[Some of] What We Are Reading to Prepare to Teach this Course

For the past year or so Dr. Cowgill and I have been picking one another's brains to ensure that the class truly benefits from our differing backgrounds as researchers: She is a sociologist trained mainly in social scientific methods; I am a rhetorician trained mainly in humanistic methods.

Huh?

For the purpose of our course, what this basically means is that we both study people and their stories, but we go about it differently. We'll likely discuss this during classtime.

Meanwhile, we'll use this posting to compose an informal annotated bibliography of the more interesting and important texts we've been examining. Because we're co-teaching this course, we assigned one another some readings to help us get a better understanding of how we each approach research--these readings included items we wrote ourselves as well as some articles or books that have influenced our own work. We also found a variety of books, articles, and websites that seemed like promising sources of information about urban sociology, cultural mapping, OKC history, and so forth--some of which we'll be assigning to the researchers in our course.

Our Ever-Evolving Annotated Bibliography for this Course . . .

Blair, Carole. "Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality." Rhetorical Bodies Eds, Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. [oops, I need to insert the publication city] U of Wisconsin, 1999. 16-57.
BH: This is the article I assigned to Julie as an excellent explanation and illustration of how rhetoricians use three-dimensional objects to analyze a community. If we end up analyzing Deep Deuce through its artifacts--perhaps inventing a methodology of our own called, e.g., "material ethnography"--then this article by Blair plus the book by Thomas might very well be our foundation.

O'Meally, Robert G. "Checking Our Balances: Louis Armstrong, Ralph Ellison, and Betty Boop." Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies Eds., Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, Farah Jasmine Griffin. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. 278-96.
BH: Although Ellison's "Deep Deuce" days are not the focal point of this article, we can learn a good deal about Ellison's perspective on race relations (in Deep Deuce and elsewhere) through his commentaries on Louis Armstrong's complex and ironical persona as an entertainer who seemed to reinforce racial stereotypes in, for example, this Betty Boop cartoon: I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal while also evolving into an outspoken civil rights activist. An OKC dance hall is where Ellison first watched Armstrong perform, and one of his indelible memories about that event concerned OKC segregation: how white women streamed into the dance hall, breaking the law to be a part of the music.

Thomas, Jim. Doing Critical Ethnography. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE, 1993.
BH: Julie assigned me this article as an introduction to ethnographic research done by people in her field. In a nutshell, ethnography is a research method that involves immersing yourself in a community in order to study it firsthand. When we first envisioned this course we were going to spend 16 weeks as ethnographers. Now that the course is happening in a weekend format, we're trying to design a research methodology that will enable us to still make critical observations despite our limited time frame--in Deep Deuce we'll basically be passersby more than community-members, though we'll still be thinking about "subcultures" to which we might each belong in everyday life. (I need to return to this article to write more about how it intersects with the material rhetoric article. I'll write more then.)