Celeste Michelle Condit's Angry Public Rhetorics: Global Relations and Emotion in the Wake of 9/11 is a complex and challenging contribution to the understudied area of public emotion that charts the course for an arduous but rewarding journey toward a greater synthesis between the study of human biological and material existence and the study of our symbolic world. Condit maintains that “shared public anger co-orients peoples and tends to direct their actions and resources along particular paths … shaped by numerous forces—including cultural traditions, ideologies, histories, and sedimented patterns of resource distributions—they are also substantively shaped by the distinctive set of characteristics that are constitutive of ‘being angry together’ as a pervasive social phenomenon” and that the “sharing of that anger” is a communicative process requiring that one “attend closely to the dynamics of the public discourses that constitute and circulate such shared emotion” (1–2). Condit develops a “script” for public anger: “(1) they (an absolutely antagonistic agent, identified as a long-standing enemy), (2) acted to cause serious harm (serious in terms of the normative claim being made), (3) to us (the model protagonist), (4) in violation of crucial social norms (or morals), (5) so we must attack!” (5–6). Her analysis of the discourses of bin Laden, Bush, and Sontag reveals that “the most resonant versions of this script … promote essentialism, binarism, rote thinking, excessive optimism, stereotyping, and attack orientations” (6).While it is often the case that one of the important tests of rhetorical theory is its ability to elucidate texts, what is perhaps most compelling about Condit's book is not its critical engagement with the texts, but rather its ambitious epistemological framework. Indeed what makes the book compelling (and occasionally results in somewhat infelicitous moments) is its unabashed ambition to adopt an epistemological framework that incorporates dispositions and findings from all three of the major research methodologies—natural science, social science, and humanities.Such a pan-methodological approach is necessary insofar as Condit's goal is not modest, as it is to “build a theory of emotion that integrates symbolic and physiological elements on firm academic ground” (150), requiring “reworking the onto-epistemological foundations from which most … operate” (15). Along these lines Condit relies upon an “onto-epistemological stance” (developed with Bruce Railback) termed “‘transilience’ (rather than E. O. Wilson's ‘consilience’) for recognizing the leaps that both signify gaps and simultaneously connect the movement across those gaps, among physical, biological, and symbolic modes of being” (17). Transilience takes seriously the biological and symbolic dimensions of human experience and hence requires that scholars show a willingness to move across the gaps separating academic disciplines and research methodologies.Condit's understanding of the “symbolic” elements is informed by her humanistic training in rhetorical studies, while her attempt to grasp “physiological” elements is informed by her more recent explorations and work in the natural sciences. Insofar as “biological beings seem to have a tendency to develop communication capacities” (26), she aims at a theory of emotions that is materially grounded in both biology and symbol systems. This biosymbolic approach aims to reconcile biological sciences and the humanities, but Condit is also interested in what has always been a central concern of social scientists in communication: the empirical effects of communicative messages: “The ultimate goal is to understand how the biological and the symbolic can produce a kind of human affect-range called public emotion that is susceptible to theoretically guided empirical observation and influence, albeit under different parameters of investigation than the model developed by classical physics” (20). Alongside the book's transilient fusion of humanistic and natural science into a biosymbolic perspective, it also employs social scientific methodologies in the form of frequent reviews of empirical research in order to assess the effects of the angry rhetorics of Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag. In the end her “view of humans as biosymbolic beings … has been undergirded by describing a transilient onto-epistemology that posits what we call the physical, the biological, and the symbolic as different but linked modes of being that result from the relatively distinctive forms in which matter has come to be arranged” (41).While Condit is centrally concerned with “public anger,” that is, how emotion circulates among collectivities in communities, the foundation of her approach is the millennia of philosophical reflections regarding the character of emotions as experienced by individuals: “Stretching back to Aristotle, many theorists have identified four components of emotion … (1) appraisal cues, (2) neurophysiology (sometimes divided into neural versus other physiological elements such as hormones or muscular activations to make a total of five), (3) subjective experience, and (4) action tendencies. Appraisal cues and action tendencies are most readily identifiable in collective emotion, and they should form the central pillars of analyses of the pathos of public rhetorics, but the other two components are involved … as well” (49). Beginning from this well-established philosophical typology, Condit overlays a wide range of insights drawn from the biological study of emotions, enabling resolution of many of the tensions between biological and neurological approaches to emotions that see them as universal species traits, and cultural and symbolic approaches that view emotions as emerging from particular cultural milieus.But since “collective emotion is not simply the aggregation of the emotion of individuals” (70), putting the “public” in public anger requires that the author explore territory that is much less well studied and understood. Public anger is complex, and “occurs when many people share the multidimensional complex featuring the action tendencies of cognitive narrowing, optimistic bias, an antagonistic approach, and four appraisals: (1) negative events have occurred that (2) result from the blameworthy actions of others, and (3) one has a reasonably high likelihood of controlling the others behavior, and (4) a relatively high certainty about events and their causes” (72). Public anger involves not only collective perceptions and understandings, but collective action. Based on the study of the angry rhetorics of Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag, Condit concludes that “to be angry together is to be predisposed to collective activity, specifically to attack, which may include intense, even violent, action. Circulation of these three sets of angry rhetorics activated their publics toward attack, but not in precisely the same ways” (216). While this particular set of cases seems to line up with “most humanistic engagements of social emotions” that “have described them as undesirable” (224), Condit also observes that public anger can have positive functions: “Studies by historians have pointed to a similar or overlapping range of functions for anger in larger human collectivities … the historians' accounts noted the way in which scripts for anger have served to regulate the contributions and accumulations of members of leadership hierarchies, both charging them to risk life and resources to protect their peoples and lands from other nobles and also limiting their own depredations upon their people” (73).The author is focused on biology and neurology, but communication and rhetoric remain at the center of shared public emotions: “With regard to specific elements of this method of analysis of public emotion, the focal evidence is the specific symbols circulated (in this case, almost exclusively words, though pictures, vocal sounds, and other nonverbal elements could be included)” (94). Indeed, it is through symbol systems that emotions are shared and made public: “It is empirically the case that symbol systems provide the imaginative and cooperative resources to create novel kinds of objects and life patterns, even as those objects and life patterns become instantiated in individual bodies by both the experience of those life patterns and by the symbols that are physiologically and fantastically part and parcel of those experiences” (32). Accordingly, the channels of discourse function as a sort of circulatory system within which public emotions move: “Public discourse that circulates emotion in order to co-orient individuals toward collective action tends to remake those individuals as members of that collectivity in ways that are shaped and constrained by the circulatory systems through which the individual bodies commune” (70). Not only are symbols of primary focus for analysis, her framework assumes that “the sharing of public emotions constitutes a key nexus of collective action,” and she uses “the example of anger to illustrate how particular qualities of an emotion shape public discourses surrounding a global event, additional to the ideological preferences or positionality of a public leader and his or her supporters” (209).In the end Condit calls for the programmatic study of other public emotions: “The treatment of anger in this analysis should also provide a model for further academic analyses of emotion and political relations. One can easily imagine analyses of the role of hope, compassion or sorrow employing the method here pursued. The detailed assessment of the proclivities of such emotions at the discursive and biological levels would produce a template to describe the tendencies encouraged by specific complexes. An examination of diverse and key public rhetorics that shared the specific emotion would then allow an understanding of the range and possibilities of the operation of that emotion in particular contexts and for particular purposes” (236). Condit reiterates “that good theory requires familiarity with both rapidly expanding understandings of human biological proclivities and the foundational structures of language” (236).What is particularly new and challenging in this book is that Condit is aiming to genuinely bring together the sciences and the humanities. For decades humanities scholars in several disciplines have earnestly sought to bridge the gap between sciences and humanities, but usually on their own humanistic grounds. Philosophers of science have long bridged the gap by examining the philosophical assumptions animating science and the scientific method, usually within philosophical frames centered on epistemology. So too historians of science have brought science and history together by making science an object of historical study. Finally, scholarship on the Rhetoric of Inquiry, in which humanities scholars explore the central role of rhetoric and communication in the discovery and development of scientific knowledge, undoubtedly effects a sort of union of science and rhetoric, but does so solidly under the sign of rhetoric.What makes Condit's work unique is that it is not merely appropriating science as an object of study under the sign of the humanities. Condit's scholarship, informed by her graduate level experiences in genetics courses and lab work, aspires to something that could be described as a genuinely synthetic view of the biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences. This work aims at a perspective that is pan- or meta-methodological. Critics might express concern that it is extremely difficult or perhaps impossible for a scholar to move beyond and transcend a methodological and disciplinary paradigm that has been instilled through decades of study, credentialing, and training within a particular kind of academic community. Indeed Condit recognizes these very barriers, and in other works on transilience has advocated the need for greater collaboration among scholars from different disciplines despite the institutional disciplinary and methodological barriers that divide them.It can be hoped that this book itself can be a place that scholars from many disciplines not only can find theories and concepts that can contribute to their own work, but also can begin to imagine themselves as potential participants in larger and profoundly more enlightening networks of knowledge discovery and creation. But such potential adventurers are to be warned that this journey is not without its infelicitous moments. This reviewer's experiences and stocks of disciplinary knowledge (informed by an undergraduate degree in biology and a PhD in communication and rhetorical studies) were an effective preparation for a positive and engaged response to the overall bio-symbolic approach. However, having only recently completely overcome my epistemological insecurity that a humanist scholar's particular interpretation of a text or message's meaning is meaningless unless empirically verified by a scientific experiment, my inward embattled humanist rhetorical scholar cringed at Condit's repeated concern to back up what would seem to be perfectly reasonable interpretive claims with empirical verification (see for instance 100, 135, 174–78). Such moments of discomfort, born of disciplinary and methodological biases, may be inevitable to most readers at different points in this book. These moments of discomfort or skepticism, one should recognize, are inevitable when one is reading a book that quite deliberately takes the readers out of their academically proscribed comfort zones. Moments of discomfort, however, are a small price to pay for a project of epistemological and disciplinary integration. Such an integration is undoubtedly necessary for the study of emotion—a phenomenon that has long been recognized to have neurological and cultural components. In terms of the much more recent explorations of “shared” and “public” emotion, the complexity of interactions between the emotions of particular organisms, the discourses by which they circulate, and the various political, cultural, and economic contexts within which these discourses circulate will undoubtedly require the insights of many disciplines and all the major research methodologies.One area that remains underdeveloped in Angry Public Rhetorics is a more systematic model of the “public” in public emotion. Thinking about the emotions as a phenomenon of public collectivities as opposed to just individuals requires more effective ways to theorize about how emotions are shared in publics and other communities. One natural way to think about this transition is to imagine communities as being like individual organisms. For instance, it is well established that one of the biological and evolutionary functions of fear is to allow individual organisms to better detect and respond to danger. So too it has been suggested that fear can serve a similar function for societies and polities—alerting us to threats that should engage our collective attention and deliberative political efforts. Condit seems to take this view, at least in the organic metaphors frequently used to describe publics and communities, speaking as she does of “the circulatory systems through which the individual bodies commune” (70). Such organismic imagery is promising in many respects, for it suggests that the assemblages of human beings comprising polities, communities, and societies are akin to the complexes of cells, organs, and symbiots that work together within the body of an organism. If we take the organic metaphor seriously, discourse, communication, and rhetoric will remain central concepts that help us to understand how the “body” of a community is constituted and maintained in the face of the forces of entropy that threaten both bodies and human communities. However, such organic imagery might also distract from alternative conceptions of society, community, and polity that more completely capture the complexity and uniqueness of human communal life.Notwithstanding epistemological complexities or occasionally ambiguous organismic imagery, Condit's “biosymbolic” approach is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to rhetorical studies and the humanities generally because it is another reminder of the continued relevance of biological materiality. Humanistic scholars that treat categories like “the body” and “embodiment” as completely open signifiers that can be construed in any way by the power of culture and convention will be disappointed to bump up against a central material fact of human existence—we have bodies (real bodies, not just cultural representations thereof). Scholars that are already sensitive to the importance of materialist philosophies like Marxism will undoubtedly welcome another reminder that our cultural world is connected in fundamental ways to our material existence within human bodies and societies. In the end the study of language, rhetoric, and culture will be enriched, not eclipsed, by works like Condit's that take the realities of our biological existence seriously.

ABSTRACTThis article explores antiphilosophical polemics written by Muslim and Jewish thinkers in the medieval Mediterranean world. These writings demonstrate, in both traditions, a struggle with the incorporation of nontraditional texts and interpretations of theology and textuality. My examination of these writings “against the philosophers” suggests that, far from constituting the reflexive, antiphilosophical fundamentalism that typically characterizes assessments of these texts, authors like al-Ghazali, Halevi, and Ibn Arabi were concerned with what they believed to be the subordination of Jewish and Islamic tradition to Greek philosophy—a rhetoric that, for them, undermined the “conditions of identification” for Muslims and Jews. I argue that these antiphilosophical texts highlight the extent to which these thinkers believed that writing was the battleground for identity in the medieval Middle East.

Tushar Irani's Plato on the Value of Philosophy seeks to put our understanding of Plato's critique of rhetoric on a new footing by turning our attention to what we might call the social dimension of that critique. Irani reads the Gorgias and Phaedrus as complementary dialogues connected not only by their focus on rhetoric but also by their treatment of love (erōs) and friendship (philia) as integral to Plato's incipient model of a philosophical art of argument. Irani's most important contribution is to emphasize the centrality of “the different interpersonal attitudes that Plato believes distinguish the rhetorical ethos from the philosophical ethos: whereas the former seeks to dominate or otherwise win over an audience, the latter seeks to benefit others. A philosophical attitude towards argument thus fundamentally requires a form of care [for others] according to Plato” (6).Irani's introduction provides helpful context (8–18), including a brief treatment of the most important fifth- and fourth-century views of rhetoric, including those of Gorgias of Leontini, Thucydides, and Aristophanes. Isocrates's model of rhetoric receives a more detailed analysis (13–18), which locates Isocrates squarely in the camp of Gorgias and other “conventional” rhetoricians, whose views Irani will contrast with Plato's model of the “philosophical attitude towards argument.”The body of the study is divided into two parts: part 1 (chapters 1–4) treats the Gorgias, and part 2 (chapters 5–8) turns to the Phaedrus. In part 1, Irani argues that Plato's critique of Gorgianic rhetoric consists of two main interconnected arguments. First, Gorgias and his students Polus and Callicles share an “attitude towards argument” grounded in an instrumental “attitude towards others” that seeks to dominate them in the rhetorician's own interest. And second, this Gorgianic attitude fails to develop an account of the soul, the object both the rhetorician and the philosopher aim to affect through their different approaches to the art of argument. Part 2 turns to the Phaedrus in order to examine the Platonic model of the soul, upon which, Irani argues, a properly philosophical “attitude towards argument” and its concomitant “attitude towards others” is founded. For Irani, the Phaedrus provides a necessary supplement to the Gorgias by offering the detailed account of the soul to which the Gorgias gestures without elaborating. Moreover, by focusing on the Phaedrus's analysis of the soul and the soul's relationship to the forms, Irani seeks to connect Plato's critique of rhetoric to his metaphysics in an innovative way.Chapter 1 explores Socrates's contrast between two ways of life dedicated to “the practice of argument” in the Gorgias, that of the rhetorician and that of the philosopher. Irani's key claim here is that “for both the rhetorician and the philosopher, the practice of argument brings with it a distinctive political outlook and disposition towards others” (31). While the rhetorician is motivated by the goal of “securing [his] personal interests or desires,” the philosopher engages in “a use of argument aimed at mutual understanding” (33).Chapter 2 develops this contrast by focusing on Socrates's claim that he is the only practitioner of the true political art (Gorgias 521d), which he characterizes as therapeia, a “form of care for the soul” (46). Irani argues that all three interlocutors in the Gorgias confirm that “while a conventional rhetorician will calibrate his efforts at persuasion to the desires of those with whom he engages, his attitude towards argument is marked … by self-interested concerns, particularly a desire for dominance over others” (53). Hence the rhetorician sees his audience as a means to his own ends, unlike the philosopher, who seeks to benefit his interlocutors because he sees them as ends in themselves.In chapter 3, Irani begins with the well-known passage from the Gorgias in which Socrates claims to share with Callicles the unusual situation of having two beloved objects: Socrates loves philosophy and Alcibiades just as Callicles loves the people (dēmos) of Athens and a young man named Demos (481c–d). The approach the two lovers take to their twin beloveds exemplifies their contrasting “ways of approaching the human soul,” which is central to their “two different ways of approaching politics” (69).An analysis of Callicles's “great speech” follows (70–75), in which Irani shows that Callicles's account of rhetoric contains a fundamental contradiction or “disharmony” (76). While the purpose of rhetoric, according to Callicles, is to satisfy the rhetorician's desires, the practice of rhetoric subjects the rhetorician to his audience's desires, which he must satisfy through pandering and flattery (77). The philosophical life, Irani emphasizes, suffers no such disharmony, since by practicing philosophy “Socrates sees himself fulfilling not only his own good but the good of others as well” (87).Chapter 4 concludes Irani's analysis of the Gorgias by connecting Callicles's immoralism and hedonism by showing how both emerge from his commitment to the rhetorical way of life and, in particular, the role of rhetoric in a model of politics in which the ultimate goal is to dominate others in a zero-sum game. Socrates's examination of Callicles, according to Irani, exposes an underlying “unreflectiveness” about what the good for humans actually is. This unreflectiveness is, in turn, connected to the absence of an adequate account of the soul and human motivation in the Gorgianic model of rhetoric. For Plato's alternative account of the soul, the reader must turn to the Phaedrus.Picking up on the discussion in chapter 4, Irani begins his reading of the Phaedrus in chapter 5 with an analysis of two models of love (erōs) presented in the three speeches in the first half of the dialogue. Lysias's speech and Socrates's first speech present love as a “purely pleasure-seeking drive,” while Socrates's second speech (his palinode) offers “an account of love grounded in the appreciation of matters of real value” (113). Irani's analysis of the three speeches emerges organically from his reading of the Gorgias and its contrast between two different views of human motivation that characterize the “rhetorical ethos” and the “philosophical ethos.” “The main import of Socrates' account of interpersonal love in the palinode,” according to Irani, is that the “genuine lover” described in the myth of the charioteer regards “his partner as a fellow companion in learning … rather than as a mere provider of pleasure” (129).Irani further argues that this view of the beloved object as a partner depends on Plato's model of psychology and, in particular, its account of human desire and motivation. Irani emphasizes Plato's analysis of the soul's complex form, in which “reason functions as an independent source of motivation in pursuing matters of value” (129, emphasis original). The chapter ends by suggesting that Plato's characterization of the forms as “the proper objects of desire for the rational part of the soul” is key to understanding how reason can constitute such an independent source of motivation (130).Accordingly, chapter 6 elaborates the psychological model of motivation sketched out in the previous chapter by adducing evidence from elsewhere in the Platonic corpus, including the Republic and Symposium. Irani argues that, for Plato, the forms are objects of desire independent of any satisfaction the philosopher derives from them: “The value or goodness of the forms … cannot consist in us desiring them, but must be self-contained” (134). Thus the philosopher's love of the forms provides a model for his love of other people, since both kinds of beloved objects are viewed as ends with intrinsic value rather than merely as means of the lover's satisfaction.Moreover, the forms exercise what Irani calls an “internal compulsion” on the philosopher, since the soul, by its nature, desires the forms. Hence Irani attributes to Plato the view “that those who are compelled in philosophical argument are in an important sense compelled by themselves” (139, emphasis original). The philosopher's deployment of argument to arouse such “internal compulsion” in the interlocutor therefore differs sharply from the manipulative or coercive force of the rhetorician's argument. “In contrast to the power of a merely rhetorical argument that moves us as if by external force,” concludes Irani, “the power of a philosophical argument is found in its ability to provoke independent thought, such that the dialectician can be said to engage in a cultivation rather than an indoctrination of his interlocutor” (143).Chapter 7 focuses on Socrates's well-known chariot allegory (Phaedrus 246a and following) as a model for the philosophical practice of “soul leading” (psuchagōgia) that recognizes and attends to the rational nature of the interlocutor. Irani departs from other readers of the Phaedrus, who tend to see Socrates's second speech (the palinode) as a more or less complete rejection of his first speech. Instead, Irani reads Socrates's two speeches together as “an example of rational compulsion” (152) through which Socrates attempts to direct Phaedrus toward the love of wisdom and the practice of philosophy. By depicting Socrates attending to Phaedrus's rational nature—an expression of his love for him—the Phaedrus stages an example of the care for others (therapeia) that, according to Irani, is central to a properly philosophical art of argument.Chapter 8 concludes Irani's analysis of the Phaedrus with a focus on Plato's understanding of the soul as defined by the principle of self-motion. Irani connects this idea of self-motion especially with the rational part of the soul as the essence of human nature, suggesting that the philosophical orientation toward others recognizes and attends to them as “self-movers.” Thus Irani understands the appeal to Phaedrus in both of Socrates's speeches as displaying “concern for Phaedrus as a self-mover” directed at his “capacity for independent movement” through his rational nature (178).A brief conclusion considers the implications of Irani's arguments for some broader questions in Platonic scholarship. Two elements stand out here. First, if the essential feature that distinguishes philosophical argument from rhetoric is its orientation toward others as rational “self-movers,” we need not assess its success or failure based on whether or not it results in persuasion or conviction (185–88). The ultimate aim of philosophical argument, as a form of care, is to advance the interlocutor's own capacity to pursue wisdom, the ultimate human good. Second, Irani's emphasis on the mutually beneficial nature of the dialectic encounter allows him to put forward a nuanced version of Socratic eudaimonism that avoids both an anachronistic characterization of Socrates as a “pure altruist” and an overly egoistic reading of Socratic ethics (188–90). Unlike Gorgianic rhetoric, in which the orator's domination of his audience is a zero-sum affair, the dialectic model of philosophical argument allows for both partners to interrogate their beliefs and desires and to benefit from the exercise of the rational element of the soul in pursuit of wisdom.While Irani's exploration of the connections between the ethical and metaphysical elements of Plato's critique of rhetoric represents an important contribution, some readers will not find all the details of this argument equally persuasive. For example, taking the principle of self-motion as the basis for Socrates's view of his interlocutors as independent thinkers, as Irani does when he claims that Socrates's two speeches in the Phaedrus show “concern for Phaedrus as a self-mover” (178), seems somewhat forced. Socrates adduces the argument about self-motion as proof of the soul's immortality (Phaedrus 245c–246a), but an individual's capacity for independent thought seems not to depend on this view of the soul as a “self-mover” but rather arises from the interaction of the soul's constituent parts and its experiences with the forms when disembodied and traveling in the company of the gods. Others may take issue with his unusually optimistic assessment of Socrates's achievements in the Gorgias: does Socrates really succeed in moving Polus and Callicles “just a little closer to understanding” by “thwarting their desire to win in argument” or in leading Callicles, in particular, “to reconsider his account of natural justice” (187)? The text provides scant evidence for such reconsideration, since the Gorgias ends not with continued argument but with Socrates's mythic account of the soul's experience after death. This mythic narrative, like the myth of Er at the end of the Republic, relies upon fear of punishment—as opposed to rational argument—as a motivation for ethical behavior in life. Socrates's interlocutors in the Gorgias do not respond to the myth, but Socrates himself suggests Callicles's most likely reaction: “Perhaps you consider this account like a story told by an old lady and despise it” (527a).Such reservations, however, do not detract from the overall value of Irani's nuanced treatment of these two central works in the history of rhetoric. Throughout the book, Irani lays out his argument in clear, relatively jargon-free prose that readers will find easy to follow, regardless of their background. Those who are interested in the social and ethical dimensions of Plato's critique of rhetoric will find many insights in Irani's detailed readings of the Gorgias and Phaedrus. In addition, Irani's attention to Plato's theory of the forms and the nature of the soul will provide much food for thought and further debate about the relationship between Plato's metaphysics and his model of philosophical argument.

The Great Recession of 2008 underscored the precarity of housing for many people living in the United States, as well as the unequal conditions that structure housing policy and practices. Victimized by predatory lending practices, many families lost their homes as a speculative housing bubble burst. Facing tremendous uncertainty, these families joined tens of thousands of others across the country who struggle with housing for a variety of reasons—leaving an abusive partner, struggling with medical and other unforeseen expenses, coping with addiction and/or mental illness, and more. Indeed, as Melanie Loehwing explains in her important new book, “housed” and “unhoused” represent not fixed categories or stable life trajectories but moments and dynamics that reveal the struggles of negotiating an unequal, exclusive, and often uncaring society that views the deprivation of some as justifying the privilege of many and, moreover, as a harsh reminder to compete in the marketplace lest the term “unhoused” characterize one's own social and material standing.Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home is a book about public policy and democratic theory. Offering this overview, I do not wish to suggest that Loehwing has written a book about two different topics. To the contrary, Loehwing argues compellingly that public policy (particularly policies geared toward eliminating homelessness) and democratic theory are two parts of a mutually informative relationship. Housed citizens tolerate homelessness because the sight of someone ostensibly living on the street comports with their idea of the polity, in which individuals' social standing and resources reflect their ability and effort to provide for themselves. Working together through the state, citizens do not demand more ambitious efforts to redress homelessness because of these ascriptions of deservingness and undeservingness to others. Reciprocally, popularly held perspectives of democracy justify inequality and deprivation by imagining ideals of the competent citizen whose lead should be followed by all. While homelessness illuminates material disadvantage and suffering, it also outlines the limits of a collective imagining of how people should act as citizens. Far from separating the public sphere from the private sphere, homelessness expresses their interrelationship for housed and unhoused citizens alike. On this basis, Loehwing critiques narrow, instrumental approaches that view homelessness strictly as a lack of housing. Instead, Loehwing argues that we should “understand announcements of an end to homelessness as a rhetorical act, one that contributes to the constitution of the civic body by strategically defining homelessness as a marker of flawed disposition that disqualifies individuals from inclusion in the political community” (4). To end homelessness, citizens and officials must do more than provide housing to people who lack it at a particular moment. Rather, redressing homelessness requires reimagining democracy and building a more inclusive civic home.Employing a democratic lens, Loehwing contrasts conventional and unconventional modes of advocacy to address homelessness. Conducted by organizations like the National Coalition for Homelessness and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, conventional advocacy engages in important policy-related efforts directed toward institutional actors to increase the saliency of and generate resources for programs to eliminate homelessness. While these and other organizations dedicate considerable energy to a comparatively undervalued issue, Loehwing explains that their advocacy seeks attention and influence at the cost of reinforcing some potentially disabling conventions about people experiencing homelessness. First, these organizations draw on a trope of visibility that assumes that housed citizens and policy makers are insufficiently informed about people experiencing homelessness and that bringing homelessness into clearer view will engender positive change. Second, mainstream organizations engaged in conventional advocacy often present themselves as tending to the broken bodies of people experiencing homelessness. By foregrounding physiological and psychological suffering, conventional advocacy reinforces the image of homelessness as a brutish existence that degrades the human body. Third, conventional advocacy aligns homelessness with a present-centered outlook that seeks the satisfaction of immediate needs at the expense of past memories and future plans. According to this convention, those experiencing homelessness can afford to think only in the moment, without any consideration of what they experienced previously or may experience in the future.Reflecting the connection between policy and visions of democracy, these three conventions not only characterize the people experiencing homelessness that mainstream organizations wish to help but also disqualify the homeless as citizens. Conventional advocacy may induce pity (or fear) of people without permanent shelter, but this advocacy does not treat people experiencing homelessness as potentially engaging housed publics on equal ground. Instead, relations of marginalization and subordination prevail. Together, the three conventions that Loehwing highlights—visuality, corporeality, and temporality—“illuminate the implicit models of ideal democratic citizenship that underwrite the exclusion of the homeless from contemporary society” (64). People experiencing homelessness, then, are not only people without homes; they are noncitizens, perhaps anti-citizens, and remain so until they obtain housing and simultaneously refashion themselves. Moreover, the persistence of homelessness, even if individuals, families, and groups may move among homeless and housed, reinforces the ideal notions of democratic citizenship.In chapters 2 through 4 of Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home, Loehwing explores in each chapter a detailed case of unconventional advocacy that challenges the conventions of visibility, corporeality, and temporality. Chapter 2 considers the practices of meal-sharing initiatives, particularly the work of the Food Not Bombs group of Orlando, Florida, to share meals with people experiencing homelessness in their city. In chapter 3, Loehwing considers efforts of activists across a transnational network to organize a Homeless World Cup—an international soccer tournament composed of players experiencing homelessness in their “home” nations. Turning to the convention of time, chapter 4 explores the practice in cities across the United States of Homeless Persons' Memorial Days, in which participants remember homeless people in their communities who died in the past year.As Loehwing argues, meal sharing reconfigures the visibility politics of homelessness and citizenship. In their imagining of the ideal, theories of citizenship retain a skepticism toward the visual as potentially weakening critical judgment in the presence of spectacle. A citizen must exhibit reason, while spectacle threatens to overwhelm reason. Conventional advocacy abides by this visibility politics insofar as it maintains the spectacle of homelessness as distinct from a housed public that may be affected by visibility. Sharing meals in Orlando's city center, the Food Not Bombs group works with people on equal terms, creating a community of homeless and housed members. As Loehwing observes, “FNB creates the sights of community anew, countering invisibility with constitutive visions of what the community could look like if different values and norms of civic relationships were enacted through the form of radically inclusive shared meals” (88–89).If ideal citizens should act rationally, they also must control their bodies. Stereotypical images of people experiencing homelessness, such as images of people performing actions that housed publics perform in private, serve as sharp reminders of the connections between policy and democratic theory—anyone who engages in “debasing” actions before others cannot be trusted as a citizen. Reversing conventional hierarchies of bodily control, the Homeless World Cup provides a venue for homeless people from across the globe to demonstrate acute physical prowess. Started by British homeless advocate Mel Young, the Homeless World Cup began as a way to bring together people experiencing homelessness from different nations. As a well-attended event, the Homeless World Cup reconfigures the bodies of participants and spectators. In addition to illuminating the unique abilities of the players, Loehwing explains, the tournament “positions a housed public as an interested and supportive spectator … [and] the HWC re-presents the individuals experiencing homelessness as representatives of the nation, rather than those rejected from the civic body” (112).From antiquity forward, ideal citizens have needed to negotiate different temporal horizons. Indeed, Aristotle's three species of rhetoric (judicial, epideictic, deliberative) each asked audiences to make a distinct time-oriented (past, present, future) judgment. Living in the now does not permit judgments of past events or future planning, which democracy asks of every citizen. As the name suggests, Homeless Persons' Memorial Days explicitly challenge the association of present centeredness and homelessness. Loehwing explains that “these events reconstruct lost lives, enact moments of identification between homeless and housed, and deliberate about the shared future of a community constituted around mourning the loss of homeless neighbors” (130). Like the other instances of unconventional advocacy that Loehwing analyzes, Homeless Persons' Memorial Days bring together, rather than separate, homeless and housed publics. These events regard people experiencing homelessness not as anonymous elements of a dystopic contemporary scene but as people with names, lives, histories, aspirations. They too made contributions to the communities in which members of housed and homeless publics lived; their lives held value.Loehwing is clear to explain that the differences between conventional and unconventional advocacy do not compel readers to choose between these modes. Indeed, Loehwing holds that the two modes “go a long way toward reconciling each other's limitations and drawbacks” (162). Focused more on institutions, conventional advocacy may garner more “recognition, resources, and social services” for people (162). Unconventional advocacy promises “a different kind of remedy—one that extends civic recognition as its core contribution, because it acknowledges that working for more resources within the existing system may not do enough to challenge the conditions that led to homeless marginalization in the first place” (163). Systemic change requires that we focus on the constitutive connection of theories and practices of policy and democracy.Loehwing envisions the convergence of policy and democracy in the concept of the “civic home.” As a home, a civic home recalls the material inequities of persistent homelessness, which compels some publics to move among housed and homeless standing as they negotiate the ups and downs of an unequal society while others go about their daily lives largely insulated from these traumatic experiences. Yet, as a civic home, Loehwing's concept underscores that resources, while irreplaceable, may not be enough if privileged publics imagine the polity in ways that perpetually exclude others. Without systemic change, housed publics will continue to tolerate homelessness as an unfortunate (or, perhaps, best unseen) byproduct of a wider society that produces benefits for those who subscribe to the vision of ideal citizenship.A civic home underscores the ameliorative role of unconventional advocacy in potentially “realign[ing] the assumptions, prejudices, and exclusions found in competing rhetorics of homelessness” (163). Loehwing locates the materials for the construction of a civic home in “rhetorical circulation.” If the civic home is a “symbolic space,” then its building requires the reshaping of political culture so that publics may appreciate connections to one another. For Loehwing, the civic home would serve as a “place of mutual recognition and inclusion” (166). Our present approach to homelessness divides publics, drawing civic ideals by denying material and discursive resources to others, and reifies the terms “housed” and “homeless,” obscuring the complicated lives and struggles of many citizens. A rebuilt civic home would disavow this zero-sum game, recognizing and appreciating the diverse contributions of intersecting and overlapping publics. In the construction process, unconventional advocacy performs both “circulatory” and “consummatory” functions. In circulation, this advocacy invites wider publics to reconsider the meanings of homeless and housed and people's relationships to one another. Yet this advocacy also consummates the agency and identity of the homeless/housed advocates, affirming their place in the civic home. While advocacy—both conventional and unconventional—constitutes one type of building material, Loehwing also includes deliberation and protest in a full civic rhetoric.Addressing issues of visibility, corporeality, and temporality, and articulating a civic rhetoric of advocacy, deliberation, and protest, Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home offers lessons for scholars and students considering a range of topics. Assumptions about who belongs within a political community and on what terms—who may gain entry to our civic home as currently constructed—pervade politics and policy. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine social policy without assumptions about diverse publics. Melanie Loehwing importantly invites readers to consider these issues explicitly. Loehwing encourages us to understand how these assumptions operate and to evaluate them, reconstructing our notions of community as necessary. In doing so, we may build a new civic home on a firmer foundation of justice, equality, and mutual respect.

ABSTRACTThis article proposes rhetorical hegemony as a new materialist intervention into the production of alternative political economic futures. It problematizes contemporary theories of hegemony that assert affect as beyond rhetorical engagement, suggesting that these accounts fail to produce viable political economic alternatives because they use, but do not reinvent, the prevailing affective relations. Turning to and extending Foucault's middle and late work to forge a different model, the article discusses rhetorical hegemony as the entangled relationships between materiality and power. In conversation with other contemporary theories, it argues for a practice of rhetorical hegemony that materially recapacitates energetic potential and, consequently, the milieu. The article ends by outlining the rhetorical, political, and intellectual implications of this shift.

Read and considered thoughtfully, Safiya Umoja Noble'sAlgorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racismis devastating. It reduces to rubble the notion that technology is neutral and ideology-free. Noble's crushing the neutrality myth does several things. First, this act lays foundations for her argument: only if you recognize and understand that technology is built with, and integrates, bias, can you then be open to her primary thesis: search engines advance discriminatory and often racist content. Second, it banishes a convenient response for many self-identified meritocratic Silicon Valley "winners" and their supporters. Post-reading, some individuals may retain their beliefs in a neutral and ideology-free technology in spite of the overwhelming evidence and citations Noble brings to bear. Effective countering of Noble's claims is unlikely to occur. For professionals working in technology, information, argumentation, and/or rhetorical studies,Algorithms of Oppressionis refreshing. Agonistic towards structural racism and its defenses, single-minded in its evidentiary presentation, collaborative in its acknowledgement of others' scholarship and research, Noble models many academic, critical, and social moves. Technology scholars and writers will find inAlgorithms of Oppressiona masterful mentor text on how to be an activist researcher scholar. Noble also makes this enjoyable reading. It is uncommon to find academic books that can simultaneously be read, used, and applied by academics and non-academics alike.

Derek N. Mueller's Network Sense: Methods for Visualizing a Discipline (2017) presents a compelling argument for adding distant reading and thin description to the Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (RCWS) research methods portfolio. Not only can these methods help professionals address information overload, but the methods also support disciplinary wayfinding and network awareness for veteran and initiate practitioners and scholars alike. Network Sense 's explicit goal is to help current and new members in RCWS avoid information overload and better understand their discipline and where it is going. Mueller's presentation and evidence builds upon lived academic experience of ever-expanding growth in research, conferences, publications, and professional activities in RCWS. Similarly, his detailing the dearth of non-local, reliable, and consistently gathered data articulates the experience and lived frustration of many scholars. Finally, his presentation and analysis regarding the increasing number of scholars cited at the end of the long tail as opposed to having more repeatedly cited authors explains the felt experience of sharing or disciplinary niching or potential diffusion. Winning the 2018 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award, as well as the 2019 Research Impact Award by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, underscores this book's value to its fields.

“In arguing that neoliberalization remakes public space in contradictory ways, this study aligns with and contributes to the rhetorical study of institutions and of the production of space.”

“In this Spanish-English film set in the near future, a high-tech border wall seals off the US from México. Mexicanos no longer enter the US to work and instead use virtual labor technologies to perform services from afar, which serves as a techno-futuristic play on the twentieth century bracero program.”

“This article recounts how my research approach accentuated the expertise of members of the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing community and their collective desire for improved access. I share my principles here as a contribution to methodologies and methods in rhetoric and related fields …”

“While sexism is a backdrop for diverse women’s professional narratives in Elizabeth A. Flynn and Tiffany Bourelle’s collection Women’s Professional Lives in Rhetoric and Composition, Kirsti Cole and Holly Hassel’s edited collection, Surviving Sexism in Academia, brings sexism uncompromisingly into the foreground as contributors define, explore and strategize responses to sexism in higher education.”

Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940, by Sarah Walden Sarah Walden, Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 220 pp. ISBN: 0822965135 Paige V. Banaji Paige V. Banaji Paige V. Banaji Assistant Professor, English Director of First-Year Writing English & Foreign Languages College of Arts & Sciences Barry University 11300 NE 2nd Ave Miami Shores, FL 33161 pbanaji@barry.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 422–424. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.422 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paige V. Banaji; Review: Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940, by Sarah Walden. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 422–424. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.422 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. © 2019 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.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay argues that Madeleine de Scudéry's engagement with the early modern dialogue genre in Conversations sur Divers Sujets reflects and strengthens the conversational theory that scholars have pinpointed as an important feminist rhetorical strategy. By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudéry enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudéry's Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot's The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudéry's feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.

Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms, by Davida H. Charney Davida H. Charney, Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms. Hebrew Bible Monographs 73; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2017. xii + 156 pp. ISBN: 9781909697805. Stanley E. Porter Stanley E. Porter Stanley E. Porter McMaster Divinity College 1280 Main St. W. Hamilton, ON Canada L8S 4K1 princpl@mcmaster.ca Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 427–429. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.427 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stanley E. Porter; Review: Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms, by Davida H. Charney. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 427–429. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.427 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. © 2019 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.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel, edited by Robert Sullivan and Arthur E. Walzer, and Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel, edited by David R. Carlson Robert Sullivan and Arthur E. Walzer, eds. Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel, Leiden: Brill, 2018. 412 pp. ISBN 978904365100; David R. Carlson, ed. Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel. Cambridge, UK: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2018. 345 pp. ISBN 9781781886205 Alan G. Gross Alan G. Gross Alan Gross Professor of Communication Studies Emeritus University of Minnesota-Twin Cities 401 2nd Street North #308 Minneapolis, MN 55401 agross@umn.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 424–426. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.424 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Alan G. Gross; Review: Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel, edited by Robert Sullivan and Arthur E. Walzer, and Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel, edited by David R. Carlson. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 424–426. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.424 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. © 2019 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.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: The Keys to Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism, by Nathan Crick, The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric, by Gero Guttzeit, and Emerson and the History of Rhetoric, by Roger Thompson Nathan Crick, The Keys to Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2017. 277 pp. ISBN: 9781611177787Gero Guttzeit, The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric. Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017. 256 pp. ISBN: 9783110520156Roger Thompson, Emerson and the History of Rhetoric. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. 158 pp. ISBN: 9780809336128 Robert Danisch Robert Danisch Robert Danisch Department of Communication Arts (ML-236B) University of Waterloo 200 University Ave Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1 Canada rdansich@uwaterloo.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 433–437. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.433 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robert Danisch; Review: The Keys to Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism, by Nathan Crick, The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric, by Gero Guttzeit, and Emerson and the History of Rhetoric, by Roger Thompson. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 433–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.433 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. © 2019 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.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE, by John O. Ward John O. Ward, Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. xviii + 706 pp. Rita Copeland Rita Copeland Rita Copeland Department of Classical Studies University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 rcopelan@sas.upenn.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 429–432. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.429 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rita Copeland; Review: Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE, by John O. Ward. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 429–432. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.429 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. © 2019 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.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Questioning modernity’s humanism, rhetorical theory has increasingly sought to describe the rhetorical force of the material. Central to this movement has been Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT). While Latour’s theory is useful, his general aversion to rhetoric prevents ANT from fully explaining processes of translation or the politics of networks. This essay mobilizes Bernard Stiegler’s theorization of individuation and technics as a necessary corrective to ANT. Their hybridization facilitates a theory of rhetoric as the architechnical organizer of networks. I develop this position by analyzing Facebook’s mobilization of the slogan “time well spent” after revelations about their problematic role in the 2016 US presidential elections. This case demonstrates how rhetoric translates memory to build networks, reshaping the subjectivity and politics of involved—and excluded—actants. Such an approach overcomes the rhetorical shortcomings of ANT and Stiegler while refiguring discussions regarding systems of individuation, rhetorical subjectivity, and power in networked relation.

We introduce “parasitic publics” as a necessary, generative addition to scholarship on publics and counterpublics. Parasitic publics are reactionary discursive spaces formed residually and institutionalized affectively through the invention, circulation, and uptake of demagogic rhetorics. They feed off of oppressive conditions in the public sphere by (1) articulating with dominant discourses to exploit dominant publics’ centripetal force and (2) safeguarding the assemblage of dominant publics against counterdiscursive challenge. To illustrate and elaborate on this concept, we use articulation theory to analyze a highly organized white nationalist collective that swarms digital forums and comment sections. Founded by a former Republican congressional aid and Ronald Reagan appointee, this collective maintains training podcasts on their politics and debate strategies, two different databases of copy-and-paste rhetorics, two rhetorical style guides, and a subforum through which they direct each other to swarm digital spaces. We conclude with implications for future research on contemporary public spheres.

This essay introduces the archive created by the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA)’s Oral History Initiative. The archive consists of 21 audio interviews recorded at the 2018 RSA conference, transcripts of those interviews, and miscellaneous supplementary materials. Recorded on the occasion of RSA’s fiftieth anniversary, the interviews feature long-time RSA members, past and present officers and board members, and those who were otherwise a part of key moments in the society’s history. The essay’s authors explore the contents of the interviews, emphasizing three key terms frequently invoked by the interviewees themselves: interdisciplinarity, intimacy, and inclusivity. The authors also provide instructions for accessing the archival materials and invite readers to make use of them.

Living in California seems to require interaction with the state’s twenty-one historic Spanish missions, either by visiting them as a tourist, driving by a mission in one’s neighborhood, or learning about them as a schoolchild. While the missions ostensibly celebrate California’s history, many promote an anachronistic and dishonest re-telling of history that elides the devastating impact of the missions on Native communities (both historically and today). The missions operate as largely uncontested tourist attractions that promote self-serving collective memories about California’s founding narrative. Rhetorical analysis, I argue, can lead to a more honest engagement with the “hard truths” of their pasts, thus enabling a decolonizing paradigm (Lonetree). Toward this end, this essay focuses on the missions’ role in shaping public memory in California by comparing the rhetorical choices made at two locations: Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa and La Purisima Mission State Park.

Asking how post-crisis countercultural formations compose new means of resisting an unjust economic order, this essay centers the tiny homes movement, which takes the financialization and commodification of housing as a warrant for radically downsized dwellings. As I argue, the campaign to displace (from) big homes and emplace tiny homes relies on coordinating rhetorical modalities: the parrhēsiastic case against dominant but flawed materializations of “good living” and the eudaimonic envisioning of an alternative “good living” less beholden to capital. I conclude by reviewing both problematics and possibilities that emerge from this inventive play for social and economic change.

With this issue, Philosophy & Rhetoric launches two features. The first is a dedicated Special Section, a space for shorter articles addressed to a specific theme, problem, or question. The second, In Focus, is a book forum in which several scholars take up a recent leading monograph and the author of the monograph offers a reply to their reflections. These new features will appear regularly in coming issues. Individually and together, they seek to encourage directed study and hopefully a bit of debate on pressing issues and contested questions that appear at the nexus of rhetoric and philosophy.The inaugural Special Section is addressed to a question that was frequently and somewhat famously posed by Paul Ricoeur—From where do you speak? It is a timely question—and perhaps a pressing one, at least as the grounds of expression feel more and more unstable, perhaps less as a function of inspired invention that takes flight from the given topoi than deepening divisions over whether there remain any common commonplaces. The matter of where and how to stand—and find standing—in the name of expression is on our minds, especially in the midst of historical and emergent forms of violence that work to contain language, dislocate the power of words, and displace the potential of speech.Co-edited and introduced by Louise du Toit, the three articles that compose the section emerged from the 2018 meeting of the Society of Ricoeur Studies in Stellenbosch, South Africa, the first time that the society gathered on the African continent. In different and often subtle ways, each article both recalls Ricoeur's influence on South African political thought and reflects on the struggle to overcome apartheid (apartness) and turn South Africa into a “home for all.” In 2019, now twenty-five years since the formal end of the regime and the beginning of nonracial democracy, apartheid's colonization remains evident. There are many who remain trapped and so without a place to speak in a way that might make a difference. Between past and future, the question of the transformative commonplace looms large.What then to say in the midst of violence? What is a plausible and proper response to rhetorical violence?With an evident concern for these questions and showing marked divergence over how they are best answered, the inaugural In Focus is addressed to Philippe-Joseph Salazar's book Words Are Weapons: Inside ISIS's Rhetoric of Terror. Published first under the title Parole Armées: Comprendere et combattre la propagande terroriste, the French edition of the work was recognized with the 2015 Prix Bristol des Lumières.As with its counterpart, Salazar begins the English translation with a challenge to a long-standing topos, the “pacifist illusion: that weapons yield to words,” and closes with a difficult call to arms. The four essays addressed to Salazar's work, along with the author's own reply, reflect closely and carefully on this difficulty, the challenge of how to hear, interpret, and respond to the caliphate's rhetoric. The debate that ensues—and it is a debate, not least over whether Salazar is somehow guilty of “rhetoric”—turns not a little on how to best understand rhetoric itself and how to grasp its potential in the midst of terror. The topoi are not stable and the signs are difficult to read, all of which suggests a need to recall Jean Paulhan's concern as to the human “rendered speechless” (6). Are there too many or not enough flowers in the park?

Obituaries are becoming an increasingly popular medium that people who have lost friends and relatives to opioid overdose are using to speak out. Many sources refer to these as addiction obituaries. In this essay, we present a generic rhetorical analysis of 73 addiction-relatedobituaries in order to question and explore this phenomenon as a potential emerging genre of rhetoric. In doing so, we argue that addiction obituaries constitute a hybrid rhetorical genre intertwining the conventions of an obituary with a public service announcement, which we call a public service death announcement, or PSDA. This symbolic form fulfills many social functions necessitated by the unique sociocultural circumstances brought forth by the opioid crisis. However, it also reveals limitations of conceiving of addiction at the level of individual faces.

Phase 1 cancer clinical trial consultations are fraught with ethical and rhetorical issues. Phase 1 trials are designed to test the toxicity, and not the efficacy, of therapeutic agents. Fewer than 5% of patients benefit from their participation in a Phase 1 trial, and over 75% of experimental drugs do not become approved cancer medicines. Bioethicists have long debated the ethics of recruitment consultations for Phase 1 trials solely in terms of the need for patients to make a rational decision based upon enough information to avoid what are called therapeutic misconceptions and/or unrealistic optimism as motivations to participate in Phase 1 trials. We argue here, however, that the ethical challenges in Phase 1 consultations go beyond providing information about the (unknown) risks and (unanticipated) benefits of a Phase 1 clinical trial. In this article, we present a rhetorically oriented case study of a Phase 1 consultation, followed by a rhetorically informed critique of the rationality of bioethics. We use Lauren Berlant’s (2011) concept of “cruel optimism” to develop a more complete account of the rhetorical and ethical nexus of patient motivations in Phase 1 consultations by creating a discursive space to explore the concerns, hopes, and motivations of cancer patients considering participation in the earliest phase of clinical research in cancer medicine. The goal of our study is to propose a framework aimed at achieving Lisa Keränen’s (2007) concept of relational integrity applied to Phase 1 consultations.

This essay takes the recent popularity of medical doctors’ narrative writings about the dying process as its cultural exigence, analyzing these alongside an earlier wave of such writings as epideictic rhetorics that function to reshape cultural values surrounding the “good death” by reconstituting our notions of virtuous dying conduct. Although the texts analyzed have many admirable and comforting qualities, encouraging us to face death with realism and assuring us that there are aspects of the way we die which are within our control, the virtues and modes of conduct they promote and exalt around a controlled death are available only to the privileged subject.

This essay assumes that the design and use of surveys is a fundamentally rhetorical act. It provides suggestions for employing and designing health-related surveys intended for research participants who might be characterized as inhabiting one or more precarious positionalities. We use “precarious positionality” to signal when research participants self-identify as one or more of the following: a racial and/or linguistic minority, economically disadvantaged, disabled, former or current drug user, undocumented, un(der)educated, oppressed, sexualized, disenfranchised, criminalized,and/or colonized. Drawing on the research team’s experiences with piloting what we hope will eventually become a nationwide survey, the essay describes how to avoid several survey-designpitfalls; it also makes recommendations for how to improve survey-based health research that enrolls participants who inhabit one or more precarious positionalities. Our recommendations attend to rhetorical complexities related to survey ethics, inclusion criteria, privacy, stigmatized and misleading language, variations in discursive repertoires, accessibility, and liability.

"Rhetoric and Communication Perspectives on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault." Technical Communication Quarterly, 28(4), pp. 426–427

This article reports on a mixed methods rhetorical analysis of a data set of news reports on campus sexual assault. A macro-level qualitative analysis of narratives combined with micro-level quantitative content analysis of verb voice offers insight into how news media shapes perceptions of power, blame, and agency in reporting. These findings offer implications for how public actors discuss campus sexual assault and implications for the teaching and practice of research methods in technical communication.

This study traced the adoption of a new social language among financial advisors responding to intense regulatory pressures. Register – specialized vocabularies, argumentative moves, and syntactical patterns – was analyzed to explore rhetorical practices embedded in agency–structure dynamics. Through analysis of advisors’ correspondence with clients and semi-structured interviews exploring their communication practices, this study demonstrates how register changes embody everyday rhetorical tactics for managing complicated audiences. This article contributes to studies of agency–structure dynamics in professional communication contexts governed by strong regulatory constraints.

Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis (times change and we change with them). Not only is the techne of today’s rhetoric and professional communication changing but we rhetors and professiona...

In 1924, the W. Atlee Burpee & Company® announced a contest calling for letters responding to the prompt, “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done for Me.” By the deadline, Burpee had received thousands of letters, many written by women. Significant elements of this early twentieth-century contest influenced women’s response. These elements—the historical context, the call for letters, and the act of gardening—converged in a kairotic fashion to form a rhetorical opportunity particularly accessible for women. The contest allowed women to apply familiar rhetorical acts in risky and self-promoting ways to validate their work and publicly identify as successful gardeners.

Nativist ideology, which dominates public discourse, implements ableist hierarchies to reduce immigrants to diseases of the body politic. Immigrants’ graphic narratives, on the other hand, reveal the disabling effects of xenophobic environments. Rhetoricians have begun to recognize comics’ persuasive potential but thus far have not explored their role in immigration rhetoric. Using this medium’s affordances, immigrants critique the nativism-ableism matrix, as exemplified by Parsua Bashi’s comics memoir about immigrating to Switzerland from Iran, Nylon Road (2006/2009). Bashi’s self-worth, displaced by her unreceptive context, depends on accepting a mental (dis)ability. Her comic counters nativism’s eugenic underpinnings by visualizing variation.

In our current cultural era of numerous social movements, it is often easy to lose sight of what drives individuals and collectives toward action. As the editors and contributors of Unruly Rhetoric...

Consider the recording studio. Its walls absorb and release sound waves, filtering and reflecting them. It is filled with electronics that further direct and diffract sound: mics, processors, audio...

This essay discusses the racialized politics, histories, and ideologies that inform the crafting and instituting of core curricula in rhetorical studies. As is the case in many rhetoric and writing studies undergraduate majors and graduate programs, core curricula can be counted on to contain survey courses that review the histories and theories of rhetoric and composition—sometimes separately, sometimes overlapping, and always subject to the ideological orientation of the program/department and the scholarly training of its professors. Through critical race counterstory, this essay explores what core curricula are intended to do within rhetoric and writing studies programs/departments.

There is no shortage of research on learner preferences and teacher perceptions of the value of feedback in L2 writing. However, studies comparing opinions from both sides are rare. Moreover, little is known whether L2 proficiency impacts learner preferences for feedback. To bridge these gaps, this study surveyed 70 students and 16 teachers from an intensive English program in the U.S. on their preferences concerning six dimensions of L2 writing feedback: source, mode, tone, focus, scope, and explicitness. The findings suggest that (1) students overall regarded teachers as the most credible source of feedback and wanted teachers to mark all errors in their writing and correct them directly; (2) higher proficiency students showed more positive attitudes towards peer feedback and inclination towards written, comprehensive, and indirect correction; (3) students at the two ends of proficiency (high and low) favored feedback in a mixed tone; (4) while teachers and students were allies on the usefulness of oral feedback, feedback on both rhetorical and language issues, and feedback in a balanced tone, teachers were nonetheless neutral about the benefits of peer feedback and preferred focused, indirect feedback. Suggestions are offered for ESL writing instructors to adapt their feedback for its maximum effects.

This article examines the use of comic adaptations of Shakespeare in the college classroom. After theorizing the class offering based upon performance pedagogy and inclusive learning practices, the author describes her experience coteaching a Shakespeare class that used three Shakespeare plays in both their traditional and graphic format. The success of the course revealed that comic adaptations of Shakespeare plays offer an accessible, rewarding means of understanding Shakespeare’s plays as both texts to be read and works to be performed.

This article explores how to use science fiction, particularly texts centered on android protagonists, to open up discussions of marginalization, race, and oppression in the introductory literature classroom. In response to the hateful rhetoric directed toward asylum seekers, this author developed an entire course around personhood and rights. She first examines how, in particular sci-fi works, paranoia and prejudice compel citizens to delineate between kinds of personhood. She then illuminates how students were invited to make parallels between the othering that the androids endure and historical and present-day examples of human rights abuses. After a semester of examining and debating these issues, students selected an android or robot in a television show, film, or video game of their choice and first assessed how the android’s personhood was delimited by human and then articulated why humans placed these boundaries on the android. Throughout the article, the author explains the kinds of texts she used for the course, the assignment students were tasked with, and how the course broached other issues of power dynamics, such as consent and disability rights.

This article names microaggressions as a rhetorical and pedagogical phenomenon. To make the case for rhetorical and pedagogical intervention, the authors define and trace microaggressions in literature from rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies; share cross-disciplinary understandings of microaggressions; and offer illustrations from sites of research, teaching, and service.

Transgender persons face many barriers preventing them from accessing and receiving health care. Gender-transition care can be difficult because such care is frequently contingent upon geopolitics, such as location-based health-care policies that exclude transgender community attitudes and values. This article uses rhetorical cluster analysis to explore the combining two conceptual lenses—tactical technical communication and participatory localization—to study the do-it-yourself geopolitical medical literacies of transgender people in one Reddit forum. We found being trans online means to be tactical and geopolitical, encountering and negotiating geopolitical awareness of health-care options, exposing a privilege invisible to cisgender users.

As discussed throughout this special issue, interest in design thinking as a process, a set of mind-sets and practices, and also a potential addition to writing studies and technical and professional communication (TPC) program curricula has increased recently, opening discussions about the rhetorical nature of design-thinking practices. Does design thinking align with the already rhetoric scholarship on design in TPC? In this working bibliography, we pull together literative from across disciplines, popular media, and higher education media to examine design thinking from a variety of angles and to offer a starting point for peers interested in learning more.

In this special issue, we explore design thinking as a broad conceptual process as well as a tool that might align with the work of technical and professional communication (TPC) programs. But what is design thinking? What are the benefits and drawbacks of the process? Can design thinking be used to help students address rhetorical challenges and complex problems? How is design thinking showing up in the field, and does it belong in TPC programs? Four scholars explore these questions in their niche areas: process, usability and user design, technical communication, and industry and programmatic perspectives.

Design thinking—at times described as a mind-set, practice, process, method, methodology, tool, heuristic, and more—is a productive, iterative approach used to engage divergent thinking. Often made up of stages incorporating empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing, design thinking provides a framework for identifying and approaching problems. Design thinking, however, generally lacks a critical–rhetorical–methodological structure that makes room for what Rebecca Burnett called “substantive conflict,” or “conflict that deals with critical issues of content and rhetorical elements.” This article situates design thinking across the professional and academic spaces in which it is heralded and implemented in order to explore how it can be used in collaborative contexts to support substantive, productive dissensus. The authors lean on the ways in which they engage in design thinking in their different roles to situate the good, the bad, and the ugly of design thinking. They conclude by suggesting a rhetorical methodology for cultivating design thinking that facilitates dissensus, addresses resistance, and considers ideological variables.

Looking into the definition of rhetoric in the digital space, one often encounters the view that rhetoric is too remote or too “ancient” to be used as a conceptual, theoretical or practical framework for researching digital media. However, a substantial body of contemporary media research applies the theory of rhetoric, using a modern conceptual apparatus (e.g. cognitive theories of metaphor). Based on Kenneth Burke’s model of the pentad, the article aims to show that media messages in the digital environment are based on the notion of the rhetorical situation and demonstrate that the rhetorical apparatus has a crucial role in discerning the ways to modify the discourse space in human-computer-human communication. The source of modification in the traditional model of a rhetorical situation is the interactive nature of communication in digital media and the fact that the recipient [agent a] is bestowed with the role of an active participant who can influence the content of the message. Thanks to the use of the rhetorical model of pentad, the argument goes that in contrast to traditional media, modifications in the model act 1 → agent → agency → act 2 are possible and they result from the inclusion of external participants [agent b] and changes in the ontological status of the digital medium from the role of an intermediary to an active participant in the communication process [agent c].