https://docs.google.com/document/d/16p0dNPhXWF6Z3IDxRZnlZkNaSpZLXtOeJ4EvCCjfZqc/edit
In the passage “The March for Science Can’t Figure Out How to Handle Diversity”, author Zuleyka Zevello conveys the message that Trump’s Administration is placing a variety of restrictions on the field of scientific research and at the same time, jeopardizing science as we know it. With presidential moves such as building a wall to separate the US and Mexico, (a decision that will prevent advancement in international science programs), and even the threat to the American Health-Care act, it seems that the only thing President Trump values is cutting costs rather than show and respect to scientific research. With motivation and desire to act, the March for Science emerged as it was inspired by the impact of the women’s march, but also was sparked due to social media conversations (Zevello, 2). By creating social media accounts and noticing the rapid growth of supporters and flowers, the organization was able to generated over 300 marches to occur in various cities around the world.
One way in which I was able to draw a comparison between this case and what we’ve been discussing through this class is through vocabulary terms. One term is specific that we discussed through this course happens to be a discourse community, which can be defined as a group of individuals in a social group who not only share similar goals, but also have specialized language/customs to distinguish themselves from other groups. One way in which I believe we can consider the people part of the march as their own discourse community is by the way they diversify themselves. First off, they prime themselves off of three main components, which are equity, access and inclusion, as their number one goal is to make everyone feel valued, heard and included. With these specific variables defining what their special group is and what they stand for, I believe we can consider them their own discourse. One way in which I can relate this to our final projects is to pay close attention to importance of identifying your specific/target audience, and realizing that your goal is to convey/persuade your main point. At times, I felt that Zevello lost train of his influential aspect in this article and found himself telling more of a factual story; which is ok, but in terms of our final project, we need our community partners to trust us and buy into what we have researched. In “Discourse Coalition, Science Blogs, and the Global Debate Over Climate Change”, author Graham Smart studies and discusses the phenomena and theory of climate change. Before presenting his findings, Smart identifies two sets of research questions that he used in order to gather and arrange his collected information. The first set questions asked “what discourse coalitions can we identify within the web-based discourse of the climate-change controversy and what can an investigation of discursive interactions between discourse coalitions reveal about how climate-science knowledge is presented to different public and the nature of this knowledge” ((Smart, 164). The second set of questions asked “what rhetorical work do blogs perform- and for whom? Also, how do blogs perform this work” (Smart 164). The second set of research question were more appealing to me as they can be linked/pertain to our very own writing for the science course. Through extensive research, Smart stated that blogs are not only be used to provide information to a vast number of people, but also for others to comment on this date provide and almost debate about the information presented.
One connection that I made between our class and Smarts piece the discussion/use of the term genre. To us, genre can have many interpretations, such as the style we intend on using when presenting to our audience, or even the subject we intend on presenting. Too Smart, he discusses the literary element of genre as researching blog tendencies in communities and how others communicate amongst each other in this field. As for the three different discourse coalitions that Smart talks about, I believe his overall intentions were to distinguish how each group argues their own individual point by taking various approaches to the climate changing topic and supporting their claim to provide their argument. As for my final project, I personally do not believe this information irrelevant to the stance I plan on taking. However, I could open up and sharpen my understanding of what genre could mean and take some examples from Smart that he provides. |
Nick GrayAlways looking for comments, questions and concerns. Please do not hesitate to comment! Archives
April 2018
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