This article theorizes infrastructures and their components as rhetorical objects for analysis and persuasive use. Though the term infrastructure has been applied broadly to several studies in the social sciences, writing, technical communication, and technology studies, infrastructures have yet to be systematically theorized as an active persuasive consideration for those engaging in communicative practice. This article makes a case for a taxonomic theoretical understanding and conceptualization of infrastructure that may lead to new methodological developments in future research. This theory builds from theories of infrastructures as relational networks of social interaction around objects. The article aims to assist the persuasive endeavors of those engaged in communicative practice in infrastructural settings.

As Annelien de Dijn tells it in her Freedom: An Unruly History, the political story of the West has been written between two concepts of liberty—one democratic, the other modern.1 The first of these dates to ancient Greece and Rome and defines freedom in terms of democratic self-government. In this understanding, citizens are free to the degree that they are able to participate in the selection and maintenance of the laws to which their community is subject. Unlike slaves—and understood, in fact, as their political opposite—free citizens are empowered to act in the public square. They have the agency to acquire knowledge, to form opinions, to take stands, to persuade others, and perhaps thereby to assist in guiding the course of the state. Along the way, they may enjoy the satisfaction and assurance that accompany the free practice of their citizenship on equal footing with their countrymen, who enjoy that practice as well. This democratic concept of liberty was the original of Western civilization, and remained dominant across the two millennia that followed.Its usurper is de Dijn's second concept, with advocates as ancient as Plato but without widespread purchase until the turn of the 19th century. This modern concept defines freedom in terms of non-interference from the state. For proponents of this view, citizens are free only to the degree that laws do not bind them, effectively casting government of whatever sort as the antagonist of liberty. Following the turmoil of the 18th century's Atlantic Revolutions, especially the Terror in France, political thinkers including Benjamin Constant and Edmund Burke reacted to democratic excess by locating freedom within the private individual. Though others have traced this development to the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of market economies, de Dijn asserts that it is best understood as a counterrevolutionary riposte. The presumption that individuals must be prioritized and popular power contained has been widely touted ever since. Today its influence is carved into our increasingly undemocratic institutions.Unsurprisingly, then, this story of long rise and short but dramatic decline follows a trajectory similar to that of rhetoric itself. Crafted by the Greeks and refined by the Romans, democratic freedom fell out of favor in Medieval Europe but bounced back during the Renaissance, found champions during the Enlightenment, and provided the vital theoretical framework for a generation of revolutionaries who were defiant of subjugation and committed to self-government. In rejecting monarchy, the architects of the United States insisted also on a degree of popular sovereignty. And in securing the franchise for (some) citizens, they built a political system in which persuasion matters, in which good ideas and rhetorical polish could wield real influence. Attractive to the rank-and-file, this model worried the elites, who quickly set to work fortifying their institutions against the mass. Early in the 21st century, their legacy survives in gerrymandered districts, disproportionate Senate representation, the Electoral College, and the passage of state-level voting restrictions, including thirty-four new laws across nineteen states in 2021 alone.2 Because rhetoric and democracy are so closely linked, the deterioration of democratic freedom unavoidably presages the forfeiture of rhetorical power.De Dijn's narrative is clearly oriented around this sense of loss. She recalls the Atlantic Revolutions as a collective eruption of democratic potential, ultimately confounded by internal complexities and class antagonisms. If the modern conception of freedom was first animated by fears of democratic anarchy and mob rule, it was refined and popularized by continental liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, who were anxious at the plight of powerless minorities. Adopted then by Federalists and Whigs, it was made to serve primarily as a rampart around the wealthy and a check upon the rest, effectively recasting equality as a threat to liberty rather than its actualization. Challenged by radical movements including abolitionism, women's suffrage, and labor, modern freedom was revived during the Cold War and represented by a fresh host of intellectual advocates. “Today,” de Dijn laments, “the West's most ardent freedom fighters (who are now more likely to call themselves conservative than liberal) remain more concerned with limiting state power than with enhancing popular control over government.” Indeed, freedom now serves as “a battering ram against democracy” rather than its raison d’être.3Long and sweeping but precise and detailed, de Dijn's account provides an illuminating backstory to the present, a compelling context in which to understand what's happening now.4 In the United States and Western Europe especially, diversifying populations are altering the composition of the citizenry and so threatening the traditional, hegemonic whiteness of the power structure. In response, resurgent rightwing movements and politicians are relying on restrictive institutions to save them and the modern conception of freedom to justify that project. By insisting that government remain small and its purview limited, by creatively sorting and containing the voters, and by challenging the legitimacy of elections themselves, the dominant agents of the American Right have worked hard to constrain democratic freedom and to secure their advantages. Over the three sections that follow, this review will consider their progress within three specific venues, applying de Dijn's two concepts of freedom to the work of rhetorical scholars examining politics, religion, and education in the United States.In politics, modern freedom is advocated most assertively by the Republican Party and most aggressively by those at the rightward reaches. In 2010, a group of these activists posted a “Contract from America” online, ostensibly revising and updating the 1994 “Contract with America” that had helped to prompt a conservative surge in Congress. Calling for a variety of crowd-sourced initiatives and claiming to speak for “the people,” this document articulated an agenda attractive to a narrow set of demographics, demanding to preempt the sort of democratic deliberation that might more accurately reflect the will of a diverse nation. At the outset of his I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States, Paul Elliott Johnson characterizes the Contract in familiar terms. It “figured the relation between the freedom of the population and the authority of government as one of inverse proportionality,” he writes, meaning that, “the less ‘the people’ are governed, the freer they are.” Surveying a short list of policy goals including fewer regulations, lower taxes, and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Johnson notes that, together, these imagined the “real” population of the United States to be “a set of radically autonomous individuals united in their possession of liberty,” with economic and popular liberty fashioned identically and used interchangeably throughout.5 For the Tea Party and its legacies, freedom has meant nothing more or less than the removal of government constraints from personal and corporate activity, consistent with a set of assumptions about who these persons and corporations are supposed to be. Fully realized, theirs is a world in which one does whatever one wants, provided only that one is one of us.For Johnson, this atomized collective is the animating ideal of conservative populism, a rhetorical mode through which a distinctly white, masculine resentment is gathered and arrayed against a nefarious liberal establishment. Cast at once as both central and marginal, the subject of this discourse is the disenchanted silent majoritarian, the white citizen with an empowered self-concept but without power itself, or at least without power in proportion to certain others with more than they deserve. “By positing a population simultaneously sure of its identity, positioned outside or beyond the messy world of politics, and in possession of a vitality self-same with freedom,” Johnson writes, “conservatism's ‘people’ is oriented with hostility toward the democratic side of the liberal democratic equation.”6 Conservative populists speak the languages of grievance and privilege, claiming entitlement unbound by accountability and indignant at restraint, especially when delivered with official sanction on legal ballots. Reproved once-too-often by electoral defeats, their rhetorical fetishization of freedom must be either abandoned entirely or validated through anti-democratic violence. In October of 2021, at an Idaho rally featuring conservative media figure Charlie Kirk, this tension was expressed succinctly by an audience member who asked his demagogic host, “When do we get to use the guns?” When the crowd responded with laughter and applause, the befuddled young man assured everyone that he was purely in earnest. “That's not a joke,” he said. “I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”7 Here de Dijn's image of the battering ram becomes especially evocative, updated, and weaponized.Though populism as a rhetorical style is traditionally deployed by mass movements against elites, conservative populism draws its boundaries vertically, uniting a portion of the mass with a portion of the elite and activating race as the applicable category for exclusion.8 If the modern concept of freedom has traditionally proven useful to the white managerial class as a means to reinforcing its prerogatives, it has also attracted the white working class with promises of autonomy and status. In each case, the appeal pledges to relieve a self-consciously self-reliant and overwhelmingly white faction of any obligation to the maintenance of a welfare state that, they suppose, caters primarily to black and brown people who do not want to work. Johnson assigns race a central role in his analysis, situating the rhetoric of conservative populism within a larger biopolitics that aligns whiteness with life and blackness with death. The white and the black circulate ominously within the conservative worldview, constituting discourses that inform and mobilize the conservative “people.” If past theoretical treatments of conservative rhetoric have understated these racialized dynamics, I the People centers them.To make his case, Johnson surveys key moments in conservative history, starting with Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential candidacy, proceeding through Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory, through Newt Gingrich's 1994 takeover of the House, through Tea Party opposition to Barack Obama in 2009, and, finally, an analysis of Donald Trump as candidate and executive. Overall, Johnson convincingly charts a rhetorical trajectory most notable for its consistency, arguing against those who claim that conservatives learned identity politics from the Left or who cite Trump as a one-off perversion of an otherwise rich and nuanced intellectual legacy. On the contrary, Johnson argues, the conservative tradition in the United States has long been driven by the same impulses that drive it today, including overt commitments to whiteness and masculinity, to hegemony and marginality, to individualism and freedom as against government and its pretensions to the common good. Stirred and mobilized still by a dogged populist tone, the movement today is the same as it ever was, if further amplified and pronounced. Proponents of democracy should be candid about what conservative populism is, and responsive to the threats that it poses.Among religious constituencies, the modern conception of freedom has been received most warmly by white evangelical Christians. Remarkably active and reliably Republican, white evangelical voters have ensured the election of conservative presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Their support proved especially decisive in 2000 and 2016, a pair of contests in which the President-elect lost the popular vote while clinching the Electoral College.9 After the latter race, in particular, when exit polls revealed that 81 percent of self-described white evangelical voters had gone for Trump, the racial, religious, and political identities had become so deeply entangled that pastors, pundits, and scholars were moved to revisit the age-old question of what, exactly, an evangelical is.10 For critical observers both within and without the fold, such an examination was necessary to explain how the teachings of Christ could possibly have moved millions into the politics of Trump. In the years since, books pledging to answer the central questions have been published to impressive sales and critical acclaim.11 One of the most recent and most nuanced has come out of rhetorical studies.In her Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Stephanie A. Martin suggests that white evangelical voting behavior is intelligible, at least in part, in the light of evangelical sermonizing. Following the dramatic housing market collapse of 2008, Martin wondered whether the “Great Recession” would prompt white evangelicals to question the linkage between their theological and economic commitments—their concomitant beliefs in the holiness of God and of free markets. Between 2010 and 2018, she transcribed and analyzed hundreds of sermons delivered in evangelical megachurches across more than three dozen states, coding specifically for economic themes.12 Because these large churches are joined weekly by such a high volume of congregants, their discourses would provide a useful window into demographic thought and practice. And because their sermons are streamed and archived online, they would be easily accessible from home. In 2016, Martin attended to election framing as well, performing the analysis that eventually culminated in a different sort of project.Decoding the Digital Church a pair of key to the The first is that, because white evangelical megachurches are for conservative citizens, they as for the of ideas and assumptions that circulate in conservative in the to the in the these reinforcing a high degree of rhetorical or what Martin de In this made by or on with made by the on the between and politics long Though have agency in their they are also to the and of the people in the a that further the of and And because the of the and most churches make their sermons for their work is and by of as well. the conservative discourse second is that, in 2016, the political of a a rhetoric of active to the questions and of the The of most evangelical not Trump for the they delivered of an otherwise that their political while guiding their to the the of is an he by God and for by committed citizens, and who have to this and citizens should the that, this the were If by the on he so do The are the are and the is not finally, the an tension between his first two it in the his to vote their vote the and God with the the to vote as the active of the the assurance of delivered the effectively and fears and the from any accountability for the by the and candidate that their political would persuade them to one of this story is that the linkage between white evangelical identity and Republican by by by the collapse of religious and by certain to further a rightwing religious politics more committed to hegemony than to in to and by this is likely to back that small government and the to would not to be be only that they are Their provides a against the education is the of democracy have themselves, once as of Conservative advocates of have that, as should be able to their to a of their either public or to the In this way, would be within an driven by market to and or the democratic that should be and through the movement to power from and it to thereby education into in which de modern conception of freedom to the democratic his and the of How characterizes the as a between of public The first is best represented by John who that democracy with public education as an for this rather than for and have been made to of as community Because everyone in a is in the citizens are into with their and are in the generation to is to to the about how should be and are from the as in the larger public Their is their influence on an to and They in a citizens, working to an system through which citizens are second is represented by and the who first of as a means to education books such as and to and of the the to in the and while individualism as a means to economic and political the driven as an in a world of collective they imagined an in which citizens may act and without by individuals would be free to their it by and by more than personal And because individuals in a with and other the to them as They this with from a pair of and the By for and by to with a set of and they that any community could citizens an of in which to a generation of of community the democratic and are of different his analysis of and that the of the market and the on which as as the by the in a Though the United States is to a tradition of and our does the and work of we our means of education around without in the community as a that, in to democracy as a of we to practice it at the starting with the should be to and of with education advocates in that the democratic has but that it has to be the best to American education would be to with democratic institutions and then their and than and such a system would young citizens in and to in which individuals rather than certain individuals to the of the the market in education a variety of to public these are and by a common rhetorical They are in a that has proven useful for conservative notes that, their the deployed the style of a of and by “the and of individuals the of In this means that they their as in a market framework that Unlike who are to themselves in and market that appeal to a and Their key are to driven by and of with American beliefs and Their on individuals and as political and economic has If their is to be proponents of democracy in any must to their with and is not a in any case, and with at the many to speak or years from these about the decline of American democracy may either or Their critical on the American Right and its advocates in the Republican Party may either or it is to if only for the of that the scholars that American democracy is in and that the is a may more a to American politics be only of For citizens to understand the across a of the books are each of them, the threat to democracy is animated by a of or at least a of of and proponents of this modern conception the as and able to and act in the world without from others or by of both political and economic this freedom the two into a with a of and to citizens as and to an identity, it is white conservatives that they built this and to that this was built upon a set of and that, in this education should and these a subject to market and to this concept of freedom may the of its American have proven and and against large that our to the by modern freedom is a of democratic the once and In a diverse democracy the and of of In the United States, a and of those citizens may still check the conservative populist The for such are narrow and and their through constraints at from voting and through the dogged of the and the power of the Electoral Their will about in the the of and that rhetorical scholars in their from public and composition through and In that this is the sort of for which rhetorical is The is but the by the maintenance of democracy in to those the of democracy its death. books a call to

On the wall of a large lecture hall at Indiana University, Bloomington hangs a painting that includes in its background a depiction of a Ku Klux Klan rally, complete with a burning cross and hooded Klansmen. The painting, titled “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press,” is one of twenty-two mural panels depicting Indiana history that were created by Thomas Hart Benton for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and later installed in three locations across the university campus. In the most recent debate about the panel, defenders argued that removal would amount to censorship and, furthermore, would mean the destruction of the painting due to its material fragility. Critics argued that it should be removed because hateful imagery has no place in learning spaces, and classrooms must be welcoming to all students. Ultimately, IU administration decided to leave the panel on display but to convert the lecture hall “to other uses beginning in the spring semester of 2018.” They argued that “repurposing the room is the best accommodation of the multiple factors that the murals raise: our obligation to be a welcoming community to all of our students and facilitate their learning; our stewardship of this priceless art; and our obligation to stand firm in defense of artistic expression.”1 As the outcome of the administration's compromise, “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press” hangs in a largely unoccupied room as a depiction of a hate-filled chapter of Indiana's past, hidden, as it were, in plain sight.IU's Benton mural is one local instantiation of national debates around what to do with representations of and homages to racism in the United States: one side argues for the value of historical and cultural significance; the other argues against honoring representations of racism and hate. While physical sites are often central to the public conversation around what to do with the symbolism of the United States’ racist history, Stephen M. Monroe smartly demonstrates in his excellent new book Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities (2021) how unexamined semiotic traditions can covertly sustain racist hegemony within the discursive practices of our institutions.Examining the discursive practices of his own local community at the University of Mississippi, Monroe asks how we can persuade more white people in the silent majority to become educated and engage in conversations about racial equality and justice (220, 221). In answer, he recognizes that we probably need both radical activism and reconciliation. However, he also insists that scholars of language and rhetoric have a responsibility to respond and act from within their local communities. His intention is “to push readers firmly away from passive acceptance of semiotic traditions and toward purposeful consideration and confrontation of those semiotic traditions” (13). Indeed, this book makes an important contribution to a vision of rhetorical scholarship that aims at producing legitimate cultural change. Monroe's intervention is multidisciplinary, targeting the fields of both rhetoric and Southern studies, and his contribution is triple-layered. He brings the disciplinary knowledge of rhetoric to bear on the interdisciplinary field of Southern studies; he brings a thorough example of archival work in institutional history to the field of rhetoric; and he models the kind of locally-situated rhetorical intervention he imagines in his call for readers to interrogate our communities’ stakes in the perpetuation of racism across the nation.The central theoretical thread of Monroe's argument—a thread that applies beyond the confines of racism—is that history, language and symbols, and communal identity are interdependent. Combining methods of critical discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, and archival research, he argues that Old South rhetoric, or “confederate rhetoric,” continues to circulate and sustain racist communal identities across the US South, specifically at the region's universities. Because the semiotic traditions of confederate rhetoric “often create stasis or even reversion,” he explains, institutions’ abilities to achieve racial progress is slowed (13). In other words, confederate rhetoric and racism sustain themselves and each other by hiding in plain sight: in university nicknames and yearbooks, in the guise of school spirit, in Southern collegiate traditions, and, in IU's case, depictions of the Ku Klux Klan.A significant strength of Monroe's project, in fact, is his archive. Over the course of the book's seven chapters, he examines university nicknames, yearbooks, cheers, and historical figures, demonstrating how such semiotic traditions constitute an archive of racist hegemony. He begins, for example, by tracing the history of The University of Mississippi's nickname, “Ole Miss,” to its appropriation from a term used by enslaved Black people to refer to the wife of a plantation owner. He follows the evolution of the name through yearbooks from 1897 to the present day to illustrate how the term covertly sustains racist attitudes. Reading the circulation and solidification of “Ole Miss” through the lens of Laurie Gries's work on virility, Monroe argues that “the term grew in vitality and consequentiality throughout most of the twentieth century, but it did not transform in any substantial sense. Instead, after being appropriated and going viral in the late nineteenth century, ‘Ole Miss’ became and still remains a force for ideological stabilization and stasis” (37).2 Because the term has not been interrogated by the larger university community, as analysis of the archive demonstrates, year after year its racist connotations remain palpable but easily disregarded by that community.Keeping his archival focus on his own institution, Monroe next examines the tradition of the “Hotty Toddy” cheer at the University of Mississippi, explaining how “indexicality is a semiotic phenomenon always at work” (66). “Indexing makes certain meanings always available,” he writes, “or when viewed from another angle, always unavoidable” (66). Thus, for example, the confederate rhetoric within the “Hotty Toddy” cheer is stabilized with each discursive use, indexing a racist agenda. As Monroe puts it, “When white people at the University of Mississippi hurl a beloved cheer against Black classmates, the cheer itself fuels and performs punitive cultural work and redefines itself in ways that are not easily revised or redacted” (66). This quality of the linguistic markers points to an evolving thread in the book's argument: discourse serves the purposes of emergent identity constitution. Each time members of the community cheer “Hotty Toddy,” they “are not simply reflecting identities previously assumed but are reiterating publicly and socially a collective identity that emerges and strengthens again and again with every interactive performance” (68). Because of indexicality, to utter the nickname “Ole Miss” or to cheer “Hotty Toddy” can serve at once to demonstrate membership in the (white) UM community and to exclude others.Even as performances like the “Hotty Toddy” cheer constitute and strengthen communal identity, Monroe expertly emphasizes a more sinister function: historically indexed acts of racism enable those in positions of power and privilege to deny its systemic nature by arguing that such events are isolated. To illustrate, he analyzes a six-year period (2010–2016) in which a series of racist events and protests took place at the University of Missouri. In recounting these incidences, Monroe highlights how university administrators minimized the string of events as isolated and unreflective of the larger university community's values. Likewise, he returns to the controversy over UM's nickname, “Ole Miss,” to show how confederate rhetoric is “naturalized within discourse communities, turned into common sense, and thereby protected from controversy” (112).Monroe analyzes two additional traditions at the University of Mississippi—Blind Jim Ivey and the flying of the Confederate battle flag—to illustrate that the indexicality of racist events cannot be minimized without symbolic and material consequences. He argues that “[w]ithin a community that reveres tradition, one way to shelter a problematic word or symbol is to place it beneath the protective notion of tradition” (143). When Blind Jim Ivey and flying the Confederate battle flag are synchronized into a false sense of historical continuity with other traditions, rather than the truths of their histories confronted and eliminated, they continue to serve as racist ideological symbols. Confederate rhetoric itself, in fact, becomes a tool for synchronization that elides the power that white people continue to wield in the South and the United States at large. “Rather than providing voice and agency to minorities,” Monroe writes, “‘synchronization elides all kinds of possible voices’; it creates undemocratic absences. It silences” (165).While confederate rhetoric certainly silences, Monroe skillfully uses his archive to reveal the complexity of how such rhetoric sustains itself. By returning to yearbooks as archival records of a university's culture and pointing out how racist images in yearbooks are reflective of a culture that openly encourages racist displays, Monroe is able to argue that institutions scapegoat individuals while, in reality, racist acts have long been sanctioned by the larger community. Thus, individuals who face repercussions today for past racist acts “were not sources of discordant messages of hate and exclusion, but were, instead, conveyors of conformist messages” (169). Even so, he characterizes personal interactions as potential sites of redemption and transformation: “Moments of white realization and conversion,” which occur most effectively at the interpersonal level, “must be multiplied within southern communities if the region's long traditions of confederate rhetoric are to be substantially weakened or eliminated” (183, 184). We must recognize that racism is institutionally sustained while acting on the progressive potential of interpersonal engagement.In the final chapter, Monroe turns the book's focus back on himself. Recognizing his “layered levels of privilege and power” as a “white male, cishet, tenure-track scholar who has held multiple administrative positions at a research university,” he asks: “what will I do with that privilege and power?” (189). Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities is an attempt to begin that difficult and indispensable work. He calls upon other scholars of language to perform similar tasks, arguing that white people have the power to change confederate rhetoric and language scholars should advocate for that (201). Through his archival analysis of Southern collegiate history and traditions, Stephen Monroe offers a valuable model of situated scholarship for rhetoricians hoping to effect cultural change at their own institutions.

Discussion of immigration is never contained to politics about migration, nation, and inclusion/exclusion. Indeed, because immigrants to the United States have frequently been framed as racially different in relation to white Americans, immigration discourse is perpetually saturated by race and racialization. Lisa A. Flores's new monograph, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant, meticulously studies public political framings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans across four historical moments of “crisis,” showing how public discourse racializes Mexicans and their descendants along the lines of deportability, disposability, and illegality.Employing constitutive rhetoric and a lens of racial performativity, Flores examines early- to mid-twentieth century newspapers, periodicals, and government documents. Flores traces how “rhetorical climates of deportability and disposability, or those constellations of discourses, cultural practices, laws, and policies that coalesce to produce and maintain constitutive spaces,” racialize Mexicans and Mexican Americans as “illegal” (9). In doing so, Flores's historical analyses identify the figures of the “illegal alien,” “zoot suiter,” “bracero,” and “wetback” as rhetorical sites through which this racialization is constructed and invoked (4). This analysis also allows Flores to identify the role of what she terms “body logics” and “mobility logics” amid a dichotomy of desire for Mexican labor and disgust of Mexican presence (13, 15).Taken together, Flores's monograph offers multiple contributions to scholarship. First, Flores presents rhetorical and race scholars, as well as the public, with a genealogy of the ways in which Mexican “illegality” came to resonate in American political discourse. Second, Flores draws previously undertheorized linkages between the racialization of Mexicans and Black Americans. Third, Flores offers a compelling case for why we ought to view racialization as a fundamentally rhetorical process. Consonant with Flores's article on the imperative of racial rhetorical criticism, this argument reiterates rhetoric's power as a discipline capable of grappling with the complex process of race-making.1 In Flores's words, if rhetorical regimes of deportability and disposability racialize Mexicans as illegal, then “that constitution is rhetorical, an effect of discourse” and rhetorical analysis is well-equipped to probe racialization (5).Deportable and Disposable's first chapter argues that in the 1930s a “rhetorical climate of deportability” spotlighting the figure of the “illegal alien” set the stage for the racialization of Mexicans into illegality (23). After the passage of the 1929 Undesirable Aliens Act, public governmental and media accounts put forward an image of Mexicans as both inherently inferior in “essence and character” as well as “criminal” (33, 35). This process was buttressed by deportation and repatriation campaigns. Deportation raids associated Mexicans with illegality, since Mexicans were deported for not presenting legal documentation; this even though carrying legal documentation was uncommon given the previously lax enforcement of immigration laws and the relatively recent criminalization of undocumented entry (35). At the same time, Flores also claims that Mexicans “perform[ed] that illegality through repatriation, their allegedly willing departure” (29). Combined with a body logic stating that Mexicans were intrinsically inferior and a mobility logic stating that Mexicans spread in scope as they “move across the space of the nation,” public campaigns and pronouncements made Mexicans an inferior, growing, and mobile criminal threat (33).Chapter 2 centers on the figure of the “zoot suiter.” Flores argues that discursive framings and violent responses to zoot suiters racialized Mexicans and their descendants as threatening and disposable (50). During the 1943 zoot suit riots, Los Angeles media and national news coverage fashioned zoot suiters—typically equated with Mexican American youth—as a sexual, masculine, violent, and unpredictable threat to white women, the city, and the nation (66, 67). Zoot suiters, and therefore Mexicans, then, were transformed into threats through tropes of “Black masculinized violence” (66). One media account, for instance, portrayed sailors as assaulting zoot suiters in retaliation for attacks against white women, who were previously represented in the cultural imaginary as threatened by Black men (69). In this account, the zoot suiter provoked a “justified defense.” Given the “threat” posed by zoot suiters, the sailors’ attacks framed whiteness and its concomitant violence as a source of “hope:” “superior, justified, legitimate, even powerful” (152). And as with “illegal aliens,” zoot suiters were once again marked by body and mobility logics. This, time, though, Flores notes that the identifying bodily marker was sartorial and that the mobility marker was instead the threat of “unpredictable” violence.Chapter 3 turns to the figure of the bracero and its implications for Mexican racialization. Unlike the “illegal alien” and the “zoot suiter,” Flores writes that the 1940s wartime bracero was received positively. Still, two prominent reasons behind the public and media celebration of the bracero resulted in a harmful racialization of Mexicans as deportable and disposable. Braceros were celebrated in part because they were synecdochally “reduced to the abstraction of their labor,” and they were conceptualized as temporary workers that “would go home, voluntarily and willingly” when they were no longer needed (82, 113). Thus, even though the body and mobility logics of the bracero did not frame the Mexican laborers as violent threats—the bracero was a Mexican person “eager to labor” whose movement was “carefully” monitored and controlled—these logics reinscribed Mexicans as inferior, deportable, and disposable (115, 103). And, as Flores points out, this racialization yet again relies on a trope key to a colonial American construction of blackness: in this case, that of the “happy slave” (105).Chapter 4 turns to Flores's final figure, the 1950s “wetback.” Flores argues here that the term “wetback” accrued the meanings associated with the previous figures and presented the nation with a non-white economic and criminal threat (143). Because “wetback” emerged after the earlier terms of “illegal alien, “zoot suiter,” and “bracero” had all produced “existing racializations,” it absorbed those meanings but also “extended and complicated” them (119). To illustrate, like “illegal alien,” “wetback” involved the “intersections in bodily logics . . . with mobility logics” such that “anxiety emerged in . . . the ways in which border rhetorics produce difference that is both on the body and exceeding the body” (142). That is, both the “illegal immigrant” and “wetback” were “criminal” figures who were dangerous because their movement traversed the nation (125, 126). However, Flores explains how “wetback” is not strictly reducible to the “illegal alien.” Like the bracero, “wetbacks” had a reportedly visible “primitivity” that assured the realness of race and racial difference (143).In her conclusion, Flores contemplates the “contemporary discursive departure” from the terminology of the four figures she analyzes and offers three potential interpretations regarding this departure's significance (155). First, Flores writes that humanizing narratives and the terminology of “family” and “children” may prompt sympathetic identification with recent immigrant family units and their children (156). Second, Flores provides the possibility that the “instability” of Mexican racialization is yet another mechanism of the “deportation regime” (156). Stated differently, Mexican racialization has always contained an “ambivalence” between desire and disgust that enables race to be “made and unmade” in the service of capitalism and nationalism (156). Third, Flores offers the disconcerting possibility that the figures of the “illegal alien” and “wetback” are no longer necessary because they have “achieved considerable ontological security” (157). In other words, illegality and deportability may now be “so firmly attached to all Latinx bodies” that the racial performative terminology is no longer necessary (157).Deportable and Disposable is useful for scholars and non-academics alike seeking to understand the historical and rhetorical processes behind Latinx racialization. Flores's attentiveness to language and detailed explication of racialized sociological dynamics can engage scholars as it can also introduce complex ideas to non-experts. For instance, it should not be lost on readers that Flores's monograph makes a compelling case that racializations are functions of discourse and that the discipline of rhetoric therefore can and should theorize historical as well as contemporary racializing discourses. In addition, Flores deserves credit for uncovering the rhetorical mechanisms through which illegality became a salient focus in immigration discourse. Sociologist Edwin F. Ackerman argues that, in much scholarship on the “illegal alien,” there exists an assumption that emphasis on illegality achieved widespread circulation because of the semantic and rhetorical “qualities [of “illegal alien”] as a discursive formation.”2 According to Ackerman, this assumption characterizes work by Lina Newton; Hugh Mehan; Douglass Massey, Jorge Durand, and Noland Malone; and Joseph Nevins.3 However, Flores's work resists this assumption and offers a corrective by demonstrating how public discourse coupled with deportation and repatriation campaigns tied Mexicanness with illegality despite undocumented entry previously being treated as a “technical flaw” rather than a moral failing.4

Abstract This essay considers rhetorical violence and the nature of violence as rhetorical in the language and actions of Patrick Crusius, the shooter charged with attacking a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The language in the Crusius manifesto is the preface to the violence Crusius brought to El Paso resulting in the deaths of twenty-three people: United States citizens, Mexican citizens, and a German national. The essay advances a framework from which to evaluate violence as rhetorical and illuminates the intersection of the shooter's rhetoric and his act of violence.

Abstract In this essay, we attend to the rhetorical and spatio-temporal contours of how the urgency to recognize Black life and aid in struggle is detached from a recognition of the deep structural and ontological nature of antiblackness. We center on two seemingly disparate case studies to unpack these phenomena. First, we look at the state lynching of Breonna Taylor and the multiracial coalition that emerged around #sayhername, and second, we turn to the politics and rhetorics of DEI initiatives on college campuses. Guided by scholars writing on Black life, our project asks how we imagine the physicality of violence in this moment in ways that interrupt common frames of both the physical and the moment. We write at the intersection of two larger rhetorical conversations on racialized violence: stoppage and suffocation, and their respective interests in theories of racialized time. We argue that the variants of anti-Black stoppage and suffocation operate on multiple temporal registers of recognition that perform recognition even as they profit from antiblackness. For rhetorical scholars invested in studies of racial violence, the urgency of the moment should serve as a reminder that possibility lies in the inventional, an inventional that requires a disciplined, intentional, and persistent practice and commitment.

Abstract The nonviolence so heralded in studies of protest has lost its strategic effectiveness; nonviolence has become, not a strategy in the pursuit of justice, but an end in itself, a telos. In order to better conceptualize violence and nonviolence in the contemporary rhetoric of social protest, this essay provides a review and critique of prominent rhetorical studies of protest violence that have placed violent tactics solely in the service of nonviolence. Rhetorical scholars are in a unique position to reconsider and reframe understandings of violence and nonviolence in social protest that persist both in rhetorical studies and in the popular imagination about how social change can and should happen. Violence and nonviolence have too often been divorced from the white supremacist history and context in which they operate, particularly in the United States—creating meaning structures that make the violent protest tactics deployed by non-dominant groups culturally illegible. This essay works to reframe the violent tactics most commonly deployed in the current moment by arguing that the looting, property destruction, and even the direct physical violence that is most often associated with various Leftist and anti-racist activists can work strategically to challenge the police-State's monopoly on violence. Drawing out the implications of these interconnected points, the essay provides a more nuanced understanding of violent tactics that can both help restore the disruptive function of protest rhetoric and better challenge white supremacy in the service of justice.

Part of the RSA series in transdisciplinary rhetoric, this volume brings together the insights of a diverse group of rhetorical scholars exploring the rhetorical dimensions of mathematics. There is no single perspective or approach on display as the reader is presented with studies of the rhetoric of mathematics as well as the use of rhetoric in mathematics and the rhetorical nature of mathematical language. These three prongs structure Edward Schiappa's foundational paper that explicitly informs the work of several contributors to the volume. In addition to these essentially theoretical explorations, the volume is rounded out by prescient applications that reinforce the topicality and importance of the subject matter. But any full review of the collection must begin with Schiappa's analyses.To the casual reader, no subjects could be more disconnected than rhetoric and mathematics. The language of demonstration and proofs measures an attitude of mind that values the apodictic and axiomatic while marginalizing, if not ignoring, the efforts of rhetoric. Chaim Perelman drew attention to this divide in his critique of the Cartesian ideal that detached the self-evident from the human sphere, wherein questions arise that mathematicians would consider foreign to their discipline.1 To consider numbers themselves as a source of evidence is part of what is at stake when mathematics is exposed as a human activity. Schiappa takes what Perelman abandoned and claims it as rhetorical territory. “In What Ways Shall We Describe Mathematics as Rhetorical?” answers the question in fertile ways (as subsequent papers show). The rhetorical turn of recent decades involves the rhetorical nature of mathematics on different fronts: “(1) the rhetoric of mathematics, understood as the persuasive argumentative use of mathematics; (2) rhetoric in mathematics, understood as the argumentative modes of persuasion found in written proofs and arguments throughout the history of mathematics; and (3) mathematical language as rhetorical, a sociolinguistic approach to the language of mathematics,” an approach supported by recent writings of Thomas Kuhn (33). In the first case, mathematics serves as evidence in an argument, increasing the persuasiveness of a claim. The second case refers to the argumentative and stylistic modes of persuasion found in proofs, a feature of the history of mathematics. The final case finds its motivation in the work of rhetoricians like Richard Weaver and Kenneth Burke,2 for whom all symbol use is rhetorical including that of mathematics. Mathematics is a language like others and with its own reasoning patterns operating in the discourse community of mathematicians. Schiappa illustrates each of these rhetorical aspects of mathematics with examples and bolsters their importance with argument, including a detailed discussion of the work of Kuhn. This, before taking a particularly interesting turn into ethnomathematics and the differences in how mathematics is conceived and used across cultures.Four of the papers in the collection make explicit reference to Schiappa's account and draw part of their stimulus from his distinctions; and the other analyses can be read through the lens of one or more of his distinctions, whether the papers are historical in nature or deal with contemporary questions. In the opening paper, and beyond their Introduction, the book's editors, James Wynn and G. Mitchell Reyes, open some of the relevant discussions by exploring relationships between rhetoric and mathematics. They reinforce their belief that the volume offers a timely and coordinated effort to explore the intersections of these two fields. In Schiappa's distinctions they find the appropriate routes into the subject matter. They trace the historical division between the fields, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, whose system of argument offered little overlap between rhetoric and mathematics, through to the uneven attention directed by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (not so much, although the authors’ reading of quasi-logical arguments suggests something) and Burke (quite a bit, with the explicit inclusion of mathematics as a symbolic means of communication). This reinforces the importance of rhetoric in mathematics, and much of Wynn and Reyes’ closing analyses confirm this.Two papers pursue the themes of the volume into the field of economics. Catherine Chaput and Crystal Broch Colombini explore the persuasive role of mathematics at work in the metaphor of the invisible hand. And G. Mitchell Reyes provides a detailed investigation of the 2008 financial crisis through a case study of the mathematical formula known as the Li Gaussian copula. As Reyes writes: “Unraveling this copula reveals the constitutive rhetorical force of mathematical discourse—its capacity to invent, accelerate, and concentrate economic networks” (83). The story is long and far too complex to be detailed here. But the study rewards the reader with an understanding of just how traditional rhetorical modalities (like analogy and argument) connect to the rhetorical modalities of numeracy (like abstraction and commensurability) to generate something new (114).Likewise, Chaput and Colombini draw from the traditions of rhetoric in exploring the metaphor of the invisible hand. Their concept of particular focus is energeia, the power or force that activates potential. One of the theses of the analysis is that “the metaphor of the invisible hand regulates the energetic force of economic arguments” (62), and they track the metaphor accordingly, from the work of Adam Smith to that of John Maynard Keynes, where mathematics gains a more central place in economic discussion, and on to Milton Friedman's “positivist mathematical economics” (66). Through these and further analyses, the paper successfully supports the argument that capitalism's force (energeia) emerges in part from the historical developments of the mathematization of the invisible hand.The last paper of Part 2, by Andrew C. Jones and Nathan Crick, weaves together the mathematical reasoning of Charles Sanders Peirce and the detective fiction of Edgar Allen Poe, specifically the Dupin trilogy that includes “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The discussion identifies similarities between Poe's forensic analyst and Peirce's mathematician, offering a further case of rhetoric in mathematics. Like Burke in the earlier paper, Peirce is a thinker who understands rhetoric as the effective communication of signs—although I would not want to be taken as suggesting similarities between Burke and Peirce beyond this—and this would apply to all signs, including the mathematical. Poe's detective Dupin further illustrates Peirce's method of abduction, and Jones and Crick take us through the steps involved, from hypothesis to confirmation (while also using the wrong turn of the real case behind “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” to show how abductive reasoning can fail).Part 3, on mathematical argument and rhetorical invention, begins with Joseph Little's adoption of Schiappa's taxonomy for his study of the Saturnian account of atomic spectra, the most technical paper in the collection. That said, the historical case study of Hantaro Nagaoka underlying the discussion is quite accessible. The investigation of atomic spectra begins with a puzzle involving different appearances under different conditions. Little addresses responses to this by looking at rhetoric in Nagaok's mathematics, specifically his use of an analogy between the behaviour of material in Saturn's rings and that of atoms in what is known as the Zeeman effect. Little then analyzes the rhetoric of Nagaoka's mathematics, showing that “a mathematical equation can function indexically, symbolically, and qualitatively in a given case without taking on a computational role (164). Finally, he completes the Schiappian analysis with an account of Nagaoka's mathematical language as rhetorical in the debate that ensued between Nagaoka and the mathematical physicist G.A. Schott.Jeanne Fahnestock's paper, “The New Mathematical Arts of Argument: Naturalists Images and Geometric Diagrams,” completes Part 3. The study takes its place among Fahnestock's meticulously wrought accounts of rhetorical thinking in the history of science.3 She plunges the reader immediately into a discussion of the depiction of scallops in Martin Lister's publications of 1695. Illustrated with original drawings from the account, the rhetorical importance of image reproduction combined with geometrical ways of seeing diagrammatically is shown to underlie arguing in sixteenth century natural philosophy to an extent “that is difficult to appreciate from a twenty-first century perspective that separates the mathematical and the verbal” (174). Fahnestock believes these features underlie arguing because, unlike today, grounding all disciplines (including mathematics) was dialectic in the form of a general art of argumentation. The dialectic in question is Philip Melanchthon's Erotemata dialectics, a work which Fahnestock has just translated into English (Fahnestock 2021). This is a dialectic in which mathematics plays a detailed role, and the paper proceeds to provide a history of this work that blends naturally into a deeper history of the argumentative use of diagrams. Her conclusions point to how, through geometrically controlled images. mathematical ways of viewing the natural world issued in today's “mathematically constructed world” (204).The final two essays comprise Part 4, and both deal with the role of mathematics in education. James Wynn's “Accommodating Young Women” explores some of the gender biases in the way mathematics is taught but more specifically provides a lengthy case study of the rhetorical devices used by TV star and math scholar Danica McKellar to turn middle school girls to the study of mathematics through her book Math Doesn't Suck. This involves an interesting application of epideictic rhetoric to a contemporary subject of concern, and the strategies used are both traditional and innovative. Essentially, McKellar strives to modify the image of mathematics, and Wynn's study of her attempts is both fascinating and instructive.The final paper in the collection, Michael Dreher's “Turning Principles of Action into Practice,” studies the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ (NCTM) rhetoric in reforming mathematics education. Two of Schiappa's categories come into play here: rhetoric of mathematics and in mathematics. Built on a historical account of philosophies of mathematics education, and incorporating several pertinent anecdotes, Dreher reveals the successes and failures of the NCTM's persuasive attempts to counter the idea that mathematical ability is inherent in only few and instead promote wide success in students’ mathematical achievement. It is a challenge that continues, and Dreher makes clear the difficulties still to be faced.This is, in sum, an eclectic set of papers gathered around a few common agreements and unified by a deep conviction of the importance of challenging any vestiges of the traditional belief that rhetoric and mathematics occupy different, even competing, spheres. The stand-out paper, testified to by the importance accorded it by many of the other studies in the book, is Schiappa's. One could say that it is worth the price of the book, but that would be unfair to the many other fine pieces of scholarship collected here.The observant reader will also have noted that much of the forgoing discussion refers to rhetoric and mathematics, while the title of the volume speaks of arguing. In fact, the attention to argumentation is pervasive, and this book takes its place among a recent appreciation of the role of mathematics in argumentation,4 while answering the kinds of dismissive critiques we once witnessed from skeptics like Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont,5 who attempted to maintain the rhetoric/mathematics gap by suggesting that those who crossed it (at least from one direction) were unknowledgeable interlopers. It was one of Schiappa's opening insights that “If we replace the word “rhetoric” with “argument” . . . we find considerable recent interest in “mathematical argumentation” as a social and pedagogical practice” (43). And, as I have noted, this is repeatedly corroborated in this highly recommended book.

Abstract On January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol, demanding the head of Vice-President Mike Pence while challenging the results of a fair presidential election. Amid the shock, US journalists—finding few words to describe the severity of the moment—dusted off the old term: “banana republic.” Banana republics are countries whose economy depends on the export of a finite natural resource, like bananas. By design, the ruling elites of banana republics work alongside foreign, multinational corporations to benefit from the republic's human labor. Banana republics are typically governed by a military dictator appointed by a foreign power and elected through illegitimate elections. Notably, dictators ascend to power through military and/or populist violence, like coups d’état and magnicide. Among the reckonings that US Americans encountered the days following the riots was the idea that their country had been relegated beside those so-called “banana republics.” Indeed, the public display of violence brought about by a populist insurrection indicated a failure of the highest rank. In this essay, I ask: “What are the implications of treating violence seriously as a rhetorical event?” I suggest that referring to the United States as a “banana republic” due to populist violence against sacrosanct, democratic institutions requires that US Americans open themselves to the possibility of unexceptionalism, a recognition that—like a medicine—few are willing to stomach. I offer the idea that Donald Trump is the first Latin American president of the United States, and, in turn, that the United States has opened itself to a vulnerability whose damage is unknowable. To do so, I revisit two works by Jacques Derrida: Autoimmunity (2003), an interview where he describes the paradox of post-9/11 counterterrorist violence as autoimmunity, or, how organisms attack themselves in a quasi-suicidal fashion; and Plato's Pharmacy (1968), where he demonstrates an approach to unveiling the unseen ideological traces that haunt particular words. I ask: what is the unseen, terroristic force concealed by the claim that the United States is a banana republic? I explore the Capitol riots as a new “major event” (a televised moment playing on loop and accompanied by specific phrases), where a new type of terrorist uses state-sanctioned freedoms to inflict violence upon itself. I then draw from Chilean poets to provide scholars a lesson on the role of violence in the forming of national identity.

Abstract This essay serves as the introductory essay for this special issue on “The Rhetoric of Violence.” In conversation with the six other essays in this special issue, I suggest that scholars in our field need to focus more explicitly on the rhetorical purposes of physical violence. To support that suggestion, I offer a working definition of how we might conceptualize violence broadly and then distinguish physical violence from two others kinds that rhetorical scholars have been studying for years now—rhetorical violence and structural violence. Distinguishing that first mode of violence as worthy of more of our attention. I then argue that the primary purpose of most physical violence is to affectively and symbolically define and reinforce individual and group identities.

Abstract Definitional work has authorized vaguely articulated, unending, US-led terror wars, constituting amorphous, violent, global terrain, spatially, temporally, and discursively. Mapping the terrain in which this violence is enacted helps us examine re-emergences of violence, including entangling Indigenous communities inside the United States—particularly as they engage acts of protest—within the same colonial machines of terror deployed in the name of war outside those boundaries. This essay maps these circulations as they coalesce at one point: the use of battle grade military equipment and former special operations teams against Indigenous protesters at the Standing Rock #NoDAPL resistance fight in 2016 and 2017. As Native protestors were transformed into jihadists and assaulted at Standing Rock, frames of savage indigeneity permeated boundaries from the terror wars’ battle sites of Pakistan and Afghanistan back to the United States. In this cartography, conditions of possibility for governing global communities are remapped. The inter/national crossroads expand and are weaponized into new necropolitical tools of colonization. Examining this violent landscape and engaging with histories of settler colonialism as well as the spatial, temporal, and discursive power of definition, this essay explores rhetorical cartography as the ground for mapping new rhetorical terrains and inter/national coalition against ongoing materializations of colonialism.

Bilateral mentorships in rhetoric and composition can persist beyond formalized, institutional arrangements in ways that continue to (re)shape lives in the profession. Mediated discourse theory provides a lens through which to describe practices of enduring mentorships in terms of ways they might advance cross-gender and cross-generational understanding.

This article argues that conceptions of public memory, as constructed, produced, and enacted in spaces such as a university campus, can be strategically reconceived for social justice ends by mapping student-created rhetorical audio tour compositions to physical locations around that place.

This assignment, designed for a graduate certificate program in rhetoric and composition, asks students to create a writing prompt for an audience of their choice and to accompany it with a reflective letter written to a stakeholder of their choice. To prepare, students first read scholarship on college writing assignments: what kinds students perceive as meaningful, what kinds are most typical, and what kinds are encouraged in a writing-across-the-curriculum approach. They then consider what elements of this research they can bring into their own context, both in terms of teaching (via the prompt) and in terms of sharing their learning with a relevant stakeholder (via the reflective letter, usually written to an administrator, a colleague, or a student). By allowing students to expressly connect course content to their own contexts in two genres, this assignment enacts features of the scholarship students read. While personalizing learning is valuable in any context, it is especially so in a graduate certificate program, because this increasingly common site of instruction serves students with diverse educational and professional histories and future goals.

This assignment aims to help nascent scholars break into print and develop scholarly connections between their own areas of interest and the subfield of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies (RC&WS). Drawing on advice from Ballif et al. (2008), students in my graduate seminar write a publication quality book review of a recently published monograph in RC&WS. After a series of priming activities, students engage in a structured peer review that follows guidelines I developed as book review editor at Composition Studies.

Learning management systems (LMSs) are a common software many higher education institutions rely on to facilitate online, hybrid, and web-enhanced courses. However, while our students use the LMS for online learning, less often do they study the LMS as a cultural artifact that shapes how learning happens. This assignment prepares first-year writing students to disrupt the perceived neutrality of LMSs. Students study the LMS and grapple with issues related to technology, power dynamics, audience, and purpose that are foundational to their reading and writing of other texts. Before engaging in this project, students practice conducting rhetorical analysis and inquiry research that prepare them for the kinds of thinking and questioning required for the final LMS project. The final project for the course is a three-part LMS project that culminates in a digital presentation.

This article introduces a flexible and adaptable Map Composition assignment to promote cartographic literacy. With applications to composition and writing across the curriculum, this assignment promotes students’ awareness of the rhetorical nature of maps, which is important as maps inform and influence public discourse on wide-ranging issues. Student work shows how composing a map can lead them toward improved rhetorical awareness, cartographic literacy, and engagement with place-based civic issues. The article acknowledges limitations of teaching maps in writing classes and concludes with discussion of how this assignment can be adapted to a range of courses to promote cartographic literacy in support of broader literacies and civic engagement.

Communicative acts that deliberately disrupt how an audience understands them as either fiction or nonfiction are well-known phenomena. Still, the rhetoric of such disruptions has yet to be systematically investigated. This essay treats the experience of such disruptions as a distinct form of reflexivity, conceptualizing it as metanoic reflexivity. Drawing on recent work on fictionality theory and on theories of metanoia, the essay uses this concept to describe the reading effect that is produced when a rhetor uses nonconventional forms of fictionality to disrupt how an audience ascribes relevance to a communicative act. Through readings of Democratic campaign rhetoric from the US presidential election of 2020, the essay directs attention to how this reflexivity has moved from artistic practices to the communicative mainstream, investigates how it operates, and discusses its potential deliberative ramifications.

This essay explores the figure of “liberal tears” as a manifestation of contemporary sadistic conservative discourse in the United States. Sadistic rhetoric betrays an underlying structure of affect where hate and desire coincide. Its primary work is to enforce separation between sadistic subjects and fantasy objects that appeal to them in ways that must be disavowed for their identities to remain coherent. The liberal other is a figure both promising and threatening overwhelming enjoyment. Because of the ways in which it relies on separation and identification to generate enjoyment for its subjects, strategies like satire and empathy are insufficient to respond to sadistic conservative discourses, but rhetoric’s capacity to destabilize identities and undermine certainty remain promising contributions to engaged scholarship.

Rhetorical studies of water-related controversies highlight multiple interpretations of water at stake. Yet nearly every dispute over water involves not just contested meanings but contested ontologies. This essay examines water ontologies in a controversy over water wells in Ontario, Canada, which residents claim were affected by pile driving for wind turbine installation. Drawing on Annemarie Mol’s theory of multiple ontologies and the Bakhtinian term, chronotope, I show how different water ontologies emerge from spatiotemporal orientations and shift how expertise is enacted. Common water ontologies, water-as-resource and water-as-chemical-entity, enshrine white settlers as experts, despite their different stances on the issue in question. Municipal leaders, corporate representatives, and community members enacted water as an entity knowable to technoscience and exploitable by humans. An alternative ontology introduced by First Nations leaders, water-as-lifeblood, emphasizes water as a sacred, life-giving force. Speakers authorize themselves as experts by enacting water differently.

In this essay I turn to the world-renowned book and film The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power and Profit by Joel Bakan in order to conceptualize and critique what I label the rhetoric of corporate psychopathy. Doing so, I advance two interrelated claims: first, that neoliberalism’s rhetorical force is derived primarily from its extension and alteration of liberal notions of possessive individualism into a dispositif of corporate personhood. Second, I claim that Bakan’s argument that corporations are psychopaths—and his larger rhetoric of corporate psychopathy—ultimately reinscribes rather than challenges the disciplinary functions of liberal discourse in interesting ways. Thus, while the rhetoric of corporate psychopathy is an easily digestible line of argument that offers a ready-made case against corporate personhood and rights it is an argument against corporate personhood that those who oppose corporate power ought to reconsider.

As a longstanding area of practice and inquiry in rhetorical scholarship, the role of the example in rhetorical discourse has undergone its share of debates, discussions, and important advancements. One important topic of discussion on these matters involves the role of the example in providing either strategic ambiguity or experiential clarity. Through an analysis of William James’s deployment of a pragmatic rhetoric of exemplary figures in The Varieties of Religious Experience, this essay advances a view of the example as a resource for transforming the ambiguous consequences of inner ideals into pragmatic and empowered social action. In a chapter titled “The Value of Saintliness,” James invokes a cadre of saintly figures as exemplars in the attempt to cultivate democratic individuality and inspire social change efforts through the conduct of spiritual meliorism. This essay offers expanded conceptions of exemplarity and pragmatist rhetoric in contexts concerning democracy and social justice.

In Phaedrus, Plato invokes a mythic exemplum concerning the Egyptian deity Thoth. Though often interpreted as an overt critique of writing, this argument posits Thoth is offered analogically to contrast Plato's rhetorical epistemology with that of the ancient Egyptians. To do so, this argument addresses why a mythic Egyptian figure might be so significant to Plato in the 4th Century B.C. Greece, whose culture already had multiple gods and cultural heroes to whom the invention of writing is attributed, when the episode in Phaedrus is axiomatically described as a critique of writing. Because Plato may have had some degree of firsthand knowledge of Egyptian traditions it explores those traditions personified in the figure of Thoth, which should be examined as an analogical device advised by Egyptian rhetorical epistemology. A closer examination of the comparative rhetorical epistemological perspective not only illuminates Thoth's appearance in Phaedrus but also the Egyptian rhetorical-epistemic tradition. Thoth's role as epistemic mediator between humans and truth, in the broadest terms, was to act as psychopomp who moves both between humanity and the arrival at knowledge that prefigures rhetorical action.

Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells; Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book by Pauline Reid; The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by David Wiles Susan Wells. Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge. RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 211 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08467-1.Pauline Reid. Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 283 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0069-6.David Wiles. The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-49887-6. Timothy Barr Timothy Barr Northeastern University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (3): 325–330. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.325 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Timothy Barr; Review: Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells; Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book by Pauline Reid; The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by David Wiles. Rhetorica 1 August 2022; 40 (3): 325–330. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.325 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.

Hugh Latimer's 1548 “Sermon of the Plough” is well-known as an example of early English evangelical rhetoric. However, the sermon has often been considered as an effect of, rather than a participant in, evangelical theology. This article reads Latimer's rhetoric, especially his creation of a persona, as fully theological, using Melanchthon's valorization of rhetoric over logic as a model. Latimer's sermon produces an authority that is not limited to Latimer himself, but serves as a reformation of Catholic notions of the authoritative role of the Church, a role based upon the rhetorically effective presentation of the Bible.

Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature, by Carol A. Newsom Carol A. Newsom. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 130. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. 382 pp. ISBN 978-3-16-157723-9. Davida Charney Davida Charney University of Texas at Austin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (3): 322–324. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.322 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Davida Charney; Review: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature, by Carol A. Newsom. Rhetorica 1 August 2022; 40 (3): 322–324. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.322 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.

Materials compositions, such as textiles, tell stories and act as data carriers. They persist in speaking even as their makers are erased or lost. When information about a maker ceases to be available, applying principles of storytelling and rhetoric facilitates a possible re–reading of a material composition as a process of recentering the human maker.

This paper offers an analysis of the landmark 1961 speech given by the Federal Communications Commission chairman, Newton N. Minow (born 1926). It includes a discussion of the rhetorical situation in which the oration was delivered, review of the persuasive tactics employed by the orator and the goals he attempted to achieve, as well as assessment of the degree to which his effort was successful. The speech is analyzed against the political background of the early days of the Kennedy administration, marked by social optimism and rapid technological progress. Widely regarded as the most significant speech on television in the history of American rhetoric, Minow’s oration was delivered during turbulent times for the U.S. media and has indeed led to far-reaching changes in the nation’s broadcasting environment, including the establishment of the system of public media in the second half of the 1960s. The landmark speech caused a great deal of stir in the national consciousness as well, becoming a part of the popular culture of the decade, with the words “vast wasteland” still remembered today.

The article combines methods pertaining to Rhetorical Genre Studies and Discourse-Historical Approach in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of Krzysztof Bosak’s nomination acceptance speech which he delivered during the 2020 Confederation presidential primaries. The discussed genre of political speech is rarely realized in European contexts. Given various differences between the American and the Polish political systems, Bosak did not follow every pattern of the standard variant of the genre. Rather his speech appears to be more similar to a nomination acceptance speech of a third-party candidate. Overall, Bosak emerged as the leader of a divided and heterogeneous party, which was not given much attention by mainstream media. The paper investigates how these factors contributed to the structure and content of the speech. Moreover, recent decades have seen a rapid rise in significance of (far) right-wing movements in Europe. As Confederation is a relatively new political formation, there is a gap in research regarding the properties of its discourse. Thus, the present paper compares the discourse of the coalition with practices of politics of fear (Wodak, 2021).

The aim of this article is to provide an analytical introduction upon the ways of representation of transgender minority in new media. Through rhetorical analysis of selected content related to two high-profile transgender YouTubers, we identified five building blocks of given discourse: reduction of a structural problem to a personal one, reduction of a person’s reality to feelings, tokenization, psychiatrization of transgender identity, and ingroup gatekeeping.

This article argues that through embodied presentations and the multimodal, international and intercultural affordances of YouTube, the rhetoric of Black hair care YouTubers is tactical TPC toward social justices. We note the interactive comments section as a place for technical communicators to identify and redress issues in normative instructional discourse. This scholarship extends TPC beyond “how to do it” and “how I do it” toward “how we must view it in order to do it.’

Black Technical and Professional Communication is defined as ”practices that are centered around Black community, culture, and rhetorical practices that are inherent in the Black lived experience. Black TPC is reflective of the cultural, economic, social, and political experiences of Black people across the Diaspora” (Black TPC Taskforce). This special issue emphasizes the importance of valuing Black TPC as fundamental to developing a comprehensive understanding of the technical and professional communication.

ABSTRACTThis article examines how 14 Black professional communicators publicly share their stories about their career change into software development and other positions in the tech industry. Findings suggest that Black readers looking to shift into the tech field benefit from emotional experiences with professional development resources as they make their strategic career pivots. Black technical joy describes this rhetorical practice to find comfort in and celebration of the strategic ways Black people approach technical communication.KEYWORDS: Computer science / programmingracial studies / ethnic studies / cultural studiesblack technical joyblack rhetoricqualitative methodsworkplace studies / professional practice AcknowledgmentsMany thanks to Christopher Castillo and Jason Tham for their comments on the first draft of my proposal to this special issue. Your disciplinary perspectives from literacy studies and technical and professional communication helped me understand how to ground my research within the expectations of Technical Communication Quarterly readers. Thank you anonymous peer reviewers for your sharp observations on how this article could strengthen its argument and highlight the most salient themes in my analysis. And thanks to the wonderful editors of this special issue for their mentorship and guiding revision.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Black professionals in this article represent the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Kenya. I use Black to encompass these nationalities.2. Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison (Citation2016) argue that "color-blind racism" points out the problem of refusing to acknowledge race while associating disability with ignorance and passivity. They suggest that color-evasiveness "allows for both comprehensively situating the conceptualization and critique of color-blindness as well as thoughtfully considering how to move the underlying ideology forward expansively" (p. 158).3. For this study, I referred to McKee and Porter (Citation2008) and Quinton and Reynolds (Citation2018) for advice on the ethics of doing my Internet research study. Rather than determining if online content is private or public, "we need to think about the sensitivity of the subject we might be researching as well as the vulnerability of the research participants" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159) to decide if informed consent is required. University institutional review boards (IRB) may not have clear guidance on how to assess the ethics and harm of Internet research (My university determined my study was exempt from further review because I was not speaking directly to the authors.). In response to limited guidance or policy from IRB, scholars should make an empathetic, humanizing "probable judgment" (McKee & Porter, Citation2008, p. 725) and reflect if "it's reasonable to assume that [the authors] desire their content to be disseminated and also commented upon, which includes the analysis of their content as a data resource for research" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159).4. Agile is an incremental and iterative collaborative approach to project management that emphasizes teams' quickly delivering versions of a product or service to clients in a two-week sprint to receive feedback. Teams can then implement desired changes to the product or service in another two-week sprint. This process of iterative discovery helps teams reduce risks and ensure the product adapts to new requirements. Agile was first developed in software development in 2001 and has since been implemented in other industries.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAntonio ByrdAntonio Byrd is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he teaches courses in professional and technical communication, multimodal composition, and Black/African American literacy. He uses qualitative research and critical race studies to understand how Black adults learn and use computer programming to address racial inequality in their communities. Byrd's work has previously appeared in College Composition and Communication and Literacy in Composition Studies. He is the recipient of the 2021 Richard Braddock Award for Best Research Article in the College Composition and Communication journal.

Throughout Cherríe Moraga’s publications (1979 to present), we see her writings pivot from expressions of cohesive oneness to articulations of generative fragmentation. Moraga’s emerged attention to metaphorical woundedness participates in Chicanx rhetorics of fragmentation, which undermines colonial fictions that the self is whole and unified. Such rhetoric emphasizes potentials of semi-ness and creative energy of shame as strategies to confront Chicanx realities, and to engage contemporary theories of decolonialism, biopower, and embodied language. Moraga’s writings provide a lens through which we investigate how confirmation and ownership of rhetorics of fragmentation might nurture rhetorical homelands, particularly for Chicanx student writers.

This article participates in contemporary conversations about ethos by extending conceptions of ethos as dwelling places” or ecologies” to ethos as hospitality. Such extension involves attending to how three recent decolonial cookbook authors construct stable textual identities and ethos using rhetorics of healing, constitutive rhetoric, and utopian rhetoric. The cookbooks under analysis–Afro-Vegan by Bryant Terry (2014), Decolonize Your Diet by Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel (2015), and The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman (2017)–offer readers knowledge of African American, Mesoamerican, and Native American ancestral foodways and encourage culturally-affiliated readers to embrace these foodways in order to reclaim their communities' physical and spiritual health. The authors demonstrate a complex engagement with ethos as they reconstitute the cultural identity of their primary audiences both literally, through the consumption of food as an act rooted in the body, and figuratively, through the ways food connects us to others.

This paper examines Aeschines’s speech Against Timarchus to offer frameworks for rhetoric to examine the historical particularities of sex work. Drawing on feminist and queer rhetorics, this paper rereads Against Timarchus as well as scholarly receptions of the speech to discuss how Timarchus has been positioned outside definitions of rhetoric in ways that highlight the instability of definitions of rhetoric and state power. This paper argues that kakos and atimia are useful concepts for rhetorical historiographers for examining sex work in classical Athens, as well as interrogating the power structures upon which a given definition of rhetoric is derived from.

This article argues for the importance of British food writer Elizabeth David (1913-1992) in questioning the centrality of power in feminist rhetorical studies and thereby furthering our capacity to understand the diversity of conservative women and their rhetorical projects. The article analyzes David's pathos in her landmark volume of gastronomical essays, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (1986), and shows how this rhetoric develops a conservative "political culture" which privileges human motivations within food cultures that move beyond the negotiation of power.

The climate change crisis is a matter of increasing concern to rhetoric and composition. Some scholars in the discipline, specifically on the new materialist turn, have engaged and accounted for the damage through methodologies of ontological entanglement and relationality. The potential of ontological accounts to facilitate global activism faces the obstacle of scalar derangement. By acting as Foucauldian specific intellectuals, rhetoric and composition scholars may employ new materialist ontological projects to bridge the gap between local accounts of climatological damage and a global, pluralist assemblage of climate activists.

In this study, we investigated audience awareness characteristics in elementary school students’ texts. To achieve this goal, we used a cross-sectional study design and sampled texts from 90 students in grades 1–3 (N = 270). These texts formed a corpus that was qualitatively analyzed by the research team. We used descriptive statistics to identify audience awareness patterns. Based on previous research, we expected to find considerable variation within and between grades. Therefore, we posed the following two research questions: (1) What characterizes audience awareness within grades 1–3? and (2) How does audience awareness develop between grades 1–3? We found that students used various rhetorical moves oriented toward the audience, such as greetings and closings, meta-text, explanations, and justifications. The results indicated that the students exhibited several characteristics related to audience awareness in all three grades. However, the variation within the grades was significant, while the variation between the grades was less pronounced.

As one kind of designed communication, technical communication is created for readers we assume use the content for some situated purpose. Understanding users and their situations to be varied, communicators rely on simplified models of both to create usable content. In many cases, this approach works, but in some commercial sectors, companies are recognizing a need to engage with users directly and to include them in the production of communication. Including users in the production of communication may ease the burden of communicating in ways that are sufficiently detailed, accurate, inclusive, localized, and timely, but these ventures also create challenges of collaboration that direct attention to how users are situated in infrastructures that allow them to act as effective readers and collaborators. This article presents a model of users, situating them amid infrastructures that extend their ability to take rhetorical action. The authors explain and demonstrate a heuristic for analyzing infrastructure as an extension of a user's "mediated potential" for rhetorical action.

Despite their central importance to a variety of endeavors and despite widespread use in both industry and academia, version control systems (software for tracking versions of files) have not been extensively studied in fields related to technical communication, rhetoric, and communication design. Git, by far the most dominant version control system today, is largely absent. This study theorizes Git as boundary infrastructure---infrastructure used to facilitate collaboration across disciplines and domains. The unique characteristics of boundary infrastructure explain how something as prominent as Git can be so invisible and help identify dangers posed by boundary infrastructure. Drawing on modes of resistance developed in feminist rhetorics, this article concludes with suggestions to ameliorate the negatives effects such infrastructure might have on collaborative knowledge work.

As artificial intelligence (AI) automates technical and dialogic processes, technical communicators produce value through articulating complex problems, facilitating new forms of participation, and managing user-generated content via experience architecture. Automated and intelligent agents are least able to grasp the context of experiences, requiring human input/feedback for maximum performance. The examples we trace both prepare communities to embrace AI as part of the available information infrastructure and create an automated infrastructure of intelligent augmented action. Following Star's anthropological investigation of infrastructure, we analyze organizational examples where rhetoric entangles AI, automation, generative design, additive manufacturing, gift labor, and assembly lines.

In this article, I focus on two competing technical communication discourses used to represent the biometric technology Ghana adopted in 2012 and subsequent elections to demonstrate how communication about technology could potentially marginalize local, nondominant knowledge systems whereas it privileges global, dominant knowledge systems. Representation of the biometric technology, therefore, reflects ways that technical communication can become complicit in silencing, excluding, and marginalizing local voices. I call attention to how communication that focuses on dominant narratives obscures and delegitimizes the knowledge of disenfranchised and less privileged groups.

This article presents an ethnographic study on the user experience (UX) design of the photo- and video-editing apps of millennial and Generation Z participants from different cultural groups. The case study calls attention to the implications of rhetorical misrepresentations of reality that photo- and video-editing apps afford and encourages future large-scale studies on the negative psychological and behavioral impacts such apps can have on users’ psychology, behaviors, and well-being. The authors use frameworks in virtue ethics to argue that despite slight variations, photo and video app UX has ethical implications that can negatively impact young adult users. For example, the study suggests that the photo and video app features tend to subvert the traditional Chinese virtues of modesty, honesty, and the middle way and that hyperbolic and playful designs can cause addictive behaviors.

The data article is a digital genre that has emerged in response to new exigencies, namely, to make data more transparent and research processes more trustable and reproducible. Following White’s framework of intersubjective stance, this article draws upon statistical tools and collocational and discourse analyses to examine the linguistic resources deployed by authors to respond to both exigencies. The results show a high presence of dialogically contractive resources (above all, passive constructions and, only in one data article section, inanimate subjects) by which authors do not fully engage with dialogic alternatives (heteroglossic disengagement). Dialogically expansive resources (anticipatory it-subjects and we-pronouns) are extremely rare, corroborating that the authors’ stance is neither monoglossic (undialogized) nor heteroglossically engaged. Further, the discourse functions and ensuing pragmatic effects of the prevailing intersubjective stance resources, significantly different between and among the data article sections, including their associated abstracts, reveal the construal of very distinct dialogic spaces for writer-reader interaction within this article type. Such intra-generic variation may be explained by the social (and rhetorical) action that the genre fulfills, namely, to describe and highlight the value of the research data.

Review Essay of the following RHM Books: Lawrence, Heidi Yoston. (2020). Vaccine rhetorics. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press. pp. 172. Hardcover $99.95.    Pender, Kelly. (2018). Being at genetic risk: Toward a rhetoric of care. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 184. Hardcover $69.95.     Rowland, Allison L. (2020). Zoetropes and the politics of humanhood. Columbus: OH: The Ohio State University Press. pp. 190. Hardcover $99.95.

Extensive evidence demonstrates that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s multimedia anti-smoking campaign, Tips from Former Smokers, is an effective public health measure. In this essay, I explain the rhetorical appeals utilized in the campaign that contribute to its resonance, arguing that the campaign invokes corporeal anxiety, an emotion that emerges from societal aversion to disability. These appeals to corporeal anxiety operate as enthymemes by relying upon an unstated premise: that disability is negative and ought to be avoided to preserve one’s normalcy. This analysis treats the campaign messages as a form of bodily rhetoric and visual argument, arguing that the campaign deters smoking through graphic bodily imagery and narratives of lost normalcy that conceptualize disability as tragedy or deficit. I conclude that the success of the campaign comes at the expense of perpetuating stigma against people with disabilities.