Not One More! Feminicidio on the Border provides a rhetorical historiography of feminicidios in Ciudad Juarez, archives the voices of family members of victims, and expands the boundaries of theori...

Rhetorical studies scholars in both communication and writing and rhetorical studies (WRS) are currently investing in momentous discussions about social justice with the promise of material, consti...

In 1907, prominent Chicago reformers led by Ellen Henrotin and Jane Addams created an Industrial Exhibit showcasing a history of women in the workplace. Seeking to promote women’s entrance into modern, electricity-powered factories, the Exhibit’s organizers portrayed women’s labor progress in three stages: a stage of premodern, domestic-based craftwork; a stage of tenement-based, sweatshop labor; and a stage of modern, factory-based labor. The Exhibit became a site of controversy when workers demonstrating their labor objected to the Exhibit’s message that tenement sweatshops were old-fashioned and unclean by striking. Their strikes disrupted the Exhibit’s timeline of gendered progress and rearticulated the Exhibit as a site of current labor negotiations between workers, management, and the public. While affluent reformers and working women mutually sought labor reform, they used distinct and unequal rhetorical modes to communicate differing narratives about women’s work to the public.

This essay suggests one way of further pushing the methodological boundaries in the study of transnational cyber-public activist rhetoric, which is to complement a new materialist approach with materialist theories rooted in local rhetorical traditions, especially those in non-Western rhetorics. To this end, the author develops a framework named a comparative materialist approach that dynamically recontextualizes the rhetorically charged material actant as it emerges, circulates, transforms, activates the public, and assembles bodies across national, geopolitical, technological, and rhetorical borders. The author then illustrates the comparative materialist approach through a case study of the 2018 anti-Dolce & Gabbana campaign through the lens of “shi”—a rhetorical concept of material propensity originated in different schools of thought during the Warring States period in China.

Coalitional politics have largely been examined across social and cultural differences that serve shared political commitments, and the rhetorical force of situated and material locations remains an open question. To provide a theoretical analytic for these excesses, I offer pluriversal and rhetorical understandings of divergence and diplomacy for coalitional politics. I demonstrate these concepts through a rhetorical analysis of a community organization from San Antonio, Texas, and their coalitional politics, which partially emerge as a response to extreme weather events and urban development. The upshot reveals that rhetorical approaches to divergence and diplomacy can help capture the material obligations and constraints across heterogeneous yet interdependent worlds. Such theoretical tools will be increasingly important for coalitional rhetorics and politics responding to climate breakdown.

Duncan Speakman’s ambient literature, It Must Have Been Dark by Then (2017), is a paperback book that is read in tandem with a smartphone app to create an immersive experience for readers. Readers walk local landscapes and create an individual map via the Global Positioning System, while listening to narratives of climate change from Latvia, Louisiana, and Tunisia. This essay completes a rhetorical critique and econarratologically close reading of Speakman’s book, and refers to rhetorical theories on walking by de Certeau, Mountford, Topinka, and Kalin and Frith. The essay concludes that Speakman’s readers immerse themselves in print, digital narrative, and actual environments, becoming performers and cocreators of individual narratives. The readers’ embodied immersion in the story allows it to transport them into distant environments affected by climate change.

“Showcasing the many intersections of public rhetoric, current controversies, and effective pedagogy, the authors in this issue of Present Tense bring to light some remarkable instances of persuasive techniques and offer nuanced critiques of those moments in less than 2,500 words.”

Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, by Tushar Irani and The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, by James L. Kastely Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xiv + 217 pp. ISBN 9781316855621James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015, xvii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780226278629 Robin Reames Robin Reames University of Illinois at Chicago Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 328–332. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.328 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robin Reames; Review: Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, by Tushar Irani and The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, by James L. Kastely. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 328–332. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.328 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870, by Tom F. Wright Tom F. Wright. Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, xi + 245 pp. ISBN 9780190496791 Granville Ganter Granville Ganter St. John's University, Queens, New York Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 323–325. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.323 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Granville Ganter; Review: Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870, by Tom F. Wright. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 323–325. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.323 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: La prière dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon à Proclus, by Andrei Timotin Timotin, Andrei, La prière dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon à Proclus. Turnhout, Brepols [coll. Recherches sur les rhétoriques religieuses], 2017, 296 pp. Jean-François Pradeau Jean-François Pradeau Université Lyon III – Jean Moulin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 325–328. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.325 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jean-François Pradeau; Review: La prière dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon à Proclus, by Andrei Timotin. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 325–328. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.325 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Cane Ridge Revival drew nearly twenty thousand participants, sparking the transformative Second Great Awakening. Barton Stone was the minister who organized and shared preaching responsibilities for the revival, and eventually, his disciples formed one of the largest American religious traditions, the Stone-Campbell Movement. In this paper, I examine portions of nine fictional dialogues published by Stone during the final year of his life, wherein he explicitly outlined the parameters of effective rhetoric or “useful preaching.” I argue that Stone developed a rhetorical theory that rebelled against authority by granting agency to the audience even in the processes of invention and interpretation, a theory that produced idiosyncratic theological convictions and a movement practically incapable of confessional unity.

In 1 Cor. 10:1–22, Paul deals with the role of Christ and his relationship to God. This is an important ethical topic that Paul deems necessary to discuss with the Corinthian believers. In order to make an effective, thus persuasive, argument, he follows the ancient Greco-Roman tradition of rhetoric and poetics. I argue that vv. 1–4 is Paul's introduction to his vivid representation of monotheism (vv. 5–22). As he presents his narrative of the wilderness events, he employs various rhetorical-poetic techniques to evoke in his hearers imaginative and emotional experiences that will transport them into a higher level of ethical consciousness, a new monotheistic reality in Christ.

Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Il velo delle parole. L'eufemismo nella lingua e nella storia dei Greci, by Menico Caroli Menico Caroli, Il velo delle parole. L'eufemismo nella lingua e nella storia dei Greci. Bari: Levante editori, 2017, 464 pp. ISBN 9788879496766 Simone Beta Simone Beta Dipartimento di Filologia e critica delle, letterature antiche e moderne, Università di Siena, Via Roma 56, I-53100 Siena beta@unisi.it Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 321–323. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.321 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Simone Beta; Review: Il velo delle parole. L'eufemismo nella lingua e nella storia dei Greci, by Menico Caroli. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 321–323. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.321 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In this webtext, I develop an in situ approach for the rhetorical study of large-scale social media data. Grounding this in situ methodology in rhetoric and feminist critiques of data and visualization, this webtext models techniques and strategies for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing Twitter data.

Our invitation is to think about composing as inclusive of written texts, multimodal webtexts, and all the things writing and rhetoric folks would normally be asked to help students improve in creating. But for this experience, we don't want to stop there. We want you to also think about composing other things. Think about films. Think about dance choreography. Think about baking pies. Think about music. How do humans learn to compose these things? How can a visualization aid in learning these things?

This article suggests that the framework of prison abolition in prison literacy studies should be developed through the relational potential of queer community literacy practices among incarcerated writers. To that end, the author presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of a newspaper by incarcerated LGBTQ+ writers. Three primary forms of audience address and rhetorical… Continue reading (Anti)Prison Literacy: Queering Community Writing through an Abolitionist Stance by Rachel Lewis

A proliferation of scholarship, teaching, and activism in the field of rhetoric and composition attends to prison writing, as an ethical imperative to combat mass incarceration and its dire consequences (Jacobi, Hinshaw, Berry, Rogers, etc.). However, parole board writing— arguably the genre of writing within prison most closely tied to material liberation—remains largely unexamined, both… Continue reading The Truth Will Set You Free: Reflections on the Rhetoric of Insight, Responsibility, and Remorse in Rhetoric for the Board of Parole Hearings by Mo, Stephanie Bower, Raymond P., Emily Artiano, William M., & Ben Pack

This analysis uses a critical race framework from African American literary studies (Morrison 1993, McBride 2001) to locate discourses of whiteness circulating between the texts of prison-based scholar-practitioners and their imprisoned counterparts, considering how those rhetorical economies risk marginalizing prisoners in an already vexed space. Recognizing the role of affect and bodily ritual in shaping… Continue reading Bodily Instruments: Somatic Metaphor in Prison-based Research by Libby Catchings

Demands for more innovative approaches to prison education have flooded the calls for papers in rhetoric and composition journals (Hinshaw & Jacobi 2018; Smith McKoy and Alexander 2018), marking a necessary push toward more dialogic prison engagement and collaboration. Specific to this special issue, Hinshaw and Jacobi (2018) hope to curate pedagogical awareness to include… Continue reading Review: Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers edited by Joe Lockard and Sherry Rankins-Robertson by Charisse S. Iglesias

Applying the framework of coalitional rhetoric, this paper seeks to consider the rhetoric of prison literacy work and its implications for university-community relationships. Through an examination of four academic publications— three peer-reviewed articles and one published conference paper—that advocate or reflect the possibility of coalitionbuilding between prison education programs and prison abolition. Link to PDF

Candice Rai and Caroline Druschke have compiled an edited collection of ten articles about field rhetoric written by scholars from disciplines as diverse as English and communication, ecology, and political science. They view rhetoric as ecological, “a complex constellation of persuasive forces in the world” that is best studied in context— through fieldwork, actively engaging… Continue reading Review of Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion by Mary Le Rouge

What do rhetorics, both those of the past and those circulating in the present, have to teach us about overcoming impediments to democratic participation? Questions like these are explored prominently by Jonathan Alexander, Susan C. Jarratt, and Nancy Welch (2018), who extend the disruptive capacities of unruliness as rhetorical tactic in their edited collection Unruly… Continue reading Review of Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics by Jacob Richter

As activists from historically marginalized communities advocate for themselves when confronted with increasing environmental and social injustices, students and scholars are uniquely poised to collect examples of, learn from, and amplify activists’ rhetorical efforts at intervention. This article argues for activist archival work in which researchers collect examples of activist interventions as a critical form… Continue reading Activist Archival Research, Environmental Intervention, and the Flint Water Crisis by Julie Collins Bates

Communities are in constant flux, shifting within a network of people, things and spaces; yet it is not uncommon to see a universal narrative emerge within the local commonplace of our towns and cities. These narratives are often too simplistic, avoiding the dynamic array of rhetorical flows that are circling through the social, material and… Continue reading Walking in Jamaica: Exploring the Boundaries and Bridges of Rhetorical Agency by Brent Lucia

During the Summer 2019 semester, Writing & Rhetoric students at Florida International University, a public Hispanic-Serving Institution in Miami, Florida, engaged with Muted Group Theory to both understand and challenge the silencing of immigrant voices. Specifically, the FIU students, the majority of whom identified as Hispanic, created video messages for a local third grade class… Continue reading The Muted Group Video Project: Amplifying the Voices of Latinx Immigrant Students by Christine Martorana

Over the last roughly twenty years, or between 2000 and 2019, scholarship on community writing has built upon a focus on service-learning composition courses to include the roles of writing and rhetoric in community engagement more generally, including necessary inquiry into the ethics of community engagement altogether. In this time, the longer-term effects of service-learning… Continue reading The Long-Term Effects of Service-Learning on Composition Students by Chris Iverson

“As we teach deliberative and engaged rhetoric, we can use this case as an exhibit for students. The revisions to the Common Rule illustrate how publicly engaged rhetoricians can negotiate the policy process and help undo decades of systematic marginalization—marginalization that has occurred as a direct result of language.”

“This article is a call to interrogate the seemingly mundane terms we use when we talk about online life. The fact that we create hierarchies that oppose the digital to the physical or dematerialize the digital through language is a subtle yet important framing we can push back on in our research and teaching.”

“A rhetoric of 心 challenges the epistemological divides present in American, and more broadly, Western Liberal Democracies, and can also be seen at work in the recent emergence of American identity politics.”

“By insisting that young people can determine their circumstances through properly regulating their fertility, Power to Decide continues to contribute to misleading rhetoric about young parents and inaccurate explanations of social inequality.”

“Pitting feeling rules against affective publics, and examining how student-athletes are placed at their center, raises future research questions about pressurized rhetorical bodies and social justice movements. How have student-athletes and professional-level athletes accorded with institutional feeling rules and engaged with the rhetorical-affective work of activists and oppositions?”

Ira Shor serves on the English faculty at the College of Staten Island, CUNY and is Professor in the City University of New York’s Graduate School, where he started up the doctorate in composition/ rhetoric in 1993. His nine books include a recent three-volume set in honor of the late Paulo Freire which includes Critical… Continue reading Hybrid Idioms in Writing the Community: An Interview with Ira Shor by Hannah Ashley

Translingual scholarship emphasizes the temporal dimensions of language use, and frame language practices as emergent phenomena shaped by repertories of discursive activities sedimented through prior experience. This essay adapts Gee’s concept of lifeworld Discourse in order to theorize (1) how Discourse competencies are cultivated through the sedimentation of discourse practices over time, and (2) how actors occupy thresholds or dwell on borders while they draw on repertoires sedimented through prior experience in response to emergent rhetorical situations. I activate the lifeworld Discourse conceptual framework in an analytical approach that I call a Discourse genealogy in order to trace out the palimpsestic emergence and blending of Discursive competencies throughout labor and community organizer César Chávez’s life. The argument focuses on the archival record of Chávez’s literacy practices in order to understand his emergent lifeworld Discourses from birth in 1927 through the late 1950s, up to the point at which he began to organize the migrant farmworkers under the auspices of the Community Service Organization in Oxnard, California (1957-8). Using textual analysis of Chávez’s writings and oral history records, the following essay shows how one thread of Chávez’s lifeworld Discourse – responding to social injustice – binds together a number of Chávez’s varied Discursive repertoires. My central argument is that when we occupy thresholds that connect Discourses, our repertoires of practice may be blended with new practices to form emergent potentials for responding to rhetorical situations. The thread of repertoires sedimented throughout a lifetime bind together the various social Discourses we encounter and engage with in our public lives.

The bulk of literacy education historical narratives about Black Americans has been gentrified by mainstream Euro-American perspectives. This article considers the contributions of a Black-American-developed form of institutionalized community education to demonstrate the critical race theory voice-of-color thesis in college-level composition-literacies education. Through reviewing the curricular, pedagogical, and instructional practices of pre-college independent Black institutions, the author works to reclaim the unique rhetorical voice of this Afrocentric literacy education form and insert it into American literacy education histories. The article presents two established unique voice of color counter-stories grounded in truthfully representing and advancing Black American cultures to argue that central features of these Afrocentric literacy education programs can afford college composition programs race- and community-conscious writing education.

A Professor of Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University, Linda Flower pioneered the study of cognitive processes in writing. Motivated by the need for a more integrated socialcognitive approach to writing, her recent research has focused on how writers construct negotiated meaning in the midst of conflicting internal and social voices. Flower is Director of Carnegie… Continue reading The Evolution of ‘Intercultural Inquiry’ by Linda Flower

“If activists/rhetoricians don’t create and perform new rhetorical practices in response to visiting rhetors like Spencer, the American academy will be a crueler, more unjust place for it.”

This paper is focused on the contextual use of the term “whataboutism” in contemporary American politics, specifically in the language of political news commentary. After tracking the word’s emergence in political discourse, some analysis of the term’s recent use in examples of commentary articles is done to explore what the term means as a rhetorical device that structures political conversations in the media and shapes political identities in the public sphere. Overall, “whataboutism” is found to be part of an asymmetrical media ecosystem polarizing the American electorate, and one of the rhetorical tools systematically used in maintaining political group divisions. How “whataboutism” is deployed in  political discourse and then grappled with or normalized by journalists is emblematic of trends in American journalistic discourse after the election results of 2016, and the term’s newfound prevalence is illustrative of the degree to which American identities have become politically tribalized.

This paper discusses the visual encodings of non-normativities in the selected K-pop music videos and seeks to establish them within the aesthetic of gendered desirability that deviates from what is considered a social norm in South Korean culture. The first part presents a short history and current boundaries of Korean pop music and the construct of gender and its (inter)relation with sex and rhetoric of desire are discussed. The next section maps out the changes in the understanding of normativity and the concept of queerness. The final part of the paper relates the theories and practices of non-normative identities to the visualities from post-2007 K-pop music videos, using examples to illustrate and contextualize them. The authors focus on the representations of masculinities and show how selected texts can be read as spaces of liminality defying normative cultural and social rules.

The article compares the formats of the final presidential debates in the latest elections in Poland between Andrzej Duda and Bronisław Komorowski (2015) and in the Czech Republic between Jiří Drahoš and Miloš Zeman (2018). The purpose of this comparison based on rhetorical genre criticism was to check whether and how the analyzed media events fit into the genre pattern of the debate. The Polish and the Czech formats were compared with respect to the interaction rules, elements of time and space, as well as the way of moderating and asking questions during the debate. The result of this comparison was the indication of the direction of genre hybridization of pre-election television debates in the last elections in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The concept of black boyhood has always been marked with negative associations. American media usually portray black boys as a potential threat. Rather than focusing on their future, they treat black boyhood as an experience “in the now,” failing to consider the historical context of African American communities. Thus, they create a monolithic picture of young black men, which highlights only their faults. This way of imagining black boyhood has inspired African American authors and illustrators to talk back and join the national debate. Their picture books reject the public rhetoric of crisis and replace it with a new black narrative, which reconstructs the black male identity. The aim of this article is to analyze selected images of black boyhood included in the books, as well as to compare them with the message of today’s media.

Radio and television broadcasters accuse climate scientists of “promoting a global warming hoax”, recommending that they be “named and fi red, drawn and quartered” (Rush Limbaugh); commit “hara kiri” (Glenn Beck); and be “publicly flogged” (Mark Morano). Conservative media are crucial in promoting climate skepticism. Likewise, climate skepticism resonates well with white middle-class men. But why does the middle class continue to support “radical” positions? This article focuses on Anti-Intellectualism to explain why climate skeptic rhetoric resonates with “Middle American Radicals” (MARS).

This article identifies and analyzes a rhetorical pattern in the Algerian negotiator Hamdan Khodja’s responses to the French occupation of Algeria in 1830. In his book The Mirror, published by a Parisian editor in 1833, Khodja sophistically and obliquely builds anticolonial critique on expressions of sympathy and identification with France, a manoeuver that makes him appear relevant. Speaking from an ethical vantage point that is shared by the French reader, Khodja’s criticism becomes credible and influential. In other words, Khodja’s appreciative judgments permit him to attack the opponent from within enemy lines: his argument is grounded in his opponent’s ethical pretentions. By the same token, Khodja displays that the inhabitants of Algiers that he represents are morally and culturally mature; they are not the uncivilized masses that colonial discourse will often have them look like. By carefully decontextualizing Khodja’s anticolonial tract, and reading it not just as a historical document but also as an articulation of personal themes and desires, as well as sympathy for the colonizer, the study contributes to our understanding of early anticolonial expression as more intricate and heterogeneous than it would appear when studied from a purely politico-historical or rhetorical perspective.

Sequential rhetoric can serve as a framework to instruct UX practice (through user story maps) to new learners because it is both approachable and affordable. Sequential rhetoric consists of five main facets that incorporate planning elements (core visual writing and envisaging) and composing elements (interanimation, juxtaquencing, and gestalt closure), which this essay both defines and relates to convergent scholarship. We argue that sequential rhetoric transfers beyond the technical classroom and into the profession itself.

This graphic meditation on issues of cultural relevance and accessibility in comic-based health communication texts presents the web of rhetorical considerations inherent in creating culturally accessible health communication texts. Applying recent technical communication theories related to social justice this article will examine contemporary instances of comics being used as health communication tools for culturally diverse patient populations. The authors offer original drawings and text for the article.

In a move that is becoming more common within digital humanities and comics scholarship, Jason Helms sets out to illustrate his argument through formal means, and thus has produced a work that is b...

Technical communication research has relied heavily on participatory, user-focused strategies as well as “participative”, posthuman frameworks. Both research methodologies have various strengths, yet also have been critiqued for underplaying the role of human and non-human agency (respectively) in rhetorical situations. Through an analysis of an urban planning comic book, I suggest that turning to the Greek concept of methexis – or “participation” – may help technical communication researchers bridge posthuman and user-centered investigative approaches.

Throughout Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope, Cheryl Glenn is attuned to her positionality and reminds readers why it has become standard and important to “announce one’s standpoint” (...

This article examines the rhetorical productivity of ambiguity in the context of a loosely-defined mood disorder formally known as dysthymia, referred to colloquially as mild depression. First, the article offers a rhetorical history of the unusual institutional conditions under which this definitionally ambiguous diagnostic entity was constructed prior to its debut in the DSM-III. Second, the article explores how dysthymia’s definitional ambiguity functions as a rhetorical resource in the context of contemporary online health interactions.

A “personally situated” approach to community-engaged rhetoric highlights the personal and performative dimensions of advocacy, which are often obscured in public and community-oriented frameworks. When applied to the advocacy practices of parents of disabled children within the context of special education, personally situated advocacy reveals how a strong personal commitment to advocacy within a highly institutionalized space can create unique and often difficult rhetorical challenges. By making these challenges more visible, personally situated advocacy suggests new possibilities for affiliation between community partners and community-engaged scholars.

As I compose this book review, the 2020 presidential primary field is shrinking as fundraising targets are hit and missed and candidates who remain are promising to make medical care affordable for...