ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses rhetorical field methods in relation to their critical intersection among communication subdisciplines and elaborates on three commitments of rhetorical field methods as an approach to in situ analysis. Rhetorical field methods operate at the intersections between critical rhetoric, ethnography, and performance studies. The chapter presents some critical problematics central to rhetorical field methods and identifies some heuristic questions and possibilities presented by methodological approach. It discusses rhetorical field methods' contributions to intradisciplinary research efforts in communication. Rhetorical field methods focuses on locating bodies of rhetors and audiences in situ and embraces the challenge of representing how those bodies perform rhetorically. The chapter focuses on how rhetorical field methods attend to lived rhetorical experiences that manifest and circulate in everyday discourses enacting identities and communities, developing social movements and ideologies, and communicating normative and resistive messages. This primary focus on rhetors' bodies to the exclusion of critics' bodies limits understanding of the embodied nature of doing rhetorical criticism.
