Exploring the Invitational

In 2016, comedian Jordan Klepper produced his first “Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse” segment for The Daily Show. Here, he sought out and interviewed Trump supporters, highlighting their tendency to whole-heartedly believe absurd conspiracy theories for the titillation of The Daily Show’s predominantly liberal audience. Meanwhile, across YouTube, political influencers like Ben Shapiro post video after video titled, “Shapiro OWNS libs” and “Shapiro DESTROYS crazy student with blue hair.” Popular and social media offer up example after example of encounters across political difference not as sites with potential, where we might seek out deliberation, mutual understanding, and accountability, but as sites for mockery, proof that those on the “other side” of the aisle are dupes, hypocrites, or villains. This is to say nothing of the dominant approaches to other forms of difference (whether racial, gender, sexual, class, and/ or otherwise) which too often involve not just mockery but dehumanization, exclusion, and violence.

This rhetoric and writing course is born out of and rooted in the invitational, in conceiving of “rhetoric” in terms of equality, immanent value, and self-determination. How do our conversations change when we approach our interactions with others with the intent not to convince them of our perspective but to seek out mutual understanding? What questions do we then ask of ourselves and others? How do we listen effectively and ethically? How do we practice accountability when our words, ideas, or actions do harm? What are the limitations of “understanding” as a goal or when is understanding either not possible or simply not enough? Our aim this semester will be to explore and practice reading, thinking, and writing as activities best performed in coalition with others. Our work, thus, will be grounded in principles of rhetorical listening, acknowledgement of and respect for difference, radical hospitality and care, feminist accountability, and queer worldmaking.