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8804 articlesMay 2022
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Review: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan ↗
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Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan 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 Sarah Walden Sarah Walden Baylor University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 209–211. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.209 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sarah Walden; Review: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 209–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.209 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Instructional Note: Redesigning Syllabus Review: Mind Maps as a Tool for Engagement in Writing Courses ↗
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An instructor of undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses creates a mind-mapping activity for syllabus review to engage her students.
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Preview this article: Review: Translingual Histories of Rhetoric, Educational Policy, and Nation-Building, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/84/5/collegeenglish31909-1.gif
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Preview this article: “Freedom: Then, Now, and Tomorrow” and Rhetorical Education, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/84/5/collegeenglish31905-1.gif
April 2022
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Editors' introduction to 5.1
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Review of Translanguaging Outside the Academy: Negotiating Rhetoric and Healthcare in the Spanish Caribbean by Rachel Bloom-Pojar ↗
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Review of Translanguaging Outside the Academy; Negotiating Rhetoric and Healthcare in the Spanish Caribbean, Rachel Bloom-Pojar, Urbana, Illinois: Conference on College Composition and Communication/National Council of Teachers of English, 2018. 161 pages, $29.99.
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Our article uses case studies of two civilian emergency response mHealth apps—PulsePoint and OD Help—to theorize the ways the mobile mapping functionality embedded in these tools, which is integrated with the Google Maps platform, enables yet also constrains users’ agential practices. Using an interface rhetoric approach, we unpack assumptions related to the embodied contexts of use facilitated by this functionality within the unique scenario of civilian emergency response. We argue that interactions between and among humans and these apps’ mapping interfaces involve complex, negotiated, contextually situated enactments, which align with a posthumanist perspective toward agency. At the same time, these interactions may also inadvertently amplify the precarity of vulnerable groups. Better understanding the ways that mobile mapping technologies shape agential enactments, particularly in ways that affect precarious and dispossessed populations, has important implications for the design of mHealth technologies—and the users who rely on them—moving forward.
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Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Zagreb University and online. The conference's theme was Rhetorical Research and Didactics. It consisted of two keynotes that opened both days of the conference, 18 papers presented by international scholars, a roundtable on rhetorical curricula, and parallel workshop sessions on different rhetorical skills and ideas.
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Food is never just food; it is also an instrument of power in a Foucaultian sense. Food is simultaneously a rhetorical tool of dominance and a means of insubordination/defiance. As depicted within slave narratives food is a site of material and symbolic struggle, serving as a means of oppression and resistance. In this study I will examine how enslaved African Americans used the production and consumption of food, as well as discourse about food, as a rhetorical means of resistance. While Michel Foucault produced the theoretical scaffolding that rethinks power and resistance, his theories can be placed in a productive dialogue with the rhetorical studies of Kenneth Burke, Gillian Symon’s general conception of rhetorical resistance, as well as more specifically with James Scott’s and Elizabeth Janeway’s theories of the everyday resistance of the “weak.” Through these analytical lenses, I will place particular focus upon the role of food in slave narratives as a rhetorical means of defining and disputing identity, of establishing and violating various boundaries, and of challenging the status quo of plantations.
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Pierwotnie tworzone jako domowe nakrycia i dekoracje w domach białych właścicieli, afroamerykańskie quilty zostały naznaczone retoryką sprzeciwu w momencie, gdy czarnoskóre kobiety zaczęły produkować patchworki na własny użytek. Wówczas quilty jako medium przekazujące wartości kulturowe stały się nieodłączną częścią tradycji artystycznej czarnoskórych kobiet. Tradycja ta jest silnie związana z retoryką sprzeciwu i wytrzymałości wobec przeciwności losu. Chociaż quilty są zwykle definiowane jako niewolnicza forma artystyczna, ich znaczenie wzrosło w ostatnich latach, kiedy Ameryka mierzy się z licznymi konfliktami rasowymi. Quilty mogą wyrażać traumę związaną z dyskryminacją rasową Afroamerykanów, jednocześnie wskazując na istotną koncepcję ‘czarnej radości’. Niniejszy artykuł analizuje werbalne i wizualne strategie retoryczne stosowane przez autorów quiltów w ramach projektu We Are The Story (https://textilecentermn.org/wearethestory/), tworzonych w odpowiedzi na liczne przypadki śmierci czarnoskórych Amerykanów z rąk policji. Artykuł podejmuje próbę oceny skuteczności zastosowania quiltów jako narzędzi politycznych w trwającym procesie walki czarnych o równe prawa. procesie walki czarnych o równe prawa.
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F.L. Wright’s written and oral statements are discussed with a view to showing the connection between his principles of “organic” architecture and the rhetorical efficacy of his verbal expression. His calculated, eloquent and dexterous enactment, or performance, of various communication strategies is presented as fully contiguous and consonant with his architectural thinking and substantiation of ideas through action. This makes him an important precursor of postmodern consciousness and praxis.
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How Real Is Too Real? User-Testing the Effects of Realism as a Risk Communication Strategy in Sea Level Rise Visualizations ↗
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In visual risk communication, there has been a push toward using realism to show potential effects of sea level rise on coastal communities, often with the assumption that higher degrees of realism are more effective. We challenge this assumption by sharing the results of a user-based study exploring reactions to simulated images of flooded landmarks. The findings identify nuanced rhetorical and emotional responses, encouraging technical communicators to contribute to risk scholarship in psychology and cartography.
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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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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: by Robert Topinka, U of California P, 2020, 182 pp., $34.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9780520343610 ↗
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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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Abstract
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 ↗
Abstract
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.