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.

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.

Ellen CushmanNortheastern UniversityThose of us gathered in these pages met at a Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute with the goal of creating knowledge that would help to re-place the mat...