Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication , edited by Samuel Stinson and Mary Le Rouge, is a timely collection of essays addressing the ways that humans conceptualize and interact with their environment when attempting to communicate the dangers of crises---such as climate change and COVID-19. Explicitly responding to the work of Jeffrey Grabill and Michelle Simmons (e.g., in their seminal 1998 essay, "Toward a Critical Rhetoric of Risk Communication"), this collection offers a broad variety of lenses for thinking about humans' relationships to their surroundings, especially while communicating environmental risk. The 14 chapters in this volume apply methodologies including rhetorical and discourse analysis, ethnography, integrated risk communication, and antiracist framing to topics ranging from university communications about the pandemic to groundwater pollution to upcycled art installations, in the process complicating traditional understandings of risk as something that exists "'out there,' independent of our minds and cultures, waiting to be measured" (Slovic, 1999, p. 690). Considered broadly, the collection offers human bodies and ecological impact as more effective barometers for risk than abstract calculations; individual chapters offer heuristics grounded in human experience or environmental considerations, along with discussion questions and assignments for use in classroom settings. The diversity of topics and methodologies represented ensure that the collection offers something of interest to most scholars and practitioners of risk communication, environmental communication, or embodiment in technical communication.

Abstract This article examines the case of Moms 4 Housing, a group of Black mothers who occupied a vacant house in Oakland, California as an attempt to advance a human right to housing. It argues that the U.S. penchant for rights discrimination, the idea that one must choose between whose and which rights matter, contributes to the need for a rhetorical strategy of rights-blurring. Building on previous scholarship that establishes a history of Black women connecting civil rights to human rights as a rhetorical strategy in the United States, this article explains how rights-blurring actually operates. It also demonstrates how this strategy functions in conversations about property rights in the United States and in the context of a twenty-first century direct-action protest.

Abstract This essay outlines the rhetorical elements and discursive strategies used to perpetuate cultural racism, or ethnicism, in contemporary political discourse. Using Marine Le Pen's Islamophobic discourse as a case study, this essay demonstrates how Le Pen deploys ethno-nationalist rhetoric to highlight the dangers that she believes Muslim terrorists pose to French national identity. She portrays Muslim terrorists as rootless wanderers capable of causing irreparable damage to France, which enables her to craft herself as a protector of the French home using populist reasoning. In doing so, Le Pen's discourse stokes fears of clandestine terrorists hiding among the French Muslim and migrant populace, which constitutes the Muslim terrorist—and by extension, all Muslims—as major security and cultural threats to the nation. Consequently, Le Pen portrays French national identity as incompatible with all forms of Islam.

In this timely book, Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women's Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Coretta M. Pittman skillfully reveals how the “hidden voices” of the Women's Era and the New Negro Era found agency through creative expression. Pittman covers a diverse array of texts (essays, speeches, plays, blues songs, novellas, etc.) and carefully traces the literary techniques utilized by Black women to demonstrate the importance of literacy for the advancement of Black people during this time. Unlike other scholars of this period, who have primarily focused on middle-class and elite Black women, Pittman instead concentrates on the Black women “hidden in plain sight.” According to Pittman, the Black women hidden in plain sight were “struggling to reconcile the promises offered by literacy and education over the stark realities of their racialized experiences” (xix). For these Black women, literacy was an important political act. In chronological order, Pittman synthesizes the literary contributions of Black women across genre as well as the theoretical contributions of their work.In order to control the influx of immigrants, mass public education at the turn of the twentieth century was implemented as a form of social control. Drawing on Harvey J. Graff's work, Pittman brilliantly explicates the entanglement of literature and citizenship during this period. Literacy helped enact moral codes intended to unify a heterogenous nation. However, the circulating literature contained harmful and stereotypical messages about Black Americans. While white middle-class mothers used literature to impart morals to their children, Black mothers were concerned about representations of Black people in popular literature. Advocates during the Woman's Era, such as Cooper and Matthews, believed literacy was integral to Black Americans’ social advancement and their perception of society.Pittman begins by analyzing Anna Julia Cooper's essay “The Negro as Presented in American Literature” and Victoria Earle Matthew's speech “The Value of Race Literature,” both exhorting Black people to pick up the pen to respond discursively to the circulating public discourse of Black Americans as inferior. Cooper makes the compelling argument that for American literature to encompass all facets of the nation, it must prominently feature Black subjects in a truthful light. Cooper mocks white authors for their negative portrayals of Black Americans and explains how they fail to capture Blackness. As a corrective, Cooper urges Black Americans to write about their own experiences to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of the Black experience. While Cooper admonished white authors, Victoria Earle Matthews attempted to expand the prominent understanding of race literature. In her speech, Matthews includes “histories, biographies, scientific treatises, sermons, addresses, novels, poems, books of travel, miscellaneous essays and the contributions to magazines and newspapers” (23). Furthermore, Matthews argued that any work created by a Black American ought to be included in the category of race literature instead of merely works by white people written about Black Americans. Matthews believed broadening the scope of what constituted race literature was essential for Black Americans to write through the trauma of enslavement. And, as Pittman demonstrates, Cooper and Matthews believed that literature about Black Americans could exercise transformational power in the “hope to transform [readers'] state of being personally, communally, and materially” (xxi). This message was primarily disseminated to Black clubwomen, whose transformative literary practices enabled Black women to craft new realities outside of their oppressive conditions.Katherine D. C. Tillman and Pauline E. Hopkins published novellas showcasing how education could transform the status of Black Americans with the proper context. Tillman's novella Beryl Weston's Ambition: The Story of an Afro-American Girl's Life imagines the life of Beryl Weston, whose endless pursuit of education elevates her status and uplifts her entire community. Tillman's novella participates in the idealization of Black Americans, forming “a middle-class cultural ethos,” more contemporaneously “respectability politics” (47). In contrast, Tillman's novel Clancy Street presents an alternative perspective on how the lack of education of formerly enslaved persons made them “underprepared for citizenship” (49). The Waters family in Clancy Street is a working-class Black family who financially struggles post-emancipation and engages in immoral behavior. Throughout the novel, the Waters family gains literacy and education that helps them embody the civic ideal of the time. Even though Tillman's novellas dramatize the lives of Black families of different class backgrounds, both publications ultimately reinforce the aim to achieve a Black middle-class ethos. Literacy would increase knowledge of the community and the self and family to transform society.Similarly, in Hopkins's Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, Ruel Briggs, a white-passing Harvard medical student, draws on his mystical powers to revive the dead. Ruel embarks on an expedition to Ethiopia, where he finds that his royal roots enable his powers and creates an ideal society wherein Black people rule themselves. The novel's overall theme is how Black people must not only use education to improve their social status but also to achieve self-actualization. Tillman and Hopkins's works participate in the idea of the transformative power of literacy, which yearns for Black people to achieve middle-class status while also serving as a rejection of the circulating retrogression theories that post-emancipation Black men would return to their “naturally bestial selves” (45). Authors in the New Negro Era would change the general approach to dispel these racist theories through literature.As Pittman chronicles, the New Negro Era saw a marked shift in Black women's perception of the capacity of literacy to address oppression in the United States. Unlike transformational literacy advocates of the Woman's Era, who sought validation from white people, the literature produced during the New Negro Era recognized the limitations of Black Americans’ literacy. Pittman argues that creative expression no longer focused on “domesticity and sentimentalism” but instead explored “despair and realism” (74). She attributes the New Negro Era's emergence to Angelina Weld Grimké’s play Rachel. In Rachel, the Loving family moves North to escape the rampant threat of lynching in the South, only to realize that despite their educated status, they struggle to secure employment and remain vulnerable to racial violence. This play highlights the struggles of the emerging Black professional class, who realized that education was insufficient to overcome the systemic racism enshrined into law post-Reconstruction via Jim Crow legislation. Pittman argues that Grimké’s play illustrates how racism leaves a long-lasting psychological effect on individuals and communities. Grimké challenged the belief that Black women engaging in middle-class domesticity would resolve racism and railed against the racist white forces keeping Black Americans in a second-class status. Jessie Redmont Fauset's novel Comedy: American Style is a satirical novel criticizing the idea that racial uplift was a “zero-sum game” (113). The novel's protagonist Olivia only increases her status in society through the denial of her Blackness by embracing her ability to pass as white. According to Pittman, Olivia's insistence on passing is the “result of a nation unwilling to let go of its racist ideals” (135). Fauset's novel is a form of what Pittman terms “transactional” literacy, as the characters do not interrogate the looming societal conditions from which their oppression originates. Transactional literacy is defined as gaining “advanced literacy skills to accrue social and material capital sometimes intraracially and/or other times interracially” (xxi). In contrast, Pittman analyzes Zora Neale Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, to showcase how Hurston gave Black working-class souls “form as fully realized characters” (150). Hurston's novel grapples with competing theories of the best avenue for formerly enslaved people to participate in society: vocational school or higher education. Through the characters of John and Lucy, Hurston works through the critical debate of the time between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington about the value of education. Overall, these literary forms depart from notions of respectability and investigate Black life in all its complexities in an era of significant racial violence.Pittman expands on existing scholarship discussing Black women in Blues by arguing that Blues offered an opportunity for Black women to divest from middle-class ideals (such as motherhood and domesticity) and move along a path towards liberation. Even though Blues has been widely studied by musicologists, historians, anthropologists, and so on, Pittman demonstrates the necessity for its incorporation into literary and rhetorical studies. Most notably, Pittman argues that Blues participates in a specular form of literacy. Specular literacy “is the practice of reflecting back properties (e.g., writing conventions and styles, dialects, values, traditions) of one's racial and class community” (xxii). Pittman examines Mamie Smith's song “Crazy Blues,” which describes the life of a jilted female lover and how she reacts to the betrayal. Smith's hit led to a drastic increase in Black women Blues singers being recorded. These works reflect alternative perspectives on Black women's options for endurance during this period: “turn inward and forsake desire and family obligations” or “turn outward and seek revenge” (xii). Similarly, Ma Rainey's songs demonstrated that the “love and sensual lives of Black people also needed to be attended to” (143). In Ma Rainey's songs, a rejection of white normativity was connected to sexual queerness, expressed publicly through art. Steve Goodson argues that Ma Rainey “would assert her dignity, her autonomy, and her humanity through her music and lyrics, all while tactically encouraging her listeners to do the same” (146). Blues, Pittman argues, gave singers the agency to address taboo subjects, articulate Black experience, and validate working-class Black American life.A notable strength of Pittman's work is the careful tracing of concepts over time. For example, Pittman makes evident Anna Julia Cooper's influence on the creation of the term intersectionality when she covers the lineage of the concept (xxii–xxvii). Cooper repeatedly discussed how race and gender influence the plight of Black women, which inspired Pauli Murray to create the term “Jane Crow.” Kimberlé Crenshaw later expanded on Murray's Jane Crow to develop a legal framework for intersectionality as a lens and resource for intervention. While this book has many strengths, one weakness is that Pittman does not truly define agency. Pittman mentions the concept with repeated reference to how literature and music could increase Black women's agency but does not provide an in-depth discussion of Black women's relationship to agency. Given the popularity of the term agency in the field, future scholars could use Pittman's work to craft an account of Black women's agency across time.This book is an excellent read for those interested in the intersection of African American literature and feminist public address. Tracing the theoretical importance of Black women's literary productions, Pittman expertly demonstrates how scholars can use close textual analysis to understand more fully the past lives of Black women. For example, students could examine how Anna Julia Cooper's public addresses incorporated “parable, analogy, derision, and humor” to communicate to nationwide audiences (14). Students could also conduct a rhetorical analysis of how the form of Blues “relies on verbal play, repetition, indirection, and subversion as vernacular modes of expression” (95). The summaries included by Pittman not only assist the reader's comprehension but also make apparent the injustices against which the authors were writing. This book contributes to the ongoing project of tracing Black women's literary contributions, who, to varying degrees, believed that literature could remedy racial tension and violence.

The morning I picked up Disorder in the Court: Morality, Myth, and the Insanity Defense, news was spreading about the Michigan State University shooting. While preparing this review, there were several more mass shootings. Such tragic events (re)shape our lives. The Aurora, Colorado shooting profoundly redrew the social boundaries of my own life, and it is no coincidence that the Aurora shooting is where Andrea Alden begins her illuminating book. Disorder in the Court uses “mass shooting” as a visible marker of mental illness and a productive opening for a study of the rhetorical shifts in the insanity defense.From the outset, Alden explores humanity's desire to reason with madness, highlighting society's perpetual search for the origin of mental illness. Her deep historical and close textual work demonstrates the constitutive nature of language in relation to fields of expertise, like law and medicine, that require a facade of stability in exchange for the public's faith. Disorder in the Court highlights three rhetorical moments in the legal and medical responses over time, mapped by shifts in the insanity defense. Alden then turns to analyze the high-profile trial of John Hinckley, Jr., and, finally, summarizes the current state of the insanity defense in the United States, ruminating on biomedical advances. Alden posits this book not as a solution to problems of madness and malice, but rather as a chance to “untangle the complexities of the rhetoric of sanism,” or as she defines it: the “irrational fear of mental illness and people who suffer from it” (4, 5). Disorder in the Court unpacks the historical realities at the intersection of law and medicine, identifying both the explicit and implicit tropes of sanism, such as shared fate, the law as (failed) deterrence, and pandemonium.Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the hegemonic rhetoric of sanism and its history. From medical advances to reforms in evidentiary standards, Disorder in the Court emphasizes that a rhetorical study of textual evidence can expose the shortcomings of ideological discourses. This detailed textual work is bolstered by the inclusion of the primary texts at the end of the volume, signaling a strong appreciation for the text itself. Identifying the danger inherent in a rhetoric of sanism, Alden reminds us that the anxiety that “I, too, may become mad” does not result in compassion; it results in segregation and the asylum mentality of the early 1800s. Or, to borrow the Platonic perspective of sanism: “Madmen are not to be free” (24).Chapter 2, “A Brief History of Western Thought on Mental Illness and Its Relevance to the Law,” is a masterclass in condensing a long timeline into digestible material without sacrificing details. Alden extensively covers the dialectic of rationality/irrationality from fourth and fifth-century perceptions of “madness,” through Greek and Roman civilizations’ emphasis on reason, and into the moral panic of the Middle Ages, before landing at the humanitarian turn of the Enlightenment era, when the body and the brain were regarded as intertwined. By weaving textual evidence from Plato and Aristotle, from St. Augustine, and from John Locke and Renee Descartes, Alden maps the evolution of thought through these discourses with authority and interest.In Chapters 3 through 5, Alden shifts to analyzing specific cases that have reshaped the insanity defense. She begins with an 1843 political assassination trial, where defendant Daniel McNaughtan asserted paranoid delusions as the cause of his violent actions. Alden describes the burgeoning field of psychiatry, where conceptions of “madness” were shifting from a moral (religious) failure to a modern medical defect. Swift and public backlash to McNaughtan's acquittal included tropes of pandemonium, fakery, and (medical) illegitimacy, ultimately resulting in a verdict of “not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect,” a phrase still recognizable to a modern audience. The eponymous McNaughtan Rules require a defendant to be unaware of the “nature or quality of the act . . . [and] not know it was wrong” (46).Chapter 4 introduces readers to the reforms in mental health care in the nineteenth century, eventually focusing on two cases, Parsons and Davis. Alden argues that as the field of psychiatry moved away from harsh methods of patient confinement (led by reformers like Dorthea Dix), legal questions shifted toward tests for impulse control. Alden first investigates the impacts of the appeal in Parsons, where Alabama Supreme Court Justice Somerville reversed a jury verdict. Sommerville's opinion argued that judicial authority should consider a defendant's ability to control their actions, elevating the discipline of psychiatry by adopting the reformist position of compassion and not assuming a defendant's moral failure. A few years after Parsons, the United States Supreme Court issued an opinion in Davis v. United States (1895) that extended the same approach, a “control test,” as the legal standard: Could the defendant resist their “irresistible impulse” at the time of the crime? Alden argues that, although scant, the media coverage of both Parsons and Davis relied on tropes of sanism. Not unlike more contemporary debates, public reaction to these cases was dismay about the law as a criminal deterrent, challenging the idea that momentary loss of self-control mitigated legal culpability.By the time Durham v. United States was decided in 1954, the publication of the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) was only a year away. In Chapter 5, we learn that the field of psychiatry had been reshaped by the influences of neurologists like Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud, and the psychiatric field was continually revising categories of mental illness and treatments. To illustrate the last major rhetorical shift in the insanity defense, Alden recounts the fate of Monty Durham—a recidivist's tale of petty crimes, institutionalizations, and temporary release into unstable housing. By the time of his appeal in 1954, the system was shifting blame for Durham, arguing about the likelihood of future criminality. Alden writes: “Nobody knew what to do with him, and nobody wanted to be responsible for him or his actions, so they just shuffled him back and forth between jail and the hospital” (68).Readers will surely recognize the deflection of blame in this modern rhetorical cycle, and while Alden details the trial and its misgivings, this reader couldn't help but return to the opening example of mass shootings and the pervasive anxieties about the inadequacy of law. And indeed, Disorder in the Court promptly brings Durham into conversation with McNaughtan, Parsons, and Davis. Alden rounds out Chapter 5 by examining the wide-ranging, written opinion from Circuit Judge Bazelon, who argued that all prior standards for legal insanity were insufficient. Bazelon's opinion historicized the medical and legal debates before moving to establish a new effects-based “product test,” meant to consider updated medical discourses concerning mental disease; this replaces the presumption of a lack of impulse control with the idea that a defendant's mental state might influence planning, decision-making, and execution of a crime (as is the case in schizophrenia or paranoid delusions). It was contrary to the previous position that legal insanity would be characterized by an inability to plan or execute actions with intent or purpose. Despite the potential importance the Durham opinion could have had, this new legal framework did not become the standard. Alden contextualizes Bazelon's opinion in relation to its reception and effects.Chapter 6 applies Alden's framework to the criminality and culpability of John Hinckley, Jr. in his trial following an assassination attempt of President Ronald Reagan. The trial arguments referred to categories laid out in the DSM-III, revisions to which had heralded the biomedical turn in psychiatry as the “triumph of science over clinical ideology” (78). Alden lays out the particulars of the Hinckley case, from his cross-country travel to contact Jodie Foster (whom he relentlessly stalked) to his attempts to conceal the actions he planned to take against government officials. Alden explains that the trial and media coverage focused on questions of rationality, mainly Hinckley's actions and his travel. Was Hinckley's meticulous behavior the cold-calculating choice of a determined killer or the obsessive, single-minded mania of a raving lunatic?The moral outrage that followed Hinckley's acquittal relies on the tropes of sanism that Alden identifies throughout the book. Because she includes explicit and implicit examples of the tropes, readers have a framework to understand how Hinckley's “not guilty by reason of insanity” verdict was received by the public. Lambasted as a miscarriage of justice, as encouraging criminal action, and as proof that experts-for-hire pervert the criminal justice system, the Hinckley trial's response illustrates sanism's pervasiveness. Following the trial, Congress passed the 1984 Insanity Defense Reform Act (IDRA), and some states adopted alternative verdicts (such as “guilty but mentally ill”) or eliminated the insanity defense altogether, though most still employ some form of the McNaughtan Rules. Alden explains that legal standards lag behind the current understanding of psychiatric medicine and further highlights that, like other legal questions, laws and punishments differ across states.She concludes the book by arguing that the pervasive rhetoric of sanism has ideological staying power; it outlasts the material shifts of case details and medical progress. Moreover, the legal standard of insanity remains the same: “Here we are, back in England in 1843,” Alden writes (97). The legal landscape is, in effect, unchanged. She concludes this masterful book with a careful proposal for how to rethink discourses: first by acknowledging they are, in fact, rhetorical; second by tapping into the nature versus nurture debate. Exploring newer, technologically-driven medical advances, Alden leaves her readers with this consideration: “anti-social behavior is the result of both biology and socialization, nature and nature” (99). Alden argues that rhetoric helps us “untangle the knots” of a one-size-fits-all approach to law and psychiatry (100). As she concludes, she reminds readers that hers is a study of competing discourses, an attempt to “shore up their boundaries” and smooth “over the narrative ruptures always threatening to break through” (95). In other words, when analyzed as rhetorical discourses, the ideological faultlines of law and medicine become clear. Rhetoric, Alden writes, “allows us to see more clearly why” there are still problems at the intersection of law and medicine in the insanity defense (102).So while we constantly fear the next mass shooting and struggle somewhere between the Platonic ideal of locking madness away and empathy towards those suffering with mental illness, it is evident that Alden has given us a reference point for understanding the intersection of legal and medical discourses in the insanity defense. Identifying the tropes that shortchange meaningful engagement with mental health opens the possibility for a both/and approach to law and psychiatry. While scientific discovery sorts out how our nurture affects our nature (and vice versa), rhetorical scholars might continue to consider where science interacts with social and cultural constructions, like the law, to promote nuanced understanding of mental illness.

Abstract This essay examines the first major American debate over aerial warfare as a case study in the relationship between visual spectacle and warfighting technologies. In the early 1920s, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell mounted a short but intense advocacy campaign to win public approval for a standalone and fully supported air force. He justified his arguments with sanitized depictions of the warplane's idealized deployment. I call such depictions technological spectacles, and I parse their three hallmarks in Mitchell's advocacy: the dissociation of violence and destruction, the self-justification of technology, and the confusion of possibility for probability. I demonstrate that these habits of spectacle pervaded not only Mitchell's rhetoric but the coverage he received in the press. The essay establishes Mitchell as a key figure in the history of American rhetoric about military technology and, in the process, offers new historical context and critical vocabulary for diagnosing rhetorics of technological spectacle.

Jennifer Mercieca's Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump arrived at a crucial historical juncture. Published in the summer of 2020, during Donald Trump's presidential reelection campaign, the book provides a comprehensive study of Trump's rhetoric during his former presidential election campaign from June 2015 to November 2016. It is a testament to the book's insights that they feel timely even after Trump's failed reelection bid in 2020 and its politically corrosive fallout. Indeed, in reviewing Demagogue for President in 2024, I am struck by a feeling I can only describe as uncanny: in her incisive analysis of Trump's rhetoric, Mercieca provides readers with a powerful conceptual framework not only for understanding the success of Trump's 2016 election campaign but also for making sense of U.S. political discourse in the years after the book was published.Kairotic moments punctuate the book as a whole. As she recounts in the preface, Mercieca found herself in the limelight after being quoted in a December 6, 2015 New York Times cover story about Trump's rhetoric, an experience that catalyzed a series of high-profile media engagements and ultimately resulted in her writing Demagogue for President. This exigency gave Mercieca the opportunity to follow Trump's presidential campaign in exhaustive detail; as she describes it, “I've studied Trump relentlessly, in order to be able to explain his rhetorical strategies clearly” (xi). That dogged pursuit of Trump's public discourse makes for an engrossing reading experience as Mercieca guides us through Trump's many campaign rallies, interviews, media appearances, and social media posts.Demagogue for President opens by arguing that Trump is a demagogue whose rhetoric harms democracy in the United States. The author shows that making this classification is trickier than we might think. After all, the term “demagogue” is often indiscriminately applied to populist political candidates, obscuring the word's meaning, and Trump consistently positions himself as an outsider, a “fearless truth teller” who speaks back to a corrupt political establishment (7). Mercieca intervenes here by returning to the ancient Greek origins of demagoguery, moving us beyond a perception of populism “unduly influenced by antidemocratic writers” such as Plato (12). Thinking through this context, Mercieca distinguishes two kinds of demagogues on the basis of accountability: “heroic demagogues” hold themselves accountable to the democratic process and use their populist rhetoric to persuade, whereas “dangerous demagogues” avoid political accountability and misuse their populism as a “weaponized rhetoric” to undermine democracy (11–14). Evaluated in these terms, Trump clearly qualifies as a dangerous demagogue and, moreover, “probably the most successful demagogue in American history” (21).On my reading, the author makes two major claims about Trump's demagogic rhetoric. The first is that Trump is a “demagogue of the spectacle—part entertainer, part authoritarian” (210), a tactical performance designed to amuse his audience while manipulating them. Central to that spectacle, Mercieca argues, are three “unifying strategies” (15–17) Trump uses to align himself with his supporters: argumentum ad populum (appeals to crowd wisdom), American exceptionalism, and paralipsis (ironic twists of “I'm not saying; I'm just saying” (16)). Likewise, the author identifies three “dividing strategies” Trump uses to isolate his supporters from their perceived enemies: argument ad hominem (attacks on personal character), argument ad baculum (aggressive threats), and reification (17–20). Mercieca contends that Trump deploys these six rhetorical strategies to “gain compliance” from his audience, which in turn “prevent people from holding him accountable for weaponizing rhetoric” (14). The book's second major claim is that Trump's rhetoric was kairotic: Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election because his campaign successfully harnessed the “rhetorical possibilities inherent in a nation in crisis” (204), which Mercieca characterizes as “a distrusting electorate, a polarized electorate, and a frustrated electorate” (20). These distinct yet intersecting contexts, Mercieca argues, supplied Trump with the suasory resources needed to secure the Republican party nomination and, ultimately, the presidency.Structurally, Demagogue for President is divided into eighteen concise body chapters, each of which offers a case study of Trump using one of his six major rhetorical strategies. Mercieca thus provides three separate analyses of each strategy, illustrating how they function in the three cultural contexts that serve as the book's major subsections: “Trump and the Distrusting Electorate,” “Trump and the Polarized Electorate,” and “Trump and the Frustrated Electorate.” Organized in this way, the author's argument gains both range and nuance. The shorter chapters allow Mercieca to analyze an impressive number of examples, and by examining each strategy in three different settings, Mercieca draws out the subtleties of Trump's rhetoric throughout his presidential campaign.Scholarly readers may be surprised to find minimal engagement with academic research in the case study chapters, but this choice serves Mercieca's goal of reaching a wider audience (21). In place of academic citations, the author catalogues Trump's rhetoric through meticulous endnotes of his campaign rallies, media appearances, social media posts, and other popular sources. Trump is quoted extensively, giving readers ample evidence of the six rhetorical strategies Mercieca analyzes. Choosing not to provide literature reviews or other trappings of the traditional academic monograph keeps the case studies accessible and brief; accordingly, any of them would make excellent syllabi material for a variety of rhetoric and communication courses.Some of the book's strongest moments occur when Mercieca pinpoints when and how Trump's rhetoric changed. For example, in a chapter on reification, the strategy of “treating people as objects” (19), Mercieca traces how Trump deliberately altered his campaign messaging about Syrian refugees to align with narratives on Breitbart and InfoWars. In early September 2015 Trump showed sympathy for the refugees’ plight and offered to help (44–45); but, just one month later, Trump began describing the Syrian refugees as a grave threat to the United States, “the ultimate Trojan horse,” to whom he would no longer be willing to offer political asylum (47). Trump even adjusted his signature campaign slogans and witticisms based on audience reactions, as Mercieca carefully documents. Trump's “Low-Energy Jeb” joke, for instance, was in fact Trump's third attempt at an effective ad hominem for Jeb Bush after “the reluctant warrior” and “Jeb Bust” failed to catch on with his supporters (82–83). In moments like these, Mercieca shows how deeply calculated Trump's rhetoric was throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, refuting Trump's claim to be someone who merely and spontaneously calls it like it is.Perhaps the most prescient case study is the final chapter on American exceptionalism, where the author dissects Trump's authoritarian rhetoric and tracks the emergence of his “Stop the Steal” narrative. Remarkably, this book published in 2020 seems to anticipate the January 6th, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, a fulfillment of the anti-democratic rhetoric that Trump has peddled for years. As Mercieca explains, Trump's campaign team crafted its “Stop the Steal” messaging in the summer before the 2016 presidential election. Trump advisor Roger Stone first raised the specter of Hillary Clinton stealing the election the day after she accepted the Democratic Party nomination in July and created a “Stop the Steal” website to circulate these election fraud claims (195–196). More ominously, in an August 1st appearance on Alex Jones's show InfoWars, Stone suggested how Trump should react if he were to lose the upcoming election: “Challenge her being sworn in. I will have my people march on Washington and we will block your inauguration” (196). Of course, Trump's supporters did march on Washington years later to stop Trump's loss to Joe Biden, eerily confirming Mercieca's observation that Trump used American exceptionalism in his campaign to “appeal specifically to authoritarian voters” (191).Demagogue for President ends by returning to the question of accountability: If Trump avoids being held responsible for his demagogic rhetoric, how do we curtail the political damage he inflicts? Mercieca makes two key recommendations here. The first is to bolster public instruction in rhetoric and critical thinking, as doing so is “perhaps the best way to neutralize a dangerous demagogue” like Trump (208). Although a familiar refrain, Mercieca's call for cultivating democracy through pedagogy is particularly relevant when it comes to Trump, who excels at overwhelming the public with his discourse (212). Taking time to unpack Trump's rhetorical strategies, as Mercieca does in this book, might help citizens regain their bearings amid Trump's onslaught of egregious claims.The author's second and far more ambitious recommendation points to a future imaginary: What if our society changed in ways that made demagoguery ineffective? Mercieca only speculates on this possibility, and it would be unreasonable to expect much more than that from the monograph. But I see much promise in Mercieca's “spectacular demagogue” framework, which helps cut through discursive deadlock of whether Trump is “really” an authoritarian or simply playing the part for political gain. As Mercieca persuasively argues, the distinction does not matter. The more important reality is that both authoritarianism and spectacle are “antidemocratic” performances that “deny consent and use rhetoric as a strategic means to an end” (213). Seeing Trump's rhetoric for what it is, perhaps we might begin to answer Mercieca's clarion call to revitalize democracy in the United States.Deep in analysis and sweeping in scope, Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump makes a significant, lasting contribution to rhetorical studies. The author's insights have only become more salient since 2020, and Jennifer Mercieca is to be commended for writing a book so intellectually rich yet eminently readable. Demagogue for President proves a reliable lodestar for reckoning with the aftermath of Trump's presidency, a book that scholars and citizens will revisit for years to come.

This dialogue offers a transnational perspective on the emergence of public health officials (PHOs) as celebrities during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on scholarship on public health rhetorics (e.g., Keränen, 2014; Malkowski & Melonçon, 2019) and on our experiences of living through the ongoing pandemic as well as observing its effects in Australia, Canada, China, and the United States, we focused our discussion on our local contexts; key public health celebrities who emerged in those contexts; changes in public reaction to those figures over time; and why the celebrification of public health figures is of interest to scholars in rhetoric of health and medicine. We close by reflecting on how our transnational discussion of public health celebrities has reshaped our understanding of celebrification in health and outline key areas of future collaboration and inquiry.

Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including communication and rhetoric, have argued that infectious disease has been increasingly securitized in the post-9/11 environment. This essay tracks the rhetoric of seven U.S. pandemic plans from 1978 to 2017 to investigate how the evolving language of these plans supports or undermines the infectious disease securitization thesis. Our analysis reveals stark differences in the arrangement, delivery, and style of U.S. pandemic plans, despite a consistent focus on antigenic shifts of influenza A, vaccines, and medical research and development. Although U.S. pandemic plans reflect connections to security since their earliest inception, they have adopted more explicit linkages to national and global health security since 2005. This move reflects the emergence of the global health security paradigm and raises questions about pandemic planning implementation.

Celebrity-driven wellness ventures are pervasive and often spearheaded by white women, resulting in white-centric health guidance. One such venture is KINRGY, a workout and lifestyle method created by professional dancer Julianne Hough that regularly appropriates and exploits Eastern, Aboriginal, and BIPOC cultural practices. Through a critical rhetorical interrogation of the workout videos and Instagram feed of KINRGY, we assess how this method relies on cultural appropriation and New Age Orientalism to situate spirituality as the crux of universal health, thus establishing a reconfiguration of healthism into what we call “neohealthism”—a phenomenon that further obfuscates structural constraints on health, and expands the individual imperatives of healthful choices by placing metaphysical considerations on consumers’ shoulders. We theorize neohealthism through the following themes: the consumption of the Other via cultural exploitation, the question of expertise in spiritual leadership, and the intensified neoliberal imperatives that individualize health and wellness for self and the universe.

Extending Sarah Singer and Jordynn Jack’s (2020) definition of illness chronicity as a complex rhetorical process of identification, this essay suggests that the development of specific temporal vocabularies (ways of defining and describing time) is an important part of this process, one that precedes and enables identification. Drawing from underemphasized temporal themes in Kenneth Burke’s work, this essay analyzes a collection of public descriptions of chronic depression to identify implicit patterns of temporal vocabulary development and to consider how these patterns relate to identification. The analysis shows that descriptions of chronic depression consistently utilize what Burke termed “directional” strategies of definition, which center permanence as the essence of the illness experience, obscuring recognition of change. While this definitional strategy enables two potentially ameliorative disidentifications, it comes at the expense of precluding kairos, which requires a dialectically-intact temporal vocabulary featuring terms of both permanence and change.

This essay discusses the need and the value of explicitly integrating rhetoric within the business classroom setting; introduces basic rhetorical structures that enhance the workplace skill set; identifies the significance of topoi in the business and professional communication classroom pedagogy; and provides an example of the practical application of using topoi as a pedagogical construct in the business and professional communication classroom.

Business and professional communication courses hold special opportunities to contribute to students’ development of entrepreneurial mindsets through the use and extension of classical rhetorical theory and praxis. We situate pedagogical activities within the context of the entrepreneurial venture pitch by using Rhetorical Canons of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery to develop oral discourse while recognizing and developing entrepreneurial mindsets. We utilize elements of entrepreneurial mindset development presented by Kuratko et al. and Daspit et al. to introduce business and professional communication instructors to cognitive, behavioral, and emotional aspects contributing to the establishment of entrepreneurial mindsets.

Because algorithms form the audiences that reach us online, students need algorithmic literacy as well as rhetorical awareness when learning to write online. This article examines student writing to explore how students can use theorycrafting to systematically test an algorithm to gain more critical awareness of how the algorithm functions and forms publics online. Finally, this article explores how students can use the algorithmic knowledge they learned from theorycrafting to reflect on the ethics their algorithm constructs for users and how it constructs ad hoc publics. The article then explores how students can create multimodal intersectional counternarratives in response that they can also more effectively circulate online to more deliberately construct inclusive online publics.

The recent speculative turn in literacy, English education, and other ELA-related fields has brought renewed energy for redesigning English teaching and learning through genre awareness. However, extant work on speculative genres of reading, writing, and literary study assumes that ELA teachers are prepared or, more fundamentally, aware of these genres and their unique features. Addressing this gap, this article presents a single intrinsic case of Carlos, a queer man of Color and bilingual elementary teacher, as he cultivated genre awareness through an interactive approach to genre pedagogy through restorying. Based on a rhetorical genre studies approach, Carlos’s case demonstrates how English teachers might expand their genre repertoire to include speculative genres and integrate them into their classrooms. This article concludes by advocating for the integration of speculative literacies into English teacher education, doing so to disrupt normative realities tied to white supremacy and homophobia within the field.

Initiating a transdisciplinary composition stretch pedagogy, I examine students’ excavations of archives to advance epistemological freedoms in support of rhetorical sovereignty in student writings. Grounded in Latinx studies first-year composition, I analyze archival projects wherein Chicanx students seek rhetorical inheritances, questing to locate textual homes and emotions of belonging.

The aim of this topos analysis is to identify features of argumentation in Swedish parliamentary debates on asylum policy in 2015 and 2016 compared to German debates. Findings include a focus on procedural rather than substantive aspects and an adaptation of government-like argumentation by cooperating opposition parties. These can be attributed to the focus on consensus and cooperation in Sweden, governed by a minority government, and may be typical of minority governments, common in Scandinavia, in general.

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by: Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age by Michelle C. Smith Nancy Myers Michelle C. Smith, Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2021. 234 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8093-3835-1. In her 1863 self-researched and self-published The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work, Virginia Penny points out that "the false opinion that exists in regard to the occupations suitable for women must be changed ere women have free access to all those in which they may engage."1 Penny's research may have expanded her readers' views on women's work in the nineteenth century; however, Michelle C. Smith's Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age illustrates for the contemporary reader the "social, economic, and cultural shifts" and contexts during the antebellum period that effect gendered labor issues today (11). Comprised of five chapters, Utopian Genderscapes presents three rhetorical case studies of intentional communities: Brook Farm (1841–1847) in West Roxbury, Massachusetts; the Harmony Society (1804–1905) settling near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1825; and the Oneida Community (1848–1881) in Oneida, New York (3). These examinations on gendered labor are framed at the beginning of the book with Smith's theoretical lens, historical [End Page 97] context, and rhetorical argument about gendered labor during the antebellum period and at the end of the text with the continuing utopian fallacy of gendered and class labor in our own time as expressed through tropes such as "tidying up," "leaning in," and "having it all" (148–153). Smith's overarching argument claims that "such rhetorics of gendered labor function to increase divides among women and preclude alliances on the basis of gender" (5). She grounds her argument through her clearly articulated and detailed theoretical approach of analyzing the intentional communities as "ecologies of gender" (6–11). This material-feminist rhetorical lens examines each community's practices in its resistance to the larger context of American industrialization and in its reflection of that industrialization as well as the societal and the cultural attitudes about gendered labor. The three case studies, as Smith explains, convey "the networks of bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses that comprised women's work within each community, intervened in larger rhetorics of women's work, and initiated patterns of gendered labor that persist today" (4). In "Domestic Rhetorics," which details the distribution of labor at the transcendentalist community Brook Farm, Smith focuses on women's work to argue that while women branched out into nondomestic labor, men did not venture into traditional housework, thus reinforcing its stigma as representing menial chores. To alleviate the burden of daily living and provide time for other endeavors, the community's middle and upper-class women employed working-class women for housework further associating those tasks with class divisions. "Professional Rhetorics" demonstrates how women, labor, and prestige are not allied. In fact, as is illustrated by Gertrude Rapp in the Harmony Society, the success of one woman's entrepreneurial and rhetorical endeavors becomes a synecdoche for all women working in the silk industry. Unfortunately, many women at that time in the silk industry were laborers working for low wages and in unsafe working conditions, so they were not aligned with Rapp's privilege and whiteness. Focused on the Oneida Community, "Reproductive Rhetorics" illustrates the complex dynamic between an intentional community's mission and its practices resulting both in reinscribing societal norms tied to motherhood, childcare, and housework and in creating new hierarchies of gendered and class labor and authority. In the final chapter, Smith appropriately positions herself as researcher and scholar, as she did in the book's opening, with her clearly articulated argument and analytical method. She expands on her aims in writing history "to restore a sense of possibility" and to make that history relevant for today as a means to imagine what "might yet be otherwise" (27). She validates her aims by drawing connections between each intentional community and current social, cultural, and economic practices and attitudes about housework, professional women supporting the advancement of other women, and the continued tension...

Reviewed by: That Tyrant, Persuasion: How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World by J. E. Lendon Christopher S. van den Berg J. E. Lendon, That Tyrant, Persuasion: How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 302 pp. ISBN: 978-0-691-22100-7. John Lendon has written a provocative book about the interrelationship of formal rhetoric and the different worlds—physical no less than intellectual—that ancient Romans built for themselves. The arrows of provocation travel from Lendon's quiver in two different scholarly directions: first, at historians seeking to uncover sources, causes, or influences for some staple topics of Roman history; second, at scholars of rhetoric who have in recent decades so eagerly sought to excavate the underlying [End Page 99] socio-cultural backgrounds and impetuses of declamation—not just how rhetoric worked at the technical level but what kind of cultural purchase it had in making men (to use Maud Gleason's notable phrase), and in making them do things. Caesar's assassination, and especially its aftermath, is examined first, with an eye to what the declamatory halls (or their late-Republican precursors) will have misleadingly taught the likes of Brutus and Cassius to expect after the tyrant's death. "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more" (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3.2.1555–1556) might have been patriotic justification enough, certainly for anti-tyrannical Romans. So why didn't this justification prevail? In Shakespeare's famous dramatization it is Antony's superior strategy of "flooding the zone" (to use Steve Bannon's motto) that wins out. By making it hard for others to know anything you can probably get them to do anything. (Antony's "Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt!" could have just as well been the insurrectionist's chant at the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021.) Lendon, rather, lays the blame at the conspirators' own door. The assassins were so mentally fixed in the declaimers' halls that when reality came knocking they couldn't find their way to the exit: "They expected that a literary convention—the evil henchmen vanish and the city returns to normal without any further effort—would apply in the real world. And what really happened is that they got to the end of their script, tried to repeat the ending several times in hope of a better result (those speeches in the Forum), and finally fell off their script into the real world, which was inhabited by Antony and Lepidus and their soldiers" (55–56). Lendon teases out not merely what rhetorical education may have prompted its students to create, but especially which creations were the indirect result of that education. As such the study necessarily and avowedly remains in the realm of speculation, but hopefully fruitful speculation, of the kind that illuminates certain mysteries or perplexing scenarios. In this sense he has little time for recent debates over declamation's acculturative or subversive workings ("we bid farewell to the sociological interpretations of school declamation," 22). Lendon examines the rhetorical shaping of thought and action in three distinct spheres of Roman activity: elite politics (Caesar's assassination); the built world (monumental nymphaea and city walls); the juridical-pedagogical stage (Roman law and declamation). His style is a jaunty mix of the light-hearted, the stern, and the ironic, reminiscent sometimes of Gibbon or Dickens and sometimes of Ronald Syme. The limitations of our own knowledge are crucial to the book's working premises: "we may conjecture that students of rhetoric under the Empire knew what they knew with great force and intensity (more than we are used to, from our systems of education), but what they knew with such vigor is not what we know" (25). This claim makes it possible to explore untrodden paths: "what the members of that class were positively taught by rhetorical education will have stood first in their minds, and been likely in principle to have the greatest historical impact" (25). The book proceeds in several case studies by circling around from effect to cause and back to [End Page 100] effect: first consider an event or practice, then salvage from rhetoric...

Reviewed by: Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire by Dana Farah Fields Anna Peterson Dana Farah Fields, Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire, Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies, Abingdon, NY: Routledge, 2021. 236 pp. ISBN: 978-0-429-29217-0. In an ancient context, the term parrhēsia is most often associated with the Athenian democracy of the fifth century BCE, where free or frank speech became a key egalitarian and therefore democratic value. But it also featured prominently in Greek literature of the Roman period (1st-3rd centuries CE), a time when a single man ruled over the Mediterranean world and social hierarchies dominated life on a local level. Although parrhēsia has been a topic of recurrent interest over the past three decades (thanks in large part to the influence of Michel Foucault), later Greek literature has been largely sidelined in discussions of this virtue.1 Dana Fields's Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire begins to fill this gap by providing a thought-provoking exploration of how Greek sophists, philosophers, and satirists of the second century CE deployed free and frank speech. Most importantly, Fields's study challenges the prevailing assumption that, after Alexander the Great, the connotations of the term shifted radically from a political right to a personal, ethical virtue. Instead, Fields argues, parrhēsia retained political significance in the second century CE, both in terms of local institutions and, more importantly, in the interpersonal relationships that so often defined politics at this time. Fields's discussion proceeds in six chapters, the first of which lays out the book's approach and establishes Aristophanes, Socrates, Diogenes, and Demosthenes as "icons of frankness" for later practitioners of parrhēsia. Chapter 2 further sets the stage by considering parrhēsia in the classical [End Page 95] period, where it was associated not just with citizenship but with further restrictive statuses, such as categories of social class and gender. Of particular interest in this chapter is Fields's discussion of parrhēsia and slavery, which considers not just the well-worn example of Roman Saturnalia but also Aelian's On the Nature of Animals, an often overlooked work. Following these first two introductory chapters, the next three chapters focus on different addressees of frank speech, specifically kings, cities, and elites. Chapter 3 explores how a speaker might adopt an adversarial style when addressing a king or emperor, a posture that Fields argues benefits both speaker and addressee by showcasing the former's courage and wisdom and the latter's self-control. As is the case with all but the last chapter, Fields does not focus on an individual author but instead draws on a variety of authors and texts. Chapter 3 consequently juxtaposes Dio Chrysostom's Kingship Orations with Philostratus's Apollonius of Tyana and examples of frank speakers culled from Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Dio and Philostratus's Apollonius remain the focus in Chapter 4, where Fields provides first a survey of Dio's civic orations before turning to consider how Apollonius offers frank criticism to cities both orally and through his letters. As Fields argues, Dio and Apollonius "occupy a space somewhere between rhetoric and philosophy" and present themselves as itinerant wise men (131). Dio and his appropriation of previous models (e.g., Socrates, Diogenes, and Demosthenes) is really the star of this chapter, and it is worth noting here that Fields might have also considered Dio's relationship to the tradition of iambic speech, particularly in the First Tarsian and Alexandrian orations, both of which are covered in this chapter. Our surviving sources suggest that urban elites navigated local internal hierarchies through delicately and carefully contrived speech. If the cities of the Greek east were in essence being run by oligarchic governance and through patronage relationships, parrhēsia and the language of friendship reduced the visibility of these social differences. Chapter 5 offers a fascinating read of Plutarch's How to tell a flatterer from a friend alongside Artimedorus's Oneirocriticon, Aelian's On the Nature of Animals, and other texts. Here, Fields challenges the conventional reading that parrhēsia in Plutarch's treatise is apolitical. As she convincingly shows, the text...

Reviewed by: Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology by Suzanne Kesler Rumsey Pamela VanHaitsma Suzanne Kesler Rumsey, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2021. 220 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2090-4. Blessed Are the Peacemakers began with literacy scholar Suzanne Kesler Rumsey's inheritance of her grandmother Miriam's papers, which included a surprising number of letters exchanged with her first husband, Benjamin Kesler, between 1941 and 1946. Rumsey "was shocked to discover what their lives were like … in the midst of World War II" (2). As "one might expect of war-era letters," they were "filled with love and longing, anguish at being apart, uncertainty and anxiety about the war and the country's future." But, in Miriam and Ben's case, the newlyweds were separated because Ben was a member of a historic peace church and conscientious objector. As an alternative to serving in the United States military, he was conscripted into unpaid labor in Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps, leaving Miriam to support the family while she too avoided better-paying jobs that contributed to the War. Working with their letters, Rumsey reconstructs the story, or small-h history, of her grandparents, weaving their narrative into the large-H History of conscientious objectors during WWII. Rumsey demonstrates the importance of small-h histories to the history of rhetoric, models how to develop them through family history methodology (FHM), and illuminates the role of love letters in both this historiographic work and the relationships they record. Rumsey's introduction sets out "three salient themes" that are woven throughout the book: "the value of small histories, the methodology of FHM, and the study of conduit and platform within letter writing" (7). Situating it within the tradition of ars dictaminis, Chapter 1 theorizes these two concepts—conduit and platform—as characterizing the nature of Miriam and Ben's letters. The letters were a conduit, "a vehicle or a means by which they could transmit the intangible," such as love (15). Through "the physical, tangible materiality of the letters," they also "functioned as a platform upon which they built their relationship" (15). The remaining chapters are organized chronologically and can be understood in two parts. The first part tells the story of the couple's early courtship and letter writing leading up to marriage (Chapter 2) and then during their separation only months later as Ben's first CPS placement [End Page 93] began at Sideling Hill in Pennsylvania (Chapters 3–8). Illustrating the FHM she developed, Rumsey moves from "extensive archival digging and secondary source reading" (33) on the broader context of historic peace churches and faith-based nonresistance (Chapter 3), to the specific story recorded in Miriam and Ben's letters. These letters document their "epistolary nesting" when first separated (Chapter 4), the details of Ben's labor at the CPS camp (Chapter 5), and Miriam's work as a young wife left responsible for supporting them (Chapter 6). Here Rumsey demonstrates the power of small-h histories, not only to show what the life of an individual conscientious objector was like, but also to uncover the lesser-known story of CPS women. Subsequent chapters nuance Miriam and Ben's story by identifying moments when the conduit and platform of their letter writing fell short: when dealing with family conflicts about time-sensitive financial matters (Chapter 7) and when coping with separation during their first Thanksgiving and Christmas as newlyweds (Chapter 8). Throughout this part of the book, Rumsey's analysis might be developed further in conversation with scholars who investigate the rhetoric of the specifically romantic subgenre.1 They offer approaches to exploring how norms of gender and sexuality get embedded in and challenged through epistolary rhetoric. Regardless, Rumsey's theory and analysis of conduit and platform will prove useful for any rhetoricians and/or historians working with love letters. The second part of Blessed Are the Peacemakers turns to Ben's next CPS placement at the Rhode Island State Hospital for Mental Diseases, where Miriam was able to join him...

Abstract: This paper highlights the importance of an audience-centric approach in the study of Athenian forensic rhetoric and leverages insights from Social Identity Theory and Burke's concept of 'identification' to examine courtroom speeches. Litigants, perceiving the Athenian dikastai as a distinct group marked by a salient social identity, rhetorically employed the group's prototypes, norms, and interests to establish their identification—and underscore the opponent's division—with the audience. This prominent role of social identity and the potential for jury bias affecting the large audiences of dikastai prompt a reconsideration of the nature of Athenian trials and suggest that, in addition to upholding the law, Athenian courts functioned as platforms for the imposition of social and legal conformity.

Abstract: Ennodius' panegyric for Theoderic the Great shows the employment of Roman rhetorical tradition and republican-era virtues to legitimise the new Germanic ruler of Italy. After Ennodius' general strategies to depict Theoderic as a Roman are discussed, this paper analyses two specific samples from the speech which show the use of traditional symbols, exempla , and even Ciceronian conceptions of tyranny alongside contemporary views of Romans and barbarians. These strategies were used to shape a version of Theoderic that removed the ruler from his Germanic background and reinterpreted him as a Roman ruler.

10 for graduate students and $25 for faculty; more information is available at cwshrc.org.Cover Art: a print (etching and aquatint) showing an elf woman in a tree.She is nude and is using a long branch to point downward at a bear who is looking up at her.In the background are other leafy branches and a scenic cove.The

10 for graduate students and $25 for faculty; more information is available at cwshrc.org.Cover Art: a fractal in shades of black, dark blue, light blue, orange, yellow, and white.The lower left corner is a right triangle in solid black with the words "Peitho 26.4 Summer 2024 Special issue: Small and Subtle Feminist Rhetorical Doings" in a slightly slanted font, all caps, in yellow.It is inspired by adrienne maree brown's idea about fractals and patterns: "what we practice on a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.

Thirty-seven years after its initial publication, David Bartholomae's essay “Inventing the University” ([1986] 2005) remains indelible in the contemporary project and continual reinvention of composition studies. Indeed, the collected essays and vignettes featured in Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies—its title echoing Bartholomae's piece—pay deliberate homage to Bartholomae by reverently calling his piece “seminal,” “pivotal,” and “long studied” even as the authors by turns complicate, disagree, and expand his initial concepts.The constant among these fifteen full-length chapters and eight vignettes is a deep, abiding respect for student writing, including the varied, nonlinear processes, outputs, and modes of exploration that students experience in our classes. As coeditor Stacey Waite situates the project in the introduction, “In our current political moment, how do students and scholars ‘invent the university’ now? What are the structures of universities in/against which students make work in our courses? How have our students helped us to create, shape, disrupt, and revise our field?” While these questions are equal parts vital and esoteric, the pieces in this anthology approach these lines of inquiry via a range of methods and theoretical positionings. Amid this diversity of perspectives, Ashanka Kumari's chapter, “Inventing Happens in Perpetuity,” might well function as a high-level overview of the issues raised across the anthology. Discussing the importance of continually checking our own perceptions about students’ writing, Kumari offers, “I often ask students to ask ‘Why’ whenever we complete an activity—why on Earth might I have made us do the thing we just did? Through this practice, I think with students about writing practices, about the histories informing what is deemed as a concept to spend time on in our classroom space.” As such, these chapters and vignettes reinvigorate Karen L. Lowenstein's (2009) concept of a “parallel practice” in higher education, wherein the ways we hope our students will write and move through the world after taking our courses must necessarily parallel the ways we ourselves teach them. In this spirit, Inventing the Discipline walks the walk of accessibility in its open-source, digital format that is fully available for any interested reader online.While the anthology's contents are not grouped by subheadings—a move I interpret as inviting readers to draw their own connections and patterns among the chapters—I have organized my review into three loose themes: the explicit rejection of student writing as somehow “less than” other forms of writing, the pedagogical and rhetorical centering of student writing in composition classrooms and in formal writing projects, and an explication of the sticky moral and linguistic issues involved in centering student writing both in the academy and, from a metaphysical standpoint, in anthologies such as this one. My grouping of these themes is not indicative of any particular authority I have in this field; rather, I offer these as one possible framework of many that readers may use as they dive into this spirited and essential collection.Fittingly, many of the early essays in Inventing the Discipline grapple with the central problem of labeling anything student writing. In “Pedagogical Genealogies,” the opening chapter of the anthology, Peter Wayne Moe traces the pedagogical genealogies he has inherited through Bartholomae, William E. Coles, Jr., and Theodore Baird, and questions how these genealogies sit differently in his particular person—how they work (or don't) in his context and to what extent these genealogies may or may not be appropriate for an ever-diversifying composition classroom. “Every teacher must, at some point, come to terms with such pedagogical genealogies, locating ourselves within? alongside? outside? against? the traditions that make our own work possible,” writes Moe. Because these genealogies inform our own positionalities as instructors, embedded within them are particular—if sometimes subconscious—orientations to the students we teach.Bruce Horner, in his chapter “Student Writing,” takes up the dialectal student-teacher relationship and calls out the deficit-based views inherent in many discussions of student writing: “ ‘Student,’ when used as a modifier—as in student work, student writing, student housing, student government, student life—typically serves to demean what it modifies by signaling its character as somehow lesser in quality than what is modified: less authentic, valuable, lasting, real, valid, substantive.” Student writing is not taken seriously in this formulation and is in fact often positioned as “not real” as a result. Horner, however, rejects this conception, and the “autonomous” view of literacy and language it contains, in favor of an epistemology that emphasizes the embeddedness of the social world in every utterance. Student and teacher alike are thus “fellow reworkers of language and knowledge,” so that, rather than dismissing student work as of low value out of hand, or fetishizing it as some immaculate artifact, the solution is “to behave . . . [as if] all of us, and all writing, remain in that same, incomplete condition.”Of course, student writing is only one element of the teacher-student dialectic. Michael Bunn, in “Undervaluing Student Writing in Composition Courses: A Reading Problem,” suggests that more attention ought to be given to how students read and, more broadly, how we in the field read student writing. Where writing pedagogies are numerous and well integrated into composition programs, Bunn urges compositionists “to pay more attention to reading.” As a means of troubling a differential valuation of writing by the professional-academic class and that of students, Bunn argues that “students are best served when they are taught to read both published and student-produced texts in the same ways.” This is, he cautions, not to say that published texts and our students’ paper submissions are of the same quality; rather, they are merely “at different stages in the writing and professionalization process.”Taken together, Moe, Horner, and Bunn remind us to question the pedagogical genealogies we've inherited, to tweak and/or dismantle them as necessary in our unique institutional contexts, and to take great care as we continue to work with students and their writing—which, like our own writing, is always already in a state of becoming. The pieces I've included in the following section are largely concerned with how we might merge these ideas within the composition classroom.A second theme I noted concerned the pedagogical possibilities presented by student writing. As one might anticipate, an anthology dedicated to the radical (re)examination of student writing features a fair amount of writing by students throughout its pages. Indeed, most of the book's chapters and vignettes fall into this broad category, though the overlaps and tensions among the approaches described are important to name. As such, I've opted to take a page from Eric A. House, who asks in his vignette, “ ‘It's Not about You,’ or, Getting out of My Own Way to Better Perceive Composition,” “I'm wondering how often instructors get out of our own way, admit that maybe the flow of the class isn't necessarily about us, and allow ourselves to be moved by students?” As a means of “getting out of the way,” a pedagogical concept I first encountered through literary scholar Marcelle M. Haddix (2018), I have opted to center actual students’ writing as much as possible in this part of the review.Consider Michael, a student of author Gina Tranisi's described in her contribution, “Respectfully Michael: A Narrative Exploration of Student Writing and What We Might Make of Its Beautiful Disruptions.” As Michael, a white, cisgender undergraduate in a midwestern university, grapples with stepping out of his comfort zone to research the stigma faced by transgender communities, he reaches a moment of struggle in the drafting process in which he confesses, “I feel like my paper is boring to read . . . I wasn't very creative with this one at least so far. My only creativity is the beginning letter of each paragraph spells out the words stigmas and distress which I feel are really important to understand with this topic.” Tranisi draws on Michael's words both to acknowledge the creative writerly choices our students make that we often miss and to lobby the rest of us to consider “the people behind the papers.”Where Michael's example hinted at the potential for worldview change through writing, Chanon Adsanatham describes how his communication students in Bangkok blended conventions of English-language business correspondence with Thai communication practices. While initially disappointed by his students’ “failure” to grasp the content, Adsanatham later realized this happenstance was a “rhetorical clash,” or “a moment in which knowledge, familiarity, and expectations about discursive arrangement, conventions, and practices from a tradition or curriculum creates questions or doubts about appropriate composing moves in a writing assignment in an intercultural rhetorical situation.” These clashes are inherently generative and productive if embraced as such. Of course, part of the work of embracing these opportunities requires a commitment to reflective practice, or an “after pedagogy,” as Paul Lynch (2011) has called it.Donna Qualley and Matthew Sorlien put this “after pedagogy” into practice in their chapter, “Our (Students’) Work (and Play) Can Make Us Smarter Next Time.” Building on the twenty-first-century literate practice of content curation, Donna asks how students and teachers can embark on writing and reading through new media literacies when both teacher and student are nonexperts in these genres, while Matthew dives head first into the Prezi Classic platform to create a presentation of over two hundred slides, complete with multiple “What I'm Thinking” slides that he notes “allowed me to present myself authentically within the work—not as a disembodied voice faking expertise, objectivity, or even comfort, but as a writer still trying to make something out of the material, even though they aren't sure what that something is.” This theme of playfulness finds a nice complement in Derek Tanios Imad Mkhaiel and Jacqueline Rhodes's vignette, “Messiness Matters: A Story of Writing in One Act,” in which the virtues of messiness, nonlinearity, and spontaneity are celebrated as thinking tools that generate powerful writing. Mkhaiel, a student in Rhodes's graduate seminar, underscores this point: Messy moments feel like moments of creative intellectual endeavor—my WRA 101 students and I are trying to write thought. Run-ons are excited ideas that don't know when to quit; fragments are dramatic brevity, not mistake. One time I had a student who used an excessive (I thought) number of commas; when I commented on the punctuation, I learned that she was trying to teach me how to breathe while reading her thoughts.In “Disrupting Hierarchies of Knowledge: Student Writing in the Digital Transgender Archive(?),” authors Mariel Aleman, Alice Galvinhill, Keith Plummer, and K. J. Rawson depict reflections gleaned from their work with the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) housed at the College of the Holy Cross, where Rawson led the project and Aleman, Galvinhill, and Plummer were undergraduate student workers and archivists. The authors describe the immense value and responsibility of working for the project, ensuring the accessibility and accuracy of artifacts, as well as the role of scholar-activism in fighting for the visibility of minoritized communities. As Plummer writes, “Working for the DTA showed me the importance of scholarly activism to unearth stories made invisible by our culture, how a mission is a much more meaningful motivator than a grade, and how a scholarly intervention can become an empowering space that's impact reaches far beyond the confines of a lab.”Just as Aleman et al. challenge the kind of writing that counts as “writing”—and who that writing does and does not typically center—Rachael Shah's vignette “Writing with Students to Make an Academia with More Room” discusses the challenges she has encountered with cowriting research with high school students. Though this sort of writing creates more space, or “more room,” as she puts it, in academia, “the message we were receiving about who writes research—and who does not—was crystal clear. It was a message I found myself constantly trying to counter, both for the students I was writing with and for academics who encountered their work.” In a similar vein, Cory Holding's vignette, “The Field and the Force: Notes from Prison Teaching” critiques the practice of writing about student writing in favor of writing with students in a variety of settings, including prisons. This shift “means not only quoting from students’ work, or even co-writing, but working together to form the research question, to think through research methods, to process critical feedback, and to imagine interventions, implications, and next steps,” writes Holding.“Writing for Change: Re-inventing the University” takes on Holding's and Shah's call to make “more room” in academe for a variety of writers in its assembling of twenty-two University of Pittsburgh undergraduate authors to ask, “What would your ideal university do?” In their employment of a Black feminist epistemology, these authors depict their ideal university as one with frequent opportunities for professionalization and with ample support for everyday financial tasks. They seek increased integration with the surrounding community and, fundamentally, an acknowledgment of difference as “an essential and permanent part of our society, making it crucial to work to celebrate that in the face of people who try to destroy it.” In so doing, they offer a powerful example of the “critical story-ing” called for in Sherita V. Roundtree's chapter, “(Re)Humanizing the Discipline: Students’ Critical Story-ing as a Resource Archive.” Roundtree, like Aleman et al., finds digital archives to be productive spaces that “help students actively see themselves as members of discourse communities within and outside of the university.”Where compositionists may well agree on a number of pedagogical principles (many of them outlined in the aforementioned chapters), there still exists a richness of tension and debate in the field. The final set of chapters and vignettes zeroes in on these tensions, many of them arising from Bartholomae's original essay. He argues of students, “They must learn to speak our language” (5), but more recently, scholars have taken issue with this dictum—do they? and to what end? Take, for a start, Pritha Prasad's chapter, “(Anti)Racist World-Making in the University: Reinventing Student Work,” which attends to the moral injury faced by BIPOC students as they attempt to “invent the university” amid harassment and assault, and asks, “How can we look at the theory-building and knowledge-creating work our BIPOC students—and particularly women of color and queer people of color—are already doing in the spaces in which they live and work as a basis for understanding how race and racism operate in our classrooms, universities, and beyond? Prasad ends the chapter by sounding an alarm regarding the use of “the master's tools,” in Audre Lorde's words, because a myopic focus on standard language forms suggests that BIPOC students only need to master the linguistic tools of what Lisa calls the of in to political Prasad's up College Students at the the of in the Composition in which she a focus on among her students, many of are and I to students the importance of different language forms for social and describe language as a of the importance of to in different and This the value of the language students already that the use of may not be appropriate for such as with and the use of language is not ideal for social such as a or in question raised for me among these two chapters is one that's the in our field for what like that Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” how much we students to their language and literacies to with the discourse community of the and how much we instructors, and in this the academy such that space for the variety of and that our students us of our with to the of institutional change on this in his vignette, with Composition Composition to seek to if this a when it . . . they just to I to as the for composition of because any field is made up of of a of scholars and and they be behind when they and is while this both in content and in author of While Inventing the this the of an as a crucial means of for minoritized students in higher In this way, “not only do students have to the university, but they need to the role of to in the L. and M. the to of the in and while out critical spaces for and Black of within the by their for final theme I noted in my reading of this concerned the of student writing in vignette, A at the that when we student writing from its original “I from essays that were and sometimes not that well and I used to make the I to she In to the Student The and E. by his not to any student writing in his that from student writing is a very he writes, “I to ask what on student writing might look like if not by the to from student the inherent differential in the of student to make one or something that vignette Though she is to and with students, the of which such have as I have to it, I've always had the most Indeed, I've the one positioned to do the she As a to this I to call out the work of L. and Cory In “Student Writing on Student Writing,” the authors that the university and the both will a about the structures which are particularly on they out the of and composition scholars the in this As they put it, who would write about student writing in terms of how it the to to with student writing less and student instructors and other instructors who would and to on ways to the of the are often from such As is in this the by Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition is It is that anthology that the reader both with and and with vital questions about the and the role of student work within Waite notes in her that attention to student work is just as as it was in when Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” was first our field this radical all of its and the to

AbstractDrawing on object-oriented approaches to rhetoric and the scholarship of museum education, the author describes her development of a first-year composition experience that puts observation at the center of first-year writing—observation of an art object and its context of display, as well as self-observation of a writer interacting with that object. The experience uses these object-oriented encounters to broaden students’ understanding of the role that close observation plays in effective writing while acting as a case study for how first-year composition instructors can draw on object and museum theories to design experiences and assignments conducted outside of traditional classroom spaces.

Using the technical and professional communication service course as the site for research, and student learning outcomes (SLOs) as the specific focus, we gathered, coded, and analyzed 503 SLOs from 93 institutions. Our results show the top outcomes are rhetoric, genre, writing, design, and collaboration. We discuss these outcomes and then we offer programmatic implications drawn from the data that encourage technical and professional communication program administrators and faculty to use common SLOs, to improve outcome development, and to reconsider the purpose of the service course for students.

In this article, I explore the rhetorical deployment of White tears, tears that are circulated within narratives of interracial conflict as evidence for the rightness of White supremacist norms. More specifically, White tears are those that are framed as deictic indicators of a White victim versus a Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) threat. These presumed relations of cause and effect are made possible within an emotional context that assumes a baseline White rationality as the norm; distress signals the threat of non-White aggression. Analysis of several prominent cases of crying demonstrates how tears can be marshaled as evidence for the legitimacy of White bodies at the expense of those of color. Although considering the rhetorical force of affect and emotion is important for critical rhetorical analyses, such work needs to contend with how scripts for emotional engagement are already inclined toward or against certain bodies. It then becomes possible to develop alternative, subversive framings.

This article looks at how exigence is made publicly observable in user-based media operating on recommendation algorithms. Messaging in these rhetorical environments often takes the form of imitative behaviors rather than statements inviting a direct response. Examined in the article are two audio memes from TikTok representing two modes of imitation: one a physical imitation meme associated with the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, and the other a narrative imitation meme where participants objectify endemic social problems. The findings suggest that the responsorial imperative of audio memes can either intensify the speed and urgency with which an exigence is experienced, or it can bring urgency to endemic problems. The studies also find that the formal qualities of a given audio meme constrain both how an exigence is communicated as well as what kinds of exigences the meme can be taken up for in the first place.

ABSTRACTThis short essay explores oblique approaches to rhetorical theory and practice and, in doing so, accidently arrives at a renewed appreciation of Aesthetics.KEYWORDS: Aestheticsobliquesense AcknowledgmentsI thank Crystal Colombini for reading versions of this essay and offering editorial guidance that made the essay much better. I also thank the anonymous reviewer whose questions and suggestions undoubtedly strengthened the work.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 One such encounter with the oblique can be found in Debra Hawhee’s A Sense of Urgency (177n13).2 Thanks to Eunsong Kim for pointing me toward Glissant’s discussion of the opaque.