Assemblage
The excerpt below is from Sara Austin's (2019) commentary on Assembling Composition (2017), edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey and Stephen J. McElroy:
Yancey and McElroy look to both art and critical theory to define and situate assemblages; in art, assemblage is the practice of bringing everyday materials together to create a new text, while assemblages in critical theory can be combinations of bodies, concepts, and ideas, allowing compositions to be seen and traced through the assembled components. This leads to an understanding of how the components work together to generate a composition, or a second broader sense of assemblage results from a constellation of texts being understood metaphorically (3). Building on both assemblages in art and critical theory, Yancey and McElroy situate assemblage within rhetoric and composition as its own assemblage of definitions. For Yancey and McElroy, "assemblage refers to and sanctions the makingness that textuality affords and its use, reuse, and repurposing of materials, especially chunks of text, in order to make something new" (4). In other words, assemblages allow for a way of composing that combines and remixes both texts, concepts, and ideas into something new. (p. 198)
Rhetorical Attunement
Excerpts below are taken from Rebecca Lorimer Leonard's (2014) "Multilingual Writing as Rhetorical Attunement":
The emergent qualities of rhetorical attunement resonate with the use of "tune" or "tuning" as metaphor. Paul Prior and Jody Shipka [2012], in their study of the literate activity of academic writers, use "tune" to emphasize how writers adapt or sync their writing activities to their writing environments, claiming that this environmental tuning is one of the "central practices in literate activity" and suggesting that writing studies would "benefit from the further study of these processes of tuning" (230). Sociologist Andrew Pickering has used what he calls the "perceptive metaphor" of tuning to convey an "aspect of temporal emergence" in the "real time of practice" (20). (p. 230)
It is the fusing of practice and condition, in which individual literate practice cannot help but be understood in a larger context of globalizing literate experiences. (p.230)
Curriculascapes
Excerpts below are taken from Tony Scott's (2018) Watson Conference presentation, "Precarity and the Making of Knowledge in Composition":
In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai [1996] describes five "scapes"… ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. He offers these scapes (which closely relates to "scales") as a way to better understand the complicated relationships between how people imagine themselves within their worlds, given, for instance, the "the multiple [imagined] worlds constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe" and how these people and groups are able to "contest and even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them" (p. 33).
I use "curriculascapes" as a way to describe the various elements that shape pedagogies that can include, but certainly extend beyond, the immediate time/space of a teacher's institutional setting. A programmatic curriculum is a particular curriculascape; however, how that curriculum is actively interpreted, transformed, contested and subverted in practices involves other converging scapes… Teachers also have disciplinary and professional affiliations that shape how they interpret and apply curricular terms, creating tensions and contradictions in application… Contestations and subversions can be intentional—as when a particular curricular articulation of genre as it relates to writing pedagogy doesn't meld with a teacher's perception—or unintentional, created by the juxtapositioning of materials and practices that don't extend from a consistent view of literacy and learning.
This complicates a vertical model of curricular formation and application that extends from the disciplinary discourse of RCWS through writing programs and into courses—the model that writing about writing is intended to enact.