Embodied Rhetoric in Scenes of Production: The Case of the Coffeehouse develops and enacts a framework for conceptualizing and studying rhetoric and writing practice. This framework develops insights of theorists like Michel De Certeau, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Bruno Latour who call for attention to the actions, practices, and intentionality of active bodies for meaning making. The framework further places the insights of these theorists in a socially and materially rich context that emphasizes the role of non-human actors in scenes of production, including writing technologies, places, and times. I enact this theoretical framework through an empirical approach for accessing the everyday practice and experience of rhetoric and writing in a local Michigan coffee shop. This empirical approach focused on the Gone Wired Café in Lansing, Michigan and drew on field observations and videotaped writing sessions to access places and moments of bodily action, as well as interviews to collect individuals' stories of use and routine. Through this analysis I argue that the coffeehouse embodied is not only a civic institution, but also a workplace where writers construct individualized writing spaces around mobile technologies. Central to this work that takes place in the contemporary coffeehouse is the role of spatial practices related to maintaining proximity and distance to objects that matter to writing--including people and technologies. Coffeehouse writers often go to great lengths to preserve a level of interaction with people and objects that facilitates work but maintains sociality, avoiding lengthy face-to-face conversations in favor of brief interchanges through social media. Drawing on the moment-by-moment unfolding of participants' work sessions in dialogue with their stories, I find that coffeehouse writing unfolds in repetitive, patterned, and systematic ways. In routine writing tasks, participants draw on habits from other parts of their lives and draw on writing practices that have been successful in the past. As they draw on common temporal topoi including crunch time and routine activity, writing emerges as an ongoing system of arrangement and creation that builds on stores of past behaviors and materials. Finally, many coffeehouse writers use social media to structure their writing time/space, indicating that contemporary social media is more that just distraction in the coffeehouse, even for academic writers who merge it as a planned part of writing activity or who "wander" when facing non-routine writing tasks. I demonstrate how acts of digital connecting are central to work done in the coffeehouse, both as a contemporary backdrop for mobile composing and as a central tool for building relationships and audiences for writing. The implications of this activity, and of this way of looking, suggest that we may indeed benefit from using the virtual/physical body and its movements as an indicator of rhetorical practice as the nature of work and workplaces rapidly changes. The research further suggests that we consider the role of knowledge work practices in writing, especially as we design contemporary pedagogical interventions
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