Instructor: Carter
Wednesday 4:40 PM – 7:30 PM
This course addresses research methods in Rhetoric and Composition from the 1960s to the present. Course participants perform close examinations of qualitative and quantitative studies, considering how various critical theories inform research design and reporting. Those examinations aim not toward achieving an ideal methodology, but toward shaping scholarly practices that are appropriate to our chosen topics as well as the material and social circumstances of our investigations. We attend to how method at once enables and constrains what we learn from each study, and how our choice of analytical terms makes certain insights available while obscuring others. Key areas of inquiry include writing pedagogy, grounded theory, autoethnography, decoloniality, queer methods, and digital communications, though weekly activities will accommodate the particular interests of class participants. As we discuss those interests, we also review methodological interventions by disciplinary historians, feminists, proponents of disability studies, theorists of race relations, and teacher-scholars working in transnational contexts.