Dissertation Dialogues, Vol. 1: Scot Barnett and Caddie Alford

This is the first in a series of special late-summer episodes of Rhetoricity. At the 2017 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, some graduate students at Indiana University helped coordinate and conduct interviews with scholars who attended that institute. Those students also pitched another idea: a series of conversations between PhD candidates and their dissertation advisors. This episode features the first of those conversations. My hope is that these episodes, which are more akin to dialogues than interviews, will not only give listeners a sense of the interlocutors' research interests, but provide a window into the advisee-advisor relationship. To that end, I encouraged participants to take some time to discuss academic mentorship.

This episode features a conversation between Caddie Alford and Scot Barnett. Scot Barnett is an associate professor in the Department of English at IU. He's the author of the book Rhetorical Realism: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Ontology of Things and coeditor of the collection Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things. Caddie Alford, who was a PhD candidate at the time this episode was recorded, has since accepted a position as an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of "Creating with the 'Universe of the Undiscussed': Hashtags, Doxa, and Choric Invention" and has an article in a forthcoming special issue of Rhetoric Review on the topic of virtue ethics.

In their conversation, Alford and Barnett discuss their interests in rhetoric and embodiment, the ways digital technologies speak to and shift longstanding rhetorical concepts, and how they approach the advisor-advisee relationship.

This episode includes clips from the following:

• "Introducing the co-writer" by Machine, Dear
• "Messa di Voce (Performance version, 2003)"
• Noah