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8804 articlesDecember 2022
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Abstract
Pamela VanHaitsma's Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education offers an insightful queer historiography of romantic epistolary rhetoric that opens the reader to queer possibilities in the rhetorical practice of nineteenth-century American letter writing. The author's stated intention is to queer the binary distinctions between public and private life that often push queer stories to the margins in histories of rhetorical education (4). With the genre of letter writing, VanHaitsma not only transcends queer recovery in American letter writing but also effectively reconsiders queer engagement, practice, and pedagogy within the rhetorical process of romantic epistolary.The introduction begins by citing the rhetorical and queer foundations of scholars like Charles E. Morris and Karma Chavez (6–7), previewing the methodological queering of rhetorical education. VanHaitsma first defines the key terms for consideration, including romantic epistolary and rhetorical education, and then situates epistolary rhetoric as a cis-heteronormative genre. Although the teaching and learning of romantic letter writing during this time exclusively privileged opposite-sex romantic discourse, VanHaitsma makes the case that the genre allows for queer openings. For example, queer possibilities existed in same-sex friendship correspondence; and queer invention emerged through a dialogue of the personal as political given race, gender, and sexuality were imbedded within romantic letter writing. VanHaitsma's archival research examines “complete letter writing manuals” (44) and romantic correspondence archived at the Connecticut Historical Society and Yale University Library's Manuscripts and Archive. As the author navigates romantic correspondence, VanHaitsma makes thoughtful choices that focus less on the sexual identity of the subjects and more on the “queer rhetorical practices” (11–12) of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus in chapter two and Albert Dodd in chapter three.The first chapter frames letter writing manuals as rhetorical (26) and then situates teaching manuals like the “complete letter writer” as inherently a heteronormative genre. The author considers the manuals as a launching point for analysis because of their ubiquity and circulation in the United States during the mid-nineteenth-century postal age. Complete letter writing manuals, according to VanHaitsma, were organized similarly by genre and served as a “model” for letter writing with respect to rhetor, audience, and purpose (25). For example, chapters are labeled as “on friendship,” “on business,” or “on love, marriage, and courtship.” By situating complete letter guides as rhetorical education, the author suggests that the teaching and learning guided by the manuals uses “language from the heart” to connect romantic epistolary to social inquiry, including class, education, and family; these matters of course were touchpoints in “appropriate” heteronormative correspondence. VanHaitsma advances three dimensions of heteronormativity encouraged by the manuals: (1) normative gendered romantic coupling; (2) normative pacing in romantic exchange; and (3) letter writing as practice toward the normative conventions of marriage. For example, manuals marked a letter as “masculine or feminine” via salutation like “From a Gentleman to a Lady.” Pacing was marked by dating the letters, and a normative convention of time, especially in romantic exchanges, would proceed slowly, cautiously, and without “passionate outbreaks” (34). Finally, the goal of romantic exchange was achieved only through its “heteronormative telos and generic end” (35), which was marriage between a man and woman. The paradox advanced by VanHaitsma is that the same three rigid cis-heteronormative constraints of letter writing manuals are also the dimensions that offer queer openings. The author suggests two “strategies for queer invention” (37); first, through “queer failure,” that informs a critical and queer “re-imagination” (46) of letter writing outside the genre. Second, VanHaitsma argues convincingly that if manuals are constructed as a resource for invention so that a letter writer may “write from their heart,” those generic conventions are already susceptible to queer challenge.Chapters two and three operationalize the call for a critically queer re-examination of American letter writing toward “queer effect,” first through the everyday romantic correspondence between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, then a more formal civic training through the letters, diaries, and manuals of Albert Dodd. Chapter two begins with a call for more perspectives on epistolary same-sex correspondence beyond the discourses of public and political figures. To this end, VanHaitsma examines the romantic exchange between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, “two freeborn African American women” (51-52) who corresponded during and after the American Civil War. In this chapter, the author is interested in how letter writers learn to participate in romantic exchange when formal training is perhaps inaccessible. As the author notes, even with access to manuals, there was no same-sex romantic correspondence modeled in the complete letter writers, so VanHaitsma considers what the rhetorical practices of these letters tell us broadly about queering romantic epistolary. The author studied the correspondence of Brown and Primus not only through a same-sex lens but also cross-class as Primus was a schoolteacher born to a “prominent African American community in Hartford Connecticut,” while Brown was uneducated in formal schooling and “worked primarily as a domestic” (51). VanHaitsma finds that Brown and Primus learned and used the generic conventions taught by complete letter writers, including salutation strategies and dating each correspondence for pacing. What differs, of course, is the queering of salutations which range in tone from a familial connection like sisters, to friendship, and even romance (55). The pacing of the correspondence reflects an urgency and intensity outside heteronormative convention with quick replies, often within a week (57). The correspondence also defied a marriage telos given the societal constraint that marriage to each other was an impossibility; as a result, the romantic exchange was never scaffolded around that particular generic convention. Finally, the author illustrates how Primus and Brown queered the rhetorical parameters of the manuals by incorporating political discussions alongside romantic exchange (61). Chapter two concludes by describing how the romantic exchange between Brown and Primus borrowed from poetry to compose and queer language of the heart. The most compelling take-away from this analysis is how the correspondence from two everyday, same-sex, cross-class, African American women adopted the generic conventions of inaccessible manuals and then crafted queer inventions to challenge generic norms.Chapter three examines the letter writing and training of Albert Dodd. Where Brown and Primus lacked access to formal rhetorical education, Dodd—an upper-class white cis-man—studied rhetoric as civic engagement at Trinity College and Yale, where he wrote a poetry album and a “commonplace book turned diary” (75). What interests VanHaitsma about Dodd is how he used classical training to repurpose rhetorical and civic education toward a romantic end, which became a multi-genre and genre-queer epistolary practice. Through his formal training, Dodd possessed a rhetorical awareness of generic letter writing conventions that allowed him to negotiate public and private binaries. VanHaitsma illustrates how Dodd's training developed into a queer rhetorical practice by broadening the genre of letter writing through an introduction of epistle verse, letters, poetry, and same-sex erotic correspondence (92). VanHaitsma connects Dodd's formal training to Brown and Primus through a “queer art as failure” (98) where the correspondence of all three defied normative training when the generic conventions could not be met; instead, the rhetors re-purposed the generic strategies for their own queer effect. Building from this connection, the author's concluding chapter is a pedagogical gesture toward “queer failure” (104) in rhetorical studies. As a challenge to the status-quo orientation and cis-heteronormative expectations of rhetorical education, VanHaitsma turns to queer movement studies and implores scholars in the histories of rhetoric and sexuality studies to stay vigilant to the “failures” of queer pasts.Pamela VanHaitsma's compact book is poignant and an important contribution to rhetorical studies, particularly in realizing queer possibilities in spaces dominated by normative histories. Exploring American traditions of letter writing, the author makes a sophisticated and accessible critique of the hegemonic democratic practices of civic engagement, public and private spheres of citizenship, race, gender, and sexuality in the histories of rhetorical education. As a reader, the text was not only enjoyable, but the pages also evoked everyday queer curiosities missing and undiscovered in white Western rhetorical studies. As the author notes, queer romantic engagement has always existed but with limited scholarly attention. The case made throughout these chapters advocates for a critical break and crucially, an intentional movement toward “non-normative historiographic ways of knowing” (101). VanHaitsma's attention to diverse learners, queer ways of being rhetorical, and queer stories of everyday people through epistolary romantic engagement is exemplary.
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Abstract
Focusing on the rich biographies of five influential figures of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Paul Stob's Intellectual Populism argues for renewed attention to a distinctive kind of populist rhetoric. In times of widespread corruption and social upheaval that he argues parallel our own, Stob identifies the “Great Agnostic” lecturer Robert Ingersoll, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, philosopher Thomas Davidson, educator and reformer Booker T. Washington, and writer, speaker, and activist Zitkála-Šá as salient examples of a “mode of inquiry” focused on connecting ordinary people around anti-establishment sentiments with intellectual, rather than anti-intellectual, appeals (xv). Stob shows how each of these figures used their available means of persuasion to claim a voice among unfriendly and unlikely audiences. This, he argues, could be an approach for contemporary academics as we advocate for higher education in an age when our work is dismissed as, at best, irrelevant due to the Internet and new technologies and, at worst, the destructive and out-of-touch machinations of liberal elitism.Intellectual populism, Stob claims, is a means by which “populism and intellectualism can work together to enhance our knowledge of the world” (xv). While populism is often characterized as anti-intellectual, Stob argues that there are parameters in populist thought, taken up by intellectuals in the past, that have been constructive to democratic processes and engaged diverse audiences, inspiring them to think critically about how together they might change the established order. It is this coming together as a “new intellectual movement” that Stob hopes to enliven with a populist model of education incorporating broad notions of teaching and learning among those currently excluded from, or hostile to, higher education (227). However, it is important to note that it is the “fight,” not the “complete victory,” of the intellectual populist figure that Stob wants to highlight (208). As the concept itself elicits, intellectual populist rhetorical strategies engage a certain degree of irony and impossibility in their undertaking.As a case in point, Robert Ingersoll, the first figure profiled in the book, uses perspective by incongruity to call into question religious authorities and affirm agnostic beliefs. Described as a speaker able to make even the police sent to arrest him for blasphemy laugh and praise him, Ingersoll ultimately affirms religious ideals by turning them on their head. This is what Stob characterizes as the core of intellectual populism, “criticizing the established order to strengthen that which the order is trying to serve” (16). Even as Ingersoll attacks religion, the crowds that he drew found that he “enlivened religious inquiry. He brought religious questions into the marketplace of ideas, which strengthened religion by showing what was real in it” (34). Ingersoll appealed widely to audiences that shared various religious beliefs and would agree with him that their own renewal of these values was worthy of investigation. At the same time, Stob points out that “Ingersoll battled a religious establishment that not only survived the assault of free-thought advocates but also created a fundamentalist power structure that continues to this day,” thus showing how even the most successful rhetorical strategies are constrained by situation (208). However, Stob suggests, this could still be an adept strategy for academics: by affirming critiques that the university is out of touch with “the people,” academics could join critics in order to energize a “new intellectual movement” that would ultimately forward the mission of higher learning by broadening its reach, not overthrowing its aims (227).The next figure analyzed in Intellectual Populism is Mary Baker Eddy, the controversial founder of Christian Science. At its height, Christian Science lectures brought together large audiences of converts, interested listeners, and a wide swath of critics. Eddy's lecturers made the case to the public that Christian Science works because it is a science wherein personal experiences of healing prove that believers do not need medicine or the church. However, to Stob's surprise, Christian Science orators did not provide evidence of healing in their lectures, creating a void to be filled with ordinary people's personal testimonies. Stob asserts that this method of unsound syllogistic reasoning instead sought to empower listeners to reclaim their own agency and expertise, previously the domain of experts in religious and medical fields. Stob characterizes this on one hand as a dangerous rhetorical strategy, “duping lecture-goers into believing that Christian Science could accomplish something it never could accomplish” (73). By framing an individual listener's personal experience as “unimpeachably scientific” it makes personal truth “truer, fuller, more absolute than any deductive proof, any rationalist logic . . . any counter argument,” thus denigrating scientific evidence that would allow one to question or change those beliefs (71). This intellectual populist argument strategy therefore either fails with “listeners with an ear for scientific argumentation” (68) or makes receptive individuals resistant to scientific evidence based in logic and expertise that could “enhance our knowledge of the world” to shape a more democratic society (xv). This critique finds renewed importance in our current era of anti-vax movements that draw upon similar argument structures. However, instead of tossing out Eddy's arguments wholesale, Stob constructively points out that the vast power of religious inquiry continues to serve as touchstone of American public discourse. Instead of dismissing religion and personal experience as antithetical to intellectual thought, Stob suggests we think of these are “potent symbolic resources” to start, instead of stop, public conversations about science and expertise (226).The next figure Stob focuses on is Thomas Davidson, a savant Scottish philosopher who spent most of his life building intellectual communities for refined society. However, in his later years, Davidson created the Breadwinner's College, a “People's University” where he taught philosophy to Jewish factory workers from the Lower Eastside of New York City. Davidson initially undertook a series of public lectures in the neighborhood, where he framed philosophical inquiry as a form of labor that factory workers were apt to pursue. This “fell on deaf ears” and angered the workers, who argued that there was nowhere for them to study in their tenement houses, and thus the idea for the Breadwinner's College was formed (106). Davidson envisioned it as the first in a branch of many spaces where workers could gather and engage in Socratic exchange on curriculum that would give those without educational opportunities a “‘bird's-eye view of the scene and course of human evolution’” (109). Stob states that “Davidson's fundamental contribution to intellectual populism was his reconfiguration of speech and space—his grasp of the way words and ideas relate to the geography in which they emerge and through which they move” (118). However, “the irony was that Davidson wrote [much of this intellectual populist mission] . . . from Glenmore [his retreat center in the Adirondacks] . . . [where] Davidson's intellectual populism came from a position physically removed from the community he worked to empower” (117). This irony, Stob concludes, demonstrates that “Empowering the people needed to happen in the spaces that defined their lives;” Davidson in many ways failed to do this (118).In contrast, Stob's chapter on Booker T. Washington illustrates how he successfully provided educational opportunities for poor African Americans in the rural South. In his career as a public lecturer and educator, Washington argued that work itself was a rhetorical process that “communicated, influenced, and persuaded as effectively as words” (121). Washington used various success stories of Black Americans to show how dignified labor “did the suasory work that words and pages tried to do, and it was far more successful than any oration could be” (144). Stob describes this as ironic considering that Washington delivered this message through the medium of oratory and made a career of such words and arguments. However, Stob spends much of the chapter analyzing Washington's many accomplishments as the first President of the Tuskegee Institute, exemplifying through alumni letters how Washington's legacy was to “elevat[e] . . . labor to an intellectual practice” and help students “use their labor to control their lives” (160). While largely an appreciative read of Washington's legacy, Stob also points to ironies within Washington's approach which schooled students in “the politics of respectability . . . [that] emphasized moral reform and reconfiguration of self” and may have “eschewed the demand for structural change” needed by African Americans (150). Both the Davidson and Washington models for populist education support Stob's argument that spaces of higher learning must adapt to the communities they seek to reach by being more reflexive about modes and spaces of engagement. Furthermore, as Stob argues in the conclusion of the book, both rhetors exemplify the importance of education as a “maker's movement,” where students are the co-creators of ideas and communities. Instead of simply transmitting specialized knowledge, we must rethink how higher education might contribute to “putting people in a position to think and inquire for themselves” (223).The final figure featured in Intellectual Populism is Zitkála-Šá, an Indigenous American writer, speaker and activist. The least documented of the figures, Stob characterizes the limited archive of Zitkála-Šá’s speeches as strategically ironic, working to secure what influence she could within the constraints of a white man's world. Zitkála-Šá was critiqued in her time for accommodating or even affirming white stereotypes of Indigenous communities. Throughout her career she wore stereotypical costumes, opted not to correct inaccurate assumptions about her identity, and espoused the overwrought metaphor of the “national teepee” as a unifying vision for the pan-Indian movement. However, Stob notes that these strategies helped Zitkála-Šá in gaining legitimacy for the pan-Indian movement and attention from various white and Indigenous American audiences that had previously dismissed her vision for civil rights. Through an appreciative read of her rhetorical strategies, Stob beautifully captures how Zitkála-Šá’s “performances invited other American Indians to identify their grievances with hers to join her in a strong, broad coalition that could secure Native lives in the twentieth century” (166). Distinguishing Zitkála-Šá’s work from a wider constellation of her Indigenous contemporaries, the chapter demonstrates the importance of exploring the ways that disenfranchised people's intellectual movements can upend the status quo. In her speeches, Zitkála-Šá repurposed white stereotypes about Indigenous Americans through Americanisms such as “God, freedom, peace, and equality” that she showed were more astutely demonstrated by the first Americans—Indigenous Americans—than by white settlers (188). While just one example of Zitkála-Šá’s rhetorical brilliance, this final chapter distills the numerous ways that intellectual populist rhetoric can encompass “the people” far beyond the narrow confides of “the people” often evoked in populist rhetoric in the United States today.Overall, Stob illuminates five different historic figures who, through intellectual populist rhetorical strategies, made compelling critiques of powerful establishments to divided audiences in their time. While looking to achieve different goals, Stob convincingly argues that it is unfair to measure these rhetors’ contributions only by their unrealized visions to change the establishments they attacked. Stob instead contours these complex characters as sometimes flawed, sometimes successful, rhetorical actors whose work forms a broad lineage of American thinkers who attempted to give “ordinary individuals a sense of agency in the pursuit of knowledge” (229). This, Stob argues, “can make a difference, even if it doesn't change the world” (229). Intellectual Populism concludes with a set of lessons intended for academics to enliven debate around the state of higher learning institutions. At the top of Stob's list of lessons is a call for academics to build broader coalitions with communities in “physical spaces” and “face-to-face assemblages,” urging us not to “stay isolated on the carefully manicured lawns of college campuses” (222). Stob's words, ironically published mere weeks into the first COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, continue to serve as an important reminder to all of us, and our institutions, that our siloed intellectual communities must continue to adapt, diversify, and expand in order to serve the many and not just the few.
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Abstract
In his Caricature and National Character, Christopher J. Gilbert contends that caricature can help us understand, address, or, at least, observe the tension between a national character defined by the promise of democratic peace and by the stubborn persistence of war. Through the comic looking glass, caricature reveals American national character both for what it is and for what it could be. Reveling in the ugly realities of xenophobic, uber-masculine warrism, racism, and the sometimes demagogic impulses on which American national character rests, caricature refuses the mythologies of American exceptionalism, righteousness, and democratic idealism. Caricature asks audiences to see the imperfections of the American experiment not as abhorrent accidents of democracy gone occasionally wrong but as essential features of our national character. Caricature reminds us that war is who we are.Gilbert's book is divided into four case studies, each taking an individual caricature artist's work in turn. In the first analysis, Gilbert considers perhaps the most iconic representation of American identity, Uncle Sam. In the second, he turns to the work of Theodore Geisel and his strange animals compelling Americans to support involvement in WWII. In the third, Gilbert analyzes Ollie Harrington's use of images of Black children to reframe and refocus conversations about Vietnam through the lens of racism at home. And, in the final case, he turns a critical eye to Ann Telnaes's comic critiques of the War on Terror and the self-professed war presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.In his first analysis, Gilbert engages with historical representations of American identity vis-à-vis the oft caricatured figure of Uncle Sam. In particular, he focuses on James Montgomery Flagg's famous “I Want You” poster as a cultural touchstone connecting American national character to war. As “a rhetorical vessel for the body politic” and the “face of [American] militarism,” Uncle Sam projects a version of American identity that is paternal, white, and decidedly pro-war (46, 38). What is more, the image of Uncle Sam demanding (commanding) democratic citizens to join the US war effort flies in the face of a national character built around individual liberties and democratic ideals.From the nation's cartoon uncle to its cartooning doctor, Gilbert's second case study takes up the remarkably xenophobic, misogynistic, and patently racist WWII-era caricature of Theodore Geisel. As with Flagg's Uncle Sam, Geisel's caricatures featuring awkwardly proportioned animals, insects, and machinery ask readers to embrace the necessity, perhaps even the allure, of war. Although better remembered as the author and illustrator of beloved children's books and graduation presents (Dr. Seuss), Geisel's caricatures, goading the nation into joining the war effort while shaming isolationists and politicians, present readers with a national character caught between the absurd reality of war and the banality of its centrality to the American experience.In the third chapter, Gilbert considers the cartoons of Oliver “Ollie” Harrington. Harrington's caricatures, in addition to his popular character Bootsie, prominently feature Black children, recasting American war culture as a racist war on American culture and Black Americans in particular. Emphasizing the innocence and naïve wisdom of children, Harrington's drawings reveal the limits of the democratic promise for Black GIs returning from war abroad to find their children at war at home. Further, relying on children as focal points, and Black children in particular, Harrington's art dances along the insider/outsider divide offering a powerful self-critique that emphasizes the all too real consequences of American warrism for Black children who are otherwise excluded from the iconography of national character and from the demos in general. As Gilbert explains, such caricatures expose the whiteness of American war culture and national character while reminding audiences that “all war is cultural war” (135).In the final case study, Gilbert focuses his attention on Ann Telnaes's caricatures of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the self-professed “war presidents” of the War on Terror. Drawing “the people” through the person of the president, Telnaes's images emphasize the egoism and self-interest of the “American Idiot” that contrasts the collectivist impulses of democracy. Her renderings of Bush and Trump as would-be despots bedecked in jewels, capes, and crowns surrounded by adoring courtier toadies represent the president as an appropriately naked emperor king or, in the case of Trump, the Queen of Hearts. Relying on farce, Gilbert argues that these metonymic critiques of national character through the lens of the national leader highlight the false greatness, the inflated ego, and the self-proclaimed exceptionalism on which American national character rests and which cannot hold up to the scrutiny of war.Readers—especially those interested in editorial cartoons and comedy—will find Gilbert's critiques of Flagg, Geisel, Harrington, and Telnaes productive extensions of any number of conversations about visual rhetoric and visual metaphor. His critiques model the utility of tracing a particular artist's sense of humor and approach to a subject over the course of its historical arc. Together, they make a strong case for the utility of caricature as a funhouse mirror amplifying the particular absurdities of American democracy and identity that otherwise can be obscured by the lens of political discourse and public address. For comedy scholars, Gilbert's critique offers ample evidence for arguments regarding laughter's capacity to disrupt the established expectations of dominant discourses rendering them rigid, mechanical, or fixed in place. Such comic disruptions create opportunities for critique by asking audiences to consider both how things appear to be on the surface and what they conceal from view simultaneously.1 Critics of war rhetoric, too, will find Gilbert's book useful. His argument that caricature reveals the United States for the war culture that it (always) is, and that war functions conceptually as a caricature of democratic peace, are likely worthy of connecting to even non-comedic texts.In terms of shortcomings, Caricature and National Character almost certainly leaves someone's favorite caricaturist on the cutting room floor. Readers might expect to find more about Herb Block, Thomas Nast, and Gary Trudeau, for instance, than they will in these pages.2 This is an all-too-common problem for any book that takes an historical approach to popular culture; for the most part, Gilbert gestures towards these and other artists in contextualizing his criticisms. Perhaps more importantly for this reader, the omission of the Obama era of the War on Terror feels like a missed opportunity. Framed by Telnaes's caricatures, which featured Bush and Trump much more prominently than Obama, Gilbert's case study works as a critique of the presidency and, by extension, the people it represents. As a treatment of the War on Terror, however, addressing Obama's role as merely an extension of the Bush doctrine leaves open questions about the rise of drone warfare, partisanship and the presidency, and, perhaps more importantly, war's capacity as caricature to cut through the contradictions of a presidential discourse that professed a desire for the end of war and policy that perpetuated it. Obama's War on Terror, in this way, might be read as a caricature of his war rhetoric and, in so doing, offer evidence of caricature's critical utility for scholars of rhetoric and war beyond the context of comedy.In total, Gilbert's book offers a particularly powerful argument for the utility of caricature as a way of peeling back the mythological layers of national character to reveal more clearly the lived realities of a nation and its character. Caricature, like comedy generally, exists alongside dominant narratives and mythologies as a ready critique of the excesses of nationalism and exceptionalism. In particular, caricatures of war remind audiences that war both is and is not a caricature of culture. War is at once the worst possible expression of democratic cooperation but also, at least in the case of the United States, part and parcel of the national character—an exceptional and yet unremarkable feature of what it is to be American. Reveling in the ugliness of war so often veiled by discourses that encourage audiences to overlook or all together ignore the gruesome realities of war and national character, caricature challenges audiences to look at war, to look at culture, to look at the nation—especially when the looking is hard to do.
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Abstract
Abstract The rhetoric of any academic discipline can involve epistemic distortions and blind spots, including a tendency to obscure systemic racism. The doctrine of political realism from the discipline of International Relations is an influential example. Realism relies on several rhetorical devices, including a structural distinction between rhetoric and reality, a modality of abstraction, and the trope of anarchy/hierarchy. These provide both a compelling theoretical framework and a discursive program that obscures race and racism. Realist discourse operates further through several dimensions of rhetorical salience that are modulated by changes in context. Foreground, background, ambient, and ontic salience provide multiple registers for inscribing realism. Realism's lack of reflexivity in disciplinary, governmental, and public arenas adds to its power and its defects. Exposing the rhetorical constitution of realism and its architecture of non-knowing raises challenges not only for realism but also for rhetoric. These include avoiding the inscription of realism and racism within rhetorical inquiry and avoiding epistemic hubris in the self-definition of rhetoric as a discipline.
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Sensory Engagement with the Rhetoric of Science: Creationist Copia at the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History ↗
Abstract
Abstract The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) opened the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History in Dallas, Texas in September 2019. Through immersive exhibits and advanced technology, the museum communicates what ICR purports to be the truth of creation science. Informed by the rhetorical concept of copia, I argue that the Discovery Center deploys sensory evidence to support creationism through the rhetorical strategies of rotation, immersion, and interruption. These material strategies use the senses as vehicles to communicate multiple arguments simultaneously, direct museumgoers’ attention, and amplify lived experiences as valid ways of knowing and evaluating the science of human origins. I conclude by noting the role of sensory rhetorical strategies in other scientific controversies and encouraging additional scholarship into how sensory evidence offers convincing challenges to scientific knowledge.
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Abstract
So often left unquestioned is the very place in and from which scholarly ethos and praxis are being proposed. The goal of this essay is to call for and work towards establishing a foundation to explore such questions vis-à-visdeep rhetoricity.Deep rhetoricityinvites and demands of us all returns, careful reckonings, and enduring tasks. We illustrate possibilities ofdeep rhetoricityacross these three epistemic principles. Ultimately, we argue fordeep rhetoricityboth as an intervention into rhetorical practices and as a praxis of invention.
November 2022
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Abstract
This paper seeks to offer a constructive critique of the idea that in order to align US writing instruction with the learning needs of a globalized, linguistically diverse population, writing studies should challenge the notion that the English language needs to play a central role in college composition courses. I point out rhetorical and pedagogical fallacies in a language rights discourse that warns against “ceding rhetorical ground to monolingual ideologies” (Flowers 33) by affirming writing studies’ commitment to ensuring access to English while promoting linguistic diversity within writing instruction. I then discuss a translingual writing program I started at a Hispanic Serving Institution that links ESL and Spanish writing courses within a learning community. I discuss how the implementation of this program relied on finding a common ground with “English only” ideology and show how this program disrupted “unilateral monolingualism” (Horner and Trimbur 595), in spite of the fact that it foregrounded the need to facilitate English academic literacy acquisition.
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Abstract
This article reports findings from a qualitative study in a third-grade classroom in the Southwest in the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration. In response to students’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric around immigration and border-wall construction, the teacher provided curricular space for students to study immigration policy and write letters to their congressional representative expressing their positions. Drawing on field notes, interviews, and student writing, this study asks, (a) What sources of knowledge did students draw on in their talk and writing? and (b) How did students respond to such curricular design? Analysis suggests that students drew on border thinking () and politicized funds of knowledge (), positioned themselves as change agents, and developed and displayed knowledge of academic genres and conventions.
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Review: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, by Amy J. Lueck ↗
Abstract
Book Review| November 01 2022 Review: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, by Amy J. Lueck Amy J. Lueck. A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886. Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3742-2 Jason Maxwell Jason Maxwell University at Buffalo, SUNY Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (4): 415–417. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.415 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jason Maxwell; Review: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, by Amy J. Lueck. Rhetorica 1 November 2022; 40 (4): 415–417. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.415 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada, by Javier Espino Martín ↗
Abstract
Book Review| November 01 2022 Review: De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada, by Javier Espino Martín Javier Espino Martín. De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada. Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Clásicos 62. Ciudad de México, MX: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 2019. 305 pp. ISBN 978-607-30-2747-2 Genaro Valencia Constantino Genaro Valencia Constantino Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (4): 412–415. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.412 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Genaro Valencia Constantino; Review: De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada, by Javier Espino Martín. Rhetorica 1 November 2022; 40 (4): 412–415. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.412 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review Essay: “The Power of Many” (Counter)stories: Materializing Spaces of Belonging for (Im)migrants in Rhetoric and Composition ↗
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October 2022
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As a counterpoint to rhetorical velocity, this essay proposes rhetorical stillness, the property of texts that are designed to have limited circulation but high audience engagement. Drawing from an analysis of Byzantine iconography, the essay examines how a rhetorical ecology of beliefs and embodied practices can slow down a text’s circulation and create space for audiences to have transformative encounters.
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Shared governance, the principle that faculty members have a role in governing the institutions in which they work, in the American university is in crisis. Do the principles that underlie shared governance retain their efficacy in the contemporary, neo-liberal university? In this essay, I examine the commonplaces that underwrite our contemporary understanding of university shared governance and the practices that are animated by them: the idea of the university as a public good, the idea that faculty expertise grants them a governance role, and the assumption that governance provides stability, security, and continuity to the institution. The essay examines the development of shared governance as a (rhetorical) means of providing order through consensus, analyzes recent instances of governance crises in American higher education, and proposes an alternative set of commonplaces with which to address a period in American public higher education characterized by mobility, unsettlement, and vulnerability.
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The Practice of Transformation-Oriented Anti-Colonial Dialogue: Personae in Post-9/11 Novels by Pakistani Authors in English ↗
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This essay argues for embodied dialog among scholars from different global situations as an academic practice crucial to anticolonial transformation. The essay illustrates this practice by recounting the critical interpretations of two differently situated anticolonial persons and the changes in interpretations wrought by our dialog. We draw on postcolonial and dialogic orientations and recent materialist theories that envision rhetorical scholarship as "making" in order to encourage expansion of the range of depictions of Muslims in literature. The analysis employs a persona theory revised through Burkean dramatism and the anticolonial perspective. The transformative potential of the approach is illustrated by a dialogically executed analysis of the Pakistan-focused novel, The Spinner's Tale, by Omar Shahid Hamid.
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Anti-pluralist arguments in the Tea Party online discourse: A mixed method analysis of populist rhetoric ↗
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Populism can be treated as an ideological attribute of political parties, but in this study, it is operationalized as a feature of argumentation that allows populists to claim to be the only ones to represent the interests of the nation. Such anti-pluralist arguments could be observed during US midterm elections in 2018 in online discourses of the right-wing political movement Tea Party. This article reports on a mixed-method study of the Tea Party’s official website obtained through scraping the All News feed. The quantitative linguistic analysis of keywords, concordances and couplings in the newsfeed sample is complemented with a qualitative rhetorical analysis of some topoi and argumentative fallacies. The analyses reveal such strategies as: (1) homogenizing the representation of true patriots, (2) polarizing between “good us” and “evil them,” (3) discrediting opponents through analogies, “worst” examples and ad hominem attacks (4) conspiracy theorizing, and (5) mobilizing modes of pathos and ethos in relation to mediatized and historicized cultural imaginaries. The study showcases the advantages of a mixed-method approach to the so-called populist rhetoric.
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When Extension and Rhetorical Engagement Meet: Framing Public Audiences for Agricultural Science Communication ↗
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This article reports from a qualitative case study exploring how a team of agricultural scientists framed their nonscientific audiences for science communication. Our results indicate communication audiences and strategies were shaped by state extension systems. As a result, we argue that technical communicators can contribute to agricultural science communication teams by modeling rhetorically engaged communication and building capacity for audiences overlooked by extension models most focused on economic impact.
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Technical and professional communication (TPC) frequently analyzes its own research. Although conferences like Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) are scholarly forums, most work presented is not included in disciplinary analyses or reviews. To articulate a baseline, this article conducts a corpus-based content analysis of the titles and abstracts presented at ATTW or published in Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ) between 1998 and 2018. The common and key words suggest topic areas and rhetorical features.
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Hyperrationality and Rhetorical Constellations in Digital Climate Change Denial: A Multi-Methodological Analysis of the Discourse of Watts up with That ↗
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Using a multi-methodological approach, we analyze member comments in Watts Up With That (WUWT), a climate skeptical Facebook group. Quantitative topic modeling revealed that members claim hyperrationality to undermine climate science. Science-based terms were often connected to other topics, such as immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, creating rhetorical constellations that shifted rhetoric from technical spaces into political and ideological ones. These findings have implications for dealing with the challenge of misinformation’s circulation on social media.
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“An Excelent Good Remedi”: Medical Recipes as Ethos-Building Tactical Technical Communication in Early Modern England ↗
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This article examines how nonprofessionals in early modern England used tactical technical communication and rhetorical strategies to build medical knowledge and healthcare expertise. Using a feminist ethos and tactical technical communication lens, this article details a content analysis study of 4,045 handwritten medical recipes from England dated between 1540 and 1860. Findings from the study extend tactical technical communication by examining non-digital/non-internet spaces and how extra-institutional nonprofessionals build ethos and expertise.
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This article asserts that auditory cues can be categorized by rhetorical function into the categories of visual rhetoric, defined by Amare and Manning under Peirce’s Ten Classes of Sign, understanding visual rhetoric to include both images and text. This article expands this definition to aural-visual rhetoric, including auditory elements as visual rhetoric to analyze multimodal Technical and Professional Communication (TPC), demonstrating this method using the opening tutorial scene from Portal 2.
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The Impact of the Literate Revolution on Orality in Ancient Athens: A Synthesis Essay on Rhetorical Research with Commentary ↗
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The impact of written communication in ancient Athens, particularly the social consequences of literacy on an oral culture, has been a subject of keen interest among rhetoricians. This essay synthesizes current research on the impact of literacy in ancient Athens from a rhetorical vector. One of the principal observations discussed in this review of current research is that the alphabetic writing of oral discourse better enabled rhetors to invent and compose complex modes of oral argument and persuasion than the heuristics of orality alone.
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This article examines how whistleblowing evolves as a rhetorical genre alongside emergent media. By analyzing three events involving student disclosures on social media, this article argues that students’ social media communication can qualify as whistleblowing, just as whistleblowing can qualify as rhetoric. Notably, whistleblowing’s current conventions, which are heavily based in business and organization studies, suggest otherwise. This article introduces a concept called kinderuption to facilitate rhetorical analyses of whistleblowing. Approaching whistleblowing events as kinderuptions invites critical attention to audience engagement and influence, and a reconsideration of underlying themes like intention, harm, and care.
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This article provides a framework for analyzing metaphor as epideictic rhetoric, accounting for the persistence of key disciplinary metaphors. It examines the metaphor of voice across distinct theoretical conversations as an example of epideictic metaphor. Voice’s epideictic function allows it to reconceptualize the shared value of power as it celebrates this value by stitching and unstitching it to various worldviews and values. An epideictic framework allows rhetoric scholars to uncover and trouble values celebrated by a discourse community’s shared metaphors while challenging values as unquestionable or mutually exclusive. Further, framing metaphors as epideictic celebrates linguistic and conceptual dissonance.
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Partisan rhetoric surrounding COVID-era face-masking has reshuffled traditional stasis hierarchy, allowing the middle stases of definition and quality, which emphasize epideictic motives of cultural affirmation, to supersede conjectural questions of medical efficacy. Viral images positioning masks as metonymic approximations of “authoritarianicity” and government overreach illustrate how right-wing masking rhetoric circumvents scientific concerns, instead rooting discourse in questions of cultural essence. Science communicators, in response, must embrace the inherently tropological and epideictic dimensions of the mask and work to recode the symbol as a metonym for citizenship and personal responsibility.
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Based on survey responses from eighty-five scholars on the job market from 2013 and 2019, this article examines mentoring for the job market in rhetoric and composition and technical communication. Respondents indicate needs for job market mentoring; more transparency about the job market itself; and more extensive, integrated support throughout graduate programs. The article concludes with actions that can be taken to improve the job market experience in rhetoric and composition and technical communication programs.
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T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy refers not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.
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This article is an ethnographic case study of the work of two activist groups in Kansas City, Missouri. It discusses how unhoused activists with the Kansas City Homeless Union, through their 13-month on-and-off occupation of city property, worked to reframe access in ways that moved toward what disability justice activists call collective access, prioritized marginalized lived experience, and asserted their right to control over the resources that impacted their lives. This article ties these interventions explicitly to community writing work through a discussion of how citizen journalists from Independent Media Association, with whom the author has collaborated, documented and crafted narratives around the union’s work in ways that demonstrate ways community literacy work can function as rhetorical solidarity practices.
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Jaclyn Carter is an educational development consultant at the University of Calgary and coeditor of Women and War from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (2020).Michael Tavel Clarke is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America (2007) and coeditor with David Wittenberg of Scale in Literature and Culture (2017). He coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Faye Halpern.Maura D'Amore is professor of English at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. She is the author of Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture (2014).Faye Halpern is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is the author, most recently, of an article in Narrative called “Charles Chesnutt, Rhetorical Passing, and the Flesh-and-Blood Author: A Case for Considering Authorial Intention.” She coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Michael Tavel Clarke.Derritt Mason is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture (2021) and the coeditor, with Kenneth B. Kidd, of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (2019).Rachel McCabe is an assistant professor and director of writing at La Salle University. Her research focuses on the affective experience and its importance to the reading and viewing of texts and how doing so impacts the student writing process. She also considers how positions of power and privilege influence the interpretation process. Her scholarship has been published in Composition Studies, Studies in Documentary Film, and Compass.Jessica Nicol is an educational developer at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) and author of the recent chapbook Can I Ask You a Question? (2020).Zack Shaw is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Florida, where he studies rhetoric and composition, film and media studies, and animation. He has taught upper- and lower-division courses, covering diverse topics such as film analysis, argumentative writing, technical writing, first-year composition, and media composing. He designs each of his courses with the ultimate goal of creating a multimodal, inclusive, and accessible educational experience for all students. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English from Northeastern University, and his work has previously appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies.Anne Shea is associate professor and chair of the Writing and Literature Program at California College of the Arts. Her fields of teaching and research include twentieth- and twenty-first-century North American literature and composition. She has published essays in College Literature, Contemporary Literature, MELUS, and Women's Studies, among others.Nathan Shepley is associate professor of English at the University of Houston, where he teaches rhetoric and composition courses at all levels. The author of Placing the History of College Writing: Stories from the Incomplete Archive (2016) and articles in journals including Reflections and Composition Studies, he studies interactions among place, history, and college student writing. He remains active in creating pedagogical resources for and otherwise assisting his fellow instructors at the UH Department of English.William Stroup is professor of English at Keene State College, New Hampshire's public liberal arts college. He teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and on environmental literatures in many traditions. He has presented on Jane Austen and pedagogy at MLA and his essays have appeared in The Wordsworth Circle, ISLE, volumes on Wordsworth and the Green Romantics, and elsewhere. He is currently editing an unpublished play by the poet Amy Clampitt about Dorothy and William Wordsworth and serving as a Thayer trustee of the Keene Public Library.Morgan Vanek is assistant professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is currently at work on a book titled “The Politics of the Weather, 1700–1775.” Research related to this project has recently appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.Paul Walker is a professor of English at Murray State University, where he teaches rhetoric, writing, and literature. His published work has primarily focused on composition, assessment, environmental rhetoric, and archival research. He is the founder and editor of Intraspection: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style, and is currently working on a monograph about the rhetoric of ordinary heroism.
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Abstract
Though only two names appear as authors of this volume, it would take a crowded eighteenth-century-style title page to include everyone whose work is included. The content as well as the format of this volume are collaborative, in the best senses of the term, making it of great value to teachers in the humanities with specialties well beyond the long eighteenth century. Bridget Draxler, of St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and Danielle Spratt, of California State University, Northridge, take on crucial questions of engaging a wider audience with the scholarly dynamics of cultural history, and add to the rhetorical strategies of defending the humanities along the way. Their resolve to show both successful assignments and those that went wrong, and to prominently include the voices of imaginative and supportive administrators (thank you, John C. Keller at University of Iowa), inclusive museum and library directors such as Gillian Dow at Chawton House, and especially students and community collaborators, provides a reflective model for other educators. Austen scholar Devoney Looser's reflection that she had to “reinvent [her]self” to be “an engaging ambassador for the past” (52) speaks to the spirit of the volume: seeking participation without sacrificing attention, urging students and faculty to work beyond campus without condescension.Draxler and Spratt use a six-part structure to organize the volume: “The Street” takes on what Spratt calls “the savior complex” in service-learning projects, discussed in greater detail below. “The Library” and “The Museum” are differentiated based on the structure of student projects from “The Archives,” “The Digital Archives and the Database,” and “The Eighteenth Century Novel, Online.” Their theorizing of the connections between what service learning can look like in the humanities with the promises and limits of digital humanities strengthens the book. Some examples involve institutional support in terms of available collections and opportunities for enhancing the meaning of study-abroad programs, while others approach digitization strategies for institutions and students without access to such resources. “In the face of an expert-scoffing, diversity-averse, post-truth society that rejects care for language as mere political correctness it has never been more critical to teach the past with a public purpose” (8), the editors write in their introduction. From this, the examples of accountability and self-reflection to avoid a “savior complex” in connecting publicly engaged learning with literary studies, including undergraduate seminars on Austen, develops into an argument that expands from Austen into other examples.Austen's prominence in the title (and on the paperback cover) functions like Austen's name in lights in programming announcements and course titles: it brings in an audience who may have been exposed to Anya Taylor-Joy's expressive eyes in the most recent Emma or Ciaran Hinds's life-giving sideburns in the 1995 Persuasion and signed up for the books themselves. Once in, the connection to other cultural productions of the long eighteenth century besides Austen can ensue. The opening two chapters engage the most with Austen, while teachers in other historical fields might benefit the most from reading the later sections on digital archives. Emma is the most-cited novel, finding among its merits a fine object-lesson in a sort of “savior” complex: Emma's condescending visits to the cottages of the local poor, whose dingy interiors have been briefly illuminated by her visits. Spratt's opening chapter “The Street” augments recent Emma studies in a way that would make any reader want to enroll in her class, as she is able to use Emma Woodhouse's visits to the local poor as an object lesson to understand the class dynamics to be aware of in service learning. Two examples of complex moments in teaching Emma in the undergraduate classroom are used for extended examples. Both are helpfully presented, and one changed my mind in a way that parallels Spratt's account.From Emma the painful scene of Mrs. Elton, newly arrived in Highbury from Bristol, seeking to arrange Jane Fairfax's expected need for a position as governess has been one of the most famous in Austen studies at least since Edward Said (1993) centered the discussion of Bristol's role in the Atlantic slave trade in Culture and Imperialism. Spratt theorizes her approach to teaching this scene in ways that have become widely shared, but concludes that Emma's silence during a scene of discussing both “the sale of human flesh” and what Jane Fairfax calls “the sale of human intellect” and the suffering attached to unprotected governesses at the time demonstrates Emma's indifference to these topics. Certainly, Emma Woodhouse is no antiracist activist, any more than Austen was a Wollstonecraft, yet it is still possible to read her silence here as a shocked response to the arrogant, domineering, presumptive behavior of the newcomer. More convincing is Draxler's discussion of how student investment in their projects—especially preparing to lead discussions of each Austen novel at the local public library—changed her long-established feelings about the character of Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey. If the received reading of his famous harangue of Catherine endorses the novel's critique of Gothic fantasy, her students’ engaged response to Henry's “Remember that we are English, and that we are Christians” (qtd. on 92) positions him not as an ideal but as “his father's son”: “A few months before the #metoo movement started, my students taught me that it's not just the General Tilneys and Harvey Weinsteins and Donald Trumps of the world who disempower women through villainous abuses of power; it is also, importantly and heartbreakingly, the Al Frankens and the Henry Tilneys, with their uncouth jokes and thoughtless entitlement” (92). At the time as such references may seem to risk a limited shelf life, this volume also includes one of the most thoughtful and useful definitions of “presentism” and its dangers that I know of, as it moves from a shared definition to a memorable, useful phrase many teachers will use: “Presentism occurs when we interpret historical phenomena according to the concepts, vocabulary, values, problems, or opinions endemic to our own time period, leading us to misapprehend the actual nature of our historical object of inquiry. Presentism interprets things as we are, not as they are” (emphasis added, 214). To write, and to teach, with the pull toward contemporaneity modified by this historical imagination comes close to my definition of the liberal arts, and that last sentence will show up in my class notes soon.The discussions of Austen's textual history, of the editing of primary sources from the long eighteenth century (with an extended example from the writings of Sarah Fielding), and of the undergraduate (and, in one chapter, graduate) productions that emerge from these sources would look quite different (the pandemic notwithstanding) at large institutions with substantial print-based library resources. For this reviewer, and for most of the teachers for whom their work is intended, the focus on digital access and shared resources for students at a range of schools other than Research 1 institutions are welcome and helpful, and even for those of us with commitment to printed texts and joyful unplugged reading, profoundly democratic and portable. Amy Weldon's contribution describing the guided tours she's led for her Luther College students to key Romantic-period author sites (which she presented brilliantly at a recent conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) also shows the need to theorize and complicate our historical experiences. Throughout the latter chapters the emphasis on making the work of editors and scholars understandable to students functions as another beyond-Austen structural example. This volume goes far to explain and contextualize for students the role and function of editors, which for the contexts of open-source and user-modified materials retain a special importance. Spratt's example from a graduate classroom of creating a digital edition of Sarah Fielding's 1759 novel The History of the Countess of Delwyn functions as a useful case study in this area. To the question of why digitization in itself cannot be the answer to every need, the inevitable challenge of the medial s remains instructive for teachers at every level: that is, from a high school history class encountering what looks like “Congrefs” in images of American Revolutionary documents, to the “Boatfwain” bellowed to in the opening dialogue of the First Folio: these cannot be scanned without intelligent, contextualized preparation of a reading text, even without the question of where and when to annotate. Austen's texts are among the first to transition away from the medial s in printed English, but even there such non-digitizable artifacts as paper quality (the acidic near-newsprint of the unknown author's first 1811 printing of Sense and Sensibility vis-à-vis the pleasantly heavy paper and generous margins of John Murray's 1816 first edition of Emma) provide useful reminders of humility for even the most passionate advocates of the digital humanities. Still, this volume features insightful analysis of how the implications of collaborative digital approaches challenge the philological precedents of what became the expected practices of modern literary scholarship. As part of a pattern of quoting students in this work, Draxler cites Alison Byerly from a Newberry Library seminar on a point that extends the interest of the book beyond the long eighteenth century to any “data-driven” “inherently collaborative” approach: “At some level, this requires us to abandon the notion that meaning can be generated only through the power of the individual mind. A different kind of meaning is exposed when technology uncovers patterns or information that would otherwise remain invisible. Coming to terms with that meaning requires a different way of thinking” (154). As much as this is in keeping with other theoretical approaches shaped by poststructuralist linguistics, the figure of “uncovering” the process of both editing and the selection of texts for attention provides a dynamic approach to a period of historical literature that won't keep still.Is 2018 already long ago? For teachers at most institutions, it certainly feels that way. The Enlightenment, and its spirited critique by many of the Romantic generations, created many institutions: the museums, libraries, schools that many current educators are working to make more accessible and inclusive. As remote learning, live-streamed events, and other virtual programming have become essential with the ongoing pandemic, the collaborators in this book are well positioned to help scholars in related fields with meaningful transitions. Though even the mention of sharing pizza at a class where students edit Wikipedia entries for eighteenth-century women writers, or of friendly talk and laughter among undergraduates and local senior citizens at Austen-related book discussions held off-campus take on a moving resonance of the power of in-person events, this reminder of the need for contact and synchronous discovery provides valuable inspiration as we move forward.
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Abstract
AbstractInstructors of writing-intensive disciplines infrequently integrate cinematic media in composition curricula. Furthermore, when instructors use films in composition courses, they often treat films merely as supplemental texts tangentially relevant to course topics and prioritize teaching content rather than media or filmmaking. This pedagogical approach overlooks an opportunity to ask students to consider how the audiovisual rhetorical efforts can meaningfully harmonize or create dissonance with the content. In this research study, the author argues that students are active media consumers engaging frequently with media as a form of composition. He navigates the limitations of Gregory Ulmer and Lev Manovitch, whose early work stressing the primacy of media literacies in composition classrooms is nonetheless seminal to the author's larger claims of film's educational import. The author relates the results of the IRB-approved research of his composition students, who offer feedback about the use of film in the class. The author calls for greater attention to film instruction and curricula development for collegiate composition classrooms, urging educators to move beyond film's supplemental use and toward more educationally fruitful practices, including teaching active watching and basic film analysis. Film is a critical form of cultural communication and media, and the author contends that it is a pivotal part of the landscape of twenty-first century literacy engagements.
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Abstract
AbstractWriting assessment and social justice rely largely on success-trajectory narratives, which sideline productive failure as a means of resisting normative futurity-based modes of education and policy. This essay offers an alternative perspective on failure in writing assessment and social justice by illustrating how relying on rhetoric as a hope and means for positive change can undermine aims of social justice and a critical education. By examining the queer (non)possibilities for assessment and acceptance without dependence on constant improvement and success, instructors may find more inclusive ways of thinking about the value of rhetoric's role in a generative acceptance of difference.
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Abstract
AbstractThis article uses narrative inquiry to examine one instructor's experiences teaching two first-year writing classes, each one marked by different pedagogical choices. Themed with the topic of place and foregrounding the recurring example of Appalachia, the classes were nonetheless taught outside the region usually called Appalachia and to college students coming from, and identifying with, places other than Appalachia. This resulting data lends support for easing non-Appalachian-identified students into studying Appalachia as a rhetorical case and for encouraging students to explore various ways that textual representations of Appalachia reveal social and economic patterns noticeable in some form elsewhere.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT The welcome expansion of kairos beyond its traditional locus in public debate to a broad range of discourse forms and persuasive actions has not been matched by a reevaluation of the temporal logic of kairos, which is still seen as located in teleologic time. This article suggests that Walter Benjamin’s understanding of time could refigure kairos as a nonteleological relationship among past, present, and future. Benjamin provides a theoretical rationale for kairotic action that is distributed in time and space and accounts for kairos of objects, places, technologies, and works of art. These temporal affordances, usually developed separately in contemporary theory, are deeply connected in Benjamin’s writing; his understanding of time therefore integrates currently unconnected lines of research and supports a fluid but coherent understanding of kairotic agency.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT The logic of humor has been acknowledged as an essential dimension of every joke. However, what is the logic of jokes, exactly? The modern theories of humor maintain that jokes are characterized by their own logic, dubbed “pseudo,” “playful,” or “local,” which has been the object of frequent criticisms. This article intends to address the limitations of the current perspectives on the logic of jokes by proposing a rhetorical approach to humorous texts. Building on the traditional development of Aristotle’s almost neglected view of jokes as surprising enthymemes, the former are analyzed as rhetorical arguments. Like enthymemes, jokes are characterized by natural inferences that can be represented as topics, and quasi-formalized in argumentation theory as argumentation schemes. Like rhetorical arguments, jokes express a reason in support of different types of conclusions and proceed from distinct kinds of reasoning and semantic relations.
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Abstract
The role of public memory in a digital information age beckons us to explore how information is stored, managed, and circulated throughout various networks. Engaging with questions of public memory allows us to meditate on how we and future generations have developed processes and methods of information management that shape how knowledge emerges today. In order to understand how public memory interacts with networks of information, we must look at the systems and technologies that store, manage, and make publicly accessible this information. Nathan R. Johnson’s Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age serves as an important contribution to this task by historicizing the formation of these information infrastructures. Johnson contends that the convergence between the labor of memory infrastructure and the development of mnemonic technê directly drives circulation of knowledge—and the history of this convergence undergirds the way networked archives take shape in our digital present.Architects of Memory carefully stitches together the history of memory with a detailed account of information science’s development in building infrastructures of memory in library schools and military intelligence agencies. In doing so, Johnson uses two key frameworks—memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê—to forge connections between memory as a commonplace in rhetorical history and in a digital age. By definition, memory infrastructure, per Johnson, refers to “the backgrounds that expose particular modes of memory” and elucidates a society’s typical patterns for exchanging and remembering information (6). Mnemonic technê denotes the technological resources used to collect, organize, and archive information that became crucial to the development of information science in the mid-twentieth century. While chapters 1 to 6 trace how memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê interanimated one another throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, Johnson’s “intermezzo” chapters provide specific examples that narrow in on the development of mnemonic technê. For example, the emergence of the Dewey Decimal Classification, punch-card coding systems, and library book trucks represent how mnemonic technê formed to systematize the processes of accessing information, which ultimately created networked memory infrastructures that produce patterns of memory management. Johnson shows that these technologies are issues of public memory because the systems that store information are the means by which future generations will come to access this information, meaning that these technologies mediate the information that publics will engage with and remember in the future.Chapter 1 of Architects of Memory is devoted to exploring the utility of an infrastructural model for understanding the rhetorical nature of memory. Johnson stresses that memory infrastructures both bridge the gap between what is remembered and what is forgotten and intervene in the process of remembering and forgetting (15). Johnson’s lengthy explanation of these phenomena is important in demonstrating how this infrastructural model stands far apart from how memory has been typically thought of in the field of rhetoric; without this long and at times repetitive explanation, the reader may struggle to understand that mnemonic technê and memory infrastructures bear a symbiotic relationship and collaborate in managing modes of public memory. Johnson discusses how artificial mnemonic devices give our future selves tools to remember the past, which, for Johnson, exemplifies how memory acts as a mode of exchange—an exchange of information regulated by the practices we use to store and access this information. Juno Moneta’s symbol on the Roman coin, as a marker of citizenship and economic participation, provides a metaphor for memory in that the networked exchange of coins crystalized the image of Juno Moneta as an important figurehead in Roman culture. Johnson’s detour into the figures of Simonides and Juno Moneta distracts from his theoretical hedging in this initial chapter because the book largely covers the twentieth-century development of information science, and yet this sets the foundation for the rest of the book by offering a helpful illustration of memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê that aids in navigating the following chapters.One of Johnson’s main contributions in this book is his thesis that the symbiotic relationship between memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê would not exist without the human labor forces that built these connections. Johnson dedicates chapter 2 to describing how the post–World War II panic over information security galvanized Western militaries to develop more sophisticated systems for scientific research and communication. The geopolitical impetus for protecting government information in the Cold War era intensified the development of more memory systems for the purposes of distributing and evaluating scientific research. Ushered in by the second industrial revolution (1870–1930), this new age of memory innovation gave rise to developments such as Paul Otlet’s Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). Further, the rise of “operations research,” championed by scientists like John Desmond Bernal, gave way to a new type of documentation that gathered data for the purposes of mathematical analysis (37). As an example, Bernal’s National Distributing Authorities (NDA) created a centralized system whereby those who work in science fields could be granted direct access to scientific research apart from the genre of academic journals. Johnson notes that while Bernal’s NDA forwarded a centralized system that ultimately failed, Bernal’s efforts mark an important milestone in the systemization of information distribution. The concept of centralized memory technologies—such as punch-card systems and microfilm—that were accessible for workers across a variety of fields took traction, which, as Johnson argues, speaks to the power of mnemonic technê to construct fields of public memory.Johnson explains in the first intermezzo chapter why information science and librarianship historically held a distant relationship. Librarianship, as a field characterized as “service-oriented” and mostly employing women, was largely disrespected, and the advent of information science could be characterized as a move to “exorcise the library spirit” (47). Thus, Johnson details in chapter 3 how information science upturned the structure of the library from the inside out. Because scientists often depended on libraries for accessing information, the postwar exigence for enhancing scientific communication and research trickled into the library sphere, ultimately reshaping library education to center around networks of information exchange. Johnson oscillates between exploring the Cold War panic over defending science research and the flourishing of professional librarian schools—a move that solidifies the causal relationship between postwar operations research and the revolutionizing of memory technologies in everyday libraries. Specifically, government grants given to Georgia Tech libraries allowed for Dorothy Crosland, the lead librarian at Georgia Tech from 1953 to 1971, to train librarians to be specialists in science and technical information—which led to the creation of a graduate program in information science. This institutional reform put a scientific sheen on the process of locating, storing, and accessing information, which created professional distinctions between the “information scientist” and the more bookish “librarian.” Information science, moreover, developed new systems for the retrieval of source information—such as Calvin Mooers’s Zatocoding system, the subject of Architects of Memory’s second intermezzo chapter. Johnson encourages the reader to see that the advent of information science, in part, stands to masculinize the field of librarianship in a way that glosses over the feminine history of library work. But instead of teasing out the ramifications of this conflict, Johnson turns at the end of chapter 3 to criticize the field of rhetoric’s indifference to memory during the mid-twentieth century. Denouncing Edward Corbett’s claim that memory is “a dead canon,” Johnson shows how the development of information science and new librarian graduate programs at Georgia Tech reveal that memory was far from a dead canon at the time. This switch to discussing rhetorical studies’ thoughts on memory at the time distracts from Johnson’s larger project of tracing the relationship between librarianship and information science, but at the same time it underlines Johnson’s work in restoring what memory can offer—and has offered—rhetorical studies.Chapter 4 clarifies that while government funding allowed for information science to blossom under the postwar frenzy for securing scientific communication, the practice of organizing and processing information in an accessible way was—and had always been—the librarian’s game. Specifically, Robert S. Taylor’s The Making of a Library (1972) outlined the transition from book-centered library services to making the library an “information institution” (91). Johnson upholds Taylor’s book as a key signifier of how this transition reflected both Cold War anxieties and a pivotal turning point in information access. Taylor was quite nervous about the possibilities bestowed by the library’s reformation as an “information institution,” and yet it was written to guide librarians and information scientists into the future of the profession. Even though Taylor remained loyal to his librarian roots, his career at the School of Library Science at Syracuse unearthed the tradition of “librarianship” and redirected library training to center around the new technologies and newer demands for accessing information. Whereas “the older course taught bibliography and literature and included sessions detailing particular academic subjects, . . . the newer informational course taught students the structure, channels, and systems of a universal scientific community” (103). This shift shows that the methods for cataloging and organizing data depend on structures of communication built both by librarians and by users over time, which indicates that library labor is less about organizing information and more about facilitating the process users undergo to locate information—effectively propping up what Johnson terms a “library economy” (105). Johnson calls us to see that teaching memory requires one to focus on how people use, access, and store modes of memory—not just the existence of memory practices themselves. Much like Crosland’s book trucks that haul books about the library for circulation (the subject of the third intermezzo chapter), the technologies one uses to access information do not lose relevance—these technologies might be picked up, dusted off, and restored for a new set of users with new demands.Johnson’s work in tracing the midcentury transformation of memory practices illustrates the symbiotic relationship between mnemonic technê and memory infrastructure. The ways people use both the mnemonic technê and memory infrastructures reveal how each take shape. In chapter 5, Johnson explains that the user’s motivations for accessing and storing data directly influence how memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê take shape. Chapter 5 pivots from the arc of the book’s predominant twentieth-century focus, as Johnson aims to rethink the tradition of memory in rhetoric’s history. He argues that memory operates as a coin, in that practices of memory center on the values and patterns of exchange that are characteristic of a community. This economic metaphor draws attention to how memory, much like currency, passes along from person to person in an established network that regulates its movement. To construct this metaphor, Johnson retells the myth of Simonides of Ceos and zeroes in on Simonides’s motivation for creating his memory palaces. By drawing on evidence from both Quintilian and Cicero’s telling of Simonides’s story, Johnson makes a compelling case that Simonides was motivated by economic reasons to remember where each person sat at Scopas’s table. In Johnson’s retelling, Simonides felt bitter about Scopas’s critique of his poem but still wanted to be paid, so when the temple fell on Scopas and his guests, Simonides sought to remember where each of them sat so that he could collect money from their families for writing their eulogies. In the same way that Simonides’s motivation for creating his memory palaces centered on money, so too can the importance of Juno Moneta to the Roman people be explained by the demands of economic exchange. While this comparison between Simonides and Juno Moneta is a bit anachronistic and far-fetched (as Johnson himself admits), this analogy suggests that memory practices can be better understood by locating users’ motivations for remembering. As the concluding chapter asserts, Johnson’s framework of memory-as-coinage illustrates that remembering and forgetting oscillate on the values and intentions of those who engage with memory practices. Chapter 6 briefly touches on the implications of Johnson’s infrastructural perspective for search engines. While he does not fully extrapolate on search engines and the algorithmic indexing that generates targeted information for users, he does imply that these memory infrastructures will play a significant role in the construction of public memory in the future. Johnson is careful to note that the construction of memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê will always be dependent on the human labor that works to make public memory possible. Just as Dorothy Crosland’s book trucks and Robert S. Taylor’s pedagogical reform changed the way library and information science work was done, so too does the future of memory technology depend on innovative labor.Johnson’s book contributes to rhetorical theory not only by calling our attention to the various technologies and systems developed over the years to accessibly store information, but also in calling attention to the rhetorical work these technologies do in shaping our interactions with information. In other words, memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê rhetorically guide our encounters with information across time and space. Though Architects of Memory applies a more historical focus and does not fully consider how memory practices will take shape in the twenty-first century, we as readers can deduce that the everyday encounters we have with search engine algorithms and targeted advertisements work on their own networked infrastructure, emerging from the tradition of data collection in information science that Architects of Memory describes. As Architects of Memory concludes, “The work of twenty-first-century mnemonists is to identify and locate memory’s commonplace so they can be reassessed continually” (155). Johnson words this as a call for rhetoricians to apply their nuanced insight into the commonplaces of networked memory infrastructures and their impact on public memory—but moreover, it is a call to the public as well to be mindful of how our commonplaces of memory will impact future generations. For rhetoricians and the public alike, Architects of Memory encourages us not just to draw on rhetorical theories of memory into our everyday encounters with information, but to take an intentional approach to exploring how the infrastructural networks of memory undergird our everyday moments of digital information access. Memory, in this sense, takes a direct role in the creation and circulation of rhetorical practices that we explore in the past, present, and future.
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Abstract
Other| October 01 2022 BOOKS OF INTEREST Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2022) 55 (3): 331–336. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.3.0331 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy; BOOKS OF INTEREST. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 October 2022; 55 (3): 331–336. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.3.0331 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2022 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2022The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
A lot has happened in Indian Country recently: water protectors and the NoDAPL movement brought international attention to Native sovereignty and ongoing resistance to settler forms of violence against Indigenous ways of being; a settler public became aware of the MMIW movement and the ongoing assault on the lives of Indigenous women; an apology was given by executive order for a genocide that occurred in California and a Truth and Healing Council was created to investigate the historical relations between California Indians and the state of California; and Native identity is “complex” and certain people seek to profit from that complexity by duplicitously or erroneously claiming Native identity, to name a few. To be sure, these are all issues long addressed by Native people (Indigenous movements, in particular, always have a long arc), but it sure feels like these are events that happened within a recent timeframe.The feeling that these are events and not manifestations of continuing struggles that go back hundreds of years is related to the well-documented fact that settler discourses on Native peoples often still represent us as existing in the past. A settler public, almost ritualistically, gets reminded of the existence of Native people and is seemingly perpetually surprised. This condition for Rifkin, while representing a significant problem on its own, also represents a double bind for Indigenous people. The long-standing and common response to these discourses of Native pastness has been to assert Native contemporaneity and/or modernity, but, for Rifkin, such a response participates in the very terms set forth by the discourses by contesting them within a linear, developmental, and rationalistic temporal framework. Rifkin rather seeks to dispel the idea that such a response adequately contests continuing settler domination and to show that it appeals to and bolsters a deeper settler framework.The double bind is a familiar ruse first theorized by Gregory Bateson in communication theory as patterns of confusion, a general condition for him for PTSD and schizophrenia, and popularized by Michel Foucault’s analysis of two opposing forms of power that together enmesh unsuspecting and well-meaning subjects further into power’s snares. In brief, Foucault argues that repressive power, the blunt, straightforward, top-down, and usually explicit kind, elicits an antagonistic response from the subjugated that surreptitiously turns them to directly face the repression or exclusion, speak up and against it, and, in order to be intelligible, and this is the twist, assert themselves within the terms of a growing if dispersed productive power that works through them. Rifkin links the double bind to claims that modernity is a collaborative construction between the West and the rest. In this case, for Rifkin, a generative knowledge production on Native contributions to modernity both depends on and bolsters what he refers to as the “background” of a shared temporal framework, asserting a common container in which events take place, which contests narratives of Native disappearance and vulgar forms of archaism and yet contributes to national and global narratives of historical progress, wedding Native assertions of contemporaneity to state interests.Rifkin’s answer to this dilemma is Beyond Settler Time, a long, theoretically expansive, wide-ranging, and erudite book on what he calls “temporal sovereignty,” which he contrasts to “temporal recognition,” the institutional and assimilative mode through which Indigenous peoples get brought/bring themselves into the present. Temporal sovereignty, on the other hand, engages “the texture of Indigenous temporalities” (Rifkin 2017, 7–8) and Native collective experiences of becoming. Echoing Glen Coulthard’s distinction between a politics of recognition (mediated by the settler state and its epistemic frames) and grounded normativities, “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time” (cited in Rifkin 2017, 207–8), Rifkin’s argument likewise emphasizes a form of self-determination that refuses external legitimation, flowing directly from Indigenous experiences, forms of governance, and social relations, but in temporal terms.Rifkin’s turn to time isn’t an obvious one for Native studies considering the intense and persistent focus the field has on “the land question.” Though, from at least the publication of Vine Deloria Jr.’s God Is Red, in which he asserts that Indigenous epistemologies have a spatial orientation in contrast to Western, Christian orientations to historical, linear, and teleological/eschatological time (which Deloria claims undergirds an inherent colonial imperative uprooting a lived sense of place) to the recent publication of Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes’s analysis of the longue durée of Native resistance up to Standing Rock, scholarship in Native studies has had an abiding interest in theorizing time. This includes the heavily populated list of Native scholars that Rifkin draws on to make his argument, including those whom he critically locates as being Native theorists of modernity (Philip Deloria, Scott Lyons, Jean O’Brien). But Vine Deloria’s lesson, drawing on years of Indigenous struggle, has been influential, with the most recent and visible manifestation being the LandBack movement. In this sense, Mishuana Goeman’s Mark My Words is another important touchstone for Rifkin, linking as it does Indigenous modes of storying to practices of grounded normativity, distinguishing between Indigenous place making and settler-colonial space making, or, as Robert Nichols calls it, the (violent) production of land as property. Goeman writes, “Stories teach us how to care for and respect one another and the land. Responsibility, respect, and places created through tribal stories have endured longer than the Western fences that outline settler territories and individual properties that continue to change hands” (cited in Rifkin 2017, 59–61). To Goeman’s abiding sense of storied Indigenous place, Rifkin offers a storied, collective, and experiential Indigenous sense of duration.The structure of Rifkin’s book is a familiar one, beginning with a brief preface; followed by a long first chapter that details the primary argument and the theoretical and methodological investments of the book, and then three chapters that develop the argument through close readings of texts, heavily weighted by novels (where the rubber hits the road, so to speak); ending, finally, with a coda that critically reflects on the relation between the book’s argument and U.S. Indian policy as it affects Native American sovereignty. Because this is such a theoretically rich text, and because Rifkin takes great pains to develop a powerful if complex argument on Native conceptions of time, in this review I primarily focus on the first chapter. For those interested in Native American literature and other forms of Native writing, Rifkin is a consummate literary scholar, and it is certainly worth reading his continuing engagement with the work of Native authors in the last three chapters, where he offers fresh takes based on his theorizing of temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty of largely canonical Native literary texts and authors. Each of these chapters engages a different aspect of temporal recognition as the means through which more radical temporal formations in the form of sovereignty are managed or silenced.In brief, chapter 2, “The Silence of Ely S. Parker,” addresses U.S. historical narratives of developmental progress through the rhetoric of a perfecting union. Beginning with a meditation on the silent, onscreen presence of Haudenosaunee politician, Ely S. Parker, in the Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner film Lincoln, Rifkin addresses the imposed temporal formation of the expanding and perfecting rule of law and its relation to violence by juxtaposing two concurrent wars caused by uprisings, the Civil War, and the lesser-known Dakota War. Attending to the writing of Parker as well as Dakota scholar Charles Eastman, Rifkin analyzes the temporal formations of the treaty and reservation systems as outcroppings of the rule of settler law. Chapter 3, “The Duration of the Land,” focuses on John Joseph Mathews’s novel Sundown, set in an Osage community during the allotment era. Analyzing the temporality of U.S. Indian policy and its focus on resource development (allotment and the petro-economy here), Rifkin notes how Mathews’s novel represents and disrupts a maturational and heteronormative conception of social reproduction. To do so, he juxtaposes reproductive futurity to the queerness of the main character, Chal, whose Indianness acts as an opening onto a sense of place-based duration. The final chapter, “Ghost Dancing at Century’s End,” addresses the almost excessively researched social, political, and spiritual response to settler invasion, the Ghost Dance. Removing it from the sociological interpretations it has been subjected to and restoring its affective and everyday aspects, Rifkin discusses two novels in which the ceremony features prominently, Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes. Referencing the version of the ceremony envisioned by the Paiute Doctor, Wovoka (there have been others), the ceremony, as made clear by Rifkin’s readings of the two novels, is both a hopeful vision for a future restored to Indigenous peoples, with the dead returning to live with the living in many interpretations, and a messianic manifestation of Indigenous rage through the prophesied disappearance of all white people. This affective ambivalence is summed up by Rifkin through the emotions of anger and longing, which, he argues, open up cross-time proximities based in prophetic temporality and its everyday manifestations.Rifkin lays out the book’s theoretical and methodological infrastructure in chapter 1, “Indigenous Orientations,” where much of his aforementioned argument and the basis for his notion of Indigenous duration reside. Ambitious and just a bit irreverent, the chapter ranges across a bewildering set of philosophies, concepts, and theories: Native and Latinx philosopher V. F. Cordova’s vitalist philosophy; Sarah Ahmed’s queer phenomenology (from which Rifkin draws the term “orientation”); Native theorist, memoirist, and poet Deborah Miranda’s archival meditations on the afterlife of annihilation in the wake of the California missions; theories of Native modernity; decolonial theories of coloniality (which get lumped in with the previous group); postcolonial critiques of the enlightenment; Native studies critiques of recognition politics; queer theories of time; Einsteinian relativity; Henri Bergson’s philosophical concept of duration; Native theorist Dian Million’s felt theory (along with non-Native queer theorists of affect); and Native conceptions of storying. It’s honestly a bit overwhelming; however, Rifkin’s erudition together with a conceptually tight argument hold it all together.After establishing the broad parameters of temporal recognition, described above, Rifkin explores a variety of theoretical conceptions of temporal plurality, what he calls being-in-time, as alternatives to dominant settler time. As a subjective form, being-in-time is a phenomenological orientation drawn from past experiences that frame possible future experience, turning one toward the future through interest and momentum in the form of a trajectory. The phenomenological experience of time organizes much of the chapter, though it takes different faces with Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, Bergson’s theory of duration, and Merleau-Ponty’s more canonical philosophy. What this step does is specify the experience of time away from abstract, common time. Threaded through this argument is the question of collective (as opposed to common) and therefore Indigenous experiences (which are not just subjective or intersubjective). To begin to answer the question, Rifkin turns to Native scholars: Cordova’s notion of communal frames of reference and Miranda’s and Dian Million’s respective theories of collective storying. Rifkin ends the chapter by staging a conversation between Indigenous storying as collective and affective frames of reference and queer theorizations of temporality. This last section is the only one in the book where non-Native theories are directly questioned through a Native critical lens and is, for that reason, one of the more robust moments of theorizing in the book. It is also very much in Rifkin’s wheelhouse, hearkening back to his earlier work on intersections of queer and Indigenous studies.The hinge between temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty in the chapter, perhaps surprisingly, is physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and his idea of frames of reference. In Einsteinian relativity, Rifkin finds a conception of time that breaks with natural time, the common temporal experience of the present as an “unfolding, universal line of development” (Rifkin 2017, 34–35). Frames of reference, on the other hand, are based on one’s relative position and make the idea of a universal time impossible. Turning to theoretical physics in order to understand temporal sovereignty, though, carries a number of risks, which Rifkin acknowledges by noting the limits of Einstein’s theory for discussing Indigenous experiences. While, according to the theory, there is no possible universal time, what makes a frame of reference intelligible is having a common measure to compare frames, in this case mathematics itself (it also helps to have a common perspective, the absolute speed of light). One can understand differences between frames by comparing them according to this measure, each having internally consistent relations to time that onto each The of is that this for different experiences, a problem that philosopher Henri out to with his theory of duration. To and notion of time, offers a and notion of duration. It is, the and subjective of relativity, a philosophical to Einstein’s physics if the that had with was of the for to the between the two conceptions of time is to Rifkin’s distinction between temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty. Bergson’s of and experiential duration from time much of the critical of Rifkin’s a that the book. than time as an abstract, measure of universal movement a can of it as as temporality than temporalities” The term is as Bergson’s notion of duration is up with the question of in two against theories that human is of asserting a of human of Bergson’s and and, perhaps as a response to the by of that is an if one takes the that space is This of space and time to assert a of experiential duration, and from abstract, had significant on American such as as well as American and It’s a critical that has had and has as a form of critical common sense, as by this by V. F. is an from the fact that there is and change in the (cited in Rifkin 2017, in this distinction Rifkin’s as It like this settler time, as a of and is a that a temporal experience for temporal such as Indigenous that this are through temporal recognition, through a conception of shared modernity and the however, time is and the of settler time is a a of experiential time. The step that Rifkin takes is to this to show that Indigenous peoples within that are at also with the individual of Western Indigenous forms of temporal sovereignty, as within the settler framework. Attending to these for Rifkin, is a to time and open space for “Indigenous forms of collective and modes of One to do this is to the texture of temporal formations in Rifkin turns to physics and a philosopher of to Native temporal sovereignty, because to made but in to Indigenous and also as a of earlier discourses of social development and a time that between peoples according to a though the make is often as a spatial one, as opposed to to Rifkin’s very rich concept of temporal sovereignty into what has as I the Western Rifkin draws on for an conception of time, do not are more than the while certainly directly with Indigenous formations of and experience, of whom theorized in ways that themselves to Rifkin’s obvious answer is that and are interested primarily in time within a Western framework, to the critically turn makes to an of the West such a still makes and then of out into and and so This is of what Rifkin refers to on as his to Western formations of in order to make open and make visible the texture of Indigenous of an critical within a dominant framework. The other obvious answer is the of by Native that it a notion of that in if not Indigenous people into of a different notion of This version of pastness is largely for the idea of a against which Native people are to the common that is a Indigenous people not just in time or but also in does the question of in relation to time discussing for in as an time (Rifkin 2017, the aspect of into Rifkin how is a concept that temporal recognition through the lens of and its and relative to Indigenous time against the of settler time. But there a between Rifkin’s notion of temporal and relativity that I I it has to do with the complex between the of the and as and by Tony the concept and the of on its and more by as of an that and and through the of subjects the in the different of between and the links this and to the of the term which the question of how and, in Rifkin’s conceptions of temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty. how do these conceptions on or and for a book review if are to it back in a the and Rifkin’s book that it Rifkin’s on a double bind of its only was a philosopher if there was one, but Rifkin’s on phenomenology a form of human of the Western a number of Native in order to this sense of time as Rifkin gets there by first the problem of settler time and then it within the of Western the and its out time as a in order to the double bind of historical and assertions of Native modernity another one in relation to the of the human as a of an as is, does Rifkin the Native people are of modernity all with Native people are also complex To begin to answer this the colonial and of and its in the of to peoples, as described by and how that undergirds a sense of the This is a question that on the of from to and a that to how in social, and and interest in epistemologies and is at as made clear by the of of Indigenous What if Indigenous epistemologies and are not in the Western What and make possible another of In his engagement with the work of Deborah Rifkin offers a possible on the of the of Rifkin notes that Miranda’s work in the of the of people in the face of such a notion of turning away from a in which Indigenous people up of for an and within a Miranda’s rather the very and of through storying as of our was to the I to that the of was but other Indians California Indians been a the a lot power to or (cited in Rifkin 2017, What is is the of the term with Miranda’s the and of as well as its an or in seemingly form, perhaps through and This isn’t against the such as the but it also have the It’s at this Rifkin’s of Indigenous takes and of Indigenous as the of land or modes of governance, Rifkin finds in Miranda’s conception of a to the of Indigenous and In the of and recognition, acts as a that the itself of an Indigenous through an sense of different and ways of living that into are an affective of experience, what Dian calls felt and in often and The one is the to which, according to like water flowing the of our (cited in Rifkin 2017, in the form of and temporal experiences. For Rifkin, this sense of storying a of a lived that back against the of imposed settler forms of recognition and that from Indigenous governance, to relations to to social and and the of the time of in Rifkin 2017, is at his this sense of into conversation with queer theories of time, his earlier work on imposed forms of settler through Indian the of of Native and and with settler in other of settler as a and the of in of recognition settler and Rifkin this question to on the possible of queer to and the of time to the and through for this of queer temporal conceptions for on of and investments in the of the settler these theories against the terms of addressed by and the for collective to in the face of and Rifkin both takes the from queer temporality and also asserts that Native temporal formations are not to non-Native (which includes non-Native queer It’s a of living with the and in an of Rifkin does with queer theory what he do with Western his notion of on this powerful of storying in and through Rifkin, through us toward another of and making making in other do take up this
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Defining the racial and ethnic “other”: Constructing an American identity through visualizing census data in the U.S. Statistical Atlases ↗
Abstract
This study analyzes the visualization of census data in the U.S. Statistical Atlases from 1874 to 1925. I examine how visual strategies were used to construct an American identity by contrasting the “native” population with the “other”—new immigrants and African Americans, which were visualized as undesirable counterparts. By defining the “other,” the Atlases created a pan ethnic identity of the “native white” population, established a racial hierarchy, and hardened the division between old and new immigrants. The study develops a rhetorical framework for understanding how data design is used to marginalize racially and ethnically minority groups.
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Abstract
This article examines visuals used in the reporting of the 2015-2016 Zika virus outbreak in order to explore the use of different image forms and genres in communicating health information to distinct audiences. By tracing an informational report through several publication types, the use of different image forms and rhetorical genres are observed, as is the robustness and flexibility of these categorizations.
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The Specialist in Athenian Written Rhetoric During the Classical Period: A Reconsideration of Technical Rhetoric and Rhetorical Iconography ↗
Abstract
This essay argues that technical rhetoric in ancient Athens is neither well nor fully understood in its present historical characterization but rather is best realized as occupying a position on a spectrum of literate skills ranging from an art to a craft. The dismissive views of technical writing advanced by Plato and Aristotle should be reconsidered and specialized literate practices be recognized as an important feature of rhetoric in Athens’ classical period. A review of discursive and material (archaeological) evidence reveals that technical writing was evolving into a craft-skill in Athens as early as the archaic period and, by the classical period, would be regarded as a respected “rhetorical” profession of artistic expression. This essay urges readers to reconsider the restrictive characterization of rhetoric advanced by some historians of rhetoric and include the specialist craft-skills of writing as a manifestation of technical rhetoric that both illustrates, and more accurately represents, the range of classical rhetoric in ancient Athens.
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Abstract
This article connects work on emotion, rhetoric, and entrepreneurial experience as it reports findings from a questionnaire issued to 80 entrepreneurs who belong to the global entrepreneur community Startup Grind. The findings from this study offer researchers a more robust representation of the rhetorical theories that guide entrepreneurs’ professional communication practices. In particular, the authors report on the distribution and dependency between two variables: operative rhetorical theory (indicated by one of four choices) and entrepreneurial experience (indicated by number of ventures and total years of experience).
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Teaching Students in the Technical and Professional Communication Classroom Practices for Innovation Rhetoric ↗
Abstract
Initiating and continuing rhetorical invention is an important practice for teams seeking to innovate. Workplace professionals demonstrate one potential model of rhetorical innovation by instantiating four rhetorical moves that make up a broader practice of difference-driven inquiry (DDI). But it remains unknown how DDI, as a model of innovative rhetoric, can be taught in the technical and professional communication classroom. Over the course of two studies, the author investigated a pedagogy attempting to teach practices for innovation rhetoric. The results show that the pedagogy can be effective but that more scaffolding is needed.
September 2022
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Abstract
In this essay I bring together two spaces—street needle exchange and the university classroom—to explore harm reduction as an epistemological model that can be adapted pedagogically in our rhetoric, communications, and composition classes. I first identify capitalism in the classroom as an insistence on mastery and the relentless call to know, acquire, and achieve. I then offer harm reduction, a public health practice that rejects these iterations of capitalism, to instead ask how we might meet students where they are and how we might forego the rewards of telos for the discomfort of process and mess. I’ll argue in this piece that reducing the harms of capitalist-based writing and knowledge requires considered attention to the ways we are lured toward production (what we might even call “deliverables”). I explore the epistemological nodes of harm reduction—its emphasis on temporality and its privileging of process—as methods for teaching writing, rhetoric, and communications while also offering a pedagogical case study along the way.
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Abstract
Rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) knowledge integrity is explored in the context of preparing RHM students, researchers, and practitioners to be careful curators and communicators of information from the medical literature. More specifically, the goal of this article is to provide a systematic framework for researching and citing claims, or “facts,” from the medical literature with transferrable skills beyond the academy. In this article, this framework is examined through the lens of science communication ethics and writer ethos to guide individuals while navigating between automation of literature databases and human agency. Furthermore, this article explores the proper citation of research claims from different genres that are published in the “medical literature” with attention to conserving the authors’ original voice. Collectively, this framework and discussion builds on prior scholarship on authorship and intellectual property in medicine.
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Abstract
Reviewed by: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886 by Amy J. Lueck Jason Maxwell Amy J. Lueck. A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886. Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3742-2 Historians of composition have long understood their work as a necessary corrective to reductive accounts of English Studies that focus solely on literary studies and critical theory. In their efforts to provide a more capacious understanding of the discipline, however, compositionists have themselves produced significant exclusions, offering a rather limited understanding of the history of college writing. As Amy J. Lueck explains, the field of Rhetoric and Composition, perhaps in an effort to fortify its standing within the research university, has tended to overlook the role that high schools have played in shaping college writing pedagogy. In A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, Lueck does not merely seek to document points of overlap and contestation between high school and college writing curriculum. Instead, her work aims to call into question the very boundaries between designations like “high school” and “college.” These boundaries, Lueck maintains, are responsible for producing a standardized academic hierarchy that limits the range of pedagogical possibilities within any given level of the system. For instance, high school becomes conceived as little more than a preparatory vehicle for college, and its curriculum becomes defined negatively—that is, high school is understood as not providing college-level instruction. History has shown that this reification and subordination proves detrimental for both high schools and colleges. While we take these distinctions for granted today, Lueck turns to the nineteenth century, a point when the current academic system had not yet solidified (in this regard, her work shares much with Laurence Veysey’s [End Page 415] landmark The Emergence of the American University [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965], which similarly documents a period of intense fluidity and contestation). Prior to the establishment of research universities, which precipitated the creation of our broader contemporary hierarchy, the middle of the century boasted a landscape populated by a wide array of educational institutions whose relations to one another were anything but clear. Consider the name “high school.” While the term might suggest an institution that serves as a capstone to the “lower” primary schools, it just as easily might be read as belonging under the banner of “higher learning” that we usually reserve for colleges and universities. Much of the ambiguity surrounding various schools’ status and function can be attributed to the larger conversation about the role of education in American life during this time. For example, many were calling into question the hegemony of the traditional college’s “classical curriculum,” which privileged learning languages like Greek and Latin in order to produce distinguished gentlemen. Critics of this curriculum suggested replacing it with a “modem curriculum” that would better prepare students for the practical concerns of work and citizenship. Because the transition to this modern curriculum was uneven at best, many high schools adopted it long before their college counterparts, making them an attractive option for many in the community. Indeed, practically-oriented high schools were not merely viable alternatives to classically-minded colleges. They also constituted sites of pedagogical innovation that colleges and universities would later draw upon in their own reform efforts. Lueck grounds her analysis in A Shared History by studying the developments of a number of schools in Louisville, Kentucky during the second half of the 1800s. She dives into the archival record and finds a range of institutions, instructors, and students that challenge long-held assumptions about the educational system and the kinds of work students are expected to produce at any given site within that system. Admitting that it would be impossible to produce a comprehensive account of the changes unfolding during this time, Lueck argues that the city nevertheless engaged meaningfully with almost every larger educational trend of the era, and several educators who worked in Louisville went on to have an impact shaping educational policy at the national level. Moreover, her...
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Abstract
This article argues that the catachrestic usage of “affection to mean “affectation” in Shakespearean drama may be best understood with reference to Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, which employs catachresis in using the existing Latin word adfectatio to render the Greek word ϰαϰόζηλον [cacozēlon]. Quintilian’s influential picture of the all-encompassing rhetorical vice of adfectatio, his catachrestic practice, and his descriptions of catachresis as both a necessary extension of the meaning of an existing word and a poetic device, appear to have influenced Shakespeare’s portrayal of some of his most complex and articulate characters, among them Hamlet and Leontes (of The Winter’s Tale). Through these characters and their catachrestic speeches, we are forced to contend with the possibility that their “affections” may be nothing more (or less) than “affectations.”
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Abstract
Design thinking, broadly understood as an organizational and entrepreneurial process aimed at innovative problem solving, has been productively incorporated by scholar-teachers in rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication. Business communication offers similar opportunities. After briefly explaining design thinking and reviewing related scholarship and pedagogy, the article traces the process of creating an innovative course in business communication through each phase or mode of this recursive method: empathizing with users, defining the problem, ideating and prototyping solutions, and testing and evaluating the prototypes. The article positions course design as a project grounded in radical collaboration, with diverse colleagues as well as students.
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Abstract
In this article, we ask what it means to think of infrastructure discursively through situational analysis. First, we consider how policymakers have historically used writing and rhetoric to redefine, reframe, and resituate what infrastructure can be in technical documents. Second, we address the impact of policymakers' discursive practices on the spaces and material realities of communities. We view the infrastructural function of writing "as a conceptual foundation for revealing structures and foundations of organizations that affect people" (Read, 2019, p. 237). We use three texts as the space of our discourse mapping: President Franklin Roosevelt's "Fireside Chat on the Recovery Program," the Green New Deal, and President Joseph Biden's recently proposed American Jobs Plan. Through these three cases, we argue that infrastructure has always been defined in relation to environment. Any definition of infrastructure is rooted in environment or seeks to change environment. These shifts in definition have been used strategically to bring more visibility to marginalized communities and make their concerns central to the concerns of the United States' socio-economic agenda. We close with implications for both communities and policymakers.
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Abstract
This article is the introduction to the second of two Communication and Design Quarterly special issues focused on conceptualizations of infrastructure. While there are more continuities than differences between the themes and methodologies of articles in the first and second issues, this second issue leans towards articles that have taken up infrastructure as it pertains to writing and rhetoric. This introduction frames the value of infrastructure as a metaphor for making visible how writing and rhetoric structure and enact much of our world, especially for writing pedagogy. In addition, this article concludes by introducing the six contributions in this issue.