Significance: One of the more current moves in the field of Rhetoric is engaging interdisciplinary conversations with Cognitive Neurosciences for at least a dual purpose of: observing the rhetoric of scientific discourse and discovering what neuroscience can show us about the nature of rhetoric (Applebaum & Jack). The latter of these goals has been focused in several ways, including observing how rhetoric is a physically located phenomenon, which really just makes the empiricists and hyper-rationalists of our culture happy. One of the goals, then, of this interdisciplinary work is to raise the credibility of Rhetoric as a field in general, making it reminiscent of a hard science which receives higher attention in our culture anyway (Jeffrey Lehman Honnold). Besides the significance of raising the status of rhetoric and its various heuristic methods in the academy in general, this project is significant to me personally as a composition instructor who would like to experiment with marginalized epistemologies and heuristics in our culture.
Methods: I intend to first of all do research in this budding field, and because resources are limited on the rhetorical sides of things, this process of finding literature specifically within the field will take some digging. I also intend to move outside of the field to find research within cognitive neuroscience that seems relevant to rhetorical and composition studies, and more specifically, embodied knowledge as an epistemology and heuristic (Like I found this SWEET book on Mirror Neurons, Honnold mentions in his Rhet/Comp thesis for USF...). I am also plotting to find people at the 4C's conference who are advancing studies in feminist rhetorics, embodied knowledge, or interdisciplinary approaches to the field's knowledge; I will try to ask them questions after their panes, if possible). In my own research network forum at C's, I am thinking about how I might ask questions to my panel about implications that will help me in furthering this line of research (since it is obviously connected to my professional paper). Finally, I also plan to use my synthesis paper to talk about what I see as "left out" in the discussions we have had in class thus far, in light of the places I see rhetoric moving toward now (and how these trajectories weren't used as insight into the field a while ago...hmmm, what implications will that search create for me?).
Jordynn Jack & L. Gregory Appelbaum (2010): “This is Your Brain on Rhetoric”: Research Directions for Neurorhetorics, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40:5, 411-437
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