Sullivan and Porter view research as a set of critical and reflective practices that should be sensitive to the rhetorical situated-ness of participants and technologies and that should operate as a form of political and ethical action. The authors revisit the issue of the ethics and politics of research, but do so from the frame of postmodern rhetorical theory and feminist methodology. Our critical practices perspective sees methodology for the study of writing not as a rigid set of structures to be applied without question to a set of writing phenomena. Rather than granting abstract Theory or Knowledge the priveleged position, this research perspective sees knowledge as local, as contingent, and as grounded not in universal structures but in local, situated practices. Attention to the distinctive nature of writing as a situated practice is essetial, then, to the methodological philosophy we are developing.
Audiences expand the mythologies of a creator's world.