Deflective Whiteness weaves together an anti-essentialist analytic across mediated rhetorics; its transmedia methodology is a novel and notable approach to thinking through the intertextual nature of racial formation in the era of “new racism” by studying the ideological functions of decontextualization, the superficial representation of Black and Latinx identity politics used to secure White dominance.

We argue that calling attention to how workplace writing is constructed in rhetorical contexts is a useful way to disrupt the seemingly “common sense” logic of professional participation. The first part of this article introduces the framework’s questions and explains the purpose of the framework. The second part of the article describes two writing assignments from our classrooms to illustrate how the framework functions as a prefigurative approach.

Dear Present Tense Community, Many universities are facing difficulties, and we have encountered challenges particularly tough for an independent journal like Present Tense that depends upon the uncompensated and often invisible labor of junior and senior scholars alike. As a result, we have experienced an unexpected hiatus snowballing from COVID. Nevertheless, today we are happy to announce our plans for moving […]

Showcasing the many intersections of public rhetoric, current controversies, and effective pedagogy, the authors in this issue of Present Tense bring to light some remarkable instances of persuasive techniques and offer nuanced critiques of those moments in less than 2,500 words.

Written prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Heidi Yoston Lawrence introduces her monograph, Vaccine Rhetorics, with a . . . candid and vulnerable personal story about refusing the rotavirus vaccine booster for her son. She then goes on to make an astoundingly prescient claim: “Even the most ardent supporter of vaccination might one day be faced with a new requirement that comes with a new risk that might demand a reconsideration of support” (xiv).

Flores’ key contribution to the field is to highlight the constitutive force of this figuration in sustaining racial national projects. She argues that the narratives characterizing Mexican migrants as temporary and cheap labor have constituted Mexicans as deportable, disposable, and racialized as illegal.

“Appalachia” is a loaded word, and, as rhetoricians, we know how much one word can matter. . . . There is, as Adichie claims, danger in a single story; all people, in all places, deserve to be viewed with nuance, with attention towards the many stories that make up a place.

This makes me wonder, isn’t the whole point of having easy access to healthcare to enable human beings to live a better life, irrespective of their race, religion, gender, nationality, class, or economic status? Isn’t healthcare a basic human right provided even to the minority ethnic populations, like myself, so that we can live a life of dignity and good health?

With Miller and Iverson’s findings, not only are handbooks at the center of college students’ ideologies, but they are also texts that uphold the power of those in charge—those who have a vested interest in underreporting and dismissing allegations of sexual violence. Thus, as the field has already set forth: language around sexual violence matters not only for material conditions but also societal ideologies.

“Diversity is not an End Game: BIPOC Futures in the Academy” marks the final installment in a conversation across multiple journals that examines the injustices behind crisis-driven diversity initiatives within the academy and how these initiatives impact BIPOC across the fields of rhetoric, composition, and communication. Following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Amhad Aubrey,1 and too many others—as well as the incompetent and often hypocritical responses by institutions across the nation—we deemed it necessary to highlight the myriad ways that BIPOC are forced to experience duress, navigate threatening spaces, and leverage precious resources within the academy. These unjust conditions reflect the harms that we must already strive to survive in everyday life and disprove the myths of meritocracy and academic “safe spaces.”

What does it mean for BIPOC, especially in the academy where teaching holds profound cultural and economic value, when past racism is repackaged as future pedagogical opportunity? How does white time weaponize pedagogy to “dictate the pace” (Cooper) of racial progress? The above examples demonstrate how the white, neoliberal academy’s deep investment in teaching/learning can naturalize ongoing modes of embodied and epistemic racial violence. Indeed, the continued retroactive acknowledgment of racial violence in the institution and its renarration as teaching/learning opportunity often do not signify “progress” as much as they render the real violences faced by BIPOC in the academy and otherwise as abstract “objects” for future white dissection. Furthermore, these rhetorics also obscure the ongoing pedagogies of BIPOC in the academy—both in the classroom and “backchannels”—that have long refused the projects of white time and space.

To clarify our opening, we don’t resent this essay. We resent that to make Indigenous space with a bunch of well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning folx is to brace ourselves for an act of settler colonial violence and white nonsense. Whether we are trying to do our own work and just need some damn permit approval, are staging institutional interventions, or invested in long-term collaboration, our everyday work feels like one meeting to get the task done and three meetings to educate settlers on Indigenous beliefs, practices, and communities. Or, we learn that people are trying to do this work on their own in the name of not putting more emotional labor on BIPOC and then they’ve gone and pissed off the elder they are working with or didn’t practice the right protocols for consultation and input and someone—whether it’s an Indigenous person or not, has reached out to us to come and fix it. Even aunties don’t got time for that shit. What follows are a series of statements, practices, and observations on how we want to move forward in regard to working or not working with settlers in our institutions and professions.

This essay is concerned with what we have described . . . as the politics of summoning. We offer our own experiences as a case study in order to demonstrate how white scholars evoke these summonings, the means by which they reprimand and attempt to retain control of those who refuse to answer their call, and their calls for collective violence against scholars of color when we refuse to comply.

This text explores our work as Women of Color (WoC) nurturing spaces and practices in response to the mirages of support, the inadequacy of resources, and the tepid responses to systemic oppression within the diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts of our university, a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) in the Midwest. Via reflective vignettes, we discuss developing a community art collaboration as a counterspace, defined by various scholars as “social spaces … which offer support and enhance feelings of belonging” (Ong, Smith, and Ko 2018, 207) for minoritized students. Throughout this text, we discuss the potential of art-based projects shaped by an anti-racist praxis as resistance to the “check-the-box” institutional diversity efforts, and as transformative spaces to imagine alternative academic futures for Women of Color staff, faculty, and students.

Dream, Ricardo. Dream, knowing this world is meant for individuals like me and you. At times, the hardest part of Life is living, my father would say to me. When it all feels like too much, find your core and reach back: we’ll be here for you, always. I love you, Dad.

Scholarship in rhetoric and composition explores intersections between race and gender, especially within writing program administration (Craig and Perryman-Clark “Troubling the Boundaries; Craig and Perryman-Clark “Boundaries Revisited). While exploring intersections between race and gender, particularly in conjunction with BIPOC experiences, the focus often shifts to microaggressive experiences, pain, and hopeful processes for healing (Carey “A […]

This article examines Thunberg’s speech within the context of democratic deliberation, citizenship, and the practice of parrhesia, the rhetorical tradition of speaking truth to power within the public sphere, especially when doing so is risky. Thunberg’s status as a child, especially one with disabilities, makes her outspokenness transgressive within the context of a meeting of adult world leaders and scientific experts. Thunberg’s performance demonstrates how parrhesia can be reimagined as not only the duty of the citizen as it is Classically perceived, but also as a demand for citizenship from those traditionally excluded from that role.

In this article, I consider the political ramifications of the Kansas shooting—specifically, a Republican politician’s uptake of Kuchibhotla’s widow, Sunayana Dumala, to support broadly anti-immigrant policies—as a form of rhetorical “brownwashing.” Racist violence is written into the deep structure of the U.S. settler colonial state, and we cannot neatly periodize it within presidential administrations. That being said, . . . “brownwashed” conservatism in the aftermath of the Trump era reveals the contradiction between conservative understandings of “acceptable heterogeneity” and violent, racist acts that do not discriminate between different members of “heterogeneous” racialized peoples. Rhetorics of acceptable difference perpetuate ideologies that make racist, violent acts possible.

From May through July 2020, we collected several hundred images shared on Facebook depicting blame for U.S. Covid-spread. Across these posts, we identified recurring patterns of blame accomplished through two rhetorical devices: attenuation and augmentation. We found two themes in these patterns of blame: individualizing social unsafety and identifying Americans as outsiders. In this article, we explain the processes of panopticonning, and provide examples of the two discourses of blame that result from panopticonning in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

My argument is that the ableist rhetorical framing of disability in the 2020 campaign trail has predominantly been used to delegitimize candidates for alleged disabilities—and in doing so, has contributed to an ableist project further stigmatizing disabled people and situating them as outside of the possibility of democratic agency. Furthermore, I argue that this ablenationalist project by which disabled bodyminds are delegitimized is more difficult to critique in a political culture of demagoguery which ultimately dismisses critiques of ableism as partisan critiques against a political party as well as uses authoritarian dismissal of disabled people as rhetorically suspect.

In this article, we investigate the platform politics and technological dynamics at play on Facebook that allowed Russian politically motivated advertisements to be purchased with Rubles during the 2016 election season. These ads were purchased using a currency that clearly indicated an attempt by a foreign power to influence a US election, something prohibited by the FEC (Federal Election Commission, “Foreign Nationals”). In the Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing, Senator Al Franken asked Facebook VP Colin Stretch, “American political ads and Russian money: rubles. How could you not connect those two dots?”

This article examines tensions within infertility advocacy campaigns, like #Access2Care, which seek to improve access to healthcare, yet, at times operate within an advocacy framework that fails to listen to the very subjects they seek to empower. Ultimately, such actions lead to a misrepresentation of what empowerment means for the advocacy subject, and in doing so, fractures coalition-building. In response to these shortcomings, I outline a rhetorical framework built on relational advocacy and illustrate how rhetorical scholars can contribute to advocacy campaigns.

While we do not consider the 14 categories and 207 entries that constitute this bibliography to be absolutely comprehensive of all work in the field of global rhetorical studies, we hope readers will recognize the following goals in our selections: to increase rhetorical knowledge globally; to create new kinds of collaborations; and to promote the circulation of key sources of knowledge about rhetorical practices that occur in other cultures. This includes both broadening and narrowing field definitions of “rhetoric” and “non/Western” so as to include a wide range of communicative practices beyond the Aristotelian frame without making either term overly expansive.

Cloud, Dana. Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture. Ohio State UP, 2018. As a nation, the US is obsessed with facts. Punch the terms “Trump” and “fact check” into any search engine, and you will discover a litany of websites and articles annotating the misinformation circulated by the […]

Hlavacik, Mark. Assigning Blame: The Rhetoric of Education Reform. Harvard Education Press, 2016. Mark Hlavacik’s Assigning Blame: The Rhetoric of Education Reform is an in-depth analysis of conversations of and about the public school system in America, done through recounting advocacy acts and reforms that have impacted the system. By revealing major historical management issues […]

Hawhee, Debra. Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Debra Hawhee’s extraordinarily complex, theoretically layered work Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation explores the ancient and ongoing contributions of nonhuman animals in rhetorical production, joining other rhetoric and writing scholars who have taken up the convergences between […]

“Showcasing the many intersections of public rhetoric, current controversies, and effective pedagogy, the authors in this issue of Present Tense bring to light some remarkable instances of persuasive techniques and offer nuanced critiques of those moments in less than 2,500 words.”

NCTE/CCCC Cross-Caucus Present Tense Special Issue: “Diversity is not an End Game: BIPOC Futures in the Academy.” Edited by Ersula Ore, Kimberly Wieser, & Christina Cedillo. This issue pursues answers for how BIPOC in the academy can build towards futures while on foundations of precarity. To this end, we seek 150-300-word abstracts from BIPOC scholars that address the question. All abstracts must be accompanied by an 25-75 author’s bio that includes institution, rank, department, and research interests. Please email abstracts and author bios to Ersula Ore at ejore@asu.edu by April 20, 2021 no later than 11:59 MST. Accepted submissions are due July 18, 2021.

“We’re excited to announce our two new Co-Managing Editors: Jessica Clements, an Associate Professor of rhetoric and composition, and previously a Style Editor for Present Tense, and John Pell, an Associate Professor of rhetoric and composition and Associate Dean.”

“Showcasing the many intersections of public rhetoric, current controversies, and effective pedagogy, the authors in this issue of Present Tense bring to light some remarkable instances of persuasive techniques and offer nuanced critiques of those moments in less than 2,500 words.”

“As we teach deliberative and engaged rhetoric, we can use this case as an exhibit for students. The revisions to the Common Rule illustrate how publicly engaged rhetoricians can negotiate the policy process and help undo decades of systematic marginalization—marginalization that has occurred as a direct result of language.”

“This article is a call to interrogate the seemingly mundane terms we use when we talk about online life. The fact that we create hierarchies that oppose the digital to the physical or dematerialize the digital through language is a subtle yet important framing we can push back on in our research and teaching.”

“A rhetoric of 心 challenges the epistemological divides present in American, and more broadly, Western Liberal Democracies, and can also be seen at work in the recent emergence of American identity politics.”

“By insisting that young people can determine their circumstances through properly regulating their fertility, Power to Decide continues to contribute to misleading rhetoric about young parents and inaccurate explanations of social inequality.”

“Pitting feeling rules against affective publics, and examining how student-athletes are placed at their center, raises future research questions about pressurized rhetorical bodies and social justice movements. How have student-athletes and professional-level athletes accorded with institutional feeling rules and engaged with the rhetorical-affective work of activists and oppositions?”

“Ideobodies like the “law-abiding citizen” allow rhetors to establish analogous material claims to others’ lived experiences, serving as a powerful and flexible tool that can be observed and identified in public contestations like the HB-2074 committee hearing, where claims to place rest in asserting one’s lived experience as artifact and argument.”

“If activists/rhetoricians don’t create and perform new rhetorical practices in response to visiting rhetors like Spencer, the American academy will be a crueler, more unjust place for it.”

“Taken together, Dolmage and Estreich show how nostalgic stories about the past are intertwined with anxieties about the future and the presence of certain bodies in that future.”

“Mifsud accomplishes the rare feat of joining a skilled historical treatment with a rich set of theoretical resonances that are widely applicable to works on other periods and topics. Moreover, she accomplishes this historicized yet generative treatment in a playful, yet learned style.”

“Holmes provides a scholastic exploration and personal examination of what it means to revisit research, explore rhetors, and reframe history as a means to answer one’s own questions about identity, social justice, and change-making.”

“Our editors are currently busy putting courses online, helping graduate students run their courses, and doing our best to remain healthy, happy, productive members of our communities. It is likely that our editorial timelines will change and our typical turnaround times will be longer.”

“Welcome to Present Tense Volume 8, Issue 1 (Fall 2019). As we announce the first installment of our 8th volume, we’d like to take a moment to thank everyone whose work throughout the years has contributed to our success in publishing cutting-edge rhetorical scholarship on important contemporary social and political issues.”

“In arguing that neoliberalization remakes public space in contradictory ways, this study aligns with and contributes to the rhetorical study of institutions and of the production of space.”

“Though certainly not new to human experience, President Trump’s self-epideictic does mark cultural shifts in deliberative styles and argumentative proofs that should be of interest to rhetoricians. The proliferation of self-epideictic may signal changes in how we argue public policy effectively, with a potential chilling effect on democratic deliberation.”

“In this Spanish-English film set in the near future, a high-tech border wall seals off the US from México. Mexicanos no longer enter the US to work and instead use virtual labor technologies to perform services from afar, which serves as a techno-futuristic play on the twentieth century bracero program.”

“This article recounts how my research approach accentuated the expertise of members of the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing community and their collective desire for improved access. I share my principles here as a contribution to methodologies and methods in rhetoric and related fields …”

“While the language of investment appears on many civic crowdfunding websites, Neighborly makes the investment literal rather than metaphorical by brokering the sale of municipal bonds: loans obtained by state and local governments to finance public works projects.”

“With such a small, affluent, and diverse group of readers, a tiny circulation, and an obvious absence on myriad bookstore and grocery store shelves, Bitch Magazine would likely be less effective in its goal of responding to popular culture using a radical feminist lens.”

“In the aftermath of Minassian’s attack, women once again raised their voices. They offer insight into their experiences. They remind the commentariat that we’ve already had this conversation before, that we’ve warned about the dangers of online communities that radicalize aggrieved men and champion acts of gender violence.”