Partisan rhetoric surrounding COVID-era face-masking has reshuffled traditional stasis hierarchy, allowing the middle stases of definition and quality, which emphasize epideictic motives of cultural affirmation, to supersede conjectural questions of medical efficacy. Viral images positioning masks as metonymic approximations of “authoritarianicity” and government overreach illustrate how right-wing masking rhetoric circumvents scientific concerns, instead rooting discourse in questions of cultural essence. Science communicators, in response, must embrace the inherently tropological and epideictic dimensions of the mask and work to recode the symbol as a metonym for citizenship and personal responsibility.

Based on survey responses from eighty-five scholars on the job market from 2013 and 2019, this article examines mentoring for the job market in rhetoric and composition and technical communication. Respondents indicate needs for job market mentoring; more transparency about the job market itself; and more extensive, integrated support throughout graduate programs. The article concludes with actions that can be taken to improve the job market experience in rhetoric and composition and technical communication programs.

Throughout Cherríe Moraga’s publications (1979 to present), we see her writings pivot from expressions of cohesive oneness to articulations of generative fragmentation. Moraga’s emerged attention to metaphorical woundedness participates in Chicanx rhetorics of fragmentation, which undermines colonial fictions that the self is whole and unified. Such rhetoric emphasizes potentials of semi-ness and creative energy of shame as strategies to confront Chicanx realities, and to engage contemporary theories of decolonialism, biopower, and embodied language. Moraga’s writings provide a lens through which we investigate how confirmation and ownership of rhetorics of fragmentation might nurture rhetorical homelands, particularly for Chicanx student writers.

This article participates in contemporary conversations about ethos by extending conceptions of ethos as dwelling places” or ecologies” to ethos as hospitality. Such extension involves attending to how three recent decolonial cookbook authors construct stable textual identities and ethos using rhetorics of healing, constitutive rhetoric, and utopian rhetoric. The cookbooks under analysis–Afro-Vegan by Bryant Terry (2014), Decolonize Your Diet by Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel (2015), and The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman (2017)–offer readers knowledge of African American, Mesoamerican, and Native American ancestral foodways and encourage culturally-affiliated readers to embrace these foodways in order to reclaim their communities' physical and spiritual health. The authors demonstrate a complex engagement with ethos as they reconstitute the cultural identity of their primary audiences both literally, through the consumption of food as an act rooted in the body, and figuratively, through the ways food connects us to others.

This paper examines Aeschines’s speech Against Timarchus to offer frameworks for rhetoric to examine the historical particularities of sex work. Drawing on feminist and queer rhetorics, this paper rereads Against Timarchus as well as scholarly receptions of the speech to discuss how Timarchus has been positioned outside definitions of rhetoric in ways that highlight the instability of definitions of rhetoric and state power. This paper argues that kakos and atimia are useful concepts for rhetorical historiographers for examining sex work in classical Athens, as well as interrogating the power structures upon which a given definition of rhetoric is derived from.

This article argues for the importance of British food writer Elizabeth David (1913-1992) in questioning the centrality of power in feminist rhetorical studies and thereby furthering our capacity to understand the diversity of conservative women and their rhetorical projects. The article analyzes David's pathos in her landmark volume of gastronomical essays, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (1986), and shows how this rhetoric develops a conservative "political culture" which privileges human motivations within food cultures that move beyond the negotiation of power.

The climate change crisis is a matter of increasing concern to rhetoric and composition. Some scholars in the discipline, specifically on the new materialist turn, have engaged and accounted for the damage through methodologies of ontological entanglement and relationality. The potential of ontological accounts to facilitate global activism faces the obstacle of scalar derangement. By acting as Foucauldian specific intellectuals, rhetoric and composition scholars may employ new materialist ontological projects to bridge the gap between local accounts of climatological damage and a global, pluralist assemblage of climate activists.

This essay analyzes Alonzo Earl Foringer Foringer, Alonzo Earl. “The Greatest Mother in the World” [1917?]. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, Web. [Google Scholar]’s “Greatest Mother in the World” poster, created for the American Red Cross during World War I but circulated in Britain and America during World War I and II. Although the image was highly circulated and reproduced, it has received limited scholarly attention. The analysis examines the poster and a magazine image with accompanying text from a visual rhetoric perspective. The essay argues that the poster and magazine image deploy rhetorics of motherhood and saliency to foster “flattening effects” that not only erase other maternal figures but also elevate ideologies of white supremacy.

Rhetoricians of science often (rightly) demarcate as antiscientific the way creationists engage with, manipulate, and circulate scientific knowledge. Though this demarcation work is essential for understanding how creationists manipulate science in the public sphere, relying on demarcation analysis closes off rhetorical inquiry. By analyzing Answers Research Journal, a creationist scientific journal, this essay contends the way creationist authors engage with scientific knowledge production offers a more nuanced way of seeing how scientific meaning-making has rhetorical capacity, which offers new avenues by which rhetoricians of science can investigate the power of scientific methodologies.

This essay demonstrates how a progressive era Radcliffe College student (1910-1914) who earned the title “strongest woman” for her athletic feats used the unique genre affordances of the scrapbook to assert an identity that at once aligned with and contradicted dominant rhetoric about women’s bodies and education. Drawing on archived personal artifacts, the essay argues that Eleanor Stabler Brooks used this vernacular, multigenre, multivocal genre in a way that amplifies the material and the visceral through a process of bricolage, composing an embodied response to the social and institutional restrictions on her body at a time when gender values were radically destabilizing.

This article examines connections between rhetoric, race, and place. Using archival research to examine Westlake Terrace, the author asks how the rhetorics of places like Westlake racialize the place and its people. The article shows that these rhetorics perpetuate the agenda of structural racism, and the material consequences of these rhetorics. It is argued that looking at the history of Westlake reveals a process of rhetorical invention that imbues the place with rhetorical and racial tensions. Attending to these moments of invention can both reveal ways that inequalities are built into places and help us work toward more equitable places.

Centering the author’s experience of representing migrant deaths through non-discursive composing practices, this article forwards quilting as a feminist, qualitative research method. The author promotes quilting as method, grounded in arts based research and feminist rhetorical practices, a method that functions as a three-part scaffold in practice: employing critical imagination through tacking in and tacking out, crafting a narrative, and gaining a better understanding of the phenomenon at hand. This tactile method has the potential to expand conceptions of research, embrace the messiness of research, and deepen understandings of phenomena shallowly understood by other methods.

While current cognitive approaches to rhetorical figures portray them as internalized to the brain, rhetorical figures emerge through embodied experiences within an environment, crystallizing material patterns and bringing elements of a cognitive ecology into relief. In particular, figures of repetition coordinate regularities in the environment, linking repeated items into relational relationships. Figures of description such as enargeia enact sensory education, making salient aspects of the environment perceptible. A situated example involving a controversy over wind turbine installation in Canada shows how rural community members use these figures to coordinate sensory information and persuade others to understand the issue differently.

The Lumosity games and subsequent “memory wars” illustrate the rhetorical power of statistics in public discourse. Defenders of Lumosity build upon discursive traces based in societal fears and arguments based in “science” supported through statistics and experimentation. Detractors of Lumosity argue that their experiments are faulty. A close rhetorical reading reveals that certain commonalities exist across defenders and detractors alike. Looking at the inventional strategies of the statistical analyst as rhetor demonstrates how statistical tools are granted agency to determine research outcomes. Displacement of rhetorical agency has ramifications for understanding popular scientific discourse and making decisions as a society.

This essay features a grounded theory analysis of the 156 Victim Impact Statements delivered by sexual assault survivors of Olympics and Michigan State University doctor Larry Nassar. I show how the Victim Impact Statements function as public, collective testimony that highlight the ramifications of unacknowledged betrayal. They narrate how adults and institutions looked away from abuse in order to maintain the status quo, and the athletes learned to trust authorities over themselves. Their testimonies destabilize assault as a crime limited to an assailant and a victim, demand accountability from those who looked away, and reclaim trust in their own witnessing.

A concept in Aristotle’s thought that is both politically and rhetorically significant for all life forms is a sign (sêmeion). Yet, scholarship has historically left underexplored how Aristotle positions the utility of a sign across human and nonhuman animal domains. Rereading his presentation of signs in the Rhetoric in light of his statements on the use of sign-inference through physiognomy in Prior Analytics elucidates how rhetoric’s interest in persuasive things makes use of a sign’s physicality. In so doing, Aristotle demonstrates how rhetoric enables political communities to grapple with an inescapable nonhuman status.

This argument demonstrates how rhetorical theory was shaped recursively by the mythology of ancient Sumer and China, and resulted in new discursive formations in subsequent rhetorical theory. These discursive theoretical formations occurred after the advent of widespread literate practice. The myth of Cangjie shaped the teleology of rhetoric of ancient China and the myth of Enmerkar shaped rhetorical theory in Sumer in similar ways. Following the authority of Walker, Schiappa, and Johnstone, which charted a similar phenomenon in ancient Greece, these non-Greco-Roman myths were deployed to form a similar pattern. By following Rita Copeland’s call to “allow the history of rhetoric to be written through mythic time,” it can be shown that the use of myths by ancient cultures to shape their rhetorical theories suggests that this is not merely a Greco-Roman feature of rhetoric in antiquity, but a human one.

The author theorizes a rhetoric of disconnect, defined as exigencies and becomings of rhetorical energies in the event of an abrupt, institutionally enforced disruption of digitally networked circulatory routes. A rhetoric of disconnect destabilizes current frameworks for analyzing digital rhetorical circulation and compels us to rethink the interplay between material rhetoricity, circulatory dimensions, and the public’s rhetorical adaptability in a transnational context. The theorization is accompanied by an analysis of the switched-off rhetorical circulation and “rhetorical rerouting” during the extended period of internet shutdown in Xinjiang, China in 2009 and 2010 that lasted 312 days. The author concludes by urging digital rhetoric and new media scholars to reassess assumptions of “always-on” digital connectivity and consider the fragility of digital rhetorical circulation under different forms of global information governmentality.

Some critics have theorized redemption in prison memoir as capitulation to prison’s disciplinary gaze. But a closer look at African-American memoirs emerging from the War on Drugs reveals that redemption is not an artifice of oppression or a singular destination but a topic for rhetorical invention. This essay shows how two memoirists—Jeff Henderson and Susan Burton—formed narrative identity from traumatic experiences and oppressive conditions of poverty and racism that led to crime and incarceration. Redemption begins when they question interpretations of that experience and create new narrative identities in the social worlds of upward mobility, recovery, and emancipation. Inventing redemption does not relieve them from the burdens of their histories but gives them new ways of relating to their histories and, in this way, new hope in controlling their futures. The rhetoric of redemption in African-American prison memoir is a powerful counterweight to the rhetoric of mass incarceration depicting African-Americans as unredeemable.

Sor Juana, a criolla nun in Mexico’s colonial period, is most recognized for her letter, “La Respuesta” (or “The Response”), to the Bishop of Puebla where she fiercely championed women’s rights in the Americas. However, few discursive spaces take up critical examinations of her work. As such, she is often inscribed within the remnants of White, European intellectual legacies. But what if there was more? Sor Juana’s epistolary writing is a rich site of revisionary possibilities, especially as feminist archival methodology flourishes in rhetoric and composition. This article aims to complicate discussions of Sor Juana as a (proto)feminist rhetorician by including interdisciplinary and intersectional renderings of her embodied, epistolary writing. Drawing on Black feminist rhetorics, I argue that we can discursively (re)read Sor Juana not just as a rhetorician but as an intersectional, cultural, and feminist rhetorician.

Given the timing of this volume’s publication, which is simultaneous with the circulation of the novel coronavirus, one cannot help but imbue each chapter of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is: ...

This Rhetoric Review Symposium extends long overdue conversations about racism in the discipline begun in a NCTE/CCCC cross-caucus College Composition and Communication symposium titled “Diversity ...

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”—Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of EffectsScott Sundvall’s edited collection, Rhet...

With its publication date in April 2020, contemporaneous with the initial waves of both COVID-19 and COVID-19 misinformation sweeping across America, Jenny Rice’s Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory,...

This article examines a digital map depicting paratransit in New York City as an example of work that, in not taking into account how impositions of visibility might impact vulnerable populations, risks exposing users of paratransit to the gaze of more powerful lookers. Building on the literature of maps coming out of visual studies, rhetorical studies, and technical communication, this examination shows how maps, as modes of visual communication, participate and extend a dominant visual culture that too often extends power into the spaces and places populated by vulnerable populations. It concludes with recommendations for how to avoid these exposures.

This article examines the rhetorical framing of San Jose’s “Winchester Mystery House” house tour to consider the role of spatiality in shaping the ethos and subsequent public remembrance of women. Built in the late nineteenth-century by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune, the sprawling Victorian mansion is now a popular tourist attraction that has become a metonym for the architect herself, whose memory remains shrouded in stories of séances, seclusion, and mystery. The article traces the image of Winchester as a bizarre and spooky widow to the public tour and the spatial rhetorics of her house itself. The house challenges our limited notions of space—particularly domestic space—with implications for other sites of women’s public memory and the ethos of the woman rhetor.

This article responds to the global resurgence of nationalist rhetoric, forgoing prior scholarship’s equation of such rhetoric with demagoguery to instead position nationalism as a form of social organization within shifting rhetorical contexts. Using the framework of constitutive rhetoric, the article shows how material changes in our routine discursive infrastructure impact the ability of people to imagine themselves as composing a unified community. Following the digital revolution, nationalism now reflects its technological basis, a transformation that upends traditional forms of identification and leads to what the author dubs “late nationalism,” a reactionary turn that has exacerbated global crises.

In 1919 Charlotte Hawkins Brown, founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute, wrote the novella, Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South as a persuasive appeal to white Southern women in Greensboro, North Carolina. This essay takes an intersectional approach to argue Brown rhetorically appropriates the mammy trope within a combination of slave narrative and Southern romantic novella addressing white female Southerner’s responsibility to their Black counterparts. The result is a novella providing evidence of Brown’s conscious use of African American Southern identity disrupting white Southern moral superiority.

This essay examines the epideictic rhetoric of Nuri Muhammad, a Nation of Islam student minister, at a Malcolm X Festival in 2018. Nuri’s rhetorical performance demonstrates how he uses the memory of Malcolm X to create a collective epideictic experience with his audience. Using Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” as a foundation, Nuri praises virtues and condemns vices that support the community’s conception and preservation of Malcolm X, positioning the audience as judge rather than spectator. This performance illustrates how everyday cultural practices may deviate from our understanding of rhetoric while augmenting our research practices and goals.

In Translanguaging outside the Academy: Negotiating Rhetoric and Healthcare in the Spanish Caribbean, Rachel Bloom-Pojar asks the following questions: What does it mean to speak well? Whose interes...

On September 22, 2014, students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong launched a five-day strike to protest the alleged limits Beijing placed on the procedures to elect Hong Kong’s chief executive...

How often do we view the Google search bar as a mnemonic device? It recalls information, follows associative pathways, identifies patterns, and distinguishes between what is relevant in the moment ...

This article examines textual artifacts surrounding Google Lens, an image recognition application, to reveal how it forwards reductive representations of the complex sets of relations constituted through locative media and augmented reality. Working across textual and posthumanist traditions, this article introduces a theoretical approach for investigating the rhetoric of technology, termed the postsymbolic. In acknowledging the formative and ontological role discursive rhetoric plays in the spatial operations and user experiences of and through locative media, the postsymbolic asserts the need for an integrated approach in which symbolic artifacts might be examined through the lens of both discursive rhetorical theory and posthumanism.

While urban and suburban planning have received sustained scrutiny from rhetoric scholars in recent years, campus planning remains relatively unexplored. Enacting a framework for analyzing the conventional and unconventional planning discourse swirling around campuses, this article focuses on a specific case: the (in)effective provision of student housing at the University of California Irvine. The analysis juxtaposes formal planning documents tied to the post-WWII origins of UCI with historical and contemporary student-generated discourse to evaluate and exhibit the means by which inhabitants, as rhetoricians-in-residence, can participate in shaping the campus community.

Kelly Pender’s Being at Genetic Risk: Toward a Rhetoric of Care makes an important contribution to scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM); rhetoric of science, technology, and med...

Despite a tradition of theorizing rhetorical aspects that have only recently become popular in the field (for example, embodiment, materiality, spatiality, ecologies), African and African American rhetorics (A/AAR) are infrequently invoked in the U.S. Four tenets of A/AAR—that rhetoric is ecological, communal, embodied, and generative—capture dynamic and often overlooked qualities of public memory places. The International Civil Rights Center and Museum International Civil Rights Center and Museum. “About.” Sit-In Movement, 2018. Web. [Google Scholar]in Greensboro, North Carolina employs these tenets to create a powerful experience and encourage visitors’ social engagement. A/AAR counter hegemonic rhetorical traditions and rearticulate public memory as integral to social justice.

As corrective to rhetorical theorists who disparage “expression,” the following article analyzes Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Kenneth Burke on “expression” and its communicative counterpart “sympathy.” Pater viewed ideal style as a unity of expression and sympathy. Wilde saw Christ as the singular representative of absolute expression and sympathy. Burke resolved both expression and sympathy into the “compromise” of the symbol. I advocate for a return to expression and sympathy as rhetorical values in the twenty-first century.

Bernard Malamud’s novel A New Life and its attention to midcentury writing instruction illuminates the emergence of rhetoric and composition. Malamud’s novel is what microhistorians describe as “exceptional typical” evidence, where exceptional status and typical topics combine to showcase power formations in historical context. The novel describes shifts in textbooks and writing curricula, identifies the emergence of process-oriented assessment practices, and witnesses the institutional and disciplinary marginalization of female instructors. As such, Malamud could be described as a proto-composition scholar. Reflecting upon his legacy at their institution, the authors consider the re-naming of a student lounge named after Malamud.

This article examines the 1893 lynching and suffrage rivalry between Ida B. Wells and Frances E. Willard in the WCTU and the racial tension generated between its Black and white members on sisterhood. It uses rhetorical analysis and frame theory to illustrate that Wells’s and Willard’s rhetorical conflict is disturbingly related to the present. Finally, the article argues that patriarchy is a resilient specter that haunts womanhood.

Lula Pace (1868–1925), a Texas Baptist science professor, ultimately weathered an antievolution campaign that roiled her denomination. Responding to this controversy, Pace engaged in demarcation (that is, discursive boundary-work) regarding the relationship of science and religion. Pace employed ethos strategies that blended the scientist’s supposedly gender-neutral expertise, the engaged educator’s concern for students, and the sincere Christian’s exercise of those individual freedoms privileged in Baptist tradition. This blended ethos highlights how scientific expertise and religious identity may serve as resources for developing a personal rhetoric to negotiate diverse community values and how ethos strategies depend upon demarcation.

Digital research is not only methodologically complex, but it also exposes researchers to numerous risks, demands emotional labor, and presents complicated and unpredictable ethical quandaries, all...

As scholars who are interested in the ways in which trauma and rhetoric interconnect, we believe that our field’s narrative research methods, even those rooted in ethical responsivity, too often re-traumatize participants. In this article, we respond to concerns about the re-traumatization of research participants by asserting that a decolonial understanding of trauma helps us better understand both why rhetoricians do this work and begin to address how we can better conduct research with trauma populations. We examine how trauma narratives have been taken up in rhetoric studies, and suggest a need for the field to be cautious with such narratives. Given our concern for how narrative methods re-traumatize participants, we call for rhetoric studies to purposefully adopt a decolonial orientation to trauma work to better enact an approach centered in care. Finally, we offer examples of practices that can help us, as a field, decolonize our scholarship on trauma.

A long lineage of Women of Color (WOC) feminists illustrates how, despite academia’s insistence on “bifurcate[ing] life into neat categories—scholar, Chicana, mother, or activist,” in the lived exp...

Jewish rhetorics recently garnered critical attention in rhetoric studies, resulting in extensive scholarship attempting to carve out the field’s jurisdiction. Jewish feminist rhetoricians, for example, often use Jewish rhetorics to reclaim women’s religious experiences. But recovering the secular voices of Jewish women is also essential to understanding Jewish rhetorics, evinced by an anonymous group of nineteenth century women. These women use secular Jewish topoi—exile, tzedek (justice), and zikaron (memory)—to articulate their identity as American Jewish women, demonstrating both Jewish rhetorics’ potential as a cultural rhetoric and topoi’s ability to empower marginalized communities through exclusionary practices.

This article calls for an expansion of the inquiry methods used to explore rhetorical education during the Americanization movement of the early twentieth century. It offers the methodology of administrative history as an approach to help scholars gain perspective on why and how local programs were developed and implemented from the perspective of administrators and participants. This approach enables a more robust understanding of not only the complexity of Americanization programs but also the diversity of approaches that were employed.