Kenneth Sutton

Rhetorical Citizenship

The concept of rhetorical citizenship I want to draw attention to is the ways

in which a citizen can associate within a discourse community. Citizenship is not
just a condition such as holding a bus pass in the case of our class, it is not just a
behavior such as protesting; citizenship also has a communicative aspect. Some
exercise citizenship by attending a city transit meeting or by discussing the city
bus system on a online blog or with colleagues or by standing up at a city
council meeting and voicing their cancers about the topic. Amy Wen wrote a
strict legalist may be puzzled by debates over definition of citizenship or even
discussion of citizenship in educational space because they view citizenship as a
legal category but citizenship theorists have expanded thinking about
citizenship beyond legal status to understanding as culture identity standing and
status civic virtue, everyday habits participatory action. Citizenship strictly
speaking in legal sense, has a very limited definition such as Wan suggests. But
when you apply theorists view that gets rid of the legal component, citizenship
can be defined as something takes on many other forms. Citizenship can be
used to define a culture as well, which is what I did when exploring in the Transit
Interpretation Project. Just like in the legal definition you can subdivide citizens of
a culture into co-cultures by studying their habits. To be a citizen is much more
then simply using the bus of a project for say; to a citizen of this culture the bus is
there preferred or only mode of transpiration they use. Citizenship is simply a

label applied to a culture to differentiate from other cultures. This works because
citizens have defining behavior, communication and social idiosyncrasies that
make them unique.

Rhetoric has two sides, first in the academic world and second in practice.
It stands in a very unique position to engage the discourse of a community
through collective aspects of civic engagement. Rhetoric draws on itself and in
conjunction with neighboring areas of inquiry in the social sciences practices.
Scholars of rhetoric are apt to study actual communicative behavior that
circulates in various fora and spheres from face to face encounters to
mediated discourse.(Welch). Scholars study these encounters and apply
different perspectives to achieve a goal outcome. Amy Wan takes practical look
at how to use rhetoric in saying I want to help my students become active
citizens who are capable of using language to defend themselves, voice their
opinions, and take part in the public debates. Educating her students how to
effectively use rhetoric in the public arena to convey their thoughts and ideas are
the key to achieving successful communication. Isocrates also argues speech is
responsible for nearly every invention, saying that if we cannot communicate
effectively we as a society would not create anything new. This is congruent with
history; as ability to communicate progressed so did the technology behind the
things we created. Rhetoric in the academic theater and in practice is the means
to accomplish a goal through communication.

Rhetorical citizenship + Transit Interpretation Project

The TrIP project was designed to take an in-depth look at Orlandos public
transit system mainly focusing on the Lynx bus system and interpreting it in an
artistic form.
When first hearing about the TrIP project I couldnt see how I was going to
produce something that involved rhetoric from riding a bus. However after
learning what the artist that is leading the TrIP project wanted to accomplish, I
had a goal in mind. I choose to explore two forms of public transit in this project,
where one provides a much more positive experience than the other. Then I
decided that I wanted to find a way to make the more positive experience with
public transit part of my life. I attempted to assimilate the idea of citizenship in the
spirit of TrIP by continuing to ride the bus after I had completed what the project
required, to truly become a citizen of this culture. By continuing to utilize the bus I
gained much more insight to why it is people choose to ride the bus as a form of
transit. In conversion with some fellow commuters on the bus I found that some
rode the bus out of choice while others had no other means of commuting. When
exploring a little further I found the citizens of these two cultures had shared
spheres of interest. Welch depicts these spheres as cultural bubbles that have
different levels of power and resources. Knowing these two things helps
determine how to effectively engage these people when using rhetoric. Also
becoming part of the bus riding culture gives me credibility within this culture, so

when engaging them they are more likely to listen to what I have to say. In the
Rhetorical Velocity Project we conducted a stakeholder analysis to determine
who to engage as a citizen of culture. My goal was to improve the experience of
transit to make it comparable to what I was comparing it to. I sought to overcome
the problem that audiences need to understand how to see through manipulative
appeals (Palczewski) when reaching the target audiences with an effective
means of communication, thus a way that I can see feed back. When conducting
a stakeholder analysis, I discovered that the target prefer to see something that
was short yet had vast amounts of detail, so I created a chart with a short
paragraph explaining what it was showing and why. Something like that coming
from a citizen of that culture would be very different then what the stakeholders
are accustomed too. A Rhetorical citizen is the person engaging stakeholders
looking for feedback to see how effective the communication was, then engaging
them again till the goal is accomplished.

Work Cited

Welch, Nancy. Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World.

Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, Heinemann, 2008. Print.

Palczewski, Catherine H, Richard Ice, and John Fritch. Rhetoric in Civic

Life. State College, Pa: Strata Pub, 2012. Print.

Wan, Amy J. In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise
of Citizenship. 2011: Print.

Isocrates, Isocrates I. Trans. David Mirhady and Yun Lee Too. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2000. Print.