My book, Engaging Ambience, takes a look at how we research the rich, everyday contexts of communication.
It’s an academic book, so it’s written for a specialist audience—other researchers, like me, and advanced students of rhetoric, writing, and communication studies.
But I’ve been heartened by interest in the book from people who are not part of that specialist audience. And good portions of it were in fact written for a general audience.
This post is for anyone interested in the book’s ideas—a guide to the most accessible sections for anyone willing to give it a go.
If you just want the page numbers and sections that are most accessible, feel free to scroll on down!
Engaging Ambience In a Nutshell
Let’s say you get into an argument with your significant other on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon inside a chain sandwich shop. It’s been simmering for a while, this argument, and for whatever complex set of reasons, it boiled over while you waited for your BLT with vegan bacon.
What factors play a role in this argument?
Surely the quality of the sandwich shop service has nothing to do with it, right? Nor the Muzak versions of Ke$ha piped overhead? What about the spotty air conditioning, or the smile—flashed at you as you walked in—from that good-looking stranger in the corner booth?
Surely none of these things are the root cause of the argument.
But some of these things might matter, not only here and now, but because of experience with previous iterations of similar routines—monthly trips to the sandwich shop, road-trip Ke$ha sing-alongs, the uncanny resemblance of that good-looking stranger to your ex…
What kinds of things actually matter in any everyday communication scenario?
That’s the question this book tries to answer, by suggesting theoretical and methodological approaches that can better account for everything that might matter.
The Background for Engaging Ambience
In the last 30 years or so, scholars in rhetoric and writing studies have turned their attention to the materiality of communication in all its forms. How do things matter in any given communication event? How do our material and ambient surroundings condition communication?
This “turn” in the theory and practice of rhetoric has gone by a few different names, the most common of which is “new materialism.” Many scholars in rhetoric and writing have borrowed and built on ideas from philosophy, theoretical physics, gender and women’s studies, and several other disciplines to re-examine what rhetoric is, how rhetoric works, and where rhetoric shows up in the world.
For me, one of the most influential books published in the last 15 years is Thomas Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric, which came out in 2013.
So, my book is responding to a couple of major developments—
- new materialist ideas and their relevance to rhetoric, and
- Rickert’s notion that rhetoric is ambient—that rhetoric, in fact, is how human beings tune into the world.
What motivated me most, though, was this:
- if rhetoric is indeed ambient (it is!), then how would we study that ambience empirically (i.e., through observational studies and fieldwork)?
The idea that rhetoric is ambient—that the muzak in a sandwich shop might play some role in how we communicate with one another—is simultaneously wonderful and bewildering.
Empirical researchers in rhetoric have long focused on what people say, what they write, and to a lesser extent, how they move their bodies or present themselves visually.
We’re a discipline of words, primarily.
So how should we study things like vibes and feelings and clothes and background music?
Most of the book is me trying to answer this question, while showing how those answers played out in a variety of empirical studies.
Much of the specialist discourse in the book is about methodologies and methods—what are some ways that we might better account for things like muzak, glances across the room, and spotty air conditioning—with rigorous and well-triangulated approaches.
In order to do this for my audience of specialists I’ve had to do some deep dives into the literature of my field, the literature of related fields (such as visual anthropology and sociology), and the foundational theories informing the new materialist “turn” and Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric.
This is the stuff that’s inside baseball, and that non-specialists may want to skip (but maybe come back to later!).
Things to Keep in Mind
If you’re a non-specialist, here are some things to keep in mind as you read the more accessible sections of Engaging Ambience:
- rhetoric is more than just how humans communicate with one another—it’s our primary filter on reality, how we understand everything that we experience (even and especially those things that can’t be put into words);
- humans aren't the only ones doing rhetoric!
- rhetoric is not only a way of knowing the world, it’s a way of being in (and of) the world;
- in any given chapter, I’m trying to understand and present ways of researching all of the above.
The Good Stuff
Here are the sections of the book most accessible to non-specialists:
- 5–9 (the entire first section of the Intro)
- 15–17 (section start to break) for a snapshot of what the book’s about
- 24–26 for a condensed overview of the book
- 27–30 for a fieldwork vignette
- 36–39 for a fieldwork vignette
- 43–46 juxtaposes visuality and visibility (academic, but potentially interesting to many)
- 53–57 on this-now-here-ness (theoretical, but hopefully accessible)
- 58 (first two paras)
- 70–71
- 87–90 for a fieldwork vignette
- 106–111 for analysis and explication of the previous vignette
- 111–116 if you want more on that field site
- 119–124 for an overview of Eucharist research
- 132–137 for fieldwork vignettes
- 137–143 for an in-depth exploration of one participant’s experience of Eucharistic Adoration
- 143–148 theory–heavy, but crucial section for understanding the next chapter
- 149–154 fieldwork vignette, chapter overview
- 159–162 set up of the research for the chapter
- [162–170 is one of the most heavily theoretical sections of the book, but not *academic*; iow, any thoughtful person can hang with it, but it’ll take some work]
- 170–187 is certified banger status that anyone can read, and my favorite part of the book
- 191–200 tough in spots, but should be intelligible to most non-specialists
- 200–201 on the origin and meaning of the word “photography”
- 208–210
If you read any of the book, thank you! I’d love to know what you think about it.
