Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies

6. Strategic Contemplation

84 6 Strategic Contemplation [U]nderstanding means listening to discourses not for intent but with intent—with the intent to understand not just the claims but the rhetorical negotiations of understanding as well. . . . [R]hetorical listeners might best invert the term understanding and define it as standing under, that is, consciously standing under discourses that surround us and others while consciously acknowledging all our particular—and very fluid—standpoints. Standing under discourses means letting discourses wash over, through, and around us and then letting them lie there to inform our politics and ethics. —Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness As we state in chapter 2, we consider our four terms of engagement as terministic screens that interact dynamically with each other to create new knowledge and understanding. Ultimately, with the term strategic contemplation , we want to reclaim a genre of research and scholarship traditionally associated with processes of meditation, introspection, and reflection . We suggest that using a meditative/contemplative approach allows researchers to access another, often underutilized dimension of the research process. Building on critical imagination, this strategy suggests that researchers might linger deliberately inside of their research tasks as they investigate their topics and sources—imagining the contexts for practices; speculating about conversations with the people whom they are studying, including historical figures long passed on; paying close attention to the Strategic Contemplation 85 spaces and places both they and the rhetorical subjects occupy in the scholarly dynamic; and taking into account the impacts and consequences of these embodiments in any interrogation of the rhetorical event. This process of paying attention, of being mindful, of attending to the subtle, intuitive, not-so-obvious parts of research has the capacity to yield rich rewards. It allows scholars to observe and notice, to listen to and hear voices often neglected or silenced, and to notice more overtly their own responses to what they are seeing, reading, reflecting on, and encountering during their research processes. Strategic contemplation asks us to take as much into account as possible but to withhold judgment for a time and resist coming to closure too soon in order to make the time to invite creativity, wonder, and inspiration into the research process. In effect, as a method of scholarly inquiry, strategic contemplation allows us to pay attention to two different parts of the research process, to two different journeys. One is an outward journey in real time and space, more in keeping with traditional notions of fieldwork, as researchers go to the archives, the historical sites, the city or country where a historical subject worked or lived. This outward journey slows down the research process so that researchers can collect data—in looking up, down, under, and around the rhetorical situation in order to take in the sights (e.g., walking the streets, seeing the buildings, examining the scale of things), carefully collecting details, information, experiences, all of which can help researchers better understand a historical period, a place in time and context, a particular rhetorical figure, or a specific practice as it exhibits rhetorical effects. The second journey can be described as an inward journey, focused on researchers noticing how they process, imagine, and work with materials; how creativity and imagination come into play; how a vicarious experience that results from critical imagination, meditation, introspection, and/or reflection gets mapped, perhaps simultaneously, as both an analytical one and a visceral one. With archival work as a prime example, we come to understand the extent to which historical figures join the living when they become a part of us, when we get to know them like friends or relatives, or when they serve on our internal landscapes as guides or mentors to our lives. In drawing attention to the benefits of this type of approach, we hasten to emphasize that the process is not solely about the extent to which contemplation processes focus on “spiritual” dimensions of scholarship. While there may frequently be evidence of such a dimension, in our review of contemplative processes, we found such accounts not to be quite as spiritual or mystical or mysterious as they might at first sound, nor did we find them to be uncommon. Contemplation as a strategic tool seemed Recasting Paradigms 86 most clearly defined by researchers willing to stop for a time and think multidirectionally, from the outside in and the inside out, not just about the subject of study but also about themselves...