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8804 articlesJune 2020
May 2020
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Abstract
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Abstract
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...
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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.
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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.
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Post-Vietnam Syndrome: Psychiatry, Anti-War Politics, and the Reconstitution of the Vietnam Veteran ↗
Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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 Origin of Species 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.
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Rhetoric, Dialectic, and Dogmatism: A Colloquy on Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s “Free Speech, Rhetoric, and a Free Economy” ↗
Abstract
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
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Abstract
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.
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Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Sophistics: On the Relationship between Dialectical Philosophy and Philosophical Rhetoric ↗
Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.
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La Construcción Retórica de la Ciencia por el Joven Adam Smith: The Rhetoric Construction of Science by the Young Adam Smith ↗
Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.
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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.
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Abstract
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.
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Feature: Threshold Concepts and FYC Writing Prompts: Helping Students Discover Composition’s Common Knowledge with(in) Assignment Sheets ↗
Abstract
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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Preview this article: Review: Provocations of Virtue: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/47/4/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege30652-1.gif
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Metaphor 1: Situating: Transdisciplinary Rhetorical Work in Technical Writing and Composition: Environmental Justice Issues in California ↗
Abstract
Preview this article: Metaphor 1: Situating: Transdisciplinary Rhetorical Work in Technical Writing and Composition: Environmental Justice Issues in California, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/82/5/collegeenglish30750-1.gif
April 2020
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Exploring Visual Framing Strategies, Sentiment, and Product Presentation Modality in Instagram Posts of Fashion Influencers ↗
Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.
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“Our Grief and Anger”: George W. Bush’s Rhetoric in the Aftermath of 9/11 as Presidential Crisis Communication ↗
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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.
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Humanizing Visual Design: The Rhetoric of Human Forms in Practical Communication Humanizing Visual Design: The Rhetoric of Human Forms in Practical Communication , by Charles Kostelnick, New York, NY, Routledge, 2019, 280 pp., $150.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-138-07151-3, $49.45 (eBook), ISBN: 978-1-315-11462-0 ↗
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Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues , by Jared S. Colton and Steve Holmes, Louisville, CO, Utah State University Press, 2018, 184 pp., $23.95 (paperback), $19.95 (e-book), https://upcolorado.com/utah-state-university-press/item/3479-rhetoric-technology-and-the-virtues ↗
Abstract
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...
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Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work: Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey, eds. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 292 pages. $49.99 hardcover. ↗
Abstract
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...
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Provocations of Virtue: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing: John Duffy. Provocations of Virtue: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2019. 172 pages. $22.95 paperback. ↗
Abstract
“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...
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Who Cares if Johnny Writes with a Pencil? Or, a Hauntological Historiography of Materiality in Composition-Rhetoric ↗
Abstract
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.
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Performative Educational Rhetorics At a Korean Women’s College During Japanese Occupation, 1930–1943 ↗
Abstract
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.
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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.
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“Their Voice Should Be Allowed to Be Heard:” The Rhetorical Power of the University of New Mexico’s Bilingual Student Newspaper ↗
Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.
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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.
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Abstract
Since its inception in 2000, Reflections has functioned as a site of synthesis for community-based writing pedagogy, service-learning, public rhetoric, and community-engaged research. Such a diverse range of influences leads to the formation of a journal that is ever shifting in its identity, scope, and mission. This complexity is what ultimately defines Reflections: a publication that constantly pushes the boundaries of knowledge creation and strives to remain receptive to topics and voices that are often excluded from other academic sources. The following collaborative article offers a content analysis of all publications in Reflections’ twenty-year history (2000-2020). Though not exhaustive, this analysis highlights unique aspects of the journal’s history, methods, non-traditional genres, pedagogical and disciplinary impact, and evolving interactions with power and privilege that have made it the public conscience for Writing Studies.
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Abstract
This article is an experimental collaboration that blends qualitative data, archival research, and rhetorical theory with autoethnographic writing. Utilizing Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) conceptualization of rhetorical ecologies, we engage strategic contemplation and critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch 2012) to explore Reflections’ past, present, and future rhetorical landscapes. We designed, distributed, coded, and analyzed a fifteen-item questionnaire to discover the journal’s readership demographics, its archival contents, and its reverberating effects/affects on issues of public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy. We identified four themes—inclusivity, advocacy, pedagogy, and discovery—as the most salient features of Reflections’ twenty-year legacy. Amplifying our participants’ voices, we discuss the ways in which these four themes work to cultivate an affirming space of theoretical inquiry and ethical intervention—a networked community of mutual reciprocity that continues to transform the field of rhetorical studies today. Altogether, this article offers unique insight into Reflections’ rhetorical ecology, including its professional legacy and the ways in which the journal has innovated the genre of writing scholarship.
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Locating Our Editorial and Intellectual Selves Through and Within the Pages of Reflections: A Personal Reflection ↗
Abstract
This article celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Reflections Journal, as a premier publication in service learning, public writing, rhetoric, community literacy, and activism. The author applauds Reflections as a space that nurtures emerging voices and professional development, even prior to the printing of individual volumes and issues. In general, the author showcases four professional collaborations between doctoral students, early-career professionals, and/or more seasoned scholars that are demonstrated through and within select special issues in Reflections. More specifically, the author recalls successes and challenges of editorship when taking on the duties as a coeditor for an African American literacy special issue. The author highlights visible and mostly invisible editorial processes, reflects on the labor of editing submissions, and discusses high and low stakes editorial choices that impacted the final production of the special issue. The author makes the case that editing and editorial decisions may illuminate scholarly voices, show community engagement, and reify pre- and early-career professional development, which has been a twenty-year hallmark of Reflections.
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Abstract
In this interview, Paula Mathieu reflects on the twenty-year history of Reflections. She discusses how the journal has influenced her teaching and research, and she talks about being the co-editor of Reflections as Rhetoric and Composition was developing newer understandings of community-engaged relationships and practices.
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Abstract
This article considers the role of real-world writing pedagogy in the persistence of the real world/academy binary that fuels contemporary trigger warning debates, arguing instead for attention to the actual rhetorical constraints of the classrooms we all work in regularly.
March 2020
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Book Review - Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace ↗
Abstract
A Review of Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace Marissa C. McKinley Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace. By Elizabeth L. Angeli. New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. 204 pages, $47.95 paper, $23.98 e-book.
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Abstract
In an effort to better understand the historical significance of the “mental illness as motive” narrative, this essay investigates what has been recognized as the first mass shooting in the modern United States—Howard Unruh’s 1949 mass shoot¬ing in Camden, New Jersey. Given that mass shootings were an unprecedented phenomenon, the news media played an important role in explaining the event. As will be shown, many Americans felt uncertain about how mental illness man¬ifested and who was vulnerable. Given the often undisclosed, albeit perceived threat of schizophrenia, the public needed reassurance that there would be some indicator of insanity. Accordingly, the media used evidence of religious fanaticism and unfavorable physical descriptions of Unruh to cast him as separate, outside, or an “other.” Ultimately, the media’s rhetorical choices differentiated Unruh and attempted to make mental illness easier to identify for an audience afraid of its influence.