A few words on the “big-picture” theoretical framing of the RSA Project are in order before we move on to discuss the way the project was organized and to introduce the contributions to this volume. As noted above, we view engaged scholarship as entwined with issues of power, place, and publics and thus focused the RSA Project around these concepts. Unlike those who endorse some version of Habermas’s ideal speech act in which public participants hold their interests in check, listen carefully to others, and determine the best course of action for all involved, rhetoricians have long asserted that deliberation cannot be quarantined from the power dynamics that complicate the process and prevent perfect decision-making. For this reason, rhetorical fieldwork must not only include diverse voices, but also place a conscious stress on how power moves structurally through institutions and unpredictably through interpersonal relationships informed by class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other identity markers. Putting rhetoric to use on a specifically situated issue requires groups that intellectually and experientially engage these power relations. Consequently, the working groups, as we imagined them, would participate in constituent-based practices as a means to develop sensibilities for the differentiated and sometimes unexpected ways that diverse groups speak as well as the uneven patterns that inform the reception of their statements. By engaging in those relationships, participants put their scholarly selves to use in pragmatic ways that challenge the presumption of academic work as the practice of disinterested and distanced analysis. And, by doing so through a wide variety of subfields with different methods, the concern for inequitable power relationship would not become pegged to a particular theory; on the contrary, power relations would be a foundational inquiry across diverse rhetorical work. Whether walking through neighborhoods, speaking to local stakeholders, listening to resident experts, surveying local concerns, recording the visual representations of the area, shadowing the movements and patterns of residents, or digitally designing alternative landscapes, participants would interact with, if only briefly, the pervasive flows of unequal power that saturate the rhetorical life of an evolving place with competing interests.

Publics theory has an extensive history of engaging both power and place as it theorizes how groups come together to discuss and advance solutions to local problems. This history—in both its public and its counterpublic variations—seemed to us inextricably linked to a project that would attempt to leverage the “growing energy around the participatory turn in rhetorical studies” for the collective exploration of a local exigency.⁴ Participants would not have time, knowledge, or sufficient connections to forge publics, but they could engage publics in both their inchoate forms (informal neighborhood groups) and their fully developed forms (writing groups, business communities, and historical preservation groups). As we had hoped, participants did build relationships with these publics and, in some cases, helped foster coalitions among them. Even as they approached locals with previously formed positions and advocacy practices, they did so with a recognition that, like all publics, these groups are in a perpetual process of evolving their immediate concerns in relationship to larger ones. In a site like Reno, for instance, neoliberal pressures toward privatization, individual responsibility, and the supremacy of market logics are deeply entangled with local exigencies. Local publics constantly adapt themselves to a fluctuating terrain of inequitable relations forged by a volatile political economy, one responsible for the 2008 recession that hit Reno so hard and the subsequent structural adjustments to the city and the university. Echoing Robert Asen who recently argued that neoliberal practices pose a significant “obstacle for a vibrant critical publicity,” many of the RSA Project working groups struggled to voice their concerns and perspectives in relationship to this prevailing public sphere and its free market doctrine.⁵ These struggles represent an important part of the RSA Project and need to be documented along with its successes. Ongoing negotiations among local groups and the pervasive forces that contour productive possibilities are part and parcel of public work as a rhetorically fluid process with an unguaranteed capacity to make change.⁶

So conceived, the RSA Project’s emphasis on power, place, and publics would serve as a heuristic across multiple and divergent working groups’ rhetorical fieldwork. We intended it to push participants toward a space of invention beyond bifurcated positions such as the preservation versus the demolition of what currently exists (both for on-campus and for off-campus buildings) or students versus permanent residents. Positioned in this inventional space, the different working groups would determine their goals in collaboration with local liaisons from the university and the community. From there, participants would both conduct fieldwork and meet with their group in traditional university settings to pull their findings together, reflect on the process, and report back to others.

When engaging in dynamic situations, scholars need time to refuel, reflect, and revise. They must, as John Ackerman and Meghan Dunn argue, “return to a familiar homeland.”⁷ Human beings, even those who imagine themselves as part of counterpublics and social movement politics, are not equipped to exclusively antagonize and resist. They must also cooperate and collaborate. When placed into unfamiliar situations and asked to stretch their professional imaginations, they must have opportunities to return to their rhetorical wheelhouse, give voice to familiar commonplaces, and feel at home in their professional identity. The RSA Project we envisioned asked participants to experiment with different rhetorical maneuvers. But it also allowed them time for discussion, reflection, and synthesis—familiar practices help ground participants in professional norms. Perhaps most exemplifying the traditional academic homeland was the final luncheon symposium. We tasked groups to synthesize their work for a final symposium presentation. First, they were given space to report to the other RSA Project participants in what might be more familiar ways and, second, they were asked to address the local audience, including university administrators and city leaders. In adapting to the non-academic context, participants moved away from the homeland, which produced mixed results: concrete suggestions clearly piqued the interest of the guests, while more adamant neoliberal critique seemed to alienate that audience. Nevertheless, the practice of engaging a shared object of study through multiple lenses, communicating tentative findings, and having immediate feedback proved valuable both to the local participants who found a renewed opportunity to engage this exigence and to the rhetoricians who had to wrestle with diverse responsibilities of a dynamic situation unfolding in real time. In the next section, we detail the planning that brought the RSA Project to fruition.

Rethinking an academic professional meeting to be an intensive, engaged fieldwork experience was an extension of what rhetoricians on our campus were already thinking about and doing with undergraduates in their courses.⁸ We often asked students to study their changing campus community by exploring the many new buildings under construction as well as published plans that framed and defined this campus development. Of particular interest was the Campus Master Plan 2015–2024 (CMP), an administrative vision that addressed a dual exigence: the growing student population and the aspirational goal of achieving a Carnegie Research High status. The enrolled student population of about 18,000 students in 2012 grew by 5% increments in both 2014 and 2015—increases that strained building capacity and classroom availability. When the student population reached 20,000, the university began plans to expand campus to accommodate up to 22,000 students. Its plan included more student residences, classroom and lab facilities, offices for the additional faculty, and spaces for recreation and art.⁹ Concurrently, the City of Reno was engaged in open discussions of how to move beyond its primarily gambling and tourist economy. Among other possibilities, the City saw an opportunity to reinvent itself as a university town with university-industry partnerships leading the economy.¹⁰ Seizing on this vision, the university administration collaborated with faculty, staff, students, business leaders, government workers, and interested citizens to outline a plan for the physical and conceptual expansion of the campus footprint. It drafted its CMP with an eye toward the interplay between campus and city, infrastructure, educational mission, and the prospects of community partnerships.¹¹ To regenerate downtown Reno and reestablish town and gown relationships, expansion of the campus would have to be southward into the downtown area, bridging the I-80 corridor that has long divided campus from the city center. Development south would also reinforce the impression of Reno as a university town by enabling visitors to see the UNR campus from both downtown and I-80.

The timing of RSA’s biennial Summer Institute coi...