Over the past few decades, Plato’s Phaedrus has become an important text for scholars interested in tracing new materialist approaches to the history of rhetoric and writing. Drawing on rhetoric and plant studies scholarship, this essay contributes to this conversation by arguing that trees disclose an important layer of irony in the dialogue, producing a deep, if not ambivalent, unity that brings together rhetoric, writing, and discourse. Through a study of trees in the dialogue, this essay demonstrates how the Phaedrus offers rich connections between spatial, nonhuman, and ecological dimensions of writing, rhetoric, and discourse.

The Sloyd Training School, an early twentieth-century private school for teachers in Boston, attempted to legitimize the Sloyd method of handiwork. Specifically, its Alumni Association's publication Sloyd Record brought together educators across the country to make a case for Sloyd's relevancy and impact on the academic and professional development of students, particularly students who were working poor or receiving educations in non-traditional settings. Its contributors painted Sloyd as a form of knowledge and a resource, as a literacy, and their rhetorical effectiveness was predicated upon Sloyd's ability to be painted as such in its far-reaching effects and comprehensiveness.

The generative AI chatbot, as an artificial rhetorical agent participating in the invention and circulation of public discourse, shakes the foundations of rhetorical tenets such as agency, ethos, circulation, and justice; and in doing so, it further isolates rhetoric as amoral, ateleological technē concerned with mere calculated effects and consequences, and may ultimately contribute to a post-rhetoric condition. This article depicts a rhetorical profile of the generative AI chatbot characterized by stochastic rhetoric, which is distinguished from the conventional understanding of rhetoric as (human) conscious and purposeful use of language to induce change. Making a case for the possibility of a post-rhetoric condition, the article considers what it might mean for our conceptualization of ethos, circulation, and justice, and suggests ways of adapting to it.

This study draws on Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) to examine the role of personal statement prompts in promoting or hindering the effectiveness of holistic review in graduate applications. Our analysis reveals that the content articulated in the personal statement prompts help to reify four ideological values held by the discipline. Through the framing of these ideological values, users are positioned into two major social roles: disciplinary expert and expert-in-training. We argue that, for holistic review to be effective, graduate programs must reconcile the tension between personal statement prompts that demand the writer take on contradictory social roles.

Grace and Lace Letter was a newsletter by and for transfeminine evangelicals in the 1990s. This article explores the rhetorical approaches contributors used to bridge these seemingly contradictory identities. Through a recontextualization and historicization of Biblical passages and an employment of a "created this way" discourse, these contributors created possibilities for an evangelical transfeminine identity and advocated for trans acceptance within their evangelical communities. However, these strategies also reveal complicity with other marginalizing discourses. Thus, this article considers the rhetorical processes through which transgender religious identities are constructed and the limitations of such approaches.

Rhetoric Re-View was established under the founding editorship of Theresa J. Enos and has been a feature of Rhetoric Review for over twenty-five years. The objective of Rhetoric Re-View is to offer review essays about prominent works that have made an impact on rhetoric. Reviewers evaluate the merits of established works, discussing their past and present contributions. The intent is to provide a long-term evaluation of significant research while also introducing important, established scholarship to those entering the field. This Rhetoric Re-View essay examines Cicero's De Senectute, or On Old Age, as a work of "gentle" rhetoric.

This essay focuses on two historical maps as rhetorical artifacts: The Piri Reis Map of 1513 produced by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis in 1513, the Reis map, and the Map of the Island of Cuba and Surrounding Territories produced by the Cuban geographer, historian, and educator José María de la Torre y de la Torre in 1841, the de la Torre map. The Reis map demonstrates the colonial logic of Americas’ cartographic invention while the de la Torre Map is an alternative cartographic artifact disrupting the Reis map’s celebratory discourse and the settler-colonial legacy of the world heritage memory.

Featuring narrative argument in Jewish dissent for Palestinians rights, this article examines identity reconstitution and the attunement to being in relationship with the foreign other. The author promotes a critical rhetoric of first-person narrative for the attunement of identity as an ethical practice in relation to alterity. This rhetoric is exemplified in the work of Sara Roy, Jewish American dissenter, and scholar, who speaks out in support of Palestinian rights as a child of Holocaust survivors. In the process of speaking out, Roy reinvents Jewish self-understanding as an alternative to Zionist identity formations.

Dialogism and dialectical knowledge making have long subtended theories of written discourse and therefore the design of rhetoric and writing curricula. As universities move toward interdisciplinary and applied disciplinary epistemologies, theories of written discourse based in the dialogical and dialectical tradition require new scrutiny. This article synthesizes scholarship from the rhetoric of science, written communication theory, and transdisciplinary theory to develop a new poly-logical and poly-lectical approach to written communication for interdisciplinary discourse. The article concludes with examples of hermeneutic and heuristic invention strategies for rhetoric and composition pedagogy that can encourage poly-logical and poly-lectical inquiry on contemporary interdisciplinary issues.

Ethos is an inherent characteristic of persuasion in commonplace scenarios. The acceptance of everyday communicative practices compels belief and trust in language usage, often without question of simple statements. A more substantial understanding of the perceived ethical quality of language usage will afford a richer view of communicative acts, cultures, politics, and events. Three areas of language usage and appearance determine this ethical quality: communion, occasion, and occurrence. Combined, these areas suggest how the phenomena of language usage, particularly within epideictic rhetoric, is not inherently factual in-itself but projects the illusion that it is such.

We argue that intellectual risk-taking offers unacknowledged potential for the writing classroom. But in order to incorporate intellectual risk into the RCWS classroom, we need a theory of its role and pedagogical practices to operationalize it. Our article puts forth a theory of intellectual risk-taking as a rhetorical, deliberative activity and offers six pedagogical topoi (emerging from survey data) where instructors and students are likely to encounter risks in their writing process. The topoi serve as inventional prompts for students, instructors, and programs interested in helping students to cultivate rhetorical capabilities as writers.

This article examines the rhetoric of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump through a psychoanalytic reading of the Aristotelian enthymeme to highlight how conspiracy theories are underwritten by an absence that appeals to the desires and fantasies of audiences. It explores how conspiracy theories that seem irrational are often highly successful enthymematic appeals designed to capitalize on the suasive qualities of libidinal satisfaction, or jouissance. Instead of dismissing them, scholars should embrace an expanded theory of conspiracist discourse that accounts for the role of satisfaction in determining which claims audiences find convincing.

I challenge an "English only" view of Paulo Freire in U.S. scholarship, arguing that an exclusive reading of the 1970 Myra Bergman Ramos English translation masks the dialogic and allusive dimensions of Freire's rhetoric. I trace Paulo Freire's use of situação-limite ("limit-situation") to Álvaro Viera Pinto's appropriation of the term in Consciência e realidade nacional from Karl Jaspers's concept of Grenzsituation in Philosophie, Existenzerhellung. A detailed illustration of the semantics of situação-limite is needed to correct for a "glass half full" terministic screen in Anglophone U.S. scholarship, which overly minimizes the term's profile of collective historical transcendence.

Discussion sections of research articles are important because they are where researchers make claims for advancing knowledge in their fields. There has been a growing interest in research articles focused on Discussions. However, only a few studies have centered on the role of arguments. What is missing in this literature is the potential for rhetoricians to identify specific, sentence-level arguments. The idea is that to analyze persuasion in Discussions, rhetoricians should be able to identify arguments contributing to persuasion. Toward that aim, I refer to Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a catalyst for specific arguments and examples from thirty science research articles.

While scholarship in rhetoric and composition has deliberated its disciplinary identity, we do not yet have a current account of how pluralistic approaches to curriculum at the doctoral level professionalize graduate students as teachers, researchers, and future faculty.

This essay shows the rhetorical and material process of regendering and forgetting that accompanied the downsizing and tearing down of U.S. progressive-era settlement homes founded by female maternalists who lost their ethos by mid-century in the U.S. The regendering of place by mid-century urban renewalist’s rhetoric, policy and culture enabled the elimination of neighborhoods. It made vulnerable the concept and material space of the neighborhood as a headquarters for community engagement, and denied the emotional attachment to homes that Progressive-Era maternalists embraced. The legacy of maternalist placemaking layered into Detroit’s contemporary social service agencies embodies the impact of this regendering.

While current approaches to theorizing rhetorical circulation often designate digital rhetorics as their object of study, this designation unintentionally closes off rhetorical inquiry. Analog, material rhetorics, like graffiti, resemble digital rhetoric in the circulation of their rhetorical effects. The study of graffiti rhetorics therefore invites a recursive application of theoretical models of rhetorical circulation. By analyzing examples of bathroom graffiti collected from a large college campus, this essay seeks to inform fresh models of rhetorical circulation that more fully account for the many diverse and interrelated systems from which the full meaning of any one instance of rhetoric is derived.

This essay uses a cultural rhetoric framework to analyze Hermanas: Deepening our Identity and Growing Our Influence (2019), a multi-authored book by evangelical Latinas in the U.S. The distinct storytelling in the text—which layers the authors' personal narratives with discussions of biblical texts—emerges from both white evangelical and Latina cultural contexts. This communal, activist approach to personal narrative enacts rhetorical leadership by confronting systemic injustices in U.S. evangelicalism and offering readers in that community new ways to engage with dominant evangelical rhetoric and with the stories of others.

AbstractThis essay rhetorically analyzes stories about domestic gun violence from Everytown for Gun Safety’s website, “Moments That Survive.” These everyday writers challenge America’s dominant narrative of protection, offering a counternarrative of protection by asking readers to reimagine the perpetrators of gun violence, guns themselves, and moments of gun violence. Extending previous rhetorical scholarship, I demonstrate how and why “imagination” is an essential concept for rhetorical scholars seeking to understand gun violence rhetorics and advocates seeking to change them. Notes1 For their feedback on various stages of this project, thanks to Laura Michael Brown, Lesley Erin Bartlett, Anne Kretsinger-Harries, and Lori Peterson. Thanks as well to Rhetoric Review editor, Elise Hurley, and the reviewers, CitationJenny Andrus and a second reviewer who remains anonymous. I presented portions of this essay for a lecture at the College of Holy Cross’s McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture; thanks to Tom Landy for the invitation and the attendees for their feedback.2 For instance, gun suicides account for over half of all gun-related deaths each year (CitationSilver).3 This percentage is likely higher because it excludes the 48.9% of cases in which “the relationship between murder victims and offenders was unknown” by investigators. Only 9.9% of people were killed by confirmed strangers.4 Although I use “story” and “narrative” interchangeably in this essay, I acknowledge that literary scholars and sociologists, among others, have debated whether these terms mean different things. I use the term “counternarrative” here to indicate how narratives and stories can challenge one another. Counterstories, by contrast, are stories that “subscribe to CRT’s [Critical Race Theory] tenets, particularly in their critique of a dominant ideology (liberalism, whiteness, color blindness) and their sustained focus on social justice as an objective” (CitationMartinez 17). The “Moments That Survive” stories’ critique of dominant ideologies is at best implicit.5 For historical examples in rhetoric, see works by Aristotle and Quintilian (CitationKennerly). Beyond rhetoric, imagination has been usefully theorized by psychoanalysts and by social and political theorists, including postcolonialist, feminist, and queer theorists.6 My description of the “Moments That Survive” website borrows heavily from my earlier essay on stories about gun suicide (CitationRood, “Protection”).7 I have described how domestic violence is operationalized within these stories, but I want to acknowledge that there is disagreement over definitions (CitationSnyder 17). For instance, according to The National Council Against Domestic Violence, “[d]omestic violence is the willful intimidation, physical assault, battery, sexual assault, and/or other abusive behavior as part of a systematic pattern of power and control perpetrated by one intimate partner against another” (“What”). Although their definition is expansive in several ways, it seems to exclude violence committed by family members and former partners.8 The FBI’s 2019 data show that 482 wives and 505 girlfriends were killed by their partner, whereas 85 husbands and 187 boyfriends were killed by their partner. Yet these data have several limitations. First, there is no space for nonbinary folks. Second, a “wife” or “husband” is presumed to be in a heterosexual relationship. A note at the bottom of the FBI’s chart reveals that “the category of acquaintance includes homosexual relationships and the composite category for other known to victim.”9 The labels “us” and “them” can be slippery. The dominant narrative of protection often assumes and perpetuates cultural biases (such as racism) so that “us” means white people and “them” means people of color. But depending on who is speaking, listeners might imagine themselves—or hear themselves being imagined—as an “us” or a “them.” For instance, even though the NRA’s account of protection regularly relies on racist appeals, a person of color might nonetheless hear themselves as an “us” rather than a “them.”In their counternarrative of protection, the “Moments That Survive” writers urge readers to consider danger not just from “them” but also from “us.” Depending on the context, “us” seems to refer to “(a) ourselves and our loved ones, (b) the exclusionary “us” common in gun rights advocacy (e.g., white men), and (c) a capacious account of “us” that includes people historically cast as literal or metaphoric outsiders” (CitationRood, “Protection” 35).10 I do not focus here on depictions of people subject to abuse, but CitationDonileen R. Loseke highlights how women subject to abuse—and organizations seeking to support them—face pressure to portray “morally pure victims” to garner sympathy and support even though such depictions are exclusionary, unrealistic, constraining, and ultimately beside the point—the problem is with the abuser, not the abused (679).11 CitationCaroline E. Light and CitationAngela Stroud thoroughly critique “stand-your-ground” laws and explain why the underlying appeal to self-defense is not available to everyone, particularly people who are not white men.12 Jennifer Andrus illustrates why these different accounts of agency matter. Police tend to assume that the abused have unrestricted agency (they can just leave) or nonagency (they will inevitably return to their abuser). Consequently, police are often ill prepared to understand let alone help the victims/survivors that they are called upon to protect.13 Paige L. Sweet traces how therapy has come to be the primary way of supporting women subject to abuse—or at least an obstacle to receiving other forms of support. While therapy can be useful, it might also suggest that blame lies within women (rather than the men who abused them). Many women desperately need other forms of support (money, housing, food, and so forth), but therapy nonetheless became politically popular because it was seen as distinct from welfare.Additional informationNotes on contributorsCraig RoodCraig Rood is an associate professor in the Department of English at Iowa State University. He is the author of After Gun Violence: Deliberation and Memory in an Age of Political Gridlock (Penn State UP, 2019).

AbstractThe rhetorical figure of speech called prolepsis, describing a presaging of time and events to come, commonly appears in environmental communication and importantly frames the possibilities for action. Prolepsis is a figure employed in communication about climate change that demands attention in its various deployments, configurations, and, importantly, rhetorical inducements. Such inducements may rely upon feelings of hope or fear, and this study investigates the rhetorical and ethical conditions prolepsis may generate. A considerable literature studying the concept of hope offers great insights into climate change perceptions and behavior concerning climate action. The present study examines prolepsis to discuss how the figure's inducement of suasive effect through appeals to hope and fear shape the ethical horizons for action. We examine media coverage of the IPCC's sixth report, Part I, warning of the enormous impacts of the ongoing climate emergency and necessary climate action to mitigate the worst of these effects. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAshley Rose MehlenbacherAshley Rose Mehlenbacher is Canada Research Chair in Science, Health, and Technology Communication at the University of Waterloo and the author of On Expertise (Penn State UP) and Science Communication Online (Ohio State UP). She is also the inaugural Co-Director, with Donna Strickland, for the Trust in Research Undertaken in Science and Technology (TRuST) network.Carolyn EckertCarolyn Eckert is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her research investigates the ethotic construction of experts during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also teaches at Conestoga College and in the Humber College School of Business.Sara DoodySara Doody is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo where she investigates climate change communication and transdisciplinary collaboration between science and philosophy. Her research examines written communication in science and higher education and inter-/transdisciplinary communication and collaboration.Sarah ForstSarah Forst is a graduate psychology student at the University of Cologne and a research assistant in the Department of Research Methods and Experimental Psychology. She was a Mitacs Global Link intern in Summer 2021 at the University of Waterloo.Brad MehlenbacherBrad Mehlenbacher is Professor of Rhetoric and Communication in English Language & Literature at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Mehlenbacher is author of the NCTE award-winning book, Instruction and Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning (MIT Press), co-author of Online Help: Design and Evaluation (Ablex).

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 As I detail in the book I’m writing, Hitler received intensive, rhetorical training in public speaking and propaganda in the German military’s demobilization force after the First World War.2 He actually says there are six elements of eloquence, but the fifth entry in his enumeration is just a list of analogies he thinks are incontrovertible.

AbstractThis article analyzes the epideictic practices Chicana rhetors use to reclaim the figure of Malintzin, a woman cast as a promiscuous traitor for her role in the Spanish conquest. Since the figure of la Malinche was used to shame Chicana feminists as the traitors of the Chicano movement, Chicanas responded by first rejecting the narrative of la Malinche through rhetorical delinking, reframing her story with the use of amplification and depreciation, and finally reclaiming Malintzin as an aspirational symbol for Chicana feminists. Chicana epideictic makes a political argument about the value and worth of Chicana feminists by praising the Malintzin figure. Chicana epideictic challenges and celebrates community values and blurs the line between epideictic and deliberative rhetoric. Notes1 I would like to thank RR reviewers Jaime Armin Mejía and Brigitte Mussack for their thoughtful and thorough feedback. Their guidance was immensely helpful.2 The works by del Castillo and Candelaria represent modern-day encomia to Malintzin since they focus heavily on her values and virtues. Gonzales and Sosa Riddell present an encomium to the Chicana and Alarcón falls somewhere in the middle.3 The events leading to the Cholula massacre remain a contested point among historians because some believe Cortés lied to cover the fact that the attack was meant to cement his alliance with the Tlaxcalan people (CitationTownsend 81-82).Additional informationNotes on contributorsMiriam L FernandezMiriam Fernandez is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at California State University, San Bernardino.

AbstractEquitable access to fertility care remains precarious and often dependent upon definitional rhetoric of infertility, which insurance policies and state legislators use to determine access to alternative family building options. This article builds upon prior rhetorical scholarship on infertility by applying an embodied rhetorics framework to capture the resilience infertile persons exhibit when faced with barriers to build their family. To do this, I share a series of texts self-identified infertile advocates produced as they reflected on their encounters with barriers to accessing care and building their families. As a disease that requires self-disclosure as a form of advocacy, I analyze the visual and written texts produced through an embodied rhetorics framework. These texts are forms of public advocacy in that they make visible the multiple embodied misconceptions infertile persons navigate when trying to build one’s family. I discuss these texts as illustrating “misconception fatigue” which is affective toll that accumulates when advocating for one’s reproductive right to have a family. I conclude by encouraging other rhetorical scholars committed to reproductive justice to adopt an embodied rhetorics framework to their scholarship and develop participatory research projects to support the advocacy needs of marginalized reproductive health communities. Notes1 I would like to express thanks to Megan Faver Hartline, Katie Manthey, and Phil Bratta who took time to read this article and provide generous feedback. A heartfelt thank you to RR reviewers Michelle Eble and the two other blind reviewers who took time to engage with the ideas of this piece and construct helpful reviews. Finally, additional gratitude must also be extended to the infertility advocates who decided to participate in this photovoice project and make visible vulnerable moments in their infertility journeys.2 One IVF cycle is defined as ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval and embryo transfer. The cost of those procedures varies by the individual’s insurance coverage, provider, and medication needs. Hence, the range of costs. See Marissa Conrad’s article “How Much Does IVF Cost?” Forbes Health, 28 Sept. 2021.3 RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association offers the most accurate reporting of state-by-state insurance coverage for fertility treatment. For instance, the organization offers up-to-date data on insurance coverage per state on their website under the page “Insurance Coverage by State.”4 The ACA does not cover fertility related treatments as reported by health insurance reporter Louise Norris.5 Alternative family building refers to other methods of conception and/or accessing options such as adoption or surrogacy to have a family. Alternative family building options may be needed for heterosexual couples experiencing infertility but also include queer couples and single parents by choice.6 The Institute for Women’s Policy Research defines reproductive rights as “having the ability to decide whether and when to have children” (n.p.). This definition asserts that there is a fundamental right to have a family/child, if one so desires. This assertion is also supported in a reproductive justice framework which includes the right to a family as one of its three tenets.7 The World Health Organization defines infertility as “a disease of the male or female reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular.” The American Society for Reproductive Medicine defines infertility as “the result of a disease (an interruption, cessation, or disorder of body functions, systems, or organs) of the male or female reproductive tract which prevents the conception of a child or the ability to carry a pregnancy to delivery.”8 To be clear, I am not suggesting embodied identity and embodied rhetoric as interchangeable terms. Rather, my use of embodied identity is informed from how Knoblauch and Moeller define “embodiment”. For them, “embodiment is more than ‘simply’ the experience of being with a body but is instead the experience of orienting one’s body in space and among others…the result of objects and being acting with and upon each other” (8). Embodied identity, in the context of infertility, is the meaning-making of coming to learn/see oneself as infertile. Embodied rhetoric, however, examines the potential actions and production of knowledge that is exerted because one sees identifies as infertile.9 Advocacy Day is an event coordinated by RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association where the infertility community talks to Members of Congress about increasing family building options and access to care (“Advocacy Day,” RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, 2022).10 All photovoice submissions analyzed for this article are included in the appendix.11 I would like to note the distinctions between reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice to be accountable to the individual histories of each term: reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice. My use of the term ‘right to have a family’ is informed from Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger’s definition of reproductive justice that asserts “reproductive justice goes beyond the pro-choice/pro-life debate and has three primary principles: (1) the right to have a child; (2) the right now to have a child; and (3) the right to parent the children we have [in safe communities and conditions]” (9). When I use the term the ‘right to have a family’ it is drawing upon these three tenets central to reproductive justice and acknowledges the history in advocating for the reproductive experiences of women of color and other multiply marginalized individuals.12 It should be noted that other infertility stakeholders have more recently adopted a reproductive justice approach to discussions of infertility. For instance, the March 2023 publication of Fertility and Sterility focused explicitly on moving beyond recognizing the racial and ethnic disparities in women’s reproductive health and have pushed for more action-oriented approaches that seek to align with the reproductive justice movement.13 By collective fatigue, I refer to the multiple experiences of fatigue represented the photovoice submissions. These include financial, emotional, and even physical fatigue. Collectively, they produce the experience of misconception fatigue.14 The toll of various treatments, doctor appointments, and time devoted to attempting to become pregnant can physically impact an infertile person and contribute to fatigue.15 A 2020 Forbes article written by Pragya Agarwal documents the retaliation some women in the workforce face when actively attempting to become a parent and how discrimination is heightened for women who need assisted reproductive technology to become pregnant.Additional informationNotes on contributorsMaria NovotnyMaria Novotny is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research considers how reproductive health patients advocate for health care through her collaborations with The ART of Infertility. Her co-edited collection Infertilities, A Curation portrays the myriad voices and perspectives of individuals who experience infertility and difficulty in family building using art and writing as mediums for personal expression. Other scholarship related to the intersections of infertility, rhetoric, and advocacy has been published in Community Literacy Journal, Peitho, and Technical Communication Quarterly.

Rhetoric Re-View was established under the founding editorship of Theresa J. Enos and has been a feature of Rhetoric Review for over twenty-five years. The objective of Rhetoric Re-View is to offer review essays of prominent works that have made an impact on rhetoric. Reviewers evaluate the merits of established works, discussing their past and present contributions. The intent is to provide a long-term evaluation of significant research while also introducing important, established scholarship to those entering the field. This Rhetoric Re-View essay examines the long-term importance and impact of the 1982 MLA volume The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern Writing edited by James J. Murphy.Dedication: This Rhetoric Re-View essay is dedicated to the memory of James J. Murphy, who edited The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern Writing and, in addition to his impressive scholarship, served for many years on the editorial board of Rhetoric Review. Professor Murphy was 98 years old when he passed away shortly before Christmas 2021.

Despite calls to give greater attention to bodies and infrastructures, and despite the development of facial recognition software and face replacement apps, not to mention medical face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic and a long history of political faces in the news, rhetoric has not directly nor adequately dealt with the face. I offer a new materialist rhetorical theory of the face, drawing on the concepts of hyle and iwi to argue that the face is a bio-social conglomeration both human and nonhuman. I look specifically to biometric data collection and to artist Zach Blas’s algorithmically designed masks from his project, “Facial Weaponization Suite,” to illuminate how the face is rhetorical and how faces might resist facial recognition suppression. The study urges rhetoricians to think carefully and ecologically about the face.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRichard Leo EnosRichard Leo Enos, Emeritus Piper Professor (State of Texas) Quondam Holder of the Lillian Radford Chair of Rhetoric and Composition, Texas Christian University.

“Bio warfare” describes a digital rhetorical tactic used by teen climate activist Greta Thunberg to challenge oppressive anger norms and assert a feminist paradigm that sees sometimes-angry teen girl activists as credible, rational rhetors. On the surface, the rhetorical strategy is simple: Thunberg copy/pastes world leaders’ disparaging language into her 160-character Twitter bio. Yet, in these seemingly simple Twitter bio updates, Thunberg recontextualizes conservative leaders’ language into her own Twitter profile, inverting their meaning to assert an opposing ideology: that teen girls’ anger can be wise.

Martial arts organizations can become Foucaultian institutions that discipline and punish practitioner bodies to enact ideologies of violence. In this article, I describe how these institutions function by examining the rhetorical history of one specific martial art, Taekwondo. My analysis extends Hawhee’s examination of Ancient Greek athletics to include modern martial bodies and the associated non-Western rhetorical traditions underpinning these practices. Martial arts institutions operate in the following ways: (1) Invent traditions for rhetorical purposes, intended audiences, and desired effects; (2) produce discursive systems of control (like training manuals) to communicate institutional standards, expectations, and authorized methods of practice; (3) ascribe rhetorical/symbolic significance to body types and martial techniques; (4) and persuade global audiences through mass media and embodied performance.

The impact of written communication in ancient Athens, particularly the social consequences of literacy on an oral culture, has been a subject of keen interest among rhetoricians. This essay synthesizes current research on the impact of literacy in ancient Athens from a rhetorical vector. One of the principal observations discussed in this review of current research is that the alphabetic writing of oral discourse better enabled rhetors to invent and compose complex modes of oral argument and persuasion than the heuristics of orality alone.

This article examines how whistleblowing evolves as a rhetorical genre alongside emergent media. By analyzing three events involving student disclosures on social media, this article argues that students’ social media communication can qualify as whistleblowing, just as whistleblowing can qualify as rhetoric. Notably, whistleblowing’s current conventions, which are heavily based in business and organization studies, suggest otherwise. This article introduces a concept called kinderuption to facilitate rhetorical analyses of whistleblowing. Approaching whistleblowing events as kinderuptions invites critical attention to audience engagement and influence, and a reconsideration of underlying themes like intention, harm, and care.

This article provides a framework for analyzing metaphor as epideictic rhetoric, accounting for the persistence of key disciplinary metaphors. It examines the metaphor of voice across distinct theoretical conversations as an example of epideictic metaphor. Voice’s epideictic function allows it to reconceptualize the shared value of power as it celebrates this value by stitching and unstitching it to various worldviews and values. An epideictic framework allows rhetoric scholars to uncover and trouble values celebrated by a discourse community’s shared metaphors while challenging values as unquestionable or mutually exclusive. Further, framing metaphors as epideictic celebrates linguistic and conceptual dissonance.