Dr. Haixia Lan will present:
Communicating with the Other, Understanding the Self, Recognizing Biases
Comparative Rhetoric
One of the many goals of UWL’s current strategic planning for achieving excellence is to enhance the ability to recognize bias so as to advance transformational education through inquiries that are cross-cultural and interdisciplinary. In this presentation, Dr. Lan will examine the difficult concept of boundary as a key to recognizing bias, and will use as an example Comparative Rhetoric, a field of study that is fundamentally interdisciplinary as well as cross-cultural. More specifically, she will compare Confucian and Aristotelian rhetoric to illustrate how porous and yet real the boundaries between the two are and therefore how problematic and yet useful boundaries between rhetoric of the self and of the other can be. In doing so, she attempts an inquiry into the elusive but also real differences between cultural values and biases, both of which are probable and rhetorical. Her hope is to show that the diversity of the self and the other needs to be both constantly negotiated and always preserved because it makes meaningful relationship not only challenging but also possible. She hopes also that reflecting upon boundaries this way can contribute to the recognition and transformation of them.
It is scheduled for Oct. 20 from 2:30-3:30 p.m. in Wimberly 112