Allison Rowland's Zoetropes and The Politics of Humanhood is about rhetorics of humanhood or how some come to be counted as human while others do not. It considers how hierarchies of humanhood are generated, sustained, and reordered, examining the discursive patterns by which movements along the scale of human valuation occur. The majority of the book is devoted to three case studies, each of which focuses on a distinct contemporary site: the American Gut Project's public information regarding the gut microbiome, the National Memorial for the Unborn's memorializations of aborted fetuses, and the gym scene in Boulder, Colorado. It is an eclectic set of cases, yet one that coheres in Rowland's conceptual framework and in its focus on health and body related issues: guts, abortion, and fitness.The book's title comes from the term “zoe,” which Rowland explains is “pronounced zoh-eh; rhymes with ‘no way’” (2). She gestures toward Giorgio Agamben in her use of the term but is clear that her usage is not the same as his notion of bare life. She appends “zoe” to “rhetorics” to identify the range of discursive moves by which life is valued and devalued across the spectrum of humanhood. As such, the book is very much about biopolitics and also, she takes care to emphasize, necropolitics. Citing Achille Mbembe's work, she stresses that when it comes to the hierarchies across which humanhood is ascribed, devaluations are an inevitable counterpart to elevations. She uses the term “transvaluation” to capture both forms of movement and their interconnectedness. And across case studies the book remains attentive to the dynamic by which humanhood's hierarchies produce both beneficiaries and casualties. As a whole, it convincingly illustrates the sort of insights that rhetoric, as field of study, brings to scholarly conversations around biopolitics and necropolitics.Rowland's book is firmly anchored in the rhetorical tradition. She aims to equip readers with a language for identifying and discussing the rhetorical patterns by which transvaluations occur. The term “zoerhetorics” is thematic, referencing modes of discursive transvaluation in general. But more specifically, Rowland is concerned with a specific iteration of zoerhetorics, zoetropes, or the figurative devices by which valuations along the hierarchy are enacted. For this, she draws from the deep well of rhetorical tropes, engaging long-standing—but now somewhat obscure—concepts like antonomasia and somatopeia to discern modes of figurative transvaluation. Her hope, she notes with a wry nod to its unlikely realization, is that even journalists or citizens might pick up this language and use it as a resource for naming and thereby more effectively addressing problematic zoerhetorics.It is fitting that Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood begins with the description of a classroom exercise the author uses to introduce students to some of the book's core ideas. Well-suited to adoption in an upper-level undergraduate or graduate course, the book explains key ideas and concepts in lucid and straightforward fashion and deploys specialized terminology judiciously. In addition, one of the book's notable strengths is its thoughtful self-reflexiveness. Rowland does not construe rhetorical analysis as a disembodied process but as one in which a positioned, sometimes personally-invested, self participates. For example, in a chapter on fitness culture in Boulder, Colorado that examines how certain privileged, fit bodies become valorized while others are cast as lesser-than, Rowland acknowledges her own participation in that culture. She describes some of her time at Boulder gyms, reflecting on the experience of complicity in that particular zoerhetoric. This is a candid illustration of what it looks like to critique rhetoric while not entirely exempt from that critique oneself.Perhaps the most compelling chapter is the one focused on pro-life fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn. Rowland examines the myriad ways the memorial ascribes human status to the fetus, through memorial plaques inscribed with individual names, for example. In doing so, she engages in highly positioned rhetorical analysis. For example, she describes first encountering the memorial via a weblink: “I remember sitting up a little at my desk . . . —how interesting, I thought; this fetal memorialization stuff is a bigger deal than I thought” (81). Later she recounts taking a research trip to the National Memorial on Mother's Day, only to be surprised to find no one else there. She also acknowledges the difficulties of doing research in the pro-life community as someone who is herself pro-choice. The chapter offers a lesson in how we might communicate about our research process in a way that acknowledges personal context. And for students, it is a helpful illustration of the messiness of academic work in which a researcher might at times be intrigued, conflicted, disappointed, etcetera and must grapple with various challenges while making adjustments during the unpredictable research process.The zoerhetorics that determine who gets counted as human and who doesn't underwrite much tragedy throughout human history, legacies of oppression and violence, and misery wrought against those deemed less than others. Rowland's arguments meaningfully intersect with long-standing scholarly conversations around the rhetorics of race, class, and gender concerned with the same. And while her case studies arguably avoid the most horrific sites of zoerhetorical consequence, she attends to their terrible potential throughout the book. In Chapter One, she elaborates at some length on the Great Chain of Being as a foundational zoerhetoric, one that still structures, often implicitly, assumptions about who counts as most and least human. As an enduring Western hierarchization, it has facilitated no small amount of subjection throughout history. Her case study on the American Gut Project addresses how communication around gut microbes sometimes draws on paternalistic and colonial rhetorics in which racial hierarchization is also involved. At the same time, one can imagine other case studies that grapple with even darker material, which dwell more fully on the horrific consequence of casting some out of the realm of perceived humanhood.Given Zoetropes’ self-reflexive approach to research questions, methods, and findings, it is no surprise that the book has a more narrative quality than many monographs in rhetorical studies. Rowland tells the stories of her research process, while also convincingly demonstrating its results. Consequently, the book is engaging to read, well-positioned to hold the interest of a broad readership. At the same time, the book also systematically details various discursive moves by which zoerhetorics are enacted. Rowland includes a mini-glossary of key terms at the end of the introductory chapter and, in the conclusion, outlines what she calls “zoerhetorical theory's propositions,” an encapsulation of the book's key arguments across case studies.Zoetropes equips its readers with tools with which to name, conceptualize, and potentially dismantle hierarchies of valuation. The stakes are high. As Rowland argues throughout the book, zoetropic hierarchies determine which lives come to matter or not, with life-or-death consequence. It is a sign of the book's merit that readers will want to take its productive conceptual frameworks elsewhere. The book effectively beckons past itself, inviting us to apply Rowland's critical tools to cases beyond her own. It is an invitation worth accepting.

Assuming the mantle at R&PA was a weighty responsibility for me, personally as well as professionally. Very few people likely know this, but I was a graduate student editorial assistant at Texas A&M when the journal started. Back in the day, I helped vet essays prior to publication, which meant trudging over to the library to pull books and journals off their shelves to check citations. Like many others in the field, I have submitted manuscripts to be considered for publication in this journal and been rejected. One of my greatest professional regrets is dropping a revise and resubmit I received from R&PA while in graduate school—I did so, I told myself, to focus on my dissertation. Never would I have thought I would become the journal's editor. Nevertheless, I am honored to be editor of a journal that has produced so much work that resonates so powerfully in the areas about which I research and write. Its scholarship has proved so influential in my thinking and research over the years that much of the readings I assign to the graduate students in my rhetorical criticism course come from its pages.I had an affectionate, yet sometimes contentious, history with the founder of this journal. Marty was my professor, served on my MA committee, provided a reference to graduate school, published my work, and offered me guidance as I became an editor myself (you have to “ride herd” on reviewers, he told me). I often have wondered what he thought when I was selected as the editor of R&PA; he was still alive at the time.When I first agreed to edit Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I knew I wanted to have an invited issue—something I did not do for either of the journals I edited previously. When the field erupted in a justifiable uproar a number of years ago, I remained silent. I did not do so to be complicit with existing power structures. I did so because others’ voices needed to be heard more than mine; our community did not need my voice merely making noise or filling space. An invited issue—in the journal around which much of the controversy came to the forefront—thus seemed to me a particularly poetic and apt opportunity to provide a vehicle through which I could magnify others’ voices.As I began to conceptualize a special issue, I knew I wanted to do something that gestured to the journal's past while acknowledging our present. I also wanted to do something that would create an inclusive space for voices not typically published within its pages, providing an opportunity for scholars not as advanced in their career trajectory to publish in R&PA. I had an idea to take a page from the journal's (and the discipline's) past and flip the script a bit.In the Spring of 2000, Michael Leff guest edited a special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs (following a presidential rhetoric conference) about what scholars perceived as President Abraham Lincoln's moment of greatest rhetorical leadership. The scholars in that issue approached the question from a wide variety of perspectives. Some analyzed a single text (varying from the famous to the obscure) whereas others used multiple texts. Some discussed the affirmative rhetorical choices Lincoln deployed whereas others discussed how Lincoln effaced himself in his discourse. All focused on the rhetoric of one orator—a celebrated and official leader of the United States of America.Realizing that rhetorical leadership looks different to different populations or within different contexts, I reached out to authors I thought could bring a unique perspective to the conversation. Not all of the scholars to whom I reached out responded. They might have missed my email, incorrectly thought the offer was a widely cast one, did not have the time or the capacity to write something, or did not want to be published in this journal. Some of the scholars who did respond were unable to draft an essay at this time or ended up being unable to do so for various personal and professional reasons. I know readers will wonder why certain voices were not included. Please know that I tried to have more perspectives represented and that I hope more voices that research different populations will be included in the pages of this journal in the future. This one issue is not enough.I invited the scholars within this issue to answer the question, “What does rhetorical leadership look like” to different people or in different contexts? I wrote to the invited authors that rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, can look different to different populations active in the public sphere. Consequently, what constituted rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, were all “open” concepts. What counted as a text, who communicated—or did not communicate—and about what they communicated were left to each scholar to be determined, according to what each would view as appropriate to their area of study. I wanted the call to be cast as widely as possible to allow creativity and agency in authorial response, yet I also wanted to maintain a discernable theme. I did not want my thoughts on the subject to lead, but to provide a site for authors who specialize in different areas of study to formulate the conversation. (This is not to say that I did not provide editorial guidance.) I asked, moreover, for the authors to keep the essays relatively short—shorter than the essays we typically publish—so that more voices and perspectives could be included within the issue. I am excited for the readership of R&PA to engage with the ideas presented by the authors.The essays in this issue of R&PA explode the idea of what constitutes rhetorical leadership. They show us that rhetorical leadership is not monolithic, it does not have an identifiable genre, and it is not speech- or discourse-reliant. Rhetorical leadership enables voices to be heard in transgressive and transformative ways through different channels of communication, through the embodiment of place and ideas, and through actions. Rhetorical leadership can be fluid and/or guided by geographic space. The essays in this issue largely reject notions of leadership that are patriarchal and adhere to traditional leadership structures. The authors often reconceptualize notions of power and forefront discourses that have not received much scholarly attention, have been neglected or silenced, or have been differently empowered. Many essays show rhetorical leadership in communal contexts, rejecting traditional pathways of power that made previously conceptualized understandings of rhetorical leadership possible.In his essay, “Queer Rhetorical Leadership: ‘Ethical Sluts’ in Modern U.S.-American Polyamory as Exemplar,” Thomas R. Dunn queers the idea of leadership, opening leadership up to “possibilities and potentialities” rather than definitive generic markers. Dunn examines how Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton's book, The Ethical Slut, uses “joyful, radical revisioning; the use of transformational vulgarities; and cultivating comfort in irresolution” to enact a form of queer leadership. Queer leadership, Dunn explains, values adjusting to contemporary issues and concerns, enjoys a “colorful linguistic style” some may deem vulgar, and invites ambiguity and a lack of resolution. Although a queer leadership style “is necessary to rethink the social norms that too often constrain queer life and which, when reinvented, can make new ways of living life queerly possible,” Dunn clarifies that queer rhetorical leadership can be used by anyone to address issues that previous understandings of rhetorical leadership have not been equipped to address.In their essay, “Led by the Land: Recovering Land Agency and Interconnectedness in Social Movement Scholarship,” Noor Ghazal Aswad and Michael Lechuga look at social movements that understand leadership through “leaderless,” land-based, shared geographic space. Ghazal Aswad and Lechuga “envision a form of rhetorical leadership that distributes responsibility, risk, and rewards to all members of a group.” Land can create political subjectivities and social connections. Using the Syrian revolution as a case study, they use the people's response to the Assad regime's practice of sieges and land-burning to demonstrate how the reclamation of the land for subsistence can be generative for survival with the land. Through practices of seed-smuggling and bottom-up farming, enabled through a cooperative agrarian network, the community's relationality and subjectivity is created through emplaced rhetoric that is intersectional and connected.Allison Hahn investigates how technology enables marginalized committees to participate in community development planning in her essay, “Rhetorical Leadership of a Data Story.” During the COVID global pandemic, technological advances such as video teleconferencing have enabled traditionally marginalized communities to participate in the deliberative process. Through her analysis of Diana Wachira's presentation of evidence-based research over a Zoom meeting to an international audience about the eviction of the Kariobangi North community in Nairobi, Kenya, Hahn shows how Wachira employs emplaced rhetoric, making known what might be unknown—or at least lesser known—otherwise. In Wachira's case, she used her own research to provide context and information about the magnitude of persons to be displaced as well as their history with the land upon which they live—information not shared via typical news networks. Wachira's emplaced rhetoric provides a powerful example of how a marginalized community can use their own narrative to counter the dominant narrative to protect human rights and to advance environmental justice.Luhui Whitebear uses counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling to examine the ways in which Indigenous rhetorical leadership advocates social change by bridging multiple worlds, across generations and between Indigenous and colonial systems in her essay, “Our Voices Have Always Been Political: Indigenous Feminist Rhetorical Leadership.” Whitebear examines the rhetoric of three Indigenous women—Zitkala-Ša's boarding school era poetry, Laura Cornelius Kellogg's popular press publications, and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland's speech from Alcatraz—to show not only how these women survived settler colonialism, but also how they resisted colonial systems and practices to preserve their own cultural Indigenous knowledge systems and values within “spaces designed to exclude them.” The rhetorical leadership of Indigenous rhetoricians represents their larger tribal community and history, advancing Indigenous rights while preserving and perpetuating Indigenous culture.In their essay, “The Greta Affect,” Justin Eckstein and Erin Keoppen look at how claims to youth get circulated in the public sphere as a rhetorical resource to create an affective response to effect change. The authors use popular memes of Lisa Simpson, projecting the ethos of Greta Thunberg, to show how a hopeful and naïve leader gets deployed in the public sphere to advocate for change by shaming adults for their lack of action. According to Eckstein and Keoppen, “the Greta Affect mobilizes affect through the moral claim of right makes might to move an intimate public.” Within the public sphere, the girl is complemented for encouraging courageous leadership and criticized for her pushy naivete. The authors contend that, although Thunberg was constrained through the Simpson memes, youth framing creates unique parameters for public deliberation, opening space for a consideration of the obligations the current generation of leaders owes to future generations.In his essay, “México Pésimo: Colosio's Metanoic and Magnicidal Leadership,” José Ángel Maldonado analyzes Luis Donaldo Colosio's 1994 Mexican presidential campaign speech, “Yo Veo un México,” that allegedly led to his assassination. In his speech, Maldonado tells us, Colosio uses his head as a metaphor for leadership (since the Mexican language does not have a direct translation for leader), acknowledges the existence of Mexican pessimism while calling for the end of pessimism via a series of opportunities that could lead to reform and transformation in the country. Colosio's speech, combined with his assassination, present a metanoic pessimism that awaits new opportunities for Mexican socioeconomic advancement.In his essay, “Lo Único Que Tengo Es Amor Para Amar: Rhetorical Leadership and the Journalism of Alfredo Corchado,” Richard Pineda investigates how the journalist Alfredo Corchado enacts leadership in the borderlands between two countries and identities. Through an analysis of two of his books, Pineda finds that Corchado advocates hybrid identity, resilience, and accessibility. Through accessible writing that relays common experiences of people living on the border, Corchado provides an example of how to negotiate liminal spaces for his audience(s). He uses personal and communal stories to highlight the reliance of Mexican Americans in the United States and in Mexico. He also uses language that connects his audience to their geographical roots while embracing the challenges of their present existence, which offers hope to his readers that they are not alone in their embodied experience.In his essay, “Legacy Leadership: Elaine Brown's ‘Education for Liberation’ Bolstering the Fight for Black Women,” Darrian Carroll examines Brown's 2014 speech to University of Georgia students to explain how Brown encourages activists to continue advocating for liberation through “legacy leadership.” A commemoration of the successes and struggles of the past, legacy leadership provides a model of Black female leadership by reminding the audience of the movement's ideological commitments, retelling the conditions of the past and present that create the need for liberation, and encouraging her audience to do all they can to fight for liberation. Brown empowers listeners to act in their everyday experiences for Black liberation through her personal narratives of leading the Black Panther Party.From these essays, we learn that rhetorical leaders may be, but they do not have to be, individuals in official leadership positions. Leaders, and leadership, abound around us. These essays help us understand that rhetorical leadership gains force from the communities from which these communications derive. Leaders(hip) thrive(s), encouraging their populations in a multitude of contexts. To see rhetorical leadership at work, we can look to the narratives and the lessons that arise from within our communities, as leadership results from a need to change and to adapt, as well as from our traditions, our geographic spaces, our shared histories, our triumphs and our challenges, our needs and concerns, our future hopes and dreams, and our search for place and belonging. People and things that speak to those things exemplify leadership. The form of leadership looks different, depending on the specific contexts from which the leadership emerges and through the eyes attuned to see it.When I assumed the mantle of editor of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I did so with a commitment to rhetorical studies as a pluralistic effort. The essays in this issue evidence the diversity of work possible. As diverse as this collection is, however, it does not—and cannot—represent the totality of scholarly and personal perspectives. Space in our journals must be opened for additional, new, and emerging voices and perspectives.

Abstract This essay examines the ways in which Alfredo Corchado, author of Midnight in Mexico and Homelands, creates and reifies rhetorical leadership by championing the hybrid identity he possesses as a bilingual, bicultural Mexican American journalist working across literal and metaphorical borders, including the challenges he has faced and the vulnerabilities experienced in the pursuit of being a journalist. A significant figure in contemporary media as one of the most prominent Mexican American journalists in the United States, Corchado still publishes articles on the United States/Mexico border, immigration, and on Mexico. The essay considers Corchado and the way he discusses resilience, both expressively and as a rhetorical guide for audiences. The essay uses the two books to highlight Corchado's arguments for the power of journalism and the significance of rhetorical accessibility and the expansion of his writing to Mexican American audiences who might appreciate his standpoint in a richer fashion.

Abstract To describe what rhetorical leadership looks like in Critical Mexican Studies, my area of study, I analyze Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta's “Speech Commemorating the 65th Anniversary of the PRI at the Monument to the Revolution,” known colloquially as the “I See a Mexico” speech. One of the fundamental texts of Mexico's 1994, “Yo Veo un México” is regarded as the speech that led to Colosio's assassination—an event that set off a series of misfortunes Mexico continues to correct. By employing the lens of metanoia, the temporal missed opportunity that leads to transformation through regret, I first describe the theoretical relationship between metanoia and pessimism. Then, I describe the sociopolitical conditions that demanded a speech that communicated a break in political tradition. Finally, I unpack the rhetorical strategies that, in aiming to create a vision of progress, shed light on previously obscure realities. Colosio asserts himself as the only leader with the proper vision to lead Mexico through the arrival of neoliberalism by evoking pessimistic images that resonated with public concerns. His speech catapulted him to Mexico's presidency while simultaneously threatening his life. Colosio offered a series of fleeting opportunities Mexico must capitalize on to enter a new stage in democratic possibility. I conclude by discussing how Colosio's haunting rhetoric continues to inform presidential campaigns.

Abstract Greta Thunberg became a beacon of hope for many in the face of climate change. While journalists and social scientists attempt to know her influence through quantification popularized as the “Greta Effect,” we understand Thunberg through rhetorical fragments that compose a broader structure of feelings in the public—what we call the “Greta Affect.” Moving from effect to affect, we look to how Thunberg as a “leader of our time” inspires rhetorical leadership grounded in appeals of innocence. Through a rhetorical analysis of a popular mode of response to Thunberg's speeches, the meme, we investigate how comparisons of Thunberg to another popular culture figure, Lisa Simpson, invite a wider manner of engagement tied to a figure of the girl as publics converge around different investments in youth appeals to innocence.

Abstract Queer rhetorical leadership describes performances of leadership with a queer disposition. As an idea, it exceeds the doing of traditional models of rhetorical leadership by queer rhetors for queer audiences on matters of queer concerns. Rather, queer rhetorical leadership subverts, inverts, and reconceptualizes many of the most common assumptions about how to do “good” leadership in order to lead others in the construction of more queer worlds. This essay explores the notion of queer rhetorical leadership by investigating the discourses of Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton in their influential text, The Ethical Slut (1997). In particular, the essay notes how the rhetors use radical revisioning, transformational vulgarities, and cultivating comfort in irresolution to lead readers toward a queerer world via the practice of polyamory.

English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ silent expression in writing is often perceived as “indirect” or “inarticulate” in the views of Western rhetoric and academia. However, the meaning of silence and its rhetorical practice can differ from culture to culture, and this difference forms a cultural ethos that is unique and significant to the writer. In response to Anne Gere’s aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of silence, I explore cultural ethos as another dimension to recognize ESL students’ silent rhetoric and to expand the theoretical and pedagogical landscape of rhetoric and composition.

This essay demonstrates the value of using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to address specific kinds of research questions in rhetoric. The essay builds on a study of a novel rhetorical object first observed by Yang on the Reddit subreddit r/wallstreetbets. We demonstrate how the rhetorical structure of "pathologics" (1) generated a kind of rhetorical authority that can be measured by higher-than-average user engagement on Reddit and (2) circulated from Reddit into more traditional legacy media. Through our research on the rhetorical circulation of pathologics, we argue that researching rhetoric with AI can center new ways of knowing about concepts relevant in rhetoric, like circulation and rhetorical ecosystems. Further, we argue that researching rhetoric with AI always also entails considering a "rhetoric of AI," requiring critical attention to the platforms, infrastructures, and data sources connected to AI systems.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that excels at generating text and public controversy. Upon its release, many marveled at its ability to author intelligible and generically responsible texts (Herman). Writing about his students' experiences using artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants, S. Scott Graham remarks that the results were "consistently mediocre—and usually quite obvious in their fabrication." Why might this be true? How can an LLM succeed in some respects and fail in others? We argue that the discrepant reactions to human and AI rhetoric are a question of genre, specifically that AI rhetoric is only generic; AI rhetoric represents a new enactment of "writing degree zero" (Barthes) that is disengaged from immediate rhetorical situations and knowledge bases. AI text generators (currently) have a more difficult time simulating the positioned perspectives that human writers bring to situations and communicate to audiences through their genre usage. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin, we treat this problem as a question of generic form and audience addressivity. We describe the interplay of form and addressivity as genre signaling and offer it as a construct for the analysis of AI rhetoric and genre as a cultural form (Miller). Genre signaling (Hart-Davidson and Omizo) describes a feature of communicative behavior as it occurs over time that can help both humans and machines evaluate written discourse as it exhibits certain stabilized formal features. When texts contain specific genre signals at expected frequencies and intensities, it may be recognized as being generally accurate, reliable, trustworthy. Without these signals, a text with a similar topical focus might fail to be taken as credible or useful. In this essay we propose to quantify genre signaling based on three measures: (1) stability, (2) frequency, and (3) periodicity.

The convergence of artificial intelligence technologies with the growth of Christo-fascist movements in the United States presents an alarming threat to women's health, especially considering known privacy violations by the major players—all in the shadow of the US Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade. These violations are ethotic; that is, they betray information that has been mined algorithmically to construct "user models," bits and pieces of which are sold or otherwise circulated without true "user" consent or cooperation. Such models are best understood as algorithmic ethopoeia, mathematized representations of individuals charted as matrices of commodified categories for commercial trafficking, but also for politicians and law enforcement. Taking inspiration from abolitionist tools for resisting intersectional racism, and incorporating data feminism, we offer six categories of design heuristics to respect and maintain ethopoeic integrity, especially in the domain of women's health in a post-Roe technological landscape, using a fundamental rhetorical concept to serve designers, as well as critics and activists.

Rhetoric is a trace retained in and by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This concept illuminates how rhetoric and AI have faced issues related to information abundance, entrenched social inequalities, discriminatory biases, and the reproduction of repressive ideologies. Drawing on their shared root terminology (stochastic/artifice), common logic (zero-agency), and similar forms of organization (trope+algorithm), this essay urges readers to consider the etymological, ontological, and formal dimensions of rhetoric as inherent features of contemporary AI.

Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, provides a unique opportunity to reexamine how affect, memory, authenticity, embodiment, and authorship are conceptualized and discussed in rhetorical scholarship. This is particularly significant as affective experiences resulting from communication with AI are increasingly normative due to the public-facing nature of many large language model chatbots. Drawing first on a recent case wherein an AI user produced a chatbot facsimile of her childhood self, this article suggests that affective changes facilitated by AI represent not only new avenues for exploring affect, but also how time itself is experienced.

Building on mental health rhetoric research (MHRR), I explore how legal advocates in non-profit organizations guide survivors of domestic abuse in obtaining orders for protection (OFPs). State statutes not only dictate what a petition for an OFP must contain, but these statutes and resulting documents also reflect cultural and structural biases about domestic abuse. Through rhetorical analysis of state statutes and personal interviews with legal advocates in this inductive and qualitative study, I discovered that these advocates engage in subversive rhetorical intervention, what the advocates call “crafty” intervention. Such intervention is designed to meet the requirements of state statutes for an OFP and also provide a way for survivors to tell their stories in their own way. This intervention sets the stage for helping survivors heal from the trauma of domestic abuse, convincing judges that survivors need OFPs to stay safe, and demonstrating to state legislators that domestic abuse statutes may be too restrictive.

This study investigates infant feeding rhetoric from the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI), a World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) partnership that prioritizes exclusive breastfeeding. The study approaches patient education materials as user documentation and analyzes the materials for kairos and metaphor. The author argued that the materials function as documentation for the birthing parent’s body operating within the system of the BFHI. The article concludes with recommendations for future research and for creating infant feeding resources that provide critical access to the healthcare system by rejecting the body-as-machine metaphor and reflecting families’ diverse situations, not just the situation of the U.S. healthcare system or BFHI.

This essay presents a rhetorical analysis of how the concept of stigma has functioned in American psychiatric discourse by tracing the concept across nearly two centuries of publications issued by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Specifically, I analyze how the concept of stigma circulates in discourses that seek to (re)establish psychiatry as a moral and scientific enterprise by managing discontinuities that potentially threaten this desired professional status. These discourses perpetually reconstitute psychiatry’s institutional identity through processes of emplacement, or recurrent spatiotemporal figurations that generate a sense of the present as placed in time. My analysis identifies three spatiotemporal figurations, or chronotopes, that persistently cluster around the concept of stigma as it circulates in psychiatric discourse: emergence, approach, and elevation. These chronotopes establish and maintain psychiatry’s professional identity by recursively (re)orienting the present against stigma, and toward an imminent future characterized by the fulfillment of psychiatry’s scientific and humanitarian mission.

The majority of first-year writing “is taught by teachers whose educational backgrounds are more likely to be in literature, cultural studies, or creative writing than in rhetoric and composition” (Abraham 78). This disciplinary knowledge gap poses a challenge for FYW faculty to adjust to new shifts in FYW pedagogy. We would expect inhouse faculty development opportunities to help fill these gaps; however, the results of our year-long qualitative study indicate that the lack of shared disciplinary knowledge and the constraints on adjunct faculty make it challenging for faculty without backgrounds in writing studies to adapt their pedagogies. We add to the body of scholarship on professionalization in two-year college writing studies (e.g., Andelora; Griffiths; Jensen et al.; Sullivan; Toth et al., “Distinct”) and argue that addressing this problem will require investing resources in adjunct support; changing hiring practices to prioritize expertise in writing studies; and designing faculty development that focuses on both theory and pedagogy.

This Instructional Note is designed to assist students with using the rhetorical skills they already have as a bridge to writing rhetorical analysis essays.

In our information age, written communication has become increasingly important in many professions. As a result, university faculty and administrators need to develop specific curricula and pedagogies that will facilitate the process of equipping students with the required writing knowledge and skills to meet the demands of their workplace environments. In this article, we argue that Writing Across the Professions (WAP) as a curricular model meets that requirement, particularly in Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) contexts, which we believe are conducive to fostering writing transfer in university students. WAP foregrounds the importance of writing in workplace contexts and aims to facilitate the transfer of students’ knowledge and practices by focusing on rhetorical genre theory and analysis, discourse community theory and analysis, providing engaged feedback on students’ writing, and inviting students to critically reflect on their previous and current writing knowledge and practices. In this article, we propose four conceptual foundations that university faculty and administrators can utilize to implement WAP programs at their institutions. The first concept is that professional (writing) knowledge and practices are contextual and require lifelong learning; WIL faculty and students thus need to be informed about what is involved in learning to write across professions. Secondly, as the transfer of professional (writing) knowledge and practices goes beyond disciplinary boundaries, both faculty and students need to build contextual awareness. Thirdly, as problem-solving is an integral part of writing in the professions, faculty and students need to engage in critical reflection. Finally, professional (writing) knowledge and practices impact identities and therefore require mentoring. In outlining these shared concepts from WIL and writing transfer research, this article offers examples of how they can inform curricular approaches and pedagogical practices in WAP.

This manuscript offers a critical rhetorical analysis of a multi-site, longitudinal study’s procedures in collecting and recording biomarkers. This manuscript opens new areas of exploration for the field of the rhetoric of health and medicine as the biomarker sampling for measures of stress, and resilience tie to critical rhetorical theories surrounding power and the body. The training manuals and protocols disseminated to the multi-site research team serve as rhetorical artifacts to examine questions of how the choices of biomarkers and the procedures employed to collect the samples needed to measure them are in and of themselves a production of health knowledge of the bodies and identities of transgender and gender diverse people. This manuscript presents an investigation of the processes of biomarker sample collection in conjunction with how the biomarkers are conceptualized as a means of deconstructing hegemonic assertions of gender and health normality.

This article argues that the field of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) needs queer and (trans)formative methodologies to support a disempowered, ignored, and devalued queer community. Building directly from Mohan J. Dutta’s (2022) work, the article 1) addresses that RHM scholarly practices attend to whiteness and neglect to amplify queer and transgender interventional and rhetorical approaches; 2) develops a methodology–institutional critique–for RHM practitioners that crosses disciplinary boundaries to showcase cistematic oppression at infrastructural, structural, institutional, and interpersonal levels; and 3) provides a personal medical story that showcases how institutions fail transgender and queer patients. Through this work, this article argues for the need for rhetorical methodological intervention in RHM research and to mobilize transgender rhetorical agency through coalitional building.

This article explores the adaptation of Gérard Genette's concept of narrative prolepsis in the realm of social media as the proleptic technique, demonstrating its effectiveness as a tool for anticipatory rhetoric in digital communication. By analysing selected instances from Twitter and Facebook, the study illustrates how digital utterances employ proleptic cues to capture audience attention and potentially engage audiences. The concept of prolepsis, traditionally associated with narrative foresight in literature, is shown to be effectively transposed into the digital context, where it functions as a mechanism to attract user attention. This adaptation highlights the dynamism of rhetorical strategies in the evolving landscape of digital communication, underscoring the continuity of classical rhetorical principles in new media environments. Future research should incorporate a corpus study, which would allow for an in-depth examination of the diverse array of proleptic cues employed by social media influencers. Furthermore, an exploration into the persuasive efficacy of prolepsis, along with its potential links to reasoning fallacies, could provide intriguing insights. Additionally, an analysis of audience reactions to these cues could contribute to a more holistic understanding of their impact.

Joining the growing scholarly conversation on food rhetorics and technical and professional communication (TPC), this rhetorical analysis addresses two themes that arise in a Jell-O booklet (circa 1913): 1) constructing white femininity through women’s frustration and technical failure related to cooking and 2) asserting the Black mammy stereotype as a mechanism of maintaining white supremacy. Such analysis illustrates how food-related artifacts construct ideologies as they simultaneously offer technical instruction.

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.

Task representation denotes students’ interpretation in which what a learning or assessment task required them to do. An argumentative integrated writing task which involves the use of reading materials as claims or evidences for composing an essay, makes the role of task representation more critical than others, as writers may be confused with whether their task is to focus on synthesizing the reading materials that they comprehend, or expressing their own views. With the aim of exploring the characteristics of task representation and its association with integrated writing, this study invited 474 secondary four students from Hong Kong to participate in think aloud writing protocol followed by stimulated recall interview (36 participants), and complete an integrated writing task and a questionnaire (438 participants). Three factors of the task representation were identified as source use, rhetorical purpose and text format, and significant positive correlations were found between the three factors and integrated writing performance. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed.

Zachary C. Beare is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. His work, which studies how identity and emotion mediate rhetorical activity, appears in College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, the Journal of Cultural Research, Reflections, Writing on the Edge, and in edited collections.Miriam Chirico specializes in dramatic literature and comedy studies at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she is professor of English. She is the author of The Theatre of Christopher Durang (2020) and coeditor of How to Teach a Play: Essential Exercises for Popular Plays (2020). She has written articles about humor for Studies in American Humor, Text & Presentation, and Shaw: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies.Chris W. Gallagher is professor of English and vice provost for curriculum initiatives at Northeastern University. He has published widely on the teaching and assessment of writing and on educational innovation in K–12 and higher education. He is author or coauthor of five books, most recently College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World (2019).Bev Hogue serves as McCoy Professor of English at Marietta College in southeastern Ohio, where she teaches courses in American literature and writing. She recently edited Teaching Comedy (2023), a collection of essays published by the Modern Language Association.Erika Luckert is a PhD candidate in composition and rhetoric at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her research focuses on writing pedagogies at the intersection of composition and creative writing, with an emphasis on social and collaborative practice. Erika's recent work includes articles in JAEPL, the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and Writing on the Edge, as well as poems in Room Magazine, South Carolina Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.Nancy Mack is a professor emeritus of English at Wright State University and author of Engaging Writers with Multigenre Research Projects and two volumes about teaching grammar with poetry. She has published articles and chapters about teaching memoir, emotional labor, and working-class and first-generation students. She has won state and university teaching awards. Her community service projects include partnerships with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, Dayton Public Television, and the Ohio Department of Education.Jessica Masterson is an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Washington State University Vancouver, where her work examines youth literacies and democratic possibilities in K–12 school settings. Her work appears in Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, and Democracy and Education.Peter Wayne Moe is an associate professor of English and the director of the University Writing Program at Whitworth University. He teaches first-year writing, creative nonfiction, composition pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and a course on the sentence. He is the author of Touching This Leviathan, a Seattle Times favorite book of 2021.Shari J. Stenberg is professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her most recent book is Persuasive Acts: Women's Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century (with Charlotte Hogg). Her work appears in CCC, College English, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Studies, and in edited collections.Luke Thominet is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric in the English Department at Florida International University. His work examines rhetorics of health and medicine, user experience in video game development, and applications of design thinking to pedagogy and academic program development. His research has appeared in Patient Education and Counseling, Technical Communication Quarterly, Communication Design Quarterly, and the Journal of Technical and Business Communication, as well as in the edited collections Effective Teaching of Technical Communication, Keywords in Design Thinking, and User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice.

Abstract Inquiry-based learning, that is, developing student capacity to frame and answer significant questions, is at the forefront of twenty-first century education. Expecting students to ask and solve genuine research questions creates a challenging teaching proposition that editorial cartooning can help solve. While the educational use of editorial cartooning is not a novel concept, asking our students to locate cartoons based on a topic of their choosing and to analyze the satirical debate across these cartoons serves as an accessible inquiry-driven research project for first-year college classes that introduces them to academic databases. This essay details the three-step process used in the college classroom: first, to “mind the gap,” that is, to apply specific rhetorical tools, like parody and juxtaposition, as a means of identifying and analyzing satire; second, to “mine the gap,” that is, to contextualize the cartoons by researching articles about contemporary culture and politics; and third, to “make the gap known” — to share their information with others through an oral presentation and a written essay. This editorial cartoon project, by educating students in research-encountering behavior, provides a genuine model of inquiry and analysis.

As we enter our fourth academic year impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, we already see evidence of institutional and cultural forgetting, or at least looking away from, the way this virus has changed our institutional (not to mention personal) lives. For most institutions, there has been a mandated return to normal. Gone are masks, more online accommodations, and reentry testing. And fading, too, are the conversations about the long-lasting impacts of COVID-19 on learning and on the mental health of our students, faculty, and staff.It is clear, by now, that there will be no return to “normal.” It is also clear that normal is often a revised history, or a history of omission, that represents a mythical bygone time that served few and denied many. Bettina Love (2020), a scholar of education theory and practice, reminds us how schools were failing “not only children of color but all children” long before COVID-19, citing the “norm” of high stakes testing, disproportionate expulsion of Black and Brown students, scarcity of teachers of color, school shootings, inadequate funding—the list goes on.Conversations in higher ed have also pointed to the labor disparities present in the “before times” that the pandemic has revealed and reinforced. In a Chronicle opinion piece, Emma Pettit (2020) observes that the global pandemic is only deepening pre-COVID-19 labor inequities for women-identified faculty, and especially women of color. And a study during the pandemic shows increased emotional labor required by BIPOC cisgender men, BIPOC cisgender women, white cisgender women, and gender non-conforming faculty, who work overtime to both help students navigate the challenging terrain of learning during COVID-19 as well as to manage their own emotional response to sometimes untenable working conditions (White Berheide, Carpenter, and Cotter 2022).As we embark on another pandemic-impacted semester, we feel, and carry with us, the weight of prolonged emotional labor. We tend to the emotional and material burdens our students experience, answer for and carry out policies we don't agree with, and scramble to adapt to the ever-changing educational landscape. All the while, even on our worst days, we strive to convey to the students, preservice teachers, and the graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) we teach our commitment to the power and possibility of pedagogical work. On our best days, we see this moment as an opportunity. The pandemic has changed us, and it has laid bare what needs to change in our institutions.We are not interested in a return to normal. Instead, we are committed to a process of learning from COVID-19’s shock to our institutional systems. So we turn to three moments in our respective professional lives that expose and survey the tensions and complexities we dwell within, using this upheaval to spur questions and imaginings toward a new way forward.As a junior writing program administrator (WPA) my primary responsibility is the education, mentorship, and support of GTAs assigned to teach in our first-year writing program. At any given time, I supervise approximately fifty different GTAs, who come to us from a range of concentrations in the MA, MFA, and PhD programs. Each fall, I teach a graduate-level practicum that GTAs take concurrently with their first semester as instructors of record. Historically, the course has served as a place to workshop issues that emerge when teaching for the first time (e.g., strategies for engaging a quiet class, approaches to making commenting and grading more sustainable, responding to problematic student comments, incorporating more multimodal work into the classroom, etc.). In the fall of 2021, though, in the first semester of my institution's return to fully face-to-face instruction, these issues took a backseat, and almost every class focused on the ongoing pandemic, rising cases, sick students, contact tracing, and my institution's changing guidelines for how we should act and respond to this moment.My practicum classroom began to feel eerily similar to the White House briefing rooms I spent the last two years watching on my TV, laptop, and smartphone. I'd walk into the room smiling under my mask and feigning enthusiasm for being there. Sometimes I'd be carrying binders or printed copies of policy memos to read from. I'd grip the podium in front of this group of people who were simultaneously my students and my teaching colleagues, and as soon as I opened it up to the floor, I'd be peppered by questions about the latest emails sent out by upper administration. I tried to appear calm and confident, even enthusiastic at times, and performing this emotional labor was increasingly difficult a year and a half into the pandemic. My answers all felt hollow and rehearsed; they were deeply unsatisfying. “The university would like to remind you that you cannot inform your students if someone in your class tests positive.” “The university assures us that they are working to address the problems you all have observed with contact tracing.” “The university is discouraging moving classes temporarily online.” “The university is asking instructors to do all they can to support students during this time.”Even as I said those words, I recognized my deliberate use of metonymy to obfuscate responsibility for decision making. “The university” functioned as a convenient and effective way to strategically divert responsibility away from the chancellor and provost who were making most of these decisions (under pressure, of course, from our conservative state legislature and the university system board of governors they have appointed). “The university” is a collective. It makes it sound like a group decision. That language feels almost democratic. It also operationalizes the ethos associated with “the university”; these are learned people, after all. Surely they must be making the most well-informed decisions, right? And, of course, I was also using “the university” to distance myself from responsibility, to avoid the recognition of my guilt and my own complicity in echoing, implementing, and policing adherence to these policies, which is, of course, partly my job (or at least how those above me would conceive of my job). Indeed, the role of a WPA as a frontline or middle manager tasked with implementing the will of higher administrators and executives has been theorized before (DeGenaro 2018; Heard 2012; McLeod 2007; Mountfort 2002), and much of this scholarship reflects on an identity crisis experienced by WPAs, a tension between how they see themselves (as politically radical system disrupters) and how others are now seeing them (as system maintainers and institutional apologists). Mountfort specifically discusses how WPAs experience less freedom to represent their private points of view because they are called on to speak publicly for larger collective views.About halfway through the fall 2021 semester, as I explained once again that the official university guidance was that instructors should not move a class online simply because the instructor has been exposed to a confirmed case of COVID-19, I heard one of the GTAs say quietly and out of frustration, “This is bullshit.” And, of course, it was bullshit. It was not a policy born out of the most recent public health guidance nor out of a desire to protect the welfare of students and teachers. It was not a policy concerned with pedagogical effectiveness. It was about optics. The university was focused on maintaining the appearance of normalcy and control. The GTAs knew this, and I knew this.This was, of course, not the first time I had announced policy decisions I knew or felt to be bullshit, but what has made the bullshit different during the COVID-19 pandemic is the stakes. We are now talking about people's health, potentially their lives. These are not just issues of ideological tension and debate anymore. They are foundational matters of safety. And as the research has made clear, these are decisions that will disproportionately affect people of color, poor people, women, those with disabilities, and so many other groups lacking privilege and access at this moment. This is why so many people are experiencing what Smith and Freyd (2014) describe as “institutional betrayal.” And that feeling of betrayal was evident in my practicum course. GTAs articulated feeling disposable and unsafe, like the institution had abandoned its investment in science and research for profit and optics, like all that they had been promised during the early days of the pandemic had been retracted. And I have been a part of that betrayal, and the emotional work of processing that is something I feel I will spend the rest of my career struggling with. I also saw my GTAs struggling with this same sense of complicity because, of course, they found themselves repeating university policies to their students. We've all been interpolated into this; it goes all the way down.Two years later, working with a new group of teachers, I continue trying to figure out what my role is, should be, or might be. This will be yet another cohort that feels betrayed by and disillusioned with the institution, though for slightly different reasons. New crises are continually emerging in higher education, wiping old ones from our memory. And while this cohort continues to be frustrated by the legacies of the institutional response to COVID-19, they have been even more angered by the institutional failure to adequately address the student mental health crises impacting our campus and campuses all across the country. In this new crisis, I find myself once again parroting institutional talking points that are, well, bullshit. “Counseling Services is here to support you during this time.” “The university has partnered with an app-based mental health counseling provider to increase access to mental health support.” “The university has not publicly acknowledged the recent suicides this term because of privacy concerns.” With each of these official communiqués, I feel these teachers losing faith in the institution and me. Is it my job to help repair that crumbling trust? Should I be working to build their trust in me? Maybe these are the questions we should be exploring with our GTAs. What does it mean to work in an institution that has betrayed us? One that continues to betray us? How do we reckon with the memory and experience of that betrayal? How should our work and our responses change in the future? How have COVID-19 and the crises that have followed in its wake helped us see the radical work there is to be done?In the second year of the pandemic, I received a small teaching grant aimed at incorporating multimodality into weekly reflective assessments in one of my courses. I was later asked by the granting office to provide a brief presentation about my work to my faculty colleagues during an optional summer professional development series. As an assistant professor of color in a research-intensive institution, I was both apprehensive to “teach” my more senior colleagues, but also a bit enlivened. So, rather than solely discussing my incorporation of multimodal options into my formative assessment structure, I decided to dive a bit deeper and engage the inequitable roots of many taken-for-granted academic practices, spurred on by Joel Feldman's (2018) book, Grading for Equity. In his quest to remove as much bias as possible from the grading process, Feldman notes how practices like assessing penalties for late work, assigning zeroes for missing assignments, and even marking off points for incorrect answers on formative assessments all contribute to the “education debt” owed to minoritized students (Ladson-Billings 2006). Feldman writes primarily for an audience of K-12 educators, and as a teacher educator myself, I was careful to note in my presentation that incorporating Feldman's strategies was part of my own parallel practice, a term coined by Lowenstein (2009) to describe the work of modeling for preservice teachers the same affective, curricular, and pedagogical approaches that we want them to incorporate in their future classrooms.As I shared these points, and specific ways I incorporate both multimodality and Feldman's equity-driven course policies into my teaching, I noticed a colleague of mine, a cis white woman, in the audience visibly fidgeting, her sighs occasionally punctuating my spoken sentences. When I concluded my brief talk and opened the floor to questions, hers was the first hand in the air. “Let me get this straight,” she said, “in addition to everything else, we're now supposed to have multimodal assessments, and no late penalties, and no zeroes, and not take off points for wrong answers? I have a baby at home, and a husband! How am I supposed to find time to do all of this, plus my research, and be a parent?” I understood her question to be mostly rhetorical, but, a bit embarrassed, I did my best to diffuse her frustration and provide actionable steps. I noted that I use only one catch-all for my formative assessments and that the of late penalties made my grading more as to come in that were for me to with. I once again Feldman's that assigning on those with the to solely on school at our the of students is my best these points to and the room I my and off by the this talk had I began to of my in of the larger of the pandemic, and all of the labor and it has to our collective was a in my and me to Feldman's as well as a of I did away with policies, both because I to up to class if felt even slightly and also because I knew mental health days were more and more for my students. I began to classes with the help of an which with and for each class in I and office every out from the of the pandemic least so I have these policies and have even found myself on making copies of course for students who the time or the to copies for and with students as they in my office so many of the long of the pandemic have them in difficult and with students a for our after yet another at a And while this has all a bit difficult to when I to a future in which COVID-19 to be a I am of the that I and many others are in the so many of us have to our students is in addition to with our own and we have felt to deeply the and of our students, and to to our pedagogical approaches As though I feel a of my during my I cannot help but and with her At what do our in the of to the of these practices, and our own called work, emotional labor of these been coined and by or labor and these all describe a of work associated with mostly in which the emotional is to by those in (2018) notes that this labor is in that it for the of the of in so and in the of and that must be by those with minoritized gender This is, in the of and that even after our work has for women and gender of color, our us with and us as more than of affect by a of the university or at it does feel as though much on the work I on of my students to it What is the to days I the of the work I do as a teacher more often I long for a way out of this How can I less of myself and be an present How might in our present and the between our work and our began fall 2021 at my institution in a a or mask The had just to high as the new through the even the campus a mask the instructor or one of the students was at high or to be classes be to My with a of from teachers in my How do I my students if they are at high they want to out is the on teachers and One into the new semester, the a mask which the university to being the was a it the of our of a mask was followed by another student a at a days of student and One of the students in my to and course said her our university in the and the had the same problems as do she with only masks, I saw of my students spent late in the were not because the of their own They just They were also is the chancellor to a We asked What does it mean to and to respond well, to on our that first I the students to me an me why they the class, their for the semester, and if there was I should that would help me support their new to the university said they felt being in after a senior year of classes in their felt new to the university as they and in for the first of them said they from I to each making a to that too, with and to that we in a time of and They were not this have come less to me early in my it felt felt them in their to a we don't have to away our mental health our our in the of an academic or And I I to for students what I myself, especially in the of about a return to normal and to be work through the students as well as be They began to with each each through and when they see And they few students, who were to our class, because of mental health I sent so many to on students that began to in my and did students at all during the we It was The teachers in my program to me with shared They were losing students to mental health students were more They how to how to They were so I now at the of the fall semester, the of COVID-19 but are mostly We have all more but for and are to even as more of us are that those us well, in the first In a recent Chronicle and to the of to will and will not that and our will not the of a will not the inequities this pandemic has laid and the of that has served as its We a way to and a case that after more than two years of “the and all it required of us, we don't more of We to respond with a they “The pandemic is not a nor should we it as We are through an that we our to higher education on every a more and system in its They an of for a from time in our classes to to students about what does and their learning to to on how we are the of the pandemic and what will us in the They are that the is not something to be to our already it about what can be to for on our our of higher education, and for my own we have found it to time to as the during the pandemic to in the or to for a office about a classroom or it to a sense of our collective work with students. When we come we the faculty in my and I also to what it to and to teaching, at this moment. We concluded that it is for us, as a to the emotional labor required to teach at a time when we see on gender and In the of to and we decided that as a we will We will about teaching We will if only for each the emotional labor required of as a I I will work to that work to the We get of the system we are but we are not can by responding from our own of in our and in our than continue to and through the and this pandemic has required of the that is us for something other than a return to “normal.” us to What does it mean to respond well to our students and to each What does it mean to and emotional What of can we do away our not with clear answers but with more questions, and our to a larger What do we for now, if not a return to in the early days of the pandemic, Love (2020) not only a return to but also that for those who have the privilege and a global crisis is time to to Indeed, this pandemic was in so many it only to use of this time to and respond in ways that are, too, time to to on the tensions we have and to and difficult As our on this has us, these questions are asked and on from across institutions, and is that we might engage in more and work to support that emotional labor and research that new responses to For and for COVID-19 has us of our than to to to and our colleagues, to on that to move in and

The diversity and inclusion (D&I) report is an important element in the corporate public reporting genre; however, as an emerging genre, it receives little attention from scholars interested in public discourse, so there are few guidelines on what should be included in a D&I report. This study helps to fill this gap in the research by examining 10 D&I reports from information technology and banking industries, exploring the reports’ rhetorical purpose and identifying their typified rhetorical moves. The author concludes by recommending what aspects of the current genre's substance and form should be improved to help meet the needs of stakeholders.

The letter of recommendation (LOR) is a stylized form of direct sponsorship, a rhetorical appeal that confers favor on a person or object in keeping with the writer’s—or sponsor’s—character, authority, and expertise. In response to Swales’s call to “unveil” the rhetorical features of occluded genres, this research employs a move-step analysis to determine the rhetorical features of a sample of 83 LORs written by college faculty and administrators for a nationally competitive, postgraduate fellowship. This study finds five core moves expressed in its LOR sample: (1) sponsor positioning, (2) applicant performance, (3) applicant attributes, (4) future projection, and (5) audience appeals. Our discussion offers three key insights and provides macro-level takeaways in an effort to raise rhetorical awareness for LOR writers and requestors alike.

Rhetorical figures of speech provide important analytical frames to chart how arguments operate within genres and within genre ecologies. Varieties of the figure prolepsis allow for the rendering of future time or fact in the present, which can be a powerful rhetorical inducement toward social and political action. In this article, we examine how anticipatory arguments drawn from complex data shape a key genre for public and policy-facing work on the climate crisis—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Synthesis Report’s (SYR) Statement for Policy Makers (SPM). We examine how the rhetorical figure of prolepsis operates within this genre to understand the anticipatory arguments and logics emerging from the synthesis of scientific findings and their reporting. Pairing figural studies and Rhetorical Genre Studies, we further offer an approach to investigate how these patterned operations of language might intersect in their rhetorical workings.

Many genre scholars have focused on how individuals might build genre knowledge, generally understood as the enculturation processes, gradual stages, or ingredients that lead to one’s facility with a genre in context. While genre knowledge describes whether people can engage genres, it does not describe the various factors that shape how people may engage genres. By consolidating scholarship across Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), this article characterizes genre access as the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genre. Furthermore, this article integrates Network Gatekeeping Theory to develop a micro-level analytical approach for explicitly describing genre access. The author demonstrates and develops genre access as a concept and analytical approach with an illustrative example from a larger ethnographic project. Specifically, this illustrative example explores genre access for the Staff Report, a common genre in local government that proposes recommendations from individual departments to their elected City Commissioners for voted approval. Overall, the purpose of this article is (1) to consolidate and extend RGS’s exploration of the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genres; (2) to identify and name genre access as a fundamental aspect of how genres work; and (3) to provide a micro-level analytical language for researchers to tease out the various factors the shape genre access.

Reviewer Frederik Appel Olsen takes issue with the approach we present in The Virtues of Green Marketing: A Constructive Take on Corporate Rhetoric (Palgrave Macmillan). In this response, we point out three aspects where Appel Olsen paints a misleading picture of our book. They concern a) the role of history in contemporary thinking, b) the role of Aristotle in our argumentation, and c) the legitimate place of rhetorical criticism. Thus, our response treats fundamental questions for the field of rhetoric.

By tracing the rhetorical ecology of an iconic protest logo created in Denmark in 1975, this article sheds light on an important part of the rhetoric of the Danish (and global) anti-nuclear power movement and how it continues to influence collective life in unpredictable and contradictory ways. Initially, the logo created a sense of community amongst anti-nuclear power activists. It was a powerful recruitment and fundraising tool, now it circulates as nostalgia, sparking both solidarity and alienation. The article builds on interviews with members of the Danish anti-nuclear power movement and a group of Danish youth today, including the founder of a current pro-nuclear power group. It relies on theories of rhetorical agency and ecology that have pinpointed the unpredictability and interconnectedness of rhetoric, and reminds us, further, of rhetoric’s potential endurance.

According to Black Twitter community members, who were active online just after rock 'n' roll artist Little Richard's passing in 2020, Michael Jackson's purchase of the Beatles catalog (thirty-five years prior) was viewed as what Twitter user and academic author DJ Scholarship calls "rhythmic reparations," offering restitution for Black artists like Little Richard who were never compensated fairly in a white industry. The purchase of Sony/ATV then became more than just a business transaction; it worked rhetorically as a pop culture object to amplify and change narratives about race, music, money, and power. I rely on two concepts of rhetoric—counterpunch and copia—to reexamine language surrounding Jackson's initial purchase and the conversation about Jackson occurring in the wake of Little Richard's death. I also explain how this conversation on Black Twitter led me to revise my knowledge of popular culture and music history and to confront my own white privilege.

This article reroutes the more radical tendrils of the commonplace by pursuing Christa J. Olson's call for questioning the "terrain of rhetoric." We ask: What if commonplaces and the commonality they entrench are not required for banding together in community? By thinking with Édouard Glissant's Creole garden, we rework the commonplace as common place, which conceives a place that welcomes difference without requiring common ground. To articulate the possibilities of Glissant's common place for rhetorical invention, we demonstrate its movement with examples of marronage in the southern Louisiana Territory of the United States. Marronage helps us to think how the Creole garden gathers the world's thoughts to "illustrate the immeasurable diversity of the world," thus founding a rhetoric that resists even as it relates to settler colonialisms and racial capitalisms (Treatise). This article demonstrates how the terrain of rhetoric may be limited by the pursuit of/for common ground.

Rhetoricians have long critiqued gendered (Gurak; Koerber) and racial (Banks; Haas) biases in rhetorics of science and technology. However, we have yet to fully consider how the patent, as a genre, perpetuates these biases both in the constraints it places on contemporary definitions of invention and innovation and in how it distorts historical narratives about who invented in the past. Delineating the patent's limitations as an index of inventive activity, this article advocates for more expansive understandings of invention. It argues that American patents have, since the nineteenth century, affirmed a dominant "rhetoric of innovation" that has since functioned as much as a marker of privilege as it has an index of inventiveness. Using the example of early twentieth-century Black hair culture, this article suggests other ways of recovering historical inventiveness among groups of Americans possessing their own, alternative "rhetorics of innovation" that reflect their culturally situated strategies for empowerment.

Taking the slogan "no lives matter" as a starting point to diagnose the nihilism of our contemporary political culture, in this essay I tie the rise of nihilism to the resurgence of far-right political movements, chiefly the neo-reactionary thought of Nick Land. Following my discussion of Land and the culture of apocalyptic nihilism, I elucidate a Black feminist and decolonial perspective that, I argue, resists this creeping nihilism, and instead offers avenues of engaged political praxis for recuperating the politics of personhood. Using Sylvia Wynter's work as an exemplar of such a perspective, I perform a rhetorical criticism of Land's essay "The Dark Enlightenment" through the lens of Wynter's understanding of the human. Critiquing his arguments, I argue that Wynter's work offers a radical alternative to Land's apocalypticism and antihumanism, one that maintains a commitment to reimagining the human rather than disavowing it.

Studies of Augustine's rhetoric have been focused on the De doctrina christiana and the Confessions. As a result, these studies have been restricted to questions of Augustine's reception of Greco-Roman ideas. This article analyzes an underappreciated source, the De catechizandis rudibus, to show that Augustine engaged with a topic that his pagan forebears did not account for, namely rhetorical depression, a condition that tempts speakers to slide into a grim silence. Because rhetorical depression does not admit of a technical solution, Augustine responds to it by locating discourse within a redemptive drama animated by love. The hope of love's ultimate victory over communicative futility and frustration inspires the depressed speaker to stammer onward rejoicing. Augustine's placement of rhetoric within a dramatic history can prompt future reflection on the stories and myths found in past handbooks of rhetoric. It may also help us tell stories about rhetoric today that help depressed speakers get up in the morning.

This article explores cadaverous rhetorics with a focus on public displays of human remains at anatomical museums. The article has two primary components: First, it advances a theory of cadaverous rhetoric grounded in a blending of rhetorical, feminist, and psychological affect theory. The article argues that combining Casey Boyle's transductive rhetoric with Sara Ahmed's cultural politics of emotion and the psychology of extensive affective regulation offers a great deal of insight into the public display of human remains. Second, the article explores the cadaverous rhetorics at three museums: the Mütter Museum, Surgeon's Hall, and the Museo de la Medicina. The article traces how the practices of acquisition, preparation, preservation, display and contextualization aim to blunt negative affective responses and to catalyze positive visitor experiences. The article closes with a rumination on the limited success of cadaverous rhetorics in the face of visitor tendencies anchored in attachments to justice-oriented frameworks.

AbstractThe core function of argumentation in a democratic setting must be to constitute a modality for citizens to engage differences of opinion constructively – for the present but also in future exchanges. To enable this function requires acceptance of the basic conditions of public debate: that consensus is often an illusory goal which should be replaced by better mastery of living with dissent and compromise. Furthermore, it calls for an understanding of the complexity of real-life public debate which is an intermixture of claims of fact, definition, value, and policy, each of which calls for an awareness of the greater ‘debate environment’ of which particular deliberative exchanges are part. We introduce a rhetorical meta-norm as an evaluation criterion for public debate. In continuation of previous scholarship concerned with how to create room for differences of opinion and how to foster a sustainable debate culture, we work from a civically oriented conception of rhetoric. This conception is less instrumental and more concerned with the role of communication in public life and the maintenance of the democratic state. A rhetorical meta-norm of public argumentation is useful when evaluating public argumentation – not as the only norm, but integrated with specific norms from rhetoric, pragma-dialectics, and formal logic. We contextualise our claims through an example of authentic contemporary public argumentation: a debate over a biogas generator in rural Denmark.