How do we move forward when the legality of teaching and learning about social justice research is called into question by the state? This article demonstrates the efficacy of collaboration as a form of institutional critique that made it possible to provide a comprehensive graduate education following the emergence of anti-DEI legislation in Florida. To teach and learn in a tumultuous legal landscape without sacrificing rigor, eliding DEI-oriented scholarship, or violating state law, we piloted a collaborative disciplinary meta-analysis project that enabled students to study social justice research along with the field’s other major research topics. This portable approach allowed us to meet the professional and ethical imperative to engage research that has been targeted by state officials but remains foundational for disciplinary expertise. It also demonstrates the futility of removing politically unfavorable scholarship from curricula. After sharing an overview of the results of our meta-analysis project, with a special focus on our field’s take on social justice and collaboration, we reflect on the rhetorical strategies those of us working in highly politicized educational climates have deployed to manage increased oversight from zealous state legislatures challenging the legitimacy of disciplinary expertise.

This article interrogates the rhetoric of “self-reliance” as a common feature of discourses about individual and community resilience by examining Canadian food charters in the context of regional food systems aimed at improving community food security. Despite the association of food charters with alternative food systems and progressive politics, we find that their ambiguous and shifting appeals to self-reliance largely conflict with their stated social justice goals of community food security, particularly the goal of alleviating the distress of food insecurity for vulnerable community members. Overall, we argue that the rhetoric of self-reliance in Canadian food charters primarily perpetuates a neoliberal ideology of resilience that promotes an active, enterprising ethos of responsibility for one’s own well-being, whether at the level of individuals, communities, or food systems. Our study thus contributes to critical scholarship that contextualizes and problematizes specific sites and practices of resilience discourse.

This essay uses rhetorical analysis to defend the population geneticist Richard Lewontin from accusations made by E. O. Wilson and others that his Marxist social philosophy distorts his empirical science. I suggest that Lewontin’s appeal to his own authority as an experimental evolutionary biologist supports his claim that racism has no biological justification and that it is his opponents whose assumptions about society distort their scientific arguments.

Analysis of food from its production side is still a comparatively rare topic in rhetorical studies. By analyzing how radical rhetorics in food- and agriculture-related discourses enable economic and political disparities between African-American and Caucasian farmers, this article reveals how such discourses have affected the U.S. public’s understanding of the federal government’s farm subsidy programs.

This poem demonstrates the importance of the Latino/Latina vote in this election year. The reader will be able to find that the Latino experience described in the poem resonates with many other Latino/Latina experiences within our families, communities and society.

In 2009, the public witnessed an upsurge in media discussions about the lower marriage rates of professional black women. In the Unmarriageable Professional Black Woman discourse, the alleged pathological behavior of black men or black women causes marriage disparities, despite the fact that demographic data that can largely account for differences in marriage rates. This paper explores articulations of a heterosexual, and somewhat heteronormative, black female romantic imagination in the twenty-first century, and unpacks how the ideals and pathologies that subjects with various agendas attach to this imagination reveal the complex interplay of western romantic love narratives, black feminism, legacies of the Moynihan Report, and liberal individualism. Through discussions of three prominent examples representing the romantic desires of ambitious and successful black women in popular discourse, I explore how the heterosexual African American woman’s romantic imagination has been idealized and derided, with the idealization reflecting the ways in which feminism has done significant work in updating the romantic fantasy even as patriarchy’s presence is transparent, and the derision illustrating the disciplinary work of patriarchy and a broader national ideology that suggests that individuals are always responsible for not attaining their heart’s desires.

Rhetoric enters into economics frequently at the junctures of alternative government policies and debates grounding competing theories of unexpected events and prudent solutions.When economies turn in widely unanticipated directions, critical discussions arise to spark questions about the legitimacy, power, and correctness of policy response.In October 1932, there appeared in The Times of London a series of brief letter exchanges signed by John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich August von Hayek (along with some of their associates) in which alternative explanations were defended about the causes of economic activity.Those explanations were grounded in macro-and microeconomics, which in the terms of the 1930s were contested as trade cycle or monetary theories (Rizzo, 2009).Also at issue, however, was a choice between alternative strategies of political economy.Nineteen thirty-two appeared to be a time of nascent recovery from the effects of falling equity values, but also could be seen as the beginning of a new era of trade protectionism and monetary contraction.One policy choice was for governments to distribute tax or printed money to citizens in the form of unemployment insurance or guaranteed employment programs to supplement private spending.Another was for governments to exercise restraint in borrowing and spending and let private capital adjust economies to new productive levels by securing good investments over time.While the subsequent decisions of the British government conformed to neither choice unequivocally, the events of the Great Depression that followed have at various times been appropriated by Hayek and Keynes' successors as evidence that the theoretical arguments of one or other have been vindicated by collective experience.The present day is another time in which theoretical controversy and alternative practices are conjoined.Named by some as "the Great Recession," the period that began in 2008 has seen accelerating rates of defaults on loan repayments, job layoffs, financial institutional distress, and speculative shortselling of sovereign debt.But this moment has also

This essay looks at the articulation of Black identity in personal and online contexts. Following Omi and Winant's argument that racial formation is a matter of racial representation within social structures, I examine the Internet as a "third place" for the online representation of Black identity by Blacks and by non-Blacks following two critical incidents in recent public culture: Kanye West's Hurricane Katrina speech and the Rev. Joseph Lowery's inauguration benediction. As a third place, the Internet encourages intimate discursive interaction, similar to the way Black barber shops and beauty salons allowed private spaces for identity discourses between Black men and women. The Internet also opens these formerly private spaces to non-Blacks, who contribute to the articulation of Black identity online.

A creative essay exploring efforts towards racial integration in an Iowa mining town and in an Iowa college town a hundred years later.