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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>Hi all,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>I would like to address Kris’s question about positive interdisciplinary experiences briefly.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>I have always enjoyed combining approaches and seeing what I can learn from a new perspective. My dissertation in 2004 used rhetoric and ethnography of communication to study deliberation and local democracy in a New England Town Meeting legislative body. I made a call to readers of the Quarterly Journal of Speech to examine local communication (by reviewing books in political science, urban planning, media). Since then, I have worked with civil engineers and transportation planners, to help understand and develop public engagement processes, as well as to understand how social networks affect perceptions on public safety. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>Transportation is an area I am completely fascinated by. How we move from place to place, physically, how we create infrastructures that support certain kinds of connections and regulate interactions has both a very applied focus, as well as a theoretical one. (When one considers refugees, they have transported themselves, or been transported, to new places. Communication itself moves about; how does it move? Where is it going?) It also involves a public/private dichotomy. (When one drives/rides in a bus, or drives/rides in a car, or when one crosses a street, their bodies can be seen by others, interpreted by others….encoded in particular ways.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>To your larger point, however, because I am a faculty member (professor of Communication, in a Department of Com. & Humanities) at a community college, research and publication is not required, but is (often, not always) appreciated. For my current project, I am working with a statistician and transportation engineer. This is my first experience in this kind of a project. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>Here departmental faculty do not have authority over one another; tenure, and promotion are handled by an all-college faculty committee, with recommendations to administration. Therefore one must be able to make one’s case using a completely different way of speaking. Any argument for promotion or tenure must be able to makes sense to someone from criminal justice, math, business, or psychology, or… The point is that when one is at an institution where the name of the journal is a binary, where it either counts or does not count, there is little room for rhetorical strategy, explanation, or description and interpretation of one’s work. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>Best,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>Becky<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>References<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.5in'><span style='font-family:"Corbel","sans-serif";color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>Townsend, Rebecca M. “Transporting Communication: Community College Students Facilitate Deliberation in Their Own Communities” in</span><span style='color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'> </span><u><span style='font-family:"Corbel","sans-serif";color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>Deliberative Pedagogy and Democratic Engagement</span></u><span style='font-family:"Corbel","sans-serif";color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>. Eds. Timothy J. Shaffer, Nicholas V. Longo, Idit Manosevitch, and Maxine S. Thomas. Michigan State UP. (anticipated 2016).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.5in'><span style='font-family:"Corbel","sans-serif";color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>---. “Mapping Routes to Our Roots: Student Civic Engagement in Transportation Planning.” <u>Service-Learning at the American Community College: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives</u>. Eds. Amy Traver & Zivah Perel Katz. Palgrave Macmillan. 2014.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.5in'><span style='font-family:"Corbel","sans-serif";color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>---. “Engaging ‘Others’ in Civic Engagement through Ethnography of Communication.” <i>Journal of Applied Communication Research</i>, 41 (2013): 202-208</span><span lang=EN style='font-family:"Corbel","sans-serif";color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>. </span><span style='font-family:"Corbel","sans-serif";color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.5in'><span style='font-family:"Corbel","sans-serif";color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>---. “Town Meeting as a Communication Event: Democracy’s Act Sequence.” <i>Research on Language and Social Interaction.</i> 42 (2009): 68-89.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Corbel","sans-serif";color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>---. “Local Communication Studies.” Lead Review Essay. <i>Quarterly Journal of Speech </i>92 (2006): 202-222.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.5in'><span style='font-family:"Corbel","sans-serif";color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>---. “Widening the Circumference of Scene: Local Politics, Local Metaphysics.” <i>KBJournal</i>. Spring 2006. <a href="http://www.kbjournal.org/townsend"><span style='color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>www.kbjournal.org/townsend</span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.5in'><span style='font-family:"Corbel","sans-serif";color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>---. Review of Jay Jordan’s “Dell Hymes, Kenneth Burke’s ‘Identification,’ and the Birth of Sociolinguistics” [<i>Rhetoric Review</i> 24 (2005): 264-279]. <i>KBJournal</i>.<i> </i>Spring 2006. <a href="http://www.kbjournal.org/townsend2"><span style='color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-color:#254061;mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha:100.0%'>www.kbjournal.org/townsend2</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Ethnocomm [mailto:ethnocomm-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org] <b>On Behalf Of </b>Kris Acheson-Clair<br><b>Sent:</b> Sunday, February 07, 2016 7:29 PM<br><b>To:</b> ETHNOCOMM@listserv.linguistlist.org<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [Ethnocomm] e-seminar<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>When I first read the Katriel and Leeds-Hurwitz texts, I was struck by the positive tone of each piece – commendably, they seem to me full of excitement and possibility. I used to believe myself an optimist, but perhaps after a couple of decades of critical scholarship that is no longer entirely the case, for Trudy Milburn’s cautionary discussion of “questions to grapple with” resonated with me strongly. After going back and taking another look at my earlier notes, especially on Wendy’s section on Interdisciplinarity, I felt compelled to add my voice here.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>My own experience with interdisciplinarity has been a bit disheartening, to be frank. Although it functions as a buzz word at the institutional level, often finding its way into discourses of strategic goals and initiatives, it seems to me at the departmental level that interdisciplinarity is commonly resisted. The tree metaphor is useful here: folks in different branches not only often have no idea what is happening elsewhere, even in parallel branches where the same kinds of tools (like EC) are being used and the same phenomena are of interest, but also sometimes discount out of hand work done elsewhere, for example not counting towards tenure studies published in cognate disciplines and limiting new hires to scholars with a very particular degree or career trajectory. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I greatly appreciated the historical perspective that Wendy further developed at the beginning of her response, and in a continued spirit of hope for the future I would love to hear from contemporary EC scholars who are successfully working in very interdisciplinary ways. Perhaps your academic home is outside of Communication or you have an appointment across departments. Perhaps you consistently work in interdisciplinary research teams. Perhaps you publish widely outside of your primary field. Please inspire those of us who have met resistance when crossing boundaries: What insights do your positive interdisciplinary experiences offer for this vision of EC’s future?<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Thanks,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Kris<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Kris Acheson<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Director of Undergraduate Studies<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Department of Applied Linguistics<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Georgia State University<o:p></o:p></p><table class=MsoNormalTable border=1 cellpadding=0 style='border:none;border-top:solid #AAABB6 1.0pt'><tr><td width=105 style='width:78.75pt;border:none;padding:11.25pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:22.5pt'><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><a href="https://www.avast.com/sig-email" target="_blank"><span style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://ipmcdn.avast.com/images/logo-avast-v1.png"></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p></td><td width=470 style='width:352.5pt;border:none;padding:15.0pt .75pt .75pt .75pt'><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:22.5pt;line-height:13.5pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#41424E'>This email has been sent from a virus-free computer protected by Avast. <br><a href="https://www.avast.com/sig-email" target="_blank"><span style='color:#4453EA'>www.avast.com</span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p></td></tr></table><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></body></html>