“Just as The Essay wouldn’t be The Essay without LeBron, The Essay wouldn’t be The Essay without NE Ohio. What comes to matter in circulation, as a result of circulation, is that The Essay is marked by its regional appeal.”

“In the ongoing quest to account for rhetoric’s “dynamic and distributed dimensions,” then, Still Life with Rhetoric contributes a robust new materialist methodology to the burgeoning scholarly reconsiderations of the material, temporal and consequential things of collective life.”

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society invites proposals that investigate, theorize, and/or analyze the rhetorical work of platforms. By platforms, we draw on Tarleton Gillespie to mean “sites and services that host public expression, store it on and serve it up from the cloud, organize access to it through search and recommendation, or install […]

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society is currently looking to bring two new editors to our current editorial team: Multimedia Editor and Review Editor. Multimedia Editor: The Multimedia Editor serves as the chief decision-maker for the technical and stylistic use of video, audio, and other means of persuasive presentation. As a member of the editorial staff, this person […]

“This issue features a range of topics, but despite their diversity, the articles share a common thread of embodiment and affect, two areas toward which much current rhetorical scholarship is directed. While theories of embodiment and affect frame just a few of these essays, all of them reflect the centrality of bodies and emotion in discourse.”

“The drawings made by children are one way to glimpse what it means to be a balsero.”

“We are emotionally and morally invested in attributing agency, and because of this, it’s important that we also learn to be guarded and cautious about the engagement.”

“The affective rhetoric of China’s Internet culture provides an instructive illustration of a kind of rhetorical activity that preserves but exceeds overt and explicit symbolic or referential meanings: a rhetoric that binds and separates people especially by the circulation of affective energy.”

“Hospitality is a useful rhetorical concept for the situated dynamics it highlights, its attention to roles and obligations, and the critical questions it raises concerning who gets to host whom, under what conditions, and to what ends.”

Present Tense would like to congratulate Matthew B. Cox and Michael J. Faris for being accepted into The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals, 2015 (Parlor Press). Their annotated bibliography, “An Annotated Bibliography of LGBTQ Rhetorics,” was published in Vol. 4 Iss. 2. Congrats!

“In this issue, we learn that what gets written into law is as important as what gets intentionally omitted and that campus timely warnings are likely neither timely nor warning. We also learn the value of hashtags in cultivating concerned publics, how cynicism can be productive, and how public rhetoric can be a symbolic and material activity.”

“The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) tells us a story through which we can more closely examine how the law has functioned in both constructing and affirming certain cultural discourses about human trafficking.”

“What I have offered is less an employable set of texts, lessons, or advice, and more the performance of a teacher coming to terms with race in pedagogy both during and after the course. What I have done is (re)turn to rhetoric.”

“By re-imagining cynicism’s utility as a productive stance, we can identify several tactics for intervention in matters of political and ethical import. Adopting cynicism requires us to introduce provocative language in the public sphere.”

“Clarifying the rhetorical potential for hashtags as an organizational tool demonstrates the caution with which protesters must approach the task of organizing online.”

“Using what he calls the “Caribbean Carnivalseque” as a rhetorical trope that defines the essence of being Caribbean, Browne grounds his analysis in Kenneth Burke’s Rhetoric of Motives and the concept of human beings as symbol-using animals.”

“What galvanizes our aim is the increasing call by scholars across disciplines to critically engage violence and repression committed by and on behalf of the state. We seek to explore the ways in which the structures of the state explicitly and implicitly normalize violence against communities of color.”

“We point out how remix and participatory culture are effective rhetorical moves against this type of psychological terrorism. By repurposing Ulmer’s genre of the “popcycle,” we put forward the concept of the “participatory popsicle.””

“Through the rhetoric of brownwashing, the Obama administration embraces heterogeneity by including acceptable and exceptional migrants into US civic life.”

“Addressing racialized State violence in the present, therefore, involves understanding both the rhetorical/visual functions and historical roots of the COC.”

“Not all speakers and listeners acknowledge that “#BlackLivesMatter as a rallying call was meant to undermine all forms of state violence” against all Black people. But we can choose to make that what it means.”

“Can rhetoric teach us to “read” White supremacy? Can it teach us why Roof murdered nine people?”

“Volume 5.1 continues our mission of publishing a wide variety of rhetorical scholarship on a vast expanse of important contemporary topics. Articles in this issue span the sacred and the secular, the deeply personal and the broadly political. The articles share an interest in movement—how rhetoric moves and exhorts audiences to move”

On August 27, 2015, Multimedia Editor Alexandra Hidalgo and Guest Editor Donnie Johnson Sackey discussed special issue 5.2 on race, rhetoric, and the state on Twitter. The Q&A has been curated with Storify below in hopes of continuing conversation on states’ questionable treatment of people of color until the issue’s release in late fall. See: […]

“Since his election in March 2013, Pope Francis has sparked unending interpretive anxiety in the American media, anxiety so acute that it has been named a syndrome: WPFMTS, or “What Pope Francis Meant to Say.””

“The symbolic practices of seductive rhetoric oppose stable meanings via strategies that highlight play and pleasure and indeterminacy in order to celebrate artifice and to dazzle audiences with dynamic and changing signs.”

“The fact that Internet memes significantly influenced the discourse around the 2012 presidential election suggests that rhetoricians should take memetics seriously.”

“SB 1070 was an inhumane bill that contributed to the continued criminalization of people of color.”

We are excited to welcome intern Audrey Strohm to the team. An upcoming senior at Whitworth University, Audrey is an English major with a philosophy minor pursuing graduate studies in rhetoric and composition after graduation. Audrey will be working alongside Present Tense editors throughout summer 2015 as we move toward the publication of our special […]

Present Tense would like to congratulate David M. Rieder for being accepted into The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals, 2014 (Parlor Press). Rieder’s article, “From GUI to NUI: Microsoft’s Kinect and the Politics of the (Body as) Interface,” was published in Vol. 3 Iss. 1.

“Roundtree argues that computer simulation requires a unique type of scientific discourse because simulations do not fit neatly into common models of science. “

“Despite some drawbacks, one likely unavoidable given the targeted audience, Applegarth succeeds in her rhetorical archeology, recovering lost or hidden texts and restoring their place within anthropological disciplinary formation.”

“The editors of Present Tense are pleased to announce a new issue focused on a range of topics, from race and law to the politics of higher education. Volume 4.2 includes articles that explore rhetoric as it exists in many different places, especially as it is employed by disempowered and disenfranchised groups in politically contested locations.”

“When groups are not allowed access to participate on the dominant platform, they “make do” by refashioning the space using everyday materials that are available to them”

“Stakeholders may celebrate the nod toward academics in the term student­ – athlete ; however, such a descriptor serves only to reinforce the marginalized status of over 450,000 student-athletes in American higher education.”

“Rhetorics of Motherhood unveils this discursive construction of motherhood within three distinct historical and American contexts to theorize motherhood as a rhetorical strategy that both disadvantages and advantages women.”

“The editors of Present Tense are excited to announce a new issue focused on meaningful political rhetoric, insightful technical rhetoric, and thoughtful critical reviews . Volume 4.1 connects rhetoric and the public sphere and includes cogent articulations of how rhetoric functions in free speech, contested legal issues, and unexpected digital realms.”

“The enthymeme, while serving as the central basis for heuristic invention, also works at the local or sentence level as a rhetorically oriented algorithmic procedure through which a rhetor determines the most probable success in persuading an audience to action”

“the realities of economic globalization are an essential feature of the political “given situation””

“Ambient Rhetoric succeeds because it usefully synthesizes and extends a broad range of anti-epistemological stirrings from within and outside of rhetoric studies and because it attempts to come to grips with some of the implications of an anti-epistemological shift.”

“The editors are quite right in arguing that both literature, because of its speculative qualities, and rhetoric, because of its overt concern with “suasion in all its manifestations,” have a particular connection to the issue of values.”

Present Tense would like to congratulate Rochelle Gregory for being accepted into The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals, 2013 (Parlor Press). Rochelle’s article, “A Womb With a View: Identifying the Culturally Iconic Fetal Image in Prenatal Ultrasound Provisions” was featured in our special Medical Rhetorics Issue.

“racism is an ongoing discourse that both gives rise to and emerges from many rhetorical moments—it is a continuous force requiring continuous opposition. The discourses of racism are as much visual as they are textual and oral”

“We have written this article to intervene in the transgender coinage narrative and to more closely attend to the ways that knowledge is built among and between academic and non-academic communities.”

Present Tense editors will be at the Rhetoric Society of America conference in San Antonio, TX. Look for conference-goers wearing Present Tense pins!

“As a somewhat conservative, non-confrontational rhetorical strategy, rhetorical empathy can open doors of discussion and address fears and threats that may prevent listening and engagement.”

“C.K.’s approach to kairos, to the complex forces that shape rhetorical situations, offers an alternative to the dominant mode of contemporary networked rhetoric: snark.”

“We fancy ourselves rational, nuanced, and critically thinking animals, and commonplaces help perpetuate this fantasy.”

“Female bodies are offered in the exhibit as… learning tools. According to these displays, women need not be equally represented or studied.”

“Medical rhetoric, much like gender and body rhetorics, enjoys a rich interdisciplinary history and so feels at home in a journal dedicated to the rhetorical study of socially significant and timely topics. We seek to expand the field’s endeavors with this special, double issue.”