THE "HUMAN" NETWORK:
DIGITAL, PROFESSIONAL, and CULTURAL ACCESS ENACTED
By
Douglas McSweeney Walls

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Rhetoric and Writing
2011

THE "HUMAN" NETWORK:
DIGITAL, PROFESSIONAL, and CULTURAL ACCESS ENACTED
By
Douglas McSweeney Walls
The idea of technological access has been a core concern in the field of rhetoric and
composition (computers and composition). Traditionally, access has been understood as a
literacy issue located in classrooms and framed in political terms such as race, class, gender,
technological materiality and activity in networked writing environments. That is to say, access
has been a trait to learn or to be possessed. Yet, with the emergence of pervasive socially
networked writing environments like Facebook and Twitter, issues of social, cultural, and
technological access express themselves much earlier in students' lives and linger throughout
professional careers. Such writing technologies collapse moments of access in activities that are
enacted across traditional private/public divides. These social writing technologies make access
harder to theorize and locate than it was even a five years ago by moving across academic
disciplinary divides like cultural rhetoric, professional writing, and computers and composition.
In this work, I update the definition of access as enacted to ask two important questions: what
does access mean today and can we locate access as it happens?
To address these questions, this dissertation builds a methodology at the level of theory
and empirical research that enables researchers, theorists, and rhetors to find specific moments of
access that span both the cultural and the technological simultaneously. I theorize and trace
access not as a trait to be assigned to individuals or in reference to specific technologies but
instead as moments of accessing enacted by people, tools, and cultures in professional and
personal lifespheres. I build my definition and methodology of access-as-enacted by drawing on

a variety of research methods (creative non-fiction, theory building critical analysis, network
analysis, and participant interview). These methods trace the professional and personal/cultural
lifesphere issues that are coordinated around and through writing technologies not by defining
access but rather by locating when and where access occurs.
This dissertation demonstrates that attention to social media, careers, and lived cultural
experiences when placed alongside traditional concerns of access give us new insights into the
interconnectedness of new media writing. Women and nonwhite ethnicities with lower social
power have spent more time struggling with the practices of access, which now include social
writing technologies. As such, their actions in social writing environments highlight the cultural
and career relationships of social writing technologies. Their actions and lived experiences index
a more accurate understanding of both cultural and technological rhetorical issues than others
who might not have to work as hard to deploy such rhetorically loaded technologies. This
dissertation helps us to understand new concerns in the field of Rhetoric and Composition about
the relationship between careers, culture, and technologically supported social media writing.

COPYRIGHT BY
DOUGLAS MCSWEENEY WALLS
2011

DEDICATION
This work is dedicated to my Father and, especially, my Mother.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am not prone to gushing, especially in print. As a writing theorist and instructor I am
somewhat out of type by claiming that there are some emotions, some experiences, which
cannot be translated into words. The irony is not lost on me. I would like to thank the Rhetoric &
Writing program at Michigan State University. I would first and foremost like to thank my
committee members– Dr. William Hart-Davidson, Dr. Malea Powell, Dr. Jeffery T. Grabill, and
Dr. Danielle Nicole Devoss for their valuable guidance, feedback, and time. I consider myself
lucky to have had each of you involved in this project.
In the last five years Stacey Pigg, Shreelina Ghosh, Michael McLeod, Madhu Narayan,
Jim Ridolfo, Donnie Sackey, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, and Sue Webb taught me a great deal
about what it means to be a colleague and a friend. Michael Wojcik and Douglas Schraufnagle
deserve special gratitude for their friendship, inspiration, and work in this last year.
I cannot express enough thanks to the women who decided to participate in this project
and cannot be identified here. Your generosity, time, and trust continue to humble me. I would
also like to thank my family for their support and belief in me despite their utter mystification as
to what I was doing while they were celebrating Christmas, Birthdays, Easter, Arbor Day, Easter
again, etc. I would especially like to thank my parents who taught me that writing was
collaborative and does work.
Finally, I would like to thank Leslie Wolcott for . . . well, she knows.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION - THE "HUMAN" NETORK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Access Granted: A Narrative Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Understanding Access: A Multidisciplinary Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Understanding Material Access to Writing Technologies: 1986-1999 . . .16
Understanding Material Access to Writing Technologies: 1999-2006 . . .18
Understanding Material Access to Writing Technologies: 2007 to 2011 .21
Locating Material Technology to Locate the Spaces and Places of Access . . . . .24
Understanding Ideological Access as Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Understanding Ideological Access as Use by Race . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Understanding Ideological Access as Use by Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Understanding Ideological Access as Theory of Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31
Disassembling Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Interruption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
CHAPTER TWO
CREATING SPACE - A THEORETICAL METHODOLOGY FOR LOCATING ENACTED
ACCESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46
Theorizing and Locating Place and Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48
Theorizing and Locating Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57
Theorizing and Locating The Rhetorical Construction of Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . .67
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
CHAPTER THREE
THE WORDS BETWEEN US - REASSEMBLING THE WORK OF BEVERLY SAUER AND
VICTOR VILLANUEVA IN TERMS OF ACCESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73
Beverly Sauer’s understanding of Cultural Matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Sauer: Space and Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79
Sauer: Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .82
Sauer: The Rhetorical Construction of Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92
Victor Villanueva’s understanding of Professional Matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .98
Villanueva: Spaces and Places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Villanueva: Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .106
Villanueva: The Rhetorical Construction of Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Interruption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .118
CHAPTER FOUR
DOWN AND "DIRTY" - AN EMPIRICAL METHODOLOGY FOR LOCATING ENACTED
ACCESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Empirical Projects on Access: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

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Getting Our Hands Dirty: The “mess” of research on access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .137
"Dirty" Research: How to Listen and See the Mess of Access Enacted . . . . . . .139
The Possibilities of “Dirty” Empirical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
“Dirty” Writing Ecologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .142
"Dirty" Conversations: Grounding a Theory of Listening . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Giving a "Dirty" Look: Grounding a Theory of Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Locating Moments of Access Enacted: A “Dirty” Empirical Pilot Study . . . . . 156
CHAPTER FIVE
MOMENTS OF ACCESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .161
Research Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .162
Visualizing Social Writing Networks as Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Visualizing Social Writing Networks as Objects: Method . . . . . . . . . . .167
Fine Grain Views of Individual User Networks: Barbara . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Fine Grain Views of Individual User Networks: Lana . . . . . . . . . . . . . .175
Listening to Moments of Enacted Access in Peoples’ lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
Listing to Coordination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
Listening to Diana’s Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Network Jumping, Enacting Accessing Across Diana's Online Networks
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Rhetorical Theory Building, Experience Becomes Enacted into Decision Making
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .188
CHAPTER SIX
CONCLUSION - ACCESS GRANTED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Can we locate access? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .191
What does access mean today? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
When access is enacted, many agents are involved . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
When access is enacted, agents coordinate other agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Access is theorized and designed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .197
Designing for Moments: Implications for Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Implications for Cultural rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Implications for Professional Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .204
Future Work and Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Final Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
APPENDIX
Appendix A: Participant Recruitment Letter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .211
WORK CITED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Polargram view of visualizing networked accessing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Figure 2: Examples of types of networks and how they enact access. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Figure 3: Different kinds of access enacted in moments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Figure 4: Counting activity in networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
Figure 5: Small talk at work, collapsing "away" from work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .174
Figure 6: Professional network access collapses without embodied presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Figure 7: Peers network does not drop as much. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

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Chapter One
Introduction - The "Human" Network
“It’s nobody’s business,” Mami would say . . . I can’t just say nothing. But there’s Mami and the
Latino ways: private things should remain private. So, play out the tensions.
Victor Villanueva Bootstraps, Notes from an Academic of Color
Welcome. Welcome to a brand new day, a new way of getting things done. Welcome to a place
where maps are rewritten and remote villages are included. A place where body language is
business language, where people subscribe to people not magazines, and the team you follow
now follows you. Welcome to a place where a wedding is captured and will be captured again
and again. Where books rewrite themselves. Where a phone doubles as a train ticket. Where
businesses are born, countries are transformed, and where we’re more powerful together than
we could ever be apart.
Welcome to the human network.
Cisco Systems, “Cisco Anthem” spoken over The Who’s Baba O’Riley (Teenage Wasteland)
This dissertation is about what access might mean today and if we can locate it. Access is
usually discussed in terms of technological access or access to systems, yet increasingly we live
in a world where issues of technological access have become inescapably linked to issues of
culture. Rather than setting out by focusing on what is being accessed (technology, culture,
ideology, literacy, etc.) as research on access usually does, I intend with my work to complicate
the very notion of access as a trait. The dissertation takes its name from Cisco Systems branding
and advertising campaign. Cisco Systems is a publicly traded worldwide company that makes a
large variety of networked technology from consumer wifi routers to the backbone
infrastructures of the global internet. Anyone who watches Sunday news shows or public
television is bound to be familiar with the Cisco Anthem as a commercial piece or their corporate
branding “Welcome to the human network” set unironically to The Who’s "Baba O'Riley"
commonly thought of by the song's most well remembered refrain, "Teenage Wasteland." In the
long form, global images appear rapidly on the screen. A brightly colored wedding in India, a
remote village in Nepal, a young white male in a European style café in world football colors,

1

Tibetan Buddhist monks huddled around a laptop, Japanese businessmen around a desk in suits,
and lots of computers and phones. What one doesn’t see is exactly what Cisco makes.
We don’t see Cisco’s technological network backend. We don’t see racks and racks of
servers or server farms. We don’t see call centers or engineers struggling to design routers. We
don’t see people struggling with getting a device connected. The viewer does not have any sense
of history of how any of the people we are seeing got those technologies in the first place or
figured out how to do any of the activities. Cisco knows that routers don’t capture the
imagination the same way people-using technology does. No matter what one is doing, leave that
to Cisco. We don’t see the struggle of being networked in any way. After all, books rewrite
themselves. Cultures come together unproblematically. We don’t even see the tensions that
Villanueva alludes to, tensions between self and a dominant culture, between a profession and
experience, tensions that might mean, literally, that which we do should not be anyone’s actual
business. Yet, there is something real about the fact that without a technological back end, the
very thing Cisco sells, there would be no “human network” to promote. In an odd way, Cisco is
trying to see itself by making itself and its goods invisible and focusing on a “human network.”
The “human” network is one that Cisco would have us believe that they enact and coordinate all
the while trying to remain as invisible as possible.
Technological access means something different today than it did even five years ago. In
the early years of desk top publishing and mass internet use, access in Rhetoric and Composition
used to mean addressing a “gap” in a digital divide. It used to mean providing Composition
courses that brought marginalized students from nonstandard Englishes (i.e. not European
American) up to college level. It used to mean getting a good job, a career. That is to say, access
is one of the main values that Rhetoric and Composition itself brought to education. This

2

commitment means in a vast and shifting world means we must continue to reexamine what does
access means today? And can we even locate access?
This dissertation is an attempt to develop a methodology to locate access as something
deeply distributed rather than as a trait that someone or something has. Here I use methodology
to mean both a theoretical and empirical form of coordination that helps us see where access
happens, when it happens, and what agents are involved in those moments. In an effort to locate
access, theoretically I draw on a great deal of the totality of Rhetoric and Composition but most
especially I draw on theories of Cultural rhetoric and Professional Writing to broaden our
perspectives of access beyond just the classroom. Along the way, I draw on a lot of “personal”
writing to locate my own rhetorical theory building and moments of access. These
“interruptions” have been attempts to locate the complex nature of access as a sustained activity
in my own career and educational process. The interruptions also locate myself as a researcher in
the voices of other theorists. Rather than a single trait that can be assigned or taught, access is
something of a practice that is deeply distributed between spaces and places, between identity
and cultural experience, and deeply related to what the body means in any given rhetorical
situation. Access, then, is something that is managed rather than something that is gained.

Access Granted: A Narrative Account
I had really wanted to get in to Digital Media And Composition (DMAC). By “get in” I
mean not only have the money to go but also to meet and study with people like Cynthia Selfe,
Beverly Moss, and Scott DeWitt. In my work at the Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE)
center, I had gotten to meet Dr. Selfe, even have lunch with her when she came in as an external
expert for WIDE’s research unit evaluation. That had been a big deal for me. I had written about
her work for my masters thesis. Plus, I had wanted to take a class from another school. There had

3

been another opportunity to take classes at other Big Ten universities for a semester but I had
someone in my life who I had convinced to interrupt her own life to come to Lansing. That had
made it pretty impossible to say, “Hey, you know that job you just got after looking for four
months? Quit it. Were moving to Happy Valley so I can take a semester at Penn State.”
Here is what I had learned so far about careers at MSU. As I had said during my job
campus visit, “Working at a WIDE and working with Native Americans in my program has
taught me a valuable lesson: alliances matter.” I had learned that the relationships I had to MSU
were a responsibility as well as an advantage and that one cultivated alliances by doing things for
others that were valuable to them. So when the call came out on the PhD list serve for a free trip
to DMAC hosted by The Ohio State, I wrote up a letter where I said just that. I knew that I could
be a representative of WIDE there. I knew I could look and listen for opportunities in other
participants' projects to work with WIDE while I was there. Oh sure, I listed what it could do for
me but I am sure everyone does those things. I was one of two who got to go. Lucky, I thought to
myself.
While I had had to go cheap on living accommodations the camp/class was fun. I could
tell it was more challenging for the faculty who had come to take the camp. They were trying to
figure out how to “sell” technology to English departments. I didn’t have that pressure. As
someone who would have to make those arguments soon, I really paid attention to trying to
figure out the warrants of their comments about technology. This group of attendees and
instructors were a lively, excited, and enthusiastic bunch willing to put aside their reserve and
inhibitions to really discuss and wrap their heads around what was being presented to them.
Conversations moved through the first week at a very quick pace and often extended into our
“off” time around lunch and dinner or just running into other attendees over coffee. Because

4

many of the ideas or the technologies (with the exception of Adobe’s Flash. Damn you, Flash!) I
was being exposed to were not particularly new or challenging I was having fun. A lot of fun. I
mean, playing around with words and ideas and talking were the reasons I became a teacher. I
liked it.
The class/camp was all those things, until we got to the issue of “race” and “technology.”
The first Friday morning was going to be dedicated to the issue. I was excited by the idea
of getting to discuss some ideas I was mulling at the time about Identity as Informatics and what
that might mean. I was excited about getting to discuss with other smart people the history of
technological adaptation and hybridization, especially in the areas of writing technologies. I was
thinking that I could share a lot with this conversation being of complicated ethnic background
myself. I was excited that our conversations about these issues was going to have the same
intensity, passion, and drive that our conversations about the other aspects about digital media
had up to that point.
That is not what happened.
What happened was the moderator, a fairly prominent scholar in the field of African
American literacy got up and asked some of what I thought were some very, very basic questions
about issues of race, collective identity, and technology. And nothing happened. I mean absolute
silence. She wasn’t asking hard questions either. “What has been your experience in seeing
students of color interact with any kind of technology?” is not exactly high theoretical discussion
material. I moved to answer some, held back trying to answer all, and for at least the first half
hour the conversation was only between myself and a few other people.
After a half an hour of teeth pullingly uncomfortable silences the conference organizer
bravely flat out asked the rest of the camp why they weren't mentioning that the topic of race?

5

She went as far as to even say it made her uncomfortable too but it was important. People began
to talk but the conversation relegated itself into one of haves and have-nots in a way that anyone
familiar with the phrase “digital divide” would immediately recognize. That “digital divide”
conversation was about classrooms rather than systematic forms of oppression that the divide
might be caused by. And why not? Everyone else in the room was a teacher after all? Some
people relied on counter stories as instructors. One or two participants mentioned successful
students of a variety of nonwhite backgrounds that they had had who had shown great
technological knowledge. It wasn’t like it was just a room full of white people either. I was
crushed. It wasn’t supposed to be like this was it? I wanted those smart people to be just as smart
about this. I wanted them to say smart things that I hadn’t thought about that helped me figure
out the problems I was having articulating about those issues. I wanted them to be better and I
was angry that they were not because I didn’t think I could do it by myself.
The reality is I had avoided having conversations in my classroom about race and
technology for exactly the same reasons I was so disappointed in that moment. I didn’t want to
be angry with them but I was. I expected these conversations with family members, at cocktail
parties, places away from work not from people who had written books! Conversations like this
frequently oscillate between reducing communities of ethnicity into communities of practice i.e.
race = access in totality rather than by different relationships with technology. Arguments moved
to the synecdochic as either endorsing the “digital divide” narrative or running counter examples
(“This one time I had an African American student who insisted on using top end gear because . .
.”). This conversation was no exception. Either way, the conversation reduced students'
experience and background to their race/ethnicity exclusively. As such reductive conversations
almost inevitably lead to and quickly became about material access, a topic too often reduced in

6

complexity. Brown students are the techno poor, white students are not.
This conversation was no exception. The conversation about haves and have-nots was
exclusively localized to the comfortable and relatively and known safe sphere of the classroom.
“Answers” to our “problems” became things like “online textbooks” and “cheap Flip
™cameras”. In short, it went along a very familiar sort of rhetorical path that one who is
interested in these issues has been exposed to before, material wealth. I thought about everything
that had come to this moment. Perhaps it was making only one day “black people and technology
day” instead of bringing up the issue everyday? Eventually, the conversation culminated with a
Professor Emeritus asking, rather honestly if not slightly annoyed I think, “Well, why are we
talking about race and technology? Why not something else like being gay and technology?”
I don’t remember what happened after that. I didn’t know what to say or do. I didn’t
know how I could represent anyone I needed to, my family, my culture, the research center,
anyone in that moment so I did nothing. The idea that “gay” and “race” could be hot swapped
out for each other in oppressive structures? Mostly though I was just as angry with myself for not
being able to make a turn in that room, for not being able to explain exactly how important the
issue was. I had missed an opportunity to represent my community, mi familia, because I had let
my own frustration get in the way.
That evening I went to the huka smoke filled den of the undergraduates I had been
staying (I didn’t have the money for a hotel for the two weeks I was there) and in the 90 degree
heat wrote a blog post that reduced why, indeed, I thought that race, ethnicity, and technology
were important to think about and posted the most important ten reasons (restricting myself to
ten) why a new media writing instructor should, indeed, think about race and technology. Often.
I doubted its ability to make any dent in shaping the very nature of the conversation. I despaired.

7

So with the next day off, I tried to forget about how angry I was and I went to a play.
That weekend Ohio State's recently assembled Black Student Theatre Network (BSTN)
happened to be producing its premier production, The Colored Museum (1988) by George C.
Wolfe. Here I have to make a confession, I spent a little over ten years of my life in the theatre as
a sometimes paid professional armature. By professional I mean the work of the theatre
dominated my life and its schedules and rhythms had to be negotiated with, and quite frequently
blurred, all the other aspects of my so-called “personal” life. Anyway, I was familiar with Wolfe
and the play. I don't want to dwell on describing the play here but it is a series of monologues
and sketches loosely bouncing back between realist and absurdist tones about the experience of
African Americans in North America.
The play starts, for example, on a slave hold of a ship bound for the “New World” where
the recently captured Africans are being lectured to by a young woman dressed as a flight
attendant about how to behave in their new lives as slaves. The speech takes the all too familiar
in-flight safety speech as genre and makes it horrible and funny at the same time. I loved
everything about the production and the play. The play was able to create a useful tension by
placing two structures, one rhetorical performance (flight attendant safety speeches), one
historical lesson (the horrors of the middle passage along with the triumphs and heartbreaks of
the African American experience in North America) and make it work as an argument distributed
across time that without a great deal of activity could not be easily reconciled or reduced to a
simple “feel good” conversation about racial experience.
I walked out of the theatre thinking, “THAT'S what I need to do.”
I did not know what my final project for DMAC was going to be but I knew what I
wanted it to do. I wanted to make something that rhetorically functioned like Wolfe’s play. That

8

is, I needed to make something that talked about history, culture, race, ethnicity, and technology
in such a way that was immediately engaging but at the same time didn’t allow for its audience
to easily categorize the that conversation into cultural tropes about race and technology.
Something that got past those The key rhetorical move would be trying to make a work that
made the issue of race and technology happen at the same time so that the audience’s reaction to
the piece did not become entrenched in silence or normal tropes about race, ethnicity, and
technology.
The new media piece I wrote and produced, “An ‘A’ Word Production: Authentic
Design” (Walls, 2008) would later be published giving me the normal ten minutes of Internet
fame that comes with such things. While there are many elements that are important to this
experience as I have laid it out here is that I was asked to submit my video to Kairos by the
editor. Lots of moments led to that one key moment. Lots of experiences. Lots of tools. Lots of
movement. Lots of thinking. But all of it mattered in one particular moment where everything
came together. Would this be a story of access if Cheryl Ball had not asked me to submit
"Authentic Design"? Could I have written something other people thought of as “funny” had I
not gone to school and gotten a degree in Theatre? What if I had quit, as I almost did, because I
couldn’t understand or write it in Adobe Flash? Would I care about the issue of race and
technology had my mother been born in Swampscott, Massachusetts instead of Colon, Panama?
The thing is, each of these elements came to bear on the situation in particular ways and I learned
a great deal about what I thought a process of access enacted might be by thinking about that
particular moment.
And yet, both then and now, when I look over our field’s conversations about “access” I
find it hard to recognize a theoretical or empirical location for my experience of writing

9

“Authentic Design.” I think the fault lies in our deep premises about access. We frame access, as
I’ll show, primarily in terms of materiality and ideology. Those conversations have been very
productive but that production has also come at a cost. Our conversations don’t always account
for all the ways “access” happens because they are not accounts of the specific moments of
access in people’s lives as much as they are accounts of traits we ascribe to people and things.
That is to say, they advance a notion of access as being a possession, something that a group or
an individual can have and, once obtaining it, keep. That idea of access as possessed trait, as
thing, means that we theorize an access that which can be possessed either materially or
cognitively. That means we don’t see access as a momentum that ebbs and flows in the
experiences of people’s lives (either in the individual or in the collective) or in the cycles of
infrastructures. It means we don’t see the elements which coordinate those moments of
experience. The type of access I am interested in finding, locating, and researching is more
similar to my account of “Authentic Design.” It is a type of access located in moments
distributed between people, ideas, technologies, cultures, and careers, specifically where these
elements align and form bonds with each other and where those moments are shaped to come
together. Those moments are hard to see. There is a reason we have not tried to think about
access in these terms. Still, accounts situated between spaces and places, between experiences
and the meaning we give them, as well as how bodies are made into rhetorical meaning are worth
looking and listening for. This dissertation has been about trying to build a methodology at the
level of theory and empirical research that would enable us to find those specific moments of
access and design to support or, more surprisingly, design to resist them.
My moment, the moment of design, could not have happened without the
professionalization experiences of two careers, the theatre and academics, or my experiences as a

10

bicultural person of rather pale color. My moment, the moment of access, I was able to assemble
the actionable knowledge of two professions, two cultures, and a massive amount of technology
(pen, paper, laptop, audio, slideshow, web browser, and movie software, the Internet) to deploy
that infrastructure in such a manner as to create my most “successful” academic work but none
of that would have mattered if the editor of Kairos had not asked me to submit the piece. Trying
to find and explain moments like that moment of access is what this dissertation is about.

Understanding Access: A Multidisciplinary Approach
There is nothing about the narrative that I just mapped out that didn’t involve either
cultural understanding of myself and the issues of race and ethnicity, nor is there anything there
that isn’t permeated by professionalization activity, writing, and the demands professionalization
places on me or the texts I produce. I will fully concede these points are not self-evident.
Access, in Computers & Composition, is almost always framed in terms of pedagogy. As
I’ll show, that focus was the natural response to the surge in impact that writing technology had
in, on, and around classrooms and education policy. For much of these discussions, the dominant
epistemological frame was “literacy”. After all, we were talking about technologies that were
and are directly influencing and changing how people composed, revised, and read texts.
Computers and networked technology was changing the way students thought about writing,
revising, researching, and reading as well as what education policy makers wanted to prioritize.
That meant, however, that issues of cultural production, professionalization activity, and
technology had been isolated and separated from each other for a variety of disciplinary,
institutional, and methodological reasons. There are moments of overlap but these issues did not
always rest as the core issues of “new literacy”. Literacy was still the point.
One of the goals of this dissertation is an attempt to bridge those separations. While

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networked technology might have to have been argued for in a number of educational settings,
the pervasiveness of networked technology, especially mobile technology, into all manner of our
lives has radically changed the issue of access even in the last five years. This ubiquity has
moved writing technology well beyond our classrooms and into the “real world” of our mundane
daily cultural lives at home, work, and all the places in-between. As we’ll see later in the
dissertation, access happens in a variety of ways through different practices where some people
effectively leverage the permeability of technology to stay connected while others draw stark
lines and deny access from themselves as a form of cultural defense. Access isn't always about
technology, but technology is involved. If we go looking for moments of access, we can see and
hear that access is not always a one-way street as my participants Lana and Diana’s stories will
show. Getting to know someone can mean that they get to know you too. Access, when it is
enacted, comes into being and disappears in the practices in which it is manipulated. As I will
show you with Lana, some of those practices are done by professionals but not necessarily about
professional topics. As I will show you with Diana some of those professional practices access
very personal senses of self and experiences in social subjectivity.
Since access differs from one place or person to another, there are differing and shifting
forms of access as it is enacted and coordinated. As researchers existing in disciplines we decide
what access means when we ask research questions. We decide which practices matter but that is
a certain kind of stabilizing move that sometimes limits our ability to see and listen to access in
multiple forms. Moving access as a trait to access as a practice enacted, what I am doing with my
work, comes at a price. That price is paid in disciplinarity not in my own disciplining but in the
ability of a discipline to shape the object of inquiry and therefore the research project. Access as
enacted practice means we do not get to look for access in only moments of transcultural actions,

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only in moments that we can easily label as moments of careers and professions, or only even in
moments of technological and material wealth acquisition. This project then, in attempting to
theorize and locate moments of enacted access must attempt to develop an epistemological
rhetoric stance and research methodology that allows it to locate those moments of access
enacted in all their complex relations.
To put it another way, by even asking when is access enacted, we must look beyond the
classroom to understand the classroom itself. And if we look beyond the classroom we must
bring theories of technology, careers, and culture that move beyond the classroom in scope.
Later in the dissertation you’ll see just how far some professions and technologies go to
keep Lana in their network of activity and when they decide that it does not have to do that
anymore. You’ll also listen to Diana describe how she reacted to multiple professional and
cultural points of access collapsing on her by denying access to a great many people and
websites, how it was part of a history of unknowable and invisible forms of oppression, how she
decided to deny access in Facebook while increasing it in Twitter, and why she did that. Having
to understand the relationships of culture is, I think, an issue that people of color, women and
other people with lower social power have had to navigate for some time to gain the practices of
access and make those navigations should be our focus of study.
Access is enacted through moments of coordination but many ideas, technologies, and
people do that coordination. These participants in coordination do not always care about
academic distinctions between work/home, public/private, culture, classrooms, professional, or
types of writing. Access as a series of enacted practices may look different from person to person
and from moment to moment but that does not mean it is fractured. As we’ll see with my
participant Lana, access is enacted by being in physical proximity to people who can get you a

13

job. As I will show with Victor Villanueva's work, access is also enacted by managing the risk of
how to address racism in your career. As we’ll see with my participant Barbara, access is also
enacted by Facebook keeping in contact with people you used to work with but it is also having a
phone that links you to a network that gets on to Facebook as well as an RSS feed that lets you
chat with them. As I learned from my participant Aurora, access can also be having a separate
Twitter feed that keeps you in touch with people that look like you, grew up near you, and have
the same kind of kinky hair as you while you are at work because everyone you work with is
white and they wouldn’t understand.
As you will see with my own creative pieces and in my attempts at an empirical pilot
study, access is enacted through moments of coordination by physical bodies, cultural
orientations, or by technologies and mobile technological objects that create space itself. Issues
of access escape the classroom. Access is multiple and multifaceted but it is anything but
separate and disparate. Access might look like several people “liking” that you arrived at home
safely but it also might look like deleting that Facebook account because your body feels
vulnerable and accessible there and instead staying with Twitter on your phone. What is
important to remember is who or whatever is doing the coordination must negotiate that
coordination with other technologies, people, and cultures involved. A technology might seem
like the most important element but somewhere lurking there are other actions working with that
technology to get everyone to the same moment.
A large part of this dissertation is, and has to be, dedicated to developing a rhetorical
theory that can support the location of moments of enacted access. With that fact in mind, I have
attempted to create just such a theory as well as an associated methodology. That is not to say
that people have not already done a tremendous amount of work trying to tackle the complexity

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of access before me. Before I move forward, I need to draw some clean lines between ideas that
are intimately related but, never the less and for a variety of reasons, have been separated.
Access both as a useful concept and as a word has had a complex background in Rhetoric.
Access is a concept that has been as slippery as it has been useful for Rhetoric and Composition
because for access to be meaningful as a concept depends on there being something must be
being accessed. Access needs a direct object. I have access to a computer. She has access to a
career. The idea of “material” access, for the most part, has depended on access to physical
objects or information technology. Someone has to have access to be at a library or to log on to a
database. This material access is constantly influenced and determined by social practices and
ideological framing, not just in terms of economic access but also historical and cultural.
Neither access, culture, nor mobile networked technologies respect the boundaries
between classrooms and something vaguely referred to as “the real world,” therefore we must
draw on theories about culture and technology outside of classroom context to understand those
contexts anew. We can only understand what sorts of material, knowledge, and rhetorical activity
must be in place to successfully support enacting access for underrepresented groups in our
classrooms by asking, "When is access enacted as a practice outside the classroom?" By locating
and theorizing access “outside,” we can begin to build cultural/professional infrastructures that
support that enacted access “inside” that bridge, or purposefully separate the two. Part of my
argument is that the deep seeded industrial distinction of work/school and life as two separate
spheres of experiential existence is problematic and with the emergence and ubiquity of
computing technology not entirely useful. Like the idea of access as obtained material or
ideological trait, it assumes a non-sustainable episteme of how people experience and support
culturally bound lives and relationships. It assumes that there is an inherent difference between

15

the two and that people and things don’t have to do a great deal of work to keep personal and
professional separate.
In the next section, I will examine the two dominant threads of access-as-literacy in terms
of material technology and ideology that have influenced thinking about access in order to frame
my position of access as enacted coordination.

Understanding Material Access to Writing Technologies 1986-1999
Between 1986 and 1999, issues of access and technology were framed with the rise of
personal computing and the word processor then shifted to include networked technologies of the
Internet. The discussion of material access has traditionally been located in the social practices
around technology and has been closely linked to literacy studies. We get the main threads of
access along material lines: literacy now involves access to technological material and access to
instructional resources including training for both students and instructors. The technology is so
new that everyone needs help. A review of the literature finds that access began framed in terms
of word processers (Hawisher, 1986; Holdstein and Redman, 1985) and their effects on
composing. These issues of access were localized in specific institutional contexts or generalized
about the technology. The rise of networked technology and the linking of national education
policy to that networked technology shifted what access meant for computers and composition.
Often quoted, Cynthia Selfe’s (1999) Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First
Century is one of the most influential texts in anything to do with literacy and technology. As she
states in her introduction, Selfe’s goal with the text was to “make teachers aware of this new
literacy agenda and to suggest how they might act in productive ways to influence its shape and
future direction” (p. xix). Clearly stating who her audiences is, Selfe succinctly and quickly
outlines her call to the writing instructor: “Literacy alone is no longer our business. Literacy and

16

technology are. Or so they must become” (3). Here she marks the importance and tie between
concerns of technology and the “literacy” instructor: networked technology=literacy.
Selfe’s second chapter seeks to label the “articulated forces” (p. xxi) at play. Her list is
quite thorough including the role of government, education, business-industry, parents, and
finally ideology in shaping current ideas about technological literacy. Her discussion of the role
of government is for the most part limited to the role of the federal government, in this case the
Clinton administration, in shaping national education policy. Her discussion of education goes on
to expand and frame Federal literacy/technological discussions adding educational literature to
these discussions. She notes the slippage between the two discourses, especially framing issues
of access for people of color, women, and, although not expressly stated, class. In her literature
review, Selfe summarizes an article that pointed to “a differential ownership of computers by
households according to race and geographic location” (p. 67). In her chapter on education
policy as well as business and industry, Selfe constantly points out the increased, and often never
discussed, financial cost of technological infrastructure, a condition that Moran (1999) would
lament later that year saying “Yet in our scholarship we either ignore/accept what Jonathan
Kozol has termed the ‘savage inequalities’ of the system in which we work, or we give an
obligatory nod in their direction and quickly turn to something else” (Moran, 1999, p. 206).
While Selfe focused on the interplay between the role of these major cultural forces, from a
theoretical side, Moran wished to focus on how to address these issues more forcefully as a field
by ways of action, essentially by “partially finess[ing] the relationship between wealth and
access by learning about, using, and advocating, less expensive equipment” (Moran, 1999, p.
218).
Additionally, Moran picked up the small thread that Selfe began, when she also decried

17

the access of the literacy instructor to tools and training Selfe states that “without such
[postservice technological] education, and faced with administrators who demanded a speedy
and cost-effective integration of computers into English programs, composition teachers often
resorted to commercial software packages” (Selfe 1999, p. 69). The lack of access on the part of
teaching professionals was again echoed in Moran when he said “what access is available to the
teachers—teaching assistants and part-timers who may be among the poorest people on campus?
Does wealth make a difference here too?” (Moran, 1999, p. 219). Material wealth became the
access issue because computers and training was expensive. Instead the definition of material
access has begun to take on new multi(media) and networked dimensions as other forms of
media began to mingle with what had been strictly textual forms of composition.

Understanding Material Access to Writing Technologies: 1999-2006
As the writing technology began to shift from the isolated word processor toward
networked technology, so the field shifted from network technology writing toward multimedia
writing. Articles that tackled the more visual elements, a key component of this new multimodal
writing, began to appear in the literature like Anne Frances Wysocki’s (2001) “Impossibly
distinct." Works by the New London school theorists like Gunther Kress (1999, 2003) made
possible, and encouraged, new media writing and research like Christine Bosse’s (1998)
hypertext/multimedia dissertation “The Ballad of the Internet Nutball.” This argument, originally
about instructor training in new technologies shifted to be arguments for the legitimacy of new
media as an important scholarly pursuit, shifting the arguments about material technological
access and completely submerging the arguments about instructor training. Literacy experts
weren’t going to colleagues and claiming that they had to learn HTML as much as saying that
they needed a computer that would enable them to write and research with HTML.

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Discussions about the materiality and access for what Grabill (2003) calls, “technopoor”
continued to occur in works like Hawisher and Selfe’s (2004) work. However, in our
conversations what we mean as a field by “technology” has shifted remarkably thus changing the
very question we are concerned with. A word processor was not enough for material access for
students. Access became an issue of a "history of access" to a whole history of technological
tools. This in turn allowed technological materiality to remain the focus while how to address the
issue of the “digital divide” became less clear other than to point and say “This also happens.”
The open nature of the answer to the question of what material technology needs to be
accessed has gained computers and writing a great deal of productive flexibility in terms of
addressing specific technologies. For example such a framing of materiality has enabled access
to address the needs of a new media classes “where robust video-editing and multimediaproduction soft-ware is in use, where Internet access is necessary to share and stream files, and
where files themselves are gigantic—easily filling gigs of hard drives and network space”
(DeVoss, et al., 2005, p. 38) where students “are doing something that is at once more and other
than writing (i.e., placing and arranging words on a page or screen)” (Shipka, 2005, p. 300).
Because the shift in the technology of literacy changes the discussion about technology it also
enables a discussion of issues of access framed in terms of the technologically mundane.
One article that does manage to highlight how materiality of technology has changed in
terms of relationship is “Infrastructure and Composing” (DeVoss, et al., 2005). In this article,
DeVoss and others track the infrastructural components of multimodal writing in one of
Cushman’s classes. The authors use this example to frame their recurrent argument to add “a
focus on the institutional and political arrangements that –typically invisibly– allow these new
media products to emerge in the first place” and “pushing practices and standards in strategic

19

ways” in the “materiality of such media (e.g., the software, wires, and machines) as well as the
“often invisible issues of policy, definition, and ideology” (p. 16). Offering both theoretical
underpinnings and grounded in the context of Cushman’s new-media class, the article displays
both a frame and a narrative of the technical and institutional assumptions that made, at least on a
surface level of consideration, Cushman’s class impossible to enact. Through their narrative of
the class events, and the institutional forces that acted on those class events, the ability/inability
to generate new-media texts is explored based on the access of material needs. Especially at the
degree of networked and institutional support, the role of access takes on new dimensions, as it is
explored by power relationships between instructor, student, and institution.
The technology as literacy paradigm has been useful but it has also led to some deep
structures that have clouded our abilities to think in terms outside material literacy. As HartDavidson and Krause have reminded us “if we find ourselves only studying and writing about
and trying to understand only the latest thing to ooze from the broadband, we might just evolve
ourselves out of being” (2007, p. 487) or that the materiality of access shifted because
“Technologies become invisible quickly” (2007, p. 489).
The “cost” of such a focus, however, is that sometimes the everyday issues of material
access can become lost. Grabill (2003) states, “mundane”-ness of the “rhetoric of the everyday”
(p. 464) and of interfaces and infrastructures can easily become obscured because the lines of
“digital divides.” The shift in materiality and access became not so much an argument about
trying to provide an environment to students who had not been provided material technology to
one where instructors were seemingly scrambling to provide environments that matched the pace
of technological development and access that students brought to their classrooms.
For example, in Jody Shipka’s (2005) article “A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for

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Composing” she explains a model for a composition class that require students to move through
several modes of semiotic meaning making activities through a “process that involves both the
potential and willingness to reimagine the goals, contexts, and consequences associated with
their work” (p. 291). The students are given “activities” that certainly involve goals and critical
self-reflection about “the purposes and contexts of the work they produce” (p. 286). Yet how
students gain access to these tools is never discussed, while the importance and value of
multimodal composing is constantly foregrounded. But in “A Multimodal,” Shipka never
explores how students might not possess the actual knowledge to engage in an active digital
literacy. This simply seems not to be an issue in the piece. Under her talking points about what
students assume responsibility for she lists, “the resources, materials, and technologies that will
be (or could be) employed in the generation of that product – again, depending on what the aim
to achieve this could involve . . .” (p. 297). Suspiciously absent from this list is any mention of
the fact that a student might not actually have the material access to video editing software, let
alone experience with that software. Hesitancy on the part of students is never allowed for as a
lack of familiarity with the tools themselves.
And while it might be argued that such a discussion is beyond Shipka’s scope, leaving
out the idea that a student who did not know how to execute such a move, or couldn’t
conceptually or pragmatically accomplish such a task certainly should not be relegated to a tacit
assumption. Indeed, all of Shipka’s examples of student work require a sort of digital work
relying on familiarly to a large degree. Instructors weren't solving divides, the divide came
between the pedagogy and the technologies students already had used.

Understanding Material Access to Writing Technologies 2007 to 2011
The idea that classrooms were no longer sites where the problem of technological

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material divides were solved as much as places where instructors were scrabbling to keep up
with an outside materiality of technological innovation was a tremendous shift in our theorizing
about access. That shift also coincided with the rise of the social web or Web 2.0 technologies. In
the last half of the first decade of the 21st century, articles move from talking about providing
students with technology to simply trying to allow a space where student technologies are
allowed or were even understood. Vie (2008) labeled the gap the Digital Divide 2.0 “where
students are often more technologically adept than their instructors” (p. 10) where the organizing
principles of social media writing encouraged composition in students before any sort of
exposure in a writing classroom and material technological access discussions just, well, dried
up. The huge and lightning quick impact that socially networked writing technologies had on
both students and on our culture simply could not be avoided as a literacy issue and an issue for
the composition classroom. Yancy (2008) pointed out the issue was no longer that there was a
“standard” and then “digital” literacy rather there was a new third “networked literacy practices”
(p. 6). Students arrive at the university already with a wide variety of social experiences with
socially networked technology. For example the Digital Youth Research project, a MacArthur
Foundation funded research project carried out by various researchers at the University of
Southern California and University of California, found that youth (below the age of 18) digital
culture engaged in a wide variety of literacy activity including amateur cultural production (Ito,
2008, Lang, 2007), mobile phone use (Horst and Miller, 2006), and balance between public and
private life in online environments (boyd, 2007). This last move has been a particularly
important one because it recognizes that the material technology of the classroom depends on
access outside of the classroom not in terms of what has happened before for the student as much
as what is happening concurrently.

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Allow me to be a bit reductive here. In essence, we have declared the issue of material
technological access, to some degree, “solved” and are now on to new problems of keeping up.
After all, how can we look at colleagues within our own department or in our colleges and say
that we have a problem getting students access to writing technologies in a writing classroom
when instructors start complaining about kids-text-messaging-and-being-on-Facebook-all-class?
The assumption has become that if students are bringing digital literacy and networked behaviors
to the classroom, they must already own or have access to those material technological items and
therefore materiality in access is not as important as it once was for anybody. Computers and
Composition tried for 20 years to bring computers into the classrooms and now we have so many
writing computers in classrooms that high schools make writing on cell phones a banned
activity? Hardly.
The way we were used to talking about material technology was what was in front of us
with students or what we knew was not in front of them. Now it exists somewhere else. As
Annette Powell points out, access is perhaps more productively discussed in terms of practices
than material possessions. That is not to say that materials are not involved, they are just not
always possessed or as easy to see. For example while arguing against a conception of access
that always positions African American students as deficient, Powell writes:
It is important to question the assumptions we as researchers and teachers make
because if the screen we use when we look at the classroom is clouded by our
preconceptions about behavior, race, and economics, and what those factors might
imply, we miss an opportunity to get at complexities. (2007, p. 32)
I would argue that technologies that exist in multiple locations and that obfuscate their
materiality like socially networked writing and texting are some of those assumptions and shape
our ability to understand just how important material technological access still is.

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The material technologies that do matter, that do the most coordination, transcend
classrooms, workplaces, and even private lives. We can locate the most powerful of these
materialities by tracing which elements of people’s lives have the most coordination. That is to
say, which technologies matter all the time in lots of different places. “Networks” made up of
“invisible” things like WiFi networks, cellular transmissions, social media and ubiquitous mobile
and networked writing technologies are no less material than word processors or hypertexts but
they are not “possessed” as much as they exist somewhere else and manifest themselves as
coordinating agents. If in 2003 "The digital divide has morphed into something even more
complex than it once was" (Grabil, 2003) it is doubly so now precisely because what counts as
material access has shifted so radically. We have failed to see it because keep looking in the
same old places. Those materialities still matter especially when trying to locate moments of
access as it becomes enacted and as it organizes and coordinates peoples lives.

Locating Material Technology to Locate the Spaces and Places of Access
We can still see material technological access in seeing how tools get used across the
main barrier we have always perceived: the classroom/”real world” divide. Rhetoric and
Composition has a large, rich, and most importantly a dynamic history on discussions of
materiality and technology where what we mean by “technology” has been productively shifted
over time. Now is not the time to shut that door and lock technological material access into rigid
categories but instead it is the time to follow those materialities outside the classroom, the
school, at home, and at work to figure out and help us locate access as something enacted rather
than possessed.
What I have tried to outline here is a tradition of technological access conversations and
their involvement in the material. First, notions of a “digital divide” literacy narrative between

24

the techno-wealthy and techno-poor in education policy shifted that conversation to emphasizing
classrooms as spaces where material technologies like word processors could be accessed. As
writing technologies advanced, the notion of material technology access productively shifted to
include new technologies like databases, HTML, and networked technologies that enabled new
media to become part of those discussions. In the last five years, there has been a third shift to
understanding access as located in the classroom attempt to catch up on new and explicitly social
literacy practices that students have. Students' seemingly abundant, mobile, and mundane writing
technologies have shifted the focus away from material technological access. Here I have called
for a continued shift in Rhetoric and Composition's flexible notion of material writing
technology and access to move beyond material that is “possessed” by students into realms that
are not always visible like network and mobile technologies. But how do we locate materiality
that we can’t see? One way might be to shift our conversations about materiality from the objects
themselves to the spaces and places that they exist in and, as I will argue later, the spaces they
generate.

Understanding Ideological Access as Use
In the third section of her book, Selfe (1999) gives several “Lessons” for the literacy
educator as well as outlining plans for action on the part of literacy educators to direct and form a
new critical ideological consciousness toward technological use. Claiming that teachers can no
longer “simply educate students to become technology consumers without also helping them
learn how to think critically about technology and the social issues surrounding its use” (p. 152)
Selfe moves to a sort of critical ideological stance about the relationship between technology,
literacy, and culture. She defines technological literacy as the meshing of a “socially and
culturally” relevant set of values and practices that take place in “electronic environments” (p.

25

148). She argues for a critical technological literacy that “suggests a reflective awareness of
these social and cultural phenomena” (p. 148). This framing of access has shaped and continues
to shape conversations about use and access in the field.
While ideological and material access continue to be linked by some scholars such as
Samantha Blackmon (2007) or Debora Brandt (2001) to race along a have/have not binary,
others have advanced more arguments to frame issues of access and race more along lines of
ethnic group uses and practices in terms of technologies such groups already have access to.
While focused on use, ideological and cultural issues remain at the core of access issues for
people who find themselves outside dominant and domineering discussions of technology.
Usually, this outside-ness manifests itself in the removing of people of color from discussions
about technology in anything other than a deficit model i.e. the “digital divide”. The ideological
model and discussion of access for these scholars relies on the coordinating principles that deny
or enable access such as ideologies and systematic racism in practice.

Understanding Ideological Access as Use by Race
Adam Banks (2006), for example, although still concerned with ideologies, technology
and material access traces ideologies as they generate use; in his case, ideologies of racism.
Using the technologies of the law and legal code as a frame he states: “In fact, the closed,
exclusive, system-centered approaches to design that so dominate American culture are in large
part responsible for the exclusions that mark our society and its technologies now” (p. 109).
Taking as a given that the established power structures of the US are a priori racist ways, Banks
is more concerned with technology’s current and attempted uses as much as in the ways that
technologies work to move away from established power structures of the US. Several examples
of this permeate his book. While discussing the law as a technology of oppression, Banks argues

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simultaneously for the inclusion of genres as technology and suggests that “genres and the
discursive conventions that comprise them can, through their privileging of certain kinds of
knowledge and experience while dismissing others, can become instruments, tools, technologies
even, in maintaining established patterns of social, political, and economic relations” (p. 87). In
other words genres, and especially digital or networked genres, matter. They establish patterns of
relating between people that enable racist situations to maintain themselves away from authorial
intent.
Ideologies of resistance can be seen as generators of Digital Undergrounds like in the
digital space of BlackPlanet (p. 79), in how ideologies disrupt technologies of law (p. 94-96), or
in African American quilters who were slaves that “devised and used many covert ways of
coding knowledge, both within the confines of slavery, and in their incessant attempts to escape
from it” (p. 123). Each of these activities build and maintain genre relationships that reorient
participants in technologies (low profile websites, legal code, and material rhetorics) and
ideologically position participants to enable access for some while denying access to oppressive
ideologies for others.
In each case, an ideology, a Black Ethos, is the generating force for design, creation,
and/or appropriation of technology and ideological use. Banks then proceeds to understand the
issue of access along three axes: functional access, experiential access, and critical access (p.
138) as a start. “Real access goes far deeper than the passive consumerism that drives almost all
computer advertising and much technology policy—it is about the ability to use computers and
the Internet as a means of production too” (p. 138, emphasis mine). Banks further elaborates that
beyond material and ideological access, access especially when framed in terms of ethnic groups
only occurs when “members of a group are able to use that technology to be able to tell their own

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stories in their own terms and able to meet the real material, social, cultural, and political needs
in their lives and their communities” (p. 138). In short, what Banks is calling for is access to
technology that allows for and engages in the productive use if technology, resulting in
generation of culture. Banks makes no claims about the ease of attaining this state and, I would
argue, this position requires that instructors first recognize cultural use, a historic problem, to
then understand how technologies are engaged to be able to accomplish any meaningful
instruction.
Bank’s position certainly complicates, as Annette Powell (2006) puts it, “the power of
(digital) Divide rhetoric in American culture” (p. 30) as a rhetorical framing trope. Powell, in her
piece “Access(ing), habits, attitudes, and engagements: Re-thinking access as practice,”
addresses some of this rhetorical framing in terms of her experience of a state funded middle
school technology camp for low income students. Her discussions of that experience are frank,
not only in terms of providing a useful grounding of the effects of the Digital Divide rhetoric as
it applies to race on instructors and administrators but also in describing how students decided to
use the technology that, ostensibly, few students had access to. Powell explores how instructors
“watched in astonishment as students independently used the multimedia computers to download
MP3s, visit various gaming sites and chat rooms, and surf a variety of pop music star web sites.”
(p. 35). These are the students who, supposedly, needed to “Gear Up” (the camp’s title) on the
other side of this divide. In reality, these were students who managed sophisticated work in
relation to their purposeful goals. In a remarkable amount of high-risk honesty, Powell asks
“Why were we amazed at the technology skills these students brought with them? Why did one
observer of the camp make a connection between the behavior of the White and Black students
and their technology use?” (p. 32). Powell simultaneously admits that race and gender are factors

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contributing to this issue. She is not a technological utopian. While reflecting on how the camp
could have been better run, she concludes “that to facilitate a critical technological literacy, the
adjustments might have encouraged these students to produce work in which they examine their
own literacy, an important addition to existing scholarship. Instead, [it was] based on general
demographics and Divide narratives” (p. 32). Here she calls for what she labels “A classroom
environment that fosters consistent critical self-assessment and collaboration is an implicit part
of the practice of access. Technology, then, not only opens up an avenue of expression but a
“means of implementing that expression in the classroom and the broader world” (p. 33). This
critical digital literacy mirrors the understanding of (what I will call analog) critical literacy
theorists such as Ellen Cushman (1995, 1998), Stephen Kucer (2005), as well as the work by
David Barton and Mary Hamilton (1998).
The work is interested in the use of literacy as determined by social exigencies. Powell
says “How students negotiate these digital spaces—both engage in and resist them—is crucial in
helping us to address this and other divides” (p. 33) precisely because students engage with
genres that ideologically orient themselves and people they know. With the advent of Web 2.0
technology, production is itself at the core of networked activity. People make videos and
comment in youtube, post photos and comment on Facebook walls. As Spinuzzi (2003) has said,
users of technology, and I would say this extends more so to people-of-color “. . . often do a
pretty good job of ‘rescuing’ themselves” (p. 4). What is troubling, and I think that Powell is not
alone in this, is that instructors of computers and writing lack an understanding of the social
world that their students inhabit and how network technologies operate in that world. These
social worlds contain, after all, the forces, influences, and exigencies made from the stuff of
ethnicity, gender, and class and therefore, such identity and the experiences that come from those

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identities remain important. Calls that place instructors as purveyors of “critical” (Maranto and
Barton, 2010) literacy methods and politics assume that some students have not already had to be
very critical to get to where they are in the first place. That they do not already know that their
culture and their bodies are not already a liability that has been thought about and made decisions
about especially in online social technologies. In short, they assume that some students aren’t
novice rhetorical theorists already because they have had to be because of the social subjectivity
they belong to.

Understanding Ideological Access to Writing Technologies as Use by Gender
How group-ness affects the use of writing technologies has been thought about for some
time. For example, gendered considerations of technology and access have been prevalent as
well. Most of these discussions have revolved around critical feminists’ understandings and
positioning about use and approaches to instruction and the assumptions of naturalized
masculinity that surround technology access and use. Scholars such as Ann Brady Aschauer
(1999) have said “Those interested in reforming the gendered relations of technology must have
a better understanding of how technologies are shaped by gender interests” (p. 16). In
discussions like this, technology is often positioned in relation to male dominance of shaping the
space and ways women and girls access technology. Again, this use is somewhat contested and
what counts as access is shaped differently than for issues of race/ethnicity. This is somewhat
due to stances of certain scholars such as Eble and Breault (2002). Their “The Primetime Agora”
is an examination of online communities of leisure for women. Eble and Breault feel that their
examination is at the very least, risky as “feminist techies (efeminists), including ourselves, who
aren’t bashing these sites are unnervingly silent” (p. 316), that is in the face of what is to be a
critical dialogue simple accounts of appeals and interactions are not good enough. Despite their

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hedge about critical projects, the dominant model of analysis in the article is one where access
and women must be controlled and allowed for. Christine Tulley and Kris Blair (2002) concern
themselves with dominance and unfair power relationships between genders in espaces,
especially during youth. For Haas et al. (2002), Tulley and Blair's feminist theories of use and
practices ensure “making a web-based writing environment more gender fair and gender safe”
and ensure that they include “more than a mere transference of intellectual and political ideas”
(p. 243). While tackling a range of issues about access, what is clear with each of these articles is
that access is defined as access to technology as a means of the production of knowledge and
keeping that knowledge as valuable in the face of powerful forces that may seek to diminish that
use. That is, technological access is best understood as rhetoric of practices as well as the
theories that people develop about how to conduct those practices.

Understanding Ideological Access as Theory of Use
When we get complete stories in the forms of stories, and when the authors of those
stories are taken seriously as rhetorical theorists, we learn a great deal about technology and
ideological practice. Smith (2004), for example, provides us with an excellent example of
personal experience with technology and the development of a personal “critical technological
awareness." Smith's article explores colonial metaphors in technology and how these metaphors
can reside in instructors' understandings of technology. This idea germinates with the notion of
learning a technology just enough to get the work done, and is explored though two angles: one,
how the colonial application of technological literacy applies still today, and two, how that
colonial/technological literacy model still applies on a personal level both to her and her
students, but can be resisted.
Smith’s argument is that she experienced this same sort of mentality when dealing with

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issues of computer technology as an academic. Much of the training she received as an instructor
from the institutions where she was employed, both as a TA and a composition professional, in
computers was all too brief. This led to a feeling of "just learn enough (of the technology) to get
by." This same lack of familiarity and hesitancy can be a real point of resistance to technological
literacy for students, especially students at the Community College level. Simultaneously, such
moments offer a common point of access to discussions of race, class, gender, and social class.
Smith frames her own experience and the experience of her students in terms of the colonial rule.
The history in Smith's work is that British colonial authorities supported literacy projects that
would instruct lower and middle class peoples in an effort to better produce better mid-level
workers. As such, we learn a great deal about histories and technologies that Smith herself
navigated as much as we learn about Smith’s experiences. In short, by articulating histories and
practices of colonialism, we learn a great deal more about use and practices. Taking Smith as a
published author seriously is easy because we can see the results of ideology on the page.
Listening to the theories and practices of people who are not authors is a much more difficult
affair.
As I have discussed here and in the previous section, locating access is hard. In terms of
locating an ideological access is very, very difficult often shifting into an easier discussion of
effects of ideological access. While many of the people I have mentioned would agree that
ideology is located in use and practices what counts and is listened to as use and practices is
somewhat muddled. We continue to rely on locating people from certain ethnic or gendered
groups as rhetorical practitioners existing in ideology rather than as rhetorical theorists, meaning
that practices are what we see on a screen that are negotiated with ideologies. Ideologies are
important to pay attention to because they manifest themselves to people at particular times but

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we have made a rather nasty habit of telling people when those times are happening. These times
are built into a history of experiences that shape what it means to act and what the consequences
of actions might, can, or will be. Finding out what practices, as well as who or what has
practices are negotiated with, is a key component of understanding access as ideological
positioning. If we shifted our orientation of practices to include listening for the processes like
thinking, experiencing, or theorizing that must come before and after texts, we might do a better
job of building a history of experience that locates individuals in their own particular experiences
as gendered and raced bodies. We might also do better at understanding what those terms mean
to them in their lives and how they decide to conduct themselves at home and at work. What is
important is that we start paying attention to practices that enact access rather than the results of
practices, i.e. content.

Disassembling Access
What is important about these two trajectories of access, the material and the ideological,
is each now finds itself interested in use and practices. Use and practices do no stay in one place
or respect the barriers that intellectual fields place on them either in location or subject matter.
The field understands the issues of access in relation to certain other conceptual and material
objects (language, networks, computers, rhetorics, power, ethics, institutions, cultures, class,
ethnic, and racial constructions). This constant shifting of what “technology” means added to our
shifting understanding of the importance that ideology places in language and identity has made
for productive and sustained conversations about access. Each of these features now faces
challenges but not obsolescence. Issues of access are still very real. At particular moments we
have recontextualized and stabilized either what we mean by technology (as word processor,
blogs, web pages, networked classrooms, myspace, video production, etc.) or ideology (as

33

cultural formation, language, culture, image, gender, class, work, home, identity, etc.) in an
attempt to gain a grip on access as a problem. A great deal of work has gone into interrogating
the different elements of each (the technological and the ideological/socio-cultural) in relation to
the other.
I think we are at a period where we must radically destabilize these locations of
knowledge again, not to do away with them but to make them stronger, better, and faster to deal
with the rapid changes in the issues of access. Technology in the humanities is frequently seen as
mediator and therefore as able to be separated out and isolated as either a variable or as traceable
indexer of larger cultural issues. Cultural critique takes the lead as the mode of interpretation
where technology aligns and structures relationships between ideas, words, images, and most
importantly, people. Frequently, however, this scholarship relies exclusively on interpretation of
textual artifacts for understanding the historical exigencies rather than an examination of the role
that such technologies play in the lives of the people who produce them i.e. their rhetorical
practice and use. The moment of technological production (i.e. the creation of a blog post) ends
up remaining the moment of cultural manifestation of language and image. This is despite
warnings against such interpretations of materiality by certain critical theorists like Homi Baba
(2004) and Alan Feenburg (1991, 1995) who see technological and material artifacts not as
“containers” of cultural manifestations but more as nodes of cultural production as well as
cultural practice.
The nature of technological and networked writing technology has evolved so quickly
and shifted rhetorical production and practice so radically that articulating the relationship
between cultural institutions, social groups, and particular communities is especially difficult.
Difficult, but not impossible if we have some sort of broader work into how those technological

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and cultural formations are integrated into the everyday lives of people.
What I have argued up to this point is that if we look not as much at the particulars of
technology or “groups,” however bound, larger pattern of access emerge. We begin to see and
here more important information. When access is gained, through whatever means, useful
information forms, enables, and supports knowledge creation. Access is used. Access is enacted.
When access is denied, through whatever means, useful information does not form, enable, or
support knowledge creation. Nothing is practiced but maybe counter intuitively elements are still
enacted. Passwords serve their purpose and keep people out. Someone turns off the ringer on his
or her cell phone at a movie theater. Something is being done when access is denied.
The enacting of access or its denial through use and practices affords us several
advantages to repositioning and understanding the ideological and the material. Locating when
access is granted or denied by locating how and when issues of access are enacted, or acts of
accessing allows us to see in greater detail and the specifics of what and who are involved in
such moments. Tracing a series of moments in an experience, say in a narrative, leads us to
understanding how issues of access are conceived and made sense of. If we really want to
understand how access is gained and lossed we must give up our comforting stabilizations of
either the social or the material. We must move them away from traits we ascribe and toward
practices we can see and listen to. We must understand how particular people use technologies in
particular moments to make knowledge from information for themselves and others. We must
move beyond the moment of the classroom and look at either much larger or much smaller
frames of time. When we do not give these issues that level of complexity we loose valuable
insight into what types of environments best support access and therefore our work as
“designers” of access rich environments as instructors and community partners.

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Conclusion
I have until this point shown how we have used the material technological and the
ideological to understand access. My argument has been that such issues have shifted over time
yet have remained productive with each culminating in an idea of access described as use or
practice that involve the material and the ideological that move beyond the classroom. Use and
practices do no stay in one place or respect the barriers that intellectual fields place on topics so
as to understand them. To truly understand access we must broaden our scope beyond classroom
experiences but not enlarge our scope so much as to make broad sweeping essentialist
categorizations of our allies who we are interested in aiding.
Moving beyond the classroom means, however, that the world becomes much more
complicated in terms of ideology and technology. The classroom and the idea of “literacy” has
helped to coordinate access. Understanding access as enacted use and practices means that these
uses and practices can happen anywhere and, more importantly, at any time making them very
difficult to see in terms of actual ideologies, not just the effects of ideology, and actual
technologies. In an effort to tackle the problem of how to locate access in material and
ideological terms outside of the classroom, I have drawn on two bodies of literature from
professional writing and cultural rhetoric to help me develop a three fold framework for locating
access outside of the classroom settings in uses and practices: Locating Place and Space,
Experience and Identity, and Rhetorical Construction of Bodies.
What I have tried to outline in this chapter are my thoughts that have led me to a
particular moment in my academic career. That moment started with understanding the
importance of digital literacy and access trying to understand what that meant in a world where
social, technological, and tools can be measured in years rather than in human generations. My

36

conclusion has been that in order to make that discussion meaningful we must expand our notion
of access as trajectory to include before, during, and after effects. So, if I was attempting to
understand a more complex but still individually meaningful understanding of access we must
think of access in terms of something distributed between people, things, and culture.
In my mind, the more complex understanding of “access” I am attempting to construct
here are discussions that could take place most usefully across two subdisiplines of our field that
do not normally understand each other as intimately related: Cultural rhetoric and professional
and technical communication. This has led me to primarily two bodies of literature that, as I will
show in chapter two, might have far more in common in their objects of inquiry than the scholars
in those fields might initially see. Specifically I think that, perhaps, we can begin to understand
these intersections of similarities in terms of work in nonwork places, access and the
transformation of experience, and the social construction of bodies.

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Chapter 1: Interruption
It would not be an exaggeration to say I would not have the career I have without the
work of Victor Villanueva. After all, as I tried to approach at the beginning of this dissertation
(chapter?) there are many, many things and events, experiences and objects that I understand as
contributing to this particular moment of professional construction. And let us not mince words,
dissertations are objects that contribute, significantly, to construction of professional self. No, I
(an “I”) would be here without his work but it would be a very different “I” doing very different
work.
Why do I say that? Because unlike many scholars of color, I can blend. I can sneak by
with only my ridiculously slow reading and, perhaps, overly exuberant emotional displays to
betray any Latin upbringing, each of which can easily be explained away as products of “class”
rather than ethnicity. I may not be brown but I am frequently the brownest person in the room.
These concerns are not abstractions. They are not vague. They are ideas and actions that shape
professional interactions and how we relate to the jobs we live with especially when you are not
the dominant or the norm, as the recent special issue in College English displayed for us as a
field, Latinos make up a very small percentage of English graduates. Other people have
contributed vast amounts of literature, especially in Composition, about the relationship between
experience and the moment of writing. Few have, I think, focused not on experience as much as
on, in his own interpretation of Cicero points out, the “Memory” or “Memoria” of experience
and, I want to make this point in as clear a language as I can, Methodology. The way that
Villanueva writes and the way research issues are presented in direct connection to the Memory
of experience, either his or someone else’s, as re-presentations of those experiences. Not facts,
cloudy and hazy moments to be connected, introduced, or framing the professional point under

38

consideration, well these were the texts I used to know that this method of
constructing/(re)membering an experience was a powerful way to create a form of researcher
self that denied nothing and was able to construct a complicated experience with laser like
precision. For me, he is a researcher self that took memory and made research from those
memories, fearless of the repercussions of such research.
Locating Spaces and Places
I am at the College Conference on Communication and Composition. I have just finished
a talk cautioning the digital remediation of conference presentations. Warning that such digital
presentations could do the same professionalizing work but could also just as easily become a
tool of marginalization. I am at a bar talking with the people I presented with and some of their
colleagues. Everyone I am talking to either goes to is a graduate of or works at this particular
university, which is, literally, on the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Many of the people I
am talking to are of Mexican descent. That is to say, their stories are very different from mine
not just because I am “white” and have no accent but because I am a first generation American
on my mother’s side, the son of an immigrant, and their families go back generations in that land
and this country. We talk about work and theory. We talk about the role for a humanities
researcher in a NSF proposal. We talk about our lives and graduate classes. I talk about my
work. I won’t presume to talk about or quote anyone but myself here.
“I’m trying to figure out how people, really,” I emphasized the word really, “gain access
to professions by using peoples and technology and how that process of organizing rhetoric is
different for people of color.”
This elicits a story on the part of the graduate student. In her work, she does not look
specifically at cultural issues, which she finds troubling because that is what some people always

39

automatically assumes is the focus of her work. She is brown and talks with a light Spanish
accent that sounds familiar to me because it is the same accent my sister-in-law Claudia has. In
her story, she is in a critical theory course where someone tells her that she is “not as Mexican”
as someone else in the class because they “knew how to make tamales.”
When she tells the story, she shakes her head in genuine confusion about what the point
of the statement is, utterly amazing. She’s conveying this with a sense of amusement and a sort of
I-guess-if-that-is-what-you-think kind of attitude.
I laugh because it’s exactly the sort of thing I am talk about. I say perhaps too loudly
“SEE?! THAT is exactly what I am talking about! That is never going to go away. You’re going
to have to figure out how you’re going deal with that. You’re going to have to talk to people
saying things like that too you. Something’s going to help you figure that out. People will help
you figure out how to handle that kind of weird social AND professional interaction without
telling them to go to Hell or figure out how to tell them to go to Hell in a polite way” Right there,
she had to deal with the social construction of her body. Right there, in that bar, she was
discussing and figuring out how to deal with a work issue in a nonwork setting. Right there, in
that moment and in the story is the building of associations and the transformation of
experiences from a cultural sense of self to how a profession views you and how to make that
experience useful and the transformation of experience into useful rhetorical knowledge.
Experience and Identities
No, Catedrático Villanueva holds a special place in my heart, yes my heart, as a man that gave
me work that I could do things with. His work made my professional life easier, because I was
not as isolated in my experience of language and the academe. If Professor Villanueva grew up
in a house of “Spanish and spanglish”, and pointed to it constantly to remind people, fellow

40

coworkers, that language and writing is not monolithic in its experience, I could do the same
thing being raised in a house of English, proper English constantly and to this day corrected in
its verbal form, and spanglish used in fits of anger, passion, command, love, and blessings.
I am at a professionalization lunch meeting about teaching. I haven’t slept. The lunch is
“Cultural Knowledge and Identity” as pedagogical tools. I listen for a long time. The issue
gnaws at me. Everything is coming across too clean. I hear too many infuriating statistics. I am
told that I don’t “have to” encounter the problem of ethnicity and that others do--because I am
white is the implication. I sigh and rudely I interrupt.
“No, no I am not. Not in the way you mean it. This is where I say that my Mom is from
Panama. This is where I say that it is more complex than that. And see, I don’t want to have this
conversation with my students. I don’t want to talk to my students about this. I don’t want to
know they are racists because it will affect my job. How I treat them. I am done proving myself to
people, let alone students. I get it, you know. I know just how much looking white gets me. I see
it. I am not an idiot and that’s the difference. I know it. I mean, I can say this here but in the
classroom one of two things will happen; my students will either not believe me and say nothing
because I am the teacher or they will openly challenge me and make me perform it some how, or
prove it to them. I know this because I know how other people react to the issue. And I don’t
want to do either. It’s personal. And if I am unwilling to do it, what right do I have to make them
do it? So what the hell am I supposed to do?” I am surprised at my own sincerity. I really am
asking the room for the answer to the question. The workshop members don’t seem to have any
answers for me. Julie Lindquist says, “Yeah. I can see that. So what would you do if a student
came up and said all of that about a writing assignment?”
I’d tell them to try, I think, but I don’t say that because I don’t want to try. Later I will be

41

talking to someone of color who will say they know exactly what I am talking about. They will
say their mother was light skinned and Creole and had to buy an Afro wig so people would leave
her alone.
“That’s double consciences, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Here is an email I was forwarded from a friend of mine that works for the Peace Education
Center. The attachment was from a powerpoint that was used during a local school district's
Opening Day 2009 for staff and some Board of Education members. The presentation was
supposed to be a funny way of addressing some of the frustrations of being a public school
teacher told through an answering machine script. The last slide had the following text
surrounded by cheap clip art in Ariel 36pt font:

If you want this in another
language, move to a country
that speaks it.
Thank you for your interest in
public education.
Let me give you a little more of the account from the email I received:
“In wanting to address this through a "chain of command approach," one staff member

42

approached Superintendent of schools, Mike Duda, and expressed his concern. Mr.
Duda responded with a pat on the shoulder and the statement, "well, we took a risk" as
he walked away from the staff member.”
These are incidents that are deeply professional and deeply personal at the same time and the
ability to move between them and to make sense of them professionally defines how and when is
how I do my job, what I bring to my job and how I live my life. I have had many conversations
with people about how their job influences how they think about the world as well as the other
way around. I have talked to nurses in bars who said they looked at everyone differently in that
situation as the health risks to bodies. I have talked to administrative leaders who, when asked
how they managed people for organizations responded their ways of leading were Native ways of
leading which allowed them to accomplish a great deal. I am not sure that work and life as a
separate experience will not be thought of as a brief, experiment in the history of human labor.
The Rhetorical Construction of Bodies
I am not sure how much of my work would be recognized by others as belonging to the
tradition that Villanueva has contributed so much to. No, as much as I identify with his writing in
bizarre ways, as the only the ways that I think the sons of immigrants can, that is not the greatest
impact his work has allowed me. The greatest impact Villanueva’s work has allowed me is
seeing the connections multimodal writing and invention have on research methodology. The
space between his work and my experience has become the object with which I have gained
access to the career I have across those ideas that I have expressed so readily here in this
dissertation so far. They are constant. Let me paraphrase a "Family Guy" punchline, in my own
experiences and in the stories of others I have listened to, these issues insist upon themselves.
The social and therefore rhetorical construction of bodies is a professional issue as much
as it is a cultural theory issue. For example when I was applying to PhD schools the Penn State

43

Graduate Application had no race category. There is a section that asks: “Ethnicity
Predominant Ethnic Background.” I could only put one. Which ever is my PRE-dominant one
was. I could have put “Latino/Hispanic American” or I could have put “White American” on the
drop down. Even better, Pitt asked for my “Ethnic Status” and to “(Please select one).” On their
drop down menu, my decisions are limited to “Hispanic” and “White.” So much for the great
liberal university. Michigan State is the only place that allows for multiple ethnicities on their
form or asked for that section to be separate from race. Leaving them blank is not an option on
either Pitt’s or Penn State’s application. I go to Michigan State. Three months after coming to
East Lansing, the state decided that discrimination and preferential treatment was the same
thing and decided, in some server on someone’s hard drive that I belonged to some other
category. The students coming in had to fill out forms that resembled the ones I saw from Pitt
and Penn State more than the one I filled out, of course for many of them. It didn’t really matter.
I am so very sick of this book being reduced to “alternative rhetorics”. You know what I
mean, I mean that one week of whatever class you are in where you get “brown people” week as
if these issues here did not affect others as well. Who doesn’t have a trajectory for how they
came to be in a profession? Such a limited view might even do more harm than good as that one
week becomes the “one black friend” trope of education i.e. the single case that is trotted out to
claim expert knowledge on the issue. One only has to hear Jackie Royster used once in
conversation in such a manner to understand that one week is not enough and synecdoche is a
dangerous form of representation in such circumstances. So, let me ask the person who does not
think this kind of work is relevant to professional concerns what they think of this review of
Villanueva’s book from amazon.com. The errors are those of A Customer:
A Mexican who became a success, in spite of the odds!, July 27, 2000
By A Customer

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This is a true story of the prejudice that Mexicans and people of color face in school and
and in life. Luckily, he found a teacher who understood him, and gave him hope. Today,
Victor Villanueva is a leader of his field, but still many people who would accept him if
he was white, will not accept him because of his Mexican heritage.
Technology is another form of language. It orients and positions similarly if not exactly.
Understanding how it does and when people use it is the crux of any critical move.

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Chapter Two
Creating Space - A Theoretical Methodology for Locating Enacted Access
In chapter one, I outlined the literature in Rhetoric and Composition that focuses on
technological access. I argued in chapter one that there are primarily two themes of access that
emerge: material and ideological. I also pointed out that those particular orientations to the
problem of access have been productive for discussions that center issues of access around
literacy and the classroom. However, these two orientations may be need to be expanded for us
to understand access in the world in general before, during, and after classroom experiences.
That is to say that if we are interested in locating the complex relationships that make up access
across contexts and disciplinary orientations, then we have to develop theories that tackle more
than just education. We have to develop a theory of access that can help us locate what counts as
the material and the ideological across those contexts in people's lives.
I do not think we have to go far. Although composition and rhetoric has a long history of
going outside of itself to understand matters that affect composition, there is enough theoretical
diversity within the field itself to address how to theorize ideologically and culturally complex
issues like access as well as how to understand complex technological material systems in terms
of labor. For my purposes here, the fields of professional writing and Cultural rhetoric have a
great deal in common in helping us theorize access as it is enacted across ideological and
material contexts away from, and sometimes within, classroom settings.
My goal here is simple. I want to explore productive ways for theorizing material
technology and ideology in relationship to each other in an effort to locate their intersection; I
want to move beyond access as trait. These two subfields have had a great influence on my
thinking about and theorizing of issues of access both inside and outside of the classroom. While

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it might seem counter intuitive, when it comes to the issues of access, professional writing and
cultural literacy have a great deal in common. That is not to say that each subfield would
understand themselves as being interested in the same issues. While objects of inquiry for both
fields, I will argue here, are close enough to each other to be productive, there are significant
differences between the two in how they each understand both their own intellectual work and
the scholarship of others. My attempt here is not to reconcile those tensions but rather to show a
relationship between the two around the issues of ideology and material technology.
This task leaves me in a particularly odd place in terms of disciplinary orientation toward
the issue of access, technological or otherwise. If one is interested in access as an educational
construct, one must also be interested in the intellectual and cultural spaces before, around, and
beyond moments of access. Access to material technology does not count as the only problem in
a world where information is not as useful as knowledge and knowledge is invariably and
inextricably linked to culturally located knowledge and rhetorical production and practice.
Access discussions should be located in creation of knowledge and the material/technological
forces that shape that knowledge creation. To understand only one part (either cultural or the
material/technological) is to understand only half of the problem at best and to be led astray at
worst. Moments do not hold to our ability to categorize. They do not care for our ability to say
“That is professional. This other is personal.” I find issues of access to be steeped in and related
to certain types of rhetorical production as much as they are about the technological and
ideological means of that production. I find these issues in the most remarkable of places
everywhere, both at home and at work. Fortunately for my work here, I think there are scholars
who understand that the neat categorizations of technology, access, and rhetorical practice are
not as “neat” as people sometimes want to make them.

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In an effort to construct connections between professional writing and Cultural rhetoric, I
think it useful to follow three lines of thought that have the potential to expand our notions of
technology and ideology in productive discussions across both fields rather than an attempt to
map objects of inquiry of each. The three part heuristic that I offer here should not be thought of
as a replacement for either the material or the ideological but rather a way of thinking that helps
us locate those two issues away from classroom exigencies. I also use the term frames to
constantly foreground the idea that professional writing and Cultural rhetoric theory are
interested in the use, that is to say how something is enacted, of things as much as and sometimes
more than the things themselves. These frames are always set in relation to objects of inquiry
within each field and thus function as points of productive tensions.
I must note here that the way I conceive of these frames is that they generate discourse
and meaning constantly and have helped me solve certain theoretical problems by helping to
define issues of scope. Hopefully my mapping here will display how these frames function in
relation to professional writing and Cultural rhetoric theory, thus tracing how each takes part in
the overlap in the knowledge production of the other. Additionally, I draw the lines of these
frames as a productive map, given the wide variety of objects of interest that professional writing
and Cultural rhetoric theory take for themselves.

Theorizing and Locating Place and Space
There is a colossal amount of work in rhetoric and composition on place and space1.

1

Just a few names a to names in terms of the ecological: see Sidney Dobrin (Weisser and
Dobrin, 2001; Dobrin, 2002), the cultural geographical Nedra Reynolds (2004), or the
technological and ethical Sullivan & Porter (1997). This is by no means comprehensive. As we
(D.M. Walls et al., 2009) cited in our article just the list of those interested in technological and
instructional space is extensive. See Stephen Bernhardt (1989); Bruce Britton and Shawn Glynn
(1989); John Dinan, Rebecca Gagnon, & Jennifer Taylor (1986); Sibylle Gruber (1995);
Christina Haas (1996); Roxanne Kent-Drury (1998); and Charles Moran (1998).
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While there are a myriad of theoretical and methodological orientations, I mean to locate my
theory of space and place very plainly. There are many common ways of talking about the
differences between space and place with a space being the epistemological, conceptual, and
affective view of an area while place is the specific geographic location. We create “spaces” for
people and disciplines within organizations. We dwell in workspaces. Places are located in broad
strokes. Spaces exist in Euclidian spaces. I’ll have more specific things to say about spaces,
places, and objects in my methodology chapter but for now we can simply look at how a theory
of the relationship between space and place plays out in Cultural rhetoric and professional
writing theory, specifically at what constitutes a “work” space or what we mean by “work” at all.
We can trace organizations and cultural affinities but the location both geographically and
culturally of specific inventive moments remains elusive to us. Here I want to echo Jeff Grabill
(2007) and Malea Powell (2002b) to say that the places, both cultural and geographical, where
places of rhetoric begin to take shape are inexorably linked to the uses that that rhetoric is
deployed and practiced in, and regardless of whether they are geographically located spaces
(Grabill, 2007) or temporally distant places (M. Powell, 2002b) they continue remain influential.
That is to say where, how and why people start to gain access with rhetorical activity is deeply
important to understanding that rhetorical activity. These use contexts shape practices deeply,
even if we have not developed methodological tools for understanding those influences.
Understanding that access can take shape in a number of places and spaces improves our
understanding of how technologies and rhetorics integrate into people’s lived lives but it also
leaves me with another deeply rhetorical question. Rhetoric itself has a long tradition of
theorizing space as forum. What happens rhetorically to that knowledge as it shifts and
transforms across space and place?

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Take, for example, Angela Haas’ work with Native American bloggers. Haas’
dissertation “A Rhetoric of Alliance” (2008) must certainly be considered an example of cultural
rhetorical scholarship. Haas herself traces a Native American tradition of visual rhetoric, perhaps
most interestingly located in the use of wampum as a progenitor of hypertext. Haas' title suggests
that there is an articulation between a cultural use of technology and a rhetorical tradition. Her
work also has an empirical edge from interviewing several active Native American bloggers:
Debbie Reese, Jim Horn, Cynthia Lietich Smith, and Matthew Fletcher. Haas’ claim here is that
each of these bloggers use accessed technology that “traces another trend among Native peoples
to challenge these colonial dig/viz [digital and visual] histories by exercising and supporting
sovereignty, self-determination, and community building by writing themselves into the
blogosphere and its history” (Haas, p. 164). Haas articulates the cultural matters that drive the
digital rhetorical work of this particular group of Native Americans when she lists: “tactics of
sovereignty, self-determination, and community activism and renewal” (p. 143). These issues
are all very personal and culturally located for Native Americans but in this particular chapter on
American Indian bloggers another pattern emerges: most of the blogs that these Native
Americans write for are related to their current or past professions. That is to say, the blogs
themselves articulate on some level the space between their jobs and their cultures.
While not focusing on the relationship between work and home, Haas makes claims that
“American Indian writers in the blogosphere [are] in service of their many and varied
communities: familial, tribal, racial, intellectual, and professional” (p. 140). In this work not only
is the articulation between work and cultural life clearer but also there is a strong relationship
between the sovereignty of both virtual spaces and physical tribal lands. Debbie Reese, for
example, whose main blog is about representations of Native peoples in children’s literature, is

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herself a former teacher at “public elementary schools in public schools and in two schools for
American Indians” (p. 139) and was at the time of Haas’ work still teaching at the University of
Illinois. Jim Horn, who writes about Native Recipes, is a former professional chef. Cynthia
Lietich Smith is a faculty member at the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young
Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and an author of, amongst other work, American
Indian-themed books, while Matthew Fletcher is an Associate Professor of Law and Director of
the Indigenous Law & Policy Center at MSU. Each of these bloggers and their respective blogs
are representations of professional and deeply cultural forms of rhetorical knowledge
construction. While this particular point lies ancillary to Haas’ argument, it is particularly
interesting to me.
Not only are they digital rhetorical spaces where the important cultural work of Native
Americans like sovereignty, self-determination, and community building is, if not done at least
supported, but also they are places where the authors' professional work is integrated around
issues of work and culture like offices and tribal lands. At some point in their experience, each of
Haas’ participants gained, became a part of, or constructed some way of merging their cultural
work with their professional lives successfully enough to have someone else pay them to do that
cultural work as well as building sovereignty for a physical place. In short, for each there was a
moment, or more likely several moments, where they gained access or, in the language of
Villanueava and others, “got over”. Not only did they “get over” but they also managed to place
the work of their home and culture squarely in the middle of their day job, a day job that might
not always have been that willing to accommodate that work.
I am not arguing here that everyone engages in cultural production at his or her job. Haas’
work challenges our assumptions about the way we order both physical places (“public” is at

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work, “private” is at home) and our assumptions about where we conceptualize knowledge, in
other words in conceptual spaces (“culture” is private, “Job” is public). Haas’ work challenges
our ideas of what counts as professional writing. Is professional writing an activity or a place?
Knowledge work and labor happens in nonwork places and it happens in a variety of
ways. I could point to other scholarship where the lines between the labor of culture and the
labor of employment are thin at best and indistinguishable at worst. For example, Julie
Lindquist’s (2002) book A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar is
located in a place of cultural linguistic production, a bar, which is defined by and in relation to a
particular kind of labor. Partly as a result of her ethnographic methodology of a specific bar but
also, partly, because of the layers of space the book constructs “working class” as bar,
neighborhood, place of labor, linguistic and argumentative structure, it is hard to make a clear
distinction between where, when, and if there is any real separation between how humans relate
to each other with language shifts in any meaningful way away from the place of their
employment. Both the bar and their place of labor exist in the same space of the “working class”.
A nonwork space is made a workspace in the way rhetoric and language is performed, not in
exactly the same place but in relation to, or in response to, those same structures at work. Like
Haas’ participants’ websites, the bar is an in-between place where home culture and the culture
of the workplace mingle and become intertwined. This is a place where people engage in activity
to order their own cultural being with the activity of their job. The mixing of work and nonwork
settings, both culturally influenced, is something that certain types of scholars have understood
actually adds value to their work.
Take for example the ways and types of language that uncover the connections of work in
nonwork settings. These are moments that blur between culturally motivated and personal

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moments in scholarship, in fact, the relationship and merging of work and non-work settings
adds value to their scholarship, or at the very least complicates it. For example, Victor
Villanueva’s (2008) "Colonial Memory, Colonial Research" begins with a vivid description of
his father's death in Spokane, Washington so far away from his birthplace of Puerto Rico, as a
framing for motivating a discussion about a particular Puerto Rico independence leader, Dr.
Albizu Campos. He does this because there would be no research about Campos without the
experience of his father's death, at least not the same type of research. The form of intellectual
labor would be different because the motivations and fundamental questions about how his father
ended up dying in a VA hospital in Spokane, Washington are directly related to how and why
Campos as a case study is understood. Personal becomes Public. The Private becomes Work,
which becomes Private. Spaces and places collapse in particular moments.
Certainly, professional writing has begun to understand that there is a shift toward
understanding work spaces in nonwork places, albeit from another perspective with different
matters of concern. These concerns are usually located in the term “community.” Community is
a malleable term in lots of academic writing, and professional writing research is no exception.
However, community is most frequently located as participants in research projects
geographically located in a singular place. In other words, community usually means people's
homes. Their nonwork places become their work spaces. Sometimes these communities are
invoked as something that particular organizations partner with to solve a problem. For example,
Williams and James’ (2009) look at how the Houston Bureau of Air Quality incorporated
community members with tools like the “Citizen Collected Evidence Information Packet” (p. 95)
in the places where the community lives. In these cases, “the community” becomes involved in
data and evidence collection for the Bureau of Air Quality, becoming part of the process of

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environmental citation and oversight to some degree. This is work (a particular kind of evidence
collection) is literally in their back yard for the members of these Houston communities. The
communities' members shift their sense of a place (home and neighborhood) from a space of rest
to a space of work, which is in this case data collection.
Communities and citizens figure prominently into this professional writing scholarship of
work in nonwork settings. The work of Simmons and Grabill (2007) and Simmons (2007) have
looked at risk communication and how citizens produce knowledge work about science and
environmental concerns, always in response to the places these citizens live. In particular, Grabill
in examining such communities as “Harbor” has focused on how people, in the places that they
live, go about organizing and producing knowledge that sometimes challenges and oftentimes
counters the knowledge of “experts.” Here again, home and community places are transformed
into knowledge constructing spaces of work, blurring not only the divide between work and
nonwork spaces but also between expert and citizen knowledge construction.
Citizens and communities are not the only places where work and nonwork spaces and
places blur. For Spinuzzi (2007) in his introduction to a special issue on distributed work, a key
understanding of new economies and the professional work of that information/knowledge
worker comes from understanding the detachment of labor from a geographically located place.
Spinuzzi begins by discussing the transition of economies, citing Delanda, Marx, and Harroway
in noting that “the homework economy” is one “in which the workday is no longer limited and
work is no longer confined to the workplace thanks to new technologies” (Spinuzzi, 2007, p.
270). As is the case with many professional writing topics, such research is driven by, well,
work, technologies, and the rhetorical management styles of work. Again as Spinuzzi points out,
“Time management gurus Stephen R. Covey and David Allen separately declare that they see no

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practical difference between home and work life,” (p. 271) but the emphasis in this work and in
other similar work seems to always be unidirectional.
Work place management style and writing does not always flow from work to the home,
however. Take, for example, Geisler’s (2003) “When Management Becomes Personal.” Using
activity theory as a lens, Geisler maps her use and the exigencies of use of Palm Personal Data
Management device examining the artifacts failure to integrate well into her goals of what she
calls her domestic sphere: “During both, my attention was given to my children and to various
aspects of home and personal management — what we might call the domestic sphere. Palm was
noticeably quiet about this sphere” (p. 149-150). Geisler maps the historical cultural creation of
Palm technology, mapping it closely to systematic management principles, as well as her
complaint that “When systematic management becomes personal, as it now appears to have done
with Palm Technologies, the simple model may require even further revision.” Whether the PDA
is successful in organizing that activity, and Geisler would say that it is not, the technology itself
brings the epistemological structure of professional thought and rhetorical action into the
conceptual space of domestic, even though the domestic sphere resists “textualization.” Here
Geisler uses “domestic sphere” in a similar manner to the way I use space, meaning conceptual
location of activities.
The routine work of the domestic sphere — time spent dressing, looking at the turkeys on
the front porch, talking with my daughter — was not scheduled in the sense that the
events and appointments of “doing e-mail” were scheduled; was not planned in the sense
that the projects of “planning work” were planned. (Geisler, 2003, p. 151)
The reality is the interruptions and breaks that resist textualization in the Palm PDA are still part
of her workday because they exist in the same geolocated place, her home. In fact, Geisler has to
use the language of spheres (both professional and personal) to draw substantive boundaries
around such activity in any sort of personal or cultural sense. So in a world where information

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“is deeply interpenetrated, with multiple, multidirectional information flows” (Spinuzzi, 2007, p.
268) that is the distributed work paradigm, we can see how it might be myopic to think that
knowledge that is constructed in and about work flows only one way, from work to life. Indeed I
think that Haas and others (Sun, 2006; Potts, 2009; and Selfe & Hawisher, 2004) remind us that
work influences life which influences how we think about work. The technological has made that
collapse more visible.
Geisler addresses many of the issues around access that I mentioned before. Access is
deeply and primarily rooted in moments of interaction between “spheres” that have traditionally
been thought about and separated intellectually, usually rooted in “school” and “home” but more
deeply rooted in a larger epistemological difference between moments or places: space and place
and how White culture and African American culture, working and middle class, male and
female, understand place and space in terms of what counts as labor. We can see the emergent
trends in understanding how knowledge and activity flows the other way, from "home" to "work"
either by how deeply the personally cultural are manifested in professional rhetorical activity (A.
Haas, 2008), how technological artifacts support, or fail to, support both professional and
personal goals (A. Haas 2008; Geisler 2003; Spinuzzi, 2007), how “communities” are
increasingly involved in the producing knowledge that either supports experts (Williams &
James, 2009) work or seeks to provide alternative knowledge (Simmons 2007, Grabill &
Simmons 2007, Simmons & Grabill 1996) to experts. What is clear from looking at an analysis
of how professional writing and Cultural rhetoric theorize space and place is that it becomes
harder to understand labor and knowledge work in terms of geographic location of space
exclusively.

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Theorizing and Locating Experience
I turn my discussion about access here to the ability to access and affect change through
rhetorical action across rhetorical contexts, in other words through something called experience.
In the last section, I talked about the connection between space and place in our conceptions of
labor (i.e. work and nonwork) but also our constructions of specific spaces in terms of cultural
constructions of place. Real people in real jobs, coming from real diverse backgrounds are the
people we should be looking at in order to understand access when access is enacted across
contexts. However, access itself as a term always carries with it a moment of interaction and
activity across boundaries (for example, work to domestic, domestic to work). Accounts of gains,
losses, and silences should be part of the understanding of what we really mean by “access” as a
useful theoretical concept.
I like to think of access as a sort of rhetorical motion. It is something that needs to be
created, maintained, and repaired for people and the technologies that people use to coordinate
that work. I’ve already covered some of where access comes from by discussing the ability
knowledge to move across geographical and/or culturally located space. I’ve done this by
articulating some of the literature that focuses on where localized and community knowledge
(nonwork) rhetorical practices move to organizational (work) rhetorical practices. There would
be no point of understanding that movement, rhetorically, without understanding how such
knowledge and practice changes across contexts.
That is to say, knowledge work takes place in both places but also in what is done to
make that knowledge rhetorically useful across contexts. Access is very much about the relevant
transformation of experience and knowledge from one context to another and trying to keep that
knowledge relevant while experience is deeply related to a sense of identity. Like issues of space
and place, discussions of identity and what that means to rhetoric and composition have a long

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tradition in the field. Concerned with language, our field has located identity as part of a
complex set of social and cultural practices that both construct and limit discussion around the
purposes of rhetoric and the capacities of literacy instruction to affect social change. Many of
these concerns involve political formulation of groups and understandings of peoples, usually
through language use, and coordinated efforts of will by cultural institutions in the Marxist sense.
Identity itself is usually discussed along three intersecting axes: historical, pedagogical, and
language/identity positioning. Identity/difference concerns usually locate themselves in the
“social turn” in composition. Maxine Hairston (1982) along with histories like James Berlin
(1982, 1988), Paulo Freire (1998, 2000) Susan Jarratt (1998) and Mike Rose (1990) have
centered and continue to center around the positioning of identity and difference in terms of
linguistic and cultural position and social subjectivity. Scholars such as Susan Wells' (2001)
work in New Literacy Studies (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Brandt, 2001; Gee, 1996; Kress, 1999,
2003; Street, 1995) and critical postmodern theory like Haraway (1991) or Butler (1990)
continued work in the social turn and language. Work along this line has shaped our complex
understanding of the power relations of language, identity, and cultural experience as they are
formed.
Identity, regardless of how socially constructed it is, is not the sole issue involved in
issues or moments of access. Identity is deeply related to experiences in and around a social
world. I want to locate my discussion of experience in terms of post positivist realist perspectives
offered by Chicana scholar Paula Moya (2002). For Moya, identity and experience are deeply
related concepts where identity is located in experience. Experience is the social sense that is
made from that which happens to an individual but also those subjectivities that are deeply
associated with culturally. Reacting against postmodernist claims about identity itself being a

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problem and should be rejected Moya's theory of experience helps us to understand how people
develop individualized and collective theories of rhetorical performance. Moya locates identity
in relationship to experience as a socially distributed activity which allows my project to theorize
how people go about constructing rhetorical theories in the world. Moya states that not only will
“an individual’s experiences...influence, but not entirely determine, the formation of her cultural
identity,” (p. 39) but also that “our ability to understand fundamental aspects of our world will
depend on our ability to acknowledge and understand the social, political, economic, and
epistemic consequences of our own social location,” (p. 43, emphasis mine). I take from Moya
that people inherit and negotiate identities from social subjectivities, make sense of them with
others, and then turn that “sense” into rhetorical actions in the world in both a personal and a
private nature. Building off Moya for this project means that there is a process of rhetorical
theory building that people engage in and make sense of; a theory that can deal with and make
sense of new information and new experiences and adjust rhetoric activity accordingly. This is
especially important in terms of deeply rhetorical political projects that rely on common political
experiences like Chicana-ness or decolonial projects that rely on a sense of a history of common
experiences, that are theorized, made sense of, and then deployed as actions in the world. Moya
helps my project in understanding how deep issues of identity and social location become
theorized as both collective and individual experiences and transformed into rhetorical action.
That transformation does not happen without intellectual and rhetorical labor, usually the
distributed kind. For example, one of the best discussions about the transformation of experience
as rhetorical practice that moves across rhetorical contexts is Ellen Cushman’s (1998) The
Struggle and The Tools. Most often placed in literacy studies, Cushman’s work examining the
literacy behaviors of an inner city community remains an example of rhetorical understanding in

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one context having to shift and be made relevant to a more formal organizational setting and
what that means for the people engaged in that rhetorical practice. Frequently, Cushman’s
participants assemble a vast and wide information and literacy network to accomplish goals. The
artifacts of social security forms, housing applications, and home energy assistance projects are
combined with community expert understandings and linguistic rhetorical “practice” in an effort
to gain access to the resources of external organizations, what Cushman calls “gate keeping”
institutions. Frequently networks are created to gain and build access in moments not of
member’s choosing. For example, the materiality of being evicted by a landlord forces action.
Experience and identities are leveraged in an attempt to create useful knowledge: how to gain
access to housing. What is useful information (how to gain access to housing) is deployed at
these moments of crisis as rhetorical information is used, created, and deployed.
. . . filling in the blanks of these forms required knowledge of the ways in which social
workers assign funds. In fact, the people who are best able to fill out these forms are
sought out, asked for assistance, and are appreciated for their knowledge about which
information prompts which responses. (Cushman 1996, p. 77, emphasis mine)
While the linguistic structure and community ties are made in advance, the moment of the
problem creates an exigency that requires the retrieval of useful information from people and
knowledge construction from people and tools.
In this way, in the community that Cushman describes, knowledge work depends on
socio-cultural/linguistic access to individuals who understand tool use in other systems and the
what the proper ethos is within those systems. Cushman’s term “literacy events” describes
moments of knowledge distribution and creation (linguistically and materially bound). The
transformation of experience and social subjectivities into actionable knowledge becomes a key
component of individuals who are “best able” to fill out forms. These community members are
sought out because they help to transform their own experiences into actionable rhetorical

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knowledge for other community members (the people who need a place to stay) and their
specific situations. Experience is transformed, a problem is generated, data is used to assemble
usable knowledge, and it is applied to the situation where infrastructure is made visible. Rather
than being embedded or contained in searchable databases, information about how to fill out
forms is distributed and embodied within known members of the community who have
negotiated these tasks successfully before and can explain them to others in similar social
formations. These “expert” opinions and people are sought out, talked to, and that knowledge is
then transformed into relevant information for the “user,” in most cases who ever is currently
filling out the form. However frequently, in terms of pedagogical technological access
discussions, humans or “invisible” technologies like manuals are never discussed, only
technologies with electrons are. This is not always the case, however, for all fields.
Access, specifically the transformation of experience that facilitates or hinders access, is
frequently the focus of a lot of work in the field of rhetoric, specifically professional and
technical writing. At its most conservative, professional and technical writing is about
professionals who build documents that attempt to facilitate experience into usability.
Professional writing and technical communication research has greatly benefitted from
understanding the transformation of the work of the field itself. Due to the effects of late
capitalism on professions and advents in digital technology, professional writers manage to
create documents that aided the transformation of knowledge from expert/designer to
layman/end user.
Perhaps most interesting is the diversity and variety that professional and technical
writing (as a result of the larger impact that technology and global perspectives) has had on
research into professional writing and rhetoric, especially in the area of the transformation of

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experience. As such, technical communicators are frequently at the crossroads of the shift from
users as audience to users as content producers. For example, Technical Communication
Quarterly, one of the flagship journals of the professional writing field, dedicated an entire
special issue to understanding the “Age of Distributed Work” (Spinuzzi, 2007) as knowledge
labor is transformed by digital/networked writing tools and the influences of global economies.
This shift in the role of technical communicator moves the job from facilitating activity to
more broadly managing individual user experience into broader lessons for other users.
Technical communicators end up managing the experiences of others for others making such
work a deeply cultural enterprise. Initially framed as a sort of how-do-I-write-a-manual-forChinese-users problem, the transformation of experiences, specifically user experiences, has
taken on more complex cultural situations and issues. For example, Sun (2006) has looked at
culturally specific interactions and uses of mobile writing technology to critique the old
professional writing paradigm of “the static vision of culture” that often ignores how
technological devices are “localized” in rich and culturally specific ways. This limited and
essentialist vision of what culture means, she argues, limits IT design principles and limits views
of what users can make technologies do for them. Her examples of how users take writing
technologies like mobile phone texting and instant messaging chat show how users localize those
technologies in personally and culturally specific ways. Sun points to users transforming the
technology and the experience of relationship across specific technological tools to maintain
control of communication channels. This control manifests itself across a variety of genres
during an interpersonal conflict in ways that can hardly be reduced to cultural “reads” of
interpersonal interaction. At the same time point, such uses point to users ability to challenge
overcome by limited technological design. Another example of how users localize and transform

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experience with technology can be seen in Liza Pott’s work (2009a, 2009b) which uses ActorNetwork theory to examine the use of social media sites in the aftermath of the London terrorist
bombings of 2005. Liza Potts hopes to shift software designers' thinking about how users create,
manage and assemble different and distributed social software tools in moments of crisis to
improve formal technological disaster infrastructure design. The moment surrounding these
terrorist acts become for Potts the ignition for a series of infrastructures assembling across
interactive web spaces as loved ones organize to create knowledge about each other's physical
status. Slowly tracing these actions out, Potts maps how these interactive web technologies are
taken over to accomplish new types of work. Experiences of terror and safety are turned into
texts and images in an attempt to gain meaning from the disaster and convey bodily safety.
Public content driven websites are assembled to not only construct and locate bodily but also to
transform the experience of “disaster” into social media.
Professional and Technical writing is interested in moments of intersection where texts
facilitate or hinder access and the transformation of experience with and around technology.
Other scholars have focused on creating such texts that facilitate access to matters of cultural
concern, usually through personal narrative accounts thus transforming identity and experience
into useful texts. I think it is important to point out that in terms of rhetorical scholarship the
personal narrative has a rhetorical purpose away from the traditional Romantic authorial purpose
that is sometimes linked to personal narrative. Personal narrative texts are deployed to help
others locate cultural and scholarly meaning-making practice in the relation of identity and
theorization about identity and experience. This narrative moves comes from a particular kind of
cultural critique and intellectual situation that for Kieth Gilyard (2004) exists between
challenging mere differences between groups and the projects of scholars “who cannot figure

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out what to do after they have deconstructed race” (p. vi, emphasis original) a problem of
postmodern conceptions of identity. Gilyard, himself, remains somewhat skeptical of the extreme
position of post modernized race, that is race as a totalizing category and a lie positioned to
exclude genetically marked bodies. Stories, the textualizing of experience, in the aggregate are
then seen as an escape from the dangers of essentialization while at the same time they become
useful for articulating common experience and thus political and ideological power. While any
number of rationales may exist for resistance to this notion, Gilyard seems to rest his primarily
on commitments to material conditions and collaborative political progress. To put it another
way, yes race as a totalizing force which may be a lie but saying so does not intrinsically
advance the people who are that constructs victims. Therefore existence in the history of a
certain people does not leave one fully involved in the political struggles of that people unless
actionable political action can be made from it.
Stories can transform ethnic experiences into usable political and rhetorical projects.
What makes such ethnic stories compelling then, is their ability to unite in shared political
struggle as well as their ability to divide person from person, but also their ability to transform
ethnic experience itself through rhetorical means as identity and experience becomes coordinated
into rhetorical, political, and professional projects. In my mind one of the best arguments for the
use and work that can be accomplished through narrative toward complex group identity and
professionalism is Craig Womack’s (1999) book, Red on Red: Native American Literary
Separatism. Womack’s book is part political manifesto and part literary cannon formation
argument. I would say that the dominant mode of analysis he relies on in the book is through
understanding Creek authors as “Creek” and operating his analysis as such. That is to say, he
places Creek authors in the historical context of the Creek nation, specifically in the crossroads

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of the oral narrative tradition and constant and usefully revised for political formulations that the
Creek Nation have experienced and continue to experience.
Womack, as the title indicates, has no intent on proving the worth of such authors to the
American/English literary cannon but rather he seeks to separate Creek authors as an entirely
separate literary cannon, a cultural and professional argument. Womack takes several chapters to
discuss specific Creek authors such as storyteller Linda Alexander, Callahan, Posey in the guise
of Fus Fixico, Oliver, Harjo and Riggs as their own cannon. Womack takes on this project by
analyzing their work over several chapters and analyzing for internal structural elements between
each and other Creek stories as well as placing such analysis in Creek historical political
exigencies during the authors’ lives and modern ethnographic work. Devoiced from this context,
literary analysis has frequently, according to Womack, plain gotten Creek stories wrong.
While the entire book is an interesting argument for cannon formation, perhaps the most
interesting elements are at the end of chapters where Womack actually uses creative and
narrative writing elements to consider the work or implication of the previous chapter. These are
constructed as letters to Hotgun, a character from Posey’s work. These stories contain political
referents, dream elements, and Creek archetypal figures such as Rabbit as they move through
contemporary situations and explore elements of Creek political life as well as questions of
literary importance. With these texts Womack argues for and creates and transforms the
mundane into a Creek way of narrative story telling that is deeply grounded in the experiential.
With these stories he helps to articulate and understand the personal and public relationship
issues important to the Creek people themselves. Using core elements of classic Creek stories
and adapting them to explain modern situations, his work represents problem articulating and
problem solving texts that are dynamic and change over time just as the particular problems of

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the Creek Nation have changed over time. I think that here Womack understands that story, an
account of experience, helps to transform the understanding of experience which helps to gain
access and shape story again in a cycle that, with the removal of any element of that rhetorical
cycle, completely uncouples the meaning of that story. And while he is locating his argument in
the story of the Creek people, the idea that narrative and personal narrative is useful to others in
an attempt to gain access is a deeply rhetorical way of thinking. Or as Xin Liu Gale (2004) has
put it “ Only through writing can the tragedy, the comedy, and the beauty of encountering others
be captured and become a source of transformation for self and culture at large” (p. 110,
emphasis mine). The emphasis again is that changing the adapting of sense of self and experience
into new theorizing of that experience as rhetorical action changes both self and culture in the
collective.
There are particular ways that people gain access while understanding, shaping, and
transforming the experiential. One way we can see in Cushman’s work is where experiential
knowledge is created from the community and deployed to gain access to state and material
resources, a deeply rhetorical and distributed situation. The next is professional and technical
writing’s tradition of understanding the importance of “user” identity in rhetorical understanding
in knowledge work and technologies that are distributed across digital tools, geographic space,
and cultures. Finally, I wonder how the stories that develop around how ethnic experience are
shaped, transformed, and revised with narrative to solve or make manifest a particular group way
of knowing in the world where relationships between self and group, group and culture, culture
and story, and self and story all hinge in balance to access and transform experience. Personal
accounts transformed into a variety of texts (narrative, blog posts, text messages, technical
manuals) help to transform the experiential into learning tools for others to gain access to

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resources and ideas.

Theorizing and Locating The Rhetorical Construction of Bodies
If the experiential is used as part of access, used as that which is to be transformed into
text or that which is adapting texts to construct access, then the experiential is always shaped at
least in part by the infrastructure social subjectivities of identity and culture. To put it another
way, experience is shaped by how our bodies are constructed socially and rhetorically. This will
not seem like new information to anyone familiar with critical theory for the last twenty years2
but it is worth reminding ourselves that this criticism began with understanding how bodies were
constructed publicly in places of work. The relationship between the nature of knowledge and
bodies is usually mapped in our field, at least to begin with, with Michel Foucault. Stemming
from his work attempting to link the connection between archive and knowledge construction,
Foucault (1995) concerns himself with how certain cultural forces came to shape bodies and how
those bodies were disciplined at a certain moment in Western history, between the 17th and 19th
century. Roughly chronologically, Foucault traces this move from public torture, to punishment,
to the disciplining of bodies correlating this move the generation of the corrective “soul” on the
part of prisoners. The disciplined body functions by regulating itself in ways that work to the
advantage of “power-knowledge” by making bodies function in ways that are self-regulating.
Disciplined bodies are placed in situations where technological infrastructures are placed, like
the panopticon, and therefore regulated along “power-knowledge” axes, themselves. Discipline
and punishment are moments where those political technologies become apparent in their
2

Again, there has been a tremendous amount of work on this issue though not always located
specifically in rhetoric and composition. For more in depth humanities conversations see Judith
Bultler (1993), Jack Selzer, ed. (1999), Joanne Buckley (1997), and James Wilson & Cynthia
Lewiecki-Wilson, Eds. (2001). In specifically technological environments see Alison Adam &
Eileen Green, Eds. (2001), Kevin De Pew (2004), Donna Haraway (1991), and Sean Zdenek
(2007)
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construction of bodies as something differentiated from the physical yet works only in relation to
the physical. For my purposes here, it is important to remember that many of Foucault's
examples were places of work: prisons, schools, courthouses, etc.
Critical theorists, especially theorists influenced by postcolonial thinking have long relied
on the social construction of bodies through language and rhetoric as a means of understanding
culture and are largely concerned with the continuing legacy, influence, and how-ness of the
Western self and Other constructions. These constructions, both private and public, mark certain
patterns of relationships that emerge and replicate themselves. Most useful for my purposes here,
these patterns revolve around public constructions of Others such as Anne McClintock (1995),
Gayatri Spivak (1988) and internal and external force, tools, and argumentative constructions of
bodies and identity especially as in relation to race (Fanon, 2008). For each of these authors, the
use of identity in locating the construction of bodies in other structures is key. McClintock
examines several texts as well as the personal lives to display the use of racial, gendered, and
class constructions of bodies through language in the creation of a system that garnered political
will engaged on the projects of empire building. In her classic essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Spivak discuses how European theories of identity construction lie along several axes through
language, perhaps the most interesting being the creation of a non-speaking subject, through their
non-speakingness, coupled with the intellectuals’ complete and utter essential participation in
that act which then justifies multiple forms of actions on the part of Subjects. Her grounding
example of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide is used to drive home how one person’s body can be
constructed through multiple discourses of epistemic control of that body. Specifically I want to
note here that these examples of use in identity constructions, of Other-ing, and grouping
(regardless of cultural positioning) are usually examined historically and placed in relation to

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contemporary uses of bodily identity formation.
There is, I think, the possibility to understand the relationship between bodies constructed
and the knowledge created, used, and maintained to construct those bodies has also influenced
professional writing and technical communication studies. If not at the direct citation level at
least in thematic, perhaps most productively, in the area of medical communication. For
example, S. Scott Graham (2009) has examined how the relationship between medical imaging
technology like positron emission tomography (PET) and other scanning technologies’ (CT,
MRI, fMRI, SPECT) ability to verify pain disorders like Fibromyalgia through their semiotic
construction of the brain itself. In the article, Graham discusses the relationship between the
previous “black boxing” technologies and the pain that patients feel in an attempt to locate the
agency of legitimization of FM past bodies themselves. The whole time, writ large in western
biomedicine, is the construction of an embodied sensory experience disassociated from patients
themselves, as Graham puts it “In essence, PET has provided the first “real” object that can
function as the Archimedean data point to legitimize the entire discourse of FM” (p. 395) that is
to say, the first legitimate construction of a “pain”ed body.
In fact, there is a great deal of science and technology studies influenced by professional
and technical writing that is very interested in how bodies are constructed in work settings. For
example, the work of Annemarie Mol (2003) discusses how bodies are constructed and separated
in western medical profession. Law and Singleton (2005) have tried to examine how diseases
like addiction are constructed in presence and absence in health workers' discussions of
recovering alcoholic liver disease patients’ bodies and in healthcare systems. Judy Segal (2008)
has examined how patients and their bodies are constructed by doctors into categories like “the
headache patient” as well as how illness stories play into medical diagnostics. While it is easy to

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see the connections between bodies constructed in medical discourses of work, that is not the
only way this field has attempted to interrogate the construction of bodies, even imagined bodies
like Sean Zdenek's (2007) examination of the construction of virtual female bodies for web
based customer service avatars.
Both of these separate literatures exist and point me in interesting directions. First, they
suggest to me that one cannot begin to understand how the rhetorical construction of bodies takes
place without understanding the historical exigencies that have been built through
knowledge/power to create such understandings; bodies have histories in the socio-cultural sense
over time. Secondly, bodies also have constructions and histories in a very real personal sense
both in terms of personal and rhetorical understandings of embodied-ness (i.e. identification or
rejection with group-ness) but also in a bureaucratic sense where organizations construct bodies
to do work/ This is most visible in the medical field but, as I will attempt to show later, is seen
also in other contexts. Third, people sometimes have very little to do with how their bodies are
being constructed away from their bodies. Patients bodies are constructed rhetorically all the
time in hospitals away from patients themselves in charts, reports, and xrays.
Rhetorical forces like colonial political structures, social services forms, virtual identities,
Google accounts, FMRI machines can all contribute to the formation of a rhetorical body
dislocated from the body itself. That is not to say that it is fractured as much as such
constructions are distributed across agents and time, affecting the perception of what counts as a
body and what counts as a presence in any rhetorical situation.

Conclusion
Expanding our notion of access beyond classroom activities means theorizing technology
and ideology beyond classroom situations. In this chapter I have attempted to broaden

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composition and rhetoric’s understanding of access, not by going outside the field but by
creating a dialogue within the field between cultural rhetoric and professional writing. What I
have attempted to do here is to show that cultural rhetoric and professional writing theory have a
great deal to say about the issues of access. I have also attempted to map the influences on
myself. These influences allow me to theorize ideologically and culturally complex issues like
access as well as how to understand complex technological material systems. They allow for
understanding the terms of labor in productive ways along three sets of relationships that directly
impact access as it is enacted across sites, people, and technologies in moments as the
relationship between space and place, between identity and the transformation of experience, and
the rhetorical construction of bodies.
That professional writing and cultural rhetoric have something in common might seem
counter-intuitive given their differences in deployed methods. I have not attempted to reconcile
those tensions here. However, the objects of inquiry for both fields are closely related enough to
each other to be productive. There are significant differences between the two in how they
understand both their own intellectual work and the scholarship of others. These tensions exist in
and around the objects that both theory and fields concern themselves with. Therefore I must
note here that the way I conceive of these frames is that they generate discourse and meaning
constantly and have helped me solve certain theoretical problems.
The work I have done in this chapter has been to conceptually place what similarities
cultural rhetoric and professional writing have toward theorizing and thinking about the issues of
access. The devil is in the details. With that in mind, in chapter three I move to a more grounded
and specific conversation of what my three-part heuristic of access looks like when applied to
specific case texts in professional writing and cultural rhetoric. Hopefully, that helps us theorize

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what moments of access enacted might look like. I articulate in more detail just how each of
these literatures understands these particular issues by examining central authors of each field
that have been influential for my thinking on this subject: Victor Villanueva and Beverly Sauer.
My goal in that chapter will be to locate what the relationship I see between Cultural rhetoric and
professional writing in specific detail by articulating that connection and making that connection
visible.

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Chapter 3
The Words Between Us - Reassembling the work of Beverly Sauer and Victor
Villanueva in terms of access
In Chapter 1, I outlined the literature in Rhetoric and Composition that focuses on
technological access. I argued in Chapter 1 that there are primarily two themes of access that
emerge: material and ideological. I also pointed out that those particular orientations to the
problem of access have culminated in a call for understanding access as use and practices deeply
involved with what happens away from the classroom. In Chapter 2, I purposed three analytical
categories to help locate our conversations about access in new and robust ways by creating a
three part heuristic (space and places, experience and identity, and the rhetorical construction of
bodies) to help us improve our ability to locate moments of access enacted but also to help us
understand what methodologies we can use to discover moments of accessing as they occur, or
how access looks when it is being enacted.
Those three categories draw heavily from work in the fields of Cultural rhetoric and
Professional Writing, fields not often associated with each other. I need to be able to draw on the
work of Cultural rhetoric and professional writing in order to do the kind of work I want to do
about technological access. This chapter then is an attempt to articulate the connections I see
between those two bodies of scholarship, Cultural rhetoric and Professional Writing when it
comes issues of culture, professions, and therefore access. I will attempt to answer the following
question through the analytics of access I purposed in Chapter 1:
Can we understand Beverly Sauer’s body of work, specifically Rhetoric of Risk and
Victor Villanueva’s body of work, specifically Bootstraps: Notes from an Academic of

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Color, as accounts of access?
The problem of even asking this question is that Sauer and Villanueva’s works are not
frequently, if ever, mentioned together. An editor in our field would not place their work in the
same compilation, let alone place them on the reading list for a graduate class focused on
technological access. The field of Composition and Rhetoric thinks that these two schools of
thought, let alone these two specific scholars and their work have little if anything in common
other than the fact that they are both interested in language and rhetoric. That position would be a
wholly fair and an accurate one. As such, if I am to argue that both Sauer and Villanueva might
improve our theoretical understanding of access, I must do a large amount of work to connect the
two. This chapter is about articulating that connection and making that connection visible.
Making that connection visible should do two kinds of work. The first kind of work this
chapter will do is to answer if the analytical frame I purposed in Chapter 1 is useful for
understanding and tracing projects about access-ing. I have the space to delve into how my three
analytics (work in nonwork places, the rhetorical transformation of experience, and the rhetorical
construction of bodies) work in more detail in this chapter. Those analytics come from my own
experiences, thinking about moments of access-ing, and reading work in professional writing and
cultural rhetoric. As such, these analytics should be able to help us understand works that are not
always associated with issues of access but can and should be. If the analytics help us understand
moments of access-ing in Cultural rhetorical and Professional Writing projects, they should also
help us understand moments of access-ing in empirical projects as well.
Additionally, I want to take a moment to state that the analytical categories I use here
should not be understood as mutually exclusive. They are intimately related. Indeed, I hope to
show just that in my analysis. Access and the rhetorical transformation of experience cannot be

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understood away from the effects of social bodies in work spaces. Without a great deal of
intellectual dishonesty, work space in nonwork places cannot be understood away from the
rhetorical transformation of experience. My analytic categories I propose here should be
understood as permeable and influential on each other while at the same time useful enough to
help us understand and identify when moments of access-ing occur.
The second kind of work this chapter should accomplish is showing the specific
relationship I see between how certain kinds Cultural rhetorical and Professional Writing
projects can and should inform each other beyond general rhetorical inquiry. Clearly, the
question of my analytical frame is more important to my specific project. However, the question
of usefulness of combining Cultural rhetoric and Professional Writing projects has much larger
implications beyond those interested in access. Those larger implications for our field reside both
at the level of theoretical inquiry and at the level of research methodology deployment. That is to
say, if we can understand Cultural rhetorical and Professional Writing projects as aligned, that
could enrich both what and how each goes about producing knowledge. This chapter then is also
an attempt to show how that enrichment might occur.
A word about the authors I have chosen to use in this chapter. I have chosen here to use
Beverly Sauer’s work on rhetorical risk construction in industrial mining and Victor Villanueva’s
work understanding of the professionalization of people of color in the education and language
arts fields to show my case. As I mentioned earlier, this chapter should be thought of as doing
two kinds of work. This chapter will decide if the analytical frame I purposed in Chapter 1 is
useful for understanding and tracing projects about access-ing and show the specific relationship
I see between how certain kinds Cultural rhetoric and Professional Writing projects that can and
should inform each other beyond general rhetorical inquiry. While any number of other authors

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would be useful to map my analytical frame3 the two scholars I have chosen, Beverly Sauer and
Victor Villanueva, have certain advantages for my discussion here. Most importantly, each
author’s work directly influenced my thinking about what moments of accessing actually look
like when they happen. That is to say, I have used each to identify and understand the work of
access-ing, even technological access-ing, in my own career4 as well as helping me to think
about and identify moments of access-ing for others like fellow grad students, my own students,
and my research. As each scholar has influenced my thinking about moments of access-ing, I
think that each is particularly good at identifying those moments. The fact that the methodologies
of their identification of moments varies radically helps to prove the usefulness of my analytical
categories of work in nonwork places, the rhetorical transformation of experience, and the
rhetorical construction of bodies.
As for the second piece of work the chapter must do, showing how Cultural rhetoric and
Professional Writing projects can and should inform each other beyond general rhetorical
inquiry, both authors fit this project well due to the disciplinary orientation I alluded to earlier. I
do not have to argue for these authors’ traditional disciplinarity. That is to say, where this work
usually is found (i.e. that Sauer’s work is traditionally located in professional writing and
Villanueva as cultural rhetoric) is a given. Because of the nature of their “core” contribution to
the fields they are traditionally associated with, each scholar makes a good example for me to
discuss and each contributes to intellectual traditions of the others’ fields. I grant with absolute
3

Specifically, Cushman (1998), Sun (2006), A. Haas (2006), Geisler (2003), Banks (2006), Potts
(2009a), Simmons (2007), Smith (2003), and Steingraber (1998) were all considered for use in
this chapter.
4
This is probably most evident in my use of Villanueva in the interlude that precedes this
chapter. While my particular professional and cultural situation is more relevant to Villanueva’s
work Sauer’s feminist influence work has been useful for me to understand how others might
understand the relationship between “home” and “work” spaces both geographically and
rhetorically.
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conviction that at the level of research method and execution, Sauer’s and Villanueva’s work are
very different. As such, they make better choices for how Cultural rhetorical and Professional
Writing projects could be linked than, perhaps, other work might be5. My attempt here is also to
provide a claim for a more expansive and influential role for these two scholars I am analyzing
by accounting for just what knowledge is lost in the line noise of disciplinarily. What I attempt
here is to produce an account at a more detailed and specific level to explain “how” such
concerns overlap across specific work and detail. Even more specifically, what I attempt in this
chapter is show how the issues that motivate and impact methodological choices can be
understood as contributing to each subfield.
In each of the following sections I will briefly outline how I understand the authors’ body
of work, purpose, and major methodological contributions to their respective fields. I follow this
section with an analysis of their work according to the analytic purposed in Chapter 1, arguing
how each author’s work “fits into” those disciplined matters of concern. After completing my
analysis of each author's work, I will argue for synergies between these two bodies of work at the
levels of theory, methodology, and contribution. I end this section with a brief essay on issues of
personal importance in professionalization.

Beverly Sauer’s Understanding of Cultural Matters
My position here is not that Sauer understands her work or intends to do the work of the
disciplinary track of cultural matters. I fully acknowledge my reading of her work here as an
5

Specifically, I am thinking of attempts to prove the usefulness of Critical Inquiry and Cultural
Studies methodologies deployed in works like Critical Power Tools (2007) which, broadly
speaking, attempt to level different methodologies and theories into the objects of inquiry
traditionally associated with professional writing. As works like these frequently exist on the
periphery of their fields, rather than in the core, an analysis of such work would do little not
prove my point about similarities between professional writing and cultural rhetorical projects’
object of inquiry.
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attempt to place her work in such a category as my own project. Sauer’s location of a rhetorical
tradition and understanding in the Western tradition marks thinking about her work as a major
contribution to cultural rhetorical theory a difficult task. However, her move in such a location
works understandable given the diverse nature of her audience as both rhetorical and risk
management theorists. As I will show, that does not mean that she has nothing in common with
cultural rhetoric in terms of what she is interested in discovering. Additionally, much of the
analysis I have focused on here are issues that Sauer uses to describe a more full account of risk
as embodied and lived risk production rather than specifically to increase understanding between
the forces of cultural and rhetorical production. Despite these caveats, I think we can still
understand Sauer’s work as capable of locating an unmarked cultural project.
This unmarked use of culture is one that is deeply engaged in understanding the
relationship between professional writing and specific culturally located experiences. Sauer
exams the cultural and rhetorical construction of risk in embodied rhetorical performances,
textual discourse, and documentation forms across specific sites of epistemological and
rhetorical production. In her work we get accounts of the cultural relationships between Agency
accident reports and the activity of doing laundry that provide us with an unusual glimpse of the
possibilities of better accounts of risk. Accounts we can provide when we understand cultural
factors involved in the construction and permeation of personal/ professional rhetorical thought,
use, and translation yet.
Beverly Sauer’s work deals with how “risk” as an idea is constructed, acknowledged, and
mitigated in the international mining profession. A regular member of the NCTE Committee on
Technical and Scientific Communications, Sauer’s work has appeared in flagship field journals
such as Technical Communication Quarterly, Written Communication, and Journal of Business

78

and Technical Communication as well as award-winning collections like Critical Power Tools
(2007) as well as her own award-winning book The Rhetoric of Risk (2002). Currently a full
professor at Georgetown University, she has impressively been a part of at least four National
Science Foundation grant awards to study risk and mining practices internationally in the United
Kingdom and South Africa as well as domestically. It would be hard to categorize her
professional record as anything other than as a pillar of the professional writing field.
Sauer’s professional projects have an overarching goal that seems to be the improvement
of the work that technical documentation does in such environments. As she states early on in
The Rhetoric of Risk (2002), there is much more at stake in technical documentation in risk
environments where the failure to achieve “rhetorical force” (p. 7) means that people lose lives.
Sauer sees a large gap in the ability of current technical documentation and accident report
writing in the mining field to grasp the warrants and rhetorical knowledge construction of how
miners themselves use understand, assess, and construct risk. Sauer has found through her
research that the rhetorical practices of miners are distributed. Those practices are distributed
across both geographic sites and personal and collected embodied physical stories about work.
Sauer argues that these rhetorical processes and knowledge constructions are ones that large
bureaucratic agencies translate and fail to translate. National regulatory agencies and mining
corporations fail to translate such knowledge in training, regulation, and accident report writing.
Agency sponsored rhetoric attempts to provide single omniscient perspective. These report
accounts do little to bridge with the positional and rhetorically distributed accounts that miners
construct in their lives both in and around work “in pubs, in training sessions, in academic
convergences, at union meetings, in ordinary conversations, at parties and more formally, in
public hearings” (178).

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Sauer relies heavily on traditional Western model of rhetorical thought as “persuasion,”
especially focusing on aspects of the classical cannon of invention. She grounds these inventive
moments in how particular rhetoricians deal with “warrants” (20) of cases and audiences for
effective rhetorical action for both mine workers and agencies. For example warrants for miners
about how they do their job are constructed in both speech and gesture as mine workers construct
stories about risk in a variety of places frequently when they are not physically at work. Their
warrants about risk are constructed at the homes where the dirt and dust of the mine is used to
counter hegemonic government findings about levels of coal dust during mining fires and
disasters (Sauer 1993). These are places where official documentation of mine owners or
governmental agencies are not welcome or are interested in going to.
For mine workers, risk and what counts as risk is the summary of knowledge and
experience and depends a great deal on what is going on around one’s body. As Agencies change
and transform the experience of miners, that rhetorical processes is translated and
decontextualized into what Sauer calls a “Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large
Regulatory Industries” (p. 17). Sauer sees this as a series of “translations” and re-translations of
and between experiences to documentation as well as between differing types of organizational
spaces (employers, regulatory departments, and law makers), the exchanges between individuals,
and the spaces where miners construct their experiences around work. Chapter one of her book
outlines why the documentation and regulation of mining is so difficult. The chapter is set up
primarily in terms of “problems” which make each issue (i.e. standardizing experience, wording,
regulatory revisions, etc.) difficult tasks for organizations to accomplish or individuals to
construct. Chapter two outlines the specifics of her Cycle of Technical Documentation in Large
Regulatory Industries theoretical construct, mapped across six critical moments of

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“transformation.” The third chapter of this section and the book discusses how uncertainties exist
in social behavior and data, which contribute to the problems of documentation drawn along
lines of access. These transformations are difficult because miner stories, which deal with
embodied work experiences and relational positionalities of bodies and are conveyed through
both words and gesture must be altered and decontextualized into single accounts in the case of
disaster reports or flexible rules for successful, clear, and enforceable regulatory policy.
Chapter four, for example, examines “the rhetorical interface” between individual
experience and agency reconstruction and use of individual experience, that is to say how
agencies construct, translate, and use individual accident stories. Particularly interesting to my
mind in this chapter is how agencies deal with and reconstruct multiple and uncertain time and
spatial relations of workers and nonhumans like fire, coal dust suppression systems, and roof
bolts experiences post-disaster. The chapter is about why and how accounts are deemed
“unusable” by agencies that deny access of experiences becoming “official” accounts. Sauer
examines how experience is turned into training as well. Here Sauer focuses on what elements of
Agency training have the largest impact and retention for miners that go through such training, or
that elements provide the greatest amount of “rhetorical force” as previous accounts of miners
and investigators are transformed into Training and Instruction. Chapter six offers Sauer’s most
pointed criticism to this point in the book about how agencies fail to integrate adequately or
represent at all textually “the embodied sensory experience” (p. 112) of miners in Agency
documentation and instruction. She locates the importance of such integration in “the warrants of
grounded experience” that miners deploy which, as she provides case for, save their lives. Sauer
provides a particularly stark example of how important embodied experience is in risk
management in an account of a roof collapse in which miners died (p. 195-196). Miners working

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in the same area who were not wearing earplugs were able to hear popping noises and react
immediately by removing themselves from the area. The miners who were wearing ear
protection heard nothing and therefore did not react to the collapse of the roof. Sauer argues that
these felt and lived experiences in mines contribute a great deal to what counts as risky behavior
for individual miners, thus becoming the warrant for what counts as “risky” behavior in a given
situation. Yet this kind of risk fails to be adequately represented in training or technical
documentation of risk management thus denying access to embodied experiential knowledge. I
want to take some time now to focus on what I think are the major forms of cultural work that
Sauer does both in this book and in her other work with risk in the mining profession.

Sauer: Space and Place
Professional writing scholarship usually locates its research in particular places. These
places are usually specific research sites of work, usually a place where people go, like an office
building or a clinic. This research is almost always done in an attempt to extrapolate knowledge
construction of specific places into providing knowledge about generalized workspaces.
However some scholars have noted the limitation of such studies as “professionals” work in
much more loose organizational structures (Jablonski, 2005; Spinuzzi, 2008). This sort of
professional writing work is harder to see because it is distributed away from our industrial
notion of work-as-place. Sauer’s work here also deals directly with the issue of the unrecognized
or “silenced” professional rhetorical traditions of mineworkers and their families. The under
documented rhetorical production of risk that mine workers use on the job remains unseen
because such rhetorical production takes place away from the “official” workplace of the mine.
How these silences occur is, however, primarily a product of the unrecognized legitimacy of
knowledge production in nonwork places and in nonagency endorsed ways.

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Sauer’s work here attempts to provide specific accounts of risk and how those accounts
interact with one another in the formalized and “official” texts of Agencies and the Law. She
must extend her research methodology past those of typical workplace studies in professional
writing if she is to account for those constructions of risk that miners use. The result of such an
extension of what counts as workspace allows Sauer to recognize accounts of the material
construction of risk on the parts of miners’ wives who can, literally, measure risk in mining
behavior by the observation of volume of dirt on work clothes during laundry care coupled with
a lack of discussion of working conditions in domestic situations (Sauer, 1993). While Sauer
contrasts this form of knowing with the scientific ways of speaking to similar observations as
particles in “parts per million” the account also provides a crystal clear example of how “work”
related issues and rhetorical work shift between workspaces and nonwork places. I'll cover some
of the repercussions of not understanding that relationship in the next section.
The nonwork places where risk construction takes place along with workplace
experiences that are distributed over career. These experiences are not accounted for in official
agency accident investigations or regulation production. The following testimony of risk
construction that takes place in domestic spheres displays how much work related risk
construction in places that are not the current workplace.
When Tommy worked at Irishman, he never came home as tired or dirty or upset as he
did when he worked for Adkins Coal Co. While he worked for Adkins, he constantly kept
a headache, and he couldn't even walk across the floor without leaving a trail of coal dust.
He told me he had to find another job because the company just didn't care about the
men's safety and it was too dangerous to work there.
(testimony of Jewelene Centers, widow of Tommy Centers, qtd in Sauer 1993)
This testimony constructs an understanding of the risk involved at a jobsite between Jewelene,
Tommy, and coal dust. The quote is also evidence of how Tommy understood that risk over his

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career experience as a miner by comparing Adkins to Irishman’s work conditions as well as
Jewelene’s citation of visual evidence. While leaving a trail of coal dust in a coalmine might not
speak to unsafe mining practices, leaving one in a living room, a kitchen, or laundry room does.
Another example comes from the testimony of Annis Ashley, widow of Dillard Ashley.
Dillard would come home filthy from the mines, and his work clothes always required
two or three wash cycles to get all the coal dust out of them. . . . And had the mines been
properly rock dusted the explosion would never have happened. While the employees at
the State hearings in Martin, Ky., said that the mines weren't dusty, they have to worry
about their jobs. They knew if they told the truth, that they would probably be replaced.
(testimony of Annis Ashley, widow, qtd. in Sauer 1993)
Sauer has attempted to show that space and labor of the domestic remain separated in Agency
and legal accounts regardless of how useful they might be in the prevention of accidents or the
accounting of agency in accident investigation. This is the point of much of Sauer’s work. She is
attempting to produce a system of rhetorical risk production that is more inclusive of workers
and their loved ones' knowledge production, which is distributed across spaces like laundry
rooms, pubs, and other places where mining “work” is not usually associated. She does this work
because to account for these ways would be to save human life. Sauer has had to do significant
work in restructuring of typical work place writing methodologies because this particular kind of
workplace in nonwork spaces kind of rhetorical production are “silenced.” Her project, then, is
one which allies her with others interested in cultural rhetorical production.
Sauer understands that the rhetorical production of risk on the parts of miners is
distributed across the time and space of the places that miners live and not just located in the
specific place of their work. Sauer reminds us that, “Individuals talk about their work in many
venues—inside of and outside of the locations they describe—in pubs, in training sessions, in
academic conferences, at union meetings, in ordinary conversations, at parties, and more
formally, in public hearings,” (p. 178). Any attempt at understanding that risk that only includes

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rhetorical production that occurs in the workplace provides a methodologically incomplete view
of how miners deal, live, and work in uncertain and dangerous environments. Sadly such a
narrow view of what counts as the rhetoric of work also silences and takes lives.
There would be little useful in Sauer’s work if official Agency accounts of disaster and
risk were satisfying and complete. Sauer’s interrogation of those official Agency and Legal
spaces and rhetorical warrants shows us that the “official” knowledge-making enterprise,
constructions of risk and accident reports often leave out the rhetorical epistemology of nonwork
spaces where miners and their partners understand and construct risk. We can understand Sauer’s
data collection methodology as one that seeks to account for where workspace accounts fail to
access nonwork space understanding.
Sauer attempts in The Rhetoric of Risk to access how miners construct risk away from
official channels by going to miners and asking for accounts of risk not only in an official
workspace through Agency and management endorsed interviews but also by interviewing
miners on three separate continents for specific lived accounts of their jobs and how they
perceive and therefore construct risk rhetorically as distributed. Sauer pays close attention in her
interviews with miners about risk both in the immediate sense (i.e. hearing roof collapses) but
also in support and practices of management and labor/management relations regardless of where
they take place. As Sauer notes, unlike Agency rhetorical risk production, for miners “When
these individuals talk about their work, they store and reconstruct this collective experience in
their stories. They can move outside of their own geographic and institutional viewpoint
rhetorically to see events from new perspectives,” (p. 178). Such understandings about the roles
management, labor, and individuals play as well as where such understandings are constructed
and are convincing is a key level of detail in Sauer’s work. That understanding is key to knowing

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how such rhetorical constructions remain outside official Agency documentation. The totality of
geographic and rhetorical diversity is a must if she is attempting to construct such rhetorical risk
production as it produces multiple perspectives on hazardous environments for miners as well as
on rhetorical production. What is important to understand is that these accounts are produced in a
variety of different places. Sauer shows us that “Individuals talk about their work in many
venues—inside of and outside locations they describe—in pubs, in training sessions, in academic
conferences, at union meetings, in ordinary conversations, at parties and more formally, in public
hearings” (p. 178) not just at one particular moment in handwritten accounts immediately after
surviving a fire (p. 138-140). Official accounts including Agency accident reports and legal
courts do not provide accounts of how work is understood in nonwork places or the influence
that nonwork rhetorical production has on decisions made in the workplace.
Sauer goes about mapping the rhetorical production of risk by miners with empirical
models of investigation, a method she has usefully deployed prior to this work. As such, Sauer
spends a great deal of time unraveling and “interrogating data collection practices and ownership
in the knowledge-making enterprise” (A. Haas, 2009, p. 10) as well as engaging with miners to
“value local discourses, practices, and knowledges and experiential culturally-saturated
knowledge through narrative, the body, performance, memory, etc.” (A. Haas, 2009, p. 10)
precisely because Agency and Legal accounts do not attempt to, or even acknowledge, nonwork
spaces or their effects on understanding and production of risk. I think Sauer does the work of
cultural rhetoric here. Sauer is committed to “interrogating” how other people make data and
accounts about accidents in mines as well as her commitment to how the places and spaces of
knowledge making as a rhetorical enterprise of marking cultural production between spaces and
in places.

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Sauer: Experience
Sauer’s work explores the modes and transformation of experience in an uneven
rhetorical process between social groups. Sauer produces robust accounts of contrasting
culturally, epistemologically, and geographically located modes of rhetorical production and
meaning. Frequently, Sauer’s work explains how official Agency rhetorical invention fails to
account for miner rhetorical production and thus fails to accurately convey the collective
knowledge and information of miners’ understanding of risk. This failure is a direct result of
official Agency’s inability, or unwillingness, to engage with the distributed nature of miner
rhetorical production that I outlined in the previous section. Work in nonwork space accounts are
left out of the more powerful and textually based Agency focused rhetorical risk production.
Additionally, Sauer’s work has for some time examined how accurate domestic sphere
knowledge production is silenced by official discourses that fail to protect miners’ lives. Whole
spheres of useful material rhetorical knowledge are left silent because miners and their loved
ones’ constructions of risk are changed so significantly by Agency inventive rhetorical practices.
As Sauer sees it, the job of the Agency is to transform miner experience, really miner
rhetorical production about their experience into useable documentation. The process of
transformation by Agencies, however, often eliminates access for workers to the rhetorical
construction of events that make such accounts meaningful. The very nature of the
transformation process itself, as Sauer puts it, “not all individuals have access to this collective
body of knowledge (miner experience) . . . agencies have created institutional boundaries and
conventions of discourse that serve as barriers to understanding, but also because individuals do
not have the rhetorical tools for interpreting information conveyed in unfamiliar rhetorical
forms” (p. 98). To put it another way, Agencies fail rhetorically not because the rhetorical

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accounts they receive are not valid but because they transform miner rhetorical experiences into
useful data for the Agency, not miners. Agencies make the knowledge rhetorically useful to
themselves through this transformation. Agencies’ processes of knowledge transformation limit
access on two levels. They do this first by taking the experiential, embodied, positionalities of
miners and transforming those experiences into another rhetorical form useful to the Agency and
second by obfuscating those Agency rhetorical practices using “unfamiliar rhetorical forms” (p.
98) to explain risk.
The core work of The Rhetoric of Risk focuses on what rhetorical appeals and topoi
Agency document creation are involved in. Sauer is very good at explaining why and how the
Agency rhetorically transforms multiple subject positions into scientific, educational, and
investigative discourses. This is the rhetorical work of Agencies, the transformation of Individual
accounts into a single scientific constructions of risk.
One of the ways Sauer has engaged the idea of how Agencies transform and obfuscate
rhetorical work has been to focus specifically on how gender constructions of embodied
knowledge occur. In The Rhetoric of Risk Sauer invokes previous work with feminist
constructions of risk (Sauer, 1993) claiming “agencies may inadvertently silence these diverse
viewpoints when they reconstruct events in an accident” (p. 178). This silencing of “diverse
viewpoints” deprives mining practitioners of valuable information in dangerous and shifting
work conditions by insisting on the rhetorical stance of the Agency and Scientifically endorsed
“single distanced perspective” (p. 179). Sauer goes on to map the tensions between working class
miners and authoritative scientific constructions of risk throughout the book. For example, Sauer
describes how engineering and scientific “experience” and knowledge production produces
warrants for the use of “invisible things” like roof bolt stability. Such invisible things dominate

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risk management accounts, agency accounts, and instructional activity. Yet such scientific
experience and reliance means little to the miner if he or she cannot translate such rhetoric into
the rhetorical situation of shifting material conditions or embodied indicators. These tensions
around rhetorical production and what counts as valid rhetorical experience foreground the
importance that culture plays in professional work as well as how, when, and if our experiences
can be transformed into useful rhetorical strategies for others and ourselves.
A large chunk of The Rhetoric of Risk investigates the tension between the rhetorical
production of Agency education (the dominant form rhetorical knowledge construction) and
miner embodied experiential rhetorical invention and knowledge construction. Experienced
miners use gesture and language together to convey and represent a wide variety of human and
nonhuman agents in a given account of labor or risk, allowing for rapid shifts of perspective
during narrative accounts. In fact, Sauer points out that this gesture and language of rhetorical
production only comes as work experience is transformed into rhetorical knowledge which is
best exemplified when she describes the absence of, or low frequency of, gesture in the rhetorical
production of novice/uninitiated miners (Sauer, p. 244-248). This lack or low frequency of
gesture correlates with novice rhetors’ lack of “representations” of agents in their accounts of
risk. To put it another way, more gestures equals better understanding of where and how many
human and nonhuman factors are dangerous.
Through her ethnographic research, Sauer notices that certain novice miners rely more on
“manual/agency” language to describe work situations while using noticeably less gestures.
Their stories also involve less information about agents’ positions. Sauer argues that these novice
workers lack the rhetorical sophistication when it comes to agent perspective in their accounts
due to the novice miners’ over identification with technical documentation. The lack of

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social/professional cohesion and lack of “tacit” knowledge in their new profession means that
technical documentation is their only point of reference for risk. While access to technical
documentation knowledge is immediate, such knowledge loses usefulness as site-specific tacit
“pitsense” and rhetorical skills supplement replace Agency endorsed documentation. The
rhetorical transformation of professional experiences in site-specific mines leads to a better
understanding by agents of risk in that specific environment.
What features come to shape interactions between technical documentation and
experiential tacit knowledge is where Sauer does her most valuable cultural rhetorical work.
Sauer locates these specifically in the social spaces of workplace and nonwork spaces but she
also provides a picture of how one of these modes dominates and transforms the other in an
uneven rhetorical process.
For example, Blake’s account of the mine fire he escaped from (Sauer, 2002, p. 138-140)
is transformed from the professional embodied rhetoric of miners to a “handwritten” account.
This handwritten account plays a small part in a much larger Agency investigation report
experience of risk and risk factors. The transformation of embodied rhetorical performance to
handwritten account is a small part of an attempt to create an “official” distanced observer,
transforming Blake’s account of experience several times over. Tacit knowledge is lost in this
noise of translation because the position of the worker is not that of the investigator.
Let me return to Haas’ argument for the work of cultural rhetoric. Haas claims that one of
the warrants of cultural rhetorical methodologies is that cultural rhetoricians act by “Agreeing
that rhetoric and culture are inextricably and dynamically linked,” (A. Haas, 2008, p. 21). That is
to say that cultural production and rhetorical production are, while not the same, certainly
associated very strongly with each other. In essence, it is the work of the cultural rhetorical

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scholar to describe and, perhaps in a more activist mode, to attempt to alter the nature of that
link. Haas goes on defining cultural rhetoric scholars as “scholars practicing cultural rhetorics
study, theorize, and write about the complex relationships between rhetoric and race, gender,
class, nationality, age, gender, sexuality, and ability, among other cultural influences,” (A. Haas,
2008, p. 21, emphasis mine). As Haas points out, one of the purviews of cultural rhetorical
inquiry lies in an effort “to interrogate the influence of dominant domains of thought and
structures of power that have subjugated some rhetorics in favor of others.” I understand this
aspect of cultural rhetorical thought to be focused on the investigation of the quality of
interaction between meaningful and epistemological rhetorics where investigation focuses on the
aspects of interplay between two or more such rhetorical traditions. Sauer does this work by
investigating the uneven social power relationships between differing forms of rhetorical
production: the “scientific” Agency dominant construction of risk and the miner dominant
embodied, experiential, and tacit construction of risk including explaining how feminist theory:
raises epistemological questions about how we value information when it comes from
sources outside traditional disciplinary and intellectual frameworks. For rhetoricians,
feminist theory helps us see (a) how culturally constructed notions of masculinity have
influenced how we think about risk and safety in the workplace and (b) how the discourse
practices of science reflect institutional and cultural assumptions that may inadvertently
or deliberately silence the voices of men and women who, labor in risky occupations
(Sauer, p. 179).
What is key to this sort of rhetorical scholarship is its acknowledgement of the role of political
power structure as well as its focus on interplay rather than comparative evaluation (see Lu for
an excellent description on the problematic history of comparative rhetoric especially between
Chinese and Western rhetorical traditions). To put it another way, looking at the interactions of
how and when one rhetorical episteme dominates and transforms experiences another is a key
focus for those aligned with Cultural rhetoric.

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Sauer: The Rhetorical Construction of Bodies
I understand the majority of Sauer's research work an attempt to take accounts of the
influence and distributed nature of miner experiences and constructions of risk. These accounts
must focus both the sociocultural (what people know) and the physical (where people are in
place) and therefore must take into account how bodies are constructed and used by miners to
understand risk. The positionality and perspectives of human bodies and nonhuman agents like
breathing apparatuses and heavy machinery is key to understanding, constructing, and managing
risk. These positionalities are constructed differently but are key in both official Agency and
personal accounts of risk. However, official accounts become the accounts of record in such
situations. They are written language and engineering that become not only “what happened” in
accidents but also “what people should do” in dangerous situations for new mining personnel.
Sauer’s research points out perspective shifting based on embodied geographic locations. This
rhetorical perspective shifting is used to understand and respond to risk by mine workers. Miners
also use their bodies to convey and produce accounts of such perspectives.
The embodied rhetoric of miners accounts for the shifting of perspectives better than
official accounts that seek single perspectives of incidents. Sauer attempts to capture and
understand accounts of miners where hands, bodies, and oral narrative convey deeply
sophisticated and complicated perspectives. She does this by listening to miner accounts where
embodied rhetorical production is at the center of rhetorical activity. Miner accounts create a
more complete account of embodied rhetorical production of miner understanding of risk. Such
embodied rhetoric, Sauer argues, contributes to a more complex rhetorical account of the shifting
positions human and nonhuman actors. As the mine environment is constantly shifting, “good”
rhetoric takes account of that shifting and positioning.

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My point here is that Sauer’s work can be said to contribute to cultural mapping of
embodied rhetorical production at several levels. First, Sauer engages in field research and
provides accounts of miners’ epistemological and embodied rhetorical accounts of “positions” of
their labor. Second, her investigation of the rhetorical invention process at the level of Agency
uncovers the process by which the personal and embodied rhetorical discourse of miners is
transformed by governmental Agencies and therefore becomes disembodied. Finally, Sauer
provides a pointed critique of the failure of Federal agency rhetoric and documentation processes
to adequately integrate the embodied and specific epistemologically rich rhetorical constructions
of risk that miners generate between themselves.
Sauer dedicates several chapters of the book to exploring the embodied experience of
miners’ rhetorical production. Here Sauer’s work focuses on how miners engage and manage
risk in relation to their own bodies and the bodies of nonhuman actors like drills, roof bolts,
safety flame lamps, and even canaries (p. 190). This distributed rhetorical production as
embodied knowledge of changing material conditions is translated into actionable rhetoric to
“save their [miner] lives” (p. 190).
The importance embodied rhetoric has to miners can be seen in their reaction during
moments of training and construction of bodies in “FATALGRAMS.” FATALGRAMS are
cartoon like depictions of risk used in U.S. mine safety-training classes. Sauer argues that these
FATALGRAMS resonate with miners not only because of the importance of embodied
viewpoints to construction of risk but also in how they construct accounts of risk. These
FATALGRAMS resonate in the same way that miners use their bodies and mimetic gesture to
convey embodied accounts as well as an account of a memory device such as “Three Finger Joe,
shakes hands with danger,” a trope that equates risk behavior with digit dismemberment.

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That is not to say that Agencies produce such useful training material with the embodied
rhetorical understandings in mind. A large amount of Sauer’s chapter on the nature of warrants
grounded in experience focuses on the difference between the embodied experience of miners’
rhetorical constructions of risk/bodies and the failure of agency documentation to adequately
translate these experiences into instructional material or scientifically based disaster accounts.
She says as much in her book when she talks about “the problem of relying on written texts to
convey the information that decision makers need to assess and manage risk” (p. 189). For
example, Sauer’s chapter four examines the reconstruction of the Wilberg mine fire experience
in the MSHA (Mining Safety and Health Administration) Report of Investigation on the incident.
Sauer shows how bodies are constructed in such a document (she frequently labels them
“viewpoints”) through such chapter subheadings as “Mapping Embodied Positions” (p. 142).
These embodied positions deal with accounts of body construction directly related to the labor
miners were engaged in at the site before during and after the fire. For example, Nagy (the
principle investigator) “tells how he determined each miner’s location according to miners’
activity at the site (e.g., coal dumping) and by their location in relation to numbered
passageways” that “are melded seamlessly into the language of engineering” (p. 142).
Additionally, bodies are also constructed in a time sequence in such documents. In the
“Reconstructing Time” (p. 143) section, Sauer reads the Report of Investigation where Nagy
uses bodies and actions, constructed in the language of engineering, to eliminate possible fire
ignition causes and reproduces those bodies. The multiple bodies of miners are reproduced via
time sequence in an attempt to locate what Sauer calls “Rhetorical Positions” of miner accounts.
This reproduction transforms multiple miner experiences from positional to a single perspective
omnipotent account. To put it another way, the investigator uses time and space accounts of

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miners to construct bodies, not perspectives, in relation to other bodies and nonhumans. The
investigator does this to account for the sensory possibilities (whether a miner could have
seen/felt/heard/smelled what they claimed they did) of individual accounts and produce a single
account of risk. This account of risk, the investigation report, is one where the language of
engineering and science is used and one that attempts to eliminate multiple perspectives about
bodies in context.
Agencies, both Federal and private, produce single unambiguous account perspectives.
These accounts are based, according to Sauer, on intellectualized bodiless warrants. Such
accounts and the warrants that support them and produce them are problems for miners and their
families. In my previous discussions of Sauer in this chapter, I addressed how Sauer discusses
how disembodied accounts leave out nonwork space indicators of risk as well as limiting access
to knowledge making enterprises such as accident investigation report writing. One of the
embodied rhetorics that miners use is “Pitsense.” “Pitsense” is embodied knowledge of risk
indicators, which develop as a key part of the lived experiences of working in a mine. “Pitsense”
accounts transcend work and nonwork places. However, such accounts are removed in the
Transformation of Experience in Agency accounts. The disembodied Agency perspective affects
social justice issues. Issues such as locating employer risk behavior, responsibility and regulatory
problems become obscured or hidden official reports. Risk is presented as knowable and
controllable via bulleted checklists in such situations far removed from miner experiences of
“pitsense,” obscuring and faulting miner rhetorical production. Such obscuring not only affects
Agency disaster reports but also the shape, usefulness and effectiveness of mandated Agency
educational efforts.
According to Sauer, Agency educational efforts are at their best when they engage miner

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professional embodied rhetorical production. For example, the cartoon-like depictions of risk
used in U.S. mine safety-training classes called FATALGRAMS are rhetorically successful
because they embody perspectives of human bodies and nonhuman actors. This success happens
despite the FATALGRAMS' comical perspective or uncomplicated nature. Other forms of
Agency training do nothing of the sort, continuing to rely on the “engineering” perspectives of
the omnipotent viewpoint.
Here I depart from Sauer because such discussions are beyond the scope of her
investigation. When I look to this research I see miner body representations at the center of the
FATALGRAM. The visual rhetorical nature of the FATALGRAM allows for an embodied
perspective of both human and nonhuman agents. The miner is allowed to not only make
connections to other previous embodied stories like “Three Finger Joe” but also allowed to shift
perspective around the representation itself. The miner does not stand in one place “observing” a
picture but can shift perspective to produce accounts of potential cause and preventative
measures. That is to say, Sauer’s position is that the FATALGRAM allows miners to engage in
an embodied rhetorical production of narrative and possible cause. I see that moment as only one
rhetorical possibility. This is the starting point to be sure, but miners also understand that many
actors, both human and nonhuman, are involved in these FATALGRAMs, some of which can be
seen in the image and many of which cannot. These unseen perspectives and the relationships
they cause and shape lie at the heart of “pitsense” as an embodied rhetorical tool. In essence,
“pitsense” is both a felt awareness of the relationship of humans and nonhumans in shifting mine
environment as well as an embodied rhetoric to assess and convey those relationships. Agency
education works best when it articulates the perspectives of bodies to nonhumans as with
FATALGRAMS and does not work, for miners, when embodied perspectives are erased or

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translated poorly.
Sauer locates her work within a tradition of feminist scholarship that “raises
epistemological questions about how we value information when it comes from sources outside
of traditional disciplinary and intellectual frameworks” (p. 179). She does this work in an effort
to undo the privileging process of what Sauer sees as “discourse practices of science (that) reflect
institutional and cultural assumptions that inadvertently or deliberately silence the voices of men
and women who labor in risky occupations,” (p. 179). At the level of cultural perspective what
Sauer provides for us is the mapping of the interaction between modes of cultural
epistemological production about “risk,” how those rhetorics interact while calling to attention
the failure of the dominant one, as well as how bodies are erased or constructed in risk work
spaces. If we believe Haas’ claim of cultural rhetorical theory as theory where “rhetoric shapes
identities and bodies” then Sauer does the work of cultural rhetoric. I interpret these moments in
Sauer’s work as moments of the analysis of how bodies and “viewpoints” that are contained in
those bodies are constructed rhetorically in dialogue, documents, image, and gesture. In Sauer’s
work, the bodies are not only sites of rhetorical production but also are made through rhetorical
work across multiple sites like homes, mines, and in reports. Haas also reminds us in her
description of Cultural rhetoric’ areas of interest that “rhetoric is more than texts/discourse (e.g.,
material rhetorics).” Sauer helps the scholar interested in cultural issues in rhetorical thought by
adding the discourses of miners’ construction of risk in rhetoric. Sauer also gives us an analysis
of the role gestures play in the production of mimetic and analytic arguments as well as the
creation of multiple-viewpoints as speakers negotiate and explore rhetorical meanings in
accounts. Sauer provides us as rhetoricians a critical perspective as to how such embodied
rhetorical perspective is disembodied or eliminated by Agency Rhetorical Transformation of

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experience.

Victor Villanueva’s understanding of Professional Matters
My position here is not that Villanueva would understand his work or intends to do the
work of the disciplinary track of professional writing. That does not stop Bootstraps and other
work from being about the rhetoric of professions. Villanueva’s book on professionalization’s
greatest strength, as Raul Sanchez put it, is “its insistence on seeing the personal and the
theoretical or the intellectual as necessarily intertwined, mutually informing,” (Sanchez, 1995).
This eloquence and crafting of personal, professional, and theoretical is done so compellingly
and so seamlessly that I am always surprised when Villanueva’s account is reduced to only being
understood in one of those categories. Frequently, the book is often categorized solely into the
province of cultural and racial issues; in other words, it is detached from all the issues that
cultural diversity and issues of race influence, especially the professional. The argument I would
like to make here that Villanueva’s account is many things but the most underappreciated aspect
of the book is a remarkably rich and complex account of professionalization.
For those interested in Culture and the field of Rhetoric and Composition, Victor
Villanueva needs no introduction. Currently he sits as the Regents Professor at Washington State
University where his awards have included the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professorship in
Liberal Arts. In 2009 he was named the 2009 Exemplar for the Conference on College
Composition and Communications and the 2008 recipient of the National Council of Teachers of
English Advancement of People of Color Leadership Award. He has been the chair of our largest
field conference, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, in 1999-2000
and was the chair of its annual meeting in 1998. Dr. Villanueva’s work itself has been the
winner of the 1995 NCTE David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship

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in English and the Richard A. Meade Award from the Conference on English Education for
Distinguished Research in English Education. Both awards were for Bootstraps: From an
American Academic of Color. His extensive scholarly work as well as his editorial work can be
seen in books such as Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader (1997), Latino/a Discourses
(2004), and Language Diversity in the Classroom (2003). There could be little doubt of the
importance of Dr. Villanueva’s leadership in the establishment of Cultural issues on the field of
Rhetoric as viable topic or his degree of prominence within the Rhetoric and Composition
discipline.
I want to take some space here to provide some justification for my focus on Villanueva’s
discussion of race and ethnicity in what follows. In some ways, what I am doing here by
focusing my attention of race and ethnicity to discuss issues of professionalization is flawed. My
flaw is to focus on race and ethnicity in terms of professionalization because the strength of
Villanueva’s work lies in his ability to convincingly construct arguments of relatedness between
cultural issues like race, ethnicity, class, language, rhetoric, pedagogy, research methodology,
and professionalization. That the complexity of the interaction between those issues is sometimes
artificially separated is precisely the point of Villanueva’s scholarship. I seem to be doing the
opposite work here by reducing those issues to only ones of race and ethnicity. In my analysis
that follows, I focus almost entirely on the racial and ethnic aspect of that conversation not
because those two issues are the most meaningful element or the most important but because that
is how Villanueva’s work is frequently reduced. That is to say that Villanueva’s work gets
reduced to the categories of race and ethnicity. His work, despite its ability to speak to a great
many issues, ends up being reduced to classrooms as part of the “talking back” or “diversity”
week readings. That has been my experience in graduate school classes, at conferences, and in

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conversations with others in our profession. However, I choose his discussions about race and
ethnicity, exclusively, as my departure point for his discussion of professionalization precisely
because of that framing. Simply put, I am being reductive in discussing his work but in a very
specific and purposeful way. I am being reductive in a way that should be familiar with how this
work is frequently positioned in the field’s conversations as a common point of departure.
Villanueva’s account in Bootstraps describes an elaborate professionalization experience
moving back and forth about how ideas and experiences influence each other. While the book
seems, on a surface inspection, to be fairly linear in it’s organization it is not. Villanueva admits
as much during the end of the book claiming that “This is a postmodern text . . . But I’m just
playing the postmodern academic’s role in saying all this. It may all be true, but not all intended”
(p. 140) and so the book takes on seven chapters that, at least in broad organizational principles,
resemble the traditional structure of biographies and histories in general. I am going to describe
the chapters outlined here briefly to denote how they are themed in one sense, or more
accurately, how they begin. I’ll come back to these chapters in more detail after that in terms of
how the entire book is organized. Chapter One, “The Block” positions Villanueva’s upbringing
and early and adolescent childhood memories involving his family and schooling in Brooklyn,
New York. Chapter Two describes El Bloque in more detail lingering over, as the title suggests
“An American of Color” in terms of how race, rhetorical action, and ethnicity are constructed
within these spheres of home, the social world of The Block, and school. The third chapter “Spic
in English!” deals with Villanueva’s family moving to California and his first tour of duty during
the Vietnam War. Chapter Four, “Coming to a Critical Consciousness,” outlines the rest of his
time in the military. With Chapter Five “Inglés in the Classroom,” Villanueva moves to his
resignation from the military and his initial attempt at obtaining an associates’ degree then an

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undergraduate degree. “Of Color, Classes, and Classrooms” is the sixth chapter that deals with
graduate school and his own teaching experience with Chapter Seven breaking the cycle.
Of course that is not exactly an accurate depiction of the book’s rich organizational
structure. Those elements are there to be sure and each chapter starts with the exception of
Chapter Seven in a typical biographical element but each biographical moment is used to show
and lead into a theoretical and, more importantly in the second half of the book, a professional
theme. And so the integration that Sanchez talks about becomes evident as multiple complex
ideas lead to others. Literature reviews of language research come to make sense of early
linguistic school experiences. Political theory informs realized career goals and failures.
Language struggles with school and professional practices of writing and instruction are
integrated with historic reviews and backgrounds on language education and contemporary
pedagogical theory and even his own experiences as an empirical researcher. Villanueva would
explore the experiential influence on research and analysis again in other work. While I locate
much of the following discussion within Bootstraps specifically, I will also draw on other major
articles that Prof. Villanueva has written because they give me insight into how experience
shapes research process and practice and enacts moments of access.

Villanueva: Spaces and Places
Villanueva’s prologue to Bootstraps starts with a quote from his mother, “It’s nobody’s
business.” The use of this quote is no accident nor is the content. This sentence functions,
literally, to point us to the representations that are left out of professionalism and writing in
professions. First, that literally the information about family, socio-cultural pressure, and
economic impact on family are not part of the business of professional accounts. Second, that
what counts as “business” is frequently what happens in informal liminal spaces of professions

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that are “boundless” (Jablonski, 2005). That is to say, it is impossible to understand certain kinds
career experiences by relying on data produced or reported solely in formal work places. A
researcher must pay attention to activities and experiences that occur around what we
traditionally call the “work place” including professional networking experiences, disciplinary
experiences, and the rhetorical interactions of family to understand career writing and careers.
The first place I want to talk about spaces in places are Villanueva’s nonwork experiences
that he draws on to build his portrayal of professional activity. As I outlined before, one of the
major strengths of this book is the unflinching refusal to separate professional and cultural
issues. Bootstraps’ rhetorical goal would be undermined by an account and such a separation
would undercut Villanueva’s claim of the interdisciplinarity of issues of professionalism, critical
Marxist theory, pedagogy, and language diversity in education and national policy. Take for
example the parallel structure Villanueva uses to express the racist experience of the lived
“working class” neighborhood. While in grad school, the house behind Villanueva’s family has
had African American tenants for a very short time, weeks when they move, “gone during
Christmas, days after their house had been broken into, “niggers” painted in red inside” (p. 116).
Compare that moment with his later describing the alienating move to a middle-class
neighborhood, “At the public gathering places Victor is spoken to in Farsi one day, asked if he is
from India the next. Victor the Curiosity. And he, himself, feels foreign. But the area is safe” (p.
116). This sense of the choice between violence and alienation in geographic lived space mirrors
his experience of professionalization. On the next page, speaking of professionalization “His
[Villanueva’s] work has him festering in insecurity . . . There is grantsmanship. There is
publication. There is teaching graduate courses on writing when he still doesn’t believe he knows
how to write, when he is not yet legitimate, still fearing that he might not become legitimate,

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certified, the Ph.D.” (p. 117). Here we can see that workspace and nonwork places affect a
collapse in understanding. Each mirrors a sense of alienation and uncoupling from social
cohesion and the legitimacy of ethnic and professional experience. In each space, Villanueva’s
social connections remain illegitimate. The tie spans most of the book but can perhaps best be
seen later in the chapter when the sentence structure backs the collapse between the two
positions “He (Villanueva) is scared, professionally alone, trying to meet all of the profession’s
demands and his culture’s demands to be an active parent, still trying to cope with poverty” (p.
118). Literally, each (work and nonwork) infringes on the other at the level of conceptual space.
They are different spaces but the same choices: the threat of (physical or economic) violence or
alienation.
Throughout the book there are other moments where the dual demands of profession and
nonwork spaces collapse. Key to Villanueva’s argument about the emergence in his own critical
consciences, one he locates as a key element of his professional identity, are a number of
nonwork conversations and places where he these conversations happen. The rhetorical
exigencies are not lost on either Villanueva or his audience. For example, the demand to speak in
English during his Vietnam tour, rather than Spanish with other enlisted Latinos, is used by
Villanueva as a launching board to talk about the ties between language, ideology, nationalism,
colonialism and the subtle but important contradictions in English Only language education and
legislation in the US. The insistence on English only in Vietnam is used to show how the
colonial project of the US relies as much on English to create an American space and place as
guns, combat fatigues, and commerce. This colonialism exists not only for the Vietnamese but
also for Villanueva in terms of a National linguistically centered ideological project. For
Villanueva, this is a structure that mirrors the schizophrenic and colonial history of English Only

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language education and legislation where the English language, assumed to be a coherent whole,
is used create both the place and space of America. This experiential account, experiencing what
will become his work, becomes linked to his accounts of writing instruction as each informs the
discussion of the other over the course of the chapter.
These experiential links and the spaces and places they occur in become key to
understanding the knowledge work of Villanueva’s academic career. There are other points
where accounts of work in nonwork settings become important. Villanueva’s career as an
educator and critical rhetorical theorist becomes directly influenced by the permeability of work
and nonwork spaces and places. For example, Villanueva’s experience with his manservant
during his deployment to South Korea is one where Villanueva locates his part of his
development as a critical theorist and understanding of the US continued colonial international
policy. His interactions with the servant take place away from both his career as an academic
(they take place before he enrolls in college) and away from his job at that time in the US Army.
Yet, those jobs deeply influence Villanueva’s understanding of those conversations both within a
career moment at that point in the book as member of the US Army and in terms of his later
academic career.
As the relationship between Villanueva and this servant builds, a slow but steady shift in
associations begins to occur. This nonwork relationship begins to affect not only Villanueva’s
understanding of his military career but also, transparently, effects his understanding of the
academic career’s ideological choices. Moments like these deeply influence Villanueva’s
thinking about the issues of language and rhetoric. As readers, we know this influence is strong
because these accounts of the permeability of work and nonwork spaces are included in a book
about professionalization experience and because selected moments like these are part of the

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account that he has chosen to develop about his own political and professional ideology and
identity. Within the text, that is the purpose that such accounts serve; to the map out the nonwork
and work experiences that have come to justify the argument of self. The biographical argument
of self that Villanueva creates in the book is one that encounters both the professional and
personal and is rhetorically being put forward in this book. Villanueva understands that to
separate such influences is artificial and is perhaps, indeed, a racist way of thinking. The
separation of spaces, identities, and categories into separate types of expediencies does a certain
kind of reductive work he is unwilling to engage in.
In my analysis of Bootstraps I rely heavily on a notion of professional writing advanced
by Jeffrey Jablonski (2005) in his notion of career perspectives. Jablonski understands career
theory in terms of four key and overlapping elements which create and account for the
“boundryless career” in some way or another: time; how careers build over time, universality;
how experience influences across organizational boundaries over time and lead to knowledge
about each, interdisciplinarity; how differing academic fields must be used to understand the
totality of a career, and duality; which factors influence and crossover personal and professional
life decision divides.
As Jablonski notes, the notion of a career relies heavily on key concepts like
interdisciplinary to explain lived careers of professionals. Villanueva himself relies on several
different academic disciplines (Critical theory, English pedagogy and Composition, Ethnic
studies and Rhetoric) to explain not just his own experience but also his professional
development across multiple jobsites and career paths. Particularly as Arthur (1994, qtd in
Jablonski) explains, boundryless careers are ones where the “career moves across boundaries of
separate employers,” as well as ones where “a person rejects existing career opportunities for

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personal or family reasons”. Villanueva shows us the relationship between work and nonwork
places for his career development by mapping the relationship between racist violence and
alienation. These relationships exist between lived experience in specific neighborhood spaces
and those same experiences across the spaces of multiple careers (military and academy). He
also shows us key elements how people negotiate boundaryless careers by showing the influence
of experience across such boundaries. These boundaries are not only located in space and place. I
have shown here space and place are deeply linked to the experience of key theoretical concepts
about language, culture, rhetoric, and professionalism.

Villanueva: Experience
Villanueva with Bootstraps has provided a text that offers a robust example of career
process and description. His inclusive and extensive blending of theoretical, personal, and
professional concerns provides a most complete description of career development over time.
Time in Bootstraps not only provides the initial structure for the book. The book’s organization
around time also maps and understands career milestones in terms of personal accounts that have
influenced Villanueva. These accounts are shown to influence his career in ways that would
otherwise be left out of other types of “professional” accounts frequently in recurring similar
moments.
Villanueva is careful enough to distribute these recurring moments throughout the book
to represent certain themes he wants to emphasize about the professionalization of people of
color in the academy. For example, recurring experiences with language and nationalism during
his experiences with the military in Vietnam (p. 120), Palo Alto, CA (p. 51-54), and in South
Korea (p. 63-64) are used to show where his political and research agenda as a scholar has come
from. Experiential moments in the book are inter-spliced with literature reviews and arguments.

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Some of these moments are about the history of English only legislation (p. 120), a discussion of
the merits and problems of libratory pedagogy in practice framed in terms of field experience (p.
51-54), and an experiential account of the motivation to shift career paths (p. 63-64). This
accounting of time in the narrative provides a richer account of the multitude of complex factors,
personal, private, financial, and matters of national policy that come to influence both
Villanueva’s career choices and his own political formation. These accounts of time provide a
robust account of Villanueva’s understanding of experiential and theoretical influences over
time. Villanueva then deftly links these influences to his particular professional positioning as
both a researcher and an instructor. The professional writing scholar interested in rhetoric of
both professional writing and rhetorical professional positioning such an account offers an
amazing snapshot at how understandings of career and work change over time in an individual.
Villanueva provides a rich account of universality from a career theory prospective. He
does this by choosing to tell his story of professionalization through experiences, especially early
ones. These early experiences with formal organizations like schools and informal social
relationships like “The Block” portrays how life experiences become transformed into his
theoretical and professional focuses on literacy education and research trajectories. In Bootstraps
in particular, Villanueva foregrounds work spaces and relationships. His emphasis on social
relationships and factors that influence work places behavior and theory are at the cornerstone of
his current theoretical and intellectual position. Villanueva signals these moments by linguistic
switches from first to second person. For example, while attempting to convey why he choose to
reenlist in the Army during the Vietnam war Villanueva shifts from first to second person, “His
is an administrative job among civilians . . . But he’s just a GED. He reenlists,” (Villanueva, 50).
The passage is used to focus attention on what social factors influence the decision to reenlist.

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These factors are place beside factors mentioned earlier in the chapter such as financial and
familiar influences. We understand he has some issues with both the linguistic and political.
Villanueva makes clear with this line about reenlistment that financial and educational factors
are more important than political factors at this point in his work history. He also shows how
each have come to influence his current thinking on racism, language, and political identity
issues of his current profession.
Reenlistment is not the only example of how past experiences come to shape decisions in
the switch between first and second person. The shift occurs again at a similar point at the end of
the next chapter emphasizing his social relation to people during this particular moment in his
career “Sgt. V returns home shortly thereafter . . . He begins to wonder how such big events
could be so effectively kept from so many. A flood of memories, a rising consciousness, a
critical consciousness” (p. 64). Here his use of the third person indicates another moment that
becomes as important to the development of his ideas as a scholar as the birth of “a critical
consciousness” (p. 64). Also, the use of the honorific “Sgt.” for sergeant indicates his social
relationship rank and expectations to others in the military, a relationship conveyed in an earlier
portion of the book where recreates an exchange between himself and a fellow noncommissioned
officer (p. 51).
I want to make a move here to specifically talking about careers and what Villanueva’s
description of experience does for our understanding of them. According to Jablonski and career
theory, there are a number of ways we should discuss and talk about boundryless careers. Two of
the key elements for understanding boundryless careers are Universality, Time, and as I
mentioned before, Interdisciplinarity (Jablonski, 2005, p. 64-65). Universality in boundryless
careers “By looking at an individual's work experiences over time, not an individual's career in a

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particular company” we can see the social contexts of people’s careers. In the case of Villanueva,
we see this boundryless career perspective across multiple career paths both military and
academic. Yet the discussion of each experience is not fragmented; far from it. Experience in one
frames positionality in the other. Villanueva has used this form to indicate and make sense
through reflection and narrative as he creates a text that transforms moments of exposure into
moments of access and “a rising consciousness, a critical consciousness” (p. 64). This same
transition between career trajectories takes place over time lending us even more perspective on
the forces that shape Villanueva’s career perspective. Time accounts shift the career perspectives
and decision making that takes place over course of ones work life. The major benefit of such a
perspective is that, “By studying different careers and collective patterns of individual career
activities, we can study individual, organizational, and social change” (Jablonski, p. 64).
Villanueva shifts experiences in his book across education, the military, and the academy giving
us clues to ideologies and linguistic use. This shift over time and across organizations lends to
our understanding of his career trajectory across organizational contexts and time. Additionally,
Jablonski notes that a key career theory perspective on boundryless careers rely heavily on an
interdisciplinary approach where “The concept of the career is not the property of any one
theoretical or disciplinary point of view” (Jablonski, p. 11). The interrelatedness of professional
experience and issues along with personal experiences are at the core the major strength of
Villanueva’s work. As the Sanchez’s quote I used to start this section indicates, it’s the general
sense making that refuses to separate experience into discrete theoretical categories that makes
the book so compelling.
Experience is transformed in Bootstraps into critical race theory, Marxism, linguistics,
teacher education, and rhetoric giving us a sense of a lived career rather than a series of jobs.

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These three career theory contexts show that Villanueva’s account in Bootstraps is not only one
that deeply engages at the level of the transformation of experience into valuable knowledge but
also a robust account of a boundryless career and work life.

Villanueva: The Rhetorical Construction of Bodies
The main tour-de-force of Villanueva’s work, of course, centers around his work on
rhetoric and racism. Villanueva’s remarkable contribution for people of color in rhetoric and
composition has been because he purposely grounds racism and rhetoric not only in theoretical
and historical contexts but also in accounts of experiential moments of his own life. As I showed
in the previous section, these accounts of the experiential transcend both personal and
professional. This marked and described experience is what makes his work so compelling for
many people. There is a reality and a constant inescapableness to the issues of racism that
professionals of color must encounter at work and across nonwork places in his work. In the
terms of career theory, Villanueva’s work portrays not only the interdisciplinarity of job work
(critical theory, linguistics, historical rhetoric, economics, education, and composition) but also
universality as experiences shift over organizations and organizational structures.
There are two things I want to point out in these accounts as Villanueva expresses them.
First, as opposed to Sauer’s work, bodies in the workspace in this kind of work are constructed
by social absences as much as in presences. Second, the construction of social bodies is
pervasive, affecting every element of professionalization due to the very aspects that make
academic careers “boundryless”. What makes such a discussion of bodies in the work place for
Villanueva so interesting is that as often times as not, it is the absence of one construction that
leads to another sort.
Let me tackle the point of absence and presence first. First, we can see that Villanueva

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understands this presence and absence of his own ethnic experience himself. The very fact that
presence and absence of racial bodies are drawn on inconsistencies dominates most of the book.
Take the prelude where he explains the move from being “white” on the block to “some sort of
ethnic” (p. xi) for the rest of the country where the “many subtleties to the absurdities of racism”
(p. xii) are made vivid. For example, there is the moment where he describes one of the key
work as nonwork settings of the book where one of his professional “Heroes” tells a story about
being hustled by a “portorican” boy during a power blackout. Villanueva describes this
interchange, “And in his stereotyping, the hero had not seen Victor as a portorican, wouldn’t
have thought about it, likely, since portoricans are not rhetoricians or compositionists” (p. 119).
Villanueva claims here “the professional” of his disciplinary self removes his marked body in
this particular encounter. The “Hero” does not recognize Villanueva’s marked body in any way
other than as professional, an absence of color, allowing the account of the ethnic street hustler to
stand on its own. The same with another account where Villanueva conveys being placed on a
search committee where a member comments that they must be wary of applicants of color who
do not know their own limits or the example the offhanded causal comment of a coworker that
opens the prologue of the book. “Still, I have a hard time seeing you as someone of color” (p.
xii). Again absence clearly is an important aspect of professionalism, key in fact. As Villanueva
states, the sentence is probably offered as some sort of complement as “of color,” must mean
“brown and black and not quite as able” (p. xii). Villanueva’s body is constructed as absent by
virtue of his professional space and place (around the table with peers, a hallway in an English
department on congratulations of the publication of a book) or organizational status (on a search
committee). In each case, because of inclusive professionalism language, the ethnic-ness of
Villanueva’s body is removed from the rhetorical situation for the speakers.

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Of course, in the universe of racist inconsistencies that are racial bodies in professional
context the opposite holds true as well. Villanueva becomes overly representational not just to
the general population where he is “some sort of ethnic” (p. xi) East Indian, Iranian, Jewish, or as
I found on Amazon.com review titled “A Mexican who became a success, in spite of the odds!”
Villanueva uses moments like these to discuss the ever-present understatement of and
questioning of careers for people of color: the construction of multitudes. Again, from the
prologue Villanueva receives a manuscript with an attached note reading “Would you please
review this bibliography of Mexican American Literature?” (Villanueva, p. xiii) Villanueva’s
note that his professional concerns lie in rhetoric and Puerto Rican writers more than literature
and Mexican writers breezes by an understanding that to be brown is to represent Otherness. The
collapse that I want to emphasize is between the social construction of professional bodies,
academic disciplines and assumptions of professional competence based on such bodied
construction. Villanueva describes meeting with a boss where “he [Villanueva] can never be
sure, not really, of his own competence, can never be sure if the laurels proffered are more
honorary for the colored kid than earned” (p. 120) because of his awareness of assumed
incompetence from his professional experiences. How can one be sure of one’s competence
when a profession constantly asks for performance not consistent within his professional
development?
My second major point about the social of construction of bodies in Villanueva’s work is
that the construction of social bodies is pervasive affecting every element of professionalization.
Here I want to foreground the nature of Jablonski’s construction of “boundryless” careers
because a way of understanding careers helps us to understand just how intertwined social bodies
are in the nature of such careers. I also want to expand some of my examples to include

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Villanueva’s other work such as his 1999 article “On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism.”
One of the ways I think that Villanueva’s work is so powerful is in describing the
insidiousness of what I will call mundane or casual racist language. For Villanueva, this
mundane way of constructing professionalism and racism are not located in specific
organizations or individuals but rather as he says, “I believe that all are fundamentally concerned
with bettering conditions for people of color and of poverty. Their efforts attest to that. I offer
these scenes to demonstrate how deeply embedded racism is, systematically,” (p. 120).
Bootstraps as an account of the issues of English education, rhetoric, ethnicity and race would
not work as a professional account if Villanueva located any of these events away from
pervasiveness. Racism happens, literally, everywhere in the book not located in individuals
solely but rather systematically.
This system does not exist in the abstract either but in organizations and people across
contexts and reoccurring. For example, a vague profession doesn’t constantly locate Villanueva’s
work as the work of Mexican Literature scholarship, an individual publisher does (p. xi). Nor is
the “hard time” (p. xii) seeing Villanueva has as a person of color the product of a vague culture
but rather the specific located agency of individuals on hiring committee, graduate school
advisors, and colleagues offering congratulations in hallways. Villanueva’s location of such
forces across professional, personal, organizational, and educational divides locates his
professional experiences in the career theory universal; that is they are shaped across specific
context and individuals to paint a systemic, causal, and mundane experiential argument about
culture, in general and the difficulties of professionalization in the specific. The emphasis of his
universal experience of professionalization in Bootstraps allows Villanueva to carry just that
much more meaning as the theme of the socially constructed body moves from education, to

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professional experience, and personal experience. This movement of moments gives his
discussions the effects that professional experiences and the exigencies influence personal
experiences. Those exigencies do not flow one way but rather move back and forth between
professional and personal experiences each influencing the other. That back and forth influence
is what career theory calls “duality.”
Let me focus on how Villanueva describes how his body is constructed rhetorically. What
is important to remember when I make these comparisons is that the social construction of the
body especially in terms of race and ethnicity is a key component to professional construction of
career. What is and is not Villanueva’s body affects how and why people discuss the topics they
do around him as well as his sense of his professional commitments. However, the presence and
absence of ethnicity and race in his social body in the work place is not an isolated solely in that
context.
Villanueva parallels workplace social constructions with the embodied influences and
social constructions in nonacademic settings as well in an effort to display the pervasiveness of
these embodied constructions. Most of the nonwork scenes used to talk about social bodies take
place in alternate professional contexts and usually tied to language use. For example, when
moving to California the move from being a “white” speaker of black English on el blocque
becomes, “In a sense, I was pushed into racelessness in California. I had been set up not to
establish a fictive kinship with Chicanos” (p. 40). Add to these discussions perceptions of race
and ethnicity away from career settings such as the one that opens to book. After briefly
describing how other people in a variety of contexts mistake him alternatively as Iranian, Indian,
and Jewish, Villanueva claims that, “He must look Jewish. The white kid in Brooklyn ain’t just
white elsewhere,” (p. xi). These social constructions of race outside and inside work permeate

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the book, providing example after example of how bodies are constructed rhetorically, not
essentially. The issues of work place and the issues of lived existence when it comes to the
construction of racial bodies becomes a constant and pervasive presence in Bootstraps arguing
Villanueva’s cultural point but also displaying the dual nature of open careers in the space
between workplace and living spaces of neighborhoods.
And while Villanueva frames such issues in terms of embedded and systematic racism
and language use, a position he spells out convincingly in my mind, they also point to the
collapse of professional career and the construction of bodies. In each case, some sort of
professional identity such as workplace competence or disciplinary role or orientation is
mediated by social construction of physical form or vice versa. Hispanic body equates to expert
on Mexican literature. Rhetoric scholar equals nonportorican. Person of color have an easier time
professionally, or alternatively, competence in field not traditionally related to people of color
equals as not of color. Villanueva creates a compelling account of professionalization and
professional experience by creating an account of professionalization in totality. That totality
includes the universality of experiences with a raced or raceless body rhetorically constructed
across time in a number of professional contexts (education, military, and academia) as well as
producing a dual account of how that socially constructed body across the duality of work and
the liminal workspaces that make up “boundryless” careers. These liminal work spaces like
dinners with colleagues and hallway conversations map the impact of such discussions on his
own sense of professional identity and competence as well as how other professionals understand
and “see” him.

Conclusion
What I have attempted in this chapter is to ground my discussion of the similarities and

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differences between particular kinds of professional writing scholarship and cultural rhetoric
scholarship that influence my project. I have attempted to map with both Beverly Sauer and
Victor Villaneuava’s academic work what I see as a pattern of scholarship that increasingly sees
work that deals with subjects and communities of working professionals and the rhetorical
problems and solutions that develop as a result. I have chosen two specific iconic works to argue
for how, in certain works, we can understand cultural rhetorical work as the work of
professionals as well as how we can understand professional writing work as the work of those
engaged in cultural rhetorical projects.
That is not to say that each of these authors, or the disciplines they represent here, have
tensions that lie through out there work. I will fully grant that each author has a specific
emphasis in each of the three categories that I have emphasized here as work in nonwork places,
the rhetorical transformation of experience, and the rhetorical construction of bodies that they
construct in particular ways to their subject matter and can, clearly, be said to emphasizing
certain elements i.e. Sauer’s focus on the organizational aspects and Villanueva’s focus on the
experiential subjective experience. However, as I hope I attempted to point out in this chapter,
while those overarching and organizing patterns (Sauer’s organizational and Villanueva’s
subjective) might be the focus they are frequently understood and set in relation to the other to
understand how and when rhetoric works in the lives under discussion. Something I have tried to
show in this chapter.
Specifically, I have attempted to show that we might be able to understand each project in
terms the categories that I laid out in chapter 1 for building and understanding a more sustainable
and complicated theory of access in terms of work in nonwork places, the rhetorical
transformation of experience, and the rhetorical construction of bodies.

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Additionally, in this chapter I have attempted to provide a grounded example of that that
understanding might look at across the two fields that I think are key in building that theory of
access: Cultural rhetoric and professional writing. I here attempted to provide specific and
detailed case analysis to demonstrate the gains of viewing such works contributing to the
particular kind of work I am interested in. In my next chapter, I will attempt to build a
methodology that can attempt to trace the work I started here across mundane interactions with
issues of access and infrastructure.

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Chapter	
  3:	
  Interruption	
  	
  
[SCENE: SMALL OFFICE. MEDIUM SHOT OVER THE SHOULDER SHOT. DOUG
PEEKS HIS HEAD OUT FROM BEHIND MONITOR WHICH INITIALLY OBSCURES
HIS FACE]
DOUG: (finishes typing and casually looks over his shoulder at
the camera) Sorry. Just finishing an email. You know, it really
is amazing how quickly email dominated the forms of
communication that institutions take on. If you didn’t
understand how email gets used, you could spend your whole
waking life just reading and responding to it.
[SCENE: TURNED BACK AROUND IN CHAIR. FACING FORWARD. CLOSE UP.
AS IF CAMERA HAS BEEN THERE THE WHOLE TIME]
DOUG: Of course, that really isn’t the case. Anyone who has ever
really used, or been used, by email knows that it is rarely used
to convey new information. More often it is used to get things
done. You know, get compliance on an issue, get people to sign a
new greeting card for someone who is sick, have people show up
to the same room for the departmental holiday party, and so on.
[DOUG STANDS UP AND OFF CAMERA. CUT TO MEDIUM SHOT TO HIM
WALKING DOWN THE HALLWAY OF A SUBTLY LOOKING ACADEMIC . .
.WELL, HALLWAY]
DOUG: Which, of course, means you have to know a great deal
about the way people work socially, that is, the way people
organize themselves to use email well. That’s why you leave
little keys to who you are socially in them like your
institutional status of your email address or your proper title
Chair, Department of so and so, Research assistant to Important
Research center and so on. Don’t mind that I spell like an
idiot; this was knocked out on my iPhone. I really am a careful
researcher when I have a proper keyboard in front of me. You
know what I mean.
[DOUG DUCKS INTO A COMPUTER CLASSROOM THAT IS EMPTY. CUT TO DOUG
SITTING DOWN IN THE TEACHING POD OF THE CLASSROOM]
DOUG: Which means, that is to say, you have to know how an email
is going to be used if you really want to write a good one. That
is to say, you have to have access to the way that the social
group you are trying to influence . . .
[CUT TO DOUG TURNING HIS HEAD CONSPIRILATORIALLY]

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DOUG (playfully smirking): . . .or is trying to organize you . .
.
[CUT BACK TO DOUG SITTING DOWN IN THE TEACHING POD OF THE
CLASSROOM]
DOUG (BACK TO PREVIOUS TONE): thinks about things and is using
the email. Now that isn’t always clear cut because, well, people
don’t exactly lie but certainly they have different audiences.
For example, let me show you an email I use with my students to
talk about this.
[DOUG TAPS INTO KEYBOARD AND BRINGS UP GOOGLE MAIL]
DOUG: Ah. Here it is. Now this particular email came out last
year when MSU was doing well, again, in the NCAA basketball
tournament. Go Spartans. Anyway, you can see that it has come
from someone who is “Associate Provost for Undergraduate
Education and Dean of Undergraduate Studies.” Well that seems
important. Well, really it was forwarded to me by the chair of
the department, who got it from the “Associate Provost for
Undergraduate Education and Dean of Undergraduate Studies.”
Either way, it is OFFICIAL. And lets see, this is about i.e. the
subject line is, “Celebrating Our Athletic Success.” Well, that
sounds fun but here you see it is really about avoiding a riot.
[CUT TO DOUG TURNING HIS HEAD CONSPIRILATORIALLY]
DOUG (playfully smirking): Yes, that’s right it is a FAQ about
rioting.
[CUT BACK TO SAME POSITION, NOW DIFFERENT ANGLE]
DOUG (quickly through the next part): Well, here are all sorts
of answers you never could have figured out on your own such as
“How can I celebrate without getting arrested?” and “What do I
do if I find myself in the middle of a declared unlawful
assembly?” (under breath) never really thought about that one
myself but I am a homebody. Ahh, here we have “What is ‘blocking
a street?’” Always wondered that myself, turns out it means when
you stop people from using a street by, well, blocking it. OH!
And here is my favorite question and answer and I quote . . .
[CUT TO LONG SHOT OF DOUG USING CLASSROOM PROJECTOR AND
HIGHLIGHING PASSAGES OF EMAIL]
DOUG: FREQUENTLY asked question – “What to do if exposed to tear
gas?” And the hereto previously unknown answer, the one that
someone spent some time coming up with and has the official

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sanction of the “Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education
and Dean of Undergraduate Studies”?
[READ CLEARLY AND SLOWLY FOR EMPHASIS]
“Move to an area that is not exposed to the chemical agents /
tear gas.”
[CUT TO DOUG GETTING UP AND WALKING DOWN ISLE OF COMPUTR
CLASSROOM IN THE BACK]
DOUG: Now I am having a bit of sport about this document because
a) you have to admit that it is kind of funny and b) there is no
way this FAQ is intended to be read as Frequently Asked
Questions by anyone. When I use it in class, I ask students to
assume that the people in charge of generating and distributing
this memo are not thundering twits who have no rhetorical savvy
at all.
[CUT TO DOUG SITTING DOWN IN THE BACK OF THE CLASS WITH THE
SCREEN STILL ON THE MEMO. DOUG ON LEFT SIDE OF SCREEN. CAMERA
OVER HIS BACK. HE LEANS OVER HIS SHOULDER.]
DOUG: Very quickly we figure out that even though it is
addressed to students and about students that this FAQ is not
intended to be used BY students. Most everybody admits to
knowing that if being exposed to tear gas one should leave the
proximity of said tear gas. So quickly, and some chuckles later,
we ask ourselves well, who then, is the real audience? Whose
behavior is trying to be shaped? Or whose future behavior is
trying to be shaped? And because I teach in a particularly well
off school, very quickly someone mentions parents and lawyers,
or parents who are lawyers, or parents who HAVE lawyers who are
neighbors who get causally asked about law issues but not enough
to get billed because that is expensive and . . . well, you get
the idea.
[DOUG CUT TO FORWARD WAIST SHOT AT DESK]
DOUG: OK so what do you have, you have someone writing a
document for the future inevitable lawsuits that MIGHT happen if
a student gets hurt during a riot; a whole “en loco parentis”
sort of thing. You want to avoid that so you want to show that
you showed a significant amount of effort to try and prevent
those lawsuits but you want to do it in such a way that if you
are ever in court, the law is completely on your side, which
means using the language of the law, which means you write
ridiculous things so that you can say with some confidence that
“Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is with some

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confidence that we state we tried to prevent student X from
doing ridiculous things and as evidence of the fact we produce
Exhibit A in which we clearly state that we tried to reduce the
chances of Student X being ridiculous and despite our best
efforts they continued to be and as a result were harmed. We are
sorry about that but we did all we could.”
Now think, for a moment, about the dizzying array of access
issues contained in this one email. You have to understand the
way email works as far as organizing human behavior. You have to
understand how it will categorize taking appropriate action. You
have to understand how lawyers and the language of law work to
give yourself the best chance of success which means you have to
have access to the people that produce knowledge about law i.e.
lawyers either as neighbors or working for a department at your
university. You have to have a throng of IT professionals that
can keep your email systems working enough to deliver such a
document to appropriate people. AND you have understand how the
social dynamics of a university work to send so that you know
the document picks up ethos in its inevitable rhetorical
velocity as forward after forward puts title after title on the
document making it more and more “official” and important.
[CUT DO CAMERA UNDER THE DESK ON THE RIGHT. DOUG LEANS IN]
DOUG: And that is just one tiny little email. How many emails do
you get a day?
[CUT TO OUTSIDE OF BUILDING. DOUG EMERGES AND WALKS TO A BENCH
PULLING OUT A CELL PHONE, HIS LAPTOP, AND A BOOK. MEDIUM SHOT OF
HIM SITTING WITH OBJECTS NEXT TO HIM]
DOUG: Think about all the traveling the knowledge of that
document did. Think of all the dizzying amount of networks and
literacies, rhetorical and ideological skill, of background and
uses that come to mind. Then think about what you do with your
email every single day. Does it involve as many people? Maybe.
Is it as complex? Maybe. Is it different? Most assuredly. After
all, you don’t have all those titles and departments to rely on.
YOU can’t snap your fingers and get your legal department on the
line but I bet you know someone who can.
And that’s really what helps you figure out and use all this
stuff to, well, get things done. Important things. You aren’t
always successful but odds are if you are still watching this
you have been pretty darn successful. And let me ask you this,
how did you get there? I am sure you have a story. Everyone has
a story. Let me show you what I mean by starting with mine and

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using the way other people have talked about access to show you
how, I think, those stories might be better told.
[CUT TO MONTOGE OF POLYHEDRIAN DICE BEING ROLLED]
DOUG (AS VOICE OVER): For this next bit, I am going to rely
pretty heavily on work done in New Literacy Studies. You don’t
mind do you?
[SCENE CHANGES TO A TYPICAL MIDDLE CLASS KITCHEN TABLE. IN
BACKGROUND THERE IS A SMALL BOY WRITING ON A SHEET OF PAPER WITH
DICE AND GAMING BOOKS AROUND HIM. FRAME RIGHT, DOUG WALKS INTO
SHOT IN CLOSE UP IN SAME OUTFIT AS ABOVE]
DOUG: You see, when one is asked to produce a sort of literacy
history that makes its way into that work, one always has to
start somewhere. “En media res” as it were. For right now, I am
going to begin mine here. At that table. I’m learning how to
play the tabletop role-playing game “Dungeons and Dragons.” My
brother, who is nine years older than me, has introduced me to
the game because he started playing it with the neighbors across
the street. Now, being a big brother means that you kind of let
your little brother tag along but you certainly don’t coddle him
which means for me, letting me borrow the books he had to play
the game but not sitting down and explaining everything.
[SCENE CHANGES TO UP SHOT OF CHILD WITH PENCIL IN HAND
CONCENTRATING VERY HARD. VARIOUS SHOTS OF WRITING THINGS DOWN,
LOOKING THINGS UP, ROLLING DICE, ETC.]
DOUG (VOICE OVER): So I spent a lot of time reading and looking
things up. I wanted to know every thing about the game so I
could make a proper character and play with everyone. And when I
had a question, something that really stumped me, only then
would I dare to broach my brother or my neighbor with a
question. After all, they were fifteen and fourteen! They had a
lot of important things to get at!
[SCENE CHANGES TO GENEREIC OFFICE CONTAINING A TELEVISION SET
AND AN APPLE IIC. DOUG SITS AT DESK.]
DOUG: Now it wasn’t only learning about role-playing games that
motivated my reading. It also motivated my first computer
interactions. What you are looking at here was the pinnacle of
home productivity in 1984. This is the APPLE IIC. It was the
computer that my father brought home to write the never ending
paper work that was his job as a fire chief and later fire
marshal for the US Navy. This computer allowed for two very

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important things in his life. One was it allowed him to produce
an amazing amount of paperwork at home and two it facilitated my
mother collaborating with him on that paperwork in ways she
could have never done before: on the page in real time. Those
two factors literally let him keep his job and his retirement
but, well, none of that mattered to me then.
[SCENE CUT TO UP SHOT SIMILAR TO UP SHOT OF BOY PLAYING D&D]
DOUG: What was important to me then was filling out forms and
designing documents. I was a strange kid.
[SCENE CUT TO WORD PERFECT 3.0 KEYBOARD OUTLINE AND SCREEN SHOT
MONTOGE]
DOUG: You see, by this point I was once again heavily into
playing Dungeons & Dragons because it was a remarkably easy way
to make friends. And if you are a slightly nerdish kid with
asthma and a rather odd intensity about your passions that’s
really what you want. A way to make friends. Now in D&D you keep
all your information on what is known as a “character sheet.”
Name, class, level, race, you name it you’ve got to have an
accurate way of saying who you are and what you are in
possession of at any given moment. Think of it as a census form
for a fictional character.
[CUT TO CONSPIRIAL ASIDE]
DOUG (SOMEWHAT HUMOROUSLY): Because if it isn’t written down it
simply doesn’t count. If your sheet doesn’t say 10 foot pole
then your character doesn’t have one.
[SCENE PREVIOUS SHOT]
DOUG: And well, one gets bored writing “Name” down in the same
place on graph paper over and over again every time you make a
new character. And I was making lots of new characters. So what
do you do? Now, the company that made D&D had foreseen this very
problem and was delighted to sell you premade character sheets
for a small fee but when you are in the sixth grade that fee
might as well have been spent on any number of other delightful
luxury products like a new Transformer or new books. So what do
you do? You are on a very fixed income but you are sick of
writing the same thing down all the time. You want to get on to
the good bit, the gaming and friend making. Well, if you were
me, you would grab your Dad’s new toy to help you print out
character sheets.

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[SCENE MONTAGE OF STILL SHOTS OF CHARACTER SHEETS MADE WITH
APPLE IIC]
And, let’s say that you have a personality that needs to get
things you care about EXACTLY right. So trying to make it look
like the exact copy of D&D’s Official Character sheets means
that you would spend HOURS trying to line boxes and trying to
make hexagons that look as close to ACTUAL hexagons and not
avant garde ASCI art.
[SCENE CUT TO WORD PERFECT 3.0 KEYBOARD OUTLINE AND SCREEN SHOT
MONTOGE]
DOUG: You also do other things, like go looking for source
material. Which led me to reading Macbeth at lunch on a day that
I didn’t want to go outside; which led to a teacher putting me
in an advanced reading course; which lead to me reading C.S.
Lewis and a whole slew of people I never would have read
otherwise, which of course doomed my romantic life in high
school. But that is another story.
[SCENE FAST MONTAGE OF PREVIOUS SHOTS FROM OTHER SCENES. IMAGES
ARE TIMED TO CORRESPONDING MENTION. WORDS ARE DELIVERED QUICKLY
IN DUB.]
DOUG: Right, so where are we so far. OK, so because I wanted to
hang out with my brother I learned to play a game that required,
among other things, lots of reading skills in application. I
kept playing the game because it was an easy way to get to hang
out and know people which is important because moving around a
lot you needed really easy ways to relate to new people. And
because I wanted to spend that game time more around people and
writing and chose to spend my economic resources differently, I
used my Dad’s computer to develop a form on a computer word
processor program, which let me spend more time playing and
researching which led me to an illustrated copy of a play about
Witches and phantom daggers which led to me being in an
accelerated reading program which exposed me to interesting
literature which ruined my romantic life in high school.
[SCENE: DOUG IN FRONT OF TABLE WITH ITEMS. D&D BOOKS, COPY OF
HOBBITT, AND OLD COMPUTER SCREEN]
DOUG: And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Now in middle
school and high school those three things: computers, roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, and pleasurable reading
became very tightly bound verbs for me. If you were doing one
you were doing the others in my world then and after. That

124

became even more so when my friends got access to the internet
and you could, and this was really amazing at the time, jump
online and be role-playing with people all over the world! Of
course you needed to build the spaces that that took place in
for that to happen. My friends took to that much more than I did
because by this time I was in college and doing a lot of
theatre. But my friends all learned how to code spaces that
supported those role playing games, which lead to them meeting
people who also coded which lead to them getting very lucrative
jobs for companies like IBM and Cisco systems but again, that is
a different story.
[SCENE CLOSE UP ON DOUG]
DOUG: Now the thing of it is, I was able to stay friends with
this group of people long after they moved away from my home
town, went to college, got married, got divorced, etc. because
we shared all these things in common. These are the people I
still stay in touch with and figure things out with. So rather
than being used to start relationships, these things became the
way that I, and my friends, maintained our relationships despite
other hindrances like developing economic differences.
[DOUG TURNS OVER SHOULDER, AGAIN CONSPIRILIATORIALLY]
They all make MUCH more money than I ever did.
[FLASH TO MAP WHICH CONVEYS GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF DOUG’S
FRIENDS (SPOKANE, LAS VEGAS, NEW JERSEY, ATLANTA, RENO, SAN
FRANCISCO, ALBERQUERIQUE, ETC.)]
DOUG AS VOICE OVER: or the fact that we distributed ourselves
all over the country.
[FLASH TO SCREEN TYPING OUT THE SAME WORDS AS SPOKEN IN THE
FOLLOWING VOICE OVER IN A SIMILAR FASION TO THE VIDEO “THE
MACHINE IS US/ING US” (mwesch, 2007)]
DOUG: The other key component all of these things involved was
literacy as both reading and writing completely and utterly
detached from educational contexts. You can’t read something
that isn’t words. Oh you can make “sense” of something that has
no words, you can interpret it, but you can’t read it. Not only
did all these things involve reading a great deal, they also
meant being interested in the underlying logic that supported
each. I mean, you can’t play a game without knowing the rules
right? You can’t write without understanding the basic
principles of how a language works and at the time you couldn’t

125

use the Internet, the way we wanted to, without understanding
how it worked on some level. If you wanted to talk about what
you had read, you had to write about it. With folks in different
time zones, you couldn’t casually toss off a comment about the
new George R. R. Martin book while others were around because,
well, they weren’t. Except maybe when they came home to bury
their Dad and, well, you don’t talk about something like that at
a funeral.
[SCENE: CAMERA CATCHES DOUG AS HE SITS IN THE “JAVA JUNGLE”
COFFEE SHOP ON A COMFY COUCH. HE STILL WEARS SAME OUTFIT AS
BEFORE]
DOUG: Now instead of just having a shared activity, I had a
shared history with this particular group of people. Both of
these things helped us to reconnect when those relationships had
not been maintained for some time. People go off to become
adults. You become adults and sometimes you have adult problems
together, some times apart, but the point is that having both,
shared interests and history means that it is easy to pick up
and have a conversation about the world and to create a shared
meaning about that world. That also helps you to figure out big
adult problems about yourself in the world with each other.
Which is why we are going to move from this coffee shop . . .
[DOUG SITS UP OUT OF COUCH. SCENE CHANGES TO THE FIELD IN FRONT
OF MICROSOFT LICENSING IN RENO NEVADA. MEDIUM SHOT OF DOUG
STANDING WITH MICROSOFT LOGO OVER HIS LEFT SIDE]
DOUG: To here. Now, in the span of my narrative we have jumped
about ten years. This is the home of Microsoft Licensing, North
America and it was the place I worked for a year after I had
finished my first MA in Speech/Communication. And, I’m going to
switch up the story I have been telling at this point and focus
on a particular moment in time that I remember in the way that a
person remembers specific life changing moments that are not
endorsed necessarily by culture. By that I mean, we all remember
the things we are supposed to, births, deaths, graduations,
first loves, all that. No, I mean the one specific moment that
one remembers when everything changed for you. You don’t always
know it at the time but sometimes you can make a great deal out
of how important a moment is for yourself with some history
behind you, which frequently you might call “chance” but because
you know where that moment came from and its repercussions, you
can claim to know just how important it really was. That’s the
sort of moment I am talking about. And just such a moment
happened for me, here, on a clear and cold fall day. And it
involved a book I had been loaned. [DOUG HOLDS UP HIS COPY OF

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed SO IT TAKES UP THE WHOLE CAMERA FRAME]
[SCENE CHANGE: DOUG SITS DOWN IN THE GRASS. CAMERA IS IN TIGHT
SHOT EITHER EYE LEVEL OR UPSHOT]
DOUG [MUCH MORE CONVERSATIONAL TONE] You see, I was on break
from my temp job working for Microsoft, which I hated but since
I was broke, I needed it. At that time, I was trying to make
sense of my MA experience, especially the alienation I felt
about the whole experience of formal education. Now, I was
talking about that experience with one of my friends, who I had
not talked to in a while but was one of the friends I was
talking about earlier that I made with gaming, reading, and
computing in high school. We had recently started hanging out
together again. Now this particular friend and I share something
in common. Both of us have a parent from Latin America. My
mother is from Panama and came to this country when she was
eight, his father is from Chile and came to escape the Pinochet
regime. And both of us had parents from the Midwest, his mother
is from Nebraska and my father is from Indiana. Now, this friend
had pursued a degree in Spanish and English literature which he
had dropped out of. Neither one of us had been taught Spanish by
our respective parents. We had, in short, a great deal of
commonality with each other that we did not have with other
people. And again, while trying to make sense of my challenging
MA experience, he thought this book might help me to understand
what I had gone through. And boy did it ever. It hit me like a
thunderbolt. Suddenly what had gone wrong with my MA, especially
how unsatisfactory the teaching part had gone, had made perfect
sense. Now, I will not bore you with the details of why it did
but lets just say that it led to a great deal of conversations
with Kyle over beers and coffee and all kinds of conversations
about culture and education. And most importantly for me, it
lead to me exploring what I had to do to get into the same field
as this unpronounceable Freire guy was in. That is, how to get
into the work of literacy education and the business of what had
shaped my, and others', conceptual worldviews. The computer.
[SCENE BACK TO DOUG’S OFFICE WHERE VIDEO STARTED]
DOUG: Now, I could go on about how that book allowed the sons of
two Latin American immigrants to talk for hours about the nature
of education and culture or how those conversations gave me a
lot to bring to the table when I went back to school to get my
degree in English Writing but that wouldn’t prove my point about
the objects or about the way literacy and technology stories are
told in our field. By which I mean we have two big stories we
tell ourselves about the way these sorts of things work. Now, I
want to be careful about this last part. I am not saying that I

127

don’t think these ways of telling these stories aren’t useful. I
think they are. But they are also useful in very specific ways.
They shape our conversations about matters in these specific
ways which, my point being, might also mean we are missing other
ways of talking about these same, or maybe totally different,
things.
[SCENE CUT. DESK CAN BE SEEN WITH VARIOUS OBJECTS LIKE BEFORE,
BUT NOW A COPY OF FREIRE’S BOOK AND DOUG’S LAPTOP ARE ON THE
DESK. DURING THE FOLLOWING CONVERSATION DOUG PUSHES CERTAIN
OBJECTS FORWARD WHEN THEY ARE MENTIONED AND “RESETS” THEM DURING
RESEARCH AGENDA DISCUSSIONS. SHOT CUTS FROM DOUG SO THAT OBJECTS
AND DOUG’S HANDS ARE IN SHOTS]
DOUG: OK, so I have in front of me representations of the
“literacy” narrative I have just told you. So one way to
describe these events would be to in terms of straight
representation right? Here is a literacy narrative that displays
how literacies develop in certain social contexts and for
particular kinds of rationales. You could ignore all this and
just count how much I use a computer at my job and in my private
life. You could also say that this pattern of literacy education
is fairly typical for White Males at a particular time in the
US. Fair enough. You could slot me into a bunch of numbers and
what not and you could even tie this to Yancy’s work with
technology use. Now that information would give you a good idea
about the trends in certain influences I would contribute to a
claim about our society and technological literacy.
[DOUG’S HANDS RESET OBJECTS]
DOUG: Or, you could claim me as an interesting case study and
use me in a chapter about certain social groups (White males?
First Generation Americans? Latino Males? Computer savvy
generations?) And focus on the influence that those social
groups has had on each of my understandings of these objects.
This is how Doug either represents/does not represent the
dominant cultural group of X (Anglo/Latino/Male) in relationship
to Y (Literacy, New Media, Writing, Rhetoric). Fair enough. You
certainly would get a better idea of specifics. You could group
me with some people that have similar stories in a collection
like Selfe and Hawisher did with Literate Lives in the
Information Age. Then in the aggregate, the people I have been
grouped with and I would form an argument about whatever trait
we are representative of and therefore give people a more
specific and at the same time general sense of technology and or
literacy in our lives.

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[DOUG’S HANDS RESET OBJECTS]
DOUG: The thing of it is though. You are only getting the
information I think is important. And clearly I think it’s
important because I have a narrative of my own life. I remember
watching an interview with Henry Louis Gates Jr. about an author
where he said: “All autobiography is an attempt to justify who
the person is who is writing is at that moment.” What I think he
meant by that is, what you would be getting is a sense of how I
think these activities are important now. Me, the PhD candidate
making sense of them after reading a TON of research and
attending a billion conferences about these matters. If you
could somehow go back and ask the eleven year old me why these
particular objects on this table are important he would give you
a completely different answer.
[SCENE: CUT UP SAME DESK. DOUG CENTER SHOT WITHOUT SEEING
OBJECTS]
DOUG: And that is the really interesting thing to me anyway. Is
how the person, in a particular moment, comes up with a new way
to use something by taking or being motivated by something they
already know how to do or know. See each of these things are,
indeed, objects but they are also objects that, when used by me
and other people allowed for, literally, new worlds to be
created, careers to be made, lives to be lived and so on. Now,
those other ways of looking at something are really very useful
and good at doing what they are designed to do. But I don’t
think they tell the story I’m interested in hearing which is
what factors allow for knowledge be constructed and moved
between here [DOUG HOLDS UP HIS OLD D&D PLAYERS' GUIDE IN HIS
LEFT HAND] and here [DOUG HOLDS UP HIS MA DEGREE IN HIS RIGHT
HAND] or between this [DOUG HOLDS UP COPY of PEDAGOGY OF THE
OPPRESED and that [DOUG LOOKS TO THE LEFT AS LIKE A NEWS
BROADCAST, “AUTHENTIC DESIGN” PLAYS SILENTLY].
DOUG: I think something very important happens. Something we
haven’t been able to get a good research or theoretical look at
yet. The rest of this work is about trying to do just that.

Addendum	
  
The problem, of course, is that such conversations have stalled. What we end up with are brief by
necessity. Our accounts are of lives lived that focus on one person and where that one person’s
transformed experiences, located in stories, are then mined for relationships between their life
and the materiality of their conditions. Two conditions need to be president in this string of
research. First, the person must have had access to a researcher who transformed the participant's
experience of relationships into stories about something (literacy, access, technology, ideology,
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etc.). Second, the person must have had access to a variety of experiences and skills that allowed
for them to transform their own experience of relationships into stories about something
(literacy, access, technology, ideology, etc.) and therefore access changes from the experiential
and lived on the part of the participant into narrative or numbers on the part of the researcher.
Yet we do not think to ourselves that one must have a narrative of access to be able to enact it?
There is something here.

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Chapter Four
Down and "Dirty" - An Empirical Methodology for Locating Enacted Access
In chapter one, I began with a personal account of access and I tried to map out the
various trajectories about technology and access. I began by reviewing literature that can be
sorted into two large generative discussions about material access and ideological access, mostly
focused on classroom interactions. In chapter two, I offered a theoretical methodology and threepart heuristic for expanding discussions of access beyond the categories of material, ideological,
and classroom. I developed a three-part heuristic around space/place, experience, and the
rhetorical construction of bodies; these are three concerns for both Cultural rhetoric and
Professional Writing. In chapter three, I deployed that theoretical orientation in the work of two
prominent scholars in the fields of Cultural rhetoric and Professional Writing: Victor Villanueva
and Beverly Sauer, in order to show that we gain new insights into the issues of access enacted
when we put these two bodies of literature together in dialogue. Using Cultural rhetoric and
Professional Writing theory as a points of departure, I showed how each contributes significantly
to our understanding of access enacted and performed by helping us locate specific moments to
understand the relationships between space and place, experience, and moments of the rhetorical
construction of bodies.
In this chapter I show how at the individual, organizational, and cultural level access is
created at the same time. I used the interludes between chapters to show, in narrative form, the
interplay between cultural and social subjectivities and professionalization experiences, and
exactly how much insight we gain from such a dialogue. My attempt was to use this narrative
work as an allegory which indicates a complex relationship between cultural and professional
issues and moments of access. I used the interlude between chapters two and three to show,
through stylized genre, not only the relationship between genres of print (documentary script)
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and the rhetorical technologies they support (video documentaries), but also how the interplay
between cultural and social subjectivities and professionalization experiences becomes
transformed into easy points of evidence to be used rhetorically. My attempt was to use this
narrative work as allegorical indicating a complex relationship between cultural and professional
issues and moments of access, which can be shown, seen, and traced.
In other words, access-ing, or access as enacted across people, materials, and ideologies,
can be shown, seen, and traced making the locating of enacted access a viable empirical project.
That cultural and professional issues and moments of access can be shown, seen, and traced is an
important fact not to be glossed over. Access is a complicated issue. As I tried to show with my
theoretical and methodological work, there are a variety of reasons why we have not attempted to
make a more holistic view of access, chief amongst these is that to understand access as
distributed and enacted means that we must look at “sites” of research that move beyond
classrooms, individuals, specific technologies, and even specific cultural formations. That is not
to say that each of these is not important or to be ignored. Quite the opposite. A smart phone
with a the ability to compose work emails can mean something different at lunch with work
colleagues than it does off and in a drawer at home. Being able to stay in touch with your smart
phone at work can mean something very different when there are other professionals of color
from your hometown and you are the only African American working at your job. These are
moments of access that are hard to trace because they shift in meaning. In specific moments, we
gain insight into the relationships that each has with the other. By stringing together a series of
relationships we gain a sense of how each element is enacted either in someone’s life or in the
professional and technological networks that life is a part of. Each moment becomes more
important because, as I have illustrated with my interruption chapters, by asking what each

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means in specific contexts we understand how each element is related to each other in historical
and present context. I move my methodology here to a small pilot study where we can see how
access is enacted in multiple but not necessarily fragmented ways.
Here with chapter four, I take my theoretical orientation outlined in the previous three
chapters of this dissertation and attempt an empirical methodology than can answer the following
research question:
How can we recognize moments of access as they are enacted across multiple sites and
actors in the world?
How do people manage issues of access?
Each of these questions lies at the core of understanding when people enact access in their lives.
My dissertation so far has been an attempt to show that we can understand access as a series of
related enactments distributed across accounts of people and tools best by understanding access
as performed during specific moments. I’ve done that work by showing how moments of access
encounter the relationship between space and place, when the rhetorical transformation of
experience becomes action, and tracing moments when the social construction of bodies affects
rhetorical situations. Rather than defining access, my goal with this methodology is to map
access as it is enacted in moments and to follow what access means to different agents as it is
enacted.

Empirical Projects on Access: An Overview
Attempting to build such an empirical methodology, as I have outlined here, is a tricky
business. As I have defined this project, an empirical project must be able to account for the
relationship between work in nonwork settings (space/place), transformation of experience into
rhetorical action (experience), and the social construction of bodies. Such work must account for
decisions about the relationship of associations between technological forums and lived

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experiences. Not an easy task to map. This last point is not a small one, and indeed lies at the
very core of the contribution I see this methodology making. One cannot understand the
influence of “work” in “nonwork” spheres without understanding the rhetorical technology like
always connected mobile devices such as smart phones or the relationship smart phone owners
have with their coworkers as well as what coordinates those relationships. One cannot truly
understand how experiences is transformed to solve rhetorical problems without understanding
when stories about self and others become important and how we are reminded of them. Nor can
we understand when or how rhetorical bodies become translated into meaningful markers both
online and offline without understanding what associations are made between those
constructions.
What happened with the scholarship on access in literacy could loosely be described as
the “social turn.” It was a turn that emphasized, and therefore developed research methodologies
that supported looking at an individual's social location and literacy activity as combined unit for
analysis. This trend is probably best expressed in Debora Brandt’s (Brandt, 2001) concept of
literacy sponsorship--both in enabling and hindering literacy activity. The idea of Brandt's
Literacy Sponsor seems almost self-evident as external forces encourage certain kinds of literacy
acquisition while discouraging others. Yet through her scholarship, we can see that if we are
defining literacy as the ability to move through a discourse, there are many social factors that
either inhibit or encourage learning a secondary discourse, many of which seem to be
economically motivated on the part of institutional forces.
Brandt’s methodology of historical case study and interview becomes largely a mapping
of sponsorship on to predetermined “social factors,” making it fit largely in the explanatory
model. That is to say, the social subjectivities she uses are convenient. Participants become

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emblematic of social epochs6 as their narrative becomes synecdochitic in nature. People do not
just stand in for their gender, race, or class; they become that race or class as their “story” is used
as evidence to support claims of larger social trends. While writers certainly interact with
systems in Brandt’s accounts, they do not form new systems as much as they are swallowed
whole by preexisting social and cultural categories subservient to large cultural stories about the
20th century. What’s more, the experience of these social formations or literacy histories are not
reflected on or contextualized by the participants but instead are contextualized by Brandt
herself.
While not the case in all of such research, in much of the research like this individuals
frequently become something else in research: synecdochic evidence. Two issues usually have
driven the stories of access that we have, as I outlined in chapter one: material technological
concerns and ideological concerns. Naturally, this leads to stories7 and research that take as their
launching point the relationship between material technology and a critical stance looking at
ideologies. That is to say, the stories quickly become about culture, material technology,
classrooms, ideologies, where the participant’s life is turned into evidence for a greater argument
about culture, material technology, classrooms, or ideologies. People’s lives, literacies, and
technologies become the focus of stories about people. For example, in Debora Brandt’s Literacy
in American Lives Dora Lopez’s story of bilingual literacy experiences is contrasted with
Raymond Branch's technological literacy narrative. While Brandt makes a tremendous move in

6

Participants neatly fit into predetermined social categories that then exemplify readily
available social trends such where the sixteen African American participants stand in for literacy
in “African American Lives” or large economic cultural shifts such as the move from an agrarian
to industrial economy.
7
I use stories here because I know “narrative” has its own intellectual baggage that I am
unfamiliar with. I am suspicious if the stories I am talking about even qualify as “narratives” as
they are frequently unarticulated.
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an attempt to locate the value of literacy across “spheres” like home, school, and work, Lopez
and Branch are still used as stand-ins for the failures of literacy education to value diversity and
of larger social trends. Lopez, as a Latina and the child of Mexican immigrants, stands in for
unrewarded language and literacy practices everywhere. She becomes all latino/as. Branch, a
white male who now works in the technology industry as a programmer, shows how in the
“information economy” home computer skills will be valuable. He becomes all white males.
While using an interview and narrative case study analysis to move away from totalizing
empirical number work on literacy, Brandt ends up re-inscribing the same type of claim.
Brandt shows us just how hard the problem of access is to tackle. The problem, of course,
is that Lopez and Branch’s experiences are not solely shaped by their respective literacy
activities. Brandt’s focus and the nature of her questions are aimed at, designed for, and represent
a concern toward literacy. The impact of Spanish and English on Lopez’s life is tied to and
associated with relationships to people more than educational institutions or economies of
production. Conversely, Branch’s exposure to material technology in 1981 did not determine that
he would become a programmer. While that is part of the history, there are other factors. My
brother had a computer in 1981. He became a firefighter like my Dad rather than a computer
programmer; I spend every trip back home solving IT problems for him. The line we have to ask
is what “other factors” count in influencing literacy acquisition? While I am inclined to agree
with Brandt’s main points about how literacies become economic forces that are valued or
devalued depending on market/context/ sphere, I am less inclined to agree that the stories of
Lopez and Branch prove that point if only because the only parts of those stories we are told
about, even parts about families, are parts that pertain to literacy and economics. That is to say,
those stories have been organized and “clean”ed up to be about literacy, economics, and

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technology. The stories remain a little too synecdochic, stabilizing complex relationships into
predetermined outcomes.
In my experience, in the research I have read, and the issues I am discussing, people's
lives are incredibly complicated. People deal pragmatically, far more pragmatically than myself,
with issues of oppressive cultural values. Their ways of understanding those values, work, home
and technology are not pondered any more than one ponders a steep hill when walking. They are
there, you get over them or you don’t. Issues of ideology, technology, and experience were
boiled down and reduced with Brandt for good reason but the work that Literacy in American
Lives inspired became about social subjectivities rather than people. Reasearchers brought
"culture" to the research to construct their own ecologies. Let me be clear, I am not saying that
this work has not, is not, or could not be useful. The work is useful for drawing “context” I think,
but I do not think it would be terribly useful to Dora precisely because it removes so much of the
“mess” of her life, cleaning her up into a sort of Latino/a experience of literacy. Dora certainly
does not need Brandt to tell her that speaking Spanish and English is not as valuable a skill as
being a computer programmer economically but then again Dora couldn’t have kept relationships
up with her extended family in Mexico with BASIC or Pascal.

Getting our hands dirty: The “mess” of research on access
By now I should probably explain what I mean by “mess.” In some ways, I have hinted at
it with my Chapter interruptions. I mean that, and I take this from any number of scholars of
color (A. Haas, 2008; Monberg, 2008; M. Powell, 2002; Villanueva, 2008; Sandoval 2000;
Minh-Ha, 2008; Law, 2007), research and the world is “messy.” The intellectual tools we use to
carve up and make sense of the world aren’t always the way things are and can, in fact, lead us
into oppressive regimes of intellectual labor. If a researcher or scholar is interested in uncovering

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or articulating a particular “truth” about an issue, either about an experience or something about
the way the world works, that researcher has to take experience and observations and, through
intellectual labor, turn that “mess” into something coherent for other people. We use specific
rhetorics to help us with those tasks whether it is taking an experience and turning it into a story
about Turtle to help tribal members understand a complex political situation or taking frustration
about work and turning it into a Tweet. All too frequently we get rid of the parts that don’t make
sense. Complicated linguistic upbringing? You are a L2 learner. A particular idea does not fit
into Derrida’s theory of language? The whole theory must be rubbish, and so on.
That isn’t always a problem. Do enough research and you understand why academics
“clean” up “messes” and make coherence for a living. The problem comes when researchers, in
an effort to shore up their claims, don’t admit that they are cleaning up the messes. This is where
I am being remarkably unfair to Brandt. Her conclusions about literacy, economies, home/work
spheres, or material technology are not necessarily wrong. Brandt doesn’t do a good job showing
us how those issues interact or showing how they interact with Dora and Raymond’s lives. For
example, take the fact that Raymond’s whiteness8 is relegated to material wealth and privilege.
More complex issues may be beyond the scope of her project, you might say, as she is talking
about influences/sponsors of literacy. I would agree with you and say that she has done an
admirable job making the “mess” of culture, race, and gender “clean” and neat. My goal with my
pilot study is to show a little bit more of that “mess.”

8

As an example of the mess I want to see, according to Brandt while Dora lives in the
“Anglo Midwest,” but the term Anglo or white is not used with Raymond. His cultural privilege
is written purely in terms economic and material privilege rather than in terms of cultural or
social subjectivity. For example, there's no discussion about the existence of
hierarchical/patriarchal familiarity assisting his understanding of coding languages like BASIC,
or how comfort with being Male White might have influenced his choice to pick an at the time
second “White” language like computer programming.
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"Dirty" Research: How to Listen and See the Mess of Access Enacted
The best way to show the mess of enacted access is to first attempt to show the
complexity of interactions of the elements of access. I have, so far, shown those elements
interacting and where they interact in theory. What I have suggested here is that they interact
most frequently in areas of study of Cultural rhetoric and Professional Writing and that they
interact, not only sometimes but frequently, in the areas between Spaces and Places, Identity and
Experience, and the Rhetorical Construction of Bodies. The “clean” thing to do in designing a
methodology would be to go out, capture stories or data of some sort, and build neat and
prepackaged accounts involving technology and race, class, and gender. Triumphantly declaring,
as if I was the only one ever to do so, that race and technology is a complex interaction and that
my way of looking (constructing?) is superior to the ways of people that live and experience such
interactions.
I have no intention of doing any of that.
Let me explain why I have no intention of producing such a “clean” empirical
methodology or method. First, both my experience and my belief is that people who exist in
repressive and oppressive social subjectivities of race, class, and gender do not need my research
or me. They deal with racism and/or sexism quite well or they do not but they hardly need me to
illuminate their position for them. They don’t need me to tell them that it is happening or where
it is happening. They know. So can anything I produce here be useful to them? Well, I like to
think so and do my best to make this work useful to people and perhaps show them interesting
viewpoints about how and when they are part of access enacted; but my firm commitment here is
to knowing that people understand their own positions and lives better than I do.
Second, material technology has made literacy and rhetoric “messy” with no help from
me. For example, look at all the language we have to talk about what new technologies have

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generated? What about “Visual Literacy,” “Science Literacy,” “Information Literacy,” “Material
Literacy,” “Visual Rhetoric,” or “Cultural rhetoric,” “Material Rhetoric,” “Digital Rhetoric,”
“Workplace Rhetoric,” and the “Rhetoric of New Media?” Are any of these terms mutually
exclusive? Do visual rhetorics take place away from the cultural assumptions of visualization?
Do artists whose art produces culture have no workplace? Is there no materiality to digital
rhetoric and if that is the case why did I have to learn how to repair my own laptop while at
home to be able to do the knowledge work of the academy? If such a matter of concern is already
so much a mess, why not start over and try and see that mess for what it is?
Third, I am mistrustful of “clean” research where predetermined categories of social
subjectivities are either essentialized or shattered into meaningless postmodern rejections of
collective experience. Such movements either remove the validity of a collective experience, or
solidify a single experience into representative of a collective whole. I think there are a great
many people of color who are mistrustful of such work as well. There are a great many reasons
why this is. I don’t think I need to go into them here but suffice it to say frequently categories of
behavior and experience are too frequently used reduce us and people we know into Things9.
Given this commitment to “mess,” how do I produce anything useful?
This leaves me with a certain type of orientation toward my empirical methodology. The
methodology has to do with two kinds of almost contradictory work. My methodology has to be
able to construct a “messy” account of access-ing that sees access-ing as a set of recursive
actions enacted between people, cultures, professions, and technology as well as one that takes
on the full complexity of experience of the humans involved. What I need then is a set of
9

The list of projects that describe with great detail the systematic dehumanization of
people, usually in terms of lingering or ongoing colonial situations is extensive. Primarily, the
most influential on this project have been Fanon, 2008; Hall, 1996; Pratt, 1992; Spivak, 1998;
and Spurr, 1993.
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theories that enable me to deal with the distributed nature of activities as well as one that allows
me to look into the quiet hidden places that influence people's lives and how they orient
themselves toward moments of access enacted in the first place.

The Possibilities of “Dirty” Empirical Research
My empirical research, like my theoretical work, will be “dirty” in the sense that the
complexity of the “mess” of the situation will be shown. It will not be cleaned up and organized
into neat little piles. The interruptions in the dissertation have been a manifestation of this
impulse for “dirty” research. I am looking for an empirical model that allows for conflict in the
data and a model where tensions in what is observed or listened to remain productive. This
tension, rather than being resolved, should point at moments that can shift and produce rhetorical
activity rather than produce overly determined criticisms. My interest then is to create a
methodology that, for a brief instant, captures as many actors directly influencing a moment of
access as possible but doesn’t seek to determine that those actors are always present in every
moment of access. In short, I want a snapshot of an ecology at a particular moment, then I want
to build those moments into a larger picture.
That is not to say that this research will be incoherent, at least that is not my intent.
Access, as I have attempted to theorize here, is multiple and complex, enacting itself differently
across actors and situations. That does not mean that access is incoherent, just complex. For
example, my understanding of enacted access depends on a deeply rhetorical idea; that social
media is a rhetorical performance not in the sense of always being “persuasive” (this may or may
not be the case for how rhetors understand social media) but in the sense of being a “public”
linguistic performance associated with a perceived audience that has a history and theory of use
on the part of its users across a variety of uses. Users perceive multiple use value from such

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technology and have histories of rhetorical action that they bring to that use. They do things with
it and understand it based on experiences in either that rhetorical venue or other rhetorical sites.
Social media does work for them like connecting them to their professional colleagues, giving
their tribe resources, alleviating alienation, eliciting participation in personal projects, allowing
knowledge work, etc. Simply put, access to Twitter is easy. Access to the professional networks
that Twitter is a part of is hard. Access to the parts of those professional networks that take place
away from, but are deeply linked to Twitter is even more difficult. So what does that look like
and when does that happen?

“Dirty” Writing Ecologies
In some ways, the ideas behind what I am talking about are not new. Composition and
Rhetoric has been concerned with the ecologies of writing for a long time. Cooper (1986)
articulated and challenged the ideas of the field had about writing occurring solely as an internal
and exclusively cognitive process. Cooper’s idea was that writing existed in an “ecological”
setting. Influenced by researchers, especially researchers of color like Shirley Brice Heath (1983)
and William Labov (1973) who knew that culture played a great roll in literacy, Cooper
understood that ecology did not merely mean “context” like Burke’s pentad but rather to quote
Cooper, “In place of the static and limited categories of contextual models, the ecological model
postulates dynamic interlocking systems which structure the social activity of writing” (p. 368).
In this place, Cooper described four broad and interlocking systems. What is important for my
discussion here is that Cooper wanted “an ecology of writing [that] encompasses much more
than the individual writer and her immediate context. An ecologist explores how writers interact
to form systems,” (Cooper, 1986, p. 368, emphasis mine). That was not exactly what happened,
however.

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Ecologies of writing have been very productive for mapping on complex relationships
between moment to moment accounts of writing behavior and historical influences and
technologies that shape such behavior. For example, Clay Spinuzzi’s work using genre
ecologies (2003a, 2003b) allowed for a number of insights into the complex nature of genres as
they shift across both personal users' experiences and technological mediation. While not
specifically about ecologies, Cushman’s (1998) ethnographic work specifically locates the
ecological relationship between institutions, communities, and individuals. In this view,
individuals deploy communities to understand complex and frequently hostile systems of
rhetorical production to obtain material support.
Ecologies were pretty useful in some cases for expanding the work of Cooper and of
Brandt. Specifically for technology, in Selfe and Hawisher (Self & Hawisher, 2004; Hawisher,
et. al., 2004) ecologies became a dominant metaphor for understanding individuals' orientation
toward technological literacy. In work like this, like in Brandt’s initial literacy sponsor work,
individuals were sought out and interviewed for technological and traditional literacy
experiences, which were then placed within specific cultural, material, educational, and familial
contexts. In both treatments, they use the phrase “cultural ecology” a lot to denote the
interactions between cultural orientations and how their participants react and deal with those
interactions, especially across cultural contexts and assumptions about gender, class and race
along with technological use and technological savvy. In essence, they had some of the same
problems I have already outlined talking about Brandt. Their methodological answer was to
interview individuals about “literacy histories” then to take those histories as accounts of
“ecologies.”10

10

You can see a lot of this from their interview questionnaire. I am deeply indebted that they
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The questions that Selfe and Hawisher used in their interview instrument are questions aimed to
elicit an account of an individual, in the parlance of ecological thinking, an individual’s history
through multiple cultural ecologies. Such a position assumes cultures are self-contained
epistemological spaces that people travel in and through rather than existing at the same place in
time frequently holding multiple perspectives simultaneously. This work is about people and
places, organisms and sites, rather than ecologies. A more ecological view would make it so that
there could be many interactions between those cultures (mostly historical) and that an individual
might be shaped not just by their own history but the history of cultural interactions, bits and
pieces of which are relevant at any given time. Taking ecologies as a productive way of thinking,
this leaves us with the “indicator species problem,” a very similar problem to the synecdoche
problem of representation. If we move past the use of ecology as a “metaphor” and into the idea
of an ecology being a complex location of interactions, looking at ecology means more than
looking at an organism traveling through that ecology. We lose a great deal of “messiness” of
interaction because the individual must remain “clean” and “coherent” in terms of research
evidence i.e. a single narrative. These accounts of people must be, above all else, good evidence
for larger claims about culture. The better the evidence though, the more we lose the complexity
of life and cultural experience.
That potential for loss of complexity of life and cultural experience is an especially
important point for work that involves oppressed people because multiple and contradictory
social subjectivities are key to understanding cultural positioning11. Some loss must happen as
we take lives and freeze them in time with research and writing. So there must be some sort of
move that links this frozen moment to something outside the research. The very pragmatic
published. Too few scholars publish their methodological tools.
11
See Fanon (2008) on the creation of neurotic colonial subjectivity.
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response from those in Cultural rhetoric is to present “dirty” stories that can be used (they are
eminently useful to the communities that they represent) to understand similar but different
situations simultaneously. Such stories are “dirty” methods in that they allow “messy”
information to be “cleaned” up at the same time because readers assemble what they need from
the texts based on similar cultural experiences. Harjo (1996) shows us the connection between
personal grief and Native histories of grieving to give us a sense of the interplay between a
personal social subjectivity and a peoples’ sense through narrative action. Villanueva (1999)
makes the connections between experienced linguistic racism and the political history of
language laws and radicalized graduate school performance.
These are strong rhetorical moves with specific aims. Such stories move by making a
series of truth claims about their experiences, making claims about how the world works (and
how it got that way), and indexing and alluding to the experiences of others sometimes letting
“messy” bits remaining productively unresolved. The advantage of the narrative over the
ecological account is that the narrative can remain productive and be messy at the same time
because it makes reference to experiences and ideas outside the text itself, usually histories and
experiences in the path of the reader. Each of these orientations sets us up to look at the accessas-individual/group12 in an historical context.
The question for my work becomes how to capture a “clean” rhetorical moment in an
actual ecology while also attempting to keep “messy” stories of people complex. Even when a
complexity of ideas like issues of ideology and materiality are linked, when a researcher divides
access into ideology and materiality, the division creates a situation within the research where
the social subject, the person, either is constructed by the access of things or constructs access
12

Again, there is a frequent collapse here between author and author as synecdoche. This
problem is only exacerbated by the “indicator species” problem.
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themselves. The person is initiating access/agencies or is the victim of other agencies, which
become our dominant stories in this kind of research. The research must be “clean” to look at an
individual in a cultural, historical, and technological situation. Moments are turned into evidence
as contradiction is not allowed to stand in such stories. Because there is no cost or place for
contradiction or even tension, divide stories like Brant’s Dora Lopez's victimization at the hands
of an uncaring literacy economy come to dominate. Contrast that story with the sort of
“bootstraps” narrative of personal or local literacy practices overcoming oppressive cultural,
racist, or economic forces that dominate our culture where we can “Win the Future” (Obama,
2011). Dirty research then would show both the complexity of access-ing as it is enacted and
deal with constructing people not as evidence but as people.
I have been tempted with all the pressure of dissertation work to compress this “mess”
into digestible formats. Yes, I could solicit accounts of people engaged in professional activity
then squarely “clean” those accounts up into stories of space in places, the identity and
experience, or the rhetorical construction of bodies. As a researcher, those moments would be
easy to make but that would not give me the “dirty” account that I want and that I think the field
needs. Such work would separate too many elements that remain collapsed like individualized
technologies, making race and class present when only race might be present as a mitigating
factor, and so on.
My empirical orientation then needs to come of such research that sees the value in how
people from similar social subjectivities of gender, race, class, or professions negotiate these
professional and cultural tensions. Such work is invaluable for the creation of professionals of
color without having such activity become rigid and prescriptive. Dirty research is a commitment
to understanding complex relationships of moments of access enacted while doing so in a

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culturally responsible manner. That is to say, understanding and capturing moments of access
enacted, a distributed activity, is my goal but I do not wish to lose the individual in that process
because my goal is to at least attempt to produce something that could be of value to such
individuals. While this research is important to me and, I hope to the field, only certain elements
will remain useful for people in the situations I am observing. Large graphs of social networks
are not useful to people, as interesting as they may be to theorists.
As I alluded to in chapter two, I think useful tools and theories for addressing this
problem lay in attempting to merge elements from Cultural rhetoric and Professional Writing and
deploy them for this project. I spend the next section outlining these two theoretical and
methodological orientations as well as how I intend as ways to produce a messy empirical pilot
study.

"Dirty" Conversations: Grounding a Theory of Listening
As I outlined earlier, one of the major problems with trying to locate access as moments
of accessing is trying to find what to pay attention to in the first place. Access coordinated is
something that is recursive, based on practice, and is frequently gained or lost in the dynamics of
the situations that support or hinder those moments and actions. People, or peoples, are equally
complex and shifting in moments that influence what people are doing and how they are doing it.
There is the vexing problem of where access is happening. As I pointed out in this chapter and in
chapter one, the question of what pieces actually matter in any given situation of sustained access
is difficult in and of itself. That is to say, it is hard to put the pieces to the puzzle together if you
can’t even see that you don’t have all the pieces to begin with.
Part of my attempt in chapters one, two, and three was to use new disciplinary
orientations to find those pieces of the action of access by expanding our notions of accessing to

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theories of cultural and professional rhetorical thinking. That move allows me a great many
theoretical and methodological tools to deploy to locate elements that influence, either by
sustaining or oppressing moments of access as they occur through interactions. That is to say, for
the methodology I am developing here, we have to listen in ways we have not done before to be
able to hear which elements, technologies, and histories influence the process of accessing,
which is a dirty process if you are doing it right.
I am partial to drawing the concept of “listening” as it has been deployed in feminist and
cultural rhetorical work to hear those connections for a few reasons. The first is that access is
usually described in our literature as something we can see as well as something that is
possessed. The singular “moment” that is observed in the classroom, the observation of the user
through a program, the brown body in a suit in the room full of white bodies in suits, or the
“social” in social media. This “seeing” is problematic as a research methodology precisely
because, well, we miss important elements that have been systematically erased like bodies and
forms of labor we are not prepared to notice or see.
For Monberg (2008), listening is important. Her project has many parts, but most
importantly it is a project to develop a methodology that will reveal what is important to the lives
of women of color, especially Filipina women of color. Contrasting herself with other theories
of listening by scholars such as Ratcliffe (2005) her goal is not to set up a “cross-cultural
dialogue” as much as it is about developing a theory that accounts for the contribution Dorothy
Laigo Cordoba, a Filipina American activist who plays a major role in the development of the
Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) in a larger context of Asian American
women contributions. Yet it is the type of role that continues to escape the attention of feminist
rhetorical scholarship, which demands the work of “specific individuals” or “explicitly reading

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through the lens of gender” (p. 85). Monberg goes on to discuss that the making of knowledge in
communities is not always recognized as such because academic scholarship wants to turn that
knowledge into something else. Academics move into a colonizing space with knowledge
production when we take participant knowledge and shift it into forms that are “irrelevant to the
needs of those community members” through acts of distancing such as the assumption that
academic theories of rhetorical production are the only ones that matter. That is to say,
frequently we theorize access by looking at and locating access as what we, as researchers, want
it to be at the level of technology or at the level of enacted theory.
After all, people have a sense of what they are doing which may or may not line up with
our own theories about what counts as access or rhetorical theory building. Malea Powell (2003)
talks about this when stating her hope for the work Native texts will do collectively in relation to
the ideological and conscience goals of the field in the rhetoric/composition. For Powell, Native
scholarship does important work grounding theory into research methodologies on communties
of people. Powell (2003) claims that the theories of rhetoric were not new to her when she first
encountered them, “I came to the study of rhetoric and to the teaching of writing, though, with
these theoretical understandings already firmly in mind” (p. 41). Here she is making a
connective tie between the principles of something known, and known differently, through
different epistimological structures that generate understandings through tensions, “That means
that we must be willing to go beyond the page upon which our scholarly essays are printed, we
must be willing to forego the pretense that each story exists all by itself, that each essay provides
all the knowledge that any reader would need,” (p. 57) and understand what people do, and the
way that people do it, as grounded in a theory in how the world works and what they should be
doing rather than simply as a rhetorical practice.

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Listening for rhetorical theories about access as it is enacted then asks us to understand that
not only do people contribute to textual production but they also choose not to contribute when
the cost is too high. Access in such cases isn’t simply “gained” or “lost.” Access is coordinated
or distributed based on theories that structure the interactions between actors. Listening means
understanding that people engage with and decide on action based on a knowledge of rhetorical
action in the world that may or may not line up with the ways we have of theorizing what access
or even a moment of access is or looks like. For example, what might have gone on before in
peoples' lives which might frame events and theories about events in digital situations? What
“pre” career cultural experiences have shaped understandings of current career practices for
participants and what can we learn by placing those theories next to our own ideas about rhetoric
rather than enforcing them as modes of interpretation on our participants? That is to say, we
should not always look for consistencies in stories about access as much as we should try to
listen to how people think and understand the role that people and technologies play in their own
journeys toward, in and against moments of enacted access, then we should show those
complexities.
To put it another way, by comparing what we hear about peoples' experiences we can
make those experiences understandable and knowable for what they are now. A theory of
rhetoric built at a particular moment in a particular time, which may and probably will alter as
more experiences are gained is what we need. We should not “clean” such theories up and force
them into our preconceived ideas of what access looks like but instead we should leave them
“dirty.” The key move here is listening to how people make sense of experience to develop
rhetorical theories about how to behave in both personal and professional capacities as well as in
offline and online spaces. Listening to interactions. Listening by itself isn’t enough, I must listen

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and write about what I hear in such a way that these experiences do not fill the synedochitic
function but rather resist such a move yet, at the same time, point to similarities of contexts that
may be productive moments of theory building on the parts of participants. I must listen to how
people manage to enact their version of access, which are multiple but not fragmented in their
lives. Such listening would allow us to hear how and when moments of access are enacted and
coordinated between participants and others. We could listen to stories of moments as people
move through and make sense of their experiences. That is something we can listen for.

Giving a "Dirty" Look: Grounding a Theory of Objects
The theory I am drawing on to understand objects and spaces derives from ActorNetwork Theory (ANT). ANT as a theory13 was developed to understand the complicated nature
and relationship between people and things, especially at the level of “associations.” While I am
not embracing the entire scope of the principles of ANT, there are certain principles of the theory
that have influenced my methodology here either in indirect ways or in direct ways like the
relationship between Objects and Spaces.
Many of my ideological commitments simply do not line up particularly well with ANT
orientations. However, ANT and the work of Latour (2004, 2005, 2010), Law (2002, 2004,
2007), and Moll (2003) have had a great influence on helping me understand and articulate the
relationship between ecological elements of technology, people, culture, and professionalism
especially at the level of when and what happens as rhetorical knowledge crosses rhetorical
contexts. In short, the theory has helped me to articulate when an utterance becomes a tweet,
when technological access enacted becomes professional access enacted, and how cultures
overlap at the same time.
13

This statement that ANT is a theory would get me in some trouble with the ANT folks
themselves.
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The main methodological contribution for me with this project is to understand the
relationship between people and differing elements of technological use. If part of my
methodological goal is to understand the complexity of a technological ecology, a key move is to
define what “Facebook” or “Twitter” is. Is there a difference between Twitter on an iPhone or on
a computer? What if the iPhone is at work? What if it is in your bed with your dog at your feet?
How does that change our orientation to these rhetorical spaces? Does it even matter? When does
it matter? Does the network and cultural space represented in the social media space shift given
such concerns? ANT’s theorizing about objects and spaces has helped me think about some of
these issues and their capacity to help us see “messy” ecologies of people, cultures, rhetorical
action, and technologies.
I think it is very important to begin with a fundamental difference in ANT between
“things” and “objects.” Each is extremely important to the other and key to understanding
“space” as I will attempt to show here. For Latour, “things” are gatherings of people, resources,
non-humans, technologies, and ideas that are deployed by, or in response to, a matter of concern.
Things make associations. They help to align other things and sometimes, when those
associations have a great number of actants involved, where there is lots of activity, things
become objects. It also happens that the reverse is true as well. Objects that were once held
together by effort, begin to fall apart into things again if people and non-human actors aren't
paying attention. I'll talk more about objects in just a bit but for now it is important to realize that
objects do work in the world. Rhetorical performances become wars, shuttles become debris.
Things can be turned into objects and objects are disassembled into things.
Objects, of course, are incredibly complicated “black boxes” that are so useful for doing
whatever they are supposed to do, that folks rarely understand how, exactly, they work. Often

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people want to figure out how they work when something goes wrong and not before. Do you
poke around in your laptop before it breaks or you want to upgrade it? Not usually.
One of the ways to talk about objects is to talk about the spaces they construct. One of the
ways John Law defines objects, differing from traditional views of ANT is that Objects, or the
stabilized arrays of things in a network, generate spaces as well. His arguments go something
along the lines of the study of topology in mathematics. He is interested in discussing how much
some Things can bend before they break, which depends on the networks they belong to.
Objects, then, rely in some sense on being able to flexibly stabilize. They do this by generating
differing kinds of space around themselves, with Euclidian space and Network space being the
most prominent.
The social space must be unpacked if we are to understand two important elements of this
methodology: the difference between how people think about spaces and places as well as the
rhetorical construction of bodies. Each of these issues exists as something we can roughly call a
“social space”. This social space assumes, like most pragmatic orientations, that there is a
physical reality that exists but also is conceptualized by social formations, language and political
and material realities (Moya, 2001). Law (2002), in his work with the technology and the social,
calls this social space the combination of a physical/material world and an ontological world,
which should not be understood as separate. Law calls these together and in relationship material
and ontological space, the topology of objects.
This is an important epistemological turn but one worth exploring. Think, for example,
about police cars. Have you ever noticed how some people will get nervous around police cars
and alter their driving behavior? Do they know the individual officer in the car and that is why
they are nervous? Usually, no. Do they have a long history of being harassed by people in police

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cars? For my purposes let’s say that it doesn’t matter because what is important to understand is
that the police car and the driver themselves produce a space where people get nervous around
them not because of “context” but because of histories. The police officer and the car do not
occupy a space where people get nervous. They create the space. We can change the police
officer and it doesn’t matter because the folks getting nervous don’t have a history of
relationships with the specific officer, they have a history with police.
Sometimes Western thinkers have a tendency to conceptualize Euclidian space as being
“empty” or “neutral” before an object arrives. As every post-colonial dabbler knows, however,
places that are seen as empty rarely, and by rarely I mean never, are. Spaces are enacted with
objects in E(udclidian)-space, objects that are rooted in N(etworked)-space of the social. So one
ends up with an object that both generates and exists in a certain E-space because it also is part
of an N-space through a process called homeophoric enactment. Homeophoric enactment is an
irritatingly fancy way of saying that the Object stretches a great deal before it breaks materially,
which means it functions the same way in N-space. For example, say I put on a police uniform
and sat on a corner in a police cruiser. People would still be nervous. The car, the uniform, and I
would still be enacting the space. Say the car is black and white and now we change it to brown
and white, would people still get nervous? You bet. Homeophoric enactment stands because we
can stretch that car into other colors we associate with authority in this country but what happens
if we change the colors from black and white to chartreuse and neon pink? Would people have
the same reaction? Probably not. The object falls apart in the space between the social and
physical realities as the networked reality breaks free from the Euclidian reality.
Law (2002) uses the discussion of 15th century Protégées sailing vessels. See, such
objects are spatially or topologically multiple. That is to say that the physical array of the ship,

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timbers, lines, sails, instrumentation, can move through E-space precisely because it has a
stabilized N-space (conceptual understanding of how it’s supposed to work, as well as purpose in
colonial endeavors). The ship's very stability physically can happen and it can be sent out into
the world to do things, can be moved, because it exists conceptually and rigidly so. Law again
uses Latour to discuss this idea as “immobility within network space which affords their
displacement within Euclidean space” (Law, p. 96). The concept of how a ship works means you
can build a new mast when one breaks out in the world. Here then is the key, “To generate
network homeomorphism it is also necessary to work in Euclidean space” (p. 97); that is to say
that the physical space that a network-object generates must be understood because “objects are
always enacted in a multi-topological manner” (p. 98).
Let me discuss this in a very grounded manner. This theory of object and spaces allows
us to see how an object comes to be and can be multiple while at the same time being coherent.
For example, such a position allows us to see relationships. When I ask people if I can follow
their “Facebook” profile, no one asks me what I mean because it coheres in their head as a series
of associations, usually something like “people I know” + “stuff I have done” + “pictures”.
Facebook is a coherent object that one can access from any number of venues. It doesn’t matter
which computer I log on to, I will see my Facebook when I log on and as long as there are
“people I know” + “stuff I have done” + “pictures” it will still be Facebook. That enables
Facebook to place itself in a great many places like phones, tablets, and computers because as
long as the N-space holds, the E-spaces can go lots of places as both spaces stretch. Until it can’t
anymore.
For example, while I was researching this project the UI design of Facebook changed.
Facebook decided to organize information differently. Did that mean I was studying something

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new? Not really. It could have but as long as internet access + servers + phones + computers +
web + engineers + advertising + web standards all stay in line and make sure that when people
log in they see “people I know” + “stuff I have done” + “pictures,” Facebook remains stable and
can alter itself in small ways. In short, such a theory helps us, along with rhetorical listening, to
see the complex articulations that we might see between the elements of access as it happens in
moments by showing how something we are talking about, like access, can be multiple and
distributed yet remain one thing.

Locating Moments of Access Enacted: A “Dirty” Empirical Pilot Study
Where to begin with an empirical project about moments of accessing? Clearly, such a
project must involve a material technology of some sort. As I showed in chapter one, material
access and discussions about a “digital divide” have produced a great deal of successful and
interesting scholarship. I have other commitments here too, however. Again my commitment to
the mundane and moments means that the technology in question must be something, well there
is no other way to say this, boring. How do I get to a boring technology that can tell us
something about enacted access? What seems like a contradictory stance might not be as much
as it first sounds. The idea here is even though a technology that we have made invisible and
boring at the level of everyday use can, indeed, be an incredibly complex system both at the level
of the technology and at the level of rhetorical theory that oppressed people have to invent to use
such technology safely.
That I might be interested in the technology in question being a writing technology might
seem to be a given but I am not sure that is entirely the case in the field. There has been a great
deal of interesting scholarship on rhetorical activities that involve both visual and aural rhetoric
sometimes referred to as “writing”. Certainly, I have no problem with discussions of

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“multimedia” or “new media” being considered fertile ground for discussions of rhetorical
discourse. My own animation on authenticity, race, and design would be a pretty good example
of such work as well as my commitments to that work being useful. While that scholarship
interests me (indeed I have produced some!) I am far more interested in writing and access rather
than “writing” and access. So here I will invent a criteria of technology to explore accessing
with.
1. The technology in question must be something that many people use every day without
really thinking about in the moments it is being used.
2. Since I hope to contribute to the field of rhetoric and composition, the technology should
be one that involves writing.
3. The technology in question must be a mobile one, as the distinctions between space and
place, between public and private, between life/work balance issues and cultural
formations all point to something, which transcends the confines of the classroom, the
home, or the workplace.
There is a great deal written about something loosely referred to as “social media” but I
want to be more specific and call the thing I am using for part of my tracing of accessing “social
writing”14. I am skipping over most of that work because those scholars are not always interested
in understanding access as much as they are interested in understanding “networks” or
“literacies.” Despite my curmudgeonly stand on linguistic accuracy, I choose to follow practices

14 There are some who would, rightly, challenge me on the point of using the phrase “social
writing” rather than “social media”. First, my use here should not be an assumption that there is a
"nonsocial" writing, something I do not think of as possible. Secondly, I am aware that image
and design play a tremendous role in such Internet sites; however, it is writing that is dominant
content backbone of such sites. Writing enables easy coordination. Writing enables dislocation of
time/space. Writing can account for such sites' popularity. Writing has a much lower rhetorical
effort curve and is therefore accessible whereas shooting, editing, and posting a video or, as
myspace taught us, designing a webspace takes more effort. Third, I use social writing here with
a specific purpose in mind to call attention to both the mundane ways writing becomes
backgrounded in our culture (i.e. media sounds cooler than writing) and to point to the fact that
these social writing platforms have such large impact precisely because they can be mundane i.e.
all the popular comments about “What I had for lunch” posts.
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in two of the most popular online writing spaces: Facebook and Twitter.com. These two “spaces”
address my criteria for a technology of access well in that people frequently use them without
much thought. As I’ll show you later in this chapter, even if a lot of reflection, thought, and
experience has occurred around Facebook as technology, Facebook itself still lends itself to
becoming mundane. Secondly, it would be hard to argue in the strictest sense that these two
technologies are not writing based in their content if not their activity. As I’ll show later in the
chapter, much of what happens in Facebook is not, in fact, writing in the strictest sense as much
as rhetorical positioning. If one moves one's body over to a computer, or pulls a smart phone
from their pocket, and one launches an app or types out www.Twitter.com into their web
browser one will see a great deal of text. Yes, images are there as well and one can launch videos
but the dominant medial form of content is text. Thirdly, Facebook and Twitter cohere nicely
across physical places as writing technologies. As web based technologies and with the rise of
the “smart” phone/computer, such technologies do a great deal of work to be coherent, mobile,
and always available in a variety of spaces. A user doesn’t even need to own their own computer
to use them! If I am in a library or a coffee shop and I have not taken my computer I can use
someone else’s computer to log in, and I see nothing different in the window from my own
arrangements. People I frequently “like” will be there. My picture of myself and all the other
decisions I have negotiated with Facebook will greet me when I log in. Facebook and Twitter are
merely convenient ways to talk about complex murky objects that exist and, literally, do work
for people and careers. They are interesting to us today because we have yet to reconcile what
they mean to us collectively other than advertising dollars to the companies that work through
them. As I hope to show in this chapter, however, they are complex arrays of information,
writing, and rhetoric for people as well as complex tools for access or more surprisingly away

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from access for individual users.
That is not to say that people don’t matter. Access enacted matters to people a great deal.
As I hope I have shown with the interruptions to the formal chapters in this dissertation,
understanding and placing oneself within the actual discourse of a career or a culture perhaps
even both at the same time is what moments of access enacted should result in. I think it is useful
and maybe even interesting to look at a technology and networks but such looking does not
satisfy my political, ethical, or pedagogical commitments. Listening to people, in the right way,
does. Moments of enacted access should not be understood by materiality or technology by itself
even if such discussions are “grounded” in something we can call “the social.” What is different
now is that that “social” is now located in and around social writing. One of the affordances of
social writing technology is that what has been metaphorical or nonspecific is turned into the real
and empirical. Social writing means that which is “boring” is now indexed, recallable, and
mobile, making it a good place to start to explore the nature of access enacted as a distributed
human, cultural, and technological enterprise. Using that work allows me to build a theory and
an empirical project that can help people by building in and around the lives and the accesses
they enact as well as showing what is enacted on them.
As a theorist and scholar of access I am interested in what people do and when they do it.
I am interested in the development of rhetorical theories that enact access itself. In the way I am
talking about moments of access, the black-people-use-Twitter-like-this trope does me no good.
It does nothing to help me understand the competing, mixed, and ambivalent ways that people
that develop rhetorical theories to navigate social writing navigate careers, technologies, and
oppression. No matter how thoroughly done, such a stance does not help me listen to theory
building practices because they bunch evidence around similarity of experience. In the next

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chapter, I show a small pilot project that deployed these theories in an effort to see if I could, in
fact, locate moments of enacted access.

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Chapter Five
Moments of Access
“We do not master realities enacted out there, but we are involved in them.”
Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple
"The sixth and final claim of a post positivist realist theory of identity is that oppositional
struggle is fundamental to our ability to understand the world more accurately."
Paula M. L. Moya, Learning from Experience
I have tried to position myself in orientation to the subject of access up to this point in the
dissertation. Specifically, I have oriented myself to access by trying to articulate access as a
process of activities enacted by people, technologies, and cultural ways of knowing the world.
That is to say, access is not a trait but is enacted. Access happens when technologies, careers,
identities, spaces, cultures and ideas interact and influence each other. Something, a rhetoric,
must make them coordinate. Access then, is a type of rhetoric rather than a trait that rhetoric is a
part of.
My orientation began by showing how the literature on access separates access primarily
into two camps of thought. These two modes of thought are often linked but are too easily and
too often separated. First, a material view of access that we can call the “digital divide” narrative
dominated much of our initial conversations about access. The “digital divide” narrative links
ethnic or racial groups' economic status in the collective to the availability of technological tools,
groups that Jeff Grabill (2003) calls in the collective “the techno-poor.” The second form of
access I examined can be roughly described as an ideological or critical cultural effort.
Ideological access locates the discussion of access in individual experience distributed over time
in an effort to provide a more holistic view of experience. Each of these literatures locate access
as both a history of both material possession and a particular kind of ideological and identity
experience, that is to say, both list access as something possessed which obfuscates access from

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being knowable. Moving away from literacy studies influenced discussions, I moved my
orientation of access to two fields of rhetorical thought: Cultural rhetoric and Professional
Writing in attempt to escape the idea of access as possession to distributed activity.
With these two bodies of literature on access in mind and drawing on a wide variety of
theoretical orientations, I assembled a view of accessing, access as a constantly shifting project
enacted and distributed across people, tools, and cultures driven by three sites: the relationship
between space and place, experience and rhetorical theory, and rhetorical construction of bodies.
I used chapter two to show that in attempting to locate accessing, through cultural rhetoric and
professional writing, we see certain patterns emerge from locating that discussion in the
relationship between space and place, experience and rhetorical theory, and rhetorical
construction of bodies.
Thus far, I have used my “interruptions” and my methodology chapter as ways to locate
my own orientation and experience in terms of certain commitments of politics, deployed
methods, and theoretical orientations. Most importantly from chapter three, I rely on a theory of
rhetorical listening to locate the people and things that become important in moments of
accessing as well as a theory of material objects that helps us understand how complex “black
boxed” systems, like social media, come into being and are reinforced through the activity of
people and writing technologies.

Research Design
At this point it would be foolish to think of this empirical work as the totality of the work
of this dissertation. As you will see, I am not capturing whole lives, careers, or even very robust
large-scale views of networks. That is not my goal with this empirical section. My goal with this
empirical work is to understand and locate the “moments” of access enacted. Moments are

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fleeting, ephemeral, and mundane increments as much as moments that spawn and generate
entire epistemological shifts in how people think about technologies, careers, and cultures in
time. These moments are difficult to capture in any empirical model because we as people have a
tendency not to remember the mundane moments. That is what makes them mundane, their
unremarkable nature. Moments that become experiences are important. They take on
epistemological meaning as they linger in our thoughts. I have one advantage in my attempt to
locate the mundane, however. Writing, regardless of its medial form, never forgets.
The effort to try and locate these moments is worth it because these moments are literally
the stuff that builds up and into careers and cultures as well as the rhetorical theories that people
enact daily. These mundane moments are also the place where oppressive structures are
reinscribed on oppressed groups15. Small moments can have devastating effects. A casual sigh
and the shaking of a head when coupled with a lifetime of other rhetorically significant
experiences can cut off access not because of their violence but because of their relationship and
similarities to other forms of oppression and violence.
How much can I bend access into moments of enacted accessing before it breaks? Instead
of trying to reconcile the two views of access by choosing to focus on either materiality or
ideology I have chosen a third way. Research and scholarship has tried to make them overlap
occasionally but such overlapping views remain difficult to maintain as an empirical model, as I
showed in chapter two. Rather than attempt to line up materiality and ideology, to force them
into a single view that reduces the world into neat but hardly overlapping packages of thought, I
have attempted to go in the other direction with my empirical design. That is to say, I want to
15

See Homi Bhabha (2004), Franz Fanon (2008). Paulo Freire (2000), Paula Moya (2002),
Victor Villanueva (1999) and Young (2004) for especially good conversations and theories of
how oppression manifest in mundane human and cultural interactions.

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view networks as networks and people as people to see how each enact moments of accessing
rather than have them compete for which is more accurate or “real” by asking each the same
questions. When do moments of access enacted happen? Who and what is involved in those
moments? How are these players coordinated? I feel no need to make these competing realities
vie for a title I can call “the way the world really works” but in the same breath I will insist that
this is not simply multiple truths expressing themselves. No. Each, as I have assembled them
here, represents moments of enacted access that are and insist on being related to a real world
reality while at the same time being as multiple as access is itself. Access is enacted differently
yet remains cohesive across certain contexts while breaking in others. The political pragmatist in
me would have it no other way.

Visualizing Social Writing Networks as Objects
As I indicated before, I am not especially interested in large-scale views or theories of
how or why networks operate the way they do. I am interested in understanding the connections
that create or deny access for people. I am more interested in how local networks build, maintain,
repair, and dissipate to enact or deny access.
By a “local” network I mean to use a social networking site as something where we can
actually see and trace all our relationships for a certain amount of time. This tracing of sites must
be able to happen regardless of inconsistencies with what we can see, read, and listen to. This is,
perhaps, a very unsatisfying answer to those interested in large-scale visualizations of network
formations and operations. The best way to explain this difference in orientation to what it means
to be, look at, or create a network through research might be something along the lines of the
difference between a usability designer and a software programmer. The usability designer wants
to understand the interface really well to advocate for users. They do not need to understand the

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entirety of the user experience or the entirety of the software programmer’s job. They look for
patterns of recognition in specific cases that may point to underlying problems in the ways users
and technologies interface16.
The local network that enacts the type of access practices I am interested is important to
see because that is the "object" that coordinates access for people. Access is enacted very
differently on the “back end” of the technology. Relatively cheap smart phones, IP protocols, and
cellular transmission spectrum standardization all enact access differently as well as coordinating
moments of access, but these are less interesting to me (in addition to being harder to follow!).
Here then, by “local” network I merely want to follow user accounts through one or two weeks
to see who associates themselves through what Facebook or Twitter calls “activity.” What I can
read and capture on a screen by “following” them. Nothing more, nothing less. No complex
system of watching how frequently a hashtag gets retweeted. Large-scale projects of following
11 million people and looking at how eleven million users enact social networking sites (Mislove
et al. 2007) doesn’t tell me much about how access happens. Such work tells me what trends of
large groups are, not individuals in relation to technologies or culture. Nor am I particularly
interested in whether such sites are “good” or “bad” for students17.
Here is a good place to rearticulate some of my guiding principles about the accessing as
it is enacted. First, accessing is hard to see and is distributed across ideological, material, and

16

This is, of course, a gross compression of what usability people do. Especially the issue of
whether users or designers should have more “agency” in the final design of a user interface.
This argument seems somewhat absurd to me as, like most things in reality, each negotiates with
the other as users adopt and overcome terrible interfaces and designers develop “intuitive”
designs.
17
Again, there is a great amount of information about whether such sites are benefits or curses to
the “younger” generation of “today’s society” ranging from the ecstatic, to the inane, to the
inflammatory. See Mark Bauerlein (2009), Gina Maranto and Matt Barton (2010), Allan Martin
& Dan Madigan, eds (2006), or Clay Shirky (2009) for a start.
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linguistic relationships. Second, access is enacted between people, things, and places in a nonmetaphorical ecology. No one actor can enact access by themselves but the totality creates an
“object” of access. We can learn how access is enacted at a specific site. Therefore we can
attempt to see how enacted access is distributed between work and home, between social and
cultural subjectivities like social networking sites because they enact the “invisible work” of
accessing as Harquial (2011) mentions. For my purposes, then, we can “see” moments of
accessing through shifts in the coordination of enacting. Accessing or the denial of access is
enacted not by content or mastery of a particular technology but rather by shifts in who and what
are recruited rhetorically into the network’s attention. Access is enacted in social writing spaces
by networks. We can see what counts as access by identifying how a network reacts to
information and new content. The more this shifting stabilizes and the more actors are involved;
the more the object creates stronger space of access. As you will see in this data, the rhetoric of
that reaction is not consistent with the content. Two users can have almost the same exact
“message” and professional and personal networks in social media spaces will react differently.
In my analytical design, I have tried to account for the fact that we can only find the
content that a user generates as important by seeing when it is not important in someone else's
network. So I have developed a loose analytic to be able to visualize moments of access enacted
with regard to broad categories of content and reactions to content from the network rather than
choosing to rely on close textual analysis. My hope is to free this work from the “bootstraps”
idea of access as simply repeating or mirroring what other people who have access say, and
move instead into showing that access is enacted differently by different networks. Access
doesn’t always look the same. As I will show you, sometimes a simple post about arriving safely
will enact as a great deal of professional access. Sometimes that same moment offered by

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someone else will elicit nothing.

Visualizing Social Writing Networks as Objects: Method
Access is not usually a problem for people of cultural or economic privilege. That
privilege and access is maintained through actions of coordination that associate people and
resources closely with certain racial, class, and gendered locations (white, male, heterosexual).
That coordination is not the product of a single individuals actions or a single writing platform. It
can't be.
Seeing and mapping the networks of privilege and access means looking at networks of
association, not individuals. I want to take one brief moment and reiterate that these are not
visualizations of participant's behaviors. That will come later. These are visualizations of
networks enacting and coordinating access. Just as to understand power and privilege we can not
study a single individual, so to understand access we must understand that which enables access
in relation to people. While my participants participate actively or passively in these networks of
access, the views I present here are not of individuals. These visualizations are of activity around
individuals. They are views of networks of access that my participants both access and are
accessed by.
I chose a population that would allow me to see unstable forms of access. In this stage of
my research I followed through either Facebook or Twitter five users. Each user was a woman of
color from various ethnic and racial backgrounds. Users' backgrounds were non-native speakers
of English as well as native speakers of English. Each user was at various stages of their early
career development. I followed five women: one undergraduate professional writing major, one
first year PhD student, one PhD student about to take her comprehensive exams, one PhD
student who is ABD, and one recent PhD who is teaching at her first job since graduating. This

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distribution of careers was a coincidence and not intentional. While valuable, each should not be
taken as a case study for that particular career point. As we will see, each network enacted access
differently.
More specifically, I followed one online social writing account of these women of color
for a one week period. In two cases where the participants did not produce over ten posts in the
one week period, I extended the data collection an additional week. In total, I examined and
coded 681 moments of activity that could be observed and located within the social media sites
themselves such as content, time, location, who was mentioned, and technologies mentioned.
Due to the nature of social media writing, these networks involve the accounts of other people. In
total 137 different people were involved in this analysis of networked writing.
How do we see access enacted in such networks? My answer for this case is to use simple
counts of particular moments and to count certain kinds of activity. Because of my commitment
to seeing multiple forms of access enacted, such counting must be able to shift depending on
what we are comparing. That is to say, the visualizaton must enable us to compare not only
moments across accounts but also moments within individual networks. The polargram
visualizations you see (see Figure 1) enables two important moves in that regard. First, by using
a simple five point sliding ordinal scale, numbers can shift in our view across users’ networks as
a group i.e. this network had more “likes” than that network. Additionally, I can readily adapt
that scale to locate moments of enacting across days, i.e. Sunday shows us more access than
Tuesday. The polargrams are sorted into three large categories: accounts involved, tools used,
and activity in total. "Accounts involved" are simply the amount of “people” we can see
contributing, commenting, or posting during a visualized moment. For example, if one post
elicited the responses of three people/accounts the total number of accounts involved for that

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particular moment would be four. "Tools used" lists the material components mentioned as forms
of rhetoric
delivery in
those
moments
i.e. “sent
from
Blackberr
y” or “via
Web”. I’ll
note here
that I
counted

Figure 1: Polargram view of visualizing networked accessing
For interpretation of the references to color in this and all other figures, the
reader is referred to the electronic version of this dissertation.

applications
separately, so if a user used tweekdeck for iPhone as well as Twitter for iPhone this counted as
two tools. "Activity," specifically rhetorical activity, constituted the production of or reaction to
content. Activities like liking or retweeting, status updates, or posting and commenting were
counted here. The right side of the polargram indicates an even more fine-grained account of
activity based on the amount of embodied rhetorical effort involved in the type of activity. By
embodied rhetorical effort I mean, literally, how much of the body had to move to engage in the
activity as well as how much time the body took to engage in said activity. For example,
retweeting or “liking” something in Facebook merely requires a single click of an onscreen

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button. Status updates require more movement of fingers to type out messages but they are
responses
to stimuli
that
happen
either in
offline
environme
nts e.g. “I
had lunch
today” or
that come
across a
screen e.g.

Figure 2: Examples of types of networks and how they enact access

“This is an interesting post” unlike the post/comment form of activity which requires people to
move their fingers and bodies to take pictures, then upload them, then frame those pictures
rhetorically by placing captions under them or requires the user to click through other web pages,
copy a link, then paste that link into Facebook, and then to then frame those pictures rhetorically
by placing captions under them. I will admit this is an unorthodox way of thinking about the
effort of rhetorical action, especially in terms of Western paradigms of what counts as rhetorical
activity. Given my own orientation, however, this is in line with the overlap between Cultural
Rhetoric and Professional Writing I outlined in chapters one and two as far as understanding the
body as marked and involved in modes of rhetorical production. I am, perhaps, being more fine

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grained in my approach here than is usually considered but as I hope to show, valuable insights
can be obtained by understanding rhetorical effort in this way.
These polargrams show patterns of rhetorical behavior in a variety of situated and
enacted types of access based on what networks value. Figure 2 shows fictional representations
of how access would be enacted in certain online spaces. You can see there that various forms of
enacting change the shape of access in those spaces. This view can capture and compare different
forms of
access.
Figure 3
shows what
these
different
types of
enacting
looks like
for two of
my
participants,

Figure 3: Different kinds of access enacted in moments

Lana and
Barbara. All names used here are pseudonyms. The visualization in Figure 3 allows us to see the
area of “access(ing)” as it occurs in different users’ networks. We can use the gray area to think
about the area of accessing enacted that the network shows comparative to other networks. We
can see here that similar amounts of space are covered but that networks enact access differently,

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at different moments and in different ways. Instead of each participant being slotted into making
a certain kind of sense as “evidence,” the social writing practices we see here allow us to see
differences in networked writing without silencing similarity.
Figure 4 also shows us exactly what those differing enacting moments of accessing look
like, allowing us to dwell on and name different sorts of accessing. For example, we can see that
Lana’s network, compared to other networks, contains a large amount of people’s accounts,
engaged in a high volume of activity mostly at a simple rhetorical level or, to put it another way,
accessing is
enacted by the
popularity of
the network.
Barbara’s
network is
enacting access
through a high
number of
different
technological
tools as well as

Figure 4: Counting activity in networks

high rhetorical
effort, something we might call experimentation. Most of this effort comes from Barbara herself,
something I will address later. Again, the process of enacting access can be seen in these views
as different orientations and conversations about experiences with accessing. Showing the actual

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numbers involved by using comparative measures allows us to see how each set of accessing
behaviors is distributed in relation to a similar set. This view also helps us understand how
different forms of distributed enacted access look in relationship to each other. The sliding
numeric scale allows us to see which moments are comparable to other moments located in time
or by level of scope. As a method of visualization, I designed a view so that the scale could shift
easily between data sets and still remain meaningful. Here, different numbers tell us different
stories of access that do not isolate or exclude relevant information from comparative cases. For
example, while Lana’s network might enact access differently from Barbara’s, the elements are
not mutually exclusive. We can still see that, although it does not have as high a volume as Lana,
Barbara’s network still engages in a lot of activity.

Fine Grained Views of Individual User Networks: Barbara's Network
While comparisons between networks are useful, comparisons of moments of enacted
access inside networks can tell us a great deal as well. For example, Barbara’s network is mostly
a result of her own activity. Most of the content created in her network came from her, with most
comments coming from people in her old graduate program. Access is enacted in Barbara’s
network by her own practices that people/accounts respond to. Almost all of the “high effort”
content (16/18) came from Barbara. By following the associations made by “groups” in
facebook, we can learn a great deal about how access is enacted in her network. Following up in
the interview with her, I discovered her most prominent network is not her current employer but
“colleagues” from her graduate program. What is important to know is that she is not targeting
an audience here with her posts. More than likely facebook is “maintaining” a connection by
feeding her content into her old colleagues' streams. By understanding the relationship between
effort and types of people, we can understand which space is being created. In this case, Barbara,

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along with facebook, is creating the space of her peers and their old/current graduate program
online and dislocated from a geographic reality. As a new PhD she teaches some 17000 miles
from her old graduate program’s physical location, and even its members are distributed across
the country. Posts and friendships are maintained but little is being done (or can be done?) to
make connections in her current geographical work place. I think it is important to point out that,
against some of our narratives about access, that these relationships, which Barbara identifies as
both professional and personal, are important professional relationships to maintain and her new
career is just
starting. The
important
point here is
that Barbara,
with
facebook’s
help, is doing
a lot of work
to maintain
those career
friendships by

Figure 5: Small talk at work, collapsing "away" from work

producing
content that her former colleagues and potential key colleagues respond to.
Figure 5 shows us just how much “facebooking” ends up happening at work for her.
Again, this method of viewing enacted access helps us to see the recursive nature of enacted

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access within a single user’s account because of its relative scale. Here we can see that Barbara’s
network is not active on Sunday. This allows us to ask questions about why, where, and when
accessing occurs for networks helping us understand an overarching life. Accessing, in this view,
shows us that it is made up of moments, not narratives about moments, that fit our predetermined
categories for “digital divides.” In my interview follow up, Barbara related to me that she spent
Sundays watching football and calling family. When Barbara shuts down, her network shuts
down. As we will see with Lana, that is not always the case.

Fine Grain Views of Individual User Networks: Lana
Lana is also in a position of career change. As a first year PhD student at the end of her
first semester,
her ideas
about her
career are in a
constant state
of flux. As we
can see here,
Lana’s
network
generates a
great deal of
activity and

Figure 6: Professional network access collapses without embodied presence

involves a
great many people. Out of all Facebook users, her network had the most activity, represented

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here by volume, as well as the most comments and the most people involved. While her personal
amount of posts was average and their content mundane, her network responded to those posts a
great deal. With just a little more information, we can learn a great deal about just how this
network functions both professionally and privately.
I followed Lana’s Facebook feed during the end of the semester. Lana’s activity remained
constant during this period. She had a series of posts, all of them made from her blackberry
where she described a trip to about two hours away from her university and then to her home
state. Some of these were text in nature, some of them photo posts. Unlike Barbara, Lana doesn't
post links, nor do the people in her network. All high rhetorical effort came from Lana in the
nature of a photopost with comment. When asked to categorize the people/accounts involved in
her network an interesting pattern develops.
Figure 6 shows that pattern. In this view, we see the people/accounts that Lana
categorizes as professional only contacts and there is a great deal of activity. In fact, Lana’s
“professional” network, in just three days, produced more activity than most of the other
participants' network in this study. Here we see how the effect of embodied presence manifests
itself in the activity of the “primarily professional” network. As Lana leaves the embodied space
of the network, the “primarily professional” network’s online activity becomes non-existent. The
“primary professional” network no longer “wants” to be part of Lana’s social writing.
Figure 7 displays the activity of peers (both friends and professional relationships). We
can see that, again, embodied presence affects how the network reacts to Lana. Here though, we
see that the network continues to maintain itself through activity, although nowhere near as
heavily as when Lana is physically present, and the change is not as dramatic. The network
alters, but is not lost. In fact, there is a higher level of rhetorical effort used in terms of

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“comments.” Interestingly, what we don’t see here is that only three current colleagues engage in
any sort of activity in the last three days, replicating the pattern we see in her "professionalexclusive" network but not as extreme.
Interestingly enough, figure eight, which shows the friendship exclusive network view,
shows almost no difference between the first part of the week and the second part of the week.
Likes, comments, and posts remain almost constant. Lana’s friendship network remains constant
whether they are physically present or not. Here we can see that the “friend” network maintains
itself consistently. This network shows us a stable network that is maintained both within
embodied
presence and
without
embodied
presence i.e. a
strong
network. We
can assume
this
network’s
relationships
were created

Figure 7: Peers network does not drop as much

well away
from Facebook and have been maintained through social writing. We can also see here that pure
“friendship” related activity is a small percentage of Lana’s writing network’s volume. Lana’s

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network is mostly a professional one with little to no professional “content.”

Listening to moments of enacted access in peoples’ lives
Access is enacted and distributed across networks of people and things. That does not
mean that people have no ability to wrestle and wrangle those networks. People have a large
stake in divisions between personal and professional, far more than networks do. The women I
talked to all had histories of enacting access through technological and professional means. They
had experiences that led them to make certain decisions about when, how, and where to be
professional or be personal. They had devices that they recruited in these efforts as well as ways
of knowing and being in the world that led them to enact access in ways that mattered to them or,
at least, managed to let them to think about, reflect, and articulate problems about access.
Sometimes access was thought about and enacted as a process, collapsed in a history where
people and work were the same. Sometimes access to the professional and the personal were kept
apart with great care and collapsed in a history where people and work were kept as separate and
distinct. In each case, listening to their stories allows us to see the actions and actors that they
negotiate with to enact access.
A note about the write up of this research: as I stated in my methodology chapter it is
important to me that lives and experiences do not become people's lives here. These stories are
ones that I elicited as a researcher and shouldn’t be thought of as the whole of people's
experiences. I have attempted to address certain problems in the way I have gone about writing
up this research. The first problem is how to write my “people” case studies in such a way that
their stories do not become a sort of finite type of evidence. As I outline in the chapter
developing my methodology, attempting to escape that problem of representation leaves me with
a certain type of orientation. My interest is in understanding the complex relationships of

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moments of accessing while doing so in a culturally responsible manner. That is to say,
understanding and capturing moments of accessing, a distributed activity, is my goal but I do not
wish to lose the individual in that process because my commitment is to produce something that
could be of value to such individuals. While this research is important to me and, I hope to the
field, only certain elements will remain useful for people in the situations I am observing. What
needs to come of such research is seeing the value in how people from various backgrounds
negotiated these professional and cultural tensions. That my write up must facilitate the creation
of professionals of color without having such activity become rigid and prescriptive is a key
element in my attempt at a methodological design.
What I imagine then is arranging a sort of conversation. And like an actual conversation,
elements from the interviews are grouped stories that emerge in their experience. These stories
are not "lifestories" so much as stories about life. I think I could then tie a lot of this sort of work
together by highlighting similarities and differences at the level of strategy that my participants
engaged in by pointing out different paths into same problem, answers, and concerns. Unlike
most of the time when I do this in the “interruption” chapters of this dissertation, here I articulate
those connections and differences rather than relying on the audience to build the connections
themselves. So the strategies that have emerged are built from "scenes" (moments that spurred
rhetorical theory building and action) but scenes can have multiple impacts.
The ways that access is enacted in people's lives and their stories of their lives mean that
access is not one goal here. There is not one type of access, technological or ideological. Not one
space that is “professional” and “personal” but many that are negotiated, collapsed, and
expanded. That is not to say that access is fragmented or that there are different “kinds” of
access. As I will show you, in people's experiences and stories of their lives there are moments

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when technology and careers collapse into a single moment of enacted access as there are
moments when cultural lives are enacted and brought into career spaces. These moments stand
side by side with moments long ago where “professional” activity was deemed as something
separate and to stand apart from “friends” and therefore technology was recruited to help keep
that separation intact. In short, people develop and enact rhetorical theories then deploy those
theories among nonhumans, phones, and their own behavior.

Listening to Coordination
Access is not an obtained trait; we can see and listen to moments of access as they
happen every day. What is more surprising is when particular moments shape and form into
experiences. As I discussed in chapter one, and as Moya (2001) reminds us “a person’s
interpretation of an event will be at least partially dependent for its meaning on her selfconception – her understanding of her particular relation to the people and happenings
surrounding that event” (p. 87). Like identity, moments of access are both constructed moments
that refer to actual events and “real world” moments that refer out to a world beyond the person
and have a reality. Access is enacted in both places as a constructed moment and as a reality
beyond the people involved, across technologies and social experiences. These “experiences”
stand out to people. They become examples of things gone right or things gone wrong with
personal lives and with careers for the people who have had them and thus generate theories
about how the world works and how to shape future rhetorical behavior within that world.
Naturally, social locations and subjectivity play a large part in understanding and theorizing
about “experience”. Race, class, and gender are useful for talking about social identities because
they explain a great many “experiences” well but they can quickly become not useful if they are
allowed to represent a totality of experience.

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Access, therefore, must have some organizing principle. If people, networks,
technologies, and careers all must come together to create moments of access, some organizing
force must assemble that moment. An experience is just such a force. An experience is rooted in
an identity, refers to an actual moment in time, but also contains the epistemological sense that
that particular moment generates for a person. That is to say, an experience is important. The
moment is given meaning because the person shapes current thoughts and actions in and about
the world. The moment then, located in a lived social sense of identity and shaped by
epistemological meaning becomes a rhetorical theory. How your boss treated you at your first
job affects how you think your boss should be at your current job. If you have seen people get
shot down in a class for talking, you might decide to speak up or you might decide to be quiet
but your observation of that person being yelled at factors into your thinking about what you
should do.
Tracing the moments of rhetorical theory, where a moment is given epistemological heft
in mind of a person, should not be thought of as just a “mental” moment. These moments refer
outward from the subject and are about the world and the technology as well as their
interpretation. Careers, colleagues, friends, lovers, technologies, phones, and theories about the
world are placed next to each other and made sense of. In the moments of coordination I have
heard many people and objects gained access at a particular moment. What those moments
meant shaped future actions.

Listening to Diana’s Stories
Coordination of access, not only technologically but also ideologically, means that
different elements gain access at a particular moment. What I did not expect while doing
interviews about access was to find that my participants were more concerned about the access

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that other people and technologies had to their own lives rather than gaining access themselves.
As I hope Diana’s story shows us, multiple forms of access are enacted at the same time. The
overlap can have serious effects on both the sense of self and the emotional life of the person
involved. Diana’s story
Diana is a PhD student at a large Midwestern university. She is not a native speaker of
English and has degrees from other countries. She recently finished half of her comprehensive
exams. I’m avoiding specifics here because I am not sure those categories would be useful to the
extent that they explain her story. In terms of writing, I followed her Twitter feed where she
produced very little writing. In fact, I extended my “observation” of her from one week to three
just to have enough content to ask her about. When I asked her if she used other social media
other than Twitter she said she had in the past but had gotten rid of that account. When I asked
her when she stopped using that account she knew the exact month she had deleted the account.
When I asked her why she knew the exact month she told me she knew because it was the same
month her first publication as a scholar had happened, which she had almost immediately
regretted for the following reasons.
Me: How many publications do you have?
Diana: One, this is the first one.
Me: Right. OK.
Diana: And if this is the piece that identifies me, it [her article] could do me a disservice
on the job market. That was the one thing. Secondly, being published . . . being published
just felt like being exposed like I was out there and people were reading my stuff and
people were going to be commenting on it and talking about it and it felt like I almost put
my body out there? Which is why I felt like this physical fear like I put a part of myself
out there. But the piece felt very personal to me as well because it was a personal story.
So it felt like I put myself out there. And um, so I stayed away from the site for a couple of
days.
Me: The [publication] site enables comments then?
Diana: Yes.
Diana describes here a point of experience and an experience of fear. Seen here, this moment has

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many elements. Diana has this experience in terms of the professional (“if this is the piece that
identifies me it could do me a disservice on the job market”) and the personal (“But the piece felt
very personal to me as well because it was a personal story”) but to call the moment either
professional or personal and not both seems somewhat dishonest. That would make the situation
too clean. This moment means something in both spheres.

Network Jumping, Enacting Accessing Across Diana's Online Networks
The situation of the publication is messy for Diana. The distinctions between personal
and private collapse into an unknowable space as the speed of the event accelerates. Lots of
networks begin to access Diana very quickly. Notice that that the traditional ways that we
organize labor and self, of public and private, of offline and online begin to collapses in her
narrative of the narrative of the event. Those distinctions collapse as more technologies become
involved. When I followed up asking her when she first experienced this fear she answered:
Diana: As soon as it was published I regretted ever having turned it in for publication
because I was actually afraid of . . .
Me: You were physically afraid or you were professionally afraid or . . .
Diana: Both.
Me: Really?
Diana: Yeah.
Diana’s fear of the repercussions of her work manifested itself in two ways, physically and
professionally. That feeling was not made any better when a scholar in the field, someone with
books and a tenured job, commented on Diana’s piece in a way that felt to Diana as “a really
condescending and a very sarcastic comment.” Having Diana’s recollection of the scholar’s
quote, I went to look up the article and the comment. Diana had quoted her almost word for
word. Clearly this brief professional exchange had left an experiential mark on Diana, one that
supported all her fears about how her “discipline” would react to her first publication and
therefore her capacity to get a job in the future. That she felt “exposed” in both areas. Diana's

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work coordinated the professional and the emotional in a single work. That work was both
accepted professionally but rejected professionally as well. As the piece began to take on new
meanings for Diana, that collapse of professional and personal becomes threat on both levels.
Diana: And the moment I saw it (the senior scholar’s response on the journal website) I
felt more exposed and I had like a panic attack. I just . . . couldn’t control myself.
Me: Yeah, you seem upset now.
Diana: Yeah, yeah.
Me: You still ok talking about it?
Diana: Yeah, I am.
Me: OK.
At this point, I still had no idea what the connection was between this experience and Facebook.
Me: Did something happen on Facebook or was it this comment, this professional awful
comment, made on this other blog that made you . . .
Diana: (overlapping) Well . . .
Me: delete the Facebook thing or was . . . was it something that happened on Facebook
too that was a contributing factor or . . .?
Diana: Well, yeah, uh. So I didn’t tell anybody in the program that I had had a piece
accepted but somebody found out and posted on my Facebook wall and said
“congratulations” and that sort of led to everybody else in the program commenting on
my wall about the piece and I was trying to keep it quiet and then, because I was feeling
sort of . . . because I was feeling sort of irrational, not irrational but I was . . . because I
was feeling so out of control of that point I felt as if people were judging me for
publishing it. That they didn’t actually mean it when they congratulated me or that they
were looking at that comment made by that other scholar and agreeing with her. And, in
my head, I started believing that people were, that people were going to think that I was
being a whiny bitch and that I should just suck it up. (emphasis mine).
Diana knows that she could not control the fact that she has been published but before her
colleague commented on her wall she felt she could minimize the impact of the article. After all,
she had time to publish many pieces between now and when she went on the job market, many
times to create other work that would “identify” her to her field. She felt that she still could
minimize the impact, and her perception of that impact, by keeping the news “quiet.” Her
Facebook network says otherwise. As the initial “object” of congratulations builds within
Facebook, the network expands and enlists other users. The more users that see the
congratulations, the more exposed Diana feels, regardless of the content creating more and more

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anxiety for her because each additional comment makes the publication, and therefore Diana,
much more visible and vulnerable.
The initial moment of access is Diana’s publication. She has access to a career, being a
published scholar but also the career has access to her. The second moment of access is the
response to Diana’s piece by the established scholar that enforces Diana’s worst fears about her
first publication, that instead of helping her get a job, the publication has a chance to harm her
chances of getting a job. Here the discipline, in the synecdochic form of the scholar, accesses
Diana’s work to rebuff her directly and “publically” because the online journal allows comments
around particles.
There is a collapse here, and not along the lines we think of as a public/work self and a
private/ home self, although we can see that is part of how Diana orders her experience. While
the threat of the online journal is bad it exists for Diana in a certain network of not only
professional associations but also, literally, on one low traffic website with only one comment.
As her article and the threat it generates for Diana becomes one solid rhetorical object, it
continues to maintain negative associations for Diana across online networks. The content
around the object does not matter, what matters is the exposure. Literally, the more people
involved, the worse the situation. What Facebook does is index the amount of exposure with
congratulations and "likes." For Diana, one person commenting was bad enough on the academic
site. Facebook gave her evidence of how many people had read the piece, in other words, how
big the object had become. In fact, the more people who have access to it, regardless of what
they say, the more influence, fear, and panic this rhetorical object creates in Diana. I want to
remind us here that this is not simply something that is in Diana's head. Facebook is literally
showing and indexing the amount of exposure she has from this piece in ways that the academic

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wiki was not. Facebook enabled the object to jump social and technological networks as well as
those social networks to access Diana herself.

Rhetorical Theory Building, Experience Becomes Enacted into Decision
Making
The act shuts down Diana’s access to the field and threatens further access to her career
by not only endorsing Diana’s feelings about the piece but also in the manner of rhetorical
delivery (short terse response that doesn’t engage the piece) and does so in a limited public way.
Anyone can see this rebuttal but who will? There is still time to publish other things and not
everyone reads this online journal. Another moment of access in this story is when a colleague in
Diana’s program moves her publication, as a presence, from the relative obscurity of the online
journal to Facebook. This movement allows for a much larger group of people to know about
comment, and offer congratulations on the now-perceived-as-damaging piece. Each comment
becomes another moment of access by Facebook and others, making the event larger. Each
moment turns the whole experience into something worse because there is nothing she can do to
control this “exposure” and nothing she can do to limit the impact of the piece now. The ability
to access Diana’s publication from an obscure academic online venue to a highly visible profile
as well as a personally relevant one collapses the two “presences” of Diana in ways that Diana
perceives is yet another point that she can do nothing about (“because I was feeling so out of
control of that point”). That is not to say Diana was passive by any means. The event takes on
meaning for Diana beyond the event itself. The event makes visible for her just how exposed she
had always been at Facebook.
Diana: And I had lots of interactions with people on Facebook. I had like close to two
hundred friends on Facebook and it just felt like I was too exposed. And . . .
Me: Yeah.
Diana: And there were too many people who knew about me and so all this just
snowballed into my deleting my Facebook account.

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What is important to realize here is that the event around her first publication is not the reason
Diana deleted her Facebook account. The event called attention to what Facebook does as a site;
it exposes her, which is a much larger and more important danger than the single incident. After
all, she could have just deleted the "congratulations" post from her colleague. Then again,
someone else might again repost another congratulations. The problem is control.
Facebook is what coordinates access, enabling vulnerability and exposure for Diana.
Diana did not stop being friends with people when she deleted her Facebook account. Far from
it, she began using other media like Twitter and email more heavily. The initial experience of the
“panic attack” like moment of the senior scholar’s comment becomes a recurring theme here, as
does Diana's reaction to feeling physically and professionally exposed. Facebook is a force
because it is the “place” where a great deal of people have access to Diana every day casually.
The nature of that access, either "good" or "bad" is not the issue. The issue is the volume of
people and how much of that access can be seen in by "likes," posts, and comments. People are
coordinated by Facebook to have access to Diana. As Facebook becomes a place that others have
access to Diana’s professional life and private life, Facebook becomes too much to bear. She
deletes the account. A new rhetorical stance emerges in relationship to the event. Control access.
Limit exposure. These two imperatives compel the action to delete Facebook. Experience is
transformed into a rhetorical theory about what is "good" and what actions to take.
As I listen to the interview, the moments of access here are the ones where Diana is
reacting to people, websites, and professions gain access to her career work and her body as well.
It is a moment not of Diana, but of other players. It is a series of accessing moments where she
has no control of how quickly that access is being enacted. There is a collapse, not of personal
and professional as much as of Diana’s piece, and all it has come to represent to her, e-

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journal/career and Facebook/career. This whole series of events gives access to both her physical
body and access to her professional thoughts. Fear.
That is not to say Diana stopped professionalizing or even stopped using social writing
technologies. When I set up my initial participation with Diana, it was to follow her Twitter
account. She maintained her Twitter account through all of what was going on between this
article, people, and Facebook.
Me: Because you maintained your Twitter, right?
Diana: I did because Twitter felt a little more close to me. Not too many people knew I
was on Twitter. My Twitter account was locked. Um, I . . . the Twitter for some reason
Twitter felt like a safer place for me at that point. Maybe because I hadn’t had so many
interactions with people on Twitter. And I had lots of interactions with people on
Facebook. I had like close to two hundred friends on Facebook and it just felt like I was
too exposed. And . . .
Me: Yeah.
Diana: And there were too many people who knew about me and so all this just
snowballed into my deleting my Facebook account.
There is a rhetorical theory being built here the links how many people can “see” Diana’s
projected body. When I asked her how many times she checked Twitter a day, she said as many
as fifteen where she would wake up, check her email then go immediately to Twitter. Even as
Diana decided to shut down a great many people’s access to her, her work, and her body she
maintained and enacted access with a smaller group of people and “a safer place.”

Conclusion
Has the small proof of concept empirical methodology I offered here done anything to
help us understand and locate moments of enacted access? I think so. We’ve leaned that access is
enacted in multiple ways across multiple actors. We’ve also learned that access is coordinated
and organized by something, usually multiple things. If nothing else, we’ve learned that access is
something that transcends classrooms. Cohorts can maintain long after they are no longer around
each other or alternatively, they can dissipate almost immediately after they are no longer

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physically present.
For some, professional access comes from maintaining a relationship with “friends” from
an old program. Digital tools allow them to keep in the thoughts and minds of people they have
worked with whom they “chat” about mundane regular things. Things that other tools bring
them. Many tools are deployed that coordinate these relationships. RSS feeds, web tools,
iPhones, texts and social writing sites are all deployed to give old colleagues and friends
something to talk about to maintain access.
For others, access has little to do with them other than whether they are present or not.
No special rhetorical effort is needed. They recruit no tools other than their blackberry. Their
physical presence is enough to coordinate access to the powerful for them. Simply being there is
enough until, of course, it is not and they are no longer there. Then access no longer happens, or
more accurately, waits until objects realign and bodies are next to each other once again. Then,
again, access will once again be enacted as relationships will be formed.
For others, the coordination of access that others do can be too much. They can feel and
see how other forces move to construct their bodies and their futures. Too many have access to
them, their psyche and their body. The only move here for them is to dislocate themselves. To
smash this access apart where it will not coordinate so easily. Where the number of players on
the board is much more limited, manageable, and knowable. Then access to a career can move
forward. The experience of the event creates a lasting lesson to avoid moments where others are
in charge of accessing them as scholar, as body, or as web presence.

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Chapter Six
Conclusion
"Well, technology is just another form of language isn't it?"
Victor Villanueva, personal conversation
Out here in the fields
I fight for my meals
I get my back into my living
I don't need to fight
To prove I'm right
I don't need to be forgiven
The Who, “Teenage Wasteland”
I’m not talking about rich, I am talking about wealth . . . I ain’t talking about Oprah, I’m talking
about Bill Gates. If Bill Gates woke up tomorrow with Oprah's money, he'd jump out a fucking
window and slit his throat on the way down. "I can't even put gas in my plane!"
Chris Rock, Never Scared
Access is enacted. Access is not a trait to be owned by a thing or a person. Rather, access
is something that we can see and listen for in the interactions between things like spaces and
places, between experiences and social subjectivities, between rhetorics and bodies, and between
people and things if we consider the personal, the cultural and the professional rather than to let
any single one dominate over our conversations. Access does not just happen. Even where we
perceive nothing to be happening, a great many agents are persuaded to make it seem like
nothing is happening, to make accessing effortless and invisible. Access is a coordinated activity
where the relationships between people and things, between spaces and places, between
experiences and moments and between rhetoric and bodies all work to enable or deny access.
Access is an act of coordination that recruits uses, technologies, and people, grouped in various
ways, to its causes. That coordination, that enacting, doesn't mean unity in form or practice. All
agents do not need to be recruited in all instances. Only enough need to be recruited to make
sense across contexts. Access is not unity nor is it fragmented. Accessing, in essence, is that act

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of recruiting where assets (either technological, cultural, professional, linguistic, and/or
embodied) are leveraged to gain or deny. Accessing is, in other words, a type of rhetoric.

Can we locate access?
This dissertation began with two simple questions: Can we even locate access? What
does access mean today? The answer to the first question is yes. Access is located in moments
that are knowable. These moments exist in material and traceable networks of material
technology. We can see how these networks shift and organize themselves around information.
As with Lana and Barbara, we can see when landing at an airport becomes a text and who
responds to it. We can how texts respond to the presence or absence or even the length of
distance of bodies in relation to texts. As with Victor Villanueva in chapter two, we can see life
stories becoming texts and the professional meaning those texts take on. Or as with Beverly
Sauer, we can see how coal dust and fatigue become better indicators of risk than parts-permillion. As with Diana, we can listen for stories where people deny and reject one professional
social writing network only to build another out of another tool. We can see access enacted and
coordinated. We do not have to "guess" at histories based on false stories about divides. Access
is knowable and can be turned into accounts if we, perhaps counter intuitively, do not make it the
object we are looking for. If, instead of saying what access is (material and ideological), we
rather look for where it is enacted as material and ideological actions and coordination. The
material and ideological are results of access, not determiners of access, making the material and
the ideological elements of access much more complex to locate.
What makes access a difficult rhetoric to locate is that that there are a great many
participants trying to make themselves invisible both in the sense that Cisco, the global
conglomerate I quoted at the beginning of this dissertation, tries, as well as the actors we do not

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see or hear because our methodologies do not allow us to see or listen to them. I began this
dissertation with two quotes. This dissertation has been an attempt to develop a methodology to
locate access as something deeply distributed rather than as a trait that someone or something
has. Here I use methodology to mean a theoretical and empirical form of coordination that help
us see where access happens, when it happens, and what agents are involved in those moments.
In an effort to locate access, theoretically I draw on a great deal of the totality of Rhetoric and
Composition but most especially I draw on theories of Cultural rhetoric and Professional Writing
to broaden our perspectives of access beyond just the classroom. Along the way, I draw on a lot
of “personal” writing to locate my own rhetorical theory building and moments of access. These
“interruptions” have been attempts to locate the complex nature of access as a sustained activity
in my own career and educational process. What I hope to have shown is that access can be
located and traced in several ways, but one powerful new way lets us follow access across
contexts.
The first way that social writing and social media helps us to locate access is by indexing
the social. Sites like Facebook and Twitter coordinate a great deal of agents in the form of
people, tools, and ideas. What this means is that what counts as "social" behavior is "textualized"
in such places regardless of how mundane such behavior is. Tiny mundane cultural framings
about what counts as small talk, ominipresent professional relationships that are maintained as
well as the corpses/corpus of textualized activities of past relationships and technologies, and
gradual shifts in meaning over time are all index-able and recallable in such digitally networked
environments. In chapter three, I noted that Beverly Sauer's participants who were the wives of
coal miners were unsuccessful in convincing powerful institutions that increased coal dust in the
bodies of their husbands and in their husbands' laundry was an adequate indicator of risk. Such

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indicators mean that the coal company was negligent. I wonder, if these women had had access
to Twitter or Facebook, would things have been different? I wonder how many boring mundane
updates about how dirty coal miner uniforms have been recently and how difficult it is to clean
them would it take to show a pattern of negligence. What if every single person doing laundry
for that mine had mentioned something? Mentioned somethings that could all be recorded,
indexed, and presented to a Federal Review Hearing, and if that might change the outcome of
such systematic exclusion? Perhaps or perhaps not, but looking for those updates certainly would
help us locate how wives at home think about risk.
The second way that social writing and social media helps us to locate access is by giving
us something to talk about. What I mean by that is that this technology is so pervasive and so
ubiquitous that it can be a starting point for many conversations about culture, professionalism,
and access. That is not to say that everyone uses such technologies. The people who do not use it
do not use it for certain reasons. Like Diana in chapter five, there are reasons why Facebook is
not used or reasons why it is. There are reasons why a computer is not used to make a status
update in some places and why a phone is. We can learn a tremendous amount about how people
theorize their own social subjectivity and technology by asking important and good questions
about these reasons and the theories about the social world that support them. In effect, social
writing and the material and ideological issues that come along with its use give us a good
window on how folks deal with cultural, linguistic, and professional issues, especially in places
where those issues overlap. The key part of our understanding is that social writing texts in and
of themselves are not always the most important stories. The stories around those texts are the
good ones. They are best place to locate access is in the space between history, the person, and
the texts.

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What does access mean today?
The second question, what does access mean today, is somewhat more murky. I have,
perhaps, made the issue of access much more complex both theoretically and operationally than
many in the field of rhetoric and composition may allow for. Have I broken the concept of
access? Is what I am talking about at the end in this conclusion still access? I certainly have
made changes to what that word could mean to the field. Mostly, I have made those changes by
shifting our theoretical and empirical methodology so that rather than looking at a single idea,
access, I have tried to follow that idea as it is made to happen, as it is enacted, in a variety of
contexts. These contextual sites have been my own professional development, at least three kinds
of literatures, and finally the lives of social writing networks and people as a set of practices. I
am not being coy or obfuscating when I say that I do not think anything I have done here
"reveals" anything new about access as much as it tries to participate in our constructions about
what access means to us as a field as researchers, as theorists, and ultimately as instructors.

When access is enacted, many agents are involved
First, access should not be thought of as this OR that. Access functions much more like
this AND that. Writing is not always the thing that matters in networks of access the most even
in "writing" situations. Access is deeply focused on the rhetorical in addition to the written. Like
Sauer's miners, meaning between humans can be made with bodies and actions as well as with
coal dust and laundry. Like Villanueva, departments and professions can betray their political
ideologies with glances and hallways that make casual conversations happen. The worlds of legal
codes enact and coordinate actions and ideologies. People do things in the world (question risk,
move away from fires, think about racism, question belonging to a profession) based not just on

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texts but also the situations and the people around texts. What makes a slide that says "If you
want this in another language, move to a country that speaks it" an activity that denies access? A
school superintendent not caring, it is the actions and the rhetorical activity around texts and
technologies that matter.
That means that a great deal of the rhetoric in these situations is shaped by what and
where people are positioned. Although we can see in chapter five that writing is the dominant
form of media in social writing situations, it is not the dominant form of activity. “Like”-ing
something or re-tweeting something, a move where a user aligns and associates oneself with
someone or something else, or as one of my participants put it one retweets something where the
person saying it “Is, like, in your head.” This rhetorical move takes little effort but, never the
less, builds associations in a network like Facebook between people and between subjects.
Facebook does the work of trying to figure out if it should associate the people/accounts with
each other or the people/accounts with the content in a constantly shifting analytical dance. Do
the people from work like Lana? Do they like travel? Do they only like Lana when she is
traveling? Facebook’s network constantly shifts these associations to figure out whose writing
and pictures should fit on whose screens. People do things to influence these associations. They
“like” things and people doing things. They make comments. They post and share.

When access is enacted, agents coordinate other agents
Culture does not just happen and neither does access. Access is enacted in different ways
in networks but never by singular entities. One way it is maintained is by posting and
commenting that call professionals and friends to respond. As Barbara’s network shows us, her
technological savvy across multiple tools allows her to bring a great deal of content to her
network. This content generates comments from the rest of her network; technological access

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comes in the form of iPhones, websites, and iOS applications as much as her RSS feeds. She
uses these to produce content that her friends from graduate school, friends that have
professional connotations, can comment on and stay in touch with her about even though she is
no longer physically around them. For Barbara then, the space of her “career” is created by her
iPhone and other tools. Her iPhone and other tools generate the content that coordinate her
former professional and friend relationships to respond. Access to her friends and former
colleagues is coordinated through tools and the content she aggregates for them to talk about. In
terms of Actor-Network theory of objects, Barbara coordinates objects with her technology and
constructs the spaces that enact ties to her old, and maybe future, career networks. Her iPhone
along with the number of apps and RSS feeds let her maintain that access. They create a mobile
work “space” by allowing her to maintain connections and access wherever she goes, except on
Sundays. Sundays don't only close down because of what Barbara is doing, but what everyone
else is doing as well. While Facebook remains agnostic about what day of the week it is, Barbara
is only persuading her former colleagues and Facebook during the week. As weeks move in and
out, Barbara will get her iPhone, her RSS feed, and Facebook aligned again with other networks
we can't see to reproduce the cycle.
This is not the case with Lana, where bodies play a greater role in how the network
decides to respond. Professional access for Lana relies on bodies being next to each other offline
to enable online presences and access. Rather than the coordination of tools and content to
generate responses, Lana’s network needs to be around her, physically, to be around her online.
For Lana, then, her body is the location of access, but it is a body that is a distributed object. Her
physically body enables her presence in the network. The removal of her physical presence shuts
down her high professional network. Her body, then, becomes objectified in the network but not

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in the critical sense i.e. used to dehumanize or oppress. Rather, her body becomes objectified in
the actor-network sense becoming and associating between both Euclidian spaces and
Networked space where each re-inscribes the other, allowing the network to “black box” her as a
single entity: Lana and her Facebook account become the same. Removal of one means the
removal of the other in the way the network behaves and how much presence Lana has in that
network independent of any content she may produce. In essence, her physical body recruits her
online presence to coordinate professional contacts.

Access is theorized and designed
Access is theorized and designed but not always by the designers of technology. People
think about their identity and their experiences to understand and react to the rhetorical situations
produced by access. They think about how to behave and change their actions based on past
experiences that may, or may not, have anything to do with a specific technology as much as a
particular way of being in the world. Diana’s account, as I have rendered it in this dissertation, is
one where many actors enact many points of access. It is also an account where people build
theoretical orientations to what is safe and what is not in both content and the site of writing. In
Diana’s case, it is Diana herself that feels the collapse between her physical body and her
presences in her article, Facebook, and Twitter. “Disciplines,” peers, and Facebook enact access
to Diana and her work, a distinction that Diana does not recognize. These various moments of
tightly associated access across Networked spaces (the digital journal and Facebook) create
moments of “panic attack” like states in the Euclidian space of her body, leaving professional
concerns to become far more immediate and embodied safety concerns. Yet, Diana herself
continues to use Twitter to maintain professional and personal access both in that brief two-week
period of crisis and afterward by maintaining a Twitter account.

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The Twitter account, however, continues to enact access to professionals and colleagues
rather counter-intuitively by limiting the amount of access others have to Diana. Listening to
Diana, we hear two stories of enacted access. One where the more things and people that have
access to “Diana” as author and as Facebook entity that comes dangerously close to having
access to her as a body. The more people and things involved, the bigger the issue becomes. The
more coordination of access between agents that happens to make a single and knowable
presence called “Diana” across networked space, the more vulnerable she feels in physical space.
However, lessening that coordination by removing her presence from Facebook and increasing it
in Twitter leaves her with more access as she does not feel as threatened. In other words, it isn’t
the site, the tool, or the content that determined her reaction, it was the number of associations
that were built, the short amount of time, and the lack of her own participation in those
associations across forums. Diana recruits Twitter to act as a sort of “firewall” because the
article, as an object, never made it there and therefore Twitter remained “safe” and continued to
grant Diana access to friends and colleagues by allowing a smaller and knowable amount of
them. The space remains safe because the article never, and thus her exposure never inhabits that
space.
Access is a diverse phenomena enacted across moments in histories. Whose history is an
important question to consider. How easily a technology and those histories can "make sense" of
the new rhetorical moment in front of them in time is not determined by that moment of
encounter as much as it is determined by the mundane moments-of-encounter that preceded it.
We can try and make sense of them individually, try to leverage each story into a story about
technology, or about culture, or about professions, but to do so is to make them all an argument
into and about something else other than access. That would mean that something (a disciplinary

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orientation) is always the most important element in every situation as lives get turned into
evidence. Such a move strips away the complex histories and experiences that networks, people,
and technologies have with one another. It makes certain moments of action, where change is
visible, more important than the thousand moments of nonchange before them or after them.

Designing for Moments: Implications for Pedagogy
Let me return to the classroom for a moment. We find ourselves in a bizarre state where
our only way to think about technology is to think about the stuff around technology. Stephanie
Vie called the idea that instructors know less about technology than their students "The Digital
Divide 2.0." That certainly is a problem for classrooms. This awareness has produced all sorts of
hand wringing on our part as a field. We, as a field, feel the need to locate ourselves in some sort
of "expert"-ness and, faced with the onslaught of new and mobile writing technologies,
sometimes we have attempted to locate our "expert"-ness into new areas like repeated calls for
"critical" technological practice. I am not sure such a stance is sustainable.
First, I am not sure at this point what we are supposed to be helping students be critical
of. What is the most dominant or popular social writing technologies changes with such abandon
as to make the idea that we can theorize, build, and deploy new criticism at such a rate for each
one a near-impossible job. Faced with such a daunting task, some researchers simply collapse
sites into the same phenomena as Gina Maranto and Matt Barton (2010) did with myspace and
Facebook to be critical with but as one of my participants expressed, "myspace was a middle
school thing." Even within social network technologies, there can be radical shifts and small
amounts of time, we tend to forget that Facebook only five years ago only allowed college
students to join. In my own empirical research window, of three months on this dissertation
Facebook radically changed its presentation of individual users' visual selves. Yes, we can

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stabilize these technologies to be critical of them but I am not sure that is the best thing for any
student, let alone students who need our help with the material or the ideological issues around
access.
What I propose here is a pedagogy that is designed around locating and enacting new
moments of access, relying heavily on making sense of past experiences from a variety of
situations rather than ones that are specifically about "technology". Rather than defining what is
cultural or what is an important technology we should allow students to understand and identify
both the cultural and the technological that are important in any given moment. That is to say,
our job should be to help students locate moments of access rather than define moments of
access for them. In some instances, there may be a technological standard that is used in a
profession but in many cases, especially in first year writing courses, we should develop
curricula that first recognize technologies of access and then understand those technologies in an
ecological manner. Clearly, making sense of current and past experiences and social
subjectivities is a key move for students in need of access. In terms of technological and
ideological access, assignments should give theoretical tools to understand access in terms of
moments of gain as well as moments of loss.
When access is enacted, many agents are involved, which means that we should teach
students to observe all of the agents at play when research and writing are done and how they
affect situations. "Process" is too easy a word to use here but paying attention to the history of
context is not. Part of this would begin by asking students to recall times when relationships
were built, maintained, or repaired away from their primary forum of interaction. Frequently
when I ask students to recall what technologies have meant to them in assignments stories will
emerge about cell phones keeping in touch with friends, long hours with parents pored over open

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computer cases, quilts that were worked on with mothers, or social networking sites from other
countries that lessen cultural alienation. Such work goes a long way to teach students broader
technical and ideological accessing skills by simply locating how technologies gather people and
culture to them.
Exploring how access is enacted by agents that coordinate other agents means
understanding the deep connection between online and offline worlds. Again here the idea is not
that a specific technology is useful but that understanding what technologies do in ecological
context is important. Perhaps the easiest way to understand and teach this idea is through one of
the oldest forms of rhetorical activity, public speaking. In my classes we use presentation
software like powerpoint and keynote to begin a conversation about what audiences do. Do we
want them to take notes? Do we want to provide notes for them? Do we want them to be
entertained? Do we want them to be informed? We then move on to a discussion about which
rhetorical activities we want to embody ourselves, as speakers, and which rhetorical activities we
want the slide presentation software to execute as well as how to best reach those goals for each.
These discussions always involve understanding the physical place of the embodied presentation
as a factor by understanding chairs, desks, screens, windows, even sunlight(!) and the time of
day for the audience (just woke up) as agents that must be coordinated or at least managed to get
the best possible results for the rhetorical performance as well as ideological expectations about
rhetorical roles. Teaching students to pay attention to all the actors involved in a moment of
rhetorical performance teaches them to seek allies that can be recruited. Allies that others might
not have thought about to overcome obstacles to access can be the difference between success
and failure.

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Teaching that access is theorized and designed means is much harder, perhaps, because it
is about the material places that we live in making such issues hard to recognize. I usually begin
by trying to produce a critical stance toward something that is important for students. For
example, focusing on space/place allows us to focus on the contexts of material technology in the
world. In my own classes I have used assignments that have focused on technological and social
uses in specific places and asked students to investigate those places for large chunks of time.
The student determines where the place is. I usually suggest that they pick a place that is similar
to a place where they want to work professionally, but I allow students to explore whatever issue
is important to them. Students are then to focus on the uses of technology and texts in the space
as well as the physical positioning and locations of bodies. When the assignment goes best, the
students see a great deal more about the ways social behavior is rhetorical behavior that
challenge assumptions about technology use. In this assignment I usually ask students to
consider how people's bodies are marked by the objects around them (desks, counters, badges,
uniforms) as well as gender and race. Perhaps the most fun in this assignment is asking students
to consider how to bind a particular place as a research site ("If something loud happens in the
hallway that disrupts a classroom does it become part of the research on a classroom?"). In these
conversations, we begin to explore exactly how bodies can create places by the way they are
marked as well to understand our conversations about the relationships between offline places
and online spaces placed in observable moments. Understanding that we do not exist in a
"neutral" world. The idea that people design and think about even our most mundane interactions
helps students to understand technological interfaces as well as their own positions within those
interfaces. Such work also helps students to theorize what they want their positions to be and
who, or what, they can recruit to build that social subjectivity.

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Implications for Cultural Rhetoric
I stated earlier that this dissertation is about trying to develop a methodology to locate
access. Not only did I draw on Cultural rhetoric to shape the method and design of the empirical
work in the pilot study but I was also heavily influenced at work in Cultural rhetoric that uses
and transforms personal experience into theory building through writing. Clearly, I find such a
theory building and writing method useful. This dissertation began with writing out my own
interruptions and personal locations. What I mean to say is I wrote the "Interruption" chapters
first. They helped me to locate what I was looking for or, more specifically, the places I wanted
to look for access.
Cultural rhetoric comes in two intertwined parts. First, the part I have drawn on the most
here in this dissertation is at the level of positioning, of methodology. This methodology begins
as a commitment to understanding the influence of rhetorical contexts over time as well as trying
to locate the researcher within that context, both in a historical cultural sense but also within two
other acts, the act of researching and the act of research writing or theorizing. Here, I am not
sure I have done much new other than, perhaps, the small move I talked about in chapter four of
paying-the-price for people's stories of access and refusing to make those stories "clean."
Cultural rhetoric is pretty good at letting research remain dirty, so in this sense I am contributing
to a theory of practices both as a research and as a theorist.
Traditionally, these two acts have been in relation to a knowable cultural entity or
community such as American Indians, Asian Americans, Chicanas, or other groups. That is to
say, there is some groupness that is an organizing principle for the research as well as being
about language and written documents that reside in organizations and archives. Like Leon
(2010) clearly I am interested in a sense of rhetoric that has more to do in the interplay and the
technology that supports that interplay between language and identity than documents or even
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public speaking and, like her, I have a sense that my work might be dismissively waved away as
Leon describes one of her participants doing, by not being about language or the analysis of
writing (p. 132-133). I can understand that position. There are those, however, like Monberg who
understand that women of color do a lot of work, thinking work, professional work, cultural
work, personal work that does not always make it into being texts, or not official texts anyway.
That work is not always made real in documents in organizations or archives or performances
around podiums. That does not mean that work and theorizing did not occur. Because a text does
not exist does not mean that nothing was coordinated or that rhetoric was not theorized. What it
means is that such rhetorical work is simply harder to locate.
I see the methodology I have developed here as contributing to the very difficult task of
locating the intellectual labor that women of color do every day. While we believe that language
and texts organize human thought, that does not always mean that all thoughts become texts or
do not do work in the world. That work is important precisely because those theories contribute
to survivance. That work keeps civic organizations members on their toes about who they are
and what they want. That work is absolutely and utterly mundane until we make it not mundane
with our research. I hope I have done something to help others try to locate and contextualize
that important rhetorical work. Those stories are important too.

Implications for Professional Writing
What is clear to me is that the line we have constructed between "work" and "home" has
collapsed. What's more, that distinction was a result of a very small amount of human history
with labor. While that point in and of itself is interesting, the examination of work "practices" is
a fairly complex affair on two levels. First, where to look for work practices and second, perhaps
more controversial, what counts as work practices. These two issues are especially important to
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professional writing which has traditionally located its research in workplaces. Now those
workplaces themselves are distributed for writing professionals away from cubicles and into
homes, coffee shops, airports and busses how should we bind our research? If places we used to
think about as nonwork places like coffee shops, home offices, and airport terminals can now be
places where we do, actually, work, should we not then look to how the rhetorical exigencies and
technological infrastructure affect writing in those places? Or, to put it another way, why do we
assume that genre ecologies end when we walk out an office door when we can carry them,
literally, in our pocket and on our phones? I have attempted to show with my methodology here
one possible solution. We should have broader understandings of what experiences and
rhetorical behaviors contribute to our careers. We should understand a great deal of cultural and
rhetorical thinking as being; literally, about the writing of a career in ways we do not always
recognize but are still relevant as they still contribute to the writing of professions.
Professions and careers certainly care about what "counts" as professional. Both in my
interviews and in popular media the threat to keeping and gaining a job that comes from the
unchecked and documented behavior that makes its way onto social media is certainly an issue.
If we understand, and can contributed to how professions understand that process, professional
writing will continue to have a great deal to say to professional and career development.
Professional writing, because of its traditional focus on workplaces, needs theories that will help
us shift to this more distributed model of what counts as "workplace writing" as well as to
understand what "outside" of work writing styles and cultural rhetorical activity contribute to
work places. Work like mine and Jeff Jablonski's (2005) that ask us to understand people in
career moments rather than just the organizations that those career moments host could sustain a
valuable service to our larger fields as well as to organizations, especially at the level of culture

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written not in broad sweeping terms but in career and development.
The other way I see my work here contributing to professional writing theory is in
theorizing about the potentials of Actor-Network Theory and a theory of objects. Most of the
work in professional writing theory (Spinuzzi, 2008; Potts, 2009a, 2009b; Graham 2009) that has
engaged ANT has engaged a version located around Bruno Latour's early work heavily citing
from Laboratory Life and The Pasteurization of France focusing on and defining agency and
networks rather than, as I have done here focusing on John Law (2002; 2004; 2007) and
Annmarie Mol's (2003) work with objects. Rather than the more structuralist leaning these
authors used, in my use of ANT I have tried to follow an object as it is enacted rather than to try
and define objects. ANT networks make up objects but if we consider the space that networked
objects make we gain something. Like the issues of access I have explored here, the version of
ANT I have advocated here in research design creates new prerogatives for following work and
workplaces open up as research avenues if we wish to take them. My work here is an example
one type of possibility.

Future Work and Implications
Access is enacted in moments of coordination. What interests me now is the scale of that
coordination. The scale of that coordination as well as a question of what is being accessed. In
this dissertation, I used theoretical and empirical pilot study work to see if we could locate those
moments of access as well as tell which agents were coordinating these moments between ideas
like "home" and "work, "public" and "private", "cultural" and "professional". In some ways,
these binaries provide orbits for the issues and the agents of access to move through. In essence,
I eliminated the need to try and define access in an effort to figure out where it takes place. I
think there is potential in this methodology to explore issues of access that revolve around orbits

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that are deeply complicated and involved in other areas of rhetorical study.
The first implication that I have from my research is that when we discuss social
writing/media we maybe be simplifying too much. Social writing/media is not stable. I mean that
Facebook and Twitter coordinate access very differently and users approach each very
differently. Facebook is heavily invested in producing activity, meaning that Facebook is not
designed for stability. Profiles in Facebook are not the point, consumer demographics are. What
Facebook does in its coordination is attempt to put rhetorically compelling content in front of
people to build an essentially unknowable (to everyone except Facebook) consumer
demographic. The more people interact with an object within Facebook's system, the more that
"object" makes its way into other peoples' feeds regardless of whether these are links, texts, or
photos hence Facebook's design to collapse people's social worlds, a collapse that every single
participant in my pilot resisted in one way or another. Facebook coordinates and enacts access
and the social more and does so constantly.
Twitter, on the other hand, was seen as an answer to such issues by virtue of both its
ability to lock out potentially threatening users and its ability to maintain multiple ethos (more
than one account). What is interesting to me is that Facebook enables presences even when no
activity is present. During the final stages of my research, I stopped using Facebook. That did not
end my presence there. I continued to be an ethos in Facebook, I still got invited to events, still
got tagged in photos and if someone clicked on my profile, Facebook did everything to make it
seem that I was still doing things in Facebook. Facebook, in essence, made me into a recallable
ethos, literally a ghost in the machine.
Such issues force us to ask some very important questions about important slippages that
might be happening when we use phrases like "new media" or "social networked" writing. If

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Facebook does so much rhetorical work itself without a user present and if it compels rhetorical
behavior so easily with something like a "like" button, does that site belong in the same category
as something so explicitly about writing as Twitter? Do we even have choices about being
represented in such systems? Or should we all try, rather, to manage and make our way through
by creating a better fiction of ourselves than Facebook can?
An implication for my research methodology has already presented itself. Right now, I
am following up my dissertation work with Aaron Lones, a community health development
leader interested in culturally grounded use of mobile writing technologies in underserved and
marginalized Latino communities in Palo Alto, California. Access in such communities in
medical literature is dominated by access to adequate health care. Yet, there are many reasons
why access does not happen. After talking even conversationally with Aaron, I have a sense that
access for Health Professionals means having patients show up to appointments. Access means
then for the community health services, literally, access to the embodied presence of patients.
Such health care professionals are interested in increasing their "patient exam retention rate"
simply put, getting people to show up to appointments. They are interested in using text
messaging systems to improve that rate. They do not care about why people who show up to
appointments do. And why should they? The system worked didn't it?
Where I see my work here contributing is in locating moments of access and then
building infrastructure to support that. Diseases are enacted differently in communities. What a
disease means for one community, especially at the level of cultural interaction, will mean
something different in another.
If I may draw on the experiential one more time, my mother had a stroke four years ago.
This radically shifted how my family, as a social and cultural unit, interacted with each other.

208

Schedules became more important. Having constant access to communication technology
through cell phones became much more important. The stroke meant something more than blood
clots and checking constant oxygen levels. It meant negotiating with a divorced ex-spouse new
childcare schedules. It meant recruiting new oxygen service providers as well as recruiting new
oxygen service machines. It meant constant Internet research into vitamin regimens. It meant
reforming familiar dynamics of interaction from where they once were. Changing who was in
charge at social gatherings. That is not to say that blood clots and O2 levels were ignored. Far
from it, as a family of nurses, eyecare professionals, and firemen, blood clots and O2 levels were
regularly, and frequently, recruited to make arguments for care but they were used differently
than in the hospital. Many elements must be recruited before people simply "show up" to
medical appointments. What is that if not culture? What is that if not work?

Final Thoughts
Our conversations about access have been useful and generative in understanding some
moments like classroom or workshop moments but not others. As a result, social categories like
race, class, and gender have been problematically collapsed into stories about access along a
narrative of “The Digital Divide.” This, in turn, has led to blind spots that do not take into
account problems of how individuals in social groups actually go about engaging and resisting
technologies in rhetorical practice. In an effort to understand that rhetorical practice, I have
attempted to broaden our discussion about the issue of access to rhetorical practice. These
practices take place before and after technological experiences of the classroom. In that attempt,
I have seen a pattern in literature emerge based around where people end up interacting with
their culture and their job, what happens to knowledge as it gains access and transforms across
rhetorical epistemes, and how the social construction of bodies in those rhetorical epistemes

209

affect and construct rhetorical actors bodies as well as ethos.
I end this work with the quote by Victor Villanueva (1993) that began this dissertation in
a longer form.
"It’s nobody’s business,” Mami would say. But I can't just say nothing about how it is I
come to know some things, come to regard some theories on literacy and writing and
rhetoric as more tenable than others, and how I come to think the ways I do about racism
and ethnocentricity and the class system, and why I can believe in the chances for
revolutionary changes in attitudes about racism and ethnocentricity and class through
language and the classroom. I can’t just say nothing. But there’s Mami and the Latino
ways: private things should remain private. So, play out the tensions.
Thoughts. The I speaking to its me. (p. xi)
I like this quote. I like the phrase "It's nobody's business" because I think Villanueva means it on
two levels. First, that literally his book is not part of anyone's business. That Bootstraps does not
fall into someone's job. That the work that it does is not recognized as work, yet as he explains, it
certainly is. That for Villanueva there can be no understanding of his position in his job, or how
he has come to understand that position without understanding these experiences as deeply
related to his job. The other meaning is, of course, is that we should talk about these personal
things because they are both deeply personal and because the deeply personal make us
vulnerable to claims of authenticity, professional vulnerability, as well as being vulnerable
personally. Tensions can be managed but going unmanaged they can also snap.
There have been many times while writing this work where I questioned my own
rationality, trying to place so many tensions in this dissertation both from the perspective my
career but also, most importantly, from the sheer affect of what and who I owed my practices to.
In the end, the thing that kept me going was, indeed, feeling a sense of indebtedness to various
people and communities. The problem of how to resolve those tensions, of how to repay that that
indebtedness, in a single document is what has kept me going.

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APPENDEX

211

APPENDIX A

Request to Participate in a Research Study Email

Douglas Walls
291 Bessey Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1033
(517) 927-7317
wallsdou@msu.edu
Dear Participant:
I am a PhD Candidate in the Rhetoric & Writing Department at Michigan State University. I am
currently working on my dissertation and I am requesting your participation. I am exploring
users’ discourse choices in updating public social media sites such as Twitter or facebook.com.
Should you choose to participate, I will ask for permission to follow or friend you on the social
media platform you most frequently update over a pre-defined length of time which can be
negotiated but which will be non more than two weeks. In the case of private or closed accounts,
I will ask you to let me have permission to follow or friend you online.
Some time after this, I will contact you to arrange an interview about your social media choices.
This interview should take you approximately an hour to do and will be arranged according to
what is most convenient for your schedule. During the interview, I will ask you a series of
questions about the specific posts and the rationale/motivation behind your discourse choices. I
will then transcribe the interview and present that transcription for your approval asking you if
there is any information you would rather not be included in my research.
Should you wish, you will be sent the results of the study.
Please email me back if you would like to participate or have any questions about what the study
would involve.
Thank you for your assistance.
Sincerely,

Douglas Walls

212

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