“The editors and authors of the chapters included in Multimodal Composing in Classrooms: Learning and Teaching for the Digital World show how multimodal composing has become an indispensible new literacy.”

Present Tense would like to welcome two new editors: our new Multimedia Editor Shreelina Ghosh and our new Review Editor Ryan Skinnell. Shreelina is an Assistant Professor at Gannon University and Ryan is currently Assistant Professor and Assistant Writing Program Administrator at San Jose State University. We’re thrilled that they have joined the Present Tense […]

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.”

Present Tense will once again have a number of editors attending and presenting at the CCCC Annual Convention and the ATTW Annual Convention, this year in Portland, OR. Be on the lookout for Editors wearing Present Tense pins, stop by the CCCC Editors’ Roundtable, and feel free to ask us questions about the upcoming issue or about your […]

Present Tense is sad to announce that Allen Brizee is leaving his position as Review Editor. He will be pursuing new editing and publishing avenues, though wishes to continue the legacy of editorial work he began at Present Tense. On a related note, Present Tense will soon be issuing a call for new Editors, including Review Editor and […]

“This analysis suggests that, in order to interrupt the injustices that flourish in Silicon Valley and in tech culture, we must rhetorically and systematically disentangle masculinity and whiteness from intelligence.”

“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.”

“Throughout the book, Owens recognizes and values the agentic moves of first-time mothers who leverage educational knowledge in their birth plans and those who draw from their own experiential knowledge of childbirth. In doing so, she resists privileging either knowledge.”

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!

Present Tense is happy to announce that two of our Editors have found new academic homes this past year. Megan Schoen, our co-Managing Editor, is now an Assistant Professor at Oakland University, and Elizabeth Angeli, our Annotated Bibliography Editor, will be moving to Marquette University. We also say goodbye to Alexandra Hidalgo, our outgoing Multimedia Editor, as […]

“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.”

“Because the Timely Warning genre positions the university community as a “wooden opponent” – it cannot succeed in its goal of developing relationships to maintain safety.”

Present Tense will once again have a number of editors attending and presenting at the CCCC Annual Convention and the ATTW Annual Convention, this year in Houston, TX. Be on the lookout for Editors wearing Present Tense pins and feel free to ask us questions about the upcoming issue or about your own submissions.

“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.”

“Our ordinary, habitual ways of comprehending the seemingly simple, straightforward acts that comprise dialogue are not only inadequate but fundamentally incorrect.”

“Readers will come away from the book with a better understanding of how the production of good citizens came to be such a common educational objective as well as how citizenship and literacy came to be so tightly bound in a variety of educational spaces.”

“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.”

“Needless to say, I didn’t make it home that night. Instead I spent over nine hours sleeping on a jail cell floor with a stale roll beneath my head for a pillow because rather than acquiesce to the ways in which white parades as blue, I transgressed.”

“In what ways does Indigenous social justice work differ from other kinds of social justice work? And what are some of the complications in building solidarity between social movements that focus on a diversity of issues?”

“The capability to turn images of Black people recently murdered or beaten by police into Internet memes further normalizes antiblack violence as spectacle, throwing doubt on the radical potential of body cameras.”

“The death of Freddie Gray on April 19, 2015 sparked Baltimore’s inclusion as a center of the Black Lives Matters movement – a contemporary iteration of an African Diasporic liberation consciousness.”

“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.”

“Acts of “vandalism” and activism alter the perception of history, contesting our past and present, and illustrate that systemic racism pervades American culture.”

“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?”

“Citizens and immigrants alike consume racial ideology on an almost daily basis, and we are repeatedly forced to think of ourselves in racial terms even if we did not do so before.”

“By unpacking the factors that led her to buy into what she describes as the lost commandment that “thou shalt not love a girl from the hood” throughout the early portions of her life, Richardson’s book makes a still urgent call.”

Present Tense is happy to announce that one of our Editors has started a tenure-track position this year. Don Unger, our Social Media Editor, is now an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing at St. Edward’s University.

“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”

If you’ll be at the Conference on Community Writing at the University of Colorado Boulder from October 15-17, say hi to Present Tense editors Allen Brizee and Don Unger. Allen will be speaking about his engaged scholarship initiatives in Baltimore, Maryland and Don will present on his work with 4C4Equality.

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.”

“The insights afforded by GFA matter—especially for research that is designed to create spaces in which to listen to marginalized people’s perspectives.”

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. “