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.

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.

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 […]

“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.”

“Robbins’ greatest contribution in this book is her ability to move analysis beyond a passive stance, showing how archives can teach and inspire collaboration beyond their initial historical moment through the use of reflection.”

“While sexism is a backdrop for diverse women’s professional narratives in Elizabeth A. Flynn and Tiffany Bourelle’s collection Women’s Professional Lives in Rhetoric and Composition, Kirsti Cole and Holly Hassel’s edited collection, Surviving Sexism in Academia, brings sexism uncompromisingly into the foreground as contributors define, explore and strategize responses to sexism in higher education.”

“Together, these two books present a strong justification for incorporating social media into schooled literacies because youth are engaging with social media, and bringing them into schooled literacies allows educators to foster critical thinking and awareness of these technologies.”

“As the book evidences, the difficulties in making change in the healthcare system are many; however, Arduser’s rhetorical work here that bridges patient agency with patient empowerment and shared decision-making aligns well with the recommendations of policy analysts as well as the U.S. government agencies such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.”

“Throughout this work, Pritchard’s methodology offers a useful intervention for future rhetorical considerations of literacy: by focusing not on the meaning createdthrough literacy but the meaning his participants give to literacy, Pritchard importantly shifts the focus of his study from literacy being something enacted onto something enacted by.”

“Asen contends that an education marketplace works in opposition to democratic citizenship, as elucidated by Dewey, because it “operates without a notion of a public good” where financial considerations are always at the fore.”

“Brandt offers writing scholars, teachers of writing, and WAC program administrators, and consultants a way to understand writing as broadly as possible as it changes in practice and evolves in theory. Writing in the workplace, and everywhere else, happens in broad contexts and has vast social implications.”

“Hidalgo’s unique video book addresses feminist filmmaking professionals and students of rhetoric and composition as she argues that moving images made by rhetoricians are teachable, publishable, and tenure-worthy projects.”

“Reddit is like a tiny internet: a place full of memes that are often offensive and hilarious at once. A place for activism and knowledge-sharing, shitposting and trolling. A place where mob mentality and anonymity more often lead to abuse campaigns and conspiracy theories than not.”

“ Weapons of Math Destruction expands our methods and pedagogies for critically engaging with digital platforms and algorithms. The book enables, and urges us, to engage new sites, civic institutions, and new issues, the effects of algorithms on institutions, those served by the institutions, and our democracy which is enabled by those institutions.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The principals of aikido, meditative breathing, Japanese calligraphy, and soft argumentation constitute four slices of the same pie, whatever their respective origins and pedagogical risks. Kroll recognizes the need for closed-fist argumentation while seeking to moderate its use.”

“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.”

“Sarah Tinker Perrault examines popular science writing to highlight how communication between science and civic society has inhibited the formation of a democratic process of communication between these two populations.”

“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.”

“Assessment, from our perspective, should help us understand what we are doing and improve the ways that we are doing it.”

“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.”

“Although Restaino’s treatment of theory could appear tenuous, the text’s weaving of storytelling and philosophy invite readers to examine the necessity of connecting theory to the everyday trials of those who actually practice composition pedagogy in the classroom.”

“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.”

“Our overarching assumption, one that carries through all principles and practices for curricular and program design, is that no one individual should be the center of the program.”

“the book advocates for experience architects to participate in the systems they build and to invite other participants to comment on the design of those systems, thus encouraging a greater fit between a design and implementation.”

“Watkins contributes to social class theory by basing his revisionist history on non-English majors and by seeing our capital not in decline inside the university, but as a provider of developing forms of cultural capital outside the university.”

“Emmons’ discourse-centered approach examines the interrelationships of personhood/gender/mental health and illness and demonstrates how language shapes and reflects gendered depictions of the depressed self.”

“Each of these essays explores the overlaps and tensions of disability and mothering in the context of subject positions and liminal spaces, the complex and often confusing space where the personal and social collide.”

“Part scholarly monograph, part handbook, part rallying cry, Reframing Writing Assessment is an important addition to a spate of recent books on assessment that encourage teachers to take back our professional lives.”

“Before we even got to the attendance policy, students were wrestling with an entire semester’s worth of work: they wanted to know how they could make a difference, how to get their voices heard.”

“At Jesuit universities, the task is not just to form better citizens but also to form persons who use the principles of Ignatian spirituality to ‘perceive, think, judge, choose and act for the rights of others…'”

“Each essay reports specific cases of rhetorical intervention in local and global issues. Both professors and students will find models for their roles in the democratic tradition, as public/organic intellectuals, or… ‘part-time peaceniks.'”

“Founded on a core belief that student-community interaction is essential to transforming students into global citizens, CSECP also works to establish competencies related to service: leadership… and ethical development.”

“Higher education increasingly follows a fast-capitalist model, according to Tony Scott, and the consequences of this model pervade writing instruction: its curriculum, assessment, and even the workforce of higher education.”