Assuming Ambiguity

This dissertation considers ambiguity throughout the history of Rhetoric and Composition, a discipline generally concerned with clarity, concision, and correctness as key attributes of “good” writing. In the first part of this dissertation, I draw from the theoretical contributions made by Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and show how the central tensions she wrestled with in that text mirror the tensions experienced at the dawn of this discipline, tensions that have (re)emerged throughout subsequent decades. I trace the disciplinary conversations in the decades following World War II, as Rhetoric and Composition sought to define itself and its space in increasingly neoliberal, corporate college and university structures. Summarizing field conversations around the problems of relevance, content/standards, teachers and students, and assessment, I show how the gap between disciplinary knowledge/best practices bumps up against the demands of a profit-driven university. This project offers another way of thinking and doing through a praxis of ambiguity, explored and articulated through five guiding verbs: imagine, emerge, expand, intuit, and situate. Through these guiding verbs, I explore how these verbs and the scholarship that supports them may offer ways to intentionally disrupt the presence of white supremacy culture in teaching, research, and administration in the discipline by making visible the characteristics of this culture and sketching the outlines of an interventional framework based on a praxis of ambiguity, offering avenues for future research.