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.

This article argues that academic manuscript review is a site for activism, using Anzaldúa’s theory of conocimiento as a framework to contextualize the reviewer’s role in this process. It demonstrates that conocimiento provides a structure for engaging in the manuscript-review process in a way that mediates among potentially conflicting worldviews. Conocimiento informs more justice-oriented reviewing and positions the anonymous reviewer as activist. This article explores each stage of conocimiento and anonymous review through multifaceted methods: storytelling, theory, and a synthesis of the two. It ends by presenting concrete, action-based takeaways for reviewers who want to approach reviewing justly and equitably.

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.

TABS: Aids for Ending Sexism in School was a journal founded by Lucy Picco Simpson and the Organization for Equal Education of the Sexes. Attention to this publication sheds light on feminist activism as it transformed in the wake of Title IX legislation in the late 1970s and 1980s. In examining the journal’s ability to facilitate networking, production, and accountability, we gain greater insight into how teachers and students were able to question normative messages about race, gender, class, and ability in educational materials and diversify the range of historical figures discussed in schools.

Western mathematics functions as a technology of violence when it enlists computational algorithms to underwrite racial neoliberalism. Theorizing algorithmic abstraction as a racial neoliberal technique, this article dramatizes the concept’s methodological affordances through a case study of 23andMe, which deploys algorithmic abstraction to affectively secure and sell Whiteness.

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,...

Evidence of political gridlock abounds amid both the worst viral pandemic in a century and civil unrest against a pandemic of systemic racism at home and abroad. In the United States, guns are a co...

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.

Institutional ethnography, a research methodology originally developed in sociology by Dorothy Smith, has entered writing studies with Michelle LaFrance’s Institutional Ethnography: A Theory of Pra...

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 piece examines In Memory’s Kitchen, a collection of recipes, poems, and letters compiled by Mina Pächter in the Terezîn Concentration Camp. The author argues that a proper reading of the text involves understanding genre, acts of resistance, and genre bending. Without applying these complex concepts to the texts, readers are at risk of misreading Pächter’s text as a cookbook rather than a memory text of spiritual resistance.

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.

As a Latinx writer who has attended and taught at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in South Texas, I have been disappointed to find that much existing scholarship assumes sameness among us, oft...

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.