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.

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.

“We call for more ethnographic and engaged approaches to research on cross-cultural visual health communication. We also provide recommendations for navigating the translation spaces of visual health communication with a design process that works from the ground up.”

“To what extent are biomedical products designed in industrialized nations contextualized to enhance health care and patient safety in underdeveloped countries that are using such products?”

“It’s time again to welcome a new issue of Present Tense – volume 7, issue 2. Though not a special issue, this edition includes articles on an array of topics that coalesce around public and visual rhetorics.”

“When we consider the range of transgender restroom placards, that there is no standard design evidences a kind of unstable assemblage that itself represents the social change currently underway concerning LGBTQ rights. For sure, there is still no consensus on these changes”

“Mr. Robot speaks to the increasing complex constructions of ethos in a multimodal media ecology. That there is no position of pure and absolute sincerity, that we are all imbricated in the brutalities of capitalism, is not a novel idea; however, Mr. Robot as content seeks to agitate against the very forms of power that enable it”

“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.”

“Media support particular modalities over others, and formally shape and ideologically infuse products based on their affordances. Hence, students must be able to analyze rhetorical contexts while problematizing simplistic definitions of access and efficacy. The concept of a “multimodal home place” provides a tool to help students become more mindful about technology use.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“We argue that “technical rhetorics” is a concept that has affordances for thinking about how to critically communicate with public audiences about specialized information.”

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”

“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.”

This issue is our most multimodal collection to date, including our first slidecast essay (“The Quiet Country Closet”) and our first full audio essay (“Voices in Egypt”), as well as a number of other essays that incorporate images, video, and additional modes beyond alphabetic text.

“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.”

“Ultrasound provisions specifically exploit the cultural significance of the iconic fetal image in order to dissuade a patient from terminating her pregnancy.”

“Wellness has become pathologized in Western culture, mapped conceptually onto a medically oriented illness model through processes that are fundamentally discursive in nature, centered on persuasion.”

“Nearly a century later, Bernays’s troubling defense of anti-democratic communication as a central component of democratic governance reverberates in a recent public relations campaign to ‘enhance’ Gadhafi’s image.”

“After writing about a visit to Bulgaria in 1996, I returned ten years later hoping to judge whether my original application of Baudrillard’s theory on the evolution of consumer society still held up…”

“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.'”

“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.”