Yogic Agency: The Yoga in Composition and Rhetoric

Abstract

Eastern practices have an increasing presence in Western locations of human services, such as mental health, hospitals, non-profits, prisons, K-12 education, among others. This trend includes the university and pedagogies of first year writing. The application of Eastern contemplative practice helps some people in certain circumstances, but its use raises questions. In the university classroom, methods like mindfulness meditation and yoga may offer perspectives that inform pedagogy. But, these interventions often lack concrete applicability to course content, oversimplify theoretical foundation of the original Eastern practices, and seem disparate from, rather than integral to, standard curriculum. My dissertation analyzes how yogic practice is already embedded in the discipline of composition and rhetoric. By resignifying rhetorical scholarship as yogic, I shape a new and amalgamated conception of agency deploying yogic and Western perspectives. I call this yogic agency. By constructing, defining, and unraveling the function of yogic agency in the writing classroom, I extract, analyze, and refigure the yogic philosophy and practice as always and already underlying scholarship of composition and rhetoric. My dissertation integrates yogic and rhetorical perspectives into one. I aim to sharpen and clarify of the role of yoga, as well as other alternative Eastern frameworks, in the Western writing classroom. There is sometimes an assumption that yoga is a pedagogical intervention replacing less effective teaching methods. This operates on the notion that our field is in a position of deficit. Instead, I generate yogic agency to illustrate the feeling of having control of one’s worldview as a means to embody a way of perceiving that one already has everything within in order to become rhetorical agents of one’s own life. I am not presenting a new way of teaching and learning but rather, a pronounced vision of the discipline as yoga surfaces within its theories.