This article examines what activism looks like in an age of "deep writing." As alumni find their ways through multiple domains of life after graduation, what role does writing play in helping them orient themselves toward engagement with the world around them? This article reviews relevant literature, including some of the difficulties of defining activism, and then analyzes focus group data in which participants describe different kinds of activism and the roles that writing plays in them. Wayfinding provides a framework for understanding how alumni writers orient their understanding of their own writing practices.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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 essay develops the concept of material inertia, a lens for studying artifacts of material and spatial rhetorics with a focus on long durations. The essay uses the case study of the DeWitt Clinton High School building, constructed in 1906 in New York City and still in use at CUNY John Jay College, to demonstrate how friction between the building’s design and use is exacerbated over decades. The essay argues for reading long-lived spaces via material inertia to understand the rhetorical force of non-human actors across time, and calls for scholarship in material rhetorics to take specifically durational approaches.

Considering recent returns to pre-Aristotelian understandings of ethos as the creation of dwelling spaces, this article argues that dwelling in algorithmically mediated spaces such as Facebook is intrinsically connected to ethos. The 2016 Dueling Protests in Houston, Texas serve as a case study of how Facebook’s platform functioned as a crucial tool for the Russian Internet Agency’s (IRA) disinformation campaigns. Examining interactions in these ethe ecologies reveals how algorithms shape community perceptions and constructions of ethos.

This article examines Reddit-users’ (“redditors”) responses to a story concerning proposed legislation that would require parents considering not vaccinating their children to participate in a public-health delivered education session on the science of immunization. In theorizing Reddit as a “peripheral public” venue and attending to its use of algorithms to sort content and commentary, this case study uses a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach to explore the rhetorical strategies employed by redditors as they discuss the proposed legislation and the scientific controversy behind it—suggesting new strategies for investigating participatory media, as well as insights for key stakeholders in the vaccine controversy.

This article examines data from an ethnographic study of an online Mormon women’s discussion board to argue that enclaves can be places for important critical and civic work. These women’s common religious identity and shared experiences of intolerance on a public board led them to adopt discursive conventions that included intimate literacy. These discursive conventions allowed for disruption of ideological feedback loops and development of responsible rhetorical agency. This article argues that an enclave’s capacity for generating openness to difference depends on the strength of the ideologies espoused and on the values and discursive conventions that guide the enclave.

This article presents the racial politics of circulation as a critical concept for elucidating how whiteness, nationhood, and doxa intertwine to reinforce and amplify white supremacy within a context of white nationalist postracialism. As a case study, the authors investigate how two popular slogans associated with Donald Trump drive the production and circulation of digital doxicons called Trumpicons and how such Trumpicons, in turn, feed back into a socio-political loop of white supremacist logics. In studying how Trumpicons become embroiled in such racial politics of circulation, the authors disclose how new media images contribute to an affective economy of whiteness in contemporary American culture.

Trees have instructed students of writing and rhetoric since long before Aristotle evoked them to illustrate hyle and telos. In recent times, Bruno Latour’s case study of the Amazon forest helped influence rhetoric’s new materialist turn. Trees are also remarkable exemplars of nonhuman communication networks. From the exigence of recent ecological studies of mycorrhizal networks, this article defines sylvan rhetorics through a study of trees in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, examining roots and branches of new materialist and more-than-human rhetorical theory.

This article refers to:The Stolen Property of Whiteness: A Case Study in Critical Intersectional Rhetorics of Race and Disability

This essay examines intersectional discourses of race and disability as they emerge in a 2014 wrongful birth lawsuit. Jennifer Cramblett filed the lawsuit after she discovered she was given sperm from the wrong donor resulting in the birth of her biracial daughter. The filing provides an opportunity to understand how rhetorics of identity are intersectional; in this case, how a legal filing for disability structures public arguments about race. Taking a critical intersectional rhetorical perspective, this essay analyzes the case and resultant public discourse to demonstrate how Cramblett enacts a mourning of her whiteness structured by already circulating disability rhetorics.

In 2012 The New York Times’s “Ethicist” column hosted a public writing contest, asking participants to defend eating meat. The contest sparked controversy due to its panel of judges—all white men. Analyzing this case study and the debate it catalyzed—a dynamic conversation about the problem of yoking animal ethics expertise to white masculine authority—issues calls for a feminist food rhetoric. Applying such an analytical lens illustrates both who may address food with authority and how such power is cultivated from gender stereotypes.

This essay examines four disciplinary challenges that faculty from broad, diverse disciplines such as rhetoric and composition encounter during tenure, promotion, and reappointment (TP&R) and highlights the arguments and rhetorical strategies that can be utilized to demonstrate scholarly worth and significance.

Queer theory often poses normativity as a primary exigency and target for queer resistance, which can result in anticipatory and ahistorical readings. A methodology of “queer rhetoric in situ” intervenes in this propensity by examining the contingent, historically specific relations among locally enforced norms, rhetors, acts, and multiple audiences. Queerness and normativity should be understood as shifting, fractured valences, rather than two cohesive opposing forces attached to perceived forms of sexual orientation, families, or activisms. A rhetorical case study of the Gay Liberation Monument’s controversial and delayed instantiation in New York’s Greenwich Village illustrates the stakes of this methodological shift.

In 2010, during the Google-China dispute, the Chinese Communist Party deployed a rhetoric imbued with the strong pathos of the "century of humiliation" (guochi) that China suffered at the hands of imperialists and used the Google incident to reaffirm its guardianship of the Chinese nation = state. As a case study, this discursive analysis of the Google dispute illustrates the rhetorical techniques and processes the Chinese Communist Party utilized to cement its legitimacy. Relying on the resistance-to-imperialism narrative template, the Chinese Government has circulated discourse that resonates with a public who continue to fear foreign infringement of sovereignty.

This article argues that historians of composition studies are burdened by adherence to history-as-narrative in archival research, whether supporting or countering master narratives of the field. I propose that historians redefine their work in conversation with the principles of archival ethnography, a concept from the field of library and information science. Reseeing historiography through this lens means privileging the position of the archivist as community interloper, thus creating a shift in responsibility from interpretation of archival material to public transmission thereof. Re-imagining the historian's role as ethnographic also aims to redress the ethical burden of inevitable re-presentation of past agents, practices, and values.

Abstract This paper employs mixed methods, namely, corpus linguistic and rhetorical analysis methods, to examine Confucius's theory on language, persuasion, and virtue as reflected in the Analects. The triangulation of methods allows in-depth analysis of Confucius's use of key concepts surrounding the language—virtue relationship and the way these concepts operate in different levels of persuasion. The study shows Confucius's theory as a virtue-centered rhetoric. For him, virtuous conduct, rather than artful words, should be employed as the primary persuasive tool.

This article examines issues surrounding the maternal rhetor in public spaces through a case study of Anne Hutchinson, a leading figure in the antinomian controversy that divided the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony during the late 1630s. It details how Puritans employed Hutchinson's fertility and malformed offspring to discredit her, silence her supporters, and consolidate secular and religious power. Their argumentative uses of Hutchinson's pregnancy and childbirth constitute a form of maternal rhetoric, a set of gendered obstacles, opportunities, and persuasive means that arise at the junction of maternity and public discourse.

Abstract This essay argues for the value of Confederate women's Civil War diaries to rhetorical history. As women faced the dangers and deprivations of war, they turned to their diaries to respond, using personal writing to rehearse and construct an effective ethos. By practicing "self-rhetorics," diarists prepared themselves to speak and act effectively in the contexts of war. One woman's diary, that of Priscilla "Mittie" Bond, serves as a case study.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I wish to thank RR peer reviewers Janice Lauer and Andrea Lunsford for their helpful advice in the composition and revision of this article. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Janet Emig and Susan Gzesh, Emig's case study subject "Lynn"; in The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, for allowing me to interview them at length.

Ethos is generally associated with individual rhetors.1 Certainly that's association Aristotle had in mind when he recorded most influential usage of term (Rhetoric 1356a). But there is ample warrant for moving to a broader level-the level adopted in this paper, a case study of outrageous of a group of generative linguists on cusp of sixties and seventies. There is ample warrant for identifying not simply with specific individuals in specific orations but also with identifiable communities. In ordinary language, for instance, has always been far more communal than individual: Ethos.... [ 1.] The characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment, of a people or community; 'genius' of an institution or system (OED, 1933 reissue) . And it has a similar sense among our academic neighbors-in literary criticism, where books have titles like The Ethos of Restoration Comedy (Schneider); in sociology, where books have titles like The Ethos of Hong Kong Chinese (Siu-Kai), or, more famously, in Merton's discussion of general ethos of science (268). Coming closer to home, consider Augustine's notion of a Christian ethos, which presupposes that rhetor stands for group values (De Doctrina 4.27-29). Consider similarly presupposing admonition of George Campbell about influence of party-spirit (97). Consider Black's above-epigramitized talk of patterned commitments and stylistic proclivities, which, as Halloran tells us, is essentially projection of to communal level (Black 85; Halloran, Molecular Biology 71). Elsewhere, Halloran tells us more: the word has both an individual and a collective meaning. It makes sense to speak of of this or that person, but it makes equally good sense to speak of of a particular

My other self-as he might be called in a brief, ambiguous novelwas in this instance a bush pilot several hundred feet above Third Matagamon Lake, face to face with a strong winter wind. The plane was a Super Cub, scarcely large enough for the two of us. We sat in tandem and talked through an intercom. There is a lot of identification, even transformation, in the work I do-moving along from place to place, person to person, as a reporter, a writer, repeatedly trying to sense another existence and in some ways to share it. Never had that been more true than now, in part because he was sitting there with my life in his hands while placing (in another way) his life in mine. (249)

In the past few years, several authors have suggested that we reflect on traditional conceptions of rhetoric to see what they can tell us about our own concerns. For instance, the authors whose articles appear in James J. Murphy's 1982 MLA anthology, The Rhetorical Tradition and Modem Writing, would agree that a study of our rhetorical tradition can teach us a good deal about the problems of the present, and they make many comparisons between ancient and modern to illustrate what they mean. Comparing rhetorical pedagogies is another promising area of study, although such comparison may at first seem to involve incongruities. Proposing, as this essay does, that there is a fundamental likeness between the modern technical writing case study and the impersonation exercises of classical rhetoric-in which the student plays Zeus excoriating the Sun-God for lending his chariot to Phaethon, or some of Caesar's troops arguing whether to commit suicide or not-would initially seem imprudent. On first glance, these two teaching methods seem pretty far apart. However, a detailed comparison of the modern case study with the impersonation and with another ancient exercise called suasoria not only is possible but can point out striking similarities. More important, such a comparison can validate the educational value of the case study, point up its grounding in rhetorical principles, and suggest some broader uses the modern methodology might serve. But before I proceed to a comparison, let me briefly describe each method. A modern case, to use a summary of a case from one of the best modern texts, goes something like this:

(1985). Designing a case study method for tutorials: A prelude to research. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 88-97.