Introduction to Comprehensive Lists

            As I look back over my research projects at Northeastern, I’ve noticed a strong and sustained interest in political activism surrounding animals, and I would like to begin my dissertation with an eye toward what strategies the animal rights/welfare movements deploy and what is at stake in these approaches. Bioethics and biolaw are key areas to focus on in activism, not merely for activists concerned about animals, but for anyone concerned with ethical engagement with the Other (be that other human or nonhuman), and the animal rights/welfare movement is struggling currently with what strategy is best to address its current inadequacies. My exams will build toward this project by allowing me to deepen my knowledge of activism and writing, rhetoric of the body, and animal studies.

            While each list is separate, they all speak to broader trends within rhetoric and composition as well as interdisciplinary shifts. From object oriented ontologists to feminist corporeal theorists to ethologists to posthumanist new media scholars, academics are rethinking what is at stake in our assumptions of materiality and the body as well as how materiality produces meaning and escapes representation. For rhetoric and composition scholars, this has drawn our attention to everything from the role of circulation and material processes in meaning-making to questioning the agency of individual writers and revision without physical protest to exploring how the material body participates in the production of meaning. Rhetoric and composition has recently turned to animals as well. In a recent issue of JAC focused on animals, articles ranged from rhetorical analyses of the animal rights movement to representations of animals and human-animal relations in popular culture to the use of animalizing rhetoric in colonialism. Despite the range, each sought to explore the complexities of our relations with animals and what our ethical obligations to them ought to be. However, these trends also push us to rethink fundamental assumptions and practices of the discipline – what do we deem worthy of study, in what ways do we study them, how do we ethically represent them, and what is the role of the activist scholar. Finally, by exploring in my list on “Activism and Writing” how specific methodologies prompt taking up different objects of study and asking different questions of them, I hope to provide myself with a foundation for what methodologies would best suit my future research.