Fabricating Consent: Three-Dimensional Objects as Rhetorical Compositions

Beyond the Makerspace

“…Public libraries and libraries in educational institutions are creating their own makerspaces, and the maker movement has attracted scholarly and pedagogical interest across disciplines and areas, including digital humanities, education, human-computer interaction, library and information science, business, and rhetoric and composition. In rhetoric and composition, my primary field, there is growing interest in making and makerspaces, as evidenced in increased representation in recent calls for proposals for conferences and collections and in the work of a growing body of researchers and teachers, including Krystin Gollihue (2019), Maggie Melo (2018), Jentery Sayers (2017), David Sheridan (2010), John Sherrill (2014), Jason Tham (2019), and Stephanie West-Puckett (2017).…”

“…These observations and experiences resonate with articulations of rhetoric like those offered by Angela Haas (2012), who defines rhetoric as "the negotiation of cultural information-and its historical, social, economic, and political influences-to affect social action (persuade)" (287), and Donnie Johnson , who similarly describes rhetoric as "a means (tactics/tools) whereby people come together to solve localized problems in movement that frequently oscillates between local and global foci" (156). Jody Shipka (2011) draws attention to "other representational systems and ways of making meaning" than printed, spoken, and digital words (131), and David Sheridan (2010) argues specifically for attending to rhetoric in 3D objects (like those made in makerspaces), because objects, like words and symbols, can persuade and create meanings and actions (250). And while rhetorical scholars have long engaged with more-than-symbolic rhetorics across epistemological traditions, some have also taken up interdisciplinary work in new materialism to consider, as Ehren Pflugfelder (2015) does, "what rhetoric is like as we move beyond the humanist symbolic arts" (443).…”

Object lessons: 3D printing and inter-professional collaboration between the library and the literature classroom

“…It is also not unprecedented. Sheridan (2010) grounds the importance of 3D printing within the historical stream of discourse, pointing to a shift from the codex to a growing awareness of other texts including film, websites, and comics (p. 258). Sheridan (2010) asserts that "The rest of the world is moving on to the sophisticated multimodal rhetorics of video and new media, with or without us" (p. 258).…”

“…Sheridan (2010) grounds the importance of 3D printing within the historical stream of discourse, pointing to a shift from the codex to a growing awareness of other texts including film, websites, and comics (p. 258). Sheridan (2010) asserts that "The rest of the world is moving on to the sophisticated multimodal rhetorics of video and new media, with or without us" (p. 258). Rather than frame these advances through fears of extinction, faculty need to see them as opportunities to foster deep, relevant learning for their students and cross-professional partnerships with librarians and technology professionals.…”

“…They would later develop these abstracts into longer papers, but at this initial stage, they were encouraged to consider the object's importance to the plot, character, and/or key conflicts. Rhetoric professor Sheridan (2010) insists upon the key role that threedimensional objects play: "[In] producing ideologies, values, identities, attitudes, and social structures-the very stuff of culture. This work shows that gender, race, class and other fundamental cultural categories are reproduced by and embodied in material objects, from t-shirts to toys, from coffee makers to cars."…”