RESEARCH
Living Newspaper Plays in the Classroom: Composing and Performing Citizenship
(Classroom Research)
What happens when composition students are asked to collaboratively research, compose and perform plays about real social issues with different characters representing different stakeholders? This project explores the results of classroom research that asked students to do just that, by assigning students a project modeled after the Living Newspaper genre (popular in the 1930's). Using grounded theory research methodology, this project argues that theatrical assignments like the Living Newspaper stand to facilitate, for composition students, an experience of civic participation in which the conflict between individual and collective is resolved, but also stand to give students practice with critical literacy skills and highlight, for students, the importance of emotional address and empathetic understanding in civic engagement. (Article in Review)
Democratizing Cultural Production: A Theory Cultivated with Hallie Flanagan Davis (Dissertation)
The gaps my dissertation fills are two-fold. First, I recover an important but overlooked female rhetorician from the interwar period, Hallie Flanagan Davis. Flanagan Davis was the national director of the American Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939), a project referred to as “one of the most important things that ever happened in a democratic government” (Orson Welles), but I would add that she was also an insightful cultural critic and rhetorical activist. She wrote several books and many articles and speeches, but declined to ever write down her ideal visions or theories about how theater could improve democracy, explaining the urge as “tempting” but that her focus was, instead, on capturing the stories of her work and the lessons gleaned from those stories as they happened (Letter to Malcolm Cowley).
Through extensive archival research, grounded theory methodology, and the help of a modern rhetorical lens, I analyze Flanagan Davis’s arguments and practices, and work to cultivate them into a rhetorical theory that can be applied today. This cultivated rhetorical theory—which I refer to as Democratic Cultural-Rhetorical Infrastructure (DCRI) theory—fills a second gap by providing insight into how to democratize the production and analysis of culture, and encourage dialogue and appreciation across groups who understand themselves to be different: prominent concerns for public sphere rhetoricians and critical literacy pedagogues (Long, Parks, Sheridan, Warner). I argue that DCRI theory is increasingly relevant and applicable today, as theatrical expressions are easier to circulate than ever before (through our many media-sharing platforms), and cultural divisiveness, at least in the US in the year 2018, seems to be an ongoing trend. (Click here for access to full dissertation.)