Lauren Mitchell Passes Exams

Congratulations to third-year RCID doctoral candidate and S3S vice president, Lauren Mitchell for passing her comprehensive/qualifying exams!  On Tuesday, March 13, in the beautiful new Lee Hall addition, Lauren delivered her "4th Exam" multi-modal presentation of her project, titled "TRANSITIONING URBANISMS: the fringing benefits of rhetoric in architecture."


Lauren's study draws on a provocative mixture of elements, including her architectural background, rhetorical theories of electrate invention, and her time in Myrtle Beach, SC.  Through her dissertation, Lauren will defend the claim for architecture that, "without balancing our emphasis on design as making form as well as making forms of knowledge, the field will progressively make less and less impact in public environments." 

"Similarly," Lauren contends, "without learning to speak to a wider audience, making engagements with fields that are already steeped in practices of making and designing objects, rhetoric scholars will continually miss out on productive bodily engagements capable of accelerating the expansion of the field.  It is specifically on the topic of invention within both rhetoric and architecture where the two can begin to enfold each other in mutually productive ways."


To see photos of Lauren's exam presentation, visit the RCID News Blog.

RCID Research in the News

Rock Hill, SC's newspaper The Herald is running full spread features as part of their promotion for the traveling Peanuts Naturally exhibit coming to the York County Museum. As part of their first feature, Herald editor Paul Osmundson recently spoke with RCID PhD candidate Stephen Lind about his dissertation research on the Peanuts franchise. Read the full interview HERE.

Jimmy Butts passes "strange" Exams

Third-year RCID doctoral candidate Jimmy Butts passed his comprehensive/qualifying exams this past Leap Day, finishing with his multi-modal/oral presentation (fourth exam) titled: "Seven Strange Attractors: How to Repent! and Be Unbaptized!"

Jimmy's dissertation topic explores how Victor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization functions rhetorically across different forms of composition and media. The ethics underlying his writing works against the flood of totalizing immersive media when they elicit only automatic or anesthetized responses from their contemporary audiences.

The project hopes to complicate expectations of standardization by seeing both potential and problems in normative and unusual compositions. He will work through seven forms of inventional strategies for strangeness including figural shifts in media, time traveling, replacement, addition & subtraction, negation, glossolalia, and exponentiation.

During a short reception in Clemson's Class of 1941 Studio, those in attendance were invited  to "strange" the familiarity of stones, followed by Jimmy's aesthetically moving multi-modal performance.

Congratulations, Jimmy, from S3S!

Steve Holmes Passes Exams!

S3S's 2010-2011 Vice President and now RCID doctoral candidate Steve Holmes passed his comprehensive/qualifying exams, back in December.  

On December 9, Steve presented his multimodal portion of the exams, titled, "Electrate Invention in the Parliament of Things," having completed his written exams in his areas of specialization: object-oriented rheorics, Heuretics/Euretics, and Tool-Being.

Steve's dissertation explores realism and materialism in relationship over the history of rhetorical theory. By tracing the disappearance of realism and the onset epistemic, social constructivist, semiotic, and poststructuralist paradigms in the 20th century, Steve explores how rhetoric came to prominence under these anti-realist theories of materiality, a situation best epitomized by Jacques Derrida's description of materiality as "matter without substance" (e.g. without a reality independent of linguistic construction).  

Steve's dissertation foregrounds the work of new movements in affective and feminist theories of materiality and the broader movement of speculative realism in the work of Graham Harman, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant, Jane Bennett, Vickie Kirby and Karen Barad as a way to talk again about the reality of nature and the nonhuman. The dissertation then considers how realism can inform theories and pedagogies related to rhetorical invention in digital and networked ecologies, drawing specific attention to the work of hardware and software studies and new media artists who foreground the materiality of media ecologies. Drawing on Gregory Ulmer's scholarship, he intends to create additional multimodal components that will bear witness to new idioms of the ways in which we have always dwelled with the nonhuman element.

A hearty, albeit belated, congratulations to (ABD) RCID doctoral candidate Steve Holmes from S3S!

Meeting Extraordinary Chileans

Third-year RCID student Walter Iriarte has returned from a trip to D.C. where he visited a special exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History on theChilean Mine Rescue.  Because the rescue attracted over a billion viewers (according to the current Chilean Minister of Public Works) and especially because two of the miners were known to have written poems while entrapped, Walter was drawn to the exhibit as an important piece in his current dissertation project.  Artifacts from the ordeal were on display, poems and writings sent between the miners and their families being of particular interest to Walter.  Also on display was the Fenix 2 backup capsule.

 

The highlight of Walter’s trip, though, was the Smithsonian Institute hosted workshop and presentation featuring Minister Laurence Golborne (organizer of the rescue mission) and Luis Urzua (the last miner to be extracted).  Before the official presentations began, Walter had the honor of interviewing both Minister Golborne and Don (Mr.) Urzua.  During the presentation, the speakers shared with the guests various stories not known to the public.  Both Golborne and Urzua also took time to discuss what critical factors contributed to their survival.  “The exchange between us was incredibly meaningful and abundant,” reported Walter.  “The experience has already initiated another project which will be in works after the dissertation.  I am very thankful for the opportunity and look forward to sharing some of the information during my oral defense."