Articles for Next Week

I just sent the articles for next week. They should give you a sense of three fairly different ways animals can be treated rhetorically. I had the pleasure of seeing Davis and Hawhee present their papers at RSA 2010, before they were published, and I loved how their takes on the matter came from completely different angles, yet were still very useful to think about for my own work. As we discussed in class this week, consilience comes in many forms, and we can often envision our own scholarship as existing in the center of a big, messy Venn diagram overlapping in places with the work of other scholars.

The articles are as follows. Send me an email if you did not receive them yet.

Davis, Diane. "Creaturely Rhetorics." Philosophy & Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 88-94.

Hawhee, Debra. "Toward a Bestial Rhetoric." Philosophy & Rhetoric 44, no. 1 (2011): 81-87.

Parrish, Alex C. “The (Instinctual) Art of Persuasion.” The Evolutionary Review, vol.4, no. 1 (May 2013).

Class Canceled, But This Should Tide You Over

No class tomorrow. We'll consolidate our weekly activities into Thursday's class session. In the meantime, here is something that will blow your mind:


Reviving extinct species.

"Population control is one of our security precautions. There's no unauthorized breeding in Jurassic Park."

No Class Tuesday

(Repeating my email message, since some of the JMU email addresses seem to be dead ends.)


After much confusion, it has been confirmed that grad courses are canceled on assessment day (Tuesday, the 12th), as well, if they are held before 4pm. That said, the Gross text is important, so I plan to make myself available for at least an hour after class ends on Thursday, for anyone who wants to continue our discussion. (This is purely optional, and is not meant to be an official "make-up" period. I just don't want anyone short-changed if they have the desire to explore this text in greater detail.)

History of Science and Governance of Technology

Two more calls for papers, which might be of interest to participants in this course:


  HSS 2013 Annual Meeting: Call for Papers
Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Isis

Boston, Massachusetts
21-24 November 2013

The History of Science Society will hold its 2013 Annual Meeting in the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. The meeting will mark the 100th anniversary of the Society's journal Isis, one of the premiere international journals in the history of science.
Submissions on all topics are encouraged. All proposals must be submitted on the HSS Web site (http://www.hssonline.org) or on the annual meeting proposal forms that are available from the HSS Executive Office: info@hssonline.org. Participants do not need to be members of the HSS, but all participants must register for the meeting. Applicants are encouraged to propose sessions that include diverse participants: a mix of men and women, and/or a balance of professional ranks (i.e., mixing senior scholars with junior scholars and graduate students). Strong preference will be given to panels whose presenters have diverse institutional affiliations. Only one proposal per person may be submitted. An individual may only appear once on the HSS program -- workshops and other non-typical proposals are excluded from this restriction. Prior participation at the 2011 (Cleveland) or 2012 (San Diego) meetings will be taken into consideration.
All proposals (sessions, contributed papers, and posters) must be submitted by 1 April 2013 to the History of Science Society's Executive Office. Poster proposals must describe the visual material that will make up the poster. The HSS will work with organizers who wish to pre-circulate papers.
To encourage and aid the creation of panels with strong thematic coh

Kuhn, 2/7

Hi Everyone,

My apologies for the late post. If you get this in time, hopefully you can give the following sections an additional look. If not, I'll try to direct us.

I'm really fascinated by Kuhn's claim that theory selection happens by a process analogous to natural selection. He makes these claims in section XII (The Resolution of Scientific Resolutions) and at the very concluding remarks of the book (at the end of XIII, Progress through Revolutions). Let's explore these claims in more depth.

Additionally, as we conclude our talk on Kuhn, I'd like to hear more about the wider implications of his work. In considering these implications, I think it's important to keep in mind where we are on our course road map. As I see it, we've moved from a discussion of rhetoric (Aristotle and Campbell); to the historical consciousness's overt awareness of the knowledge divide--or gulf--between science and humanities (Snow); to a discussion of the ways in which science and progression thereof is not the rational "clockwork" that idealized pictures of science might imply, but rather is influenced by biases and rhetorics (Kuhn). It seems that we're aimed at a theorist who claims that rhetoric is a natural part of all reasoning, including scientific reasoning (Gross). In what way is Kuhn a logical progression from these earlier thinkers? In what ways has he influenced later, as well as current, debates? Has his work influenced scientific practice or rather, has it only sought to describe science, and why does this distinction matter?

Clearly, we've talked about some of these matters already, but I see these topics as a reasonable focus for our concluding remarks on Kuhn.

Cheers!

Michael

RSA Webinar, FYI

Of potential interest to the class:

RSA-Second Annual Graduate Student Webinar-February 15, 2013
We are pleased to announce that the Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL) at the University of Texas at Austin will host the second annual graduate student webinar on February 15, 2013, 3-5 PM CST. The DWRL will present Associate Professor Rita Raley of UC Santa Barbara and her talk “From Creative Cloning to Where-Next: Tactical Media as Speculative Practice.” In her 2009 book on the subject, Raley describes tactical media as that which “signifies the intervention and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible” (6). Raley looks through the lens of activism and aesthetics to discuss media’s ability to immediately adapt to changing material and rhetorical situations. In a continually evolving technological climate and in light of the Arab Spring’s reliance on new media platforms, for example, Raley’s discussion of the relationship between media and rhetorical practice is a significant and timely one for the rhetoric community.
Positioned at the intersection of rhetoric, writing, and technology, the DWRL dedicates itself to the identification and promotion of twenty-first century literacies. In order to further these goals, the DWRL and RSA will host a live, interactive webinar. To ensure that the webcast be readily accessible to viewers, ad-free, and offer opportunities for remote audience participation, participants will be able to use a Google+ hangout embedded on the DWRL website accompanied by a Twitter feed to ask questions and discuss the talk with one another in real time. An on-site moderator will select a few of the Twitter questions and present them to Raley during the live Q&A session.
Details about registering for the talk will be forthcoming.
RSA hosted the first graduate student webinar in 2012 to facilitate connection between graduate student chapters and to provide an opportunity to discuss matters relevant to the field across the entire RSA community.
For more information, contact:
Megan Gianfagna: megan.gianfagna@utexas.edu
Jennifer Keohane: keohane@wisc.edu
Kendall Gerdes: kendalljoy@utexas.edu

Week 4 Readings

Reposting Gwen's email:


Hi, everyone -

I can't post this on the blog, but perhaps Dr. Parrish can copy and paste this into a blog entry, so that its all together neat and tidy.

As we work on CP Snow's work this weekend, I want to forward on some items that might prove helpful.

1 - Please read the book in the following order: The Rede Lecture, A Second Look, and finally, the Introduction by Stefan Collini (as near as I can tell, Collini's Introduction was written in 2012). I think reading it with eyes as the world saw it as they came about will be insightful as you develop your opinions on the works.

2 - While Collini's Introduction very ably summarizes Snow's life and place in academia, if you would like another, unofficial resource for learning more about Snow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._P._Snow. And Stefan Collini: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/people/Collini/Stefan/

3 - This article was written 45 years after Snow's first lecture: Barash, David P. "C.P. Snow: Bridging the Two-Cultures Divide" The Cronicle of Higher Education. November 25, 2005 . If that link fails, try this: go to JMU Libraries homepage, select the "Background Information" icon in the center of the screen, enter CP Snow in "get background information about people", and the article should be one of the first to show up under "academic journals".

4 - And finally, as I finished Collini's Introduction, I was reminded of an essay by Wendell Berry, "Why I am not going to buy a computer". I haven't fully crystallized why I thought of it, but maybe we'll talk about it on Thursday.

Right, that's all for now. Gwen