THE DEPARTMENT OF

Statement of Research J. Michael Rifenburg In broad terms, my research is focused on the troublesome relationship between athletics and academics in American higher education and how such a relationship scholastically impacts student-athletes in writing intensive courses. Looking at this issue from the field of composition and rhetoric, my dissertation explores how athletics and academics (specifically early forms of rhetoric) related to each other in 5th and 4th century BCE Greecea time where rhetoric was in a nascent stage and training in philosophia and gymnastics was needed for an Isocratean liberal arts education. I argue that while athletics, like poetry and democracy, was central to the codification of rhetoric, athletics has been largely erased from modern rhetorics, an erasure harming student-athletes. I then move to the contemporary rhetorics of multimodality. Recalling Selfe and Takayoshis definition of multimodality as that which exceed[s] the alphabetic and may include still and moving images, animations, color, words, music, and sounds (1), I read an Auburn Universitys 2004 football defensive play as representative of college football plays and, more importantly, as an instantiation of extracurricular multimodal rhetoric. To do so, I first examine recent treatments of multimodality and then construct the language framework of linguistic structuralism as the way student-athletes are required to internalize and execute these complex multimodal texts. In a close reading of Auburns play, I argue that through student-athletes repeated engagement with this representative multimodal play they are operating within a discourse that shuns dialogic meaning-making. This happens because the construction and execution of a football play demands players undertake a structuralist view of language, a view at direct odds with the dialogic meaning making processes typically espoused in the college writing classroom. As such, while student-athletes engage with multimodality outside of the classroom, they can struggle to engage with it inside the classroom. While I have two articles taken from my dissertation forthcoming and one under consider, I aim on submitting my first chapter on classical rhetoric and athletics to Rhetoric Society Quarterly after I strengthen the focus to include an emphasis on the role of embodiment in the rise of rhetoric. As RSQ is devoted to histories of rhetorics, especially those colliding with or upsetting traditional (read: hegemonic) ones, I believe this journal is an appropriate venue for my work. I plan on publishing the remainder of my dissertation as a book-length study, which explores how composition and rhetoric speaks to contemporary fissures between athletics and academics. This study will not only include a section on multimodality and student-athletes but will include my work on student-athlete writing centers. These centers are concrete representations of the relationship between athletics and academics because the one-on-one writing sessions practiced in this space are caught between adhering to NCAA academic compliance mandates and incorporating innovation pedagogical strategies, which often conflict with these mandates. Again, the individuals most impacted by this conflict are student-athletes. With its interest in alternative approaches to composition and rhetoric, as well as writing center practices and theories, I believe Utah State University Press would be a strong fit for this book-length study. Beyond my dissertation, my future work is tentatively aimed at bringing an ecological view of writing to college basketball and football plays. Believing that these two sports are engaged with high levels of literate activity (e.g., the reading and enacting of textual plays), such a theory focuses on a person acting within a particular community with various tools and texts (see, Cooper, Syverson, and Dobrin). While early composition researchers viewed writing as temporally and spatially bound, an ecological perspective suggests writing is dispersed across time and space and research should attend to the production, consumption, and distribution of the text. Through a bounded case study including interviews with student-athletes and coaches, observations of practices and game, and textual analysis of football and basketball plays, I aim to expand our understanding of how studentsin this case student-athletesengage with extracurricular writing and how such an engagement impacts our classroom practices and theories. Again, in broad terms, like my current research my future research is concerned with how composition and rhetoric reacts to what I perceive as an ever-widening gap between athletics and academics, which impacts numerous parties. As a result of recent unsettling events, college sports are heavily scrutinized. And rightly so. However, while much current research calls for the banishment of sports from campuses, I suggest careful work by those in composition and rhetoric, will illumine the value of college sports to all people served by American higher education.
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