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The District of Complexity: On Ecological Fieldwork “The archive is what actor­network tracers and the flaneur have in common. And the archive that they share is special in that it has no end in sight.” ­­Jenny Rice Distant Publics 174

Calls for new research methods flow thickly ­­ and pool ­­ in the basin of rhetoric

and writing studies. They sluice from a wide variety of tributaries: network and

complexity theories; the study of environments, organic and synthetic; digital,

multimodal, and public rhetorics; and posthuman studies. These calls tend to echo each

other: new methods must respond to “the challenges of investigating chaotic

phenomena” (Cooper 16). They must themselves be “complex, diffuse, and messy”

(Fleckenstein et al. 389). They must enact “inquiry for action” (Dobrin, “Writing Takes

Place” 14) and heed the “ecological imperative for composition studies” (Dobrin,

“Introduction” 3). Moreover:

Future research would need to make network maps, identify how and where

various spheres form on it, and discuss the intensity and sustainability of their

ongoing development into spheres. These collective points of contact and density

create the ambient environments or spheres and provide connections between

places and commonplaces for publics to emerge . . . it would take long term

studies to really track the variations of movements and circulations. (Hawk,

“Curating Ecologies” 176)

General agreement, perhaps, has emerged that new methods must be more ecological

­­ shaped and scaled for our (relatively) new ecological accounts of rhetoric. And yet,

Laura Micciche has recently remarked that ecological approaches “have not gained

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much traction” (494). Sidney Dobrin notes that while writing studies has “embraced the

metaphors of space and place,” it has also “been limited in its adoption of ecological

methodologies” (“Writing Takes Place” 12). This collection, with its focus on the local,

offers an opportunity to advance methodological work, while also addressing rhetorics

of the local. In Ambient Rhetoric, Thomas Rickert describes terroir as a “close­knit

relation among grapevines, the earth, and cultivation techniques that imparts a unique

quality to a wine,” offering in shorthand that terroir is the “taste of a place” (271). In

order to get at the taste of any place, its local flavor, I argue that the subject and the

approach co­constitute each other; the study of the local needs ecological methods, that

is, and ecological methods need the local.

In April 2014, the Urban Institute published “Our Changing City,” to “tell

[Washington, D.C. residents] what’s obvious in their neighborhoods: the city is changing

dramatically.” Their statistical analysis provides context to what Washingtonians already

see and feel, the rapidly shifting demographic and material realities of life in the nation’s

capital. This report highlights three major recent changes to life in Washington:

1. Historically one of the U.S.’s few majority­black cities, the Chocolate City has

seen the reversal of its decades long trend of population decline, as a result of a

huge influx of affluent white millennials ­­ to the point that Washington no longer

boasts an African­American majority.

2. To accommodate this new population, developers have enthusiastically

re­shaped the city.

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3. High cost rentals account for a larger and larger share of available housing,

resulting in one of the most expensive housing stocks in the country.

These changes are occurring in a city that for decades has experienced an ongoing

influx of transplanted residents because of the enormous federal presence, which

persistently maintains the complex divisions between those born and raised in

Washington and more recent (and often temporary) arrivals. It’s the job, I will argue, of

rhetorical researchers to coordinate with accounts such as the Urban Institute’s to

address the subtle ways that cities express themselves­­“to capture . . . the lay

knowledge that lies outside of the typical documentation” (from the CFP).

DC/Adapters, my study of a local rhetorical network, makes strides in this

direction. For two years, I’ve photographed and archived material and digital

adaptations of Washington’s city flag. Emerging in diverse forms and diverse places,

adapted flags hang in shop windows, dress­up brick alleyways, and bounce all over the

web. A wide variety of agents produce these artifacts, including street artists, local

entrepreneurs, and activists organizations, among others. This embodied and

embedded form of research, which I call ecological fieldwork, traces one topos, local

flag adaptations, and uncovers an entire rhetorical network. DC/Adapters demonstrates

how ecological fieldwork can coordinate with studies like the Urban Institute’s and offer

access to the unique pathos of a city in the midst of convulsive change.

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Designed by Charles Dunn to evoke the red stars and bars on a white shield portion of George Washington’s family coat of arms, the flag was formally adopted by the District of Columbia in 1938. At 14th St NW’s the Red Derby; photograph by Matthew Pavesich.

A simple adaptation into a red sticker, with chevrons instead of bars and differently sized stars. Found on the black painted door of Columbia Station on 18th St NW; photograph by Matthew Pavesich

In order to illustrate this approach, I’ve organized this chapter into three sections,

all of which include methods, materials, and findings from this longitudinal ecological

fieldwork project. Because of the format of this text, I’ve elected not to include images.

Hundreds of adapted flags are viewable, however, at dcadapters.org. The first section

outlines how the project began and its general methods. The second section notes

emergent complexities of the work and how they have necessarily re­shaped the project

itself but also my disposition as a researcher. The third section addresses the ethics of

ecological fieldwork and the rhetorical production it demands. The latter becomes

especially important in that it illuminates the insufficiency of description as the goal of

local­facing research. The challenge of the local’s essential indescribability, as I’ve

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learned from my ecological fieldwork, is not that such work offers better description of

local conditions but that it orients me toward interaction among and coordination with

human and non­human agents that shape D.C.’s local flavor.

Shape and Scale

DC/Adapters jolted to life, just as Jenny Rice suggests all tracings do, from an

initial spark (Distant Publics 174). For me, this event occurred at Washington, D.C.’s

Union Market in February of 2013. Within forty feet of each other, I observed three

different food stands, all of which adapted the District of Columbia’s flag in their

commercial signage.

DC Sharp at Union Market. Photograph by Matthew Pavesich

Within a second or so, I thought all of the following things, in some unrecoverable

order:

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1. The D.C. flag operates like a topos of graphic design ­­ a way to proclaim

one’s position in and allegiance to the local.

2. All three use the same visual means of persuasion, which suggests none

think the others’ use diminishes their own.

3. This reminds me a bit of Jenny Rice’s short tracing of the topos “Keep

Austin Weird” in her widely cited article “Unframing Models of Public

Distribution.” (14­20).

4. I’ve seen these in other places around the city. I remember them now that

I see these here at Union Market, even though I didn’t really take notice of

them before.

5. I’ve lived here for two years, but am only now recognizing this uniquely

local rhetoric, which suggests something about the time required for

attunement to a new local.

6. Maybe I should begin to trace these and see if this is a thing ­­ to try to

find out what this phenomenon responds to and what it does.

And so I set out to trace the variations of one topos in a dense urban network.

I hoped to devise a new way of seeing ­­ and moving through ­­ the city that

would highlight already­existing material rhetorics. Ethnography makes sense as an

approach to the layers of public, civic activity in material urban environments, and of

course many contemporary rhetoricians utilize its methods, including Ralph Cintron,

Ellen Cushman, Julie Lindquist, and others. Orienting fieldwork ecologically, as I aim to,

is to look at a rhetorical thing, but to consider it primarily (or at least consistently) in its

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relation to other things. Ecological fieldwork, that is, combines a rhetorically­ and

materially­focused version of ethnography with ecology­scale attention. It swaps the

microscope of traditional rhetorical research and analysis for a camera with a

wide­angle lens set to a high shutter speed. As Byron Hawk puts it above, this sort of

work examines the relationships between places and commonplaces, which

ethnography already does, in such a way that highlights the intensity and sustainability

of sphere formation in networks. This work would include examination of what Jim

Ridolfo calls rhetorical velocity, originally articulated in a 2009 Kairos article with

Danielle Nicole DeVoss, which he later elaborated on in The Available Means of

Persuasion with David Sheridan and Anthony J. Michel: “the potential recomposition

and redistribution of a text,” including speed and direction, as well as something like

uptake or viral potential (79). From the spark­moment at Union Market, I devised four

original guidelines to ecological fieldwork.

Original Guideline 1: Photograph each artifact and note its location. I began by

using my iPhone to gather images of all adapted flags I found around the city. As I

began to stumble across adapted flags on the web, screenshots joined my amateur

photographs. I noted each object’s location because I was and am interested in where I

find adaptations, the joining of places and commonplaces. Which neighborhoods and

webspaces witness the greatest number of adapted flags? What is it about these

places? How do the adapted flags’ locations shape my and others’ experiences in D.C.?

Original Guideline 2: Everyday encounters only. I decided early on to collect only

those adaptations I encountered in the movements of my daily life. I didn’t want to

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approach this project in such a way that it might seem to overwrite the idiosyncrasies of

complexity. This project cannot claim to retrieve all adapted flags in the city, nor can I

make unassailable observations about where this rhetorical activity occurs and where it

does not because, for starters, many of these objects are ephemeral, winking into

existence for a day or two or even less sometimes due to weather, human actions, web

rot, and so on. More broadly, all fieldwork is ecological, embedded and embodied, yes,

but also in the sense that it acknowledges its own partiality; good ethnography cannot

claim to present knowledge that transcends its humanness. At the 2015 Conference on

College Composition and Communication, Marc C. Santos aptly described Jeff Rice’s

Digital Detroit as an exercise in imagining a counterhistory of Detroit through his own

personal access. Similarly, I interact with Washington, creating a spatial counterpresent

through my personal access (I’m tempted to say “counterpresence,” rather than

“personal access.”).

Original Guideline 3: Adaptations, not appropriations. I’ve focused on graphic

alterations to the flag’s red stars­and­bars, rather than simple iterations like the

straight­up appropriation of a red and white t­shirt. It’s rhetors’ fluid interactions with

objects, color, shapes, genres, and velocity that energize this project; the exciting

rhetorical work occurs in agility, manipulation, craft, etc. Timothy Richardson, in 2014’s

“The Authenticity of What’s Next,” nicely captures my thinking here by considering

“hacking” from a rhetorical perspective. “Hacking,” he notes, “seems about reuse and ­­

more importantly ­­ repurposing” (1). “The hack,” he continues, “is all about new

functionality . . . And a hack would be an argument, I suppose” (4).

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Rule 4: Be public. I could not know when I began if this project would catch on as

it has, whether or not D.C. would continue to generate this specific link between place

and commonplace, and how many adapted flags I would find. It seemed important to be

as public as the objects I’m tracking, in the sense of James J. Brown, Jr., who

encourages conducting rhetorical experiments in public (2). At first, I housed the archive

on Tumblr, moving to WordPress as my vision of DC/Adapters grew and changed. The

site houses the materials for future analysis and production, even as the archive itself

functions as a form of production and public circulation.

DC/Adapters could easily have died on the vine, but it has not ­­ it emerges from

sustained rhetorical energy in Washington, which the project itself continually gathers

and makes visible. The archive now collects and stores nearly four hundred unique flag

hacks (and counting). We know that emergence is the engine of rhetoric, as described

by Hawk’s exploration of vitalism in A Counterhistory of Composition, but I still feel

surprised with every addition to the archive. I wonder how long the phenomenon will

continue, when the topos will exhaust itself, while marveling at its renewable energies.

My four original guidelines, I see now, allow for the project’s acknowledgement of and

co­emergence with these energies. The mundane surprise of each new object helps me

to see, more than I did two years ago with my original guidelines, how one might shape

ecological fieldwork projects by designing for such openness. But what I’m only now

beginning to understand are the ways that this intellectual work, and the research of the

local itself, demands dispositional change, too.

Emergence and Disposition

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Partiality confronts the ecological fieldworker: what I don’t know, or can’t access,

constantly thrusts itself in front of me. This section grapples with emergence as a

powerful force in ecological fieldwork and the disposition it requires of researchers. I

offer here an account of what it means to coordinate with a project, rather than to

conduct it, the traditional model wherein the researcher understands himself to be the

active agent and the project the necessarily passive creation of that agency. I’m trying

to be both open and systematic in tracking down relations between artifacts and places,

as well as coding them for analysis. This balance, between openness and systematicity,

indicates the limitations of the latter; systematic, in ecological fieldwork, amounts to

something like “oriented to the system,” rather than perfectly pinned down and

annotated. I would argue that the need to adapt one’s analytical framework for new

findings and to allow for a new disposition as a researcher is always in play no matter

what sort of work is pursued, but they are amplified with ecological fieldwork.

At the most fundamental level, hacks of the D.C. flag emerge as a regional

rhetoric. I use the term “regional rhetoric” in Jenny Rice’s sense. Rice writes, “Regional

rhetorics provide alternative ways of framing our relationships and modes of belonging,”

elaborating on them as, “particular (re)makings of patterns within specific material sites.

. . regional rhetorics are more specific and strategic instances of how topoi help to

create space” (“From Architectonic” 203). Hacked flag designs re­write the urban

landscape not in the metaphorical sense, but in both a material way ­­ the objects

populate the space ­­ and in the sense I named earlier as local flavor, a felt sense of

bodies in that space. Specific places in D.C., in other words, co­emerge with this

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regional rhetoric. When I talk with people about the project, local residents see what this

is about right away. Even when such individuals haven’t in highly conscious ways noted

the presence of the Washington flag, our conversation typically calls to mind the

nonconscious impression these objects have made. We all, in other words, acquire a

felt sense of these place/commonplace zones. Some stretches of city street feel like

pop­up gallery spaces for flag design hacks, including U Street NW, the Black

Broadway of historical Washington, and 18th Street NW in Adams Morgan, a

nightlife­rich strip.

Band sticker on U Street NW. Photograph by Matthew Pavesich

Outlining the features of regional rhetorics, Rice notes that they help people, “to

assess, critique, and respond to the global flows that cut through . . . specific local

spaces” (“From Architectonic” 204). Global flows coursing through D.C. include the

seismic shifts I mentioned earlier, substantial population overturn, exploding housing

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cost, and proliferation of high­end dining and shopping. Locally­owned boutique

Redeem, for example, responds to the global flow of big box shopping with a

chalkboard sidewalk sign that reads “Redeem: Defend the District” and features a

hand­drawn flag. Signs like these operate as a consumer call to arms. In seemingly

direct response to the changing racial proportions of Washington, one Magic Marker tag

in a bar bathroom adapts a flag by adding the text, “You’re in D.C. now, Wonderbread!”

This hack suggests another kind of defense the District might require. Advocates of

D.C. statehood, an issue rife with collisions between the local, national, and global, hack

flags by adding text such as “No Taxation without Representation.”

Though not exactly surprising, D.C. flag hacks are wildly diverse. As Hawk put it,

I’ve been discovering “collective points of contact and density” and the “connections

between places and commonplaces.” So far, I’ve identified five subsystems of flag hack

­­ Shop Local, Street Art/Graffiti, Activist, Electoral, and Municipal­ish. These categories

have emerged unevenly and shaped the project over time. The local has determined the

project rather than the other way around, by which I mean that these categories form

through differences among the hacked flags. My tracing began with what I would come

to call Shop Local at Union Market, and now includes Glen’s Garden Market (with

t­shirts featuring a store logo that replacing the flag’s stars with chickens), Whole Foods

(with totes on which cherry blossoms replace the stars), and Off Road bike shop (with a

window sign in which gear cogs replace the stars). Street Art/Graffiti includes crude

graffiti like a sidewalk etching with three letters “x” replacing the stars and the words

“Peter’s Meth Lab” arranged around it, and three­story high, commissioned murals like

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Antarah Crawley’s piece “Greetings from Dystopia City.” Ads for local electoral

candidates flared into view during the campaign cycles, featuring multiple genres, of

course, but predominantly the placard/lawn sign sometimes planted in a small yard but

mostly stapled or taped onto streetlights. Mayoral candidates and those for other

city­wide offices distributed their signs all over the city, but those for advisory

neighborhood councils were more geographically specific of course. The subsystem I

call Cultural Consumption emerged most recently, splitting off from Shop Local. As I

found more and more local bands who hack flags on their promotional flyers and

stickers, it became harder to categorize their activity in the same category as a

newly­opened high­end restaurant. Thus, Cultural Consumption, rather squishy I admit,

includes local bands and D.J.s, and other aspects of the local cultural like museum

exhibits. This is hardly a tidy distinction: restaurants and local bands both desire my

money, but they still feel different to me, which indicates the frequently felt collision

between my method and these constantly emerging categories. Lastly, while I have little

interest in municipal uses, which I don’t see as hacks, I’ve dubbed a category

Municipal­ish in order to tag hacked flags from, for example, initiative partnerships

between a city agency and a local non­profit.

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Sticker for a local activist hacker space. Photograph by Matthew Pavesich

As I hope is clear, these subsystems contain wildly disparate action in and

among them; they are deeply heterogeneous. And while I can’t categorize a substantial

number of the adapted flags I’ve archived so far, I can report this early subsystem

distribution: Shop Local 35%; Cultural Consumption 17%; Street Art/Graffiti 11%;

Activist 10%; Electoral 9% (and remember, the latter flared for only a short time around

the campaigns). These figures leave fully 18% uncategorized (though Municipal­ish is

not yet accounted for) which indicates all the action that continues to push on my

categories, that challenges them and forges new ones. We’ll see if elements of this 18%

eventually coalesce into distinct new subsystems. Each subsystem emerged in this way

as well: I first found Shop Local hacks that day at Union Market, but then I found tags in

alleys and stickers on signs, and Street Art/Graffiti emerged. A next stage of analysis

will include investigation into the spatial distribution of these subsystems. In other

words, does Shop Local tend to be concentrated in a certain neighborhood or

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neighborhoods? Where do we see the densest Street Art/Graffiti occur? Emergence,

though, hasn’t only functioned in the formation of these subsystems.

Other sorts of emergence have also shaped my evolving analysis. For example,

I’ve begun to chart a taxonomy of graphic moves. So far, I’ve noted seven types of

graphic design hack (not to mention ­­ yet ­­ all the different genres, materials, and

methods of circulation). These include adding text; replacing the stars with other

images; replacing the bars with other images; replacing both; spatially re­configuring the

three stars and two bars design, like flipping them upside down or smooshing them into

a pyramid; incorporating these elements into another image, a fairly common example

of which is to turn the stars and bars into a crown on someone’s head; and, lastly,

various combinations of any of these moves. Eventually, I will also look at patterns

across these categories ­­ what sorts of influences shape the hacking within

subsystems? Is there a more common type of topos adaptation in X subsystem? Also,

is there greater incidence of genre and forms of circulation with certain types of hack, or

in certain neighborhoods?

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Political advertisement in which the flag becomes the letter “E.” Photograph by

Matthew Pavesich.

Even my method has evolved as the project has proceeded. Though I designed

the project ecologically, which as a body of thought de­emphasizes the sovereign

rational subject and distributes cognition and writing, I alone collected these initial

images and managed the archive at first. As time passed, I naturally discussed this

work with friends, colleagues, and students, and a kind of organic crowdsourcing

emerged. I began to receive submissions from others, which I was only too happy to

archive. These led to a contact with a reporter at the Washington Post, who wrote an

article on the project, which in turn spurred more submissions from others, this time

from outside of my personal network. I’ve even seen colleagues, like Steph Ceraso at

the University of Maryland ­ Baltimore County, assign their students hacks of iconic city

images, using DC/Adapters as an archive of possible models, which in turn generates

more hacks to archive. This shift, however, from flag hacks as found objects to flag

hacks as resulting from my project itself in some way, raises questions about my place

in terms of this rhetorical production. The project, then, has experienced its own kind of

ecological expansion. In this matter, I turn to Kristie Fleckenstein et al. when they write,

“even as feedback helps the researcher determine the scope of research, it

simultaneously highlights the permeability of any circle a researcher draws to define the

organism­in­its­environment. . . . Project perimeters are not just flexible [but] also

porous” (398). The ecological fieldworker, I’ve found, must remain, “sensitive to the

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porosity of the perimeter” (399). Note they don’t say that the researcher must maintain

this perimeter.

Porosity of this kind suggests something like what Collin Brooke and Thomas

Rickert, in a chapter of Beyond Postprocess, indicate in their prompt for the field to,

“shift our research idiom from retrieval to interaction (175, original emphasis). They

describe the researcher’s interaction with “sentient ecologies,” of a piece with their

posthumanist bent, and while they address Web 2.0 environments and I address an

urban ecology, I’d suggest they share a kind of sentience. A shift from

research­as­retrieval to research­as­interaction amounts to a foundational

methodological shift, especially when we’re dealing with objects still construed in regular

life and academe as semiotic objects, objects to be interpreted. A central part of this

shift, then, includes sliding towards a view in which hacked flag designs function as

rhetors themselves, object­agents in the world rather than the texts of distant human

rhetors. Without coming to understand research as interaction, the researcher dooms

herself to ignore, as Brooke and Rickert put it, “the rich, material interanimation between

people and things of the world” (166).

Ecological fieldwork also requires of researchers a dispositional shift. Sheridan,

Ridolfo, and Michel note that photographs and videos ­­ and archives, too, I would add

­­ often assert themselves as arhetorical. Ecological fieldworkers must actively work

against the appearance of such arhetoricality. For Sheridan et al., the real ethical action

of rhetoric resides in the effort to reveal what’s beneath, to forego the voice of god

narration and foreground uncertainty (131). As I note in Original Guideline 2, I’m

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extremely limited in terms of what I can say about where hacked flags do and don’t

circulate in D.C.; I can only say where I’ve found them in the parts of the city through

which I move. More importantly, I need to create analyses and digital artifacts that

balance my findings with acknowledgement of the partiality of the work. The project, that

is, must foreground that the patterns I identify in these networks crisscross my network

pathways, not the city as a whole. This difference doubles down on the attractiveness of

the increasingly open­sourced method that has emerged in DC/Adapters, but even then,

even as the reach of the project expands, I will still need to foreground its limitations. I

think here of Ralph Cintron’s linking the limitations of ethnography with its value: “What I

like about ethnography is the possibility of mobilizing a complex formula that utilizes

empirical data, reveals sociopolitical constraints, delivers a tentative analysis of social

structure, recognizes the limits of research, and is attuned to love (or at least to

empathy and companionship), and purposefully awakens these inside the ethnographer

and the readers” (10). For Cintron, then, the open­endedness of such work intersects

with the researcher’s ethos; the form of ecological fieldwork, or so I would extend his

argument, coordinates the motions but also the feelings of researchers with their

environments.

People ask me if I plan to interview the humans involved in flag hacking ­­ and

I’m torn. A pre­ecological approach would demand interviews in order to access

authorial intention. I am wary of my ability to balance human rhetors with each object’s

rhetorical power. I’d hate to do anything that would undermine the flat ontology of

humans and objects observed in DC/Adapters and the productive speculation prompted

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by the objects themselves. I don’t want to obscure the point that this is about the flaneur

in a city and how this network of material objects shapes that walker’s (now, walkers’)

experiences of the environment. I want to highlight objects’ opacity and the limits of

access, not tip the project toward the hermeneutic. The things themselves are no more

or less transparent to ecological fieldwork than in other methods, nor can we risk

pretending so. Ecological fieldwork doesn’t seek answers, or at least those on the

model of transparency; ecological fieldwork seeks attunement ­­ the result of sustained

interaction ­­ with the objects themselves, but also within the larger system. Rickert, in

Ambient Rhetoric, suggests the not­so­humble aspirations of projects like mine and a

method like ecological fieldwork: “we take as provisional starting points the dissolution

of the subject­object relation, the abandonment of representationalist theories of

language, an appreciation of nonlinear dynamics and the process of emergence, and

the incorporation of the material world as integral to human action and interaction,

including the rhetorical arts.” (xii). As ethical rhetoricians oriented toward the local, we

can ask of our work neither for more than this nor settle for less.

Mapping and Other Making

Fleckenstein et al. write, “Neither entirely material nor entirely semiotic,

ecologically oriented research is always poised on the edge of difference . . . To

paraphrase Bateson, [it] is undertaken so that new knowledge can be a difference that

makes a difference” (406, emphasis in original). Rhetoricians have always been poised

on this edge, in a way. In the introduction to George Kennedy’s definitive translation of

Aristotle’s On Rhetoric (2nd ed.), he notes how Aristotle vacillates between rhetoric as

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identifying the available means and putting those means to public use (16). Similarly,

Richardson highlights Aristotle’s use of the term dunamis, or the faculty or capacity to

act, another way of highlighting how we are at all times poised between observing the

available means and putting them into action. Ecological fieldwork, because of its up

close and personal engagement with the local, cannot maintain the appearance of mere

retrieval or observation, unlike other forms of research. It will never be enough in

ecological fieldwork, that is, to identify the available means of persuasion. Because

ecological research needs the local, as I suggested earlier, the ecological researcher

finds herself drawn to observe available means as they emerge, collide, and intertwine

in complex systems. Simultaneously, the experience of ecological fieldwork quietly

expresses the demands of the local, nudging the researcher into new and strange forms

of action ­­ to respond to making with making.

Writing studies has become increasingly interested in “making.” James J. Brown,

Jr. and Nathaniel Rivers envision rhetorical carpentry and the composers’ workshop.

Kristin Prins works from the term “craft,” noting that it, “calls to mind a maker, the tools

that maker uses, and the materials that maker shapes into an object. And as the

tradition of craft guilds illustrates, craft also implies a complex of relationships between

a maker’s identity, her interactions with others, and the things she makes” (145).

Alternately, David Sheridan prefers the term “fabrication” in his exploration of 3D

printing and composition. Jeff Grabill argues that rhetoric makes political things: we

must interest ourselves with the “assembl[y] of a we and then caring for that assembly”

(256). Fleckenstein et al. even frame archival work, curation, as a step to networked

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activism (406), a claim echoed by Ben McCorkle and Jason Palmeri in their co­edited

issue of Harlot. Together, these examples illuminate the unprecedented moment of

productive creation in rhetoric and writing studies.

More specifically, mapping has emerged as one prominent mode of scholarly

making. We’ve seen collections like Else/where, an interdisciplinary exploration of digital

mapping techniques in 2006. Scot Barnett explodes past metaphors of space and place

with his elaboration of the “psychogeographical,” the way individuals “re­experience

familiar spaces at the level of the felt (and un­felt) bodily sensation,” and consideration

of Christopher Nold’s Bio Mapping project. Similarly, Jason Farman seems perfectly

justified in examining the intersection between informational and anthropological

cartography. Rhetoric and writing studies has also become increasingly interested in

mapping its own contours. For example, Benjamin Miller maps methods of study in the

field over time. Jeremy Tirrell, with his project Mapping Digital Technology in Rhetoric

and Composition History, “provides access to maps and data that document the history

of digital technology in the field of Rhetoric and Composition.” At rhetmap.org, Jim

Ridolfo charts rhetoric and composition PhD programs and jobs (rhetmap.org). The turn

to mapping in our field reflects a larger cultural shift; data visualization and other digital

visual capabilities seem to have brought about the mapping zeitgeist. You Are Here

(youarehere.cc), a part of the Social Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab, creates

maps that, “will be an aggregation of thousands of microstories, tracing the narratives of

our collective experience. We will make maps of the little things that make up life ­­ from

the trees we hug, to the places where we crashed our bikes, to the benches where we

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fell in love.” CourtVision Analytics “evaluates basketball performance via spatial and

visual modalities” (courtvisionanalytics.com). This American Life seems to have been

ahead of the curve with its episode on mapping in 1998. Fundamentally, the turn to

mapping indicates a growing sensitivity to ecological phenomena, in that they tether us

to the embodied and embedded local and maintain our attention at the level of the

system.

I’ve already begun the making aspect of DC/Adapters with the archive itself, but

the local pushes for more. As with Aristotelian dunamis, this archive gathers materials,

and it also verges into a making, a putting to public use. Mapping, however, is the next

stage. The site already features a heat map, demonstrating the overall spatial

distribution of all hacked flags I’ve found. The heat map highlights the areas with the

densest concentration of artifacts (from my encounters, not a god’s eye view,

remember). Next, I intend to partner with others in order to create a fully interactive map

that includes all identified hacked D.C. flags. The purpose of such an artifact is to offer

to others a digital experience that chronologically and spatially condenses my findings.

Such a map would include my photos of hacked D.C. flags pinned on the location I

found them, featuring filters to highlight items by subsystem category, material, and

method of circulation. Once the interactive map is completed, I intend to move into a

series of static maps with flags by neighborhood overlaid on a variety of data slices. I’ll

identify various proxies for gentrification, and create comparative maps that explore the

correlation between the shape of the hacked flag network and where gentrification is

most intense. These proxies will include the spatial distribution and density of building

23

permits, as well as change in relative wealth over specific time periods and change in

racial populations. Lastly, though I don’t have an even tentative answer yet for this

question, this project has forced me to consider how to map digital and material

circulation pathways onto each other. In a way, the sheer number of maps I intend to

create are more important than any single map. By making a whole series, I hope to

trigger the ethical function mentioned earlier, eschewing the voice of god narration and

foregrounding uncertainty. By piling maps on top of maps, the whole prevents any

single map from seeming to assert a single narrative or transcendent view of action in

this ecology. But there’s no reason to stop with mapping when it comes to the making

aspirations of the project.

After the mapmaking stage of DC/Adapters, I intend to act on the suggestion of a

friend that I first shrugged off, thinking it was too far outside my work as a teacher and

scholar in rhetoric and composition. He suggested putting together a gallery show, and

I’ve warmed to the idea over the last year, especially because I’ve come to believe that

such an ongoing event could, as Grabill put it, “assemble a we and maintain that

assembly.” As of now, I imagine a map of the District covering a gallery’s floor, maybe

coming up the walls, too. I hope to devise a way of displaying every hacked flag on this

map through a combination of material fabrication and projection. Visitors as they move

through the show will shoulder their way through adaptive rhetorics in the dense

clusters in which I found them. This immersed perspective, though, is just the first view;

I hope to devise a means of offering multiple positions from which to view the whole that

allow visitors to see the flag hacks sliced in different ways: by location, sure, but also by

24

subsystem, graphic move, and so on. Perhaps a catwalk view from above will allow a

view of neighborhood distribution. Partially elevated viewing portals from the side might

allow for the artifacts arranged at different elevations to show viewers subsystem

differentiation (so, shop local artifacts are at height X, while street art artifacts are at

height Y, and so viewable as slices). I’m also currently imagining how I might use an

augmented reality app like Tagwhat to virtually annotate each flag for viewers. And

while my imagination is running wild with possibilities, I may as well note that I’d like to

move the show around D.C. and thereby trace new layers to these networks.

Mapping and such other making constitute, “a ‘publics approach,’ [which]

understands publics and their discourse as the best site for making interventions into

material spaces” (Rice, Distant Publics 7). Rice invokes that word “difference” again: “In

other words, rhetorical theory and rhetorical pedagogy can make a difference to the

current development crisis not by interrogating ‘place’ but by helping to shape different

kinds of subjects who can undertake different kinds of work” (Distant Publics 7). The

combination of a publicly available archive, a sizable collection of digital maps, and a

roving gallery show, if successful, might energize a “publics approach” to this particular

local, especially if viewers at differently located galleries were offered materials to hack

the flags themselves for their own purposes.

As Fleckenstein et al. put it “Rather than beginning with a research question or

artifacts, which are the conventional starting points for research, a rhetorical researcher

enacts the systemic nature of ecological thinking through kairos, a move that shifts

research from a process of problem identification and problem solving to a response to

25

the urgency of a particular situation within which the researcher is immersed” (407,

emphasis in original). The local, all locals, always crackle with urgency. D.C.’s current

urgencies include intense development in the context of unique local politics like the

racial proportions of the city and its sub­statehood status. Locally­attuned rhetorical

research, as I have framed ecological fieldwork, coupled with the urge to make, cannot

“stop” gentrification (whatever that would mean) any more than can conventional means

of activism or even well­intentioned policy initiatives. Ecological fieldwork can, however,

activate in oneself and others a kind of sensitivity to and interaction with local environs.

Efforts to interface with the local, like that offered by this volume, must embrace

and extend ecological methods. If rhetorical ecologies haven’t gained traction as much

as some writing studies scholars would prefer, that can only change through

engagement with the local with precisely these methods. The future of rhetorical

research, as it now takes shape on the horizon, eschews retrieval and description and

the placid certainty that such methods historically reinforce. Instead, this future

embraces the essential indescribability of the local. Indeed, you always “have to be

there.” Ecological fieldwork plunges into the messy local, and crosses a threshold where

it becomes ethically impossible not to respond with your own hacking and making. This

is where the lines blur for rhetorical researchers, where we should force ourselves

always, to be with local publics.

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