Project Areas:

• The Moral Appeal of Environmental Discourse
  Project Team: Bernice Hausman, Clare Dannenberg, Katy Powell, Heidi Lawrence
  This project seeks to identify how people make decisions to use energy. In general, decision-making occurs with respect to various forms of public and private information, as well as family traditions and circumstances, personal beliefs, and socialization. In other words, decision-making occurs in the context of competing cultural discourses and practices. Increasingly, perceptions of risk affect decisions. Often, information about energy usage is narrowly geared toward people as “consumers” and, consequently, other aspects of people’s lives are not considered part of energy decision-making. We seek to study the interaction of competing influences in order to positively impact energy decisions and behaviors toward greater efficiency and conservation. We seek to expand the types of audiences persuaded to make changes toward energy efficiency and conservation, and to understand and utilize those approaches that are most successful in translating intentions into action. In addition, we seek to explore perceptions about various forms of energy (coal, nuclear, wind, solar, etc.) as they are expressed in people’s everyday discussions of them, in order to better understand how to engage citizens in informed decision making at the community, state, and national levels.Return to Project Summaries
  
• InVisible Seasons
  Producer/Director: Maria Finitzo; Co-Producer: Kelly Belanger; Executive Producer: Gordon Quinn
  Thirty-five years ago, a life-changing piece of legislation called Title IX was enacted into law. Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education, including athletics. By mandating equal opportunity, Title IX set in motion far-reaching changes that would not only revolutionize America’s playing fields, but its political, social and cultural landscape as well. Under development with Kartemquin Films, this feature-length documentary that will look at how and why change takes place in a democracy by exploring how Title IX has altered the face of sports, and also by understanding the meaning of sports in the American experience. InVisible Seasons will raise questions of inclusion and exclusion, fairness and tradition, principle and compromise. In the film we will come to understand the power of mentors and role models to inspire the acts of courage, sacrifice, and principle upon which our democracy depends. This project is supported by funding from the Illinois Council for the Humanities, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Virginia Tech Institute for Society, Culture, and the Environment. Top of page Return to Project Summaries
• Blue Ridge Writing Project
  Principal Investigator: Kelly Belanger; Project Co-Director: Aileen Murphy
  2009/10 Project Team also includes Brian Gogan, Libby Anthony, Amy Reid
  This project brings a National Writing Project site to Virginia Tech and to teachers in the largely rural, economically mixed community of Southwest Virginia. The Blue Ridge Writing Project (BRWP) aims to improve the teaching of writing and the use of writing for all students in all disciplines from kindergarten through university. Housed in the English Department, the BRWP draws on the expertise and resources of a wide variety of units at the university although the site’s activities are be organized through the department’s Center for the Study of Rhetoric in Society (CSRS) and Composition Program. The site is led by Kelly Belanger, Aileen Murphy, and Nyanne Hicks—all of whom work closely with Diana George (Director of the Composition Program), members of the advisory board, doctoral students in our Rhetoric and Writing program, and colleagues at other NWP sites. Top of page Return to Project Summaries
  
• Construction Accidents in the News: Using Journalism to Improve Safety
  Principal Investigator: Bernice Hausman; Co-Principal Investigator: Carolyn Rude; Project Assistant: Ashley Patriarca
  This research project will examine reporting on construction accidents and risks in mass media and construction trade publications. As suggested in the National Construction Agenda, mass media and industry trade publications are key venues for raising public awareness of construction safety and health issues. Media reporting on dangerous occupations such as mining, as well as devastating accidents such as the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle explosions, has brought public pressure to bear on those industries to improve worker safety. However, very little scholarly research currently assesses media coverage of the construction industry and its associated risks. Through this pilot research project, we will collect, analyze, interpret, and disseminate data on media reporting on construction accidents and risks. Using methods from the fields of cultural studies and technical communication, the investigators will review twenty-five years of mass media and industry reporting on the construction industry in order to (1) examine how the media present construction risks to the public, (2) determine what kinds of reporting lead to changes in industry practices, including the characteristics of accidents and risks that are deemed newsworthy, and (3) evaluate how knowledge of media representations of risk may refine industry safety training to motivate behavior changes among workers and managers alike.Top of page Return to Project Summaries
  
• Rhetoric and Public Policy Research Group
  Project Team: Bernice Hausman, Katy Powell, Clare Dannerberg, Paul Heilker; Carolyn Rude; Carlos Evia; Jim Dubinsky, Kelly Pender, Kelly Belanger, Heidi Lawrence
  The theoretically informed study of language use offers important access to cultural ideals, beliefs, and experiences that are crucial to addressing pressing social problems. Our collaborative research group seeks to contribute our expertise in the study of discourse to problems that require insights from the humanities as well as the social and natural sciences. One area of interest is in examining the cultural aspects of problems whose solutions are perceived to be technological or managerial. We seek cross-disciplinary partners to develop projects in four primary areas: gender, ethnic, and class disparities; displacement and trauma; energy and culture; and risk and health. We are seeking project partners and work with consultants to obtain funding from private foundations and federal agencies, emphasizing the interpretive research methods that are the strength ofhumanistic research. Refining and developing our methodology in a collaborative research context will help us connect to potential partners and to articulate our projects and goals to funders. This project is supported by funds from Virginia Tech’s Institute for Society, Culture, and the Environment. Top of page Return to Project Summaries
  
• Viral Mothers: Breastfeeding in the Age of HIV/AIDS
  Author: Bernice Hausman
  The transmission of HIV through breastfeeding is a medical and public health issue that touches on and augments contemporary concerns about bodies, germs, and the environment. These concerns affect all people around the globe as we struggle with the meanings of health, risk, and embodiment in modernity. Viral Mothers addresses and explores current constructions of mothers (through the configurations of risk, purity, denial, and choice) in order to understand the dense cultural meanings evoked by postnatal transmission of HIV. In so doing, the book pays special attention to fears of contamination and contagion that emerge as consequences of a medicalizing modernity. I have written this book because I believe that cultural studies scholarship can address the seemingly intractable, and tragic, problems posed by HIV in the modern world. Medicine is fully embedded in, and not outside of, the cultural spheres in which it operates. Cultural studies scholarship can help to solve the world’s problems by framing its analysis as contribution, not just critique. Top of page Return to Project Summaries
• Mapping the Research Questions in Technical Communication
  Author: Carolyn Rude
  Agreement about research questions can strengthen disciplinary identity and give direction to a field that is still maturing. The central research question this article poses foregrounds texts, broadly defined as verbal, visual, and multimedia, and the power of texts to mediate knowledge, values, and action in a variety of contexts. Related questions concern disciplinarity, pedagogy, practice, and social change. These questions overlap and inform each other. Any single study does not necessarily fall exclusively into one area. A mapping of a field’s research questions is a political act, emphasizing some questions and marginalizing or excluding others. The emphases may change over time. This mapping illustrates reasons for the tensions between the academic and practitioner areas of the field. It also points out their shared research interests and opportunities for future research. Top of page Return to Project Summaries
• Reformist Possibilities?: Exploring Writing Program Cross-Campus Partnerships
  Authors: Marie Paretti, Lisa McNair, Diana George, Kelly Belanger
  Writing programs have a long history of partnering with departments across campus, and these partnerships have borne fruit in multiple ways. But while we have numerous reports about the results of such partnerships, we have fewer sustained characterizations that situate them within theoretical frameworks for collaboration. This article explores cross-campus partnerships through the lens of an interdisciplinary framework, and it examines the opportunities this lens offers to WPAs, to our collaborators across campus, and to students. Our examination of faculty and student experiences of cross-campus partnerships suggests both possibilities and cautions. The nature of the connections between the WPA outcomes and those provided by other sources seems to continue to work against enabling writing to emerge as a field of inquiry rather than simply a skill, and writing courses may not (yet) be sites of interdisciplinary development. But as difficult as it may be to help both students and faculty understand writing as a discipline rather than simply a skill, we believe that doing so, and creating a climate of interdisciplinary collaboration, has the potential to enhance both writing research and student learning.Forthcoming in the Fall 2009 Issue of WPA: Writing Program Administration. Top of page Return to Project Summaries
• Research Centers in Rhetoric and Writing: Discovering a Disciplinary Past, Inventing a Future
  Author: Brian Gogan, Kelly Belanger, Ashley Patriarca, Megan Fisher
  There have been many calls for members of the field of composition and communications to bring our research to a wider public audience. These calls for change suggest a gap in our discipline’s research culture, yet as members of a research center that takes “rhetoric in society” as its focus, we feel compelled to describe what already does exist. In this article, we examine the history of research organizations in rhetoric and writing studies and assess the present state of these centers. We find that the success of centers’ rhetorical stances and moves seems mixed. Research centers offer valuable lessons and cautionary tales to guide us in mapping a viable, vibrant, and sustainable disciplinary future in the twenty-first century academy. Discrete rhetorical moves have proven effective for individuals, departments, and even institutions, but we wonder what the collective impact of these efforts has been. In our article, we offer some suggestions to increase the visibility and influence of the collective work of research centers. Top of page Return to Project Summaries
• Representing Autism
  Author: Paul Heilker
  Whatever else it may be, autism is a profoundly rhetorical phenomenon. And we all—parents, educators, caregivers, policymakers, the public, and autistic people themselves—would be significantly empowered to understand and respond to it as such. This paper examines numerous rhetorical aspects of autism and their complex effects, including the public conflict between autism and autistic communities over who really has the ethical right to speak for people on the autism spectrum, the long-lasting representation of autistics as normal people imprisoned behind some barrier and struggling to emerge, the rhetoric of the Freak Show which consistently portrays autistics in the popular media as exotic strangers from unknown lands who are endowed with status-enhancing attributes, and the rhetorical constructions of autistics as a diseased, disabled, or diverse population. Ultimately, following an argument by Jim C. Corder, this paper contends that autism itself is a rhetoric, a way of being in the world through language, through invention, arrangement, and style and that we should attend to the discourse of autistics using the practices of what Krista Ratcliffe calls rhetorical listening, a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture. This article concludes by invoking “The Students’ Right to Their Own Language” and applying it to autistics as a newer minority population on campus. Top of page Return to Project Summaries