This essay examines the production of economic space as a rhetorical project in the motion picture work of Ford Motor Company between 1918 and 1945. On film, Ford’s overlapping visual narratives worked to position abstractions like markets, commodities, and class as spatially experienced entities grounded in the materiality of roads, village industries, and national parks. When presented to an American public working through ideas of national identity, isolationism, and economic depression during the interwar period, these films played an integral role in shaping the trajectory of the American landscape to this day. Moreover, in taking up this set of artifacts, I position Ford Motor Company as a unique category of spatial rhetor—an institutional figure large enough and powerful enough to generate and distribute narratives that can crack open the codified elements of social life and insert, in the newly formed intermediary spaces, images of individuals performing industrial or corporate identities.

This essay explores the role of rhetoric in an American West town that embraced prostitution as integral to its sense of identity from 1884–1991, when its economy began to shift from silver mining to tourism. The circulation of social values negotiated through gossip enabled a century-long period during which brothels flourished in an illegal yet decriminalized way. Even though the madams and sex workers were subject to spatial restrictions and the whims of local political and regulatory power, they managed to harness the available means of opportunistic discourse often overlooked in rhetorical analysis. I highlight the influence of the semi-private exchange of rumor and normative small talk. Arising out of spatial and qualitative public memory, gossip can be a persuasive force that harmonizes community needs across past, present, and future.

While recently browsing online news, my eyes wandered to a particularly enticing headline: “Abortion Rates Drop to Historic Low in Wealthy Countries.” Eagerly, I clicked the link and was brought to...

Examining the rhetorical responses of Hongkongers toward the influx of mainland Chinese maternal tourists, this article investigates citizenship claims made by a citizenry that is locally and culturally powerful but is transnationally and sociopolitically marginalized. By analyzing how alienizing discourse circulates and gains political valence through social media and popular cultural discourse, this article demonstrates that citizenship—particularly at a moment of national crisis—is intimately tied to and regulated by collective affects that could foreclose alternative and more inclusive articulations of membership.

This essay extends efforts to facilitate emotional–material frameworks of rhetoric informed by strides in rhetorical and biological studies respectively. Specifically, I examine Edwin Black’s theory of exhortation in light of neurological theories of affect, emotion contagion, and embodiment. I argue Black’s theory offers a prescient precursor to emotional–material rhetoric but also demands revision in light of recent advances in neuroscience. I present two claims. First, I argue emotionally grounded rhetoric can exhort emotional–discursive connections and preference judgments absent the need to convert emotional experiences into formal beliefs. Second, I argue physiological indicators are at least as important as verbal discourse in facilitating emotional exhortation. Finally, I conclude with some theoretical implications for the emotional–material study of rhetoric.

In order to highlight the genuinely radical nature of John Dewey’s educational and democratic vision this essay articulates a vision of contemporary rhetorical education that is grounded in a pragmatic rereading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “will to power.” Drawing from Dewey’s treatment of the will to power in Human Nature and Conduct, I argue that rhetorical pedagogy seeks to arouse, channel, and finally compose the impulses of students through the activity of intelligence in such a way that reflects and advocates for students’ interests within a democratic ethic of advocacy, criticism, and deliberation.

Now that the student-professor relationship has been confirmed, I’m anxiously awaiting what tomorrow’s media coverage will look like. Since we don’t seem to know anything concrete about the shooter...

As rhetoricians combine antiracist and postmodern discourses to compose a hybrid critical discourse on whiteness, they fail to consider the contradictory attitudes toward historical knowledge embodied by the two original discourses. Repressed from the hybrid discourse’s content, the contradictory attitudes nonetheless surface in its style. On one hand, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by active sentences that strive to represent historical dynamics, following the antiracist imperative to ameliorate historical amnesia. On the other, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by abstractions and vague actions, which reflect postmodernist skepticism of historical knowledge. Abstract nouns replace specific agents and social groups, while weak verbs gesture toward unspecified practices and processes. These stylistic elements constitute “stactive” sentences that substitute a feeling of historicity for concrete historical dynamics. Uncritical immersion in the stactive style can limit the field’s and the public’s ability to develop a much-needed historically rich discourse on whiteness.

Local publics open a distinctively generative space for deliberation, one that can actually use difference, based on race, status, or discourse, as a resource—but only if such marginalized perspectives can gain standing and be heard. For difference to gain a voice may depend on a discourse that can delay consensus, acknowledge conflict, and provoke a difference-driven inquiry. Drawing on a study of a deliberative process triggered by issues of diversity within a university, this essay sketches a working theory of community engagement supported by the rhetorical scaffold of a Community Think Tank. The essay explores the theoretical potential of conflict in local publics while asking how rhetorical activists and educators might support a difference-driven deliberation in practice.

The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, by Deborah Brandt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 196 pages. $29.99 (paper).Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in Ameri...

This article extends research on the production of embodied space by focusing on the relations between place and memory. Beginning with a consideration of how wearable technologies enable new spatial practices within the constructed order of the city, we develop a conceptual framework to understand these spatial practices by returning to the rhetorical art of memory and the building of memory palaces. The art of memory, exemplified by memory palaces, offers a rhetorical resource for understanding how smartphones as wearable technologies may be incorporated—that is, brought into the body, as integral to the production of embodied spatial memories. We argue for the memory-palace builder as an inventive rhetorical (and mobile) figure who not only walks but also wears the city, composing and embedding hybrid memories into and onto hybrid places and, thus, providing a coherent way of being and acting in contemporary urban space.

In this essay, I develop a feminist framework for analyzing wearable technologies as embodied rhetorics, one that considers (1) how wearable technologies enable micro-performances of gender, status, and identity; (2) how wearable technologies are embedded in policy/political frameworks as well as scientific/medical ones; (3) how wearable technologies are embedded in spatiotemporal networks of actors, objects, and so on; and (4) how the design of technological objects themselves do or do not live up to the promises of wearability and mobility. Using an analysis of the breast pump as my case and drawing from interviews with women about their experiences, I show how the breast pump crystallizes a network of rhetorics that is both disruptive and productive of gendered differences. In particular, the breast pump presents rhetorical arguments for returning to work soon after childbirth while performing a professional role. At the same time, this technology makes an argument for including nursing bodies on college campuses, spaces that have not historically considered those bodies or their needs.

In both popular and scholarly discourse, wearable technologies are characterized primarily as technologies that quantify, providing wearers with new knowledge about themselves and their environments. Such limited characterizations do not fully engage technologies that are, indeed, wearable but do not simply quantify. This essay argues that wearability encompasses rhetorical work beyond that of popular, mainstream technologies like fitness trackers and sleep monitors. Using Judy Segal’s “kairology,” this essay traces five ostomy pouch narratives—focusing on narratives of empowerment and constraint and analyzing competing experiences of wearing and the divergent identifications those experiences support. The essay concludes with preliminary insights into how kairology is well-suited to help researchers tease out the dynamic processes between wearer and technology, as well as the identities that those processes make possible.

The essays in this special issue identify and analyze the rhetorics enabled and disabled, disclosed and foreclosed by wearable devices and the discourses attending to them, focusing on new rhetoric...

This essay proposes that the rise of sentient cities inaugurates an era of pervasive citizenship wherein individual citizens function as wearable devices for a collective body. To understand what rhetorical practices are available in this problematic, the essay proceeds in three parts. First, it surveys how information systems help determine rhetoric through and as a kind of systems theory. Second, the essay traces how technologies and techniques that form individual bodies are now emerging at larger scales and shape collective bodies. Through several examples, the essay shows how these multipartner ventures to install data collection sensors in cities are informing a new problematic that we term #SenseCommons. Third, the project offers extradisciplinary resources for rhetorically navigating today’s increasingly pervasive information spaces. Ultimately, this essay proposes that the emergence of sentient cities introduces a system of continuous rhetoric whose primary function is not to persuade but to inform.

Wearable technologies in general and mHealth data in particular are championed frequently for ways they afford individual agency and empowerment and promote what the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) calls a “culture of health.” This article complicates such epideictic rhetorics based on results from a situational analysis of the RWJF’s Data for Health listening events, which incorporated panelists from the RWJF, JawBone, Inc., the Quantified Self, and other mHealth technology organizations as well as audience participants who work in community health. Given panelists’ and audiences’ diverging claims about how mHealth data either succeed or fail in creating a culture of health, I mobilize precarity as an analytic construct for critiquing the coexistence of technoscientific progress alongside the persistence of health disparities among vulnerable populations.

The Evolving Citizen: American Youth and the Changing Norms of Democratic Engagement, by Jay P. Childers. University Park: Penn State UP, 2012. 220 pp. $56.95 (cloth).After the Public Turn: Composi...

This essay extends efforts to complicate traditional understandings of ethos by considering it as expressed through and by means of the body. This analysis also examines ethos in relation to Vicki Tolar Burton’s concept of rhetorical accretion or the practice of overlaying new texts on the primary core text. To reveal the significance of analyzing ethos in this manner, this study explores the work of Genevieve Stebbins, a late nineteenth-century proponent of the ideas of French acting and vocal instructor François Delsarte. The essay examines her use of textual accretion as a form of critique but also as a means of acceptance and overlay. More significantly, it reveals the ways that Stebbins’s deployment of rhetorical accretion represents a striking reversal of Burton’s concept. Instead of men overlaying a woman’s text we see the opposite practice in Stebbins’s case.

In 1970, black autoworker James Johnson, Jr., fatally shot three people at Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue Gear and Axel Plant in Detroit. The shooting occurred three years after a devastating urban uprising and in the context of black militant labor organizing in local automotive plants. After a legal defense arguing racism and labor exploitation provoked his actions, Johnson was found not guilty for reasons of insanity. In this essay, I attend to the defense strategy that attempted to retain the political critique implicit in Johnson’s “black rage” while working within the constraints of jurisprudential and clinical notions of “insanity.” The Johnson case suggests that the mobilization of black affect is an always-ambivalent endeavor that can enable radical critique and political practice, while also subordinating black rhetorical agency.

This essay argues that the mechanical voice of Stephen Hawking requires theorizing the public as a voice object. I contend that Hawking’s mechanical voice threatened his audience with what Jacques Lacan called the object voice, a voice in excess of bodies and languages that functions as an elusive object-cause of desire. Upon showing how the psychoanalytic account of voice and rhetorical scholarship on publics may mutually inform one another, I argue that, due to the role of publics as an objet petit a, the strange qualities of Hawking’s synthesizer were rhetorically surmounted. In sum, this essay considers whether Hawking’s mechanical voice was really all that different from our own.

Last October I bought a ticket to hear the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. I went because I wanted to hear what democracy sounded like. Or, more accurately, I went to hear wh...

When Susan Jarratt asked me to write an essay that would invite RSQ readers to engage with all four articles in this issue, she described the task using the musical metaphor of “Counterpoint”—the t...

In this essay, I analyze anti-Chinese rhetoric produced by the Knights of Labor to explore how labor functions as a performance of citizenship. I argue that Knights deployed citizenship as a embodiable topos, using the physicality of labor as a channel to claim inclusion in the national polity despite their marginalized class status.

This essay engages the understudied Indian reformer, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), in order to explicate pragmatism’s influence in non-Western rhetorical situations. By charting the influence of John Dewey on Ambedkar as a student at Columbia University, this study explores Ambedkar’s translation of pragmatism into an Indian context filled with religiously underwritten injustice. His form of pragmatist rhetoric focuses on conversion as a solution to the problems of untouchables in India, and represents a version of pragmatist rhetoric that is revolutionary in form and effect. Expanding our knowledge of how persuasion relates to religious conversion, I argue that Ambedkar constructs and employs a pragmatist rhetoric of reorientation. Honed by Ambedkar in the pluralistic context of India, this process is composed of three distinct steps: evaluation of existing religious commitments, renunciation of harmful worldviews, and conversion to beneficial alternative religious orientations.

In the contemporary United States, concerns about the rise and continued influence of Christian Fundamentalism are likely to be more political than religious in nature. Based on widely held assumpt...

In 2010 the Danish artist Søren Thilo Funder was in Cairo to produce the art film Disastrous Dialogue. As Funder set to work he had a foreboding about how politically charged the piece might be. When he cut the film, however, events had exceeded his most fateful premonitions, reshaping the interpretative context completely. The changes in Egyptian society, thus, altered the possible meaning–agency relations of the finished work. Through a close reading and a conceptually guided criticism of the text–context relationships of Disastrous Dialogue we explore interrelations of meaning and agency through the lens of the concept of plasticity. This leads us to propose a plastic understanding of agency as both formed by and formative of meaningful relationships—and able to creatively destruct and, thereby, transform configurations of meaning.

I argue for conceiving agency via dispossession rather than possession, specifically in the context of prison writing. While the study of prisoner discourse tends to link agency and resistance to the subject through what I term the recuperative narrative, I map out an alternative paradigm through an analysis of Nawal El Saadawi’s prison memoir and Václav Havel’s prison letters. I demonstrate how the prisoners write to retain their fundamental address-ability and response-ability that is the condition for any sense of self, and not (only) to reclaim a subject position and voice. I conclude by considering how this response-ability provides the potential for resistance, a kind of agency and resistance that does not rely on notions of the individual will. I argue that our primary dispossession can serve to redress the unequal distribution of forcible dispossession and that rhetoricians have a significant role to play in this project.

There is little rhetorical inquiry that does not grapple, in one way or another, with tensions between the need for healthy, beneficial encounters with authority and concern for the monolithic and ...

In his article “Wine Tasting is Bullshit,” Robbie Gonzalez cites a real wine review that reads, “Overall character is that of a sex-loaded starlet; endowed, jaunty and erotically scented, with ever...

This essay reads John Bulwer’s seventeenth-century gesture manuals Chironomia and Chirologia. Bulwer advances a theory of invention as an inherently gestural form. The frequent consignment of gesture to delivery is rooted in a persistent tendency to treat motions as ornaments that may be taken or left. Bulwer’s gesture theory refuses the separation of action and invention from which this tendency derives. From this refusal, I argue for a model of animate eloquence that can be used to collapse distinctions among mind and body and reason and emotion in the production, transmission, and reception of persuasive claims.

Teaching delivers signs. The teaching body produces … signs, or more precisely, signifiers supposing the knowledge of a prior signified. … Every university puts language in a position of belatednes...

Increasingly, rhetoricians have taken up the task of understanding how rhetoric is applicable to material conditions, yet have found difficulty in approaching the rhetoric that exists between nonhumans. While the debate over the size of rhetoric, big or small, has often dominated discussions, the concern over size is less important than the relationship between rhetoric and materiality. Both “rhetorical materialism” and “rhetoric’s materiality” approaches see nonhuman objects as subsumed in symbolic representations and human-centric worldviews. This essay suggests a micro-rhetorical stance, which avoids discussions over size and builds upon existing formulations of exploratory, nonhuman rhetorics. A micro-rhetoric allows for concepts not previously thought of as rhetorical, such as hyle, which can be used to identify persuasive elements within nonhuman relations. To show how hyle can be used in a micro-rhetorical investigation, this essay offers a brief analysis of the material persuasions involved in the design of a microbrewery malting system.

As I write this review, the Cameron Crowe film Aloha has just been released to much criticism for its unrealistic portrayal of Hawai‘i; a protest atop Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in the world f...

Carl Herndl and Stuart Brown argue that the complexity of environmental rhetoric is such that its concerns are embedded in both our lived experiences and across many intellectual endeavors. To think through environmentalism, they suggest, is to think through rhetoric, and both entail crossing boundaries. Environmentalism and its concomitant rhetorics, however, frequently draw a bold line between humans and nonhuman nature, and so long as rhetoric remains wedded to the human and the human alone, environmental rhetoric will continue to miss the mark. A strange environmental rhetoric, which blurs the line between humans and nonhumans, calls for more relations and not less—not a removal of humans from the environment, but another way of comporting ourselves with environments.