Theories

My emerging understanding of principles, practices, and theories that matter to me.

Teaching. Teaching is my passion. Regardless of my profession or career, teaching is my vocation. As a teacher, I stay abreast of pedagogical theory. I seek opportunities to improve my instruction and increase my understanding of my discipline and my instructional style. I seek to meet students where they are and provide them tools to grow and develop as scholars and as human beings.

Scholarship. Ongoing scholarship is vital to continued relevance, both as a teacher and as a scholar. New theories must be discovered and explored. I seek to stay abreast of ongoing scholarship and new areas of knowledge, and to create knowledge when and where I can. I value scholarly collaboration for the way it opens wide unseen possibilities.

Rhetoric. I find rhetoric in everything, from the glass of ice water to the works of William Shakespeare. I see rhetoric as the communicative attempts of rhizomatic collections of networked agents between and among themselves, mediated by technologies, by space-time, by ecologies and biospheres, and by symbolic systems.

Digital. While I am no digital native, I am a digital immigrant. As a new citizen pledges allegiance to a nation, I have pledged my allegiance to the digital realm. My identity is digitally mediated in the Googleverse; my communication efforts are mostly rendered digital; and my professional and scholarly work rely on the partnership of the digital and the social.

New Material. I recognize the vitality of material and ascribe agency to material entities, both independent and assemblage. Experience is materially mediated, and the embodiment of human experience must be considered in understanding rhetoricity. Materiality need not be limited to physical entities or sensory input; the ambient environment contributes to agency and rhetoricity.

Posthuman. I consider the posthuman to represent what might be termed post-post-modernism. I seek ways to eliminate Cartesian anxiety by seeking agency beyond subject/object binaries. Reliance on human subjectivity and external objectivity to understand the universe represents the influence of modernism, an influence I seek to replace with an understanding of agency as the emergent activity of human and nonhuman assemblages.

Ontology. New materialist and posthuman theoretical lenses lead toward an understanding of knowledge as emergent, available only (and only partially) among the traces of rhetorical agency. Tracing this activity and creating knowledge requires an ontological approach that focuses on being in the moment rather than epistemological approaches to meaning. Meaning represents interpretive approaches to ontological study; I use new materialist and posthuman theoretical lenses to attach meaning to ontological tracings.