“Visualizing Street Harassment” is a digital map project prompted by the question of how and where activists have repurposed the format and characteristics of the YouTube video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” to build public conversations about street harassment and to critique the public rhetoric surrounding it. The project was developed… Continue reading Visualizing Street Harassment: Mapping the ’10 Hours of Walking’ Street Harassment Meme by Rebecca Hayes

This article enacts the transgenre resources of the personal academic essay to examine the politics of gender and questions of privilege across academic and public spheres. The author interweaves prose, poetry, criticism, and argument to interrogate the practice of transcultural citizenship and the transdisciplinary project of Writing Across Communities. Link to PDF

If rhetoric and composition is taking a “public turn,” Frank Farmer cautions, let’s be sure that the “public” we imagine actually exists. Farmer examines what a public is—or, more precisely, what publics and counterpublics are. His close examination of the punk zines and his new term, citizen bricoleur, highlight the creative ingenuity of counterpublics, and… Continue reading Review: After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics and the Citizen Bricoleur by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder

In this article I examine the nature of reciprocity and representation when mental illness is associated with the researcher and/or participant. Reciprocity has been a central concept of activist research methodology, which explores how academic knowledge can be used in the public sphere. Ellen Cushman defines reciprocity as “an open and conscious negotiation of the… Continue reading Dangerous Reciprocity: Creating a Madness Narrative Research Methodology by Cynthia Fields

We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment group: graduate instructors. We describe the civic engagement program we participated in as graduate student teachers, the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program, and we illustrate how our early experiences with community-based pedagogies led to formative and long-term impacts on our approaches to… Continue reading Mad Women on Display: Practices of Public Rhetoric at the Glore Psychiatric Museum by Lauren Obermark & Madaline Walter

On July 14, 2013, a group of education activists in Southern California held the 2nd annual Raza Studies Now Conference at Santa Monica College and presented a draft of the Plan de Los Angeles (PLA), a manifesto for spreading Ethnic Studies in local high schools. Link to PDF

The idea of public rhetoric, the first term in this journal’s new subtitle, might seem self-evident. The language of political campaigning and party platforms, the arguments that formulate (or justify) policies and institutional practices, the calls for voter participation — all of this surely is what we might think of as public rhetoric writ large.… Continue reading Editor’s Introduction: Public Rhetoric and Activist Documentary by Diana George & Diane Shoos

Regular Reflections readers will notice, among other things, a change in the journal’s subtitle. We are now “A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning,” having shifted from “A Journal of Writing, Service Learning and Community Literacy.” Title changes – even subtitle changes – are no small things, so we begin with a… Continue reading Editors’ Introduction by Diana George, Cristina Kirklighter, & Paula Mathieu

Much of the scholarship that explores the democratizing potential of the Internet begins with an assumption that ideal public discourse will appear as on-line deliberation; it seeks out discussion forums on issues-based and community-oriented websites to examine whether strangers come together in these spaces to deliberate about public concerns. This article questions the focus on… Continue reading Public 2.0. Social Networking, Nonprofits, and the Rhetorical Work of Public Making by Phyllis Ryder

This article argues that community publishing initiatives might extend the scope and impact of their work by critically examining the ways in which technology influences the production and circulation of their [counter]public discourse. Building upon the work of Paula Mathieu, the author analyzes the material and discursive complexities of the “street paper” movement as a… Continue reading Global Street papers and Homeless [Counter] publics: Rethinking the Technologies of Community Publishing by Erin Anderson

“We is people” reverberates throughout Tropic Tendencies as Kevin Browne illuminates how Caribbean people acknowledge the past but do not remain there. For those of us who are people of color and/or teach marginalized communities, this idea of acknowledging our past but not remaining there is a powerful one. For Browne, public rhetoric is central to… Continue reading Review: Kevin A. Browne. Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean, reviewed by Romeo García

This essay focuses on the pedagogical implications of teaching Atatürk’s “Address to the Youth” for a more inclusive and diverse understanding of global rhetorics in the U.S. writing classroom. We propose that the public work of rhetorical instruction includes helping students develop as global citizen leaders by allowing them to explore and critically become aware… Continue reading The Pedagogical Implications of Teaching Atatürk’s “Address to the Youth” for Global Public Rhetorics and Civic Action in the U.S. Writing Classroom by Elif Guler & Iklim Goksle

Book Review| March 01 2019 Rhetoric, Humor, and the Public Sphere: From Socrates to Stephen Colbert Rhetoric, Humor, and the Public Sphere: From Socrates to Stephen Colbert. By Elizabeth Benacka. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017; pp. ix + 165. $80.00 cloth. Michael Phillips-Anderson Michael Phillips-Anderson Monmouth University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2019) 22 (1): 153–155. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.1.0153 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Phillips-Anderson; Rhetoric, Humor, and the Public Sphere: From Socrates to Stephen Colbert. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2019; 22 (1): 153–155. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.1.0153 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the formal dimensions of “post-truth” as a discourse. Specifically, I read post-truth as symptom, not as an “era” or “world.” The emergence of this symptom, the post-truth signifier, directs our attention to an anxiety regarding the desire for truth, rather than its presence or absence in public discourse. Based on Jacques Lacan's theory of discourse in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, I argue that the emergence of the term “post-truth” in the popular vernacular epitomizes a masculinized discourse of hysteria. To outline the formal features of post-truth discourse, I draw upon an early use of the term “post-truth” in a 1992 article of the Nation written by screenwriter and playwright Steve Tesich. The article concludes by consulting the critical psychoanalytic writings of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray to better specify the uniquely masculine form of post-truth hysteria and its implications for public discourse.

Book Review| September 01 2018 Representing Ebola: Culture, Law, and Public Discourse about the 2013–2015 West African Ebola Outbreak Representing Ebola: Culture, Law, and Public Discourse about the 2013–2015 West African Ebola Outbreak. By Marouf A. Hasian Jr. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickson University Press, 2016; pp. v + 251. $85.00 cloth. Skye de Saint Felix Skye de Saint Felix University of Arkansas–Fayetteville Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (3): 551–554. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.3.0551 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Skye de Saint Felix; Representing Ebola: Culture, Law, and Public Discourse about the 2013–2015 West African Ebola Outbreak. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2018; 21 (3): 551–554. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.3.0551 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACTJacques Rancière's account of the political demonstration of equality makes an important contribution to long-standing conceptualizations of democracy as occurring apart from state institutions. Rancière's performative account of democracy, however, recognizes the impurity of political language used within state institutions as well as in democratic events. Rancière's polemics against “metapolitical” theories of social existence and the state take issue with how such forms of philosophy assume the primacy of their own capacity to explain political language. Community rights ordinances (CROs) demonstrate how conceptualizing shared political language as doxa reveals the possibility that a metapolitical rhetorical style can occur within Rancière's method of equality. CROs also demonstrate how the method of equality can operate in the context of democratic philosophizing.

Coedited by Wendy Hinshaw and Tobi Jacobi In recent years “mass incarceration” has become part of our national vocabulary, indicating a growing awareness about the cost (in lives and dollars) of maintaining the world’s largest prison population. And yet even as public discourses increasingly criticize the criminal justice system, we maintain the fiction of “crime… Continue reading Call for Submissions: Special Issue “Prison Writing, Literacies, and Communities” (Closed)

Abstract During the World War II era, a time of civilizational uncertainty, globalism emerged as a rhetorical alternative both to the isolationism predominant before the war and to the Cold War bipolarity that would replace it. A primary advocate for globalism was Wendell Willkie, the failed 1940 Republican presidential candidate who went on to cooperate with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving as his former rival’s proxy and personal representative in two famous overseas trips. While scholarship in rhetorical studies has accounted for the Roosevelt presidency and other forces shaping public discourse during the war and early Cold War, it has generally overlooked the importance of Willkie’s globalism in providing a bipartisan vocabulary with which Americans could describe a postwar peace sustained by interpersonal economics of free trade, global human rights, and burgeoning domestic civil rights. Using Willkie’s 1943 book One World as well as materials from his archives at Indiana University, this essay reads a popular figure and his influential ideas back into our historical narrative, demonstrating how he established what Kenneth Burke termed identification through the use of the related rhetorical strategies of proximity, presence, and ethos, inviting ordinary Americans to imagine a globally interdependent postwar peace.

Book Review| June 01 2018 Political Rhetoric Political Rhetoric. By Mary E. Stuckey. The Presidential Briefings Series. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015; pp. xxxiii + 93. $79.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury Wabash College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (2): 371–374. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.2.0371 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury; Political Rhetoric. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2018; 21 (2): 371–374. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.2.0371 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Coeditors Laurie Grobman and Deborah Mutnick seek submissions for the Fall 2018 volume of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning. Continuing a nearly 20-year history of leading writing and rhetoric’s scholarly and theoretical study of service learning, public rhetoric, community writing, civic writing, and community literacy, the journal publishes wide-ranging… Continue reading Call for Submissions Fall 2018 (Closed)

Abstract The execution of captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh in February 2015 by Daesh (or ISIS) forces generated large public outcry in Jordan and thereby presented the regime of King Abdullah II with a moment of danger. In response to this rhetorical situation, the Abdullah regime engaged in rhetorics of enemyship based on appeals to religious orthodoxy, authoritarian ideology, and apocalyptic language. By examining these texts, this essay seeks to draw from contemporary rhetorical scholarship on terrorism, enemyship, and mass violence to expand the heuristic scope of the rhetoric of enemyship to include political rhetoric situated outside democratic contexts.

“Grindr has the potentiality of being such a market-mediated counterpublic, where queers can meet in virtual space, encountering difference and developing new intimacies with each other, ones that play out both through the app and in physical space.”

ABSTRACT Walter Benjamin's warning against unphilosophical “astonishment that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible” has new urgency in the face of real estate developer and reality-show host Donald Trump's surprise victory in the presidential election of 2016. Philosopher, sociologist, and cultural theorist Georg Simmel's 1900 magnum opus, the Philosophy of Money, provides valuable orientation at a moment when the expectation that public discourse must be oriented by norms of truth and accuracy is under siege—not least by those who ascended to power openly denigrating the value of expertise and the specialized knowledge long regarded as essential to modern government. Trump has an instinctive grasp of Simmel's decisive insight that “money is the strongest and most immediate symbol” of the cynical truism that “the only absolute is the relativity of things.” Situating philosophy at the limits of disciplinary ways of knowing, the Philosophy of Money develops a modernist, performative strategy of thought that turns relativity into a philosophical resource. It can help us to counter the dissolution of the ideal of veracity in an era of absolutized marketing by disentangling thought from narratives of rational progress that obscure its opposite and interrogating the limitations of the professionalized ordering of knowledge practices in which expertise continues to be produced and maintained. Simmel's strategy for embracing the fragmentation, multiplicity, and uncertainty of human experience may thereby help us address the complexity and ambiguity of a historical situation growing increasingly surreal as techno-scientific progress goes hand in hand with post-truth politics.

“Our new issue features articles on such a range of research, it’s hard to write about them all at once. Articles here focus on pedagogy, students’ rights, investigations of public rhetorics, and the political and social impact of rhetorical choices.”

This essay discusses the affordances of using an affect-based approach to 9/11 discourses that facilitates teaching civic engagement. Representations and rhetoric about 9/11 are found in a range of modes—film, documentary, literature, news coverage, and official government documents. Asking students to analyze these representations using a variety of rhetorical strategies highlights the way that various sources of (competing) knowledge about the national tragedy disrupt the notion that there is an accepted, uniform way of understanding this event. Furthermore, this approach demonstrates how varied sources of meaning making construct our public sphere.

AbstractFoundational theories of the public sphere prioritize civic speech while distrusting forms of visuality. As a corrective to this model of the public sphere, rhetorical theorists have recently emphasized visuality as a constitutive mode of contemporary public culture, but they nevertheless tend to prioritize the civic actor over the civic spectator. A productive alternative would begin to distinguish an emerging shift from “deliberative publicity” to “photographic publicity.” The bourgeois public sphere innovated verbal communicative practices that produced a specifically deliberative publicity, enabling one resolution to the core political problems of an earlier (feudal) era. Likewise, contemporary publics utilize emerging digital technologies to produce a specifically photographic publicity, allowing them to address fundamental limitations of the bourgeois public sphere. Photographic publicity helps us rethink the problem of the public sphere in terms of theatricality and civic spectatorship.

Geocomposition engages students in writing on the move in order to explore how such writing composes the multiple layers of public places. This article describes a collaborative, location-based composition project designed for students to rhetorically engage a responsive public through locative media: media that work in and through specific sites. View a brief video abstract: Geocomposition in Public Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogy

In this article I describe a type of hyperbole which does not add certainty to a technical claim by removing qualifiers and hedges to make boring science exciting. Rather, paralogical hyperbole overstates while jumping from one line of reasoning to another. For example, citing technical science to argue publicly that the “missing link” has been found is exaggerative, and in a direction illogical, given its starting premise, born of a technical sphere, which actually identifies “missing links” as indefensible claims. From an analysis of the popularization efforts of a few scientists regarding Darwinius Marsillae, a fossilized lemur-like skeleton first described in the technical scientific journal PLoS ONE, I show that paralogical hyperbole can result in discourses that are unnecessarily polarizing regarding scientifically-opposed publics, and can pose threats to broader public understandings of science. I close with a discussion of the rhetorical practices of dissoi logoi and prolepsis as means by which to more consciously experience and represent scientific rhetorics characterized by parlogical hyperbole.

Abstract Jürgen Habermas supports his transhistorical conception of violence as a form of instrumental reason to be rejected from the ideal polity with a historical narrative that recounts the rejection of Machiavellian and Hobbesian instrumental violence by the Enlightenment philosophes. This article provides a revised narrative, which emphasizes the persistence of a rhetorical conception of violence from Machiavelli's princely violence to a line of Anglo-American republican thinkers who shifted the locus of sovereign rhetorical violence to the people's armed militia. The narrative culminates with Madison's exegesis of the Second Amendment and sketches how this Madisonian conception harmonizes with Habermasian norms and law.

“In this issue, we learn that what gets written into law is as important as what gets intentionally omitted and that campus timely warnings are likely neither timely nor warning. We also learn the value of hashtags in cultivating concerned publics, how cynicism can be productive, and how public rhetoric can be a symbolic and material activity.”

“What I have offered is less an employable set of texts, lessons, or advice, and more the performance of a teacher coming to terms with race in pedagogy both during and after the course. What I have done is (re)turn to rhetoric.”

“By re-imagining cynicism’s utility as a productive stance, we can identify several tactics for intervention in matters of political and ethical import. Adopting cynicism requires us to introduce provocative language in the public sphere.”

A hybrid assignment, a research-based academic essay paired with a research-based weblog, incorporates elements from both personal and academic writing to challenge students to critically think about how and why they write privately and publically. Students writing into this new model of public discourse can experiment with stance and tone across genres to exercise their abilities as responsible and flexible writers.

ABSTRACT In public debates there are occasions on which persons might feel obligated to show disrespect in order to preserve integrity. In some public discourses (like those between evolutionists and creationists) interlocutors often show disrespect by “writing off” one another's reasons in an attempt to defend and preserve their own particular beliefs. To make better sense of the apparent discomfiture of intuitions concerning the connections between respect and integrity in such public confrontations, an “other-words orientation” to communication is proposed. The other-words orientation requires that individuals “stand for something” but in a way that respects one's opposition as the living, breathing, reason-giving entities they are. The ancient art of double argument is central to this endeavor.

“The fact that Internet memes significantly influenced the discourse around the 2012 presidential election suggests that rhetoricians should take memetics seriously.”

ABSTRACTRalph Waldo Emerson's theory of rhetoric has been the subject of ongoing inquiry that has moved Emerson further and further outside a line of Platonic thinkers in order to make his discussion of rhetoric applicable to contemporary discussions about civic discourse and the public sphere. Such accounts, however, subtly undermine the complexity of Emerson's attempts to reconcile transcendentalism with democracy. Understanding Emerson as involved in a project to not only democratize language and rhetorical theory but also Plato, the representative of truth seeking and idealism, clarifies precisely how Emerson understands the power of rhetoric and philosophy to shape and enact democracy. Emerson was trying to find a place for Platonic idealism in the shaping of a young country, and in doing so, he reconfigured what might seem today to be irreconcilable dualities. For Emerson the split between the spiritual and the material world does not implicitly prioritize one domain over the other. Instead, Emerson negotiates the terrain between the worlds and suggests ultimately that language and action are means of straddling them and realizing real change in society. If ideals are in some way external in Emerson's metaphysics, they are no less accessible by every person who attends to his or her own experience in the world. Rhetoric, for Emerson, brings those poles together.

As College English's recent special issue on the social turn can attest, English studies in general and composition studies in particular have often embraced the epochal language of "the turn" to gauge its self-efficacy, often hinging on the mission of its determined publics and/ or the liberal mission of the university. It is in this context that Frank Farmer's book, After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur, is welcome, as it attempts to put these turns into perspective by splicing the concept of counterpublics into our understanding of two publics often evoked in composition studies: one cultural and ad hoc, one disciplinary and institutional.

Real Writing Interactive: A Brief Guide to Writing Paragraphs and Essays, by Susan Anker, Reviewed by Mark Blaauw-HaraAfter the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur, by Frank Farmer, Reviewed by Jill Darley-VanisRhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center, by Tiffany Rousculp, Reviewed by Glenn Hutchinson Jr. and Paula GillespieTeaching Creative Writing, edited by Heather Beck, Reviewed by John Reilly

Abstract Jesus often spoke about the Christian obligation to provide for the poor. Yet, public opinion polls and scholarly studies consistently find that conservative Protestant voters favor economic policies of low taxes, limited state spending on welfare, and personal responsibility for financial success. This study uses evangelical sermons as a means for analyzing how conservative economic discourse, defined as a preference for limited government interference in market activities, proliferated inside American megachurches over four years following the 2008 recession. It also examines how pastors of large congregations rhetorically justified support for policies that scholars have shown work against the economic interests of middle-class and poor citizens alike. The study found that when megachurch pastors speak about economic issues, they deploy language and arguments that emphasize American economic providence and the need for individuals to take personal responsibility for financial outcomes, premises that afforded pastors the discursive space necessary for making claims about the superiority of private charity over public welfare. These findings suggest that, contrary to arguments that situate the public discourse of conservative Protestants as being mostly about social issues, there is inside evangelicalism a robust conversation about financial questions. This economic discourse is strikingly similar to that of nonreligious conservatives in the United States, a confluence that works to create a rhetorical resonance among the base constituencies inside the Republican Party and so fortify its ideological appeal and strength.

In a society in which expertise becomes increasingly specialized, we need to understand how to manage gaps in knowledge between experts in various fields and between experts and the public in general. That need is especially great in the public sphere, where technical understanding and lived experience do not always align. This study attempts to model the process by which discipline-specific topoi filter into common knowledge and general topoi are acknowledged by experts. It first addresses the issue of expertise in complex rhetorical places, then employs Michel Meyer's reinterpretation of ethos, pathos, and logos to show how experts and non-experts in such places negotiate rhetorical relationships. The study then explores the social and rhetorical mechanisms by which ideas become commonplaces, building on the established theory of symbolic convergence. Finally, the study demonstrates proof in principle with a brief analysis of one topos in the Reports of the Immigration Commission (1911).

This article describes a series of community-based research projects, (Re)Writing Local Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Histories, done in partnership with the local African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Jewish communities. The author argues that these projects are one substantive response to the ongoing, growing demand that English studies teacher-scholars and students participate in purposeful, impactful public work. These projects position students as rhetorical citizen historians who produce original historical and rhetorical knowledge and promote democracy through conscious, deliberate rhetorical historical work. But these partnerships also raise complex issues of unequal, fluid, and shifting discourses among community partners, students, and faculty and, consequently, inform ways to enact publicly shared meaning in community literacy partnerships.

With neither national nor local-level discussions of Senate Bill 1070 adequately addressing bottom line issues such as marginalization, access, and civic engagement, an exploration of marginalized rhetorical acts can provide an informative lens for understanding challenges among marginalized people, their rhetorical tools, and their relations to public spheres. Through an exploration of anti-Senate Bill 1070 graffiti, this article examines how the practice of graffiti points to difference manifesting and playing out in the wider public sphere. It calls for scholars and activists to recognize graffiti as a rhetorical tool worthy of study and cross-cultural discourse.

“The editors of Present Tense are excited to announce a new issue focused on meaningful political rhetoric, insightful technical rhetoric, and thoughtful critical reviews . Volume 4.1 connects rhetoric and the public sphere and includes cogent articulations of how rhetoric functions in free speech, contested legal issues, and unexpected digital realms.”

“Westboro Baptist Church has made clear that they have no real interest in any form of discussion, debate, or deliberation; moreover, they appear fundamentally opposed to the very democracy they’ve appealed to for protection.”

“Sinners Welcome” explores the relationship between current community partnership models and the political rhetoric that often surrounds them. Taking up the frequent invocation of Cornel West’s “prophetic pragmatism” in such partnerships, this article investigates what it might mean to understand this term as a call to work for actual systemic justice for those most oppressed by the current political moment. To make this concrete, the article discusses a community partnership project that resulted in an activist organization being created by local residents in response to a large-scale redevelopment effort in the neighborhood. Once created, this organization became the site of a concerted countereffort to defund and discredit such partnership work. It is this tension between community partnerships and activism, between prophetic pragmatism’s theoretical goals and its actual practice, that represents a fundamental choice within English studies. Ultimately, the article poses the question of how far our field is willing to go in the name of a “transformative politics.”

The viral video Kony 2012 is the point of departure for our argument that composition’s public turn is marked by a concern with discursive features and digitized forms at the expense of attention to historical context and human consequences. The alternative we propose, critical materialist pedagogy, reconnects discursive and digitized arguments to the extradiscursive interests they serve. By urging teachers and students to “think through the body,” this critical materialist pedagogy tests fetishized appearances against lived reality—and reconnects public rhetoric to embodied examples of struggle and material potential for creative action.

Abstract This essay defines and describes the atheistic voice. Drawing from Thomas Lessl’s “voice” metaphor (“The Priestly Voice”), the logology of Kenneth Burke, and the literary insights of Mikhail Bakhtin, I map out the rhetorical tropes of the atheistic voice by analyzing the rhetoric of Christopher Hitchens, which exemplifies the atheistic voice as a rhetorical ideal. Hitchens demonstrates that the rhetorical strategies of burlesque and grotesque rejection are the atheistic voice’s primary means of ridiculing and tearing down the god-terms of priestly and bardic discourses. After analyzing these strategies, I point to concerns—some perennial, some contemporary—that the ebb and flow of atheistic voices in a democratic public sphere present.

Abstract This article explores questions about “civility” in the 2012 election. Through an analysis of media discussions raising the term, four themes are constructed focusing on the limitations of civility discourse. While seeking to preserve the best that civil orientations afford, I argue that adding a deliberative approach to such discourse addresses moments when civil appeals appear to be most limited. This essay finds that working between civil and deliberative constructs provides an instructive perspective for understanding the workings of and possibilities for public discourse during situations when civility rhetoric is typically raised. Relative to civil communication—and associated concepts such as dialogue and advocacy—specific norms, benefits, examples, and implications of a deliberative rhetorical vision are charted for problem-solving, public policy contexts.