Supplemental Aesthetics: Techniques in Live Performance

In this essay, I make a bid for the incorporation of the Derridian supplement into aesthetic discourses as a means of understanding and evaluating live performance. I call this move “supplemental aesthetics,” which, in the end, expands the vocabulary of absence and presence. I contend that a method of supplemental aesthetics adapts Derridian vocabulary to account for the intertextual and multisensory experience of live performance, asking practitioners and scholars to account for both the present and absent aspects of staged production. Supplemental aesthetics encourages a dialectic understanding of aesthetics: we make meaning by the simultaneous experience of reading what is present and what is absent on stage

Book Review: Sara Ahmed\u27s Complaint!

Aptly named, Sara Ahmed’s (2021) Complaint! exposes the institutional processes through which feminist complaints and allegations of racism and sexism, among other forms of oppression, are silenced, redirected, and displaced. Drawing from her own experience as a woman of color who resigned from her university post “in protest about the failure of the institution to hear complaints” as well as narratives from others who have complained, Ahmed seamlessly interweaves testimonials and lived experience with theory (p. 8). This poetic and nuanced interplay of theory and praxis constructs a vision of institutions as simultaneously complaint graveyards and complaint collectives. In the face of institutional strongholds against complaint, Ahmed asks her audience to consider enacting a “feminist ear” or being attuned to mechanisms that enable feminist complaint— those who make them, and those who refuse to listen (p. 3)

Criticizing Paywall Publishing, or Integrating Open Access into the Feminist Movement

Dominant scholarly publishing models, reliant on expensive paywalls, remain preferential throughout higher education’s landscape. This essay engages paywall publishing from a feminist communicative perspective by asking, how can publishing extend or prohibit feminist movements? Or, as Nancy Fraser (2013) asks, “which modes of feminist theorizing should be incorporated into the new political imaginaries now being invented by new generations” (2)? With these questions in mind, we integrate feminist epistemologies into publishing practices to argue that open access is integral to the feminist movement. The argument unfolds in three parts: first, we conduct a feminist criticism of paywall publishing by arguing that status quo practices constitute a dominant public based on onto-epistemological foundations of exclusion that systematically subordinate potentially liberatory knowledge. Second, we consider open access as a feminist re-tooling that creates new political imaginaries. In this section, we place open access in conversation with bell hooks’s conception of literacy and Fraser’s counterpublic theory. We conclude by considering how to live feminist lives with these criticisms and re-toolings in mind

The Neutrality Myth: Integrating Critical Media Literacy into the Introductory Communication Course

Our current cultural moment requires reflective urgency. COVID-19 has forced a collective pedagogical confrontation with new media’s materiality, and how such materiality intersects with, for example, the public speaking traditions within introductory communication courses. While COVID-19 has spotlighted online-only educational conversations, our disciplinary need to refocus new media introductory course curricular practices pre-dates the pandemic. This essay extends Rhonda Hammer’s (2009) critical media literacy framework into the introductory course, a practice whereby students are empowered to “read, critique, and produce media” rather than be passive consumers. We explore critical media literacy as pedagogically fruitful in identifying and resisting dominant ideologies that sustain inequalities through new media, focusing on information, power, and audience as core pedagogical principles that can re-shape introductory content and teaching

Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy

This project was made possible by a grant from KU Libraries’ Parent’s Campaign with support from the David Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright and the Open Educational Resources Working Group in the University of Kansas Libraries, with a contribution by the University of Kansas Student Senate. Portions of this text were updated, remixed, and adapted from Exploring Public Speaking: The Free Dalton State College Public Speaking Textbook by Barbara G.Tucker & Kristin M. Barton, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License"Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy" is a contemporary, interdisciplinary public speaking textbook that fuses rhetoric, critical/cultural studies, and performance to offer an up-to-date resource for students. With a focus on advocacy, this textbook invites students to consider public speaking as a political, purposeful form of information-sharing

Interrogating the Power of Open: Critical Pedagogy and the ‘Talk’ of Teaching

Panel discussion on Friday Video description: by Meggie Mapes, PhD. Introductory Course Director in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. This session explores open pedagogy at the intersection of critical communication pedagogy (CCP). CCP -- a process that centralizes power by engaging the relationship between communication and teaching -- expands open pedagogical conversations by focusing on the talk about foundational educational processes and practices. In other words, what are mundane and everyday rhetorical choices that normalize publishing processes, naturalize privatized resources, and acknowledge that a commitment to open begins in how we teach about teaching, publishing, and scholarship

Information Literacy Assignment: COMS496

This assignment was the product of a KU Libraries Information Literacy Mini-Grant (ILMG). The mini-grants program pairs faculty with a team of librarians to redesign an assignment in an undergraduate course to meet an information literacy learning outcome. One outcome of the mini-grants program is to share information literacy assignment materials as an Open Educational Resource (OER).These assignments were developed for Communication Studies (COMS) 496: Capstone in Digital Rhetoric, but can be adapted to any subject area. The first is a discussion guide meant to introduce students to the concept of a scholarly conversation. It is also used to introduce the final assignment, a mini-literature review, for the class. The second is a reading log that is intended to be completed for each assigned reading for the class. The purpose of the reading log is to organize information sources and help students make decisions about their final projects