Disciplinary identities: On the rhetorical paths between English and communication studies

The Province of Sophists: An Argument for Academic Homelessness

“…Our neighbors need intermediaries to demonstrate their uniqueness and importance to each other: They need translators (Mailloux, p. 133;Spinuzzi, 2005); facilitators, mediators, and negotiators (Hart & Conklin, 2006, pp. 412-413); moderators (Lefevre, 1987, p. 75); and even ambassadors (Conklin, 2007, p. 227;Mailloux). All these terms are used to describe technical and professional communicators.…”

“…Some have traced our history through the academic schisms that shaped the field (Faber & Johnson-Eilola, 2003;Mailloux, 2006;Russell, 2002) or have narrated the emergence of the field in response to a pedagogical need (Kynell & Tebeaux, 2009). Other scholars have offered state-of-the-discipline assessments of the field's current position and forecasts of its future development (Faber, 2002;Savage, 2004).…”

“…We use research methods that may seem incompatible with each other, and we study topics that other disciplines might never consider. Yet, according to the criteria offered by Mailloux (2006), our field is a discipline because it is "fundamentally, the transformation of practical wisdom into accredited techniques, of phronesis into techne" (p. 5). To be accredited in this sense, the research done within a specific discourse community must follow, acknowledge, or challenge its body of knowledge, reasoning patterns, methodologies, language, philosophies, and history.…”

“…Mailloux (2006) defined academic disciplines as "hierarchically organized, institutionally supported, self-perpetuating networks of practices for knowledge production and transmission" (p. 5). To be hierarchically organized, a discipline follows levels of institutional control, beginning with the scholar-teacher and progressing through program, department, and college or school.…”

Communications skills and a brief rapprochement of rhetoricians

“…Rhetoric was central to the curriculum of American colleges until the founding of English departments in the late nineteenth-century, when rhetorical theory was dethroned by philology and rhetorical pedagogy was replaced by a required first-year course in composition, the curriculum of which featured an amalgam of literDownloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 20:44 26 November 2014 ary study and instruction in current-traditional grammar and usage (Crowley 1998,102-03). The academic study of rhetoric was revived with the founding of Speech departments during the early twentieth-century (Mailloux;Keith;Leff 2000b). Between 1915 and 1960 a group of speech scholars-Everett Lee Hunt, Marie Hochmuth Nichols, and Karl Wallace, to name only three of many-produced impressive histories of ancient and premodern rhetorical traditions, while other speech scholars compiled a substantial body of rhetorical criticism dealing chiefly with American public address (Norton).…”