In Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace (2019), Elizabeth L. Angeli explores the unpredictable workplaces which are the locations of emergency medical services provided by first responders, the EMS personnel who receive 911 calls but may have little idea about what to expect once they arrive at the site of the emergency. While rhetoric of health medicine (RHM) is not a new area of rhetoric, Angeli found little research about EMS professional rhetoric, leaving a void in understanding the modes of communication in these ever-changing, life-altering workplaces. Her text began as part of her dissertation project but morphed into a rhetorical analysis/EMS rhetorical training pedagogy for Technical Professional Communication (TPC) and RHM as well as EMS trainers and trainees.

This article shares lessons from designing <u>EcoTour</u>, a multimedia environmental advocacy project in a state park, and it describes theoretical, practical, and pedagogical connections between locative media and community-engaged design. While maps can help share information about places, people, and change, they also limit how we visualize complex stories. Using deep mapping, and blending augmented reality with digital maps, EcoTour helps people understand big problems like climate change within the context of their local community. This article demonstrates the rhetorical potential of community-engaged design strategies to affect users, prompt action, and create more democratic discourse in environmental communication.

Abstract Public address scholars trained in U.S. communication departments have tended not to study rhetoric created by people with disabilities as much as they do other social movements. Here I attribute this relative lack to two ableist assumptions associated with communication’s emphasis on winning arguments: the presumed disqualification of people with disabilities from public argument itself and the normalization of this disqualification based on biases related to rhetorical performance and capability. Overall, I argue this disqualification is the product of how communication scholars have understood and reconstructed the role of the ideal arguer in public affairs and call for more expansive views.

AbstractIn 1925, Herbert Wichelns published The Literary Criticism of Oratory. By many accounts, the essay would become the founding document of the academic study of rhetoric and public address. However, in that same year, historian Carter G. Woodson published Negro Orators and Their Orations, which focused on the study of the African American oratorical tradition. In this essay, by way of speculative history and using my sanctified imagination, I wonder what an alternative or speculative history would look like if we can conceive Woodson as challenging the dominant (exclusively white) notions of public address and rhetorical praxis. By paying particular attention to Woodson’s introduction in Negro Orators and Their Orations, I submit that not only would we have been introduced to the richness and power of the African American public address tradition earlier but, more importantly, who we start to see as scholars and what we call scholarship would be different as well.I examine this by first, offering an examination of Woodson’s text, paying close attention to the introduction, where Woodson develops his theory of oratory. Second, I examine the African American rhetoric and public address scholarship between 1925 and 1960. Finally, I offer a speculative history of what could have been and what we can still do if we would include some of these voices and their scholarship in the public address canon.

AbstractTransnational rhetorical scholarship has yet to enact meaningful solidarity with the subaltern. “Inclusionary” efforts have actively excluded what I term the “radical subject,” the subject revolting against repressive hegemonic forces to achieve liberatory change in society. Without privileging the radical subject and a critique of freedom over a critique of domination, hegemonic narratives continue uninterrupted. This paper turns toward the Syrian revolution to illustrate how critical rhetoric does not stretch far enough for the radical subject. I propose a radical rhetorical paradigm that centers the radical subject’s lived knowledge as determining meaning. This approach realizes the wisdom in relinquishing skepticism during the critical reasoning process by placing the radical subject as the starting point in inquiry in contested spaces where negotiation over meaning is ongoing. It acknowledges the radical subject’s testimony as born of the epistemic relevance of social location and the boundedness of knowledge. The radical rhetorical approach consecrates the epistemologies of the radical subject as inculcating the imperative for action on behalf of the oppressed.

Abstract We discuss the role of critics in rhetorical studies. Working from different, yet often synchronous, perspectives, we try to thrash out the relationships of critics to texts, the responsibilities of critics in their current context, the ways that critics craft authority, and more.

AbstractAuthors define their approach to academic labor scholarship and activism. They note challenges to engaging with labor in scholarship and practice and call for normalizing discourse about class and labor in relation to the university. The authors suggest directions for future scholarship and activism in local institutions and professional associations.

AbstractWe argue that decolonization must be a future direction for the study of rhetoric and public address. Settler rhetoricians must not only recognize that the field is founded on settler colonialism but also commit to an ongoing process of unsettling the field and making both mundane and extraordinary tangible engagements with decolonization. What the field needs is to begin charting a path for all rhetoricians to participate with decolonization struggles, particularly settler scholars. Drawing from research from Indigenous scholars and Native American and Indigenous studies, we focus on tactics for settler scholars to engage with this important research trajectory. This essay teases out the distinctions between theories of postcoloniality, decoloniality, and decolonization; highlights the active role rhetoric plays in settler colonialism; and lays out tactics for settler rhetorical scholars to enact forms of accountability and responsibility in their research, at their universities, and in the field of rhetoric.

AbstractRhetorical studies as a discipline relies on a set of theories and a geography of case studies that circularly reinforce one another to authorize white-Euro-American traditions of knowledge beholden to colonial ways of knowing the world. Calls to “internationalize” the cases and topics of rhetorical studies are easily subsumed by the self-authorizing racist epistemology of the discipline, since additive models of “diverse” cases repurpose diversity to reinforce the authority of the discipline as it already exists. How should the globalization of rhetorical studies address the disciplinary logic of white, colonial, U.S. normativity? Studying non-U.S., non-Western rhetorical practice must be an anticolonial political intervention to fundamentally reimagine the discipline or it will risk reproducing a racist disciplinary structure.This essay maps three ways that scholars studying “international” cases have led a restructuring of the discipline by challenging the presumptions of universality that creep into scholarship. Anticolonial rhetorical scholars challenge processes of universalization as method, as rhetorical practice, and as ontology. When these processes of universalization become the object of study for rhetorical scholars, there is a possibility that rhetorical studies can develop the reflexivity to challenge its own circularly reinforcing, exclusionary disciplinary logic of white-U.S. normativity.

Abstract In this conversation series, we discuss some of the enduring and evolving interests that the subfield of visual rhetoric provokes for us. We begin with how we found visual rhetoric; questions of disciplinarity and methodology; issues of archive and field; concerns about the objects and scenes for visual rhetoric; and conclude with a focus on the future, core and evolving concepts, and pedagogy.

Abstract We have been asked to engage in a conversation about the current role of ideology—as critique, as rhetoric, as a framework within which academics operate. Our approach will not seek to write the history of rhetorical critique from an ideological perspective, nor work from extant literature as one might in a traditional research essay. Still, we reference ideas emanating from that literature; instead of the normal “source citation in text,” we will list references at the end. Our ideas do not exist in a vacuum—they are stimulated by our own reading/writing in the area of ideology critique— from the original “ideological turn” to the present day. Hence it seems appropriate to acknowledge where ideas, especially about missing elements or future trajectories in research, come from. This conversation touches on the Cold War afterlife of the public as an ideological force, whiteness’s role in gatekeeping the field, and how political liberalism and those interpellated by it constrain the field’s future(s).

Abstract We argue that part of Rhetoric & Public Affairs’ future should center public-facing scholarship in rhetorical studies. We begin by chronicling some of the work colleagues are doing to bridge expert and lay publics: podcasts, popular and trade press interviews, social media content development and management, and activist engagements. Centering public-facing scholarship creates several notable shifts: (1) it changes the “so what?” for traditional scholarship by inviting scholars to think about audiences outside of journal readership; (2) it opens space for different stylistic conventions in scholarly writing; and (3) it indicates that nonexpert audiences are valuable as readers. We note the considerable barriers to entry to public scholarship including gatekeeping, framing public scholarship for tenure, and training. We contend that Rhetoric & Public Affairs could lead other journals through an updated definition of impact that takes into account contemporary modes of circulation and sharing, should accept pieces written for nonexpert readers in rhetoric, and should consider, if possible, making available for public reading one scholarly article every month or every quarter.

AbstractUsing the murder of Magdiel Sanchez as a case study, we argue that rhetoric’s future must embrace practices of situated listening. While much of the field’s work has focused on speakers and practices of invention, we argue that a more just study of public deliberation must position this approach in conversation with an acknowledgment of situated reception. We follow scholars of color, feminist theorists, and disability advocates who have long argued for the practices of ethical listening, adding that the imperative to listen extends beyond the listening ear, accounting for the totality of the body and its environmental and contextual positions. By reaching beyond the demands of race to consider the intersecting axis of (dis)ability, we push the fields of rhetoric, sound studies, and critical/cultural communication studies to consider embodiment as a whole condition of rhetorical reception.

AbstractWhile many have critiqued the racist, sexist, and otherwise prejudiced nature of comedic rhetorics, few have considered how identity-based comedy, particularly racial comedy, functions productively, rather than merely oppressively. Studies of comedic rhetorics have primarily focused on Black and white comedians, but the increasing number and variety of popular comedians of color demands investigation into how comedians from different racial backgrounds use humor to rhetorically articulate the boundaries of their racial(ized) identities. This essay theorizes comedic rhetoric, particularly stereotypes in comedy, as a constitutive form of rhetoric that can articulate generative racial identities as they exist within the ambivalent spaces of in-group stereotypes. By pairing polysemy, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony, and Tina Chen’s theory of impersonation to analyze the standup performances of Asian American comedian Ali Wong, this essay ultimately represents a necessary intervention into understanding racial comedy and stereotypes as potentially productive sites for examining racial identity.

Abstract The case of Southern regionalism shows both the problems with current treatments of regionalism—illustrative of the problem of colonialist perspectives more generally—and the path forward. That path forward involves rethinking whose ancestors count as members of a place, the issue of whose voices are centered, memory and trauma, and counterpublics. The authors advise (1) embracing the field’s interest in local identities and identity movements—therefore, interrogating rhetoric as symbol systems carried in intergenerational, relational identity; (2) pushing further against colonialism, as the world is more layered by global systems of trauma and memory; and (3) admitting that nation-building rhetoric is an imperfect paradigm compared to resistive counterpublic discourse.

Abstract This introduction provides a brief context for the rebooting of the journal, including a history of the journal and the controversy that led to its reimagining, and offers brief synopses of the individual essays included within.

AbstractDecolonial smuggling is a practice that falls at the intersections of fugitivity (Moten) and delinking (Mignolo, Wanzer-Serrano). It is geared toward disrupting rhetorical studies’ zero-point epistemology to open space to marshal alternative epistemologies—of Black being, Indigeneities, and their relational formations—against the canon to enable more radical, decolonial disciplinary futures. Building on the work of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) scholars, this essay details the forms of whiteness and knowledge production that reproduce epistemic violence, performs metaphoric (meta)criticism across various strands of race scholarship, and comments on white scholars’ role in these conversations. This essay seeks to add clarity to what decolonization looks like for rhetoricians with respect to the epistemologies and ontologies embedded within the metaphors that, for many, are matters of life and death.

Abstract What obligations do scholars of rhetoric and public address have to understand, address, and sustain the conditions of earthly coexistence? Only if the field of rhetoric embraces a genuinely ecological notion of rhetoric, the author argues, and only if we collectively commit to addressing the ecological dimensions of our various objects of study, can we truly give back to the earth in ways that honor all that it has given, and continues to give, to us. Toward that end, this essay outlines several dimensions of an “ecocentric rhetoric.“

Abstract Annie Hill and Carol A. Stabile discuss U.S. cultural and political shifts in relation to sexual violence and what that means for rhetoric, public affairs, and the academic landscape.

AbstractThe pandemic and economic catastrophes of 2020 and the forms of resistance that surged against racist systemic and physical violence indicate, we contend, that studying public address in the present moment requires attention to the mutual contingency of rhetoric and digitality. Relying on interdisciplinary literatures and a global perspective, we direct such attention along three vectors: platforms, commons, and methods. We indicate how theorizing rhetoric and digitality transforms critical and historical traditions. In expanding the purview of the public address tradition while retaining the tradition’s hermeneutic potential, we emphasize the need to challenge disciplinary terms and the desirability of expanded analytical methods. We submit that by not attending sufficiently to the advent and diffusion of digital media technologies, public address scholarship misses opportunities to shape ongoing conversations about how rhetoric mediates public affairs; and that insofar as struggles for racial justice are bound up with, not just mediated by, digitality, the prospects of diversifying rhetoric’s professoriate increase when research on this topic is central rather than peripheral.

AbstractAs a subfield of rhetorical studies, public address has been conservative and defensive from the start in its method, theory, politics, and even subject. Even as there has been an expansion of the subject (i.e., the “text” to be studied), the field has, on the whole, remained skeptical of new methods, all critical theories, and alternative political motives. Because of this, the subfield of public address has remained incredibly white and largely male. If the subfield is to continue to exist and, perhaps, thrive, it is time for a clear change in tack. Public address must open its gates widely to the critical methods and theories that can allow for more diverse knowledge production and reorient the field’s political goals. And in a reversal, public address should define itself solely around the study of speeches directed at publics.

There is a particular urgency in this political moment to understand children’s experiences with current events. Drawing from data generated following the 2016 presidential election, this paper focuses on three racially and linguistically diverse children’s persuasive compositions. Within a critical literacies writing unit focused on (im)migrant experiences, children called on legislators to act on the Republican administration’s policies. Building on the understanding that all literacies are political and that teaching and learning are value-laden tasks, the author engaged a cultural rhetorics orientation—grounded in the understanding of texts, bodies, materials, and ideas as interconnected aspects of communication—for data generation and analysis. The findings highlight how children strategically employed rhetoric to persuade. They used logos, pathos, and ethos, as well as story, a central tool for meaning-making and building practices in the world. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how children, when properly supported, can agentively participate in critical literacies and act on real-world politics. Through the stories of young children, this study emphasizes what children have to tell adults and what a cultural rhetorics orientation, through its emphasis on story, enables literacies researchers and educators to understand about children’s composing.

This article considers the problem of conflicting researcher obligations in RHM, particularly when professional medical rhetoric is analyzed with the goal of improving patient care. Taking one case as illustrative, this article argues that medical professional participants are in positions of relative power, and that their choice to participate in RHM research or not can have downstream effects on more vulnerable patients. Furthermore, this case demonstrates that the interests of medical professional participants may diverge from the interests of their patients. As a result, when RHM researchers assume traditional orientations towards medical professional research participants, they may find themselves unable to advocate for more vulnerable patient populations.

This article examines the rhetorical effects of a rape accusation on the survivor and on the survivor’s community of social justice activists. Relying on interviews with the survivor and with the community affected by the allegation, the article analyzes responses to the allegation, articulates how those responses are informed by rape culture, and illustrates how those responses affected the survivor and her rhetorical agency. The article argues that rhetorical agency can be productively distributed across various allies to assist survivors and help restore the rhetorical agency that rape erodes. Establishing sexual assault as a public health issue, the article recommends broad education in rhetorical listening to improve how those entrusted to hear assault stories listen, respond, and, when appropriate, help survivors speak or act.

This paper explores how I navigated the complicated terrain of opposition research during the dissertation phase of my doctoral program. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted on a pro-life organization, I illustrate that care-based ethics (Held, 2006; Tronto, 1994) is not just for vulnerable and agreeable participants but is valuable and appropriate for researching powerful groups whom we oppose. Furthermore, I argue that rhetorical listening (Glenn & Ratcliffe, 2011; Ratcliffe, 1999, Ratcliffe, 2005) is not just a valuable methodological approach to research, but also a form of reciprocity, especially critical when studying groups we oppose. Such an approach promotes the mutually beneficial goals of respect and understanding.

We argue that by using existing data and sharing research in a databank, RHM scholars can practice a research habit that conserves and optimizes intellectual and institutional resources. When possible, by using existing datasets, scholars avoid data waste, that is ignoring or bypassing existing data. The data distinctions that we call attention to—derived, compiled, and designed—account for various ethical and rhetorical concerns regarding privacy and confidentiality, expected context, and consent. Equally important to the aforementioned data deliberations we explore, collecting and managing shared RHM data in a databank, while possible, are not without ethical, logistical, and rhetorical difficulties.

The intersection of industry sponsorship, government regulation, academic interests, and medical journals is a core interest in biomedical research, and one that overlaps with concerns in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). At stake in conversations about this intersection are authority and participation: who is and is not invited to offer opinions and, even when invited, whose opinions are taken seriously. Following, colleagues with ties to the International Society of Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) present their ideas in response to questions about authorship and authority posed by another, who is also an RHM scholar. The answers of medical journal editors and publications professionals employed by corporate entities largely align with the view that both authorship and authority should be determined by scientific practice and knowledge rather than power relations or politics. A philosopher who gave an invited plenary talk at the national ISMPP meeting and participated in the organization’s first white paper offers a different perspective, considering the ways that fields self-constitute in part by bounding authority and authorship.

We proudly present this special issue of Community Literacy Journal on "Building Engaged Infrastructure." Our vision for this collection begins with the inaugural Conference on Community Writing (CCW), which took place at the University of Colorado Boulder in October 2015 1 and attracted 350 scholars, students, activists, and community members representing forty-two states, three countries, 152 colleges and universities, and forty-eight community organizations.This large group was drawn to a vision of higher education that connects with local, national, and international communities by using writing for education, public dialogue, and social change.The overwhelming response to the conference underscored a desire by those working in community writing (a growing subfield within rhetoric and composition that includes genres such as service learning, community-based research, community literacy, community publishing, advocacy and activist writing, and more) to have opportunities to network, share best practices, and receive mentoring.This event brought together academics and community members to explore the relationships between communication, writing, and social action.According to CCW founding chair Veronica House, a conference goal was "to build a national network of people, ideas, resources, and support structures-an engaged infrastructure-to make the work we do in and about our communities more sustainable, impactful, rewarding, and rewarded." 2 In the pages that follow, we turn our attention to the scholarship and practice of community writing that emerged from, or was reflected in, presentations and conversations at CCW.We realize, and want to highlight in this special issue, the obstacles, challenges, and paradoxes of working in community writing.For one, as the astute reader will no doubt notice, definitions of community range widely.The same is true for what counts as writing.An exploration of engagement and infrastructure is no less complex.However, we believe that the inclusion of multiple viewpoints, and the deferral of a precise definition of terms, effectively identifies the fluid boundaries of this thing we call "community writing." Those who attended CCW, or previous events like the 2008 "Imagining Community Literacy" meeting in Philadelphia and the 2011 "Writing Democracy" conference in Commerce, Texas 3 , or who are energized by work that engages the ethics and populations outside of the traditionally defined borders of the university share enthusiasm for engaged work and an optimistic belief that the study and practice of writing can lead to a more just world.We also share concerns about the risks embedded in this work.In April 2016, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) published an official "Position To this end, they hosted a conference of about 150 librarians, public historians, community leaders, and teachers and scholars from our field and beyond at Texas A&M-Commerce in March 2011 and have held pre-conference workshops at the CCCCs every year since.In July 2012, Michelle Hall Kells hosted about 25 leading scholars in community literacy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the Summit of the National Consortium of Writing Across Communities.Clearly, the desire to establish a collaborative unit of some kind is high.3.

Preamble The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) represents teachers and scholars of writing and speaking whose work in and beyond colleges and universities regularly extends to sites for online learning, professional workplaces, and both near and far-flung communities. This statement provides guidelines for understanding, assessing, and valuing the community-engaged work colleagues may undertake across career stages, ranks, and roles. As such, it underscores the worth community-engaged work can have for individual participants, participating campuses, and disciplines associated with CCCC. As a resource for both faculty and administrators, this statement, we hope, will serve to credit teachers, researchers, and programs appropriately for their contributions to university-community partnerships that are anchored in rigorous scholarship and designed to enhance community capacity. This statement echoes others in related fields, which offer similar frameworks for valuing and evaluating academic community engagement.

This article discusses the successes and vulnerabilities associated with combining the pedagogical methods of Theater, Composition, and Community Literacy in the Composition classroom. It examines how the ideas of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed can be combined to support an innovative approach to Composition teaching, one that additionally employs engaged scholarship and service learning. The essay describes how methods and cycles of story gathering, playwriting, and rhetorical analysis have been used with various community partners, including an adult day care for dementia patients, an HIV/AIDs clinic, and Public Health outreach programs that address Health Disparities. The article explains how the ready audience of community-written plays and the inherent characteristics of theatrical production enable finite and clearly definable communication moments and products—especially in the autobiography-fantasy fused genre I have termed magical memoir—while engaging and empowering the voices of students, teachers, community partners, and audience members alike. All human beings are actors (they act!) and spectators (they observe!) They are spect-actors. … Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, instead of just waiting for it. –Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors

It is not typically the bent of infrastructure to be continually responsive in a way that is expansive and inclusive; instead, for newcomers or those with alternative histories, aims, vision, values, and perspectives, the inertia of infrastructure is more likely to be experienced as infrastructural breakdowns. We ask: What might wisdom look like in these “structured” encounters? That is, what is the intellectual work of rhetoric on those thin ledges where institutional chronos shapes and limits possibilities for knowledge work and working relationships among people who likely would not have otherwise met? In response, we advance a framework for a constructive approach to infrastructure—one that prizes deliberation over rationalization and actively attends to the warrants underlying calls for public engagement. We first consider the relationship between infrastructure, rhetorical wisdom, and the imagination of possibilities, then lay out a framework for cultivating rhetorical wisdom in response to infrastructure breakdowns.

At our workshop at the inaugural Conference on Community Writing on the rhetoric of the corporate university, participants noted that the values espoused by community literacy “in the community” are being eroded at the university. Furthermore, they noted the underlying rhetorics of missionary zeal, whiteness, and privatization in community literacy and service learning work. The authors build on these critiques by examining two successive administrations at Syracuse University. The first presented a model of “engaged infrastructure” with progressive rhetoric but oppressive outcomes; the second shed the façade of community partnership for an explicitly corporate and militaristic vision of higher education. Through this comparison, the authors interrogate foundations that community literacy has been built on with the hope of opening new possibilities.

When first admitted to Oberlin College, women were expected to attend their rhetoric courses in silence. Not content with an education that did not prepare them for public speaking, some women students collaborated to educate themselves. Their history uncovers feminist and antiracist disruptions to composition and rhetoric that have much to teach present-day educators.

This article describes and reflects on a collaborative, in-class activity that asks students in a business writing course to analyze the intersection of language, values, and social justice through a rhetorical analysis of corporate mission statements. The activity looks at how mission statements, as a genre, work to construct an ethos of civic engagement targeting a specific audience. Students reflect on values embedded in mission statements and compare these values with corporate action. Students then work in groups to create their own mission statements that direct their research and teamwork for their other, collaborative course projects. I offer this activity focused on mission statements as a concrete way to discuss social justice, values, and civic engagement in a business writing course; specifically, students explore how language impacts social justice and structural (in)equality.

While online learning and community engagement are not necessarily adversarial, this article explores the tensions between the two and how an online rhetoric course adapted place-based pedagogy to explore the idea of belonging. The assignment described here leverages online learning while sponsoring community engagement. The assignment invites students to learn about and participate in social justice action that, while accomplished virtually by way of Web 2.0 technologies and spaces, still connects students to the places that are significant to them. Such an approach is inherently invested in place-based pedagogy that frames social justice as abstract and complex issues that not only affect nation-states, but that also have tangible implications for privileged and marginalized groups in local communities (Flynn et al., 2010).

A t a time when both physical and symbolic borders from national borders to socio-economic inequality are at the front of political debate, the exigency of Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines Across America cannot be overstated. The collection explores the rhetorics of borders and their immediate implications for our students, our classrooms, and our communities. The essays in this collection operate in concert to highlight how the rhetoric of lines impacts democratic discourse as well as offer sites of intervention for rhetoricians and compositionists.

Veronica: I bet that a bunch of our readers either have community literacy projects that they're working on or are thinking of launching, and they're wondering, how do I fund the work I do, and how do I explain it in ways that make sense to people outside of writing and rhetoric studies?So to begin, could you tell us a bit about your

The course treated film, fiction, and all matter of non-fiction as textual representations equally worthy of critical analysis. Distinctions between signifiers from domains traditionally labeled "rhetoric" and those from domains labeled "poetics" held no water. Like Linkon's syllabus from two decades ago, The Half Life of Deindustrialization assumes that all texts have the potential to reveal important insights about cultural myths and values. Her engaging study looks at texts from a wide range of genres that offer representations of deindustrialization in the United States. Linkon sees memory, nostalgia, socio-economic insecurity, community, pride, and politics through a critical lens, offering a nuanced and compelling portrait of how deindustrialization still reverberates, even decades after initial waves of plant and factory closings.

his conversation/article resituates the concept of reciprocity, as it has been theorized and enacted in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, within a larger framework of social justice, one that recognizes legacies of struggle, survival and perseverance. When situated within the Filipinx indigenous notion of kapwa, reciprocity takes a temporal turn not only in recognizing that building trust and reciprocity happen repeatedly over time but also in recognizing how enacting reciprocity extends beyond initial research contexts, participants, and outcomes. Enacting reciprocity requires slowing down in time and working with others in social justice work strategically, tactically, and repeatedly over longer durations. To see ourselves as reciprocal beings means that we continually see ourselves as members of a larger community invested in making structural asymmetries legible and open to deep revision.

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 makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

ince the 2016 election, activism and protests have garnered increasing media attention. At the same time, the conduct of individuals involved in social movements is intensely scrutinized by politicians and the public at large who label these protests obscene, unruly, or even violent. The edited collection Unruly Rhetorics attempts to address the fraught implications of "civility" in an age characterized by political tension and the rise of neoliberalism. Community Literacy Journal readers will find this collection to be an important resource for community organizing and deliberative rhetoric as many chapters discuss the rhetorical power of dissent. Activists and community organizers will also find that Unruly Rhetorics gives credence to the struggles they face every day in the public eye as they fight for equality and justice.

ABSTRACT “Exclusive Pumping” straddles the most common infant-feeding methods: breastfeeding and bottle feeding. Exclusive pumpers express milk and feed with bottles. Yet experts rarely recommend exclusive pumping, creating a need for information outside of formal communication outlets. This article argues that exclusive pumping forums are sites of tactical technical communication – operating as “anti-institutional” – and explores these forums as places of inspiration and support, as well as spaces where mothers seek to solve technical feeding problems while avoiding institutional judgment.

In Translanguaging outside the Academy: Negotiating Rhetoric and Healthcare in the Spanish Caribbean, Rachel Bloom-Pojar asks the following questions: What does it mean to speak well? Whose interes...

On September 22, 2014, students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong launched a five-day strike to protest the alleged limits Beijing placed on the procedures to elect Hong Kong’s chief executive...

How often do we view the Google search bar as a mnemonic device? It recalls information, follows associative pathways, identifies patterns, and distinguishes between what is relevant in the moment ...

This article examines textual artifacts surrounding Google Lens, an image recognition application, to reveal how it forwards reductive representations of the complex sets of relations constituted through locative media and augmented reality. Working across textual and posthumanist traditions, this article introduces a theoretical approach for investigating the rhetoric of technology, termed the postsymbolic. In acknowledging the formative and ontological role discursive rhetoric plays in the spatial operations and user experiences of and through locative media, the postsymbolic asserts the need for an integrated approach in which symbolic artifacts might be examined through the lens of both discursive rhetorical theory and posthumanism.