Across SU, departments use the X00 designation both to offer one-time topics that aren't otherwise found in their curricula and to pilot new courses before submitting them for "regularization"; specifically, 400 is used to identify a senior level offering. As the WP continues to innovate and refine its curriculum, you can expect to see "400" appear in the schedule of classes often. Last year, Lois Agnew's "The Ethics of Rhetoric: Truth or Flattery?" and George Rhinehart's "Writing With Video" bore the 400 designation and last Fall Krista Kennedy offered "Information Design."
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“I think the most interesting part of this course is connecting cultural, historical readings to modern day rhetorical practices. This course requires the students to work hard to think of communication and rhetoric as a world-wide activity that exists outside the confines of Aristotle and Greek rhetorical practices. It is valuable for us, as rhetoric majors, to explore different sorts of rhetoric and prepare ourselves for a global business environment.”
—Francesca Merwin |
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“Global Rhetorics focuses on different cultures' views on rhetoric as a sort of philosophy. For instance, we studied Asian rhetoric through the Dao of Rhetoric and Mao, Indian rhetoric through The Bhagavad Gita and Confucius, African rhetoric through Campbell, and so on. By relating these ideals to our Western theories, the class brought to my attention that rhetoric should be viewed in a cross-cultural context because it is present in all countries and every aspect of life.”
—Dani Haygood |
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Focus on 400: Global Rhetorics
“Global Rhetorics” may seem like a massive undertaking for a 14-week course, but Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Iswari Pandey has designed a course that enables students to easily explore and experience a sampling of different cultures and contexts. Aware that the sheer scale of the title Global Rhetorics may scare some students away, Professor Pandey acknowledges that it is “a pretty big topic, almost an impossible idea . . . .” Pandey's main goal in the course was to "introduce students to different rhetorical conventions and practices in relation to the Greco-Roman tradition that they are familiar with. Studying non-western rhetorics on their own terms would be ideal but a tall order for an undergraduate course. Instead, a relational approach would help students learn enough to change the way they understand how rhetoric operates not only in other cultures but also their own.” Global rhetorics are, then, understood as emerging from and responding to specific, local contexts and non-local, transnational forces.
Pandey has carefully constructed a syllabus that examines a broad range of texts from Africa, South America, Asia, as well as Ancient Greece and the US. Students explore Eastern and Western constructions and analyze how rhetoricical practices can differ from culture to culture within these broad constructions. Students are asked to read book chapters and and journal articles or watch short videos and then respond to them through blog posts and classroom discussions. Pandey’s goal is that through these readings and discussions students will look beyond “narrow bounds of Athenian rhetoric and look at how other cultures and communities view and value rhetoric.”
Professor Pandey has always had a deep interest in transnational communication and the linguistic issues that underlie cross-cultural contacts. Professor Pandey has used this passion to guide and “expose students to different ways that rhetoric can be understood and broaden our view of rhetoric."
For the culminating projects, students have been working on a topic of personal interest, under Pandey’s guidance, and examining how it functions rhetorically on a global scale. Pandey notes that the most interesting part of the class for him has been seeing what the students have decided to undertake for their final projects and the ways they are executing them combining, as they do, traditional academic research and multimedia. Students’ projects range from rhetorical studies of corporate commercials across cultures, cross-cultural politics of containment in Disney movies and McDonalds, (post)colonial sexualities, corporate and advocacy blogs for transnational audiences, and global circulation of the rhetorics of eugenics and mental (dis)abilities to the language of consensus and (non-) violence and protest rhetorics in the Middle East and North Africa. Spending time with one particular topic and moving it from an idea to a full-fledged argument allows students to put all their new knowledge, interests, and rhetorical abilities to work for one final project. However, in the end they have all come to realize that this is only just the beginning of appreciating what is Global Rhetorics.
—story by Samantha Paige Stark
Writing Program Intern &
WRT 400: Global Rhetorics Student |
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