The New York Sophist

Podcast

Let’s see what this is like.

Hey Folks!

Since Substack allows seamless podcasting, I thought I would start experimenting with short-form podcasts on whatever is on my mind each and every Monday.

So Monday should be experiments in orality and Friday will be experiments in the written form. I’m becoming a full-service rhetorician in this space.

This podcast is some brief comments on my shift toward oral assessment and oral assignments in the last 2 years. There will be more about this in future short podcasts. Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Dr. Lee Pierce, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo joins Dr. Dan the Renaissance Man and Steve for a discussion on the relationship of post-structuralism to rhetoric, graduate school pedagogy, and whether or not it matters if you have read everything Derrida ever wrote.

Have a listen here!

Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash

I was asked by the people at Power of Public Speaking if I would like to be a guest host on their POPs Community podcast. In thinking about what to talk about for 45 minutes or so, I thought a great topic would be why we are obligated to allow students to speak about very real, very immediate controversies in the world.

Here’s the podcast. I think it went really well and I had a great time. Makes me think I should do some solo In the Bin episodes once in a while. Might be a good way to mix up the modality of shared ideas.

As always let me know your thoughts, questions, comments, and of course opposition to my ideas in the comments here or over in the POPs Community. Would love to hear what you have to say.

This essay is one of my absolute favorites to teach in argumentation. My friend Dan and I take it on in an hour long conversation on the latest podcast.

Every year the students complain about this essay mostly because of Burke’s eccentric writing style. I’ve tried different ways of teaching it over the years, but part of the difficulty is that each time you read the essay something new pops out at you.

Burke’s essay really speaks to our moment where those involved in political argument take great pleasure from a strategy of total eradication of the other side, person, utterance – you name it. In Burke’s essay he explains why this strategy does not advance understanding.

As always feel free to leave a comment either here or at the Anchor website, where you can record an audio comment that we will play on the next show. We’d love to hear from you.

I was invited on the Essence of Wonder podcast last weekend to participate in a very interesting and stimulating discussion about whether we should engage with the works of authors and creators who have expressed problematic viewpoints.

I really enjoyed the thoughtful conversation. It raised a lot of new ways to think about the issue for me. My position is most often that language has it’s own position apart from the author, and it’s the interpretive frame of the audience that either permits the material to be consumed or not. This is a result of how traumatizing it is to learn the author or creator’s viewpoint on social or political issues.

There should be links to the video of the episode behind the link up there. I detonated most of my social media, so I’m not sure. I couldn’t get the YouTube link to work but here’s a Facebook link!