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OSU English Alumna’s Book wins CCCC Outstanding Book Award
Krista Ratcliffe’s third book, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, was one of two winners of the 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award. The CCCC Outstanding Book Award is presented annually to the author or editor of a book that makes an "outstanding contribution to composition and communication studies."
In Rhetorical Listening, Ratcliffe "examines how whiteness functions as an 'invisible' racial category and provides disciplinary and cultural reasons for the displacement of listening and for the use of rhetorical listening as a code of cross-cultural conduct." She studies eavesdropping and listening metonymically and pedagogically as "approaches to rhetorical listening." Her theory is grounded in classical rhetorical theory, Heideggerian theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory.
An alumna of Ohio State’s Rhetoric and Composition Ph.D. program, Ratcliff wrote her dissertation, "Words of One's Own: Toward a Rhetoric of Feminism in Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich," in 1988. She is the author of three books, including: Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich; and, Who's Having This Baby?: Perspectives on Birthing. Ratcliffe teaches Rhetoric and Composition, Feminist Theory, and Women’s Studies at Marquette University, where she directs their first-year English program.
