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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“By understanding these documents through memory and re-memory as a rhetorical function, rhetoricians of health and medicine may possess a more nuanced understanding of consent and literacy within a tribal context.”

Present Tense would like to congratulate Patricia Fancher for being accepted into The Best of the Journals in Rhetoric & Composition, 2018 (Parlor Press). Patricia’s article, “Composing Artificial Intelligence: Performing Whiteness and Masculinity,” was published in Vol. 6 Iss. 1. Congrats!

“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.”

“Present Tense would like to congratulate andré carrington for being accepted into The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals, 2017 (Parlor Press). André’s article, “Implicating the State: Black Lives, A Matter of Speculative Rhetoric,” was published in Vol. 5 Iss. 2. Congrats!”

“Collectively, these articles focus our attention on issues of identity, inclusion, and social justice in realms ranging from sites of education to historical signage, to bathroom placards, to music, and to television. Taken together, these articles offer a view of how rhetoric shapes and is shaped by the multifaceted world around us in profound ways.”

“While I do not propose that the signage is simply a denial of the ontological character of the surrounding spaces, I do assert that the signs create an ontological impression that we experience as a result of the rhetorical absences in the narrative.”

“Rhetoric and other humanities instructors eager to teach topics on sustainability and food systems, which some call the most significant environmental issues of our time, can rely on campus experts with practitioner knowledge of these topics as well as campus activists engaged in these issues.”

“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.”

“Not only are platforms rhetorical in the sense that they occupy a public imaginary that is discursively constructed via carefully crafted branding efforts, but they are also rhetorical in that their decisions produce effects in the world.”

“The tension between open authorship/open participation and the legal, cultural, and technological systems that shape them is ongoing today and will no doubt continue as we further blur the lines between physical life and online life.”

“Researchers must be mindful of the identities they create on social media, being sure to consider the ethics of these platforms as both user and researcher. Social media platforms are powerful research tools, but they are above all rhetorical, and therefore deserve our continued methodological attention.”

“Grindr has the potentiality of being such a market-mediated counterpublic, where queers can meet in virtual space, encountering difference and developing new intimacies with each other, ones that play out both through the app and in physical space.”

“Algorithms function as information brokers that manage, control, and direct the content that platform users can search and access; in doing so, they exert rhetorical influence by determining what information matters and is available to researchers, and by providing that information across the many interfaces of the platform.”

“Our new issue features articles on such a range of research, it’s hard to write about them all at once. Articles here focus on pedagogy, students’ rights, investigations of public rhetorics, and the political and social impact of rhetorical choices.”

“Expanding on this link between the Southern Strategy and neoliberalism, I argue proponents of municipal schools in Shelby County, TN, deployed a small government rhetoric of freedom and a neoliberal framework of self-regulation to codify the boundaries of white flight in the geospatial and discursive realms of the new school districts.”

“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.”

“It is critical that scholars explore not only the emergent movement to end aging but also the phenomenon of aging itself, and that they do so from humanistic as well as scientific perspectives.”