System.out.println("Hello, World!");

Hello, World! My name is Stephen Quigley and I'm the Clemson Geopaths' rhetorician / artist-in-residence / something-or-other.  I'll be posting regularly to share what I'm doing with my composition classes, Clemson Geopaths, and my dissertation...entitled the Clemson Ghost Tour: Disrupting Stagnant Ecologies...more on that later. 

Why am I here? I want to help. I want to help you think about your research and how you might better connect with the public.

How'd I get here? For years I was a happy-go-lucky bicycle-commuting high school English, philosophy, creative writing teacher. But one day, I woke up and realized that the waters are rising and not enough of us are acting. Sure more and more of us are taking notice, but what are we doing about it? Instead of acting, we seem to be living in the present past, reproducing the same mistakes over and over again. How might we move into a way of being more focused on the present future?

So like I said, the waters are rising. As a rhetor, I think I'm in a unique position to help. As a rhetor, I'm always thinking about how I can use my writing, making, and teaching to help others think about the design of our world and how it, in-turn, designs us. But while our empiricism may help us unconceal the severity of our global situation, our communications must go a step further--are you ready?--they must help our audience realize their agency.

How do we do that?  I think this question should be the overarching goal of this blog: to seek out transformative examples of science communication. 

-Stevo