A slideshow of my Watson presentation.

1. Justin M. Jory :: Salt Lake Community
College

2. A TURN TO “EVERYDAY” RHETORICAL PRACTICES
Manifested in scholarship that takes the city as a site for
rhetorical education.
• Material and social spaces construct and are constructed by symbolic
discursive practices (“The Space for Rhetoric in Everyday Life,” Ackerman).
• Pedagogies must foreground relationships between discourses and social
and built environments (Geographies of Writing, Reynolds).
• Contemporary rhetorical education should cultivate an “everyday politics
based on pluralism and propinquity,” preparing student-rhetors to reshape
the city through participation in policy-driven public discourses (emphasis
added, City of Rhetoric, Fleming).

3. THE IMPLICATIONS & CRITIQUE
Students encounter rhetoric & writing in the context of a deficit
model.
• The city is broken – rhetoric and writing are both causes and solutions.
• The job of students is to read the the city as broken, as a kind of closed text.
• Rhetorical-political engagement (rhetoric-as-action) is tied to participation in
policy-driven public discourses and dependent on their ability to re-allocate
urban resources.
• The stakes for rhetoric and writing are nothing short of democratic life itself.

4. A PRAGMATIC EFFECT
The “exceptional” subject – students who orient
away from public discourses (Distant Publics,
Jenny Rice).
This is a move away from, not toward, an
“everyday politics based on pluralism and
propinquity.”

5. ISSUES OF RESPONSIVITY
How can we talk about rhetorical-political practices in the
city in ways that suggest the practices do not have be
policy driven and do not need to seek explicit democratic
aims?
How can such an attempt move scholars, teachers, and
students closer to understanding an “everyday”
rhetorical-political practices in the city?

6. AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL: RHETORIC AND/IN THE CITY
Recognizes divisions and boundaries in the city while viewing the city as a
functioning whole that is in a state of constant becoming.
“The city as a network of ever changing and forming relations” (Digital Detroit, Jeff
Rice).
Pedagogical focus on rhetoric and writing as generative forms of political
engagement, forms that aim to construct, maintain, extend, or otherwise
transform relations. (Rhetoric and writing make/do)
Possibilities for political engagement emerge from student-rhetors desires
to assemble the city through “everyday” (discursive and non-
discursive) actions.

7. AN INTERESTING PEDAGOGICAL CITY SPACE
Because a city and its history are not static but a complex network of
connections, environment and relationships, the purpose of Mapping Salt
Lake City is to create a continually evolving narrative in which community
members and scholars, writers and artists can be in dialogue. And because there
are always absences in any record of place, we rely on readers to fill in these gaps
by writing and submitting their own content. Over the years, as more people add
their own stories, Mapping Salt Lake City will change, expand and grow in the
same ways that a city might, to become a more inclusive reflection of our
community's diverse, and diverging, perspectives.