Children, as a result of age, social status, and developmental stage, depend upon caregivers and medical professionals to interpret health discourse. However, children have largely gone unexamined in research on visual health communication. Because children are a vulnerable audience, rhetoricians should more closely attend to texts addressing them. This article analyzes 147 children’s picture books about COVID-19. These texts draw on the rhetorical concept of identification to encourage readers to take up particular health behaviors. These texts illuminate three specific risks of using identification to instantiate health behaviors in children: failing to acknowledge material limitations on children’s agency, glossing over the risks of infection, and distorting scientific discourse. Ultimately, while the majority of the texts in our corpus articulate the need for a community-centered approach, only a handful acknowledge directly that children’s agency and power are limited. These texts, therefore, also highlight a larger issue beyond the coronavirus: the difficulty of relying on an individual health imperative in communicating public health—an inherently communal enterprise.

Rhetoric about bodies, health, and medicine is conceived at the intersection of multiple discursive systems and social domains. I contend that religion remains an underexplored (and sometimes misrepresented) realm in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM)—a gap this article seeks to address. Here, I present my research on the importance of Protestantism in the invention of the premature infant as a medical figure in the United States. I show that early discourse about premature birth is shot through with Protestant rhetoric and beliefs, and I propose the term “theo-moral physiology” for the religiously informed medical orientation popularized in late 19th century medical literature about premature babies. Ultimately, I challenge RHM scholars to resist the tendency to treat the rise of American biomedicine as a fundamentally secular project by attending to the ways modern medicine has evolved in tandem with contemporary religion.

This article uses the example of nootropics—a flexible term that capitalizes on the flexibility of the brain—as a category to describe how seemingly oppositional tropes, or turns, can occupy the same rhetorical topos, or space, and produce distinct ethos, political identity, and commitment within that space. It considers two dialectical, gendered tropes in nootropic discourse. The tropes are a falsely binary and highly problematic set of subjectivities, a Gothic masculine and an ostensible Gothic feminine. These two tropes exemplify how rhetorics of wellness produce identities whose turnings towards a politics does not map cleanly onto electoral politics or even identity politics in the US and Canada.

Data Justice and the Right to the City consists of a set of case studies each exploring the intersections between urban governance and datafication. This volume, edited by Morgan Currie, Jeremy Knox, and Callum McGregor, situates itself within the critical discourse on how data-driven technologies reshape urban spaces, impacting notions of citizenship, justice, and democracy. Each chapter draws inspiration from Henri Lefebvre's concept of the Right to the City (RTTC) theory by integrating data justice as a complementary framework to address the political ramifications of datafication in urban contexts. RTTC emphasizes participatory parity in urban space by developing spaces and data systems that enable all residents, regardless of their economic status, cultural background, or political power, to have an equal say in how their cities are designed and managed.

In Amplifying Voices in UX, a diverse group of scholars and practitioners come together to explore different aspects of user experience (UX) with a focus on inclusivity and social justice. This book moves beyond conventional UX frameworks, presenting innovative pedagogical strategies and methodologies that highlight empathy, accessibility, and the importance of considering marginalized voices in design. The authors delve into areas often overlooked in mainstream UX discourse, offering new perspectives on how to create more inclusive and impactful user experiences.

American Kairos: Washington National Cathedral and the New Civil Religion by Richard Benjamin Crosby speaks to multiple areas within rhetorical studies, particularly for researchers interested in U.S. religion and politics, spatial rhetorics, presidential rhetoric, and kairos as a multilayered concept.Crosby is Professor of English at Brigham Young University and has published extensively on race, politics, and religion. American Kairos fits well within his previous work analyzing Mormon, presidential, priestly, prophetic, and civil religious discourse. As he mentions in the preface, some of the archival research for this book took place during his doctoral studies at the University of Washington.Rather than a straightforward rhetorical history or close reading of the cathedral, American Kairos analyzes several rhetorical dimensions of the building's relationship to civil religion in the United States. The book's attention is thus split between two theses. As Crosby states early on, “The main argument of this book is that American Civil Religion, the implicit system of values, ideals, rituals, traditions, and symbols that lend shape and meaning to our citizenship, has never been properly imagined, and that, as a consequence, the nation's past is haunted by ghosts that presently grow louder and more violent” (xii). This set of claims sits alongside what this reader takes to be the overarching rhetorical claim of the book, which appears in the introductory chapter: “The Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul—also variously named the Cathedral at Washington, Washington Cathedral, Washington National Cathedral, or the National Cathedral—is one the of the great, unknown rhetorical triumphs in the history of American religion. Without government mandate or public vote, it has claimed its role as America's de facto house of worship” (6). The two lines of argument surface in each chapter in some form, although they do not fully overlap.American Kairos is structured in an unorthodox manner. It is comprised of eight chapters, not including the introduction and conclusion, and split into two main sections. The first section explores the history and idea of the cathedral as it was conceptualized by prominent figures in its development, including Pierre L'Enfant, Henry Yates Satterlee, Francis B. Syre, and Mariann Edgar Budde. The second section examines the cathedral's “public space,” that is, its most well-known speeches and symbolic artifacts. This section begins with a close reading analysis of the cathedral's symbolism and spatial rhetorics by drawing on the theologically driven architectural vision of Philip Hubert Frohman, who served as the cathedral's principal architect from 1921 to 1972. It then moves into three chapters dedicated to major speeches delivered at the cathedral. The first analyzes Martin Luther King Jr.’s final Sunday sermon, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” given five days before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. The next contrasts the speeches of George H. W. Bush, who dedicated the cathedral in 1990, and George W. Bush, who offered pulpit remarks for the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Closing the trilogy is a chapter dedicated to the 2014 address of Cameron Partridge, an openly transgender Episcopal chaplain, and the 2018 interring of Matthew Shepard's remains within the cathedral, each highlighting the institution's role in promoting LGBTQ+ causes.Drawing liberally from the chapter on Dr. King, Crosby links various elements of the National Cathedral's rhetorical life to the concept of kairos. Building on James L. Kinneavy's theological work, Crosby defines kairos as “not just a moment; it is . . . an opening into what is truly real” (23). For Crosby, American kairos comprises “a sacred space wherein citizens could be moved by their experience of the country's heroes, deeds, and ideals, a space wherein citizenship becomes a holy practice” (23). One of the limitations of this book is that it does not offer precise definitions for these constituent terms—holy, religion, sacred, etc.—and thus does not fully articulate what separates “civil religion” from “religion” proper. By drawing on a wider and more critical literature on the intersection of faith, politics, religion, and society via the work of thinkers like Talal Asad, William Cavanaugh, David Bentley Hart, Kyle Harper, Stanley Hauerwas, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Neuhaus, Charles Taylor, or Joseph Massad, the book's claims regarding kairos and the cathedral might have delineated those concepts more sharply. Regardless, Crosby robustly identifies fractures and inconsistencies within American civil religion and shows how those divisions manifested within the cathedral's rhetorical career, concluding the book with a call for the United States “to imagine itself at the helm of something unique . . . by throwing out all notions that we are a nation with a distinct religious or ethnic past. From there, we will find that we remain as rich as ever in the raw materials of civil-religious potential” (233).Along the way, the book makes several notable academic contributions. First, it provides a first-rate close reading of the National Cathedral itself. Chapter Five, which synthesizes scholarship on spatial rhetorics with Frohman's “fourth dimension” approach to ecclesial architecture that prioritizes “an experience in which the worshipper loses all sense of time and space and becomes co-present with God,” is a major contribution of the book (144). It offers a useful guide for scholars who seek to understand the sacred as it intersects the rhetoric of space and place. Second, the first section of the book offers a fascinating history of the National Cathedral as a rhetorical site, perhaps providing a roadmap for future scholarship that seeks to perform a similar diachronic rhetorical analysis of a specific monument, building, or public space. Third, Crosby's meditations on kairos, particularly in the preface and introduction, offer an insightful and interdisciplinary take on an oft invoked and potentially ambiguous rhetorical concept. Additionally, the book does a good job of situating its criticism of the chosen rhetorical artifacts within their articulatory and civil religious contexts by referencing the cathedral archives and other primary sources. American Kairos is, if nothing else, a work of patient and extensive research that models the best practices of public address scholarship.That said, the book has several areas where it could be stronger. First, the overall structure confused this reader. Perhaps because of its patient composition, the chapter sequencing can jump across historical eras and arguments, making important throughlines between chapters difficult to identify beyond general themes. While beginning with L'Enfant's dream of a national church makes sense chronologically, the result is that the book begins with a detailed, contested history of a rhetorical institution across multiple chapters without fully establishing from the start the rhetorical dimensions of that institution. One of the casualties of this organizational design is that a sustained rhetorical analysis of the National Cathedral's relationship to other spaces in the District of Columbia as they exist today is not provided. This absence seems all the more striking given Chapter Three's focus on anti-Catholic attitudes among nineteenth century Protestants. This chapter could have been expanded by discussing the proximity of the National Cathedral to a major center of Catholic life in the United States—Maryland and northeast Washington D.C.—epitomized by the Catholic University of America (established 1887), which boasts its own cathedral on a rival hill a mere five miles away (The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, consecrated in 1920). That this information is left out seems like a missed opportunity.Second, the wide-ranging organizational structure leads to an attenuated sense of context at times across the book. For example, Chapter Four's discussion of Mariann Edgar Budde, the cathedral bishop since 2011, references several controversies related to President Donald Trump along with McCarthyism, xenophobia, immigration, and standards of civic dignity over the span of three pages. Chapter Three does not reference any anti-Catholic invective from Protestant pulpits prior to the nineteenth century or any of the significant criticisms of liberalism, democracy, and the United States offered by the Vatican during this era. Chapter One describes L'Enfant's vision of a “Great Church for National Purposes” that would be “assigned to the special use of no particular Sect or denomination, but equally open to all” (48–49). Crosby returns to this description in later chapters, even asking, “Was L'Enfant's church supposed to be Christian?” (122). The book would have benefitted from a more thorough explanation of what a non-Christian church would look like and what would differentiate it from another kind of religious gathering. As these brief examples illustrate, while the book ably analyzes the rhetorical figures it selects, it sometimes struggles to capture key elements and the full complexity of the broader context, which may in part reflect the book's ambitious scope.Finally, a main contention of American Kairos is the polemic assertion that “we have never had a coherent civil religion” (230). Likening the National Cathedral's attempt to embody American civil religion to “a charioteer holding the reigns of wrangling horses” (143), Crosby laments the cathedral's serpentine history and mishmash of iconography as “brilliant but unsettling and perhaps nonsensical” (163). Crosby proposes a view of the National Cathedral as an embodiment of a new civil religion: I imagine his [L'Enfant's] church as a place of ritual and memorial, yes, but also a great center of civic education where students and citizens come to study, debate, and celebrate the rights, responsibilities, and implications of their citizenship, including the responsibility to atone for past sins. To this end, such a church might also host schools and libraries, symposia and debates, artists and scholars in residence, and of course great speeches and civil-religious sermons (229).To this reader, this description sounds a lot like a university—an educational institution with many departments that is focused much more on here than the hereafter—and less like a church, mosque, temple, or synagogue. An alternative reading of the “incoherence” of American civil religion as embodied within the life of the Washington National Cathedral might find that its contradictions reflect democracy, in all its messiness, itself. In that sense, it would be difficult to find a building that more perfectly encapsulates the full range of the American experiment than the National Cathedral in northwest Washington D.C.In conclusion, American Kairos: Washington National Cathedral and the New Civil Religion is an insightful book that deserves to be on the shelf of any serious scholar of political rhetoric, civil religion, and religious discourse in the United States. It merits a readership that, like the cathedral itself, seeks to chart a path forward in divisive times.

Abstract This essay analyses wilderness debates in the Utah Public Lands Initiative (PLI). From 2012–2016, the PLI sought to answer the “question of wilderness” through a holistic, state-centric public lands bill. The effort was spearheaded by former Utah Representative Rob Bishop who argued that the state could achieve “certainty” through “compromise,” or that the state's problems with wilderness and public lands could be resolved by reaching consensus on how best to use those lands. Bishop sought input from seven Utah counties, who would submit their own proposals for how best to resolve pressing land-use issues in their respective counties. I examine public discourse about one proposal, from Grand County, analyzing county documents, newspaper reports, and citizen comment letters. Following work in rhetorical studies on wilderness, my analysis demonstrates how local communities construct wilderness and its meanings in a particular cultural moment. Reading the county's PLI rhetorics for how citizens valued wilderness and their relationships to public lands, I argue that the county had difficulty attaining compromise and certainty because citizens could not agree on the meanings of “wilderness.”

African immigrants in the US and across the globe are confronted with issues of language and culture retention, resistance to the loss of the same, and reconstruction of their identities while navigating the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of the host nations. The experiences of one such family are shared through the African Oral Traditional Storytelling Framework developed on the tenets of African oral traditional storytelling techniques, African ideologies, and African worldviews, in which storying is both method and analysis. Through oral stories, poetry, proverbs, and songs, the Opokus invite readers to partake in the fireside chat as they share their lived experiences and the implications those experiences have on their identity conceptualization and that of their children. The shared stories expand scholarly discourse on the social identities of African immigrant families and youths about the global, political, and economic forces that shape their experiences. Finally, it also urges English language arts teachers to engender African-centered writing approaches to acknowledge African peoples’ linguistic ambivalence and the “power” associated with the teaching and learning of English due to colonialism.

The conquest of America brought with it the introduction of rhetoric as a model of teaching and as a practice in the different manifestations of religious discourse, of which the preaching or sermon was the most important for scholars of the colonial era (16th-18th centuries) who, on the other hand, gave little importance to the three political genres: deliberative, epideictic and judicial or forensic, although these had not disappeared as discursive practices. The great classical deliberative oratory had taken a backseat in New Spain but continued to develop in the consistories of the mayoralties and in public debates; the judicial genre continued to be exercised in lawsuits before the Inquisition and local judicial bodies and the epideictic genre was manifested in the lives of saints and praises of various kinds. This situation changed during the 19th century, particularly in the second half, when great parliamentary oratory, civic and patriotic speeches that flooded the republic and judicial oratory flourished because of the new political conditions brought about by the struggle for independence and the triumph of liberalism, in addition to other important genres such as history and journalism. The purpose of this essay is, first, to offer an outline of oratory practices and rhetorical teaching during the Colony, emphasizing the importance of sermons and the oblivion of other discursive expressions and, second, to show the emergence of political genres during the 19th century, which reached their greatest splendor in discursive practices and liberal education.

The article focuses on the paragraph 30 from the epideictic speech of Gorgias The Defense of Palamedes (B 11a in: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker 1956, 291), where the noun μνήμη ("memory") appears. Through a contextual philological analysis, the Author manages to establish the full semantic range of mneme and determine the role it plays in this passage (B 11a, lines 188-198). The title character of the speech, Palamedes, defending himself against a false accusation, presents his inventions as the main argument for his innocence. One of the most important inventions is writing, which mneme - "memory" entrusts stored information, becoming its confidant. Based on a detailed contextual analysis, it can be convincingly concluded that the proper meaning of mneme in the examined fragment is "intellectual ability, power" to collect, organize and store messages, understood as a "reservoir" of remembered facts and events. Written word is the real guarantor of their preservation in an unchanged form. In this way it becomes the guardian of "memory", moreover, as its confidant, writing removes the "troublesome" excess of information from it and thus makes it regenerated, efficient and accessible for humans to acquire new information and knowledge.

This study conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of the live streaming of Jiaqi Li, a well-known Chinese streamer. Integrating systemic functional grammar and systemic visual grammar to explore the construction of interpersonal meanings in Li's live streams, the authors found that Li uses verbal semiotics to convey information and feelings and, more important, to create his different interactive roles as an authoritative opinion leader, a protector of consumers’ benefits, and a friend who shares his experiences and recommends products. This study offers insight into e-commerce discourse and communication, adding to the literature on live streaming in commerce and business communication.

ABSTRACTAs immersive technology grows in popularity, universities are developing academic innovation labs (AIL) that often introduce students to virtual reality (VR) and other emerging cross reality applications. Although these labs help educate students on emerging technology, a more critical eye is needed to examine user experience (UX). This article reports on a qualitative, multimethod study that employed a talk-aloud UX protocol to gather data on VR users' experience at the University of Connecticut's OPIM Research Lab. To fully define and contrast this data, we juxtapose these individual narratives with rhetorical analysis of marketing discourse, as presented by VR platform HTC Vive, Google's VR application Tilt Brush, and the Research Lab's promotional material. Based on our findings, we assert that sociotechnical imaginaries as constructed by promotional material often reduce the complexities of immersion in user experience. Such marketing rhetoric creates "top-down" imaginaries that contrast with "bottom-up" imaginaries generated in user experience, reinforcing the complex and fluid definitions of immersion. The resulting study has practical implications for stakeholders across higher education, especially in the context of innovation labs, as well as for technical and professional communication educators and practitioners.KEYWORDS: Immersive technologyinnovation labsvirtual realityimmersionuser experienceemerging technologyfuture imaginariessociotechnical imaginaries Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsBrent LuciaBrent Lucia is an Assistant Professor In-Residence at the University of Connecticut School of Business. He has a PhD in Composition and Applied Linguistics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His current research explores the rhetorics of technology and its relationship to the production of space. His recent scholarship can be found in Rhetoric Review, Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, and Enculturation.Matthew A. VetterMatthew A. Vetter is an Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Composition and Applied Linguistics PhD program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His research, which asks questions related to technology, rhetoric, and writing, has been published widely in venues such as Social Media and Society, Rhetoric Review, Studies in Higher Education, and Computers and Composition. His co-authored book, Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality, was published by Routledge in 2021.David A. SolbergDavid A. Solberg is a teaching assistant at the Holy Family Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his MA degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His master's thesis was entitled The Use of Parallelism in Poetry Writing for the Acquisition of English Grammar (available from ProQuest).

ABSTRACTThis study examines technological research in higher education as a social justice issue. Focusing on technologies developed for war, surveillance, and policing at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), we compare institutional and activist discourses about these projects, uncovering significant differences in accommodation strategies and values-based arguments. We conclude that locally situated controversies such as this one might value not only for social justice research, but also in providing pedagogical and theoretical scaffolding toward real local change.KEYWORDS: Social justice / ethicsscience communication / environmental communicationdigital technologies / emerging technologiestextual analysis / linguistic analysis AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank Alex Helberg and Laxman Singanamala, who each provided helpful feedback on drafts of this work. They are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to editors Rebecca Walton and Tracy Bridgeford for their useful comments and suggestions. In addition, they wish to thank their former colleagues and comrades at Carnegie Mellon University, who inspired many aspects of this project: particularly the members of CMU Against ICE who authored the Dis-Orientation Guide. Finally, they give special thanks to Alaina Foust and Gunjan, Manish, Siddhant, and Daksh Bhardwaj for their advice and support.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsCalvin PollakCalvin Pollak is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in Technical Communication & Rhetoric at Utah State University, where he teaches courses on research methods and professional editing. His scholarly interests include institutional rhetoric, language accessibility, and social justice. He is also co-founder, co-producer, and co-host of re:verb, a podcast about language in action.Sanvi BhardwajSanvi Bhardwaj is a junior at Cornell University studying Health Care Policy and Inequality Studies. Her scholarly interests include social justice, health disparities among marginalized groups, and community-based healthcare interventions. She is also involved in local activism as a member of Cornell Progressives.

ABSTRACTWe asked 15 editors about their perceptions of five sentences using singular they in different contexts and about the style guides that inform their work. Editors appreciated the inclusivity of indefinite and definite singular they and recognized APA for its leading-edge stance. Our findings indicate the need for editors to develop a heuristic for determining when to deviate from style guide advice and to develop their own system for mitigating ambiguity in relation to they.KEYWORDS: Editingsocial justice / ethics Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. We explained to editors that, in each sentence, the capitalized pronoun referred to the capitalized noun phrase.2. When we refer to a "comprehensive style guide," we mean a manual that provides standards for writing, editing, and publishing texts. A comprehensive style guide may be written by a publisher or discourse community but adopted widely. For example, University of Chicago Press's Chicago Manual of Style is used by other publishers and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is used in disciplines outside of psychology.Companies may create their own style guides for internal use. Such guides may or may not be as detailed or complete as comprehensive style guides and may, in fact, be based on or direct users to a comprehensive style guide for any gaps in content. For example, ACES: The Society for Editing "Style Guide and Proofreading Checklist" (Filippini, Citation2021) is for ACES communications and based on the AP Stylebook.Some editors in this study referred to style sheets. A copyeditor creates and uses a style sheet to note a running list of grammar and usage that are specific to a manuscript and which may be different from house style or a comprehensive style guide (CMOS, Section 2.55).Despite attempting to define these terms, we recognize there are overlaps among the categories and across fields. For example, the Microsoft Writing Style Guide began as an in-house style guide and is now used by other software companies. Further, there exist other contexts of the terms "style guide" and "style sheet," such as brand style guides, programming style guides, and web design style sheets.3. Of the remaining two editors, one said that they would revise the sentence to avoid using singular they, and the other said that they would use the name Pat again instead of a pronoun.4. Only three editors (4%) said they would edit the sentence.5. The two remaining editors differed in their responses. One said that they would avoid using singular they by revising the sentence; the other said that they would change the pronoun to her.6. Ten editors said that they would edit this sentence.7. As of August 16, 2022, AP Stylebook Online advice under "accent marks" reads: "Use accent marks or other diacritical marks with names of people who request them or are widely known to use them, or if quoting directly in a language that uses them: An officer spotted him and asked a question: "Cómo estás?" How are you? Otherwise, do not use these marks in English-language stories. Note: Many AP customers' computer systems ingest via the ANPA standard and will not receive diacritical marks published by the AP."Additional informationNotes on contributorsJo MackiewiczJo Mackiewicz is a professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University. She studies the communication of pedagogical and workplace interactions. Her book, Welding Technical Communication: Teaching and Learning Embodied Knowledge was published by SUNY Press in 2022.Shaya KrautShaya Kraut is a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at Iowa State University, where she teaches first-year writing. She has also worked as an ESL teacher, a writing center tutor, and a teacher/tutor for adult basic education. Her research interests include composition pedagogy and critical literacy.Allison DurazziAllison Durazzi is a communication professional with experience in industry settings including law, the arts, and freelance editing. She is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University where she researches and teaches technical editing and teaches business, technical, and speech communication courses.

In this work, we explore the use of digital technologies and statistical analysis to monitor how Italian secondary school students’ writing changes over time and how comparisons can be made across different high school types. We analyzed more than 2,000 exam essays written by Italian high school students over 13 years and in five different school types. Four indicators of writing characteristics were considered—text length, text complexity, and two indicators of source use, all extracted using natural language processing tools—which provided insights into students’ citation practices over time and in different school contexts. In particular, we measured the portion of students’ essays that included text from source material as well as the amount of copied text that was not properly referenced. We found that student essays became shorter in length over time while also getting more complex. We also found that the tendency to copy uncited text in the essay decreased. High school curricula predict different writing strategies: essays written by students attending scientific and humanistic high schools are longer and less subject to incorrect citations. We argue that such text analysis enables the study of writing features in high school classes and supports the evaluation of curricula.

ABSTRACT Why does post-truth discourse feel true? This article argues that post-truth fears the death of rhetoric, rather than truth, and traces that fear to the voluminous, rapid, and intense production of stasis on social media. Social media enable and weaponize the production of stasis, and that production generates affects more aligned with death than life (stagnation, hopelessness) that explain why post-truth feels true. These fears and their concomitant hopes constitute an affective economy also present in philosophy’s predominant images of rhetoric. Some images picture rhetoric as movement, whereas others emphasize rhetoric’s capacity to secure the status quo. Social media beckon a supplementary image—a vortex—in which rhetorical movement functions to produce standstill. This image suggests the need to consider affects generated by rhetorical processes as much as from texts. Post-truth’s affective economy also drives stasis production generally, and scholars should attend to the affective economies driving various rhetorical modes.

ABSTRACT The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) pose important questions for rhetorical theory and pedagogy. This article offers an overview of how LLMs like GPT work and a consideration of whether they should be considered rhetorical agents. To answer this question, the article considers structural and argumentative similarities in classical theorizations of rhetoric and the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. GPT’s particular method of encoding statistical patterns in language gives it some rudimentary semantics and reliably generates acceptable natural language output, so it should be considered to have a degree of rhetorical agency. But it is also badly limited by its restriction to written text, and an analysis of its interface shows that much of its rhetorical savvy is caused by the highly restricted rhetorical situation created by the ChatGPT interface.

The proliferation of materialist perspectives in rhetorical studies has generated feelings of disciplinary crisis and fragmentation. Early materialist formulations of rhetoric, such as those put forward by Michael Calvin McGee and Raymie McKerrow, conceptualized materiality discursively and, thus, maintained continuity with more traditional accounts of rhetoric as a practice of “symbolic action.” However, beginning with texts such as Ronald Walter Greene’s “Another Materialist Rhetoric” and Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley’s edited collection Rhetorical Bodies, scholars began emphasizing the ontological and embodied rhetoricity of physical contexts and environments over discursive and ideological conceptions of materiality. This turn toward the ontological and embodied has rapidly expanded over the past twenty years, with numerous scholars now offering new materialist, postcritical, ecological, computational, and digital perspectives on rhetoric that privilege concepts such as affect, circulation, and assemblage over more traditional rhetorical terminology.It is in response to this tension between standard rhetorical perspectives and materialist rhetorical approaches that we can appreciate the interventions of S. Scott Graham’s recent book, Where’s the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. Rejecting the view that the materialist turns in rhetorical studies (particularly rhetorical new materialisms [hereafter referred to as RNM] and computational rhetoric) have left the discipline more fragmented and less capable of defending a unified perspective on rhetoric, Graham believes it is possible to generate a new unified theory that can affirm the lines of scholarly influence that have given rise to RNM (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “right branch”) as well as the more traditional lines of scholarly influence that have led to a formulation of rhetoric as “symbolic action” (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “left branch”). To accomplish this task, Graham argues that we should avoid the tendency to view RNM as “other” to traditional narratives about rhetoric and, instead, consider how these latter perspectives are compatible with the former. Much like unified field theories in physics that seek to bridge older perspectives on general relativity with newer perspectives on quantum mechanics (e.g., string theory and quantum loop gravity), Graham believes it is possible to achieve similar results in rhetorical studies by approaching standard rhetorical perspectives from the ontological viewpoints enabled by RNM.What makes Graham’s angle on this claim particularly unique is his premise that a proto-new materialist perspective has underpinned some of the most influential left branch approaches to rhetoric all along. While most rhetoricians start from the present when introducing concepts associated with RNM, Graham, following historically informed thinkers such as Scot Barnett, Debra Hawhee, and Thomas Rickert, demonstrates that there is a line of thinking about “symbolic action” as “situated action” that goes back to the relational approach to metaphysics put forward by philosopher Henri Bergson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, as Graham argues, if we begin with Bergson’s relational ontology, rather than the postmodernist and social constructivist philosophies that (explicitly and implicitly) shaped interpretations of rhetoric’s left branch during the second half of the twentieth century, we do not “need to re-engineer rhetoric” to fit the latest trends of RNM (41). From Graham’s perspective, many standard rhetorical perspectives have been hospitable toward new materialism from the outset. To appreciate this fact, we simply need to recuperate the Bergsonian legacy that informs this tradition.To make a case for this Bergsonian approach to rhetoric, the first main chapter of Graham’s book (chapter 2) engages in detail with the work of Kenneth Burke. As a crucial founder of the symbolic action paradigm, Graham believes that if he can show the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thought, he can, in turn, demonstrate how scholarship informed by Burke is also influenced by Bergson. To trace the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thinking, Graham focuses on Burke’s early work, especially Permanence and Change. In contrast to Burke’s later writings (e.g., A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and Language as Symbolic Action), which have been crucial to interpreting him as a theorist of symbolic action, Graham argues that Permanence and Change is directly indebted to a Bergsonian process philosophy that emphasizes the rhetoricity of situations. For the Burke of Permanence and Change (which Graham calls Original Bergsonian Burke [OBB]), there is no ontological or epistemological gap between symbolic action and material situations. Instead, symbolic practices and the situations that underpin such practices (e.g., environmental ecologies, social ecologies, digital ecologies, etc.) can all be conceived immanently, as nested complex dynamic systems that reveal motives toward reality. Hence, according to Graham, available in the writings of OBB is a Bergsonian ontology that emphasizes relational processes all the way down and rejects any Cartesian dualism (or Kantian correlationism) between nature and culture and things and words. For OBB, which is also the Burke Debra Hawhee focuses on most extensively in her book Moving Bodies, symbolic action is the effect rather than the cause of material processes of becoming, and rhetoric is the act of responding to these material processes in a satisfying way that is always itself creative and inventive.After offering a novel way to think about Burke and his materialist contributions to rhetoric, chapter 3 of Graham’s text turns to Carolyn Miller’s highly influential essay “Genre as Social Action” (originally published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1984). As her piece is deeply influenced by Permanence and Change, as well as the writings of Austrian philosopher Alfred Schutz, Graham believes that rhetoricians can also read Miller’s formulation of genre as presupposing a Bergsonian ontology. While Miller does not mention Bergson in her essay, Graham argues that by appreciating the influence of Bergson on Burke and Schutz, it is possible to see that Bergson has indirectly influenced Miller’s account of genre. Graham argues that rhetoricians can also appreciate the link to Bergson in terms of how Miller’s project explicitly rejects “modernist materialism and the postmodern fetishization of discourse” (90). For Miller, the situations that produce genres—as repeated patterns of discourse—are not mechanistic and mechanical but active and dynamic processes that sediment through time (what Bergson calls duration). For Graham, then, the resources for interpreting Miller as “in some ways, the [discipline’s] original rhetorical new materialist” are already at play within her text (90). If we simply expand Miller’s understanding of situation so that, like OBB, it accounts for patterning and structuration not only at the social level but also at the flattened ontological level of movement and becoming, then Miller’s Genre as Social Action (GASA) framework can be reconceptualized in terms of a new materialist method that Graham calls Genre as Process (GAP). Whereas GASA conceives of genres as abstract nouns that emerge out of stable social patterns, GAP emphasizes genre-ing, “[t]he processes of structuring activity that occurs in situational hierarchies and guides situated action” (73). A GAP approach also helps realize Miller’s recent call for deeper engagement with new media technologies. As dynamic structures that are always entangled with their larger contexts and environments, new media technologies, such as Twitter, are best approached through a GAP framework that can appreciate the way these technologies repattern the norms of genre (e.g., letter to the editor genre on Twitter vs. traditional letter to the editor genre). Approaching GASA as GAP, then, allows rhetoricians to conceptualize genre in terms of dynamic patterns of circulation that are continually predisposed toward change and entropy. While effective genre deployment, like Burke’s rhetoric, requires kairotic responsiveness (or what Graham, borrowing from Whitehead, calls satisfaction), this situated responsiveness (especially in digital contexts) is itself inventive and, thus, continuous with the patterns of circulation that makes genre itself possible.Chapter 4 of Graham’s book concludes the conceptual portion of his project. In this chapter, Graham argues that a GAP framework can enrich not only traditional rhetorical (left branch) perspectives but also RNM. While Graham identifies as a new materialist rhetorician who favors the ontological turn in rhetorical studies, he believes that part of what makes the GAP framework valuable is its tendency to move RNM back toward a study of “the recurring experiences of practicing rhetors” (122). Too often, Graham argues, advocates of RNM adopt a “zoom-out” (distributed agency) perspective that makes it challenging to locate rhetorical agents’ strategic, situated practices. A GAP approach, by contrast, returns to the situated rhetor without rendering their agency discrete, atomistic, or self-contained. By conceptualizing rhetorical agency as the accomplishment of “structuring structures” that produce performatively enacted boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, GAP enables both a “zoom-out” and “zoom-in” approach that can account for the rhetorical strategies that satisfy particular human situations and exigencies. Graham’s framework, thus, not only improves traditional rhetorical perspectives by making them more process-oriented but also enriches RNM approaches by making them more suited to analyze rhetorical practices and discourses.The remainder of Graham’s book is a sampling of case studies that apply the GAP framework to cultural artifacts. In chapter 5, Graham discusses the qualitative research he produced studying the work of Brandon, a graphic designer who consults with various companies to create novel digital products. Graham argues that the novel digital products that Brandon produces for these companies can be understood through a GAP framework. Across his consulting work, Brandon must demonstrate an ongoing sensitivity to the genre constraints of various situations (that are ecological, social, and digital) to effectively satisfy his clients and consumers—a practice Graham calls “fit foraging.” Graham argues that a clear example of this approach to “fit foraging” is the holiday e-card video game that Brandon produced for the Ryzex Corporation (a UPC scanner manufacturer). After being asked by Ryzex to create a novel holiday e-card that could satisfy the company’s various clients, “Brandon designed a shooting-gallery Flash game that used Ryzex UPC scanners as ranged weapons and barcode-marked boxes as appropriate targets” (126). According to Graham, this shooting gallery game was an excellent example of fit foraging because it combined the genres of the holiday e-card, shooting gallery games, and Ryzex’s unique brand identity to produce a novel outcome.In chapter 6, Graham turns his attention to scholarship on computational rhetoric. Focusing largely on his own work deploying content-analytic methods, Graham argues that these approaches work through an ongoing dialectic between intuition, which he defines as “an experiential approach to metaphysical inquiry” (139), and abstraction. This Bergsonian framing is valuable, Graham argues, because it locates practices of quantification in a GAP framework that understands data as “aggregations of intuitions rendered symbolically so that the patterns, abstracted for the local sites of situated action, become more clearly visible” (149). Hence, for Graham, computational rhetoric should be approached not as “other” to more traditional rhetorical perspectives but as a distinct genre of rhetorical inquiry that is compatible with his larger GAP framework. Graham’s insights in this chapter also have important implications for scholarship centered on the rhetoric of science. Like content analytic methods, scientific inquiry can be understood generally as a process of abstracting the intuitive and forging a fit with material reality through embodied experimentation. Graham’s Bergsonian approach to the rhetoric of science is, thus, compatible with scholars, such as Bruno Latour and Andrew Pickering, without needing to draw extensively on their distinct science and technology studies vocabulary. If we simply start with a Bergsonian relational ontology, Graham argues, all rhetorical practices emerge out of the nexus between intuition, the patterns of stabilization (or duration) that result from intuition, and the processes of symbolic abstraction that attempt to provisionally capture intuition and duration in a satisfying way.In chapter 7, Graham returns to a more specific case study that deals with the rhetoric of Donald Trump. Arguing that the Trump moment poses a crisis to traditional studies of presidential genre, Graham claims that a GASA framework can help make sense of Trump’s success as a rhetor. Graham’s method for analyzing Trump’s rhetoric works at two registers. First, Graham shares the results of a quantitative study he conducted to test the widely held conviction that “the 2016 presidential primary [featuring Donald Trump was] . . . more negative . . . [than] prior campaign cycles” (165). Contrary to popular perception, Graham shows that his study reveals that a similar level of negativity characterized previous primary debates and that there is no stark difference. Graham then zooms in on the specific rhetorical strategies enacted by Trump during the primary debates, focusing in particular on his infamous exchange with Marco Rubio about hand (penis) size. Graham’s main argument here is that Trump’s communication during this exchange (and others) can be appreciated in terms of a Laconic rhetoric genre that “leverages the powerful organizing structures of reality TV and Twitter flame wars to supplant the traditional genre-ing processes of political oratory” (176). Graham argues, furthermore, that this same Laconic genre did not work when Rubio deployed it because his situated responsiveness did not align with “the media apparatuses that supported . . . [Trump’s] rhetoric” (176). Graham’s case study in this chapter, thus, shows how a GAP approach to presidential genre, especially when paired with computational rhetoric, can reveal illuminating insights about rhetors. While a historical perspective on negativity in presidential primary debates cannot capture, on its own, the qualities that made the Trump presidency unique, Graham’s GAP framework is able to locate the specific “structuring structures” that made Trump such a powerful contemporary rhetor.Chapter 8 concludes Graham’s text by recapping key theses and offering a glossary that defines key terms. My summary sense of the key takeaway is that Graham offers scholars a new materialist perspective on genre (GAP) that can account for the diverse material structures that pattern symbolic meaning in historically specific contexts. Effective responsiveness to this new materialist conception of genre works in terms of Whiteheadian satisfaction, or fit foraging, which I would describe as an ontologically situated enactment of kairos (similar to the account offered by Debra Hawhee in Bodily Arts). In addition to providing a recap of his project and clearly defining key terms in the book, the concluding chapter of Graham’s text notes some of the book’s limitations. Some of the critical limitations raised here include a need for more careful engagement with cultural rhetorics (i.e., rhetorics that study the performance of identity and embodied subjectivity), applying GAP to old media in addition to new media, and considering GAP more directly in relation to sound studies.While Graham does a good job acknowledging the limits of his project, I’d like to conclude this review by discussing what I perceive as a few more limitations. First, in addition to engaging more directly with cultural rhetorics, Graham’s text could benefit from a more robust theorization of power and its effect on the patterning of genre. For example, while I agree that new materialism should explore the processes that produce the situated boundary of the human, I believe, following the interventions of scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Armond Towns, that what constitutes a “fitting” response within this domain is overdetermined by structures of racialization (as well as patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.). Graham’s work does not discuss the boundary of the human in this way, and his case studies seem to overlook the problem of positionality in relation to genre. It would be interesting, as part of Graham’s ontological account of genre formation, if he considered how genres emerge out of historically specific patterns of exclusion and bordering.Second, while I find Graham’s advocacy of “zoom-in” approaches to RNM compelling, I feel that his book could engage more with the nonhuman. Most of Graham’s case studies foreground the materiality of new media, but they say little about concrete extrahuman processes of mattering. I’d like to hear more from Graham about the role of physical ecosystems and nonhuman entities (like plants, animals, and even inorganic matter) in the dynamic materialization of genres. It seems that from an RNM perspective, something as banal as the energy used to power new media technologies would play a constitutive role in genre formation.Finally, there is the question of whether turning to Bergson can resolve rhetoric’s crisis of disciplinary identity. Bergson, after all, is first and foremost a philosopher, and Graham’s project could have benefitted from more argumentative scaffolding to support the case that Bergson was doing philosophy from a rhetorical vantage. Perhaps if Graham returned to some of the earlier disciplinary debates over rhetoric and philosophy that occurred between the late 1960s and early 1980s, he could locate more commonplaces for exploring these tensions and justifying why Bergson’s relational metaphysics should be conceived as an ontological approach to rhetoric.Limitations notwithstanding, Graham should be praised for this important contribution to the discipline. Graham demonstrates a masterful understanding of RNM, computational rhetoric, and thinkers associated with the left branch of rhetoric. And his ability to synthesize all this work into a unified theory is very impressive.I look forward to reading new scholarship in genre studies that builds on this text, and I look forward to following the theoretical debates it prompts with respect to the compatibility between RNM and traditional rhetorical perspectives. I also look forward to future scholarship that situates Graham’s process-oriented account of rhetoric in relation to a larger historical context and disciplinary genealogy. As scholars such as Debra Hawhee, Thomas Rickert, Scot Barnet, and Mari Lee Mifsud have all shown (at least indirectly), perspectives that resonate with the process philosophy of Bergson can be found in Greek antiquity as well as the Homeric period that predates Greek antiquity. More work should be done to connect these historical threads so that rhetoric’s ontological relationship to process, change, movement, and indeterminacy can be fully appreciated.

Background: The bulk of international trade has led to increasing demand for specialized professional communication texts in multilingual contexts. Persuasive language is required in promotional discourse to sell products. When transactions are carried out with foreign countries, translation becomes essential for successful commercial exchange. Literature review: Persuasion requires the use of positive evaluation to describe products. This article addresses the need to contrast the expression of positive evaluation in English and Spanish online promotional cheese descriptions. Research questions: 1. What are the linguistic resources used to express positive evaluation in English and Spanish in online promotional texts of the cheese industry? 2. What is the distribution across parts of speech and semantic categories and subcategories between these two languages? 3. How can semantic tags in bilingual comparable corpora provide useful information for translation practice? Methodology: Empirical data have been extracted from Online Cheese Descriptions (OCD), a semantically tagged English-Spanish corpus, and classified using the Appraisal Framework into the subcategories of appreciation, judgment, affect, and graduation. Results and discussion: Tests of statistical significance have revealed cross-linguistic differences, mainly in appreciation, thus leading to a qualitative analysis. The findings also include a large inventory of all evaluative items that express appreciation for cheeses in both languages and general guidelines for translators. Conclusions: This multilayer corpus-based analysis has yielded relevant data that can be used to enhance the second-language writing and translation processes required for marketing cheese in English and Spanish, thus supporting international professionals in their communication in multilingual contexts.

AbstractThis paper introduces moral argument analytics, a technology that provides insights into the use of moral arguments in discourse. We analyse five socio-political corpora of argument annotated data from offline and online discussions, totalling 240k words with 9k arguments, with an average annotation accuracy of 78%. Using a lexicon-based method, we automatically annotate these arguments with moral foundations, achieving an estimated accuracy of 83%. Quantitative analysis allows us to observe statistical patterns and trends in the use of moral arguments, whereas qualitative analysis enables us to understand and explain the communication strategies in the use of moral arguments in different settings. For instance, supporting arguments often rely on Loyalty and Authority, while attacking arguments use Care. We find that online discussions exhibit a greater diversity of moral foundations and a higher negative valence of moral arguments. Online arguers often rely more on Harm rather than Care, Degradation rather than Sanctity. These insights have significant implications for AI applications, particularly in understanding and predicting human and machine moral behaviours. This work contributes to the construction of more convincing messages and the detection of harmful or biased AI-generated synthetic content.

AbstractIn this paper, we present a model of pathos, delineate its operationalisation, and demonstrate its utility through an analysis of natural language argumentation. We understand pathos as an interactional persuasive process in which speakers are performing pathos appeals and the audience experiences emotional reactions. We analyse two strategies of such appeals in pre-election debates: pathotic Argument Schemes based on the taxonomy proposed by Walton et al. (Argumentation schemes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008), and emotion-eliciting language based on psychological lexicons of emotive words (Wierzba in Behav Res Methods 54:2146–2161, 2021). In order to match the appeals with possible reactions, we collect real-time social media reactions to the debates and apply sentiment analysis (Alswaidan and Menai in Knowl Inf Syst 62:2937–2987, 2020) method to observe emotion expressed in language. The results point to the importance of pathos analysis in modern discourse: speakers in political debates refer to emotions in most of their arguments, and the audience in social media reacts to those appeals using emotion-expressing language. Our results show that pathos is a common strategy in natural language argumentation which can be analysed with the support of computational methods.

AbstractThis study tackles hashtags as framing devices which shape public arguments and controversies in computer-mediated communication environments. It focuses on the use of thegenocidehashtag on Twitter in the context of the Ukraine-Russia war. It proposes and showcases a methodology to surface how the semantic and discourse properties of the term genocide affect its framing properties as a hashtag which bears argumentative functions, directly or indirectly calling for action.

Although power manifests as a form of social behavior through language, how it contributes to business English lingua franca (BELF) discourses remains underresearched. This article problematizes how perceptions of power dynamics manifest through choices of BELF discourses as practiced in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments (RMG) industry. Data for this study were collected from interviews with three levels of business professionals. Findings show that perceived power is embedded in everyday business discourses to both empower and disempower speakers and influence differences in their language use. Specifically, perceived organizational position, business position, linguistic ability, and sociocultural identity impacted language differences.

Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication , edited by Samuel Stinson and Mary Le Rouge, is a timely collection of essays addressing the ways that humans conceptualize and interact with their environment when attempting to communicate the dangers of crises---such as climate change and COVID-19. Explicitly responding to the work of Jeffrey Grabill and Michelle Simmons (e.g., in their seminal 1998 essay, "Toward a Critical Rhetoric of Risk Communication"), this collection offers a broad variety of lenses for thinking about humans' relationships to their surroundings, especially while communicating environmental risk. The 14 chapters in this volume apply methodologies including rhetorical and discourse analysis, ethnography, integrated risk communication, and antiracist framing to topics ranging from university communications about the pandemic to groundwater pollution to upcycled art installations, in the process complicating traditional understandings of risk as something that exists "'out there,' independent of our minds and cultures, waiting to be measured" (Slovic, 1999, p. 690). Considered broadly, the collection offers human bodies and ecological impact as more effective barometers for risk than abstract calculations; individual chapters offer heuristics grounded in human experience or environmental considerations, along with discussion questions and assignments for use in classroom settings. The diversity of topics and methodologies represented ensure that the collection offers something of interest to most scholars and practitioners of risk communication, environmental communication, or embodiment in technical communication.

This Instructional Note is for two-year college instructors who have attended conference presentations and read articles about the benefits of ungrading and want to know more about the pragmatics of teaching and how the shift to alternative assessment will affect their work.

The emergence of populist politicians internationally in the past twenty years is remarkable. This phenomenon has prompted voluminous academic analyses: scholars from political science, political theory, and media studies have analyzed populism in books, articles, and edited collections. Rhetoric as a discipline has been relatively quiet. Populist Rhetorics: Case Studies and a Minimalist Definition proposes to address the dearth of work in disciplinary rhetoric not by inviting scholars identified with rhetorical studies exclusively (though some are) to analyze populism but by asking all the contributors to take a “rhetorical approach” in analyzing the discourse of a populist politician. The editors associate a rhetorical approach with, especially, close readings, and each contributor analyzes at least one text of a populist politician to see how the text works to persuade the audience the text invokes. This disciplined (in both senses of the word) approach marks this volume as important for readers of Rhetoric and Public Affairs and gives the volume a unity that many collections lack, further advanced by the apparent agreement among the contributors to raise fundamental questions concerning how to understand populism; to wit, should populism be thought of as an ideology or as a style? Since the chapters include populists from both the left and from the right, and since the contributors are committed to a rhetorical approach, it is not surprising that the authors individually and collectively conclude that populism is performative, not ideological. Finally, this volume gives witness to what is truly remarkable (some might say scary) about our particular moment: that populism is international. The case studies examine the rhetoric of populists from Britain, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Venezuela, and the United States.The object of Paul Elliot Johnson's analysis in “Populist Melancholy” is the Republican Platform of 2016, adopted by the party without change in 2020. That the party decided to reproduce the same platform in 2020 following the Trump presidency suggests to Johnson that the grievances that the platform identifies could not be addressed by political action; otherwise, why weren't at least some of the grievances ameliorated while Trump was in office? On Johnson's reading, the “people” of the Republican imaginary see themselves as weak and powerless—victims. He argues that Freud's analysis of melancholia captures well both the feeling of loss that the Trump base experiences and its inability to articulate a positive path to addressing this loss—thus, on his analysis, the pathology of the current American right. In defining Republican populism in psychological terms, Johnson's thesis recalls Richard Hofstadter's argument that populism is fueled by status grievance and resentment, rather than material conditions.In “Voltagabbana Rhetorics: Turncoating as a Populist Strategy in Pandemic Times,” Pamela Pietrucci notes a propensity of populists to practice a voltagabbana, a turncoat or flip-flopping rhetoric. She notes that Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and Matteo Salvini—all identified as right-wing populists—changed both their positions and their practice with regard to masking during the Covid pandemic; none attempted to reconcile the contradictions in their advice or practice. Pietrucci examines in detail the voltagabbana rhetoric of Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League and the Deputy Prime Minister of Italy in 2019. As is typical of populists, Salvini lacks an historical connection to a consistent ideology; he began his career as a Communist while at present his politics are right-wing. According to Pietrucci, the positions Salvini advances are based on the analysis produced by “The Beast,” a search engine that identifies the terms, themes, and memes most prevalent in Internet computer searches. If “hydroxychloroquine” is trending well, then presumably Salvini would endorse it as an effective Covid cure that “bureaucrats” are keeping from the public. On Pietrucci's analysis, Salvini has no ideology. He might be labeled a populist of “algorithmic” opportunism (73). Ultimately, the politics that Salvini practices, she concludes, is one of disavowal, whose inconsistency is in the service of deniability (75–76).In “Brexit, YouTube and the Populist Rhetorical Ethos,” Alan Finlayson maintains that populism should be understood more as a political style or performance than an ideology, drawing extensively on work in rhetorical studies to make his case. Finlayson argues that ethos is central to populist rhetoric, not merely its premise but also its conclusion (86). The populist appeals to voters to become “the people” that they already are, he maintains. The object of his analysis is the YouTube video, “The Truth About Brexit,” created by the popular conspiracy-theorist Paul Joseph Watson, which had nearly a million views during the Brexit debate. Finlayson's analysis is attentive to the effective use that Watson makes of the affordances of YouTube as a medium as well as the discursive contradictions in Watson's narrative.In “Populism and the Rise of the AFD in Germany,” Anne Ulrich, Olaf Kramer, and Dietmar Till report the rise of populist movements from the right, especially the AFD (Alternative for Germany), that have gained prominence via the use of a rhetoric of provocation suited to online broadcast. The authors maintain that new media create spaces for provocateurs to perform an identity and identification with “the people.” The authors offer close readings of speeches by Björn Höcke, a prominent member of the New Right, and by Alice Weidel, co-chair of AFD. The Höcke speech, broadcast live on YouTube, employs rhetorical devices typical of demagoguery: breaking taboos, stoking indignation, and inspiring negative emotions (122), all with an intention to provoke. To this end, Höcke identified the “‘true victims’” of World War II as the inhabitants of Dresden killed in the allied bombing in February 1945 (125). Weidel is similarly provocative in her characterization of immigration as a “Great Replacement” strategy that installs fertile “‘headscarf girls’” and “‘knife men’” as the basis for a new majority (130). The racists metonymies are made for circulation as memes, the authors argue.Sophia Hatzisavvidou analyzes the populist rhetoric of socialist Alexis Tsipras who became prime minister of Greece in 2015. As a result of the 2007–08 world-wide recession, Greece's debt was staggering. The European Union, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank conditioned a bailout on Greece's enacting of severe austerity measures. But round after round of tax increases, while producing much general suffering, seemed to make economic matters worse; thus, “the crisis” of 2015. Hatzisavvidou analyzes Tsipras's campaign of resistance to the austerity measures, characterizing Tsipras's rhetoric as a moralizing discourse that contrasted “the people” as morally superior—more genuine than the technocratic elites. The technocrats’ austerity program failed on its own economic terms, Tsipras maintains, but succeeded in creating a resistant people with a “‘purity’” (156), who want “to take their lives into their own hands,” and who stand up to “‘blind conservative forces’” (157). Drawing on Aristotle's three types of rhetoric, Hatzisavvidou characterizes Tsipras's speeches, surprisingly, as epideictic rather than deliberative, surprising because, like deliberative rhetoric for Aristotle, Tsipras's speeches advocate a future-oriented solution to a political problem. Still, the speeches are indeed epideictic because the audience addressed lacks the power to solve the problem: the bureaucrats held the purse strings, and Greece had no choice but to accede to the bankers’ demands.Viktor Orbán can credibly claim to be the model for the contemporary populist-right nationalist leader. His rhetoric is the subject of Miklós Sükösd's “Victorious Victimization: Orbán the Orator—Deep Securitization and State Populism in Hungary's Propaganda State.” Sükösd finds the template for Orban's subsequent rhetoric in his speech at Heroes Square, attacking Soviet occupation in 1989; at the time, Orban was the leader of the leftist Fidesz party. The speech set the pattern for speeches that Orban gave annually since his election as prime minister in 2010. On Sükösd's analysis, in Orban's case a populist rhetoric served first a liberal and then an illiberal politics. Drawing on a content analysis of forty-one of these speeches, Sükösd's argues that Orban's rhetoric is especially notable for fear-mongering: Orban exaggerates threats to Hungary's sovereignty and national character from EU bureaucrats and immigrants. If the Hungarian voter is especially vulnerable to such threats, the history of Hungary can explain why: Hungary was dominated by the Hapsburgs in the eighteenth century, followed by the Russians, then, in the twentieth century first by the Nazis and then the Soviets. Sükösd's essay is notable for giving a relatively rich account of how populist appeals are rooted in national character. He writes, “Themes of fear, suffering and gloom occupy central places in Hungarian national identity and culture” (179). Hungary sees itself as “ever the guiltless victim of contempt, assault and injury perpetrated by others” (179).” Sükösd's analysis shows in a compelling way how perceived victimhood and its attendant resentments are fertile ground for the populist.Pierre Ostiguy identifies his analysis specifically as rhetorical in his chapter, “The Voice and Message of Hugo Chávez: A Rhetorical Analysis.” By a rhetorical approach, he appears to mean not only an analysis that features close readings but also an analysis of “relational-performative” elements, more traditionally the fourth canon, actio. Ostiguy identifies a number of features of Hugo Chávez's rhetoric that mark his brand of populism as unusual and extreme. The speeches are uniquely characterized by expressions of passionate love: for fatherland (la patria), for the flag, and for Christ, reflecting values that are more typically associated with right-wing politics. Famously aligning himself and his movement with Símon Bolívar, Chávez claims to be less an heir to that original revolution than its re-incarnation and extension, as if he and his movement were pre-ordained to bring about its messianic completion. Furthermore, Chávez would not merely represent the Venezuelan people but embody them. Chávez, Ostiguy writes, “is the people.”Like other populists Chávez also shares a penchant for “the low,” an important idea that Ostiguy advanced in earlier work. “The low” manifests as a general vulgarity that is intended to shock, especially in coarse, personal insults. Ostiguy notes as exemplary a Chávez speech in March 2006, in which he “unloaded” on George Bush (following the invasion of Iraq) with personal insults, including calling Bush a donkey, a genocider, a drunk, a sicko, a coward and worse. Equally important is Chávez's actio. Speaking without a manuscript or teleprompter, Chávez exhibits an apparent spontaneity but delivers with cadence and rhythm, in a deep baritone, punctuated by an expressive arm waving.This is an excellent, well-conceived collection. Each of the chapters reviews the literature on populism and offers a taxonomy for classifying and understanding it. Each also critically analyzes at least one work that bears the populist label. The chapters demonstrate the value of a rhetorical take on populist rhetoric. It invites rhetoric scholars to take a seat at the table. We should heed that invitation.

Abstract This article critically examines how the term diversity rhetorically functions in progressive white parents’ school choice discourse. I draw from interview and focus group data with white, politically progressive, socioeconomically advantaged parents of K12 school-aged children living in the Madison, Wisconsin area. I demonstrate the significance of the racialized contexts in which the polysemous term diversity circulates to suggest how diversity produces contradictory “both/and” meanings. I argue that emphasizing the privileged positioning of white rhetors illustrates how diversity functions both to celebrate multiculturalism and to maintain whiteness as center. My analysis explores how parents position diversity in relation to their school choice decisions as threat, as distant other, as capital, and as commonplace. In doing so, I demonstrate the varying degrees to which diversity functioned to reinforce whiteness's dominance. Through troubling how parents engaged the term in uncritical ways, this paper contributes a nuanced and complex interpretation of how diversity rhetorically functions in polysemous ways within white progressive parents’ school choice discourse to produce paradoxical meanings.

Abstract On April 7, 1989, on the north side of Taipei, magazine editor, free speech activist, and democracy advocate Nylon Cheng ignited himself on fire, defying the authoritarian KMT's attempt to arrest him. The immolation rocked Taiwan and triggered waves of revulsion against the Chiang dynasty, helping to move the nation toward freedom. Thirty-plus years later, Nylon is immortalized in the Nylon Cheng Liberty Foundation Memorial Museum, a site that merges history, activism, and myth-making. Situating our analysis within the Communication sub-fields of museum studies and memory activism, and celebrating Taiwan's transition from authoritarianism to democracy, we argue that Nylon's sacrifice shaped Taiwan's national identity and evolving democratic habits. We approach Nylon's contested legacy by addressing the representational complications driving questions about the roles of free speech and communication in political advocacy, the ways power is embedded in different notions of bravery, how the living co-opt the actions of the dead, how postcolonial legacies impact contemporary Taiwan, and how memory activism perpetuates necessary myths in the name of social justice. While tackling these questions about the representational challenges of memory activism, we introduce Nylon to western readers, for we believe he deserves inclusion in the pantheon of global activists working for justice.

As national parks saw a significant uptick in traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic, so too has scholarly attention to these public symbols increased. The Enjoyment of the People: The Creation of National Identity in American Public Lands by Mary E. Stuckey offers a complex understanding of how America's national parks and public lands do “political work” (22). By evaluating how American presidents have rhetorically positioned public lands, Stuckey argues that these spaces invite specific discursive lenses to national identity, citizenship, patriotism, and stewardship. She interweaves criticism of presidential rhetoric with case studies of policies involving lands run by the U.S. National Park Service (NPS).For the Enjoyment of the People opens with the story of Mount Rushmore: land stolen from Indigenous peoples and quite literally carved up. Stuckey calls attention to this harm while noting that the NPS has been attempting (although not particularly well) to negotiate their harmful past actions by working with Indigenous people when interpreting the parks. This narrative sets the tone for the rest of the book, pointing “to the importance of rhetoric in understanding the nature and implications of these interpretive struggles” and positioning conflicts about identity—Indigenous identities especially but not exclusively—at the center (1). This book emphasizes how Indigenous voices are neglected within U.S. national narratives. Throughout For the Enjoyment of the People, Stuckey revisits conflicts surrounding Indigenous representation. She emphasizes the importance of using Indigenous-preferred names for places, despite each artifact's clear centering of white settler colonial perspectives. Overall, Stuckey's newest work leans on ideological analyses of American presidential rhetoric, interspersed with criticisms of discourse found within the spaces themselves, to illuminate how America's public lands discursively negotiate national identity. In doing so, Stuckey has crafted a thorough, thoughtful, and deliberately critical guidebook for rhetorical scholars and the American public generally to recognize how the nation's lands perpetuate certain American identities and values.Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of national identity as it is discursively manifested within American public lands. The first chapter explores the erasure of colonialism as seen in overseas national parks: the U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa. In “Establishing National Origins: Erasure, Dispossession, and American Empire,” Stuckey discusses how time and space intersect to form explanations and accommodations of identity by examining how U.S. policies regulated Indigenous people and their lands. For instance, by grouping all Indigenous peoples together as “Indians,” white settler-colonists conflated space and time; they applied policies generally to vastly different Indigenous communities across decades despite their unique locales and histories. Political discourse erased Indigenous communities from their lands through erasure by discovery, entitlement, visibility, and interpretation. Stuckey weaves this history with two contemporary case studies. Colonialism is both erased and displayed in the U.S. Virgin Islands as the park is portrayed as scenic and economically beneficial. Colonialism is negotiated in American Samoa as the park is naturally wonderful and contains “pure culture worth preserving” (48). Stuckey presents a thoughtful evaluation of the NPS's interpretations, recognizing that their efforts to improve are “embedded in a colonialist web of historical and cultural interpretation from which it cannot be completely disentangled without foregrounding that colonial history” (42). The first chapter clearly depicts how American public lands were founded on colonial white supremacy and how these effects still resonate. This theme lingers with the reader for the remainder of the book.Chapter Two, “Claiming a National Past: Patriotism and Citizenship,” reveals how patriotism and citizenship are negotiated at Gettysburg National Historic Park, Gateway National Park (formerly known as Jefferson National Expansion Memorial), and Manzanar National Historic Site. Stuckey discusses how these become “places of considerable contestation over what constitutes American patriotism” (55). The chapter brings together theories about citizenship, rhetoric, place, and memory, evaluating how these memorial sites portray authenticity. Each example shows the complex discursive negotiation performed within and around places with shameful pasts, like Manzanar's Japanese American internment camp. At Manzanar, the NPS makes specific interpretive choices, such as whether to freeze oppression in the nation's past or encourage the visitors to relate with the victims.The third chapter asks how history is preserved and interpreted and narrated in NPS museums. Stuckey focuses the entirety of “Asserting a Singular National Narrative: Whose History and Whose Heritage?” on Mesa Verde National Park and on how its museum appropriates, displays, and memorializes antiquities. The evaluation of park museums is complemented by criticisms of the park's advertising, which portrays Mesa Verde—and thus both contemporary and ancient Indigenous peoples—as either primitive or romantic. The chapter concludes with critique of how the NPS interprets marginalized communities, arguing that the federal agency might be “doing better,” but their efforts also expose ongoing conflicts about recontextualizing national history and the accessibility of Indigenous cultures (114).Chapter Four, “Protecting Natural Resources: Citizen Stewards and the Nation's Future,” evaluates how the NPS's education and park management construct visitors as citizens and stewards of American lands. When evaluating Everglades National Park and the public lands of the California desert, Stuckey notes how the NPS educates through park interpretation and how the parks themselves are oriented to establish visitors as citizen stewards (119). As the first park to be set aside primarily for wildlife preservation, Everglades NP exemplifies the debate around what land deserves to be “preserved.” The discourse around the California Desert Protection Act shows how policies can affect American citizenship and stewardship of public lands. Finally, in “Measuring Value: Entitlement in the Land of Opportunity,” Stuckey considers Bears Ears National Monument and Alaskan public lands, noting how “public” lands are valued and their rightful ownership discursively assigned as entitlement. Stuckey links political decision making, land “ownership,” and citizenship through case studies. “Measuring Value” draws attention to the complicated debate around land value and entitlement.While For the Enjoyment of the People is far from the only scholarship about American public lands, its methodology sets it apart. Stuckey skillfully joins rhetorical criticism of presidential discourse about American public lands, evaluations of policy debates about expanding or reducing the lands, textual analysis of the NPS's interpretations of the lands, and rich descriptions of their historical contexts. Rooted in a political rhetorical tradition, this book spans disciplines in its methods and applications. Unlike recent works in rhetorical field methods, For the Enjoyment of the People is far more discursive than material in its approach to space. While this work contributes to the discipline as a rhetorical criticism, embodied work is also needed to investigate these spaces further.This book provides a much-needed update to the literature on parks and public lands as it is intentionally critical of American institutions like the NPS. Multiple chapters are devoted to how the NPS has repeatedly neglected Indigenous voices in park interpretation. Stuckey offers attentive and serious criticisms of the NPS, arguing that “Based in dispossession and erasure on one hand and displacement on the other, [the NPS] remains mired in the rhetoric and other practices of colonialism despite interpretive efforts to overcome those legacies” (53). This criticism recognizes the context of the contemporary moment when American federal agencies are asked to reckon with their colonial legacies. Stuckey concludes with clear calls to the NPS, emphasizing the need for action. Stuckey recommends that the NPS include this complex discourse in their interpretations rather than pretending parks are apolitical. Stuckey also calls for the NPS to position Indigenous voices as contemporary and not just histories, to “include consistent and clear interpretations that speak to Indigenous presence, removal, genocide, and contemporary lives . . . become foregrounded and made manifest in the present” (179). The reader is left with a deeper understanding of how America's parks function politically and, imperatively, with precise calls to public action.For the Enjoyment of the People interrogates identity in a way that is accessible to a public audience. America's national parks, monuments, memorials, and public lands are often depicted as non-controversial symbols of national unity. Quite the opposite is true, as Stuckey reveals, and their history and continued interpretation have profound implications on broader conceptions of what it means to be “American.” Stuckey's engaging style, in-depth case studies, and comprehensible analyses of complex policies and presidential rhetorics make this book eminently readable. For the Enjoyment of the People could serve as a helpful textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses about a variety of topics, from presidential discourse to environmental communication. Alternatively, Stuckey's political-rhetorical lens provides a contemporary perspective on the ongoing conversation surrounding identity and place, an important addition to the cross-disciplinary literature linking political power, space, and identity.

This study investigates the impact of guest speaker programs on student engagement and skill development in a university setting, focusing on different types of speakers: alumni and industry experts. Through a quantitative analysis involving 159 business students, the research examines how speaker characteristics influence perceived learning outcomes, problem-solving abilities, and communication skills. The findings reveal that alumni speakers, sharing a common educational background with the students, significantly enhance students’ perceived learning outcome and communication skills because of their relatability and personal insights. The implications of these findings underscore the need for educational institutions to strategically select guest speakers to optimize educational outcomes and prepare students more effectively for professional environments. This study contributes to the broader discourse on integrating practical experiences within academic curricula to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application in higher education.

This article details an assignment that provides students opportunities to develop critical thinking skills native to the process of what it means to “think like a lawyer.” By asking students to map and compose a narrative about a contested public issue that describes the issue’s various dimensions (social, cultural, political, legal, economic) and how they interact to animate the issue as a matter of public concern, the assignment invites students to reimagine their roles as authors and see themselves as having the capacity to assemble and set a problem for analysis and deliberation rather than accept a problem as pre-structured. While completing the assignment, students witness firsthand the constitutive nature of the structure of legal discourse and the intra-operations of the distinct facets of legal critical thinking. Through explaining the assignment’s design and rationale, this article demonstrates how writing assignments that emphasize problem setting prepares students well to navigate the transition to law school and ultimately begin laying the grounds for successful professional careers.

The generative AI chatbot, as an artificial rhetorical agent participating in the invention and circulation of public discourse, shakes the foundations of rhetorical tenets such as agency, ethos, circulation, and justice; and in doing so, it further isolates rhetoric as amoral, ateleological technē concerned with mere calculated effects and consequences, and may ultimately contribute to a post-rhetoric condition. This article depicts a rhetorical profile of the generative AI chatbot characterized by stochastic rhetoric, which is distinguished from the conventional understanding of rhetoric as (human) conscious and purposeful use of language to induce change. Making a case for the possibility of a post-rhetoric condition, the article considers what it might mean for our conceptualization of ethos, circulation, and justice, and suggests ways of adapting to it.

Grace and Lace Letter was a newsletter by and for transfeminine evangelicals in the 1990s. This article explores the rhetorical approaches contributors used to bridge these seemingly contradictory identities. Through a recontextualization and historicization of Biblical passages and an employment of a "created this way" discourse, these contributors created possibilities for an evangelical transfeminine identity and advocated for trans acceptance within their evangelical communities. However, these strategies also reveal complicity with other marginalizing discourses. Thus, this article considers the rhetorical processes through which transgender religious identities are constructed and the limitations of such approaches.

This research methods article introduces the open source PERSUADE 2.0 corpus. The PERSUADE 2.0 corpus comprises over 25,000 argumentative essays produced by 6th-12th grade students in the United States for 15 prompts on two writing tasks: independent and source-based writing. The PERSUADE 2.0 corpus also provides detailed individual and demographic information for each writer. The goal of the PERSUADE 2.0 corpus is to advance research into relationships between discourse elements, their effectiveness, writing quality, writing tasks and prompts, and demographic and individual differences.

This article explores genres as recurrent acts of positioning that contribute to associating particular positions with the genre users as social actors. As an illustration, the study investigates the positioning of Chinese university presidents in their published opening convocation speeches. By combining rhetorical move analysis with the positioning triangle framework, this study demystifies three positions conventionally used by university presidents in the genre: guiding educator, morale builder, and university representative. These positions, legitimized by the role of the university president, establish specific types of social relations between the president and the students, which function as channels for the transmission of values, particularly collective values, to address relevant social expectations in Chinese society. This study suggests that the genre-based positioning analysis can offer valuable genre knowledge to novice practitioners, enabling them to familiarize themselves with adequate positionings that adhere to the code of conduct within a discourse community, thereby facilitating effective genre realization.

ABSTRACT Since at least the work of Plato, the Western philosophical tradition has observed an ambition to detect fixed truths in the swirling movements of discourse. Related to this is the tension at the heart of our understandings of “argument,” a tension between a set of fixed propositions abstracted from the dynamic of human exchanges, and those exchanges themselves, alive with the uncertainties of experience. This article explores this tension with a view to recovering a sense of “argument” that stays true to the ways in which it is lived in everyday situations.

The state of movement is a question—of movement, in theory.What is movement, a movement, perhaps not least as the condition of arrival, an “original” beginning? Where does it come from? How does it work, in better and worse ways? To what does it lead—and why? If these standing questions remain open, there is also a chance that they are not questions at all, that they remain in some basic way beyond inquiry, precisely as they beg the question, as Giorgio Agamben has contended, of how “movement” remains “our unthought,” of the way in which “movement” presents us with the puzzle of an unconceived concept, the tension of a word whose work demands forgetting the “defeats and failures” of its use in the name and at the edges of democracy, and getting around the aporia of its necessary power without end (2005, 1). Perhaps we can only boggle—and perhaps we should. To inquire into the “state of movement” may be less a struggle for answers than the condition of question-ability itself, a movement of movement that appears in theory.Inspiring gesture. Endless stasis. Myriad advances. Countless retreats. Emerging hopes. Multiplying panics. Forced dislocation. Involuntary relocation. Indefinite incarceration. Sovereign and disciplinary borders crossed, closed, and blurred. Speech acts—in action. Moving words—gone sideways. Gathering judgments. Calling out and compounding injustice. Cancelling the show. Incursions, attacks, invasions. History’s (always) incoming storm. Recalling, extending, and setting aside law’s precedent. Blown away, in a gust and a measure of time. Rising sea levels, receding forests, spiraling temperatures. Rustling aspen trees at altitude. Getting back on the bike. Staying put for the planet. Finding, instilling, and following desire. Unbounded discovery. Undue appropriation. Undoing what’s been done. Bodies at work, play, and ecstasy—and in decay, duress, and internment. Swept off the streets—and the quad. Vectors of transmission and expression. Breaking quarantine—and cliché. Soft landings and winding supply chains. Streaming words. Tropes turning into (intelligent) algorithms—and back again. Bullets flying . . . in homes, hospitals, classrooms. Struck by the light of a nebula and a sky full of kinetic kill vehicles. Populist uprising—progressive overreach. Equal and opposite reactions. Runway culture. Throwaway sociality. Publicity’s collapse. Privatization’s disclosure. Hopes for stillness and repose. Travel bans . . . for life. Packing the U-Haul for a better life. Generations letting go—and digging in. Rounds of chants. Days of marches. Cycles of emergency. Revolutionary aspirations in the avenues. Circling the leader, demanding commands. Running resistance. Caught out. Making way—and away.Asking after the state of movement may be less about the pause of cataloguing than the open that appears with being still, making a way of moving without movement, for a moment—to reflect on our understanding of the modes, manners, grammars, and vocabularies of movement and to speculate on the experience and so, in some basic sense, the assumption of movement, the line between those movements that remain in the background, out of view and taken for granted, often in the name of being able to simply get on with things, and those that provoke, invite, and disturb inquiry. If, for instance, the sort of movement named a “journey” is a long-standing and basic feature of the human condition (one can think variously, of better and much worse instantiations, from the Odyssey to the bloody quests for “salvation” that might have but mostly didn’t hinge on the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow to the Trail of Tears and Middle Passage to the moon shots), what’s happening in an American culture currently besotted with the idea of “being on a journey”—of discovery, fitness, creativity, acceptance, recovery, parenthood, leadership, home ownership, and so on and so forth. One wonders—or boggles—if such journeys, if they are journeys, whether as events, metaphors, or, speech acts, amount to prefigured objects or open-ended activities (Folit-Weinberg 2022). If not nostalgic, many seem self-indulgent if not self-confounding, at least those that have no apparent way of beginning or ending and so amount to passing time. Some smack of a home-baked lockdown hangover cure, while others present as a way to resist political stasis, though it’s not always easy to differentiate this latter impulse from the desire to run away, whether from oneself or from everyone else. More than a few are looking to find a more or less lost plot, one that’s been perhaps derailed by too much scrolling. It’s difficult to say, as the trope (topos, more likely) rarely distances itself from its own cliché. And so, this too shall pass—and quickly. Madison Avenue (itself now displaced into the influencer ether) will soon enough turn its eye to another notion. The journey will come to a close, whether successfully or as a function of getting lost or just running out of steam. One movement will enable, cover, and confound another. And so on. Entropy and revolution will touch, a coincidence that bears wholly on the fate of the romanticized “social movement,” the pure light of a heralded beginning giving way to the shadowy work of institutionalization and the latter’s paralyzing “corruption.”As Aristotle had it: “Now if a thing is moved, it can be otherwise than it is,” except for that unnamed and unnamable “something—X—which moves while being itself unmoved, existing actually” (XII, vii, 1072b). Timely, at least for its hint that inquiry into the state of movement confronts and expresses an exception, an aporia, and a paradox. First, the exception, as the state of movement is . . . movement. It’s all (in) motion, all the time, in the background, round and round. At quantum, atomic, cellular, and bodily levels, there is no pause—in gravity, form, life, or death. And for the most part, as we go about the movements of the day, all of this remains in the background, the ground of the lifeworld. The sun rises. One breath follows another. The coffee drips into the cup. Ideas appear, not least with the words that arrive, and the words that are expressed, more or less where they are supposed to go. Paths are forged, though mostly followed. Places along the way are ignored, encountered, and forgotten. Mis-steps happen. Mis-takes are made. All in all, bedrock is a vast and mostly unseen and unappreciated complex of movement, which means that there is nowhere to actually stand, no place that affords certain standing. The irony of the human lifeworld (in antiquity: the ground of tragedy) in which zoē gives way to bios, in which life exceeds the necessities of simply staying alive, is that living being cannot be what it is—in constant motion, in infinite flux, in complete contingency. If all movement all the time is stasis, everyday life, at least, begins in exception to its movement, a way of being inside and outside what it is, moving inside and outside its movement, in the name of a beginning, a power to pause and move anew.Second, the aporia, the statement that expresses the state of movement only by altering its speed and blocking its trajectory, often forcing it to turn—around, one way or another, if not on itself. As an impulse to inquire into the existence, nature, or qualities of movement, the statement aims toward and proffers what movement is, an account that puts movement in its place, even as movement qua movement has long been a condition of the epistemic interest that underwrites the work of definition—the movement of reason (Kotef 2013, 5). If understanding the world entails leaving the cave and getting out into the world, such movement may be thwarted by the words that are addressed to moving, the words that move themselves but which can’t keep up with (their own) experience, that arrive to movement only by displacing, slowing, rerouting, and perhaps stopping it in its tracks. In kinēsis (and semiotics): movement-disturbing-movement is not simply tautology. And in so many words, in language, an account of movement amounts to its reification, its interruption, an aporia that turns more complicated precisely as the word that is always behind, always dragging movement toward a halt is itself moving, the moving words of the speech act, trope, rhetorical-argument, poetic, and translation, the words that move within and beyond what they state, that hold a power to move that vibrates, resonates, and shimmers with potential, a power that remains in-between, that may or may not come to be.1Third, the paradox, the movement that puts us in a state, a condition fundamental and anathema to politics, that recalls Oedipus’s recollection of the dangers held in kinēsis, the movement that disturbs the given design and profanes the sanctified order, the constitutive mysteries that inaugurate the movements that they then strive to control (1527). Hence the difficulty of locating let alone critically accounting for movement, a concept that appears in the midst, at the very center of the political-ethical life that cannot fully bear its disorder, insecurity, and ambiguity. As Agamben observes, “Movement is the impossibility, indefiniteness, and imperfection of every politics” (2005, 3). It is, in Hagar Kotef’s useful account, the “manifestation (and precondition) of a free social order” at the same time that such “freedom is only politically valuable if it relies on some mechanisms that would regulate the movement that manifests it” (2013, 8). The capacity for movement, whether intellectual, physical, economic, sociocultural, or political, sets the promise of the democratic and autonomous (liberal) subject, a promise that is then selectively narrowed and policed in the name of constituting a state that establishes and extends the right of movement to citizens, the subjects deemed capable of moving reasonably, that is, with the movement of rationality that marks “civilization” and which is then taken to warrant imperial-colonial movement, the confinement, relocation, domestication, and redistribution of those, the “savages” and the “dissidents,” held to roam without purpose, meaning, or propriety and who turn to resist these movements with another (6, 8). Taking leave of “normal” politics and so resisting definition, this movement, for Agamben, is nevertheless decisive: “Movement becomes the decisive political concept when the democratic concept of the people as a political body, is in demise” (2005, 2). Movement is paradoxical precisely as it is always in transition, for a transition that defies full account.The remarkable essays that follow shed significant light on the exceptional beginnings, aporetic potentials, and paradoxical transitions that arrive with and follow inquiry into the state of movement. And they do quite a bit more. In a variety of idioms, approaches, and speeds, the essays ask after a number of intersecting, diverging, and sometimes parallel ways of moving and do so through a variety of movements. Recalling another and often overlooked sense of kineō, the collection asks after and indeed disturbs the assumptions on which the concept of movement tends to rest. Momentum is altered—and sometimes broken. What can we yet say about the given modes, manners, and forms of movement? On what does movement depend, and what does it yield, as energy, force, or power—in time, across space, and through words? On what conditions does it disperse, dissipate, and still? How is it experienced, understood, and perhaps assessed as so much the better or worse? And with these inquiries, one finds a dedicated concern for the movement of inquiry itself, the arrival, appearance, and disturbance of a question, with its turns, arcs, circulations, and deviations, including the disorderly and disordering economies of interdisciplinary wonder. In short, these essays move. And, not least as essays, they are on the move. To their credit, individually and together, they are not quite here, not necessarily, where they are supposed to be, as they take their leave, often very subtly, to ask after the state of movement, holding out and expressing the possibility of being elsewhere and otherwise, at least for a moment, with and without the promise of return.In and along their way, finding and making way, these essays move with movement. They do so in a way that recalls and recollects an old and perhaps still important idea, one that is not always easy to see and for which there is not always a place. Here, there is a disclosure of theory, of theoria—as movement, in its movement, the paths beyond the walls that are found, followed, and sometimes forged by the theoros, those who undertook a passage if not a pilgrimage in the name of setting eyes on a spectacle before returning home (nostos) and setting forth their vision in so many (pre)measured words (epideictic).Theory moves—or, at least it used to. In theoria, it may have begun with a call to take leave, a decision if not a demand to set out and see the sights, take it all in, and report back. In the sixth and fifth centuries (BCE), as Andrea Wilson Nightingale reads the record, theoria was “generally defined as a journey or pilgrimage to a destination away from one’s own city for the purposes of seeing as an eye-witness certain events or spectacles” (2001, 29).2 In a civic capacity, the theoros was “an official envoy” charged to consult an oracle, undertake various rituals, and return with an account of what they had done and witnessed. Such work, if it was work, could also involve travel to religious festivals, events that blurred the line between secular and sacred space, precisely as it afforded the chance for the theoros to “assert the voice of one’s own polis” and gather those words that arrive from beyond (Rutherford 1995, 276). In all of this, including the excursions of private citizens interested to see the world and experience other cultures, Nightingale contends that “the practice of theoria encompassed the entire journey including the detachment from home, the spectating, and the final reentry” even as she stresses that “at its center was the act of seeing, generally focused on a sacred object or spectacle” (2004, 3–4). In theoria, the theoros “entered into a ‘ritualized visuality’ in which secular modes of viewing were screened out by religious rites and practice” (4). Thus, prefiguring the familiar concept of theory as first and foremost rooted in the ocular (theoria from thea, rather than theo or theos), the stress here is on each “end” of the movement undertaken by the theoros, the spectacle taken in upon arrival and the epideictic words offered upon return (Cassin 2004, 1037).What then of theory’s passage, the grounds, appearance, experience, and value of the movement on which a basic sense of theoria is held to rest, in which it unfolds, and through which it promises insight? Inquiry into the state of movement offers one way (there are a variety of others) to dislodge and (re)open this question, perhaps all the more so in light of the city-state’s charge to the theoros and its contested rules (evident, for instance, in Plato’s Laws XII, 953) regarding who can pass through the gates, hear the oracle, speak for the polis, and judge what is best said upon return. It’s a question that may unravel itself, as it involves un-assuming theory and setting it (back) into motion, perhaps by wandering off method’s oft-trod telic path (hodos) and displacing the theoros turned itinerary-laden tourist unable or unwilling to wonder after the “excluded” middle of the trip.3 As they stand, as neither of these typical excursions show much interest to actually leave the city, there is then little chance of their being without the banister of recognition, of being unrecognized, if only for a moment, without the laws of analysis, interpretation, and communication. So too, on this trip without movement, there is never a doubt that the homologeō rides for free, with no charge for its baggage. Never then at a loss for words. No need even for a moment of silence. No need to hear let alone listen. In short, no experience of language as such, as a question not to be asked in so many words but as questionability itself. Benjamin’s aside is crucial: “(A questioner is someone who never in his entire life has given a thought to language, but now wants to do right by it. A questioner is affable towards gods.)”; that is, the appearance of potentiality in which the beautiful soul turns on its addiction to (its own) “becoming” and confronts the bad infinity of (its own) promise turned into endless waiting.4 In the name of politics, at least, the movement of transition abides in a difficult middle, in the collision of the power of beginning and the aporia set down by the causality of fate.The state of movement is a question—of theoria, as movement.

This paper examines the written, spoken, and performed texts at The Alamo to quantify and analyze the white narratives that are presented. Through the use of a content and discourse analysis, we evaluate the rhetorical strategies The Alamo uses as it communicates Texas history to visitors. Our findings indicate that Anglo/white people are labeled as heroes and Mexican people are labeled as enemies. Narratives of Indigenous, Black, and Tejano people are virtually nonexistent in spite of the vibrant community organizations like the Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation who are fighting for an accurate and thorough rendering of the site.

Abstract: The Hebrew Bible accords great moral agency to the collective “children of Israel.” Its discourse focuses as much on the attitudes, words and actions of the nation as on those of kings, priests, or prophets, let alone ordinary individuals. Yet key texts emphasize that God’s covenant is forged with individuals. The relative priorities of individuals vs. the nation are nowhere stated explicitly. However, a remarkable text, King Solomon’s dedicatory address for the Jerusalem Temple in 1 Kgs 8, suggests that they have equal claim on God’s attention. Solomon authorizes seven types of petitions, half for individuals and half for the nation. The importance of individuals’ petitions is heightened through four distinctive rhetorical strategies—sequence, amplitude, narrative time, and billing. Implications are sketched for understanding the Hebrew Bible’s conception of identity, agency, and moral character.

The Evolution of Pragmatism in India is an evidence-based exploration of philosopher John Dewey's influence on the Republic of India's constitutional mastermind Bhimrao Ambedkar—but such a description understates Scott Stroud's achievement. Drawing on material and archival research, Stroud chronicles Ambedkar's reception, creative appropriation, and reconstruction of pragmatism in the unique context of India's emerging democracy and battle against caste oppression. As a contribution to the global history of pragmatism, and as an extrapolation of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric, Stroud's book speaks to scholars interested in rhetoric, philosophy, pragmatism, democracy, social justice, religion, caste/class, politics, public address, and their complex intersections.From the outset, Stroud stresses the importance of not merely finding similarities between Dewey's work and Ambedkar's. Instead, he reconstructs the actual content and form of Deweyan ideas that Ambedkar encountered while at Columbia University and throughout his life. Stroud's project is to account for Dewey “as Ambedkar knew him” (3, emphasis original). Rather than simply adopting Dewey, Ambedkar also rejected, revised, and synthesized portions of Dewey's thought with his own distinct philosophy. For Stroud, Ambedkar is a pragmatist whose audience awareness and rhetorical practice were likewise shaped by Dewey. Additionally, Stroud suggests that Ambedkar had a deep, early interest in connecting Buddhism to pragmatism as a potential solution for caste oppression. This is a significant reconsideration of the commonly accepted story of Ambedkar, but Stroud offers both tantalizing and compelling evidence that Buddhism was a focus for him while at Columbia from 1913 to 1916 and therefore may not have been a late development for his thought. Stroud is careful to clarify that Dewey was not Ambedkar's only, or perhaps even principal, influence but, rather, contends that Dewey “is the best documented influence on Ambedkar's development at Columbia, the most evident source of inspiration and material for important parts of vital writings and speeches by Ambedkar, and a vivid inspiration to Ambedkar's revisioning of Indian traditions such as Buddhism” (12, emphases original). As Stroud argues, if we take seriously the influence of Dewey and pragmatism on Ambedkar, then we are also in a position to view Ambedkar as a unique theorist of democracy, who ought to be taken seriously in his own right.What classes did Ambedkar take from Dewey while studying at Columbia? What influential insights did he glean from them? How would those matter for this young Indian student, born an “untouchable” Dalit, who would eventually become the central anti-caste activist of the twentieth century in the world's largest democracy? This is the subject matter of Stroud's first chapter. Based on archived syllabi, Dewey's prepared lecture notes, and student-recorded transcriptions, Stroud reconstructs the content of Dewey's Philosophy 231 course that Ambedkar took in the fall of 1914, as well as Dewey's Philosophy 131–132 course, a two-semester sequence on ethics. Many aspects of Dewey's curriculum shaped Ambedkar, including the fundamental vocabulary of individual, society, stimuli, habit, attitude, custom, reflection, force, and freedom. From Dewey, Ambedkar learned that socialized individuals could reform society via reflection, changing problematic attitudes and constructs such as caste through a process of “reconstructive meliorism” (35). Democracy, thus approached, is the “possibility of any individual having a share in this general redirection of society” towards better ends (64). These Deweyan terms and methodologies became important for Ambedkar's later rhetoric and activism.An often-overlooked instance of Ambedkar's early rhetoric and activism is his book review of Bertrand Russel's Principles of Social Reconstruction, which was perhaps his first public attempt to affect change in India. As Stroud argues in his second chapter: “Russell's book gave young Ambedkar a conceptual vocabulary and testing ground to develop the prototype of what would become his fully employed reconstructive rhetoric” (75). This rhetoric is a reform strategy that meliorates the problem of force—namely, that the oppressed easily become oppressors. Dewey endorsed “coercive force,” such as group shaming of individuals; but, since that same type of force perpetuated the caste system, Ambedkar instead drew on Russel's idea of reform as education (93). Stroud summarizes: If “reform can be forcefully and effectively pursued by individuals” and if “reform pursued through rhetorical action could be seen as a form of education,” then “the reconstruction of society” could be “pursued through individual effort” and education (99, emphases original). This type of rhetorical, educative reform is what Ambedkar went on to pursue.In chapter 3, Stroud analyzes Ambedkar's 1919 testimony to the Southborough Committee regarding Indian enfranchisement. Writes Stroud, this “testimony is important [. . .] as the earliest instance of Ambedkar's reconstructive pragmatist rhetoric being applied to a specific situation of caste-based social justice” (104). The testimony employs what Stroud calls rhetorical “echoing,” or Ambedkar's tendency to utilize language, ideas, and even complete paragraphs from Dewey without quotation or acknowledgment (115). As Stroud demonstrates, Ambedkar's choice to cite, revise, or echo Dewey was governed by his audience and rhetorical situation. For example, Ambedkar excised sentences from Dewey about education because he was combatting caste's educative norms. In this way, Ambedkar not only talked about reconstructive social reform but also embodied reconstruction as he engaged Dewey's material. This allows Stroud to outline seven principles of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric that largely summarize the first three chapters regarding: (1) societal reconstruction, (2) the individual-social dialectic, (3) rhetoric and reform as educative, (4) the need for and problems of force, (5) selectivity, (6) reconstruction in and through discourse, and (7) the tentative and impermanent nature of reconstructive efforts. Stroud concludes: “Ambedkar's use of Deweyan text [. . .] not only describes reconstructive method to his audience, it performs reconstruction insofar as his quotational practice selectively adapts and adopts Dewey's ideas to fit a program of caste reform in India” (123–124).Having examined Ambedkar as a student, writer, and rhetor, Stroud next explores Ambedkar as a reader. In chapter 4, he performs an exhaustive analysis of two books that Ambedkar owned, read, and heavily annotated: the 1908 Ethics by John Dewey and James H. Tufts and Dewey's 1916 Democracy and Education. The passages that Ambedkar most heavily engaged with are synthesized, reconstructed, and echoed near-verbatim in his famous 1936 text The Annihilation of Caste, a text that represents a hinge point between Ambedkar's early desire to reform India from within Hinduism and his later advocacy for a complete break from Hinduism. Stroud aptly asks: why would Ambedkar plan to give such an incendiary speech to an audience of high-caste individuals if his radical solutions were unlikely to be accepted? Perhaps, as Stroud argues, this puzzling rhetorical move can be better understood as Ambedkar's personal embodiment of reflective morality; since his audience was not actively reflecting on caste as a habitual attitude, Ambedkar's speech forced them to reflect for themselves. Thus, Stroud demonstrates that large portions of The Annihilation of Caste reveal a dynamic interweaving of Ethics and Democracy and Education aimed to “produce the irritation of doubt” that could expand into “an epochal reorientation within each member of [the caste-based] society” (177). In Stroud's reading, The Annihilation of Caste is a vivid example of Ambedkar's rhetorical project of educative reform that underscores his belief in the power of the individual to enact societal reconstructions.Eventually convinced that Hinduism and caste were inextricable from each other, Ambedkar resorted to a rhetoric of Buddhist conversion as a strategy for annihilating caste. Stroud analyzes this conversion rhetoric in his final chapter, primarily throughout Ambedkar's speeches to fellow Dalits in the 1930s, which often drew on Dewey's 1888 essay “The Ethics of Democracy” and other aspects of Dewey's late 1880s thought. Stroud explains that Ambedkar absorbed Deweyan concepts to inform his rhetoric of conversion—conversion being an individual act of agency and will toward self-flourishing, dignity, and growth of personality. Moreover, conversion is a name change for the individual that reconstructs society into a new religious order (i.e., Buddhism) that avoids social stratification. Buddhism became Ambedkar's new religion of choice, and he staged a highly public conversion that Stroud reads as a profound rhetorical act. Stroud summarizes: “Ambedkar's conversion . . . culminated in something more than his speeches and writings ever intimated: it was the affective living out of what he had preached and argued for in so many previous ways” (221). “In this way,” Stroud continues, “his performance unites the themes of individual reformers mattering, speech as educative to those who hear it, rhetoric as reconstructive, and the value of an agent's willfulness” (224). Stroud concludes that Ambedkar's public conversion was “an absolutely unique event in the evolution of pragmatism, and perhaps philosophy in general”—the climax of Ambedkar's own embodied process of reflection, renunciation, and conversion (231).In his conclusion, Stroud consolidates five tentative propositions that comprise what he calls Ambedkar's “Navayana Pragmatism” (238). Weaving together Ambedkar's 1950s work such as The Buddha and His Dhamma, “Riddles in Hinduism,” and “Buddha or Karl Marx,” Stroud situates Ambedkar's thought in the global history of pragmatism by abstracting its philosophy outside of a caste context, making it applicable even to scholars with no background or geopolitical interest in India. Thanks to Stroud's distillation, Ambedkar's philosophy pertains “to societies pursuing the democratic ideal in light of injustices that may or may not include caste division” (237). Stroud emphasizes Ambedkar's vision for a social democracy that balances the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Importantly for Ambedkar, fraternity is both a means and an ends-in-view that limits the types of force one can employ against oppression to the soft but powerful force of rhetoric and persuasion, always in a spirit of love rather than anger. Stroud summarizes, “Ambedkar's Navayana Pragmatism issues a stern warning: we cannot achieve justice in the sense of a balance among the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity if we sacrifice one of these values” (254, emphasis original). Most importantly, Stroud's reading of Ambedkar enables us to appreciate him not only as “an anti-caste figure” but also as “a theorist of democracy” whose philosophies have rich potential for those pursuing freedom amid rampant and systemic injustice (237).Stroud's work is rigorously researched and exceptionally executed. When it comes to archival and argumentative integrity, Stroud exceeds expectations. His book offers a sophisticated balance of meticulous detail with impressive scope. What I appreciate most, however, is the relevance of his work for contemporary exigencies in rhetorical studies. I am always grateful when scholarship transcends its raw materials in a specific historic or geographic context and yields rich conceptual utility for other situations. While Ambedkar has often been viewed as an anti-caste activist, Stroud re-envisions Ambedkar as a theorist of democracy whose ideas and practices address systematic and social injustice of many kinds: caste, similar, or otherwise. Both Stroud and Ambedkar are full of insights with significant implications for global democracies; and, thanks to Stroud, Bhimrao Ambedkar and his legacy are now poised to facilitate greater equality, freedom, and community—if his work can become more widely known. In an increasingly interconnected society, American academics ought to be familiar with the work of important thinkers and activists from outside the Global North. Stroud models such transnational engagement and illuminates the benefits of taking the resistant ideas of the colonized seriously. In this way, a book like The Evolution of Pragmatism in India can, perhaps surprisingly, offer significant resources for rhetoricians who are engaged in the work of actively reconstructing other, very different worlds.

In Organs for Sale: Bioethics, Neoliberalism, and Public Moral Deliberation, Gillespie examines human organ debates to critique neoliberalism's predominance in and preemption of public moral deliberation. Although organ sales have been previously analyzed by economists and philosophers, Gillespie employs a unique rhetorical lens to discern the positions, justifications, and typical lines of argument representative of each camp. This distinction allows Gillespie to hone in on the argumentative dynamics of public advocates and construct a thorough overview of the debate. The rhetorical landscape is positioned as an exchange between two main camps: the market advocates, who rely on the “autonomy, efficiency, and consistency” allotted by markets, and the altruism advocates, who insist that “virtue, justice, and civic community” are better norms with which to guide the exchange of organs (196–197). This debate is framed in the terms of neoliberalism, a political theory that “asserts the centrality and priority of individual rights, marketization, and free markets in human well-being.” (18) Gillespie argues that the expansion and resonance of neoliberal rhetoric weaken public morality by shrinking the civic duty to deliberate, relegating moral deliberation entirely to supposedly neutral, amoral market forces.In Sections 1 and 2, Gillespie outlines the current organ donation policy and conducts a rhetorical analysis of the main arguments, tropes, keywords, testimonials, horror stories, and urban legends that each camp deploys. The altruistic camp, whose position is reflected in current U.S. law, argues that altruism is “inspirational,” “enacts justice,” and “promotes and performs civic community” (59). The case for the altruistic system is undergirded by an emphasis on civic virtue, an “attitude” that needs to be cultivated and publicized to increase organ supply (55). Official stories, like those on OrganDonor.gov, feature testimonials of organ recipients and public service announcements meant to inspire others to donate. Celebrity organ recipient testimonials, such as those of Alonzo Mourning, Steve Jobs, and Tracy Morgan, give voice to the altruistic system and tend to garner more mainstream attention. Fictional accounts, including films, television shows, and novels, also contribute, albeit in artistic or dramatized ways, to the organ debate. Social media campaigns, either for publicity or crowdfunding, play a similar role in characterizing donors and recipients. These various forms coalesce into a rhetoric of altruism that promotes “a particular view of the virtuous citizen,” who contributes to the organ deficit through the selfless act of donation (51).Market advocates, whom Gillespie contrasts with the altruists, seek to persuade the public that financial compensation for human organs, either through a regulated market or through incentivization, “is rational, efficient, and consistent with public values” (60). Here too, Gillespie conducts a rhetorical analysis of the prominent stories told and language used by market advocates. The horror stories of botched black-market surgeries and deceitful medical malpractice are used ubiquitously by market advocates, implying that a regulated, transparent market would eliminate illicit sales (60, 66). Market advocates also argue that the altruistic system is already undermined by an otherwise thriving market in body parts—like sperm, ova, and plasma—and in the thousands of dollars paid to doctors and medical personnel for transplants. Stories of willing buyers in the United States and of desperate sellers in economically impoverished areas testify to the existence of a market, ostensibly whether altruism advocates like it or not. These arguments, often oriented toward “choice” and “transparency,” make the case for an organ market on the neoliberal premise that it would maintain autonomy, efficiency, and consistency with current practices (83).In Sections 3 and 4, Gillespie crystallizes his critique of neoliberalism, first by providing an overview of the pluralistic dilemma of liberal democracy. Pluralistic democracy demands that “ethically diverse” members of society reconcile their moral doctrines through public deliberation, a perpetual “tension” emblematic of the “cooperative search” for the good life (214). For Gillespie, the quality of contemporary public discourse regarding the morality of the sale of human organs resembles a limp rope rather than a tension. The reason, he argues, is that the supposedly neutral market has become a “default” setting that preempts moral deliberation altogether (177). The neoliberal predominance of the “Civic Restraint Principle,” best known by the colloquial maxim “You do you, and I'll do me,” centers individualism as the essential ethic (99).Dumping the burden of moral deliberation onto the Civic Restraint Principle does not make us principled, Gillespie argues; it makes us pragmatic. This is not to say that neoliberalism is necessarily immoral. Gillespie writes to reinvigorate a public deliberation that “argues about morality—even if those arguments are fierce and at some level intractable,” rather than resigning to individualistic relativism (205). He argues that neoliberalism shouldn't be defaulted to without proper consideration of the ethics of organ sales. If total individualism is taken as an ethic, it effectively opts out of important moral disputes. When “bracketing” is taken as an ethic in itself, the result is a vacancy of any ethic. In this way, neoliberal rhetoric “hijacks the very practice of and space for public moral deliberation,” conceiving it strictly as an individualized affair (201).Gillespie maintains that tolerance is a virtue, albeit a flimsy ethic on its own. Indeed, Gillespie concedes, “the liberal virtue of tolerance is vital” given the dilemmas of pluralism (152). In a healthy democracy, however, citizens owe much more to each other. Moral deliberation cannot be minimized to individualism. In Michael Sandel's words, “‘moral reflection is not a solitary pursuit but a public endeavor’” (16). Moral disputes, which are often categorical, must be justified in the public sphere, given normativity through good reasons. The weighing of reasons is done rhetorically; the stories, characters, and language that make up public moral deliberation have rhetorical force that persuades deliberative participants to make judgments about which reasons matter most. Gillespie sums up his deliberative theory unambiguously: “The search for moral truth, to be codified under law, is collective and procedurally intersubjective, but morality itself is not” (152).Ultimately, whether “dignity is or is not violated by organ sales” represents a key turning point in the organ market debate (158). Markets, even regulated ones, can exploit vulnerable and socioeconomically exploited populations. If a kidney or a piece of liver were worth fifty-thousand dollars, “a struggling low-income person would, ostensibly, be unable to turn down such an offer” (172). The asymmetrical nature of the exchange suggests to status quo altruists that a certain degree of exploitation is taking place. They insist that market mechanisms are blind to the “background condition that makes the actual contractual engagement—even if undertaken voluntarily—morally suspect” (169). Gillespie notes, however, that “the need for an organ by a person in dire straits and facing death is not exactly an empowering situation either” (172).Market advocates use the concept of dignity differently. They consider the blindness of market mechanisms to be a form of fairness and neutrality from the moral paternalism of the allegedly dignified majority, or worse, the state. Dignity, in neoliberal logics, inheres in the freedom to choose whether selling an organ coincides or conflicts with one's own moral compass. Restricting this choice would be to impose a bourgeois definition of dignity on less privileged classes. What dignity means, market advocates argue, may be established by the tyranny of the majority, and thus should remain an individualized, privatized concern.Gillespie ends with a short self-reflection, wherein he acknowledges that, even after gauging the moral complexity of the question of the organ market and criticizing the lethargy with which neoliberalism addresses it, it would make sense, under certain circumstances, to buy an organ. Readers should not look to Gillespie for an answer to the moral question of organ procurement. He insists, rather, on a revitalization of public deliberation on the matter. Public deliberation cannot be reliant on a neoliberal, marketized principle of civic restraint in place of affirmative moral considerations (101–102). Students and scholars of the rhetoric of science, bioethics, and political theory, particularly in the areas of discourse theory and pluralism, would benefit from Gillespie's exploration of the moral deliberation surrounding organ sales.

Assuming the mantle at R&PA was a weighty responsibility for me, personally as well as professionally. Very few people likely know this, but I was a graduate student editorial assistant at Texas A&M when the journal started. Back in the day, I helped vet essays prior to publication, which meant trudging over to the library to pull books and journals off their shelves to check citations. Like many others in the field, I have submitted manuscripts to be considered for publication in this journal and been rejected. One of my greatest professional regrets is dropping a revise and resubmit I received from R&PA while in graduate school—I did so, I told myself, to focus on my dissertation. Never would I have thought I would become the journal's editor. Nevertheless, I am honored to be editor of a journal that has produced so much work that resonates so powerfully in the areas about which I research and write. Its scholarship has proved so influential in my thinking and research over the years that much of the readings I assign to the graduate students in my rhetorical criticism course come from its pages.I had an affectionate, yet sometimes contentious, history with the founder of this journal. Marty was my professor, served on my MA committee, provided a reference to graduate school, published my work, and offered me guidance as I became an editor myself (you have to “ride herd” on reviewers, he told me). I often have wondered what he thought when I was selected as the editor of R&PA; he was still alive at the time.When I first agreed to edit Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I knew I wanted to have an invited issue—something I did not do for either of the journals I edited previously. When the field erupted in a justifiable uproar a number of years ago, I remained silent. I did not do so to be complicit with existing power structures. I did so because others’ voices needed to be heard more than mine; our community did not need my voice merely making noise or filling space. An invited issue—in the journal around which much of the controversy came to the forefront—thus seemed to me a particularly poetic and apt opportunity to provide a vehicle through which I could magnify others’ voices.As I began to conceptualize a special issue, I knew I wanted to do something that gestured to the journal's past while acknowledging our present. I also wanted to do something that would create an inclusive space for voices not typically published within its pages, providing an opportunity for scholars not as advanced in their career trajectory to publish in R&PA. I had an idea to take a page from the journal's (and the discipline's) past and flip the script a bit.In the Spring of 2000, Michael Leff guest edited a special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs (following a presidential rhetoric conference) about what scholars perceived as President Abraham Lincoln's moment of greatest rhetorical leadership. The scholars in that issue approached the question from a wide variety of perspectives. Some analyzed a single text (varying from the famous to the obscure) whereas others used multiple texts. Some discussed the affirmative rhetorical choices Lincoln deployed whereas others discussed how Lincoln effaced himself in his discourse. All focused on the rhetoric of one orator—a celebrated and official leader of the United States of America.Realizing that rhetorical leadership looks different to different populations or within different contexts, I reached out to authors I thought could bring a unique perspective to the conversation. Not all of the scholars to whom I reached out responded. They might have missed my email, incorrectly thought the offer was a widely cast one, did not have the time or the capacity to write something, or did not want to be published in this journal. Some of the scholars who did respond were unable to draft an essay at this time or ended up being unable to do so for various personal and professional reasons. I know readers will wonder why certain voices were not included. Please know that I tried to have more perspectives represented and that I hope more voices that research different populations will be included in the pages of this journal in the future. This one issue is not enough.I invited the scholars within this issue to answer the question, “What does rhetorical leadership look like” to different people or in different contexts? I wrote to the invited authors that rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, can look different to different populations active in the public sphere. Consequently, what constituted rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, were all “open” concepts. What counted as a text, who communicated—or did not communicate—and about what they communicated were left to each scholar to be determined, according to what each would view as appropriate to their area of study. I wanted the call to be cast as widely as possible to allow creativity and agency in authorial response, yet I also wanted to maintain a discernable theme. I did not want my thoughts on the subject to lead, but to provide a site for authors who specialize in different areas of study to formulate the conversation. (This is not to say that I did not provide editorial guidance.) I asked, moreover, for the authors to keep the essays relatively short—shorter than the essays we typically publish—so that more voices and perspectives could be included within the issue. I am excited for the readership of R&PA to engage with the ideas presented by the authors.The essays in this issue of R&PA explode the idea of what constitutes rhetorical leadership. They show us that rhetorical leadership is not monolithic, it does not have an identifiable genre, and it is not speech- or discourse-reliant. Rhetorical leadership enables voices to be heard in transgressive and transformative ways through different channels of communication, through the embodiment of place and ideas, and through actions. Rhetorical leadership can be fluid and/or guided by geographic space. The essays in this issue largely reject notions of leadership that are patriarchal and adhere to traditional leadership structures. The authors often reconceptualize notions of power and forefront discourses that have not received much scholarly attention, have been neglected or silenced, or have been differently empowered. Many essays show rhetorical leadership in communal contexts, rejecting traditional pathways of power that made previously conceptualized understandings of rhetorical leadership possible.In his essay, “Queer Rhetorical Leadership: ‘Ethical Sluts’ in Modern U.S.-American Polyamory as Exemplar,” Thomas R. Dunn queers the idea of leadership, opening leadership up to “possibilities and potentialities” rather than definitive generic markers. Dunn examines how Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton's book, The Ethical Slut, uses “joyful, radical revisioning; the use of transformational vulgarities; and cultivating comfort in irresolution” to enact a form of queer leadership. Queer leadership, Dunn explains, values adjusting to contemporary issues and concerns, enjoys a “colorful linguistic style” some may deem vulgar, and invites ambiguity and a lack of resolution. Although a queer leadership style “is necessary to rethink the social norms that too often constrain queer life and which, when reinvented, can make new ways of living life queerly possible,” Dunn clarifies that queer rhetorical leadership can be used by anyone to address issues that previous understandings of rhetorical leadership have not been equipped to address.In their essay, “Led by the Land: Recovering Land Agency and Interconnectedness in Social Movement Scholarship,” Noor Ghazal Aswad and Michael Lechuga look at social movements that understand leadership through “leaderless,” land-based, shared geographic space. Ghazal Aswad and Lechuga “envision a form of rhetorical leadership that distributes responsibility, risk, and rewards to all members of a group.” Land can create political subjectivities and social connections. Using the Syrian revolution as a case study, they use the people's response to the Assad regime's practice of sieges and land-burning to demonstrate how the reclamation of the land for subsistence can be generative for survival with the land. Through practices of seed-smuggling and bottom-up farming, enabled through a cooperative agrarian network, the community's relationality and subjectivity is created through emplaced rhetoric that is intersectional and connected.Allison Hahn investigates how technology enables marginalized committees to participate in community development planning in her essay, “Rhetorical Leadership of a Data Story.” During the COVID global pandemic, technological advances such as video teleconferencing have enabled traditionally marginalized communities to participate in the deliberative process. Through her analysis of Diana Wachira's presentation of evidence-based research over a Zoom meeting to an international audience about the eviction of the Kariobangi North community in Nairobi, Kenya, Hahn shows how Wachira employs emplaced rhetoric, making known what might be unknown—or at least lesser known—otherwise. In Wachira's case, she used her own research to provide context and information about the magnitude of persons to be displaced as well as their history with the land upon which they live—information not shared via typical news networks. Wachira's emplaced rhetoric provides a powerful example of how a marginalized community can use their own narrative to counter the dominant narrative to protect human rights and to advance environmental justice.Luhui Whitebear uses counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling to examine the ways in which Indigenous rhetorical leadership advocates social change by bridging multiple worlds, across generations and between Indigenous and colonial systems in her essay, “Our Voices Have Always Been Political: Indigenous Feminist Rhetorical Leadership.” Whitebear examines the rhetoric of three Indigenous women—Zitkala-Ša's boarding school era poetry, Laura Cornelius Kellogg's popular press publications, and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland's speech from Alcatraz—to show not only how these women survived settler colonialism, but also how they resisted colonial systems and practices to preserve their own cultural Indigenous knowledge systems and values within “spaces designed to exclude them.” The rhetorical leadership of Indigenous rhetoricians represents their larger tribal community and history, advancing Indigenous rights while preserving and perpetuating Indigenous culture.In their essay, “The Greta Affect,” Justin Eckstein and Erin Keoppen look at how claims to youth get circulated in the public sphere as a rhetorical resource to create an affective response to effect change. The authors use popular memes of Lisa Simpson, projecting the ethos of Greta Thunberg, to show how a hopeful and naïve leader gets deployed in the public sphere to advocate for change by shaming adults for their lack of action. According to Eckstein and Keoppen, “the Greta Affect mobilizes affect through the moral claim of right makes might to move an intimate public.” Within the public sphere, the girl is complemented for encouraging courageous leadership and criticized for her pushy naivete. The authors contend that, although Thunberg was constrained through the Simpson memes, youth framing creates unique parameters for public deliberation, opening space for a consideration of the obligations the current generation of leaders owes to future generations.In his essay, “México Pésimo: Colosio's Metanoic and Magnicidal Leadership,” José Ángel Maldonado analyzes Luis Donaldo Colosio's 1994 Mexican presidential campaign speech, “Yo Veo un México,” that allegedly led to his assassination. In his speech, Maldonado tells us, Colosio uses his head as a metaphor for leadership (since the Mexican language does not have a direct translation for leader), acknowledges the existence of Mexican pessimism while calling for the end of pessimism via a series of opportunities that could lead to reform and transformation in the country. Colosio's speech, combined with his assassination, present a metanoic pessimism that awaits new opportunities for Mexican socioeconomic advancement.In his essay, “Lo Único Que Tengo Es Amor Para Amar: Rhetorical Leadership and the Journalism of Alfredo Corchado,” Richard Pineda investigates how the journalist Alfredo Corchado enacts leadership in the borderlands between two countries and identities. Through an analysis of two of his books, Pineda finds that Corchado advocates hybrid identity, resilience, and accessibility. Through accessible writing that relays common experiences of people living on the border, Corchado provides an example of how to negotiate liminal spaces for his audience(s). He uses personal and communal stories to highlight the reliance of Mexican Americans in the United States and in Mexico. He also uses language that connects his audience to their geographical roots while embracing the challenges of their present existence, which offers hope to his readers that they are not alone in their embodied experience.In his essay, “Legacy Leadership: Elaine Brown's ‘Education for Liberation’ Bolstering the Fight for Black Women,” Darrian Carroll examines Brown's 2014 speech to University of Georgia students to explain how Brown encourages activists to continue advocating for liberation through “legacy leadership.” A commemoration of the successes and struggles of the past, legacy leadership provides a model of Black female leadership by reminding the audience of the movement's ideological commitments, retelling the conditions of the past and present that create the need for liberation, and encouraging her audience to do all they can to fight for liberation. Brown empowers listeners to act in their everyday experiences for Black liberation through her personal narratives of leading the Black Panther Party.From these essays, we learn that rhetorical leaders may be, but they do not have to be, individuals in official leadership positions. Leaders, and leadership, abound around us. These essays help us understand that rhetorical leadership gains force from the communities from which these communications derive. Leaders(hip) thrive(s), encouraging their populations in a multitude of contexts. To see rhetorical leadership at work, we can look to the narratives and the lessons that arise from within our communities, as leadership results from a need to change and to adapt, as well as from our traditions, our geographic spaces, our shared histories, our triumphs and our challenges, our needs and concerns, our future hopes and dreams, and our search for place and belonging. People and things that speak to those things exemplify leadership. The form of leadership looks different, depending on the specific contexts from which the leadership emerges and through the eyes attuned to see it.When I assumed the mantle of editor of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I did so with a commitment to rhetorical studies as a pluralistic effort. The essays in this issue evidence the diversity of work possible. As diverse as this collection is, however, it does not—and cannot—represent the totality of scholarly and personal perspectives. Space in our journals must be opened for additional, new, and emerging voices and perspectives.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that excels at generating text and public controversy. Upon its release, many marveled at its ability to author intelligible and generically responsible texts (Herman). Writing about his students' experiences using artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants, S. Scott Graham remarks that the results were "consistently mediocre—and usually quite obvious in their fabrication." Why might this be true? How can an LLM succeed in some respects and fail in others? We argue that the discrepant reactions to human and AI rhetoric are a question of genre, specifically that AI rhetoric is only generic; AI rhetoric represents a new enactment of "writing degree zero" (Barthes) that is disengaged from immediate rhetorical situations and knowledge bases. AI text generators (currently) have a more difficult time simulating the positioned perspectives that human writers bring to situations and communicate to audiences through their genre usage. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin, we treat this problem as a question of generic form and audience addressivity. We describe the interplay of form and addressivity as genre signaling and offer it as a construct for the analysis of AI rhetoric and genre as a cultural form (Miller). Genre signaling (Hart-Davidson and Omizo) describes a feature of communicative behavior as it occurs over time that can help both humans and machines evaluate written discourse as it exhibits certain stabilized formal features. When texts contain specific genre signals at expected frequencies and intensities, it may be recognized as being generally accurate, reliable, trustworthy. Without these signals, a text with a similar topical focus might fail to be taken as credible or useful. In this essay we propose to quantify genre signaling based on three measures: (1) stability, (2) frequency, and (3) periodicity.

This essay presents a rhetorical analysis of how the concept of stigma has functioned in American psychiatric discourse by tracing the concept across nearly two centuries of publications issued by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Specifically, I analyze how the concept of stigma circulates in discourses that seek to (re)establish psychiatry as a moral and scientific enterprise by managing discontinuities that potentially threaten this desired professional status. These discourses perpetually reconstitute psychiatry’s institutional identity through processes of emplacement, or recurrent spatiotemporal figurations that generate a sense of the present as placed in time. My analysis identifies three spatiotemporal figurations, or chronotopes, that persistently cluster around the concept of stigma as it circulates in psychiatric discourse: emergence, approach, and elevation. These chronotopes establish and maintain psychiatry’s professional identity by recursively (re)orienting the present against stigma, and toward an imminent future characterized by the fulfillment of psychiatry’s scientific and humanitarian mission.

Effective Q&A management in team presentations is a crucial yet often neglected aspect in academic discourse. Building upon Usera and Fuller’s previous work, this article explores the intricacies of Q&A management for teams. It outlines three key challenges teams face in managing Q&A, introduces two common components (isolated and embedded Q&A) with strategic insights, and proposes techniques for anticipating and responding to questions. By aligning Q&A strategies with the five team presentation formats identified by Usera and Fuller, this article offers a comprehensive framework for enhancing team presentations, with implications for educators, practitioners, and researchers in public speaking.

Although a growing body of research recognizes the importance of viewing argumentation as a means of understanding rather than combating others, little is known about how teachers cultivate this practice in classroom conversations when teaching argumentation. This study examines how argument can be taught in classroom discourse with an empathizing stance and generates associated pedagogical constructs. Adopting a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis, this study examines the key instructional events in an argumentative writing unit in two high school English language arts classes. The analysis demonstrates that the empathizing stance is introduced in the relationship between arguers and their warrants and the differences existing between arguers. It also generates four pedagogical constructs related to the teaching of argument with the stance: (1) identifying the connection between arguers’ warrants and backgrounds; (2) transposing oneself into others’ backgrounds; (3) exploring interlocutors’ common and divergent grounds; and (4) situating argument in a broader context. It concludes with a discussion of the affordances of teaching argument with an empathizing stance.

Peer feedback has long been an essential part of a process approach to writing in university EFL classrooms. This study examines how the affordances of peer feedback are shaped by students’ language choice. We interviewed 27 Chinese university students in an English writing course about their experiences giving and receiving oral peer feedback on an initial and revised draft of an essay. Semi-structured interviews were analyzed thematically and triangulated with stimulated recall, transcripts of peer review discussions, and content analyses of learners’ incorporation of feedback across essay drafts to better understand perceptions and actions following from language choice during oral peer review of their L2 writing. Findings show that students incorporated 56 percent of oral peer feedback instances when revising, and almost all of these occurred in students’ first language, Chinese. Participants described the L1 affordances of clarity, efficiency, and pragmatics as important considerations when giving oral feedback on peer writing. Through triangulation of oral peer feedback discussions, change across essay drafts, and student interviews, language choice is shown to be a supportive practice for L2 writers in oral peer feedback. In contrast to previous research that suggests that the L1 is used primarily for solving problems and less frequently for discussion of content, our findings show that students chose to use their L1 for peer review because of the perceived support offered for improving their writing – namely, clarity, efficiency, and pragmatics.