Abstract This essay examines how President Trump’s vacillations between overt and colorblind racism represent the intensification of white racial anxieties in anticipation of an impending demographic shift toward a nonwhite majority. Trump’s contradictory rhetoric on race becomes legible in the context of white ambivalence, a condition that entails that white identity, history, and culture be respected as morally superior but, at the same time, not be characterized as white supremacy. Examining a selection of Trump’s campaign and postelection rallies, I show how white ambivalence constitutes a perverse mixture of overweening and explicit valorizations of people of color and, simultaneously, a forceful disavowal of racial conversations that might otherwise implicate white identity in the legacy of white supremacy.

Abstract During the 1924 Democratic National Convention, Will Rogers described the party’s deliberation on Saturday as “the day when I heard the most religion preached, and the least practiced of any day in the world’s history.” The Democrats had been debating over whether to officially condemn the Ku Klux Klan in the party platform. William Jennings Bryan ended his own address offering white supremacist support with an all-too-common appeal for the party to simply “return to Jesus” rather than condemn white supremacy. Among the flurry of religious rhetoric that week, one voice surprised the delegates. Just before Bryan, one son of a Confederate officer and former mayor of the Klan stronghold, Athens, Georgia, spoke. He looked small. His voice cracked. But when he spoke outside the stereotype of a Southern politician and against the KKK, Madison Square Garden erupted with both hisses and cheers. That day Andrew Cobb Erwin gave us a model of how to resist within a politically charged religious climate.

AbstractThis paper aims to address the need in rhetorical scholarship to recognize the obstacles that atheists face in the public sphere. I propose that, within the United States, there is a systematic normalization of theism, which I refer to as theistnormativity. While theistnormativity is advanced through various systems within a society, I argue that presidents reinforce theistnormativity through their use of religious political rhetoric. I reason that the theistnormativity that is prominent in presidential inaugural addresses from 1933 to 2017 contributes an ideal space that privileges theists and marginalizes atheists.

Book Review| June 01 2020 A Way Forward: Reflections on the Presidency and Presidential Campaigns Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us about Donald J. Trump. Edited by Ryan Skinnell. Exeter, U.K.: Imprint Academic, 2018; pp. iii + 200. $29.90 paper.The Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in the Digital Age: Insiders and Outsiders in Democratic Politics. By Mark Rolfe Singapore: Springer, 2016; pp. x + 259. $109.99 cloth; $109.99 paper.Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t: How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation (Without Even Knowing It). By Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-Hye Han. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018; pp. xi + 208. $79.95 cloth; $32.95 paper. Devin Scott Devin Scott Devin Scott is a Ph.D. student studying Rhetoric and Political Culture in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (2): 367–379. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.2.0367 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Devin Scott; A Way Forward: Reflections on the Presidency and Presidential Campaigns. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2020; 23 (2): 367–379. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.2.0367 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

I weave stories on my relationships with the land, ancestral knowledge, and my experiences in doing research to theorize a relational scholarly practice. I invite readers to contemplate and grapple with me on what land-based knowledges, Indigenous intellect, and relationality can offer rhetoric and composition studies.

This article uses storytelling, rhetorical analysis, and critical historicization to critique the color-blindness of the writing studies movement’s two key texts, Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Down’sWriting about Writingreader and Linda Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s edited collectionNaming What We Know. Juxtaposing the writing studies movement with contemporary translingual and hip-hop theory as well as the history of the Students’ Right to Their Own language resolution and CUNY’s Open Admissions period, the author argues that the writing studies movement’s pivot toward neoliberalizing higher education excludes multilingual and diverse writers from its pedagogical audience as well as its conception of writing expertise. The author calls for a broader conception of writing studies that can theorize literacy in all its complex global instantiations.

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

This paper describes methods to study the impact of service-learning on the writing performance of students in first-year college composition. Linguistic and rhetorical features commonly identified as affecting judgments of writing quality are compared to holistic essay ratings to assess the impact of different teaching and learning contexts on writing performance. Link to PDF

This article adopts the perspective of rhetorical theory to examine student, teacher, and client assessments of community service writing projects created by students in a technical writing course. The study compares both students’ and clients’ assessments of the benefits of the service-learning experience and the teacher’s and clients’ evaluations of the documents. It highlights significant… Continue reading In the Eye of the Beholder: Contrasting Views of Community Service Writing by Teresa M. Redd

Marching in public, as members of a public meant to be seen in public, has been one of the most frequently deployed forms of collective social protest in the United States. For people with disabilities, however, this type of rhetorical action is fraught with normative assumptions that go beyond presumed needs for accommodation, access, and alternative modes of participation. This essay identifies the far less visible constraints created by previous historic and rhetorical practices, including some of the discourse of other progressive social activists. Both the prospect and the practice of marching as a rhetorical form of performative public argument are thus complex for people with disabilities who are too often not seen as equal citizens. The trouble with marching is thus ableism and its sustained invisibility.

This essay argues for understanding publicity as a kind of ability. Using a brief reading of accounts of nervous breakdown in US newspapers, it suggests that the condition was characterized by the inability, usually temporary, to appear in public. Previous scholarly approaches to public access have focused on the question of who is let in and who is kept out; this essay suggests that the capacity for public appearance also enables—and constrains—rhetorical action. In conclusion, it suggests that the public may be thought of as a kind of kairotic space, which allows us to see how publics may be disabling, but also how dispublicity might be accommodated.

Advertisements for hearing aids often tout the “invisible” nature of their product, designed to obscure visible markers of disability. This essay examines mid-century appeals to women hearing-aid wearers, emphasizing the labor of embodied and cognitive passing in kairotic spaces as well as practical rhetorical implications of human/machine integration, both of which continue to apply in contemporary contexts.

Attention to disability and undocumented status illuminates the impact of in/visibility on multiply marginalized individuals. Visibility can prove dangerous for vulnerable populations exposed to physical and symbolic violence; yet invisibility also poses risks. Nevertheless, visibility and invisibility can also be useful rhetorical schemes. Here, I focus on branding and non/images to interrogate this ambivalence in the case of Rosa Maria Hernandez, a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy brought to the United States when she was three months old, and that of Eva Chavez, an undocumented activist whose defense campaign publicized her role as primary caretaker of her 11-year-old disabled citizen son. These cases show that, for targeted people, in/visibility is gradated, compulsory, and tactical, producing presence and belonging relative to exposure and risk.

Cancer rhetoric’s development in the twentieth-century United States provides a striking example of the risks and rewards of visibility. Twentieth-century efforts to publicize cancer improved the q...

Between 1842 and 1890, 23 women wrote 33 memoirs about their time spent incarcerated in American insane asylums. While a handful of these memoirs have been studied, there has not been a recognition of how many asylum mem­oirs exist and their significance as a collective body of work. Grounded in an inductive analysis of the collective 33 works, this article begins a process of recovering a mostly forgotten moment in time when former patients took agency over their experience, ethos, and rhetoricity to break down the institutional wall of silence and give the public the first patient-centered memoirs. I argue that these women rhetors did this by foregrounding their own identity as patient and by creating a rhetorical position from which their readers would feel the trauma of asylum life. Both rhetorical moves countered institutionalization’s dehumanizing effects by placing the patient experience at the center of understanding the asy­lum experience.

This pilot study of a mental health call center clinician’s workplace tools, processes, and organizational structures proposes a preliminary theory of “distributed and mediated ethos.” A distributed and mediated ethos refers to how an organization uses various resources—artifacts, technologies, and processes—situated across dis¬parate locations in order to expand and control their identity in the service of extend¬ing their reach and capacity to render essential services. An analysis of a participant clinician’s rhetorical context flowcharts and network pictures shows how an agency’s ethos is mediated through various technologies. Findings suggest that a distributed ethos (1) projects the impression of being “always there”; (2) relies on dexterity across several human and nonhuman actors; and (3) necessitates targeted tasks from branches that extend ethos farther from the organization. This pilot study, thus, provides researchers of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) with a new tool for exploring the intricate and complex nature of health at a distance and other complicated 21st century healthcare delivery formats.

Using primary source materials from medical, government, and journalism archives, this study of public medical discourse reveals the role of argumentation in posi­tively shaping public perceptions of traumatized soldiers and locates the contem­porary origins of the trope of “soldier as psychological victim of war”—a perception that continues to inform public policy and medical research. Using Jasinski’s (1998) concepts of interior and exterior constitutive potential to analyze the public writ­ings, interviews, and Congressional testimony of VVAW-affiliated psychiatrists, the study finds that the radical psychiatrists’ interior (directed at veterans) and exte­rior (directed at public and medical institutions) rhetorics were (and arguably remain) mutually effective in creating an identity for veterans to occupy that exculpated them from their involvement in war, while allowing them to garner benefits for their ser­vice. The article concludes with two examples of the “veteran as psychological vic­tim of war” trope as it shapes the contemporary rhetorical ecology of former servicemembers.

While interactive maps are important tools for risk communication, most maps omit the lived experiences and personal stories of the community members who are most at risk. We describe a project to develop an interactive tool that juxtaposes coastal residents' videorecorded stories about sea level rise and coastal flooding with an interactive map that shows future sea level rise projections. We outline project development including digital platform selection, project design, participant recruitment, and narrative framing, and tie our design decisions to rhetorical and ethical considerations of interest for others developing interactive tools with community participation.

Tree-like visualizations have played a central role in taxonomic and evolutionary biology for centuries, and the idea of a “tree of life” has been a pervasive notion not only in biology but also in religion, philosophy, and literature for much longer. The tree of life is a central figure in Darwin’s <em>Origin of Species</em> in both verbal and visual forms. As one of the most powerful and pervasive images in biological thought, what conceptual and communicative work has it enabled? How have the visual qualities and elements of the tree form interacted with biological thinking over time? This paper examines the pre-Darwinian history of tree images, the significance of Darwin’s use of such images, and the development of tree diagrams after Darwin. This history shows evidence of four separate traditions of visualization: cosmological, logical-philosophical, genealogical, and materialist. Visual traditions serve as rhetorical contexts that provide enthymematic backing, or what Perelman calls “objects of agreement,” for interpretation of tree diagrams. They produce polysemic warrants for arguments in different fields. The combination of the genealogical tradition with the cosmological and the logical changed the framework for thinking about the natural world and made Darwin’s theory of evolution possible; the later materialist tradition represents the “modernization” of biology as a science.

Long: I do have a quarrel with what McCloskey's chapter says about Plato's Gorgias, one of my favorite Platonic dialogues.One of the aims of that dialogue is to distinguish between two modes of speech -one that aims at truth and one that aims at power.Plato identifies the former with philosophy and the latter with rhetoric, thus drawing McCloskey's ire because she is a longtime defender of the importance of rhetoric.McCloskey: Yes, Plato is charming, and Gorgias most of all.But we must not, I am sure you agree, love his eloquence so much that we fall for his authoritarian tastes, the tastes of an aristocrat hostile to democracy.I do defend rhetoric, and long have.My reasons are two: (1) It is the basis of a free society, as its inventors in Sicily understood, and, as the essay argues, (2) There is no "dialectic" that can yield Truth, capital T, only an honest rhetorical discourse getting agreed truth for the nonce.Both of these reasons are assaulted by Plato, everywhere in the writings we have.Roderick Tracy Long: But in her critique of Gorgias she says that Plato is defending a state-imposed standard of truth.I don't see that in Gorgias at all.Maybe

Other| May 22 2020 Books of Interest Michael Kennedy; Michael Kennedy Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Mark Schaukowitch Mark Schaukowitch Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2020) 53 (2): 199–205. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.53.2.0199 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Kennedy, Mark Schaukowitch; Books of Interest. Philosophy & Rhetoric 22 May 2020; 53 (2): 199–205. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.53.2.0199 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT This article approaches the problem of post-truth and the opposition between philosophical dialectics and sophistic rhetoric. The antagonism is addressed through a reading of Žižek's depiction of the ongoing discussion between Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, the “new version of the ancient dialogue between Plato and the sophists,” as stained by sexual difference, and the dialectics between Parmenides and Gorgias. The article argues that only through acknowledging the inescapable failure of these sides to ever establish a complete totality are we capable of overcoming the antagonism that resides at their core, thus making a dialectical sophistics, on the basis of Žižek's thought, possible. Thus, only by taking the path through post-truth can we attempt to reach the disavowed core of truth that haunts every failed system.

ABSTRACTRhetoricians usually consider Plato's Republic as a work dedicated to political philosophy. As such, it is ostensibly antidemocratic and thus antirhetorical. But if we focus on the reason for the political allegory—the investigation of justice in the soul—it is clear that Plato is interested in Burke's question: “What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” Accordingly, this article employs the terms of Burke's pentad in order to articulate the rhetorical significance of Plato's own drama of psychic motivation. Ultimately, I read the degenerating constitutions of the Republic as a rhetorical typography that not only identifies audience types and how to influence them, but also offers a map of psychic transformation that addresses Socrates's famous challenge to rhetoric in the Phaedrus.

El presente artículo interpreta la obra de Adam Smith a partir de la retórica. Basándose en el análisis comparativo de los textos, afirma la dependencia de la Historia de la Astronomía con respecto a las Lecciones sobre retórica y, con ello, la naturaleza retórica del uso smithiano de la ciencia. Tras analizar las metáforas utilizadas por Smith, deja de lado la metáfora gravitacional y la de la mano invisible y se centra en las basadas en el teatro y en la analogía con la máquina. De esto concluye que Smith recurrió al potencial constructivo de la retórica para superar el escepticismo humeano, lo cual, a su vez, tiene consecuencias sobre nuestra comprensión de la historia de la retórica.

Book Review| May 01 2020 Invention and Authorship in Medieval England, by Robert R. Edwards Robert R.Edwards, Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus: The Ohio State Press, 2017. 230 pp. ISBN 9780814213407 Jordan Loveridge Jordan Loveridge Jordan Loveridge Departments of Communication and English Mount Saint Mary's University 16300 Old Emmitsburg Rd. Emmitsburg, MD 21727 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 232–234. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.232 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 Jordan Loveridge; Invention and Authorship in Medieval England, by Robert R. Edwards. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 232–234. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.232 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| May 01 2020 Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures, by Jean Bessette JeanBessette, Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017, 202 pp. ISBN 9780809336234 Morgan DiCesare Morgan DiCesare Morgan DiCesare Department of Communication Studies University of Iowa 25 South Madison Street Iowa City, IA 52242 morgan-dicesare@uiowa.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 225–227. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.225 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 Morgan DiCesare; Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures, by Jean Bessette. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 225–227. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.225 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| May 01 2020 The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory, by Peter A. O'Connell Peter A.O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 Ruth Webb Ruth Webb Ruth Webb Universite dé Lille ruth.webb@univ-lille.fr Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 227–229. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.227 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 Ruth Webb; The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory, by Peter A. O'Connell. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 227–229. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.227 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| May 01 2020 Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus by Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch HaroldParker and Jan MaximilianRobitzsch, eds., Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus, (Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 368), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 202 pp. ISBN 9783110573978 Peter A. O'Connell Peter A. O'Connell Peter A. O'Connell Departments of Classics and Communication Studies The University of Georgia Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 229–232. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.229 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 Peter A. O'Connell; Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus by Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 229–232. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.229 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 Plato's early dialogues, the impossibility of talking to the crowd appears as a constitutive element of the opposition between rhetoric and dialectic and raises the understudied question of the role of the audience in Socratic thought. However, Xenophon's Socrates constantly identifies public and private speech. But this likening is also found in the Alcibiades Major, which gives a key to understand the true meaning of this assimilation: one can convince an audience, by talking to each individual in the crowd. The need to address each one implies an adaptation of language that can be found in the texts of different disciples of Socrates. The rhetorical aspects of the Phaedrus' psychagogia should then be understood, not as a new Platonic concept which allows the good orator to address the many, but rather as a new formulation of a well-known and shared Socratic ideal.

In our analysis of seventy-five FYC writing assignment prompts, we identify common elements and offer pedagogical suggestions so faculty can use assignment sheets as rhetorical tools to introduce students to writing studies’ threshold concepts.

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A highly visual social media platform such as Instagram is incorporated by many companies in their marketing communications strategies to advertise their products and services employing digital visual rhetoric. The purpose of this study is to extend the current understanding of visual framing strategies, sentiment, and product presentation modality in the multicultural context by examining social media practices of influencers belonging to two cultural backgrounds, namely the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the United Arab Emirates. Using content analysis, this study reveals visual rhetorical strategies practiced by Instagram influencers that can equip digital marketing practitioners with effective devices of persuasion. The study provides a useful contribution to the theory of digital visual rhetoric.

The paper examines man’s involvement in the communication process. While elucidating communication one needs to take into account the subjective factors which condition its existence. The article particularly highlights the personal dimension of human existence and an integrated action of his powers thanks to which man constitutes the subject and motive for all forms of communication activity. The basic types of communication are affected by virtue of a relation to human powers: intellective-cognitive and volitive-emotive. Yet, it is persuasive communication that, methodologically ordered within the framework of rhetoric, seems to fully recognize the communication determinants characteristic of man’s nature. The progressing technicization of the media also needs to be perceived through an integrated personalistic perspective accepting the subjective determinants of man participating in the communication process.

This paper offers a review and analysis of speeches delivered by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. Bush’s motivations, goals, and persuasive strategies are discussed in detail in the following study, with consideration for the cultural and political contexts of American oratory and the idiosyncratic features of the Republican as a public speaker. The characteristics of Bush's 9/11 communication acts are then compared with Franklin D. Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor speech in order to analyze the differences between the two politicians' rhetorical modi operandi as well as the changing political environment of the U.S.

In Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues, Jared Colton and Steve Holmes wrestle with a core question facing digital rhetoricians: how might any example of digital communication technology or practi...

In their seminal text, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. K...

“The term virtue,” John Duffy notes wryly in his recent book, “is not exactly trending”—yet perhaps it should be (14). Virtue, as Duffy, John Gallagher, and Steve Holmes suggest in the introduction...

Composition-rhetoric is experiencing a surge in research examining how the material is rhetorically consequential, sometimes termed new materialism. However, much of this research is future-oriented, leaving intact traditional disciplinary values. This article offers a hauntological re-reading of our disciplinary history from a materialist perspective wherein we are always-already material. By examining three canonical articles where the original research is haunted by the rhetoricity of matter, the field’s traditional history and, concomitantly, current-future identities are left radically open and unsettled. New adjacent possibilities are available for realization only if/when we render our past-present-future selves unfamiliar.

Few Anglophone rhetoric studies have explored how colonial environments affected the work of American-supported schools and performances. Korea’s first women’s college, however, used hybrid Korean, American, and Christian cultural references in the pageantry, visuals, and music of its 1930 May Day to negotiate Japanese colonization. These May Day “performative educational rhetorics” acknowledged colonial authority while resisting Japanese assimilation objectives until they were silenced during Japan’s Pacific War. Unlike American-operated schools in U.S. colonies and occupied territories, therefore, Japanese colonization rendered performances not only of Korean but also Christian and American identities as potentially subversive symbols of freedom.

This article reports on a rhetorical analysis of media reports on campus sexual assault informed by the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). The analysis reveals patterns of narrative construction wherein those accused of campus sexual assault remain absent from reporting while universities and accusers are burdened with responsibility. Consequently, the “disappearing accused” contributes to public uncertainties about how to respond to the problem of campus sexual assault and complicates how governing policies, particularly Title IX, are perceived, wherein Title IX’s equity framework does not match expectations of justice in response to violence.

In 1902, the congressional sub-committee on territories visited New Mexico to assess its fitness for statehood. Their subsequent report recommended against statehood, in part because too much Spanish was spoken throughout the territory. This historical moment provided a rhetorical exigency for the students at the University of New Mexico to use their student newspaper as a site for negotiating citizenship in a border space. By incorporating Spanish into their English-language newspaper, these students challenged monolingual notions of literacy and advocated for a multilingual understanding of American citizenship.

One way toward a more embodied digital rhetoric is through interrogating constructions of digital disembodiment. To make that case, this article examines one of the most famous esoteric or “weird” programming languages, which are not designed for any “real world” purpose, but as art, parody, or experiment. This language, named “brainfuck,” is notorious for its difficulty and uses challenges of mastery to assert a “true” (white, straight, masculine) programmer identity. As brainfuck reveals, a contemporary struggle to connect the effects of technologies with the people who create them can be sustained because their creators perform being machine-like themselves.

This article engages archival and oral history research to explore the documentation practices of Gays and Lesbians United for Equality (GLUE), a lesbian and gay organization active in Louisville during the 1980s and 1990s, and their effects on the production of an LGBTQ archive by local activist David Williams. I demonstrate one way of considering the rhetoricity of archives by attending to the situated rhetorical production of materials that comprise them, exploring the relationships between GLUE’s motivated production of organizational documents and the material made available to Williams’s archive. Organizationally, GLUE could not directly engage in explicitly political activity, leading to rhetorical decisions about what to include in organizational documents. These rhetorical performances, as circulated in GLUE’s documents, reflect complicated rhetorical strategies of what Jose Estéban Muñoz calls disidentification with politics.