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ROYSTER AND KIRSCH’S FOUR TERMINISTIC SCREENS
Critical Imagination - an inquiry tool to develop a critical stance that allows for intentional and intense engagement in the intellectual processes surrounding one’s work. Educated guessing.
Steps for critical imagination:
Steps for critical imagination:
- Gather evidence on what we know and put it in order.
- Speculate methodologically about probabilities regarding what else you can learn about your area of research. What is true based on what you know? What else do you need to know?
- Consider people at whom you have not looked before, particularly women
- Consider genres you may not have looked before
- Consider places where you have not looked before, particularly “women-designated” spaces
- Close reading to focus on existing resources, fragments in scholarship, etc (fits well with qualitative research methods)
- Big data, macro-level analyses (fits well with quantitative research methods)
- This can also work temporally
Strategic Contemplation - A strategy in thinking and research in which one sets aside distinct time to think and reflect. Step outside your research, and focus on the quality of thinking, shifting perspective and looking perhaps beyond obvious conclusions. This strategy also creates a space for researchers to listen to the embodied experience of research and to acknowledge both the inner and outward journeys of research. This is important for recognizing that their own lived research experience acts as an agent in the research process.
“Strategic contemplation asks us to take into account as much as possible but to withhold judgement for a time and resist coming to closure too soon in order to make the time to invite creativity, wonder, and inspiration into the research process” (85).
“Strategic contemplation asks us to take into account as much as possible but to withhold judgement for a time and resist coming to closure too soon in order to make the time to invite creativity, wonder, and inspiration into the research process” (85).
- Tacking in (references to Malea Powell)
- Noticing and listening to researcher's lived experience during the research process.
- "...resist coming to firmly set conclusions too quickly" (90).
- Giving space to reflect and notice both inward and outward experiences helps create "thick descriptions," revealing complexities and layers in the research (90).
- Tacking out
- Noticing broader patterns and different perspectives on research
- Allows that we are not only learning from participant's words and our data, but we are learning from their "worlds" (91).
- Visit places and research cites to gain the embodied experience (92).
Social Circulation - Social circulation asks us to look past traditional educational and disciplinary spaces, across "space and time" to see where knowledge is developed and how it circulates. Recognizing rhetoric as a "social phenomenon," rather than something simply public or private, applies value to previously unrecognized work. Noticing these social movements allows the researcher to see connections across cultural, generational, social, and political divides.
- Tacking in (references to Jessica Enoch)
- Recovering voices outside of academic or disciplinary spaces and places.
- Push beyond disciplinary or traditional boundaries in our research
- Look for meaning across time as well as place.
- Tacking out
- Pay particular attention to the social context in which communication takes place.
- Establish meaning situated in specific cultural and historical contexts
Globalizing the Point of View - Globalizing one’s point of view is less like a methodology and more like an affirmation to look beyond one’s own locality, to seek rhetorical practices of women that are either not respected or virtually silenced by the Western, U.S. gaze. It’s a recognition that, while women’s rhetorical practices exist as a minority in the rhetorical canon, the voices of non-white women and women who live outside of Western traditions have been ignored or worse.
To amend this silence, they stipulate that we can
To amend this silence, they stipulate that we can
- Read and render knowledge in a global context
- Connect local analyses to global impact
- Consider the imperial past when engaging in research and history
- Use a scope of analytic interrogation beyond the U.S./Western agenda to understand women's experiences in more-globalized terms.
- Question how global inequalities, uneven educational opportunities (or lack thereof), and different qualities of life affect rhetorical engagement.
- Increase one's geographical range to notice connections with other relations on a global scale, and note how those relationships are impacted by rhetorical practices.