Listening in class the other day to the different projects, all I could think about was how vastly varied our interests are. Royster and Kirsch state, "the key questions are how do these features of the researcher's sense of self inform the topic the researcher studies, the research questions she asks (and does not ask), the data she collects (and does not collect), the interpretations she offers (and does not consider), and so on. In other words, we are suggesting that identity plays a much-larger role in research than we have considered at this point" (95). This makes a lot of sense looking at the works we have read so far, Fredrick Douglass was interlinked in what he was writing about, as was Christen de Pizan. The work of those rhetoricians is completely linked to their identity, so what we take them from is completely linked to ours.
My interest in authority comes from my experiences growing up as short, and as a girl, as well as Catholic. All three of things have equally shaped my own characteristics as well as what I like to research. My ethos is regularly diminished because of these three categories, and the compensation, the tokenism, that takes place to reverse preconceived notions is always present. In looking back over my life the rhetorical canon of memory becomes increasingly important to the Royster and Kirsch's idea of "critical imagination." Although I can never hold onto exact conversations, I use imagination to recreate those memories, and than I critically put them to use in self-reflecting on my identity and how it shapes my interests as a researcher. In Jackie's Reflection she states, "I had a research agenda" (81). The word "agenda" stood out to me because it implies a problem that needs addressing. Perhaps the real connection between identity and research questions is what problems we personally feel like need to be addressed, whether we have lived through them or they have made us uncomfortable.
I like the idea of identity and interpretation as inseparable entities. A person cannot separate the very core of their being from the ideas that arise on any given subject. Their responses are a reflection of themselves. I read these chapters as almost a how-to guide on research practices and didn't directly consider where these authors were coming from and was probably a little too critical on the worth of their suppositions. Their reflections were important because not only did they show some of these rhetorical practices at work, they gave their readers a better understanding of from where their specific ideas arose. These chapters were some of the first to include explicit reasons why identity is central to rhetorical analysis.
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