Going Public
What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement
“Focusing on the many ways women make meaning in the world through these tactics creates a space in rhetorical studies that moves beyond the rhetorical acts we so often hear about and study to consider those that are often invisible, despite many women participating in them.”
—Courtney Adams Wooten, George Mason University
“The focus [of Women’s Way of Making] is on rhetoric, e.g., women rhetorician's ethos and authority from body experience, rhetorical awareness in embodiment movement, rhetorical value of text and art together, arguments using deeds as well as words, and women mentors in academic writing program administration. . . . Recommended”
—CHOICE
"Each section included thought-provoking challenges to things we all have taken for granted. After reading each section, I am inspired to live even more intentionally."
—Women & Learning
Women’s Ways of Making draws attention to material practices—those that the hands perform—as three epistemologies—an episteme, a techne, and a phronesis—that together give pointed consideration to making as a rhetorical embodied endeavor. Combined, these epistemologies show that making is a form of knowing that (episteme), knowing how (techne), and wisdom-making (phronesis).
Since the Enlightenment, embodied knowledge creation has been overlooked, ignored, or disparaged as inferior to other forms of expression or thinking that seem to leave the material world behind. Privileging the hand over the eye, as the work in this collection does, thus problematizes the way in which the eye has been co-opted by thinkers as the mind’s tool of investigation. Contributors to this volume argue that other senses—touch, taste, smell, hearing—are keys to knowing one’s materials. Only when all these ways of knowing are engaged can making be understood as a rhetorical practice.
In Women’s Ways of Making contributors explore ideas of making that run the gamut from videos produced by beauty vloggers to zine production and art programs at women’s correctional facilities. Bringing together senior scholars, new voices, and a fresh take on material rhetoric, this book will be of interest to a broad range of readers in composition and rhetoric.
Contributors: Angela Clark-Oates, Jane L. Donawerth, Amanda Ellis, Theresa M. Evans, Holly Fulton-Babicke, Bre Garrett, Melissa Greene, Magdelyn Hammong Helwig, Linda Hanson, Jackie Hoermann, Christine Martorana, Aurora Matzke, Jill McCracken, Karen S. Neubauer, Daneryl Nier-Weber, Sherry Rankins-Roberson, Kathleen J. Ryan, Rachael Ryerson, Andrea Severson, Lorin Shellenberger, Carey Smitherman-Clark, Emily Standridge, Charlese Trower, Christy I. Wenger, Hui Wu, Kathleen Blake Yancey
