WRTG 3890 - Rhetorical and Critical Methods

This course takes seriously the idea students are researchers--reading, inquiring into, crafting questions for, and developing tools and strategies to answer questions about the everyday. In it, students will learn about a wide variety of research methods such as close reading, listening, discourse analysis, archival research, translanguaging, and ethnography. These are tools that researchers draw upon to collect, analyze, and make meaning of cultural data. They are also methodologies that are the epistemic and theoretical interests driving the undertaking of research. Ultimately, students in this class will design and pilot a semester-long research study into a cultural phenomenon, both developing researchable questions and selecting appropriate methods to collect data about, interact with, parse, and analyze the rhetorics of everyday life, communities, and/or culture.