation concluded by circling back to one of our first questions—what is the scope of “rhetoric”?

Our winter quarter meeting was held on Wed., Feb. 5th. We explored who “belongs” in the writing classroom and in rhet/comp scholarship. We selected works that engage disability studies, raise questions about accessibility and design, and focus on the creation and dissolution of borders—manifest in built environments, language, and politics:

• Michelle Jarman, Leila Monaghan, and Alison Quaggin Harkin, eds., “Introduction: Entering the Field” and “From Poison Ivy to Live Oak: How Transferring Colleges Changed My Perception of Disability” from Barriers and Belonging: Personal Narratives of Disability (Temple UP, 2017)
• Kendall Gerdes, “Trauma, Trigger Warnings, and the Rhetoric of Sensitivity” (Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 1, 2019)
• Melanie Yergeau, et al., “Over There” and “Reason” from Multimodality in Motion: Disability & Kairotic Spaces(Kairos, vol. 18, no. 1, 2013)

We began by sharing how we use trigger or content warnings in our own teaching as well as some of the considerations we make when introducing and discussing potentially sensitive material with our students. We looked at how Gerdes’s work is embedded theoretically in Davis’s (which we read in the fall). For the excerpts from Jarman et al., we discussed the role of our students’ narratives in guiding our teaching and awareness. We considered the affordances of the online format of Yergeau et al.’s work and how multimodality could be further incorporated to support the authors’ assertions.

In our spring quarter meeting (also the first-ever RRG on Zoom due to the coronavirus!), we discussed different approaches for next year’s reading group to explore the reciprocal, interdisciplinary relationships between critical theory and rhetoric and composition. We asked questions like, how do we, in rhetoric and composition, frame our methodologies in conversation with other strains of thought? How do other fields draw upon our scholarship? We explored some approaches within rhetoric and composition to political economy for our discussion on methodology as well as how similar approaches could inform our reading group next year.

• “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy” by Catherine Chaput, 2010
• The Conclusion to Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates by Catherine Chaput
• “Alliances, Assemblages, and Affects: Three Moments of Building Collective Working-Class Literacies” by Jennifer Harding, Jessica Pauszek, Nick Pollard, and Steve Parks