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Contact me! E-mail: robertcs@purdue.edu
Purdue University Department of Communication BRNG 2114 100 North University Street West Lafayette, IN 47907-2098
Telephone: (765) 494-3429 |
Chris Roberts |
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Doctoral Candidate Rhetoric and Organizational Communication |
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Rhetorician, Forensicator, Critical Theorist, Ludologist, Technician—and Technomancer! |
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Who I am and what drives my research |
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TECHNICIAN
Prior to pursuing my PhD, I worked as a software consultant for Aspect Communications (now known as Aspect Software). My experiences in the telecom world offered me tremendous opportunities for travel, visiting complex corporate environments, and engaging technologies as I saw them implemented in Fortune 500 companies.
FORENSICATOR
As the coach for the Purdue Speech and Debate team, I spend a huge amount of time with the students preparing them for tournaments, teaching argumentation and debate theory, as well as doing all the administrative work (hotel reservations, tournament entries, national memberships). The amount of effort for a single coach to sustain our team is mind-boggling, but I am also happy to have the opportunity to continue doing what I enjoy while pursuing my PhD. Purdue is a small program, with a small budget. We raise half of our travel budget from our annual invitational tournament. As the head coach, I essentially act as director, having complete control of the budget, practice sessions, and navigating our university’s bureaucracy. Our department treats forensics the same as teaching one section of public speaking with no course reduction. This semester, I teach two upper level sections along with coaching forensics. While it certainly tests my organizational skills and is a huge workload compared to the other graduate students, I would never trade the opportunity. I know this experience will train me well for the right position at the right university that fully supports a forensics program and understands the workload. As an undergraduate, I debated on scholarship at Western Kentucky University. My WKU experience is a very special one to me and I am honored to have witnessed the program become what it is today. When I started at WKU, our program was still quite small and met all the obstacles many other programs currently face. Fortunately, we had a very special person, Judy Woodring, that pushed us not only to do our best, but pushed the administration to support the program. By the time I had finished at WKU, I had earned my own national debate championship title (that I share with Doug Mory) as well as coached some of the best debaters (and the best people!) in the country.
LUDOLOGIST
My first year at Purdue, I met two brilliant researchers, Professor Charles Stewart, a rhetorical scholar, and Professor Samantha Blackmon, a critical theorist. Under Professor Stewart, I learned the tenets of rhetorical criticism and had my first opportunity to apply them to the virtual online word in his extremist rhetoric on the internet class. Samantha Blackman led me on a critical journey into the heart of technology, computers, and rhetoric. As a critical/rhetorical scholar, I am interested in the ways that technology influences and shapes our perceptions of reality. My preferred focus is on internet gaming. Authors such as TL Taylor, E. Castrnova, James Gee, Jasper Juul and Lisa Nakamura have all written about the MMORPG (massively multi-player online role playing game) phenomenon. My personal interests are to take those theories, apply them and extend them—as well as apply/extend Burkean notions of identification to the online realm.
CRITICAL THEORIST
I have always looked at the world from a different perspective, and after having worked with scholars interested in notions of power and control (Robin Clair, Jennifer Ziegler, Samantha Blackmon) I have gained more interest in this approach as a method of understanding. Carter Woodson said it best, in The Miseducation of the Negro: “If you can control a man’s [sic] thinking you do not have to worry about his [sic] action. When you determine what a man [sic] shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he [sic] will do. If you make a man feel that he [sic] is inferior, you do not have to compel him [sic] to accept an inferior status, for he [sic] will seek it himself. [sic]” (p. 84). Other scholars, such as Lisa Nakamura have extended these theories into the online realm, in her study of menu-based driven identities. Specifically as it applies to online spaces, the hegemonic order tends to get reproduced. As a critical theorist, my goal is to explore these spaces and generate “new tools for living” (in the Burkean sense). |
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Doctoral Candidate Rhetoric and Organizational Communication |