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8796 articlesJanuary 2020
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Visualizing Birth Stories from the Margin: Toward a Reproductive Justice Model of Rhetorical Analysis ↗
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Through a rhetorical analysis of Romper’s YouTube series Doula Diaries, I demonstrate how the reproductive justice framework helps illuminate the need for an intersectional approach to advance birth justice. While the video series brings obstetric racism to light, portrays empowering birth experiences among women of color, and prioritizes the shared experiences and communities among non-normative birthing people, it falls short on supporting the rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ people to have children. I further argue for rhetoric scholars to adopt the reproductive justice framework in order to more critically interrogate how intersecting social forces and power structures influence the reproductive lives of individuals across positionalities.
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This essay analyzes Union peace activism, commonly called the “Copperhead” movement, to illustrate how anti-war rhetoric during the US Civil War participated in debates over the nature of political violence. While the Copperhead push to end the war failed, the movement was an influential cultural and electoral force, pressuring opponents to modify their views while popularizing a version of national identity that did not end with the advent of Reconstruction. Far from petitioning for peace, the Copperheads’ rhetoric reframed the boundaries of justified violence along intersecting lines of gender, race, and memory. Specifically, I consider how the Copperheads appealed to a powerful “generational” memory built on a gendered interpretation of activism itself, offering a narrative of “manly” resolve meant to withstand the withering effects of their effeminate opponents who threatened the bedrock of an American civilization indebted to a white supremacist system.
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This essay revisits the rhetoric of El Plan de Delano, a pivotal document in the farm workers movement and the broader Chican@ movement. Composed and circulated during their peregrinación from Delano to Sacramento, California in 1966, the manifesto stretched the topography of race in the 1960s, both geographically and bodily, as it publicized the farm workers’ struggle during their wage-strike. My reading of the visual and verbal rhetorics of the pamphlet of El Plan de Delano surfaces race as an energizing topos. I show how El Plan de Delano (re)fashioned a racial identity for farm workers and parlayed that identity in its appeals.
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<i>Reforming Women: The Rhetorical Tactics of the American Female Moral Reform Society, 1834–1854</i>, by Lisa J. Shaver ↗
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While 2016 marked the defeat of the first woman presidential candidate nominated by a major political party, it also marked a groundswell in particular forms of women’s engagement with US politics....
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Preview this article: Drawing Hope from Difficult History: Public Memory and Rhetorical Education in Kansas City, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/82/3/collegeenglish30477-1.gif
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Preview this article: Review: Feminist Rhetorical Questions and the Broadening Imperative, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/82/3/collegeenglish30480-1.gif
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This webtext focuses on Lockridge's production of Rhetorlist, an inventory of new books published in Rhetoric and Writing, Composition Studies, Technical Communication, and related disciplines. Tracing the histories and challenges of these disciplines' engagement with digital tools, Lockridge argues for an attention to small, meaningful projects of service to field, and offers strategies for the development of such projects.
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The comments sections below online news articles are popularly regarded as hostile—but many scholars see comments sections as spaces that expand democratic discourse. This webtext complicates the tension between these two interpretations of the comments sections by examining women’s rhetorical strategies in response to gendered hostility that accompany articles covering feminism and women’s issues.
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In this webtext, we explore how Magic and other complex analog systems operate rhetorically as activity networks. Our scrutiny of Magic’s protocols leads us to consider and compare the game’s anticipated activities (as described in its game rules and our social expectations, conventions, and norms involved in playing the game) with its realized expressions of those activities (as encountered when actually playing one or more iterations of the game itself).
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This webtext reports on initial corpus-based analysis of roughly 45 years' worth of scholarship in top-tier journals in the field of second language writing. Findings suggest that while “rhetoric” is variously inflected by specific, historical preoccupations of the field, articles throughout the corpus evince a sustained interest in deploying “rhetoric” as a label that names explicit pedagogical targets for multilingual student writers.
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Open Pedagogy relies on tools and collaboration to facilitate public discourse. Student projects are linked throughout the narrative, which were also collaboratively composed. As we will demonstrate, the inclusion of digital tools enabled students to engage with the rhetoric on a level appropriate for the times, creating our own kairotic moment.
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A synthesis of converging and contrasting perspectives on ways of knowing and doing in digital rhetoric pedagogy among 25 teacher-scholars that provides a rough sketch of the state of digital rhetoric pedagogy as it is understood and practiced in the second decade of the 21st century and as it is told by a range of voices, including leading voices, in the subfield of Digital Rhetoric and identifies and highlights areas of productive tension among interviewees’ responses.
2020
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Reform as Access, Reform as Exclusion: Making Space for Critical Approaches to the Neoliberal Moment ↗
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This essay offers a critical framework for engaging with Basic Writing at the two-year college. By intersecting access-oriented initiatives within the progressive tradition of basic writing scholarship with neoliberal, corporate-sponsored initiatives, the article stakes out a pragmatic space for values-driven change to calcified developmental education structures. When Students Don’t Identify as Basic Writers: Fostering Basic Writers’ Rhetorical Agency Through Community Partnerships
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International Undergraduates' Perceptions of their Second Language Writing Development and Their Implications for Writing Center Tutors ↗
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With the large numbers of international students on campuses across the United States seeking help from writing centers, more research is needed on how second language writing skills develop over time. Expanding our previous studies of second language writing, we wanted to learn more about what international students think about the development of their ability to write in English and the role of the writing center in it. To that end, we designed a survey that asked participants about different features of their writing and how these had changed since starting to write at the college level. The results reveal that participants perceived their overall English-writing development positively, and they reported their rhetorical and linguistic areas as almost equal in development. We also found that participants who used our writing center perceived both rhetorical and linguistic features to be more improved than did participants who had not used the writing center. The rhetorical features participants reported as the least improved involve communicating with readers, while the linguistic features they saw as the least developed include word
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This article reports findings from a single-bounded case study on student-athletes’ performance of what educational psychologist Yves Karlen refers to as metacognitive strategy knowledge (MSK) in two first-year composition assignments. This case study is focused on the following research question: how might the promotion of MSK in a FYC class support the development of student-athletes’ writing skills? Data collection includes semi-structured, in-person interviews, visual and bodily mapping exercises, and textual analysis of research participants’ academic writing. This essay offers a two-pronged argument based on the data. First, promoting the development of MSK through established composition and rhetoric writing assignments dovetails with student-athletes’ athletic literacy and supports their development as academic writers. Second, student-athletes’ prior knowledge and practice of metacognition helps instructors gain a stronger understanding of how they may use MSK to facilitate future writing assignments.
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Current paraphrasing instruction in the composition classroom may ironically promote “knowledge telling” source use, such as patchwriting. We argue for an approach to source use instruction that teaches paraphrase as a spectrum of task-dependent rhetorical skills ranging from knowledge telling to knowledge transforming. We encapsulate and test the effectiveness of this approach in a series of interactive videos. These videos present a rhetorically-grounded framework for source use instruction, including think-aloud protocols that demystify how reading processes can be used to critically engage with source content. We validate this approach with two different demographics: Non-Native English speaking graduate students and First Year Writing students. Findings suggest our approach, compared with a workshop that used ‘traditional’ fear-of-plagiarism tactics, helped NNES students better recognize knowledge transforming as a task-dependent option and understand the process of note-taking to transform source texts. In contrast, the traditional workshop promoted knowledge telling behaviors.
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Learning from Interdisciplinary Interactions: An Argument for Rhetorical Deliberation as a Framework for WID Faculty ↗
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As this article argues, a systematic approach to WAC/WID work that conceptualizes interdisciplinary interaction as a deliberative argument (rather than a benign collaboration) benefits all aspects of a WAC/WID program, in particular projects involving writing and other disciplinary faculty. Our approach builds from scholarship that highlights the distinction between “adversarial” and “collaborative” deliberation, in particular the work of Patricia Roberts-Miller and the foundational rhetoric theories of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. After laying out the contours of our approach, the article details a recent not-quite-successful attempt at interdisciplinary collaboration. In documenting this example, we illustrate that a systematic focus on combining adversarial and collaborative deliberation can prevent common pitfalls of writing scholars working with other disciplinary faculty, including the problems that arise when writing is considered ancillary to disciplinary “content.” In this sense, our example highlights the deliberative missteps that our approach is precisely designed to prevent.
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In this interview, on the eve of his retirement in spring 2020, I speak with Dr. Lad Tobin about his career and work in composition and rhetoric, his commitment to the teaching of writing, including and especially personal or expressive writing, and his arguments about the continued relevance of creative-nonfiction to composition.
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Working Toward Social Justice through Multilingualism, Multimodality, and Accessibility in Writing Classrooms ↗
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This article threads together multilingualism and disability studies research in writing studies, and introduces composition pedagogies that embrace multilingualism, multimodality, and accessibility simultaneously. We argue that writing teachers can work toward social justice in writing courses by considering accessibility through intersectional (Crenshaw; Martinez) and interdependent (Jung; Wheeler) approaches that put language diversity and disability in conversation (Cioè-Peña). Each of us shares two pedagogical examples that consider language diversity/difference and embodied diversity/difference as unified concepts. Our pedagogical examples include projects related to multimodal and digital rhetoric, multilingual/multimodal community engagement, reflecting on communication differences, and analyzing multimodal/multilingual communication in practice. Through what we call intersectional, interdependent approaches to accessibility in writing classrooms, students and teachers can honor the multitude of valuable communication practices that students engage in within and beyond the English writing classroom.
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Heuristic-Based Learning and Doctoral Preparation: Revising Georgia State University’s PhD Exam in Rhetoric and Composition ↗
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This program profile describes a restructure of the PhD exam intended to enhance graduate-level instruction and advisement within the Rhetoric and Composition program at Georgia State University. We explain how a mix of institutional constraints and mentorship opportunities drove revisions to our doctoral exams and processes of doctoral advisement. Shifting away from a gatekeeping model to a heuristic-based approach, the revised exam is intended to decrease time-to-degree and to better support students’ job preparedness. Our reflections on these programmatic changes speak to the necessity of graduate programs in Rhetoric and Composition to not simply replicate the models of doctoral studies through which we were educated and to instead imagine new possibilities.
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Addressing the Challenges and Opportunities of a Feminist Rhetorical Approach for Wikipedia-based Writing Instruction in First-Year Composition ↗
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Wikipedia’s gender gaps are both well-established and well-challenged, and while Wikipedia-based assignments have become more common in composition, teacher-scholars have not fully explored the opportunities for feminist pedagogy offered by the encyclopedia. This article reports on a teacher research study designed to examine the efficacy of the feminist rhetorical approach for understanding critical literacy learning through Wikipedia-based assignments in First-Year Composition (FYC). Findings from student forum posts, surveys, and reflection essays suggest that, despite its benefits, the Wikipedia assignment has been met with challenges that hinder students from making contributions critically and effectively, especially as they struggle to assume agency and criticality in the FYC classroom. By identifying and addressing these challenges, we seek to offer alternative approaches to teaching feminist rhetorical inquiries in FYC, and to expand the current critical practices in Wikipedia-based writing instruction.
December 2019
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The Public Trial and Execution of Arthur Greiser in Poznań: Visual Rhetoric of Documentary Photography and Local Memory ↗
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On the example of the ethically controversial photographs made by Zbigniew Zielonacki from the public trial and execution of Arthur Greiser, the Nazi deputy in the Wartheland, the author demonstrates the visuality of local memory at the intersection of the narrative and non-narrative, private and public, individual and collective sphere. The photographs have become an inherent element of Poznań inhabitants’ memory of World War II and its outcomes, although they did not fit any of the emerging main war narratives.
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The modern view of addiction as a progressive brain disease originated in the second half of the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Historians attribute the shift from a moral to a medical concept to the efforts of a small but well-organized band of physicians forming what is known as the Inebriety Movement in the United States and Great Britain. Members aimed to distribute the disease theory to a disinterested and biased medical community, establish protocols for evidence-based treatments, and transfer the management of drinkers and drug users away from religious organizations and penal institutions to the care of trained practitioners. Members’ efforts to rhetorically achieve these goals on the pages of medical journals has received scant attention in the scholarly community. Based on an analysis of 92 medical articles on addiction published between 1870 and 1930, I will reveal a complex, inclusive, and multimodal rhetoric employed to refigure “drunkards” and “underworld” drug “fiends” as patients and their confounding addictive behaviors as symptoms rather than signs of degeneracy. Before advanced understanding of brain’s pleasure circuits and dopamine receptors, these early medical authors dramatically rendered the havoc that substances can play on those systems. Recovering the narratives and patient tropes I find in these texts may be instructive as we try to find ways to erase persistent stigma surrounding addiction. My findings will hopefully encourage dialogue and new research pathways for scholars interested in the rhetorical history of addiction.
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On the Focus and Scope page of the journal’s website, we describe RHM as a “multidisciplinary” journal that publishes rhetorical studies, and then go on to reference publishing “interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research” that “can combine rhetorical analysis with any number of otherhumanistic or social scientific methodologies.” We still think, in some ways, that both the journal and field of RHM can be described as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary at the same time; beyond drawing from a number of scholarly areas, for example, our collective research often synthesizes and integrates (in a holistic way) concepts, methods, and findings from these areas, creating new hybrid forms of scholarship that are not fixed within disciplinary boundaries.
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This study describes and analyzes a sample of noncommercial web pages that address cancer genetic testing. These “gateway documents,” which were returned in an initial Internet search for information, may serve as the only texts that people read when deciding whether to pursue genetic testing. Deliberative rhetorical theory elaborated into dimensions of embodied knowledge and scientific knowledge was mapped onto problematic integration theory to create a framework for investigating the documents. Analysis reveals the contingent nature of evaluating probability in genetic testing and the intrinsic need to examine the rhetorical construction of gateway documents as multidimensional communication events in which disadvantages and benefits shift—and sometimes transpose—according to the embodied knowledge of each person. Benefits and disadvantages of genetic testing become topoi that healthcare providers should consider carefully to improve the decision-making information offered to people who are searching for online resources.
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Booher, Amanda K., & Jung, Julie. (Eds.) (2018). Feminist rhetorical science studies: Human bodies, posthumanist worlds. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 274. Paperback $45.00.Yergeau, Melanie. (2017). Authoring autism: On rhetoric and neurological queerness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 312. Cloth $104.95, Paperback $27.95.Koerber, Amy. (2018). From hysteria to hormones: A rhetorical history. University Park: Penn State University Press. pp. 264. Cloth $99.95, Paperback $34.95.
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Business communication instructors can improve their own instruction about networking online given further understanding of the gender gap among LinkedIn users. An analysis of the rhetoric of magazine advice articles finds gendered differences in the representation of LinkedIn to readers. Examining how publications talk about LinkedIn leads to guidance on how instructors can discuss LinkedIn and gender in the classroom. The article suggests instructors can modify or create assignments to address potential gender usage patterns.
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AbstractThis article investigates how slavery tours on the former estates of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison negotiate memories of the presidents as historically revered figures and prominent slaveholders. I argue that these tours recirculate benevolent memories of the presidents that work to sanitize the sites’ slave history and venerate the founders’ legacy. My analysis demonstrates that these tours do not just work to recirculate artifacts and narratives that speak to the presidents’ lives, but they revive a republican culture of remembrance from the nineteenth century through which to justify presidential actions and beliefs. In short, I suggest that this rhetorical negotiation helps craft new narratives of historical U.S. slavery and the early presidents’ lives that appear both more credible and less disturbing.
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Research Article| December 01 2019 Robert L. Scott: Memories of a Great Man Martin J. Medhurst Martin J. Medhurst Martin J. Medhurst is Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Communication at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2019) 22 (4): 673–679. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0673 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Martin J. Medhurst; Robert L. Scott: Memories of a Great Man. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2019; 22 (4): 673–679. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0673 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. © 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Research Article| December 01 2019 Tribute to Robert L. Scott Robert Hariman Robert Hariman Robert Hariman is Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He had the privilege of delivering the after-dinner speech to honor Robert L. Scott at the Eighth Biennial Public Address Conference, University of Georgia, October 5, 2002. The text provided here has been edited slightly, but it remains a speech given as if the honoree were in the room. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2019) 22 (4): 657–662. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0657 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Hariman; Tribute to Robert L. Scott. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2019; 22 (4): 657–662. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0657 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. © 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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“Righting Past Wrongs”: Rhetorical Disidentification and Historical Reference in Response to Philadelphia’s Opioid Epidemic ↗
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Abstract Opioid addiction and overdose are widely recognized as a contemporary “crisis” across the United States. To address rapidly increasing mortality rates related to this substance use epidemic, the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office announced in January 2018 that it would encourage the development of supervised injection sites or “Comprehensive User Engagement Sites” within city limits. Official communications cited select moments from the region’s past to frame these sites as urgent while constituting a supportive, unified public. Through remediating disidentification, a mode of rhetorical contestation and reformulation, local community members used an alternate historical framing to resist dominant ideology and revise the terms of the related public discourse. By further developing the concept of rhetorical disidentification, this essay demonstrates how the deployment of historical analogy in response to proposed public health interventions can enable the public recognition and potential address of systemic racial inequities.
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Abstract Algorithms have never been more influential, yet our collective understanding of how they transform massive networks of cultural power has not kept pace. This is especially true when it comes to economic algorithms, which operate as black boxes largely inaccessible to the majority of citizens whose worlds they continuously reshape. This essay offers a rhetorical approach to reading algorithms—not only to challenge the positivism and mathematical realism that naïvely apotheosizes algorithms and algorithmic culture but more importantly to become critical informants, scholars who can open up these black boxes for fellow citizens, examine the hidden assumptions therein, and study how they actively transform our social-material worlds. The essay’s exemplar is the 2008 financial crisis and a little-known algorithm called the Li Guassian copula, which played a major role in the spread of subprime mortgages. I argue that this copula puts on spectacular display the power of algorithms as principles of composition—actants that materially expand our social collectives even as they marginalize human agency and practical judgment with forms of technological rationality that, in the case of the Li copula, concentrated the networks of structured finance around a single decision apparatus, rendering those networks both larger and, contra conventional wisdom, more fragile.
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Editorial| December 01 2019 Editor’s Note Martin J. Medhurst Martin J. Medhurst Editor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2019) 22 (4): 491–494. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0491 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Martin J. Medhurst; Editor’s Note. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2019; 22 (4): 491–494. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0491 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. © 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Research Article| December 01 2019 Scott’s Body Barry Brummett Barry Brummett Barry Brummett is Chair of the Department of Communication Studies and the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Communication at the University of Texas, Austin. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2019) 22 (4): 663–672. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0663 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Barry Brummett; Scott’s Body. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2019; 22 (4): 663–672. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0663 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. © 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Research Article| December 01 2019 Robert L. Scott Karlyn Kohrs Campbell Karlyn Kohrs Campbell Karlyn Kohrs Campbell is Professor of Communication at the University of Minnesota. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2019) 22 (4): 651–656. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0651 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Karlyn Kohrs Campbell; Robert L. Scott. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2019; 22 (4): 651–656. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0651 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. © 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Preview this article: Review Essay: Se hace camino al andar or 道行之而成: Performing Rhetorical Way-Making, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/71/2/collegecompositionandcommunication30425-1.gif
November 2019
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“Welcome to Present Tense Volume 8, Issue 1 (Fall 2019). As we announce the first installment of our 8th volume, we’d like to take a moment to thank everyone whose work throughout the years has contributed to our success in publishing cutting-edge rhetorical scholarship on important contemporary social and political issues.”