Papers by Fernando Delgado
The Velvet Light Trap, 2010
International Journal of Communication, Oct 26, 2011
This essay explores the differences between university administrators and faculty members in the ... more This essay explores the differences between university administrators and faculty members in the context of a challenging environment. While recognizing that there are significant differences in roles and perspectives, the author argues that the divide between faculty and administration, while predictable, need not be as wide nor seen as inherently resulting in conflict. The author suggests that collaboration and willingness to face change can be the only productive response to the many challenges facing higher education. The challenge to higher education is unquestioned. While the specific assaults and typically deleterious effects, as experienced within individual colleges or universities, may vary as a result of size, mission, or location, those of who labor within public and private institutions of higher education no doubt feel as we have entered a crossroads where our future viability is by no means ensured. Bill Readings' The University in Ruins advances a critique of the conversion of the university to a quasi-(on the way to fully) corporate mentality and how this response to external pressures has not protected the university but may have helped erode our core values. There is much truth to this. Accrediting bodies do begin with propositions of total quality management or continuous quality improvement. As finances have become harder to come by, particularly as a result of the financial meltdown, concepts such as lean production (Balzer, 2010; Waterbury, 2011), the need to attend to revenue/cost ratios and to develop strategic revenue models, and forecasting revenue and enrollment have become the concern of both the financial and academic sides of the university (Layzell, 1997, Maguire & Butler, 2008). The result, I fear, is that the vocabulary and discourse of university administration, now becoming ever more professionalized and attendant to the external stressors, have the potential to create ever-widening gaps between administrators and faculty. Of course, as language and meaning go, culture follows. Near the turn of the millennium, and several years before the first of two large economic meltdowns during the past decade, Philip Altbach (1999) observed, "American higher education finds itself in a period of significant strain. Financial cutbacks, enrollment uncertainties, pressures for accountability, and confusion about academic goals are among the challenges American colleges and universities face at the end of the twentieth century" (p. 271). More than a decade after Altbach's observation, we would agree that these pressures are only more acute. Similarly, Altbach noted how the heart of the universitythe curriculum and the faculty who own and deliver it-is also under withering attack: "higher education has come under widespread criticism. Some argue that the academic system is wasteful and inefficient
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2004
This essay explores the visual and discursive elements of Americanos, a published collection of p... more This essay explores the visual and discursive elements of Americanos, a published collection of photographic images of Latina/o life in the United States. While clearly a mass-market text intended for enjoyment and edification, Americanos also serves as a mass-mediated rhetoric through its location and its representation of Latina/o life and cultural practices. We argue that, in this role, Americanos serves the project of a critical rhetoric by articulating a vernacular rhetoric, and we explore how the verbal and visual fragments in Americanos invent a Latina/o community while reifying Latina/o differences. We conclude that Americanos implicitly critiques how Latina/o identities have been flattened and distorted by dominant discourses. A long-standing tension exists between the persistence of specific Latina/o identities and the pursuit of a pan-Latino identity. As a consequence, the articulation of a unified Latina/o cultural community has been elusive. Geographically situated Latina/o identities-each with their own sense of community and ethnicity-such as Chicanos in the southwest, Cuban-Americans in south Florida, and Boricuas in the northeast, complicate the pursuit of a singular Latino identity, community, ideology, or aesthetic. In terms of politics, these divisions have manifested themselves in party affiliations and political attitudes. In cultural forms (literature and performance) Latina/os have demonstrated their predisposition for attachment to the U.S. as well as a nostalgia for their cultural homes. In the visual arts, the variety of Latinismos has led to tensions resulting from the tendency to totalize Latino-ness through the prism of a particular Latino aesthetic. As Dávila (1999) observes, "in corroborating the Latinness of particular works or artists by relating them to particular Latin cultures
Communication Theory, 1998
This essay explores the role that race plays in rhetorical theorizing. Linking the literature in ... more This essay explores the role that race plays in rhetorical theorizing. Linking the literature in critical race theory (CRT), critical rhetoric, and vernacular criticism, the essay examines the case of Proposition 187 for the ways in which race was deployed and occluded. The essay demonstrates that rhetoricians can and should systematically assess racial dimensions in communicative practices. Such a rhetorical turn emphasizes race as part of historical, legal, political, and cultural discourses. The authors build a case for a racialized critical rhetorical theorizing (RCRT). Fear turns us against our neighbors, and so it begins. Joseph Altick (1994) Within the field of rhetoric, there is perhaps no more volatile subject that the issue of "race" and racial construction. In spite of the clarion calls that theorists need to sensitize themselves to the ideological components between rhetoric, "text," and audience (McGee, 1990; McKerrow, 1989; Wander, 1983), we are still in the early stages of theorizing about the role that race plays in various rhetorical cultures.' McPhail (1994) has recently remarked that "there has been scant discussion of race and rhetoric which incorporates contemporary perspectives" (p. 8). Even when critics have looked at race, there is a tendency
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Papers by Fernando Delgado