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8796 articlesApril 2022
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“Motherhood, Saliency, and Flattening Effects: World War I and the ‘The Greatest Mother in the World’” ↗
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This essay analyzes Alonzo Earl Foringer Foringer, Alonzo Earl. “The Greatest Mother in the World” [1917?]. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, Web. [Google Scholar]’s “Greatest Mother in the World” poster, created for the American Red Cross during World War I but circulated in Britain and America during World War I and II. Although the image was highly circulated and reproduced, it has received limited scholarly attention. The analysis examines the poster and a magazine image with accompanying text from a visual rhetoric perspective. The essay argues that the poster and magazine image deploy rhetorics of motherhood and saliency to foster “flattening effects” that not only erase other maternal figures but also elevate ideologies of white supremacy.
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Rhetoricians of science often (rightly) demarcate as antiscientific the way creationists engage with, manipulate, and circulate scientific knowledge. Though this demarcation work is essential for understanding how creationists manipulate science in the public sphere, relying on demarcation analysis closes off rhetorical inquiry. By analyzing Answers Research Journal, a creationist scientific journal, this essay contends the way creationist authors engage with scientific knowledge production offers a more nuanced way of seeing how scientific meaning-making has rhetorical capacity, which offers new avenues by which rhetoricians of science can investigate the power of scientific methodologies.
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This essay demonstrates how a progressive era Radcliffe College student (1910-1914) who earned the title “strongest woman” for her athletic feats used the unique genre affordances of the scrapbook to assert an identity that at once aligned with and contradicted dominant rhetoric about women’s bodies and education. Drawing on archived personal artifacts, the essay argues that Eleanor Stabler Brooks used this vernacular, multigenre, multivocal genre in a way that amplifies the material and the visceral through a process of bricolage, composing an embodied response to the social and institutional restrictions on her body at a time when gender values were radically destabilizing.
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Our world is no stranger to mobilities, ranging from molecular movement in ecological systems to quotidian economic transactions and social interactions to transnational voyages across continents.Thus, readers of the Community Literacy Journal (CLJ) are sure to be engaged by this eclectic addition to the current scholarship on mobilities work, with the construct of mobility emerging as a central theoretical idea that underpins the epistemological and methodological premises of many disciplines, including that of cultural geography, feminist studies, critical race theory, queer studies, and composition and rhetoric.With a universalizing and broad focus on composition-in-mobility, this edited collection-organized in two sections across which all the contributing authors unpack and articulate the mobile nature of mobility and composition-answers the central question of what constitutes and sustains mobility in our divergent, diverse, literate activities and practices.The volume editors-Horner, Hartline, Kumari, and Matravers-advance a mobilities paradigm to further unpack the dynamic constitution of mobility in composition and rhetoric and to cast a norm-based light on mobility-in-composition work (3).In particular, rather than treat mobility as a matter "requiring adjustment or accommodation", Horner et al. argue that the proposition of mobility as a commonplace or even as a fact is long overdue (4-6).One hallmark that characterizes this paradigm is that mobilities are poly-faceted forms, whose social value is mercurial, relational, and provisional (4-6).This critical premise holds the potential to shift our perspective of viewing language, composition, writing-curriculum administration, writing pedagogy, or writing research as impermeable to perceiving them as fruitfully unsteady and potentially subject to transformation.As the volume addresses the nature of mobility in composition, the organization of the twenty chapters-divided into Part I where case studies in mobility-in-composing-practices (e.g., community literacy, translingual composition, or digital and professional writing) are reported and Part II where critical responses to Part I are articulated-also attempts to reflect on the nature of mobility, with each chapter conversing
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Abstract
hile teacher neutrality is a contested concept within the field of rhetoric and composition, the public often expects a teacher's neutral position.
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T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy refers not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, disability studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.
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Ilana M. Blumberg is professor of English literature at Bar Ilan University in Israel and author, most recently, of the memoir Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American (2018). She has won teaching awards from University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University and is currently a recipient of an Israel Science Foundation grant entitled Postsecular George Eliot.Rosalind Buckton-Tucker studied at King's College, London, and the University of Leicester, UK, and holds a PhD in American literature. Her main research interests are twentieth-century British and American literature, travel literature, and the pedagogy of literature and creative writing, and she has published a variety of articles and book chapters in these fields as well as presenting numerous papers at international conferences. She has taught in universities in Kuwait, Oman, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran, and has also worked as a freelance journalist and editor in the UAE and Oman. She enjoys writing fiction, memoirs, and travel articles.Elizabeth Effinger is associate professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, where she teaches British Romanticism with special interests in William Blake, the intersections of Romantic science and literature, the Anthropocene, and human-animal studies. She coedited (with Chris Bundock) William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror (2018). She was principal investigator of Erasing Frankenstein, a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council)-funded public humanities outreach activity that transformed Shelley's 1818 novel into a book-length erasure poem in collaboration with incarcerated and nonincarcerated citizens. For more on the project, visit erasingfrankenstein.org.Moira Fitzgibbons is professor of English at Marist College. Her most recent work includes an edition of “The Merchant's Tale” in The Medieval Disability Sourcebook (2020).Michael Keenan Gutierrez is teaching associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Trench Angel (2015) and his work appears in the Guardian, the Delmarva Review, the Collagist, Scarab, the Pisgah Review, Untoward, the Boiler, Crossborder, and Public Books.Angela Laflen teaches digital rhetoric and professional writing at California State University, Sacramento. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition and Assessing Writing, among other venues.Laci Mattison is assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University in the Department of Language and Literature, where she teaches courses on twentieth-century, Victorian, and contemporary literature. She is one of the general editors for Bloomsbury's Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series. For this series, she has coedited volumes on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Alongside Derek Ryan, she has also coedited a special issue of Deleuze Studies titled Deleuze, Virginia Woolf, and Modernism (2013) and has published articles and book chapters on Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, H. D., Mulk Raj Anand, and Vladimir Nabokov.Kelly Neil is professor of English at Spartanburg Methodist College, a small liberal arts institution located in the upstate of South Carolina. She received her PhD in English literature from the University of California, Davis, where she studied early modern literature and gender. She has published in such journals as Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies and This Rough Magic. She is currently coediting a collection of essays on teaching Shakespeare to nonmajors.Sarah Ann Singer is assistant professor in the Department of English at University of Central Florida. Her work appears in College English, Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Peitho.Rachel Tait-Ripperdan is associate librarian at Florida Gulf Coast University. She received her master's degree in library science from Florida State University and her master's degree in history from Florida Gulf Coast University. She serves as library liaison to the Departments of Language and Literature, History, Communication, Philosophy, and Religion. Her research interests include information literacy instruction, collection development, and graphic novels and manga in the academic classroom.Theresa Tinkle (she/her/hers) is a medievalist by training, a teacher committed to supporting students’ development and ambitions, and a disability studies scholar. Her most recent book is Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (2010). She has published widely on medieval English and Latin literature, gender, religion, and manuscript culture. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is engaged in antiracist work, writing to learn, writing in the disciplines, and writing program assessment.
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ABSTRACT How does one hear a story that isn’t tellable, or advocate on behalf of someone who is illegible? We propose to develop the concept of atopos as an unspeakable, but nonetheless productive site of social energy.
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ABSTRACT The tension between freedom of speech and academic freedom results from the contradiction between democracy and expertise, resulting in a rhetorical “gray zone” that stymies faculty appeals to due process and constitutional protection. It’s not so much that certain “uncivil” words and utterances cannot be said in this gray zone; it’s that such words, when said, require one’s ejection from the (academic) demos. In an examination of the case of Steven Salaita, I’ll show how the tyranny of the demos, in the guise of “civility,” “community standards,” or “institutional values,” trumps academic freedom, and how the commonplace of democracy—understood as public opinion—can and does compel faculty silence.
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ABSTRACT In contemporary U.S. public discourse, calls for achieving equity abound. Many metrics now measure equity being achieved. I inquire into whether equity can be said to be achieved and still be equity. Inquiring as such leads me to excavating the menacing and actual cultural violence of developing such achievement. Simultaneously, this excavation shows the rhetoric of equity qua equity as a means of abolishing the conditions for that violence to take hold. I put forward that equity cannot be said to be achieved without the conditions of possibility equity offers being colonized. If a commitment to antiviolence speaks, it cannot say, “Equity achieved.”
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ABSTRACT A brief reflection on the possibility of contingency in the midst of what cannot be said.
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ABSTRACT In the West’s Will to Know and its attendant rhetorical forms, speech has been related to silence in primarily three ways. In rhetoric and dialectic, speech pursues speech; in rhetorical education, silence pursues speech; and in sacred, ascetic rhetoric, silence pursues silence. These three relations of speech to silence as a form of knowledge in the Western rhetorical tradition leave a fourth untraversed. Yet to be explored is speech in pursuit of silence. This essay turns to the Buddhist tradition of rhetoric and dialectic to identify a form of knowledge where speech—negation—pursues silence. I then trace the same model of negatory speech in pursuit of silence in the long-repressed practice of sophistic antilogos.
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ABSTRACT Philosophy joined with rhetoric is a means to speak fully about the human condition. Socrates’s statement concerning the “unexamined life” and Joyce’s manner of “two thinks at a time” are examples of how to approach the human condition. They show us ways we can speak of our humanity and ways that we cannot.
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ABSTRACT When enmity seizes language, speech needs be silenced to give meaningful communication a chance. But current Manichean structures making life a moral battleground have to first be undone to make shared problem solving possible. It is suggested that a rhetoric of the essay is better suited to this task than the rhetoric of speech.
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ABSTRACT Motivated by a seeming disregard of the problem of speech proper in some rhetorical theorizing, I attempt to show the heuristic value of a semiological approach to what can(not) be said to rhetorical inquiry. I argue that attending to the specifics of speech, of its conditions of (im)possibility, is one way to arrive at rhetoric’s multiple compositions. To illustrate these points, I consider the case of what cannot be said from the perspective of speakers of Shona through an integrational philosophy of communication.
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What cannot be said? The question presses, as there are no words, or no fitting words, or no words that make sense let alone do justice, all perhaps in the face of demands (not) to speak. And, as voice collapses in the midst of the violence that confounds reference, degrades language, imposes silence, and enforces repression—what cannot be said may turn on privation, the grounds, incentives, and intentions of expression that are banished, disappeared, and colonized, often in the name of deterring and containing the “dangerous” word, the word assumed to be violent, perhaps intrinsically and perhaps as it’s held to contravene the homologeō with so much “barbarism.” In this way, what cannot be said may also be a function of what’s given or taken for granted, whether as capacity, presumption, affirmation, commonplace, law, or spirit, just as it may stem from surplus, the economies of nonstop expression that cannot bear quiet reflection on their own presumptions, not least the possibility that there is such a thing as too much all at once.What cannot be said? Speaking is fraught, in the midst of a breath-taking pandemic and the suffocating smoke—so much smoke—of the next war and an earth on fire. It is an altogether tense time, place, and manner to speak, at a moment when the idea, doctrine, and “marketplace” of “free expression” divides generations and fuels contemporary kulturkampf, a proto-stasis in which fewer and fewer want or care to hear from those who are not already in the “proper” (progressive, reactionary, tolerant, conservative, fundamentalist, etc., etc.) crowd, singing the proper tune in the right chords, the truths about all the big lies. The infinitely recallable words afloat in social media’s gloomy cloud set the fear of being called out—ever later—into the calling to speak. The demand to burn books echoes from school board meeting to meeting, as trending tirades about the difference between cancelation and censorship flame, smolder, and flame back. More fire—throwing light on the fact that the problem at hand is a very old one. The hemlock has taken many forms, with varying levels of toxicity. The promise underwriting audi alteram partem has long provoked (better and worse) opposition and more than a few bans for violating standing “terms of service.”What cannot be said? It’s fashionable to deem language incapable of revealing what “matters” and so best indicted as mere “linguisticism.” If the charge risks a certain hypocrisy, it is never self-evident what grounds good speech or embodies its power, whether to cross the line turned smudge between speaking and writing, and how best to conceive the work of interpretation, representation, and critique that continues to attend and confound expression. Though so many words yet strive to figure a rational-deliberative-public persona that may have long left the building, this aspiration with dwindling audience may be no less chilling than a fragmenting articulation of belief that demands recognition of an “I” that appears naïve to the speech-action on which its emergence hinges. One wonders then if much has changed, if we remain in a moment, as Foucault put it, that “never attached much importance to the fact that, after all, speech exists”—a denial that has well-served those who take the word as their own in the name of refusing any advice about the merits of learning more about how to talk about talk.What cannot be said? The question abides, multiplies, and compounds, not least within and between rhetoric and philosophy. What goes and what can perhaps only go without saying, for better and worse—that is, for the lifeworld? What is said in what’s left unsaid, perhaps as the unsayable is the ground and demand to speak? What’s not being said in the name of being and at the cost of becoming otherwise? What remains unsaid and unsayable, in silence and in the midst of the damage done, not least the damage done to language itself? What cannot be said in time and what saying has no place? What cannot be said for history? How does what cannot be said appear—as inability, choice, prohibition, transgression, virtue, imperative? What potential abides in the unsaid and unsayable, for truth, freedom, authority, judgment?What cannot be said? Quick and tidy replies will not do, except perhaps as evasion. This is partly to say that it is likely important not to introduce this special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric, an extended and challenging consideration of the question—What cannot be said? It is not so much that the essays here speak for themselves, although in many ways they do, at the same time that they ask after and frequently trouble such certainty. It is not that they demand silence, even as they provoke quiet reflection. And it is not that they require an interpretive map, as they are best approached from multiple angles and taken up in various orders—the essays here sit in some tension, and also abide with and work for one another, in ways that invite discovery. Indeed, anything resembling a “proper” introduction may be less a distraction than evidence of a deep misunderstanding, a failure to grasp that the question of what cannot be said—as a question—may resist obligatory first words, the definitions, topoi, speech acts, and language games that are deemed prior and held so very tight, perhaps at the cost of language itself. The essays here, not least as they manifest the possibility that Adorno discerned in the essay’s form, resist this conformity. In their own way, each “says what is at issue and stops where it feels itself complete—not where nothing is left to say” (1984, 152). Neither first nor last word, but a compound opening, an idea whose very form may amount to heresy.
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This article engages with recent discussions in the field of technical communication that call for climate change research that moves beyond the believer/denier dichotomy. For this study, our research team coded 900 tweets about climate change and global warming for different emotions in order to understand how Twitter users rely on affect rhetorically. Our findings use quantitative content analysis to challenge current assumptions about writing and affect on social media, and our results indicate a number of arenas for future research on affect, global warming, and rhetoric.
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The rhetorical challenges and deliberations of scientific authors writing climate change assessment reports have received scant scholarly attention. As our interviews with 21 authors reveal, authors engage with multiple stakeholders who bring diverse scientific, political, economic, and cultural interests and perspectives. They must remain aware of politically motivated climate change denial and scientific illiteracy while remaining committed to producing policy relevant rather than policy prescriptive statements. These challenges lead to intense rhetorical negotiations over the lexical and visual features of a document they hope will deflect denial and contribute to meaningful policy solutions.
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Prior researchers have identified charter documents as texts that serve an outsize role in stabilizing social reality and mediating work, writing, and network building. While charter documents are typically authoritative and text-only tomes, this article expands the category to include charter graphics, visual texts that serve similarly important genre and network functions. Through retrospective analysis of one charter graphic and its role in a decade-long project by a nonprofit organization, this article demonstrates the potential rhetorical, social, and network functions of charter graphics; distinguishes them from charter documents; and offers suggestions for both practitioners and researchers.
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Predatory publishers deliver neither the editorial oversight, nor the peer review of legitimate publishers, and benefit from those whose positions require academic publications. These publishers also provide a home for conspiracy theorists and pseudoscience promoters, as their lack of scrutiny offers fraudulent academic research articles a veneer of scholarly credibility. While most predatory journals were designed to dupe researchers, the fraudulent articles they often publish are designed to be found by members of the public, and their accessibility ensures that unlike legitimate research, they are likely to be employed as evidence by those seeking evidence. While studies have examined the common features of predatory journals, their emails, and their websites, this essay situates fraudulent academic articles in posttruth discourse, offers a taxonomy of illegitimate research articles, and highlights their common rhetorical features, in the hopes that the concepts discovered here can further contribute to pedagogy and public understanding.
March 2022
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This essay provides an overview of my experiences teaching Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) courses with an explicit health justice focus. I ground a discussion of pedagogical possibility by reflecting on my emerging course design, which centers reproductive justice—one example of a justice-oriented framework—as a site of learning and inquiry. In describing my course development and delivery, I suggest that a health justice approach to RHM instruction can be timely, contextually relevant, and challenging. Throughout the essay, I offer specific examples for the purposes of replication or adaptation for differently justice-oriented RHM teaching applications.
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In this article, I analyze the trigger warning, a pedagogical practice often framed as student-responsive and trauma-informed, to elucidate the ways in which trauma-informed pedagogy functions rhetorically to pathologize and individualize experiences of racism and other societal inequities that cause collective trauma. I draw upon original interview data and rhetorical analysis through a systems framework to explore how reductive pedagogical practices developed within the confines of a white, western notion of trauma may subsequently perpetuate students’ marginalization. Finally, I highlight the potential for more comprehensive, inclusive pedagogies to address student trauma, acknowledge societal conditions that impact individual experiences, and shift popular discourse that pathologizes trauma.
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Complex health and medical contexts demand not only responsive, mutable research but also responsive, flexible pedagogies. Arguing for a shift from the dominant conception of pedagogy as a pre-planned, linear scaffold, this article proposes instead an approach—called Lego™ Learning—that re-conceptualizes instructional content as self-standing, short-term units or modules, much like Lego™ bricks. Because such modules have self-contained learning objectives and corresponding tasks, they can be shifted within a course or across courses as-needed. This approach allows rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) instructional content to respond to, and prepare students for, the ever-changing exigencies and contexts of RHM-related work. It also encourages collaborations across classes, institutions, and other contexts. In this entry, we frame our discussion around four learning outcomes and teaching practices that can be facilitated through this approach, and we provide an extended example of an ongoing cross-institutional partnership that employs Lego™ Learning.
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White settlers began to establish Christian schools in what is now Wisconsin in 1661. Through examining the papers of Benjamin Stucki, the headmaster of the Winnebago Mission Home—a Wisconsin boarding school in which many Ho-Chunk, Oneida, Chippewa, and Potawatomi children (and others whom were of mixed ancestry) were indoctrinated into Christianity—the author argues manipulation of chronos affects decolonial kairotic moments. Undergirding this argument is the conviction that manipulation of chronos tampers with perceiving settler colonialism’s everyday exigency. The mission school’s rhetorical obscuring and replacing of settler colonialism’s exigency with one (or multiple) they manufacture is a settler exigency. In this process, settlers segment, omit, and create new timelines that distract from the past violence that is undoubtedly stretching into the present. Through manipulating time, what surfaces as the new problem (i.e., not settler colonialism) is the Indigenous person’s vulnerability. The implications of rhetorically manipulating time are therefore central concerns in decolonial goals and coalitions.
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"Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900." Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 52(2), pp. 217–218
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Frankenstein myths circulate widely in Western culture and offer robust indices of common anxieties about invention. This essay articulates a version of the Frankenstein myth that emphasizes potential contributions to the practice and teaching of rhetoric. Specifically, this essay suggests that this myth about the practice of invention in general can contribute to understandings of rhetorical invention in particular, especially with regard to the extent to which rhetorical invention may, in some instances, be informed by themes associated with deception, duality, and autonomy. The essay closes with a discussion of implications and limitations.
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The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine & Resistance is a critical contribution to the field of rhetoric and composition. Chvez's book demonstrates queer coalitional work as it examines heteronormative cistems of oppression that have disempowered and marginalized migrant bodies and folks of color since the early AIDS epidemic. 1 However, before engaging with Chvez's work, it is important to note that Ryan Mitchell, Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College, has also written a review about this book. In his review, Mitchell provides a strong account about the parallels to current events, as well as articulating Chvez's ability to add to archival histories by "shifting focus from the work accomplished by mostly white, mostly middle class, cosmopolitan AIDS activist groups . . . . [and] draw[ing] from queer of color, migrant, and feminist traditions to recover an alternative history of AIDS, one that is attuned to how the epidemic affected (and continues to affect) those on the borders of civic and national belonging. " As Mitchell illuminates, Chvez's work adds to archival work by amplifying a historical perspective that captures racialized migrant bodies and moves away from centering White bodies, organizations, and perspectives. Building from Mitchell, I also see this book queering heteronormative institutionalized cistems of oppression to signify white supremacy's dominance and its violence against marginalized, disempowered, and ignored bodies. 2 As my review suggests, this text argumentatively informs readers about perspectives, identities, and literacies that are not often discussed in dominant heteronormative educational and archival scholarship.
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Does Every Lesbian Have a Superpower that Makes Them Out and Not Dead by Suicide?: A Poetics against Standardizing Literacy Narratives ↗
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This essay, in three parts plus a conclusion, is a performance of US third world feminist praxis for our contemporary moment. Part one is a literacy narrative that resists generic convention. Part two uses conventions of academic writing to explore the damage that is happening to the field of composition and rhetoric due to the academic erasure of US third world feminist praxis. Part three is a gift. The conclusion is a manifesto to end the economic exploitation of students and teachers in our first-year writing classrooms. The sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
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Using the 1980s Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) surveillance definitions for AIDS, this article examines how the CDC’s rhetorical techniques may have been harnessed to create more inclusive AIDS morbidity and mortality data in the U.S. epidemic’s first decade. The CDC’s decision to privilege disease specificity over sensitivity led women, people of color, and drug users to be underrepresented in epidemiological reporting due to AIDS’s manifestation as more commonly seen—and therefore less specific—diseases in these populations. My analysis of the first three AIDS definitions shows heavy reliance on four classical topoi as the CDC sought to constrain who was and was not considered an AIDS case for national reporting. I argue that, while these four topoi—space, time, correlation, and causation—did constrain symptoms to the desired specificity, the CDC had the ability to place similar specifications on common diseases for the sake of including vulnerable communities in surveillance data.
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In 1907, the National Tuberculosis Association (NTA) began selling Christmas Seals to raise money for the fight against tuberculosis (TB). The decorative holiday stamps quickly became a hallmark of American popular culture throughout much of the 1900s. This project asks how the Christmas Seals, sold between 1920 and 1968, shaped the depiction, imaginary, and understanding of tuberculosis in popular culture. Through visual, rhetorical analysis of the Seals’ presented and suggested elements, I show that the Seals make present normalized images of Whiteness, health, and holiday settings. I argue that the Seals presented elements made absent images of tuberculosis, distancing an invoked, White audience from the realities of the disease and playing on their hope and desire for a world free of TB. This case study considers the rhetorical function and value of popular, non-medical expert images, adds to the historical literature on tuberculosis, and offers a framework for the continued study of medical fundraising images.
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According to a recent study by the Brookings Institution (Reeves & Krause, 2016), vasectomies are safer, more effective, and less expensive than most other voluntary sterilization methods. While the procedure has grown in popularity in recent years, particularly in the United Kingdom and Canada, it is much less common in the United States. This discrepancy can be attributed to both social (a perception that contraception is “women’s work”) and policy-based factors (lack of coverage under the Affordable Care Act). This paper examines the role and extent to which invitational rhetoric could be a useful communicative lens for both partners and providers considering vasectomies, thus increasing access to and utilization of the safe, effective, and affordable procedure. In this policy brief, we suggest strategies for incorporating invitational rhetoric into health professions education curricula, patient counseling literature, and policy language in order to address some of the social stigma around the procedure.
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Archives, Rhetorical Absence, and Critical Imagination: Examining Black Women's Mental Health Narratives at Virginia's Central State Hospital ↗
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<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> This article examines the rhetorical implications of archiving technical documents by studying the erasure of Black women's mental health narratives in Virginia's Central State Mental Hospital in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This article seeks to examine how historical mental health documents characterize (or fail to characterize) Black women and their mental health. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> We examine Black women's mental health experiences through absences in the annual reports from Central State Hospital in Virginia (formerly Central State Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane). <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> There is a dearth of work related to the unique experiences that Black women face when dealing with mental health challenges coupled with or compounded by a legacy of misogynoir. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods/approach:</b> We offer an inventive approach for reading rhetorical absences and provide guiding questions for employing the critical archival inquiry methodology. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> In taking on this endeavor to learn more about how Black women's mental health was represented in historical archives, we learned a great deal, not from the text on the page of the documents but from the text that was missing from those documents. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Technical communication scholars, especially those with an interest in inclusion and justice, must adjust their methodological orientation and their approaches to historical and archival research to include an exploration of what is missing from the archives. Technical and professional communicators have a unique skill set that is ideal for reading through absences and erasures in both contemporary and historical documents.
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Precarious Data: Crack, Opioids, and Enacting a Social Justice Ethic in Data Visualization Practice ↗
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<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> The linguistic framing strategies used in media reporting on illegal drugs have been extensively documented, but less attention has been directed toward visuals, particularly data visualizations. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Positioning illegal drug use as a criminal justice problem or a public health issue are types of frameworks that use specific rhetorical strategies. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What are the rhetorical strategies used in data visualizations published during the crack and opioid drug epidemics, respectively? 2. Do these strategies advance dominant media narratives that crack addiction should be criminalized but opioid addiction should be treated like a public health issue? And if so, how is this accomplished? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> Drawing from the media studies approach previously employed in a study in technical and professional communication (TPC) on information design trends, I apply the concept of “scripto-visual” rhetoric to select data visualizations published by mainstream news media during both drug epidemics. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> I argue these graphics escalated the perceived threat during both drug epidemics but different scripto-visual rhetorical strategies were used. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Attending to ethical considerations in the creation of data visualizations has long been important in TPC, while scholarship has integrated social justice as a core component of the discipline. In the last section of this article, I bring these themes together by arguing that a social justice ethic is needed in data design work. I then propose a critical heuristic constructed from Jones et al.’s positionality, privilege, and power framework that can be used analytically or as an inventional tool to tease out the ways particular scripto-visual rhetorical decisions may be promoting inequities.
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Abstract
<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Background:</b></i> <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">The Washington Post</i> 's Fatal Force fatal police shooting database was first created in 2015 to fill a gap in official data collection on police use of force. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Literature review:</b></i> Critical data studies scholarship suggests that data system design is rhetorical and communicates cultural values, not just numerical data. Narrative research methods, which focus on thick, rich contextual data, could help address the rhetorical and cultural dimensions of data system design. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research questions:</b></i> 1. How do data collection, aggregation, and curation practices influence data stories about crime and violence? 2. How does Fatal Force, a data system about police use of force that originated outside law enforcement, prioritize and organize information? 3. How does designing data systems with explicit, highly specific goals and aims (like the inclusion criteria and purpose of Fatal Force) influence the system as a whole? <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Methodology:</b></i> Using “unblackboxing,” a combination of narrative and critical data studies methods, I analyzed the Fatal Force database and its accompanying data stories. I compare this database with its institutional counterpart in the FBI's fledgling Use of Force database. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Results:</b></i> Fatal Force is constructed with particular attention to questions that users may have about police brutality, police shootings, and race. Fatal Force's data stories use narrative commonplaces like sociality and temporality to humanize the issue of police use of force and communicate greater nuance. The FBI's Use of Force database shows an orientation toward police perceptions of use-of-force incidents and a lack of attention to national conversations about police brutality. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Conclusions:</b></i> Data systems show clear perspectives on the issues that they describe, which influence how users encounter the data system, how useful the system can be for various users, and how inclusive or just the data system is.
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Abstract
<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Introduction:</i></b> This article offers an approach that we call <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">critical collaboration</b> —an array of theoretical commitments drawn from the authors’ embodiments and lived experiences. In making explicit the connections between authorial embodiment and the content of theory and practice, our practical models demonstrate new and varied approaches to public feminisms. We begin with a discussion of embodiment and then offer four sections—amplification rhetorics, apparent feminisms, a techné of marginality, and memetic rhetorical environments—with key takeaways to guide readers through our related-but-different approaches. Our goal in doing so is to underscore the importance of public feminisms to enacting social justice in technical and professional communication. This means recognizing our obligation to respond to unjust technical communication. Technical communication is not a utopia of inclusion and anti-racism—although some corners of the field are dedicated to those topics, to be sure. Rather, despite the social justice turn, some parts of the field still insist on objectivity, neutrality, and practicality as the touchstones for “good” technical communication. Our work here shows some of the ways in which we might resist the cultural blinders that allow such ideas to persist unabated. Drawing especially on research in rhetoric and embodiment studies, we build interdisciplinary bridges with critical race studies (including critical race feminisms), womanism, gender studies, technical communication, Black rhetorics, queer studies, cultural studies, and rhetorical genre studies, among other fields, to provide a set of practical approaches to public feminist exigencies that resist collapsing all feminisms into a single approach. We argue that drawing on embodiment to develop a multiplicity of feminist approaches and engaging in critical collaboration as those approaches evolve is a way forward that allows for more stakeholders to engage fruitfully in public feminist projects. Our hope is that readers can then imagine public feminisms as one avenue for doing the social justice work that is vital to the growth of technical and professional communication as a field.
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Abstract
<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Background:</b></i> There is a lack of conceptual framework for how to develop more inclusive practices in the subfield of technical editing. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Literature review:</i></b> Some researchers have posited theories, like feminism and rhetorical theory, as ways to conceptualize technical editing. This piece extends that literature into social justice using Walton, Moore, and Jones's 3Ps heuristic of positionality, privilege, and power. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research questions:</i></b> 1. What ideologies are circulating in technical editing pedagogy? 2. How might technical editing pedagogy become more inclusive? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Methodology:</i></b> We conduct a rhetorical analysis of the major academic works in technical editing, including books, textbooks, and academic articles, and compare them to an established framework for social justice in technical and professional communication—the 3Ps heuristic. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Results:</i></b> We find that there are strong instrumentalist underpinnings to much of the current literature in technical editing, making the goal of technical editing linguistic conformity to American Standard English (ASE) at the expense of linguistic diversity. We offer a conceptual framework, the inclusive editing paradigm (IEP), to challenge that linguistic hegemony in technical editing and provide technical editors with theoretical and practical foundations for developing a more inclusive editing practice. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Conclusions:</i></b> More work needs to be done to shift technical editing in a more inclusive direction. We call on practitioners, academics, and users to contribute to this dialogue.
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“I Don't Have a Gun Stop Shooting”: Rhetorical Analysis of Law Enforcement Use of Force Policy Documents ↗
Abstract
<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Background</b></i> <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">:</i> Under the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, law enforcement agencies are required to draft and uphold a Use of Force document to safeguard the rights of the public. This document, in its most successful form, defines use of force and offers specific core principles that outline de-escalation tactics and techniques to reinforce use of force and deadly force as a last resort. What is missing from the conversation of this policy is an analysis of the rhetorical choices within each document, and the understanding that these documents are rarely written with social justice in mind; rather, they are focused on legalese and protecting the individual departments and the police officer responsible for using force. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Literature review</b></i> <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">:</i> The Use of Force document is a genre of policy that academics have been drawn to, especially in consideration of social justice. With a rise in law enforcement violent interactions with historically marginalized groups of the public, policy analysis is necessary. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research questions</b></i> <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">:</i> 1. What key terms, concepts, and narratives are used within each document to reinforce oppressive ideology? 2. What rhetorical moves give agency of force to officers through various terminology? 3. What does an analysis of these policy documents reveal for technical and professional communicators regarding our role in social-justice-driven work? <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research methods</b></i> <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">:</i> I performed a rhetorical analysis of each document, pinpointing words, phrases, and sections that were unique to the specific text. NVivo qualitative research software was used to create word trees, where word frequencies were analyzed to uncover each department's situational position and the implication of such. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Results and discussion</b></i> <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">:</i> The analysis revealed that of the two documents under review, one tended to humanize not only the situational officer, who is incapable of being neutral, and the person whom force is being used against. The other tended to reflect policy-driven terminology that works to dehumanize the person involved with the officer and continues to uphold oppressive rhetoric. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Conclusion</b></i> <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">:</i> Technical communicators have a responsibility to insert themselves in issues of injustice. An analysis of these policy documents reveals areas of revision, areas where the public should be involved, and is a move toward further accountability regarding police brutality against historically marginalized communities.
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Linguistic Justice on Campus: Pedagogy and Advocacy for Multilingual Students: Brooke R. Schreiber, Eunjeong Lee, Jennifer T. Johnson, and Norah Fahim: [Book Review] ↗
Abstract
This book offers college writing instructors strategies for creating linguistically diverse classrooms. Building on theories of language that multilingualism is a student’s strength not a deficit, the book will help faculty, staff, and graduate teaching assistants design lessons, courses, professional development opportunities, and writing center programs that support multilingual students and challenge notions that success on US campuses requires strict adherence to communicating in Standard Academic English (SAE). Through a highly engaging series of studies, the authors in this collection provide evidence that their approaches strengthen their writing pedagogies and empower their students. Although this book is primarily addressed to writing instructors, it may have some utility for professional communicators in industry. The rhetorical listening framework outlined in Chapter 10 would support in-house training on communicating across differences. The editors note that their work on the collection occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, another relevant context emerged that is not addressed in the book explicitly. Following now-revoked Executive Order 13950, more than half of US states have enacted or are debating laws that would restrict classroom and professional development training around issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity. These laws may affect state-funded universities in ways that limit educators’ ability to enact the pedagogies described in this collection.
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Abstract
AbstractIn their bookCommitment in Dialogue, Walton and Krabbe claim that formal dialogue systems for conversational argumentation are “not very realistic and not easy to apply”. This difficulty may make argumentation theory less well adapted to be employed to describe or analyse actual argumentation practice. On the other hand, the empirical study of real-life arguments may miss or ignore insights of more than the two millennia of the development of philosophy of language, rhetoric, and argumentation theory. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for adapting such theories to serve as applicable tools in the study of argumentation phenomena. Our approach is boththeoretically-informedandempirically-groundedin large-scale corpus analysis. The area of interest are appeals to ethos, the character of the speaker, building upon Aristotle’s rhetoric. Ethotic techniques are used to influence the hearers through the communication, where speakers might establish, but also emphasise, weaken or undermine their own or others’ credibility and trustworthiness. Specifically, we apply our method to Aristotelian theory of ethos elements which identifiespractical wisdom,moral virtueandgoodwillas components of speakers’ character, which can be supported or attacked. The challenges we identified in this case and the solutions we proposed allow us to formulate general guidelines of how to exploit rich theoretical frameworks to the analysis of the practice of language use.
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Abstract
In the prologue to the Rhetorica ad Herennium book 4, Comificius boldly departs from tradition: he will create his own examples to illustrate styles and figures of rhetoric, rather than drawing from poets and orators, as Greek manuals typically did. This methodological discussion, which resembles a declamation, portrays itself as an exemplum in that it embodies the precepts exposed in books 1, 2, and 3. Moreover, this exemplary discussion partakes in a larger debate between philosophy and rhetoric and must be considered in its historical and cultural context.
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan Sarah Walden Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-2038-6 In Lives, Letters, and Qailts, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan argues for the value of “everyday rhetorics of resistance” or “the conscious, purposeful recontextualization of the seemingly ordinary means and materials available in order to mediate thought and action, and to persuade others” (3). She examines three women or groups of women who demonstrate the power of persistent, everyday acts that recontextualize the means available to them in a particular time, place, and space. Throughout the book Sohan emphasizes two key arguments. First, she argues for the importance of a translingual and transmodal framework in order to avoid oversimplifying language, to understand difference as the norm, to “recover and reclaim the ways individual composers recontextualize within and across languages, genres, modes, and media,” and to adopt “more democratic and descriptive approaches to language” (9). Sohan’s second key argument involves the need to expand what counts as rhetoric, to redefine resistance, and to reframe how scholars situate rhetors who do not necessarily fit within the typical heroic narratives. For example, when Sohan discusses the ministry of Eliza P. Gurney, she describes the legend that one of Gurney’s letters was in President Abraham Lincoln’s breast pocket the night he was assassinated. She writes, in one of the most powerful lines of the book, that this myth serves as “a reminder of how a powerful, feminist rhetorical figure can be pigeonholed and, as a result, remain hidden in plain sight, because her rhetorical practice is evaluated solely in relation to the men with whom she came in contact, rather than on its own merit” (70-71). Sohan’s commitment to feminist rhetorical scholarship is clear throughout the book as she works to articulate and examine the everyday rhetoric available to women and to argue for its value as a site of study. In chapter one, Sohan explores the letter-writing campaigns of the Townsend Movement, a populist movement that advocated pension reform for the elderly by establishing local clubs that could organize and promote the plan through letter-writing campaigns, voter-registration drives, and petitions. These clubs promoted literacy through workshopping letter-writing, which allowed members to “collaboratively imagine” their future without financial worries (41). Pearl Buckhalter, president of the Oregon [End Page 209] City, Oregon, Townsend Club No. 1, is an example of a leader who recontextualized the means available to position herself as an expert, using her own experience as her ethos, rather than simply repeating the words prescribed by Townsend headquarters (52). Sohan argues convincingly that the translingual and transmodal literacy practices of the Townsend Movement allowed individuals like Buckhalter to transform their lives through the literacy training they receive as part of their activism, even if the movement they promote ultimately fails, as the Townsend Movement did. Nevertheless, she argues, this is exactly why rhetorical scholars must fight against the impulse to examine only heroic narratives of activism and must include the everyday in their analyses. In chapter two, Sohan examines the life and work of Quaker minister and activist Eliza P. Gurney. Gurney, Sohan argues, skillfully blends the epideictic form of classical rhetoric with the “nondirective, nonconfrontational, conversational rhetorical approach” of the Quaker community (71-72). Sohan examines several key parts of her ministry: her development as a minister, her traveling ministry in Europe, and her relationship with President Lincoln. Sohan argues that Gurney harnessed silence and kairos to establish an ethos with potentially hostile audiences, at a time when ethos was assumed to be more fixed than fluid. In her discussion of Gurney’s meeting and correspondence with Lincoln, Sohan demonstrates how Gurney recontextualized the epideictic to develop a relationship with the president and to plead with him to imagine a more peaceful and just world. In this chapter, Sohan significantly builds on prior scholarship on Gurney to establish her as a skillful activist and rhetorician through a detailed exploration of Gurney’s speeches, letters, and meetings. Chapter three is perhaps...