Effective Q&A management in team presentations is a crucial yet often neglected aspect in academic discourse. Building upon Usera and Fuller’s previous work, this article explores the intricacies of Q&A management for teams. It outlines three key challenges teams face in managing Q&A, introduces two common components (isolated and embedded Q&A) with strategic insights, and proposes techniques for anticipating and responding to questions. By aligning Q&A strategies with the five team presentation formats identified by Usera and Fuller, this article offers a comprehensive framework for enhancing team presentations, with implications for educators, practitioners, and researchers in public speaking.

Although a growing body of research recognizes the importance of viewing argumentation as a means of understanding rather than combating others, little is known about how teachers cultivate this practice in classroom conversations when teaching argumentation. This study examines how argument can be taught in classroom discourse with an empathizing stance and generates associated pedagogical constructs. Adopting a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis, this study examines the key instructional events in an argumentative writing unit in two high school English language arts classes. The analysis demonstrates that the empathizing stance is introduced in the relationship between arguers and their warrants and the differences existing between arguers. It also generates four pedagogical constructs related to the teaching of argument with the stance: (1) identifying the connection between arguers’ warrants and backgrounds; (2) transposing oneself into others’ backgrounds; (3) exploring interlocutors’ common and divergent grounds; and (4) situating argument in a broader context. It concludes with a discussion of the affordances of teaching argument with an empathizing stance.

Peer feedback has long been an essential part of a process approach to writing in university EFL classrooms. This study examines how the affordances of peer feedback are shaped by students’ language choice. We interviewed 27 Chinese university students in an English writing course about their experiences giving and receiving oral peer feedback on an initial and revised draft of an essay. Semi-structured interviews were analyzed thematically and triangulated with stimulated recall, transcripts of peer review discussions, and content analyses of learners’ incorporation of feedback across essay drafts to better understand perceptions and actions following from language choice during oral peer review of their L2 writing. Findings show that students incorporated 56 percent of oral peer feedback instances when revising, and almost all of these occurred in students’ first language, Chinese. Participants described the L1 affordances of clarity, efficiency, and pragmatics as important considerations when giving oral feedback on peer writing. Through triangulation of oral peer feedback discussions, change across essay drafts, and student interviews, language choice is shown to be a supportive practice for L2 writers in oral peer feedback. In contrast to previous research that suggests that the L1 is used primarily for solving problems and less frequently for discussion of content, our findings show that students chose to use their L1 for peer review because of the perceived support offered for improving their writing – namely, clarity, efficiency, and pragmatics.

In our information age, written communication has become increasingly important in many professions. As a result, university faculty and administrators need to develop specific curricula and pedagogies that will facilitate the process of equipping students with the required writing knowledge and skills to meet the demands of their workplace environments. In this article, we argue that Writing Across the Professions (WAP) as a curricular model meets that requirement, particularly in Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) contexts, which we believe are conducive to fostering writing transfer in university students. WAP foregrounds the importance of writing in workplace contexts and aims to facilitate the transfer of students’ knowledge and practices by focusing on rhetorical genre theory and analysis, discourse community theory and analysis, providing engaged feedback on students’ writing, and inviting students to critically reflect on their previous and current writing knowledge and practices. In this article, we propose four conceptual foundations that university faculty and administrators can utilize to implement WAP programs at their institutions. The first concept is that professional (writing) knowledge and practices are contextual and require lifelong learning; WIL faculty and students thus need to be informed about what is involved in learning to write across professions. Secondly, as the transfer of professional (writing) knowledge and practices goes beyond disciplinary boundaries, both faculty and students need to build contextual awareness. Thirdly, as problem-solving is an integral part of writing in the professions, faculty and students need to engage in critical reflection. Finally, professional (writing) knowledge and practices impact identities and therefore require mentoring. In outlining these shared concepts from WIL and writing transfer research, this article offers examples of how they can inform curricular approaches and pedagogical practices in WAP.

This essay focuses on two historical maps as rhetorical artifacts: The Piri Reis Map of 1513 produced by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis in 1513, the Reis map, and the Map of the Island of Cuba and Surrounding Territories produced by the Cuban geographer, historian, and educator José María de la Torre y de la Torre in 1841, the de la Torre map. The Reis map demonstrates the colonial logic of Americas’ cartographic invention while the de la Torre Map is an alternative cartographic artifact disrupting the Reis map’s celebratory discourse and the settler-colonial legacy of the world heritage memory.

Dialogism and dialectical knowledge making have long subtended theories of written discourse and therefore the design of rhetoric and writing curricula. As universities move toward interdisciplinary and applied disciplinary epistemologies, theories of written discourse based in the dialogical and dialectical tradition require new scrutiny. This article synthesizes scholarship from the rhetoric of science, written communication theory, and transdisciplinary theory to develop a new poly-logical and poly-lectical approach to written communication for interdisciplinary discourse. The article concludes with examples of hermeneutic and heuristic invention strategies for rhetoric and composition pedagogy that can encourage poly-logical and poly-lectical inquiry on contemporary interdisciplinary issues.

The diversity and inclusion (D&I) report is an important element in the corporate public reporting genre; however, as an emerging genre, it receives little attention from scholars interested in public discourse, so there are few guidelines on what should be included in a D&I report. This study helps to fill this gap in the research by examining 10 D&I reports from information technology and banking industries, exploring the reports’ rhetorical purpose and identifying their typified rhetorical moves. The author concludes by recommending what aspects of the current genre's substance and form should be improved to help meet the needs of stakeholders.

Studies of Augustine's rhetoric have been focused on the De doctrina christiana and the Confessions. As a result, these studies have been restricted to questions of Augustine's reception of Greco-Roman ideas. This article analyzes an underappreciated source, the De catechizandis rudibus, to show that Augustine engaged with a topic that his pagan forebears did not account for, namely rhetorical depression, a condition that tempts speakers to slide into a grim silence. Because rhetorical depression does not admit of a technical solution, Augustine responds to it by locating discourse within a redemptive drama animated by love. The hope of love's ultimate victory over communicative futility and frustration inspires the depressed speaker to stammer onward rejoicing. Augustine's placement of rhetoric within a dramatic history can prompt future reflection on the stories and myths found in past handbooks of rhetoric. It may also help us tell stories about rhetoric today that help depressed speakers get up in the morning.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Zhihu live talks, as a major online knowledge commodity, enable speakers to provide professional information and interact with the audiences. The use of hedges and boosters has been associated with the realization of such a goal. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Previous research has indicated the relevance of disciplines or genres in the use of hedges and boosters in academic discourse; however, little is known about the use of these metadiscourse markers in Zhihu live talks as a new register for popularizing professional knowledge. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What are the disciplinary variations in the use of hedges and boosters in medical science and health (Med) and education (Edu) live talks? 2. To what extent do speakers’ characteristics (i.e., expertise and community status) have an impact on the use of hedges and boosters in Med and Edu live talks? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methods:</b> We collected the transcripts of 123 Med and 126 Edu live talks, as well as the demographic information of each speaker. Following a framework adapted from Hu and Cao, we conducted an analysis of the frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters, and how they associate with speaker characteristics in each category of live talks. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> The two corpora exhibited significant differences in the frequencies and functions of hedges/boosters, and the differences can be attributed to the conventions of knowledge making in medicine and education disciplines. In addition, speaker characteristics have some impact on the use of hedges and boosters, such as speakers’ levels of conformity to disciplinary conventions or their strategic efforts in relational management. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> The findings can guide different speakers to configure metadiscourse to inform, argue, and direct while popularizing professional knowledge of different disciplines.

AbstractArguments may sometimes be advanced with a non-standard function. One such function, it is suggested, is the expression of identity, a practice which may play a significant role in political representation. This paper sets out to examine a number of short addresses given at the High-Level segment of the Cop26 conference, which are considered to contain instances of such argumentation. Their content is analysed and evaluated by means of the Comprehensive Assessment Procedure for Natural Argumentation (CAPNA), and an attempt is made to highlight the purposes of the delegates in addressing the conference. At a more fundamental level, the goal of this work is to assess the possibility of identifying arguments as being meant largely as statements of identity or representation, and the suitability of the CAPNA or other norm-based systems for evaluating such discourse. The speakers studied include representatives from OPEC, the Trade Unions, and the leaders of Vietnam and Liechtenstein. Ultimately, the study concludes that while further work is necessary both on understanding the relationship between argument and identity in the political arena, and on the application of argument norms to representational discourse, evaluations of this kind are meaningful and informative.

Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication , edited by Samuel Stinson and Mary Le Rouge, is a timely collection of essays addressing the ways that humans conceptualize and interact with their environment when attempting to communicate the dangers of crises---such as climate change and COVID-19. Explicitly responding to the work of Jeffrey Grabill and Michelle Simmons (e.g., in their seminal 1998 essay, "Toward a Critical Rhetoric of Risk Communication"), this collection offers a broad variety of lenses for thinking about humans' relationships to their surroundings, especially while communicating environmental risk. The 14 chapters in this volume apply methodologies including rhetorical and discourse analysis, ethnography, integrated risk communication, and antiracist framing to topics ranging from university communications about the pandemic to groundwater pollution to upcycled art installations, in the process complicating traditional understandings of risk as something that exists "'out there,' independent of our minds and cultures, waiting to be measured" (Slovic, 1999, p. 690). Considered broadly, the collection offers human bodies and ecological impact as more effective barometers for risk than abstract calculations; individual chapters offer heuristics grounded in human experience or environmental considerations, along with discussion questions and assignments for use in classroom settings. The diversity of topics and methodologies represented ensure that the collection offers something of interest to most scholars and practitioners of risk communication, environmental communication, or embodiment in technical communication.

Abstract This essay outlines the rhetorical elements and discursive strategies used to perpetuate cultural racism, or ethnicism, in contemporary political discourse. Using Marine Le Pen's Islamophobic discourse as a case study, this essay demonstrates how Le Pen deploys ethno-nationalist rhetoric to highlight the dangers that she believes Muslim terrorists pose to French national identity. She portrays Muslim terrorists as rootless wanderers capable of causing irreparable damage to France, which enables her to craft herself as a protector of the French home using populist reasoning. In doing so, Le Pen's discourse stokes fears of clandestine terrorists hiding among the French Muslim and migrant populace, which constitutes the Muslim terrorist—and by extension, all Muslims—as major security and cultural threats to the nation. Consequently, Le Pen portrays French national identity as incompatible with all forms of Islam.

In this timely book, Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women's Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Coretta M. Pittman skillfully reveals how the “hidden voices” of the Women's Era and the New Negro Era found agency through creative expression. Pittman covers a diverse array of texts (essays, speeches, plays, blues songs, novellas, etc.) and carefully traces the literary techniques utilized by Black women to demonstrate the importance of literacy for the advancement of Black people during this time. Unlike other scholars of this period, who have primarily focused on middle-class and elite Black women, Pittman instead concentrates on the Black women “hidden in plain sight.” According to Pittman, the Black women hidden in plain sight were “struggling to reconcile the promises offered by literacy and education over the stark realities of their racialized experiences” (xix). For these Black women, literacy was an important political act. In chronological order, Pittman synthesizes the literary contributions of Black women across genre as well as the theoretical contributions of their work.In order to control the influx of immigrants, mass public education at the turn of the twentieth century was implemented as a form of social control. Drawing on Harvey J. Graff's work, Pittman brilliantly explicates the entanglement of literature and citizenship during this period. Literacy helped enact moral codes intended to unify a heterogenous nation. However, the circulating literature contained harmful and stereotypical messages about Black Americans. While white middle-class mothers used literature to impart morals to their children, Black mothers were concerned about representations of Black people in popular literature. Advocates during the Woman's Era, such as Cooper and Matthews, believed literacy was integral to Black Americans’ social advancement and their perception of society.Pittman begins by analyzing Anna Julia Cooper's essay “The Negro as Presented in American Literature” and Victoria Earle Matthew's speech “The Value of Race Literature,” both exhorting Black people to pick up the pen to respond discursively to the circulating public discourse of Black Americans as inferior. Cooper makes the compelling argument that for American literature to encompass all facets of the nation, it must prominently feature Black subjects in a truthful light. Cooper mocks white authors for their negative portrayals of Black Americans and explains how they fail to capture Blackness. As a corrective, Cooper urges Black Americans to write about their own experiences to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of the Black experience. While Cooper admonished white authors, Victoria Earle Matthews attempted to expand the prominent understanding of race literature. In her speech, Matthews includes “histories, biographies, scientific treatises, sermons, addresses, novels, poems, books of travel, miscellaneous essays and the contributions to magazines and newspapers” (23). Furthermore, Matthews argued that any work created by a Black American ought to be included in the category of race literature instead of merely works by white people written about Black Americans. Matthews believed broadening the scope of what constituted race literature was essential for Black Americans to write through the trauma of enslavement. And, as Pittman demonstrates, Cooper and Matthews believed that literature about Black Americans could exercise transformational power in the “hope to transform [readers'] state of being personally, communally, and materially” (xxi). This message was primarily disseminated to Black clubwomen, whose transformative literary practices enabled Black women to craft new realities outside of their oppressive conditions.Katherine D. C. Tillman and Pauline E. Hopkins published novellas showcasing how education could transform the status of Black Americans with the proper context. Tillman's novella Beryl Weston's Ambition: The Story of an Afro-American Girl's Life imagines the life of Beryl Weston, whose endless pursuit of education elevates her status and uplifts her entire community. Tillman's novella participates in the idealization of Black Americans, forming “a middle-class cultural ethos,” more contemporaneously “respectability politics” (47). In contrast, Tillman's novel Clancy Street presents an alternative perspective on how the lack of education of formerly enslaved persons made them “underprepared for citizenship” (49). The Waters family in Clancy Street is a working-class Black family who financially struggles post-emancipation and engages in immoral behavior. Throughout the novel, the Waters family gains literacy and education that helps them embody the civic ideal of the time. Even though Tillman's novellas dramatize the lives of Black families of different class backgrounds, both publications ultimately reinforce the aim to achieve a Black middle-class ethos. Literacy would increase knowledge of the community and the self and family to transform society.Similarly, in Hopkins's Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, Ruel Briggs, a white-passing Harvard medical student, draws on his mystical powers to revive the dead. Ruel embarks on an expedition to Ethiopia, where he finds that his royal roots enable his powers and creates an ideal society wherein Black people rule themselves. The novel's overall theme is how Black people must not only use education to improve their social status but also to achieve self-actualization. Tillman and Hopkins's works participate in the idea of the transformative power of literacy, which yearns for Black people to achieve middle-class status while also serving as a rejection of the circulating retrogression theories that post-emancipation Black men would return to their “naturally bestial selves” (45). Authors in the New Negro Era would change the general approach to dispel these racist theories through literature.As Pittman chronicles, the New Negro Era saw a marked shift in Black women's perception of the capacity of literacy to address oppression in the United States. Unlike transformational literacy advocates of the Woman's Era, who sought validation from white people, the literature produced during the New Negro Era recognized the limitations of Black Americans’ literacy. Pittman argues that creative expression no longer focused on “domesticity and sentimentalism” but instead explored “despair and realism” (74). She attributes the New Negro Era's emergence to Angelina Weld Grimké’s play Rachel. In Rachel, the Loving family moves North to escape the rampant threat of lynching in the South, only to realize that despite their educated status, they struggle to secure employment and remain vulnerable to racial violence. This play highlights the struggles of the emerging Black professional class, who realized that education was insufficient to overcome the systemic racism enshrined into law post-Reconstruction via Jim Crow legislation. Pittman argues that Grimké’s play illustrates how racism leaves a long-lasting psychological effect on individuals and communities. Grimké challenged the belief that Black women engaging in middle-class domesticity would resolve racism and railed against the racist white forces keeping Black Americans in a second-class status. Jessie Redmont Fauset's novel Comedy: American Style is a satirical novel criticizing the idea that racial uplift was a “zero-sum game” (113). The novel's protagonist Olivia only increases her status in society through the denial of her Blackness by embracing her ability to pass as white. According to Pittman, Olivia's insistence on passing is the “result of a nation unwilling to let go of its racist ideals” (135). Fauset's novel is a form of what Pittman terms “transactional” literacy, as the characters do not interrogate the looming societal conditions from which their oppression originates. Transactional literacy is defined as gaining “advanced literacy skills to accrue social and material capital sometimes intraracially and/or other times interracially” (xxi). In contrast, Pittman analyzes Zora Neale Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, to showcase how Hurston gave Black working-class souls “form as fully realized characters” (150). Hurston's novel grapples with competing theories of the best avenue for formerly enslaved people to participate in society: vocational school or higher education. Through the characters of John and Lucy, Hurston works through the critical debate of the time between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington about the value of education. Overall, these literary forms depart from notions of respectability and investigate Black life in all its complexities in an era of significant racial violence.Pittman expands on existing scholarship discussing Black women in Blues by arguing that Blues offered an opportunity for Black women to divest from middle-class ideals (such as motherhood and domesticity) and move along a path towards liberation. Even though Blues has been widely studied by musicologists, historians, anthropologists, and so on, Pittman demonstrates the necessity for its incorporation into literary and rhetorical studies. Most notably, Pittman argues that Blues participates in a specular form of literacy. Specular literacy “is the practice of reflecting back properties (e.g., writing conventions and styles, dialects, values, traditions) of one's racial and class community” (xxii). Pittman examines Mamie Smith's song “Crazy Blues,” which describes the life of a jilted female lover and how she reacts to the betrayal. Smith's hit led to a drastic increase in Black women Blues singers being recorded. These works reflect alternative perspectives on Black women's options for endurance during this period: “turn inward and forsake desire and family obligations” or “turn outward and seek revenge” (xii). Similarly, Ma Rainey's songs demonstrated that the “love and sensual lives of Black people also needed to be attended to” (143). In Ma Rainey's songs, a rejection of white normativity was connected to sexual queerness, expressed publicly through art. Steve Goodson argues that Ma Rainey “would assert her dignity, her autonomy, and her humanity through her music and lyrics, all while tactically encouraging her listeners to do the same” (146). Blues, Pittman argues, gave singers the agency to address taboo subjects, articulate Black experience, and validate working-class Black American life.A notable strength of Pittman's work is the careful tracing of concepts over time. For example, Pittman makes evident Anna Julia Cooper's influence on the creation of the term intersectionality when she covers the lineage of the concept (xxii–xxvii). Cooper repeatedly discussed how race and gender influence the plight of Black women, which inspired Pauli Murray to create the term “Jane Crow.” Kimberlé Crenshaw later expanded on Murray's Jane Crow to develop a legal framework for intersectionality as a lens and resource for intervention. While this book has many strengths, one weakness is that Pittman does not truly define agency. Pittman mentions the concept with repeated reference to how literature and music could increase Black women's agency but does not provide an in-depth discussion of Black women's relationship to agency. Given the popularity of the term agency in the field, future scholars could use Pittman's work to craft an account of Black women's agency across time.This book is an excellent read for those interested in the intersection of African American literature and feminist public address. Tracing the theoretical importance of Black women's literary productions, Pittman expertly demonstrates how scholars can use close textual analysis to understand more fully the past lives of Black women. For example, students could examine how Anna Julia Cooper's public addresses incorporated “parable, analogy, derision, and humor” to communicate to nationwide audiences (14). Students could also conduct a rhetorical analysis of how the form of Blues “relies on verbal play, repetition, indirection, and subversion as vernacular modes of expression” (95). The summaries included by Pittman not only assist the reader's comprehension but also make apparent the injustices against which the authors were writing. This book contributes to the ongoing project of tracing Black women's literary contributions, who, to varying degrees, believed that literature could remedy racial tension and violence.

Jennifer Mercieca's Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump arrived at a crucial historical juncture. Published in the summer of 2020, during Donald Trump's presidential reelection campaign, the book provides a comprehensive study of Trump's rhetoric during his former presidential election campaign from June 2015 to November 2016. It is a testament to the book's insights that they feel timely even after Trump's failed reelection bid in 2020 and its politically corrosive fallout. Indeed, in reviewing Demagogue for President in 2024, I am struck by a feeling I can only describe as uncanny: in her incisive analysis of Trump's rhetoric, Mercieca provides readers with a powerful conceptual framework not only for understanding the success of Trump's 2016 election campaign but also for making sense of U.S. political discourse in the years after the book was published.Kairotic moments punctuate the book as a whole. As she recounts in the preface, Mercieca found herself in the limelight after being quoted in a December 6, 2015 New York Times cover story about Trump's rhetoric, an experience that catalyzed a series of high-profile media engagements and ultimately resulted in her writing Demagogue for President. This exigency gave Mercieca the opportunity to follow Trump's presidential campaign in exhaustive detail; as she describes it, “I've studied Trump relentlessly, in order to be able to explain his rhetorical strategies clearly” (xi). That dogged pursuit of Trump's public discourse makes for an engrossing reading experience as Mercieca guides us through Trump's many campaign rallies, interviews, media appearances, and social media posts.Demagogue for President opens by arguing that Trump is a demagogue whose rhetoric harms democracy in the United States. The author shows that making this classification is trickier than we might think. After all, the term “demagogue” is often indiscriminately applied to populist political candidates, obscuring the word's meaning, and Trump consistently positions himself as an outsider, a “fearless truth teller” who speaks back to a corrupt political establishment (7). Mercieca intervenes here by returning to the ancient Greek origins of demagoguery, moving us beyond a perception of populism “unduly influenced by antidemocratic writers” such as Plato (12). Thinking through this context, Mercieca distinguishes two kinds of demagogues on the basis of accountability: “heroic demagogues” hold themselves accountable to the democratic process and use their populist rhetoric to persuade, whereas “dangerous demagogues” avoid political accountability and misuse their populism as a “weaponized rhetoric” to undermine democracy (11–14). Evaluated in these terms, Trump clearly qualifies as a dangerous demagogue and, moreover, “probably the most successful demagogue in American history” (21).On my reading, the author makes two major claims about Trump's demagogic rhetoric. The first is that Trump is a “demagogue of the spectacle—part entertainer, part authoritarian” (210), a tactical performance designed to amuse his audience while manipulating them. Central to that spectacle, Mercieca argues, are three “unifying strategies” (15–17) Trump uses to align himself with his supporters: argumentum ad populum (appeals to crowd wisdom), American exceptionalism, and paralipsis (ironic twists of “I'm not saying; I'm just saying” (16)). Likewise, the author identifies three “dividing strategies” Trump uses to isolate his supporters from their perceived enemies: argument ad hominem (attacks on personal character), argument ad baculum (aggressive threats), and reification (17–20). Mercieca contends that Trump deploys these six rhetorical strategies to “gain compliance” from his audience, which in turn “prevent people from holding him accountable for weaponizing rhetoric” (14). The book's second major claim is that Trump's rhetoric was kairotic: Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election because his campaign successfully harnessed the “rhetorical possibilities inherent in a nation in crisis” (204), which Mercieca characterizes as “a distrusting electorate, a polarized electorate, and a frustrated electorate” (20). These distinct yet intersecting contexts, Mercieca argues, supplied Trump with the suasory resources needed to secure the Republican party nomination and, ultimately, the presidency.Structurally, Demagogue for President is divided into eighteen concise body chapters, each of which offers a case study of Trump using one of his six major rhetorical strategies. Mercieca thus provides three separate analyses of each strategy, illustrating how they function in the three cultural contexts that serve as the book's major subsections: “Trump and the Distrusting Electorate,” “Trump and the Polarized Electorate,” and “Trump and the Frustrated Electorate.” Organized in this way, the author's argument gains both range and nuance. The shorter chapters allow Mercieca to analyze an impressive number of examples, and by examining each strategy in three different settings, Mercieca draws out the subtleties of Trump's rhetoric throughout his presidential campaign.Scholarly readers may be surprised to find minimal engagement with academic research in the case study chapters, but this choice serves Mercieca's goal of reaching a wider audience (21). In place of academic citations, the author catalogues Trump's rhetoric through meticulous endnotes of his campaign rallies, media appearances, social media posts, and other popular sources. Trump is quoted extensively, giving readers ample evidence of the six rhetorical strategies Mercieca analyzes. Choosing not to provide literature reviews or other trappings of the traditional academic monograph keeps the case studies accessible and brief; accordingly, any of them would make excellent syllabi material for a variety of rhetoric and communication courses.Some of the book's strongest moments occur when Mercieca pinpoints when and how Trump's rhetoric changed. For example, in a chapter on reification, the strategy of “treating people as objects” (19), Mercieca traces how Trump deliberately altered his campaign messaging about Syrian refugees to align with narratives on Breitbart and InfoWars. In early September 2015 Trump showed sympathy for the refugees’ plight and offered to help (44–45); but, just one month later, Trump began describing the Syrian refugees as a grave threat to the United States, “the ultimate Trojan horse,” to whom he would no longer be willing to offer political asylum (47). Trump even adjusted his signature campaign slogans and witticisms based on audience reactions, as Mercieca carefully documents. Trump's “Low-Energy Jeb” joke, for instance, was in fact Trump's third attempt at an effective ad hominem for Jeb Bush after “the reluctant warrior” and “Jeb Bust” failed to catch on with his supporters (82–83). In moments like these, Mercieca shows how deeply calculated Trump's rhetoric was throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, refuting Trump's claim to be someone who merely and spontaneously calls it like it is.Perhaps the most prescient case study is the final chapter on American exceptionalism, where the author dissects Trump's authoritarian rhetoric and tracks the emergence of his “Stop the Steal” narrative. Remarkably, this book published in 2020 seems to anticipate the January 6th, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, a fulfillment of the anti-democratic rhetoric that Trump has peddled for years. As Mercieca explains, Trump's campaign team crafted its “Stop the Steal” messaging in the summer before the 2016 presidential election. Trump advisor Roger Stone first raised the specter of Hillary Clinton stealing the election the day after she accepted the Democratic Party nomination in July and created a “Stop the Steal” website to circulate these election fraud claims (195–196). More ominously, in an August 1st appearance on Alex Jones's show InfoWars, Stone suggested how Trump should react if he were to lose the upcoming election: “Challenge her being sworn in. I will have my people march on Washington and we will block your inauguration” (196). Of course, Trump's supporters did march on Washington years later to stop Trump's loss to Joe Biden, eerily confirming Mercieca's observation that Trump used American exceptionalism in his campaign to “appeal specifically to authoritarian voters” (191).Demagogue for President ends by returning to the question of accountability: If Trump avoids being held responsible for his demagogic rhetoric, how do we curtail the political damage he inflicts? Mercieca makes two key recommendations here. The first is to bolster public instruction in rhetoric and critical thinking, as doing so is “perhaps the best way to neutralize a dangerous demagogue” like Trump (208). Although a familiar refrain, Mercieca's call for cultivating democracy through pedagogy is particularly relevant when it comes to Trump, who excels at overwhelming the public with his discourse (212). Taking time to unpack Trump's rhetorical strategies, as Mercieca does in this book, might help citizens regain their bearings amid Trump's onslaught of egregious claims.The author's second and far more ambitious recommendation points to a future imaginary: What if our society changed in ways that made demagoguery ineffective? Mercieca only speculates on this possibility, and it would be unreasonable to expect much more than that from the monograph. But I see much promise in Mercieca's “spectacular demagogue” framework, which helps cut through discursive deadlock of whether Trump is “really” an authoritarian or simply playing the part for political gain. As Mercieca persuasively argues, the distinction does not matter. The more important reality is that both authoritarianism and spectacle are “antidemocratic” performances that “deny consent and use rhetoric as a strategic means to an end” (213). Seeing Trump's rhetoric for what it is, perhaps we might begin to answer Mercieca's clarion call to revitalize democracy in the United States.Deep in analysis and sweeping in scope, Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump makes a significant, lasting contribution to rhetorical studies. The author's insights have only become more salient since 2020, and Jennifer Mercieca is to be commended for writing a book so intellectually rich yet eminently readable. Demagogue for President proves a reliable lodestar for reckoning with the aftermath of Trump's presidency, a book that scholars and citizens will revisit for years to come.

Business and professional communication courses hold special opportunities to contribute to students’ development of entrepreneurial mindsets through the use and extension of classical rhetorical theory and praxis. We situate pedagogical activities within the context of the entrepreneurial venture pitch by using Rhetorical Canons of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery to develop oral discourse while recognizing and developing entrepreneurial mindsets. We utilize elements of entrepreneurial mindset development presented by Kuratko et al. and Daspit et al. to introduce business and professional communication instructors to cognitive, behavioral, and emotional aspects contributing to the establishment of entrepreneurial mindsets.

This article examines the rhetoric of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump through a psychoanalytic reading of the Aristotelian enthymeme to highlight how conspiracy theories are underwritten by an absence that appeals to the desires and fantasies of audiences. It explores how conspiracy theories that seem irrational are often highly successful enthymematic appeals designed to capitalize on the suasive qualities of libidinal satisfaction, or jouissance. Instead of dismissing them, scholars should embrace an expanded theory of conspiracist discourse that accounts for the role of satisfaction in determining which claims audiences find convincing.

I challenge an "English only" view of Paulo Freire in U.S. scholarship, arguing that an exclusive reading of the 1970 Myra Bergman Ramos English translation masks the dialogic and allusive dimensions of Freire's rhetoric. I trace Paulo Freire's use of situação-limite ("limit-situation") to Álvaro Viera Pinto's appropriation of the term in Consciência e realidade nacional from Karl Jaspers's concept of Grenzsituation in Philosophie, Existenzerhellung. A detailed illustration of the semantics of situação-limite is needed to correct for a "glass half full" terministic screen in Anglophone U.S. scholarship, which overly minimizes the term's profile of collective historical transcendence.

AbstractThis article argues that the oral performance of personal monologues in first-year composition courses allows students to identify meaningfully with one another across difference at a time when the American political climate too often forecloses such opportunities. The author considers the opportunity personal monologue provides for parrhesia that recontextualizes the space in which deliberative discourse occurs. Drawing on a case study of the author's food-based composition course, this article provides supporting evidence for the power of performed personal monologue to encourage mutual identification among students that creates a new foundation for subsequent discourse.

Thirty-seven years after its initial publication, David Bartholomae's essay “Inventing the University” ([1986] 2005) remains indelible in the contemporary project and continual reinvention of composition studies. Indeed, the collected essays and vignettes featured in Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies—its title echoing Bartholomae's piece—pay deliberate homage to Bartholomae by reverently calling his piece “seminal,” “pivotal,” and “long studied” even as the authors by turns complicate, disagree, and expand his initial concepts.The constant among these fifteen full-length chapters and eight vignettes is a deep, abiding respect for student writing, including the varied, nonlinear processes, outputs, and modes of exploration that students experience in our classes. As coeditor Stacey Waite situates the project in the introduction, “In our current political moment, how do students and scholars ‘invent the university’ now? What are the structures of universities in/against which students make work in our courses? How have our students helped us to create, shape, disrupt, and revise our field?” While these questions are equal parts vital and esoteric, the pieces in this anthology approach these lines of inquiry via a range of methods and theoretical positionings. Amid this diversity of perspectives, Ashanka Kumari's chapter, “Inventing Happens in Perpetuity,” might well function as a high-level overview of the issues raised across the anthology. Discussing the importance of continually checking our own perceptions about students’ writing, Kumari offers, “I often ask students to ask ‘Why’ whenever we complete an activity—why on Earth might I have made us do the thing we just did? Through this practice, I think with students about writing practices, about the histories informing what is deemed as a concept to spend time on in our classroom space.” As such, these chapters and vignettes reinvigorate Karen L. Lowenstein's (2009) concept of a “parallel practice” in higher education, wherein the ways we hope our students will write and move through the world after taking our courses must necessarily parallel the ways we ourselves teach them. In this spirit, Inventing the Discipline walks the walk of accessibility in its open-source, digital format that is fully available for any interested reader online.While the anthology's contents are not grouped by subheadings—a move I interpret as inviting readers to draw their own connections and patterns among the chapters—I have organized my review into three loose themes: the explicit rejection of student writing as somehow “less than” other forms of writing, the pedagogical and rhetorical centering of student writing in composition classrooms and in formal writing projects, and an explication of the sticky moral and linguistic issues involved in centering student writing both in the academy and, from a metaphysical standpoint, in anthologies such as this one. My grouping of these themes is not indicative of any particular authority I have in this field; rather, I offer these as one possible framework of many that readers may use as they dive into this spirited and essential collection.Fittingly, many of the early essays in Inventing the Discipline grapple with the central problem of labeling anything student writing. In “Pedagogical Genealogies,” the opening chapter of the anthology, Peter Wayne Moe traces the pedagogical genealogies he has inherited through Bartholomae, William E. Coles, Jr., and Theodore Baird, and questions how these genealogies sit differently in his particular person—how they work (or don't) in his context and to what extent these genealogies may or may not be appropriate for an ever-diversifying composition classroom. “Every teacher must, at some point, come to terms with such pedagogical genealogies, locating ourselves within? alongside? outside? against? the traditions that make our own work possible,” writes Moe. Because these genealogies inform our own positionalities as instructors, embedded within them are particular—if sometimes subconscious—orientations to the students we teach.Bruce Horner, in his chapter “Student Writing,” takes up the dialectal student-teacher relationship and calls out the deficit-based views inherent in many discussions of student writing: “ ‘Student,’ when used as a modifier—as in student work, student writing, student housing, student government, student life—typically serves to demean what it modifies by signaling its character as somehow lesser in quality than what is modified: less authentic, valuable, lasting, real, valid, substantive.” Student writing is not taken seriously in this formulation and is in fact often positioned as “not real” as a result. Horner, however, rejects this conception, and the “autonomous” view of literacy and language it contains, in favor of an epistemology that emphasizes the embeddedness of the social world in every utterance. Student and teacher alike are thus “fellow reworkers of language and knowledge,” so that, rather than dismissing student work as of low value out of hand, or fetishizing it as some immaculate artifact, the solution is “to behave . . . [as if] all of us, and all writing, remain in that same, incomplete condition.”Of course, student writing is only one element of the teacher-student dialectic. Michael Bunn, in “Undervaluing Student Writing in Composition Courses: A Reading Problem,” suggests that more attention ought to be given to how students read and, more broadly, how we in the field read student writing. Where writing pedagogies are numerous and well integrated into composition programs, Bunn urges compositionists “to pay more attention to reading.” As a means of troubling a differential valuation of writing by the professional-academic class and that of students, Bunn argues that “students are best served when they are taught to read both published and student-produced texts in the same ways.” This is, he cautions, not to say that published texts and our students’ paper submissions are of the same quality; rather, they are merely “at different stages in the writing and professionalization process.”Taken together, Moe, Horner, and Bunn remind us to question the pedagogical genealogies we've inherited, to tweak and/or dismantle them as necessary in our unique institutional contexts, and to take great care as we continue to work with students and their writing—which, like our own writing, is always already in a state of becoming. The pieces I've included in the following section are largely concerned with how we might merge these ideas within the composition classroom.A second theme I noted concerned the pedagogical possibilities presented by student writing. As one might anticipate, an anthology dedicated to the radical (re)examination of student writing features a fair amount of writing by students throughout its pages. Indeed, most of the book's chapters and vignettes fall into this broad category, though the overlaps and tensions among the approaches described are important to name. As such, I've opted to take a page from Eric A. House, who asks in his vignette, “ ‘It's Not about You,’ or, Getting out of My Own Way to Better Perceive Composition,” “I'm wondering how often instructors get out of our own way, admit that maybe the flow of the class isn't necessarily about us, and allow ourselves to be moved by students?” As a means of “getting out of the way,” a pedagogical concept I first encountered through literary scholar Marcelle M. Haddix (2018), I have opted to center actual students’ writing as much as possible in this part of the review.Consider Michael, a student of author Gina Tranisi's described in her contribution, “Respectfully Michael: A Narrative Exploration of Student Writing and What We Might Make of Its Beautiful Disruptions.” As Michael, a white, cisgender undergraduate in a midwestern university, grapples with stepping out of his comfort zone to research the stigma faced by transgender communities, he reaches a moment of struggle in the drafting process in which he confesses, “I feel like my paper is boring to read . . . I wasn't very creative with this one at least so far. My only creativity is the beginning letter of each paragraph spells out the words stigmas and distress which I feel are really important to understand with this topic.” Tranisi draws on Michael's words both to acknowledge the creative writerly choices our students make that we often miss and to lobby the rest of us to consider “the people behind the papers.”Where Michael's example hinted at the potential for worldview change through writing, Chanon Adsanatham describes how his communication students in Bangkok blended conventions of English-language business correspondence with Thai communication practices. While initially disappointed by his students’ “failure” to grasp the content, Adsanatham later realized this happenstance was a “rhetorical clash,” or “a moment in which knowledge, familiarity, and expectations about discursive arrangement, conventions, and practices from a tradition or curriculum creates questions or doubts about appropriate composing moves in a writing assignment in an intercultural rhetorical situation.” These clashes are inherently generative and productive if embraced as such. Of course, part of the work of embracing these opportunities requires a commitment to reflective practice, or an “after pedagogy,” as Paul Lynch (2011) has called it.Donna Qualley and Matthew Sorlien put this “after pedagogy” into practice in their chapter, “Our (Students’) Work (and Play) Can Make Us Smarter Next Time.” Building on the twenty-first-century literate practice of content curation, Donna asks how students and teachers can embark on writing and reading through new media literacies when both teacher and student are nonexperts in these genres, while Matthew dives head first into the Prezi Classic platform to create a presentation of over two hundred slides, complete with multiple “What I'm Thinking” slides that he notes “allowed me to present myself authentically within the work—not as a disembodied voice faking expertise, objectivity, or even comfort, but as a writer still trying to make something out of the material, even though they aren't sure what that something is.” This theme of playfulness finds a nice complement in Derek Tanios Imad Mkhaiel and Jacqueline Rhodes's vignette, “Messiness Matters: A Story of Writing in One Act,” in which the virtues of messiness, nonlinearity, and spontaneity are celebrated as thinking tools that generate powerful writing. Mkhaiel, a student in Rhodes's graduate seminar, underscores this point: Messy moments feel like moments of creative intellectual endeavor—my WRA 101 students and I are trying to write thought. Run-ons are excited ideas that don't know when to quit; fragments are dramatic brevity, not mistake. One time I had a student who used an excessive (I thought) number of commas; when I commented on the punctuation, I learned that she was trying to teach me how to breathe while reading her thoughts.In “Disrupting Hierarchies of Knowledge: Student Writing in the Digital Transgender Archive(?),” authors Mariel Aleman, Alice Galvinhill, Keith Plummer, and K. J. Rawson depict reflections gleaned from their work with the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) housed at the College of the Holy Cross, where Rawson led the project and Aleman, Galvinhill, and Plummer were undergraduate student workers and archivists. The authors describe the immense value and responsibility of working for the project, ensuring the accessibility and accuracy of artifacts, as well as the role of scholar-activism in fighting for the visibility of minoritized communities. As Plummer writes, “Working for the DTA showed me the importance of scholarly activism to unearth stories made invisible by our culture, how a mission is a much more meaningful motivator than a grade, and how a scholarly intervention can become an empowering space that's impact reaches far beyond the confines of a lab.”Just as Aleman et al. challenge the kind of writing that counts as “writing”—and who that writing does and does not typically center—Rachael Shah's vignette “Writing with Students to Make an Academia with More Room” discusses the challenges she has encountered with cowriting research with high school students. Though this sort of writing creates more space, or “more room,” as she puts it, in academia, “the message we were receiving about who writes research—and who does not—was crystal clear. It was a message I found myself constantly trying to counter, both for the students I was writing with and for academics who encountered their work.” In a similar vein, Cory Holding's vignette, “The Field and the Force: Notes from Prison Teaching” critiques the practice of writing about student writing in favor of writing with students in a variety of settings, including prisons. This shift “means not only quoting from students’ work, or even co-writing, but working together to form the research question, to think through research methods, to process critical feedback, and to imagine interventions, implications, and next steps,” writes Holding.“Writing for Change: Re-inventing the University” takes on Holding's and Shah's call to make “more room” in academe for a variety of writers in its assembling of twenty-two University of Pittsburgh undergraduate authors to ask, “What would your ideal university do?” In their employment of a Black feminist epistemology, these authors depict their ideal university as one with frequent opportunities for professionalization and with ample support for everyday financial tasks. They seek increased integration with the surrounding community and, fundamentally, an acknowledgment of difference as “an essential and permanent part of our society, making it crucial to work to celebrate that in the face of people who try to destroy it.” In so doing, they offer a powerful example of the “critical story-ing” called for in Sherita V. Roundtree's chapter, “(Re)Humanizing the Discipline: Students’ Critical Story-ing as a Resource Archive.” Roundtree, like Aleman et al., finds digital archives to be productive spaces that “help students actively see themselves as members of discourse communities within and outside of the university.”Where compositionists may well agree on a number of pedagogical principles (many of them outlined in the aforementioned chapters), there still exists a richness of tension and debate in the field. The final set of chapters and vignettes zeroes in on these tensions, many of them arising from Bartholomae's original essay. He argues of students, “They must learn to speak our language” (5), but more recently, scholars have taken issue with this dictum—do they? and to what end? Take, for a start, Pritha Prasad's chapter, “(Anti)Racist World-Making in the University: Reinventing Student Work,” which attends to the moral injury faced by BIPOC students as they attempt to “invent the university” amid harassment and assault, and asks, “How can we look at the theory-building and knowledge-creating work our BIPOC students—and particularly women of color and queer people of color—are already doing in the spaces in which they live and work as a basis for understanding how race and racism operate in our classrooms, universities, and beyond? Prasad ends the chapter by sounding an alarm regarding the use of “the master's tools,” in Audre Lorde's words, because a myopic focus on standard language forms suggests that BIPOC students only need to master the linguistic tools of what Lisa calls the of in to political Prasad's up College Students at the the of in the Composition in which she a focus on among her students, many of are and I to students the importance of different language forms for social and describe language as a of the importance of to in different and This the value of the language students already that the use of may not be appropriate for such as with and the use of language is not ideal for social such as a or in question raised for me among these two chapters is one that's the in our field for what like that Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” how much we students to their language and literacies to with the discourse community of the and how much we instructors, and in this the academy such that space for the variety of and that our students us of our with to the of institutional change on this in his vignette, with Composition Composition to seek to if this a when it . . . they just to I to as the for composition of because any field is made up of of a of scholars and and they be behind when they and is while this both in content and in author of While Inventing the this the of an as a crucial means of for minoritized students in higher In this way, “not only do students have to the university, but they need to the role of to in the L. and M. the to of the in and while out critical spaces for and Black of within the by their for final theme I noted in my reading of this concerned the of student writing in vignette, A at the that when we student writing from its original “I from essays that were and sometimes not that well and I used to make the I to she In to the Student The and E. by his not to any student writing in his that from student writing is a very he writes, “I to ask what on student writing might look like if not by the to from student the inherent differential in the of student to make one or something that vignette Though she is to and with students, the of which such have as I have to it, I've always had the most Indeed, I've the one positioned to do the she As a to this I to call out the work of L. and Cory In “Student Writing on Student Writing,” the authors that the university and the both will a about the structures which are particularly on they out the of and composition scholars the in this As they put it, who would write about student writing in terms of how it the to to with student writing less and student instructors and other instructors who would and to on ways to the of the are often from such As is in this the by Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition is It is that anthology that the reader both with and and with vital questions about the and the role of student work within Waite notes in her that attention to student work is just as as it was in when Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” was first our field this radical all of its and the to

The Chilean curriculum for writing education includes five paradigms: cultural, macro-linguistic, micro-linguistic, procedural, and communicative. The implementation of such a poly-paradigmatic curriculum can occur in multiple ways. Therefore, we analyzed classroom practices with two aims: (a) to describe how the paradigms are evident across practices, and (b) to analyze the paradigms’ internal alignment within each practice. We conducted classroom observations with five Spanish language teachers with varied orientations toward writing instruction. A content analysis of teachers’ discourse formed the basis for a narrative case-by-case analysis and a cross-case analysis. This process was guided by data collected during a previous survey study and supported by teachers’ interviews. Findings revealed that the cultural, macro- and micro- linguistic paradigms were implemented most often, while the implementation of procedural and communicative paradigms was rare. Additionally, paradigm alignment was visible in two practices but not in other practices. Possible reasons for this lack of integration and potential solutions to resolve this issue are discussed.

Throughout the 2010s, “success” became a common descriptor in writing centers, academic units, and student services. While the term carries connotations of professional achievement and economic improvement, it is rarely explicitly defined. This ambiguity is an example of how the interests of public institutions of postsecondary education are entangled with neoliberalism. Using a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach, this essay examines uses of the ideograph “success” within an original mini-corpus comprising the webspaces of eight writing centers from one large state university system in the United States. The analysis considers how writing centers contribute to neoliberal discourses of “success” that are defined by specific political and business ideologies, reinforce white supremacist ideology, and require students, tutors, and others associated with writing centers to adopt those same perspectives.

Even though learning outcomes have become an expected part of writing programs, how they are defined and subsequently used is often unclear. This study did a textual analysis of the terms used for outcomes on 42 universities’ first-year writing webpages. The study found that university writing programs use different terms for outcomes and define those terms differently across programs. The lack of clear definitions for outcomes across programs makes these documents difficult for writing programs, faculty, and students to use. Consequently, the author argues that composition studies needs to study definitions of outcomes terminology and then clearly define those terms in the materials programs, teachers, and students use. The author then presents suggestions for how programs and teachers might do this definitional work to make outcomes more useable for effective course design.

In the pursuit of fostering vibrant and inclusive learning environments, this article explores how the practice of community-building can be a contemplative practice. Drawing upon personal experiences and pedagogical insights, Muir navigates the rewards of cultivating authentic connections among students while dismantling hierarchies within the classroom. Through reflective anecdotes and theoretical frameworks, this article underscores the significance of shared values, respecting diversity, and democratic engagement in shaping transformative learning communities. Emphasizing practices such as establishing common ground, engaging in creative expression, and co-constructing syllabi, the article advocates for a holistic approach to education that prioritizes empathy, agency, and reciprocity. By integrating the contemplative practice of community building into the fabric of academic discourse, Muir envisions a future where students and educators alike embrace interconnectedness, compassion, and collective growth.

This study explores the discursive practices the researcher utilizes during recurring asynchronous writing consultations to engender mutually adjusted and context-driven interactions meaningful to writers’ development during virtual tutoring. While earlier studies have critiqued asynchronous tutoring for its inability to efficiently promote the writing center philosophy, the inevitability of writing centers’ transition to online modes due to the global COVID-19 pandemic warrants that writing center scholarship rethink the effectiveness of these online spaces. This study utilizes a discourse-analytic approach to analyze textual data collected from both WCONLINE and drafts I, the tutor, worked on. Individual interviews are also collected to ascertain writers’ perception of recurring asynchronous writing consultations as conversational. Textual analysis reveals that conversations occur in recuring asynchronous writing consultations on three contextual layers: first is the opening phase; second is the dialogic phase; and third is the closing phase. Interview data also shows that participants perceive their asynchronous sessions as conversational as those sessions not only function to inform, elicit, direct, and suggest, but also promote familiar relationships and provide affirmations. The study concludes by offering recommendations on how to retool the asynchronous writing consultation as not a lesser appointment option but a different option with the same opportunity as traditional writing consultation.

In his book A Working Model for Contingent Faculty, Robert Samuels presents multiple ideas for helping contingent faculty organize to gain equity on campus: in their careers, working conditions, and pay. Samuels critiques current prominent, negative discourse on contingent faculty, offering instead ways to emphasize contingent faculty’s diverse and positive experiences and opportunities. I offer additional insights spurred from Samuels’s ideas, including connecting with student government and finding ways to make writing center work and research more public and apparent to institutional stakeholders (e.g., students, faculty, donors, administrators, boards/trustees).

This paper demonstrates the connections between certain cultural traits of Scandinavia, a scholarly interest in rhetorical practice and the workings of rhetoric, and a recent interest in audience-oriented research methods. Scandinavia is characterised by a tradition of practical rhetoric, egalitarianism, high trust, and low scores on power distance and masculinity in Hofstede’s culture comparison tool. This, I suggest, is reflected in an interest in the everyday pragmatic functions and workings of rhetoric, paving the way for the use of audience research.

ABSTRACT This article builds on the scholarship on violence at the nexus of rhetoric, philosophy, decoloniality, and human rights discourse to theorize what it calls a rhetoric of everyday violence. Moving beyond the focus on the politics of representation in slow violence, it brings a transnational feminist rhetorical analytic and a focus on the politics of recognition to illegible temporal violence, arguing that a rhetoric of everyday violence can help recalibrate human rights discourse to recognize temporal and gendered violence as human rights violations.

Rhetorical scholars have turned to various new materialist frameworks to shift the discipline’s historically anthropocentric focus and fully engage matter’s rhetoricity. While all such frameworks attempt to challenge “the anthropocentric assumption that nonhuman matter is intrinsically passive or non-agential and thus external to or separable from (human) meaning,” Figures of Entanglement enters this burgeoning conversation by centering the unique contributions of Karen Barad (xi, x). Readers may recognize this collection from a 2016 special issue of Review of Communication. Yet, with a new foreword by editors Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan and an afterword by Laurie Gries, this collection makes Barad’s distinct approach to matter’s rhetoricity even more apparent, underscoring its fruitful potential for new materialist rhetorics invested in ethical, political transformation.In the book’s foreword Gamble and Hanan differentiate Barad’s performative new materialism from “vital” as well as what they refer to as “negative” new materialisms to show the generative potential of Barad’s framework and the notion of entanglement (x). Other new materialisms tend to be “inclusionary”—add matter and stir—and fail to complicate “the human” itself and its differences (xiv, xi). First, vital and negative new materialisms maintain a distinction between being and knowing, allowing humans to emerge with a unique capacity to “objectively observe and know the existence of something essential, determinate, and unchanging about reality that precedes and remains unaffected by both its own activities and our observations of it” (xi). On the contrary, Barad’s performative approach suggests that “no aspect of reality—including human thought, meaning, and observation—is in any sense external to matter or ever remains entirely unchanged by matter’s ongoing performances” (x). Here, humans are not “outside” of observation, but all observation “human or otherwise” co-constitutes what is observed (xi). Second, failing to interrogate “the human” in an attempt to observe matter’s vitality is an ethical flaw that makes other approaches less capable of grappling with difference: they have been charged with “erasing associations between race, gender, and matter” and (re)producing a homogenizing, “Western-colonialist notion of humanness” (xiv). In contrast, Barad’s is a “thoroughly relational,” performative new materialism (1).Barad’s concept of “entanglement” draws attention to the indeterminacy of matter and meaning, but it is accompanied by an ethical imperative to examine how difference, human or otherwise, is produced and the implications of power imbalances that arise through these enactments. For Barad, the notion of entanglement does not dissolve difference; difference is what matters. Indeed, they give us a way of thinking about how performative intra-actions produce difference through material-discursive practices, or apparatuses—differences that may be expected but are not inevitable. Rhetorical scholars are therefore invited to interrogate the production of boundaries that cause harm and reconfigure them, rather than assume the discreteness of boundaries from the start. Gamble and Hanan thus make a convincing case for how Barad’s work may contribute to important scholarship in decolonial and critical rhetorics for which vital and negative new materialisms are less equipped.Gamble and Hanan utilize the introduction to show how Barad’s performative new materialism both “supports and affirms” rhetorical materialism, or rhetoric’s materiality, and enriches it (5). Ushered in by Michael Calvin McGee, “standard” rhetorical materialism worked to challenge the centuries-old debate about rhetoric’s secondary, supplementary status vis-à-vis philosophy by recognizing rhetoric as part of a “shifting and dynamic material history” (6). Building upon this view, Ronald Walter Greene utilizes Foucault’s notion of the apparatus to demonstrate how even the “material history” McGee called our attention to is itself “produced by apparatuses”—history is not “outside” of meaning (6). Instead, rhetoric’s materiality is a “publicity effect” produced through technologies of rhetoric and intersecting power relations. Gamble and Hanan suggest that Barad’s framework expands this view by demonstrating how “matter itself is, in fact, the fully tangible condition of possibility for human and more-than-human experience and rhetorical meaning.” This extends Greene’s notion of apparatuses and publicity effects to recognize that such effects produced are “not reducible to an exclusively human domain of apparatuses and technologies” (7). Gamble and Hanan demonstrate how this insight undergirds the entangled reality of humans and nonhumans and the imperative that scholars grapple with this entanglement seriously if we wish to address the power imbalances that persist from normative, taken-for-granted hierarchies. Barad’s unique approach, they argue, has the capacity to shore up power imbalances across all matter and challenge the Western tradition of human exceptionalism—a necessary stance given “the economic and ecological crises currently unfolding” (11). With Barad, then, rhetoric’s engagement with the politics of materiality is enriched.In their own ways, each contribution in this collection analyzes what the editors coin “figures of entanglement,” such as disciplinary “turns,” capitalism, breast cancer, or rhetoric itself, to challenge binary ways of being and knowing. “Figures of entanglement” offers a way to account for issues that matter for critical rhetorical scholars, such as political transformation and power differentials among humans, while also accounting for matter’s rhetoricity (x). Though there are many insights one may glean from this collection, I note three for this review: entangled genealogies that rethink rhetoric’s diversity and origin story, diffraction as a concept-metaphor driving rhetorical reading strategies, and political theorizations of matter’s rhetoricity.Thomas Rickert and Nathan Stormer offer ways to rethink rhetoric’s origin story and rhetoric’s diversity through methodological approaches that emphasize entanglement and relationality. In “Rhetorical Prehistory and the Paleolithic,” Rickert defines rhetoric as “an incremental, bottom-up achievement” that “coalesces out of multiple cultural, material, and semiotic strands that are mutually entangled and coevolving” (89). To explain rhetoric’s emergence as dependent upon both sociocultural and material conditions, Rickert takes readers to the Paleolithic caves with an approach he calls a materialist historiographic method. This method allows us to “look for strikingly different explanations of modern humanity’s emergence, and in turn, rhetoric’s development” by considering “rhetoricity in other forms of evidence, especially material traces” (94, 89). As his analysis shows, cave art does not so much “represent something” as perform it; shamans could draw upon spiritual experiences, the caves’ darkness and sounds, along with environmental materials, to perform “a theater of the sacred” (103). In effect, Rickert provides a method for rhetoricians to attune themselves to rhetoric in a way that challenges its emphasis on oral and written disciplinary history and considers its “emergent capacity,” which has always already been ambient (103).In “Rhetoric’s Diverse Materiality: Polythetic Ontology and Genealogy,” Stormer enters the conversation of rhetoric’s development from a different route by invoking polythesis as heuristic. Beginning with the point that “what qualifies as rhetoric according to scholar A may be unrecognizable as such to scholar B,” Stormer seeks to offer a way of understanding “rhetoric’s verdurous materiality” as diverse—“ontologically one and many” (35, 38, 36). This complicates the “Big rhetoric” debate by showing how rhetoric is polythetic: entangled and emergent, in a processual state of “becoming-together” (40). As such, Stormer shows that what matters is not what is rhetorical so much as “how a specific potential for discursivity, realizable in many forms, inheres in dynamics afforded by a nexus” (48). This suggests that entities are entangled (a nexus) and, through their relationships, an entity may emerge as rhetorical (rhetoricity, or rhetorical capacity). For him, rhetoricity does not have an essence, nor does rhetoric have but one genealogy; genealogies themselves are already “coconstitutive acts” (43). Engaging Barad’s notion of “entangled genealogies” and Foucault’s work to offer “genealogies of rhetorics,” Stormer illuminates the sense in which rhetoric as a figure of entanglement has always been “otherwise” (41, 48). “What genealogies of rhetoric’s capacities produce,” he concludes, “is working knowledge of different strains of rhetoric as they have emerged and, perhaps, conditions for their transformation” (50). A Baradian approach to poststructuralist genealogy thus allows him to answer his central question of how we might talk of rhetoric and its genealogies as diverse (35). That is, rhetoric’s genealogies, plural, show not a linear unfolding but a series of historical appearances, never erased, never superseded.As Gamble and Hanan explain, “diffraction” is a useful term for a methodology that can read such figures of entanglement to consider how difference is produced through intra-actions. As I understand it, diffraction is a concept-metaphor that recognizes the intra-action of an apparatus—what Barad calls a measuring agency—and what it seeks to observe as a boundary-making practice that produces difference effects. Such intra-actions can be made visible by a rhetorical critic through a diffractive reading strategy when a critic puts in conversation two or more concepts to produce new insights. By constellating two concepts, for instance, one can show how both are entangled—inseparable, though made different through intra-actions with various apparatuses. A central function, then, of a diffractive reading strategy for rhetorical critics is to observe how apparatuses, as Gamble and Hanan explain, co-constitute whatever is being observed (xi).In “Entangled Exchange: Verkehr and Rhetorical Capitalism,” Matthew Bost diffracts Marx and Engels’s concept of verkehr (“intercourse”) in The German Ideology through Barad’s “notion of intra-active entanglement” to produce new insights about the relationship between historical and “new” materialisms (72). Reading verkehr diffractively through Barad’s concept of entanglement, Bost argues, “allows a refinement” of Marx/Engels’s discussion of production and intercourse insofar as both become understood as inextricably linked, though “cut apart” as they intra-act with larger apparatuses (78). Specifically, Bost suggests that it is “humanist discourses” that help sustain “power relations under contemporary capitalism” (82) insofar as such discourses inevitably and necessarily create boundaries around the very concept “human.” Therefore, he argues, “Verkehr, in conversation with Barad’s work, reframes class and class struggle as figures of ethical entanglement that work against the insulation of certain bodies from precarity at the expense of others” (83). A diffractive reading thus illuminates verkehr’s contemporary relevance and “common ground” with a posthumanist view of capitalism as entangled relations, “providing rhetorical scholars with additional tools for theorizing capitalist power outside a civic humanist frame,” which is to say, to understand how the boundaries which determine how value is produced and extracted is invariably the product of agential cuts among a confluence of materialities—cuts that are historical and for which we are ethically accountable (71, 76). Ultimately, Bost’s work challenges the dichotomy of new materialism and historical materialism: over and against, say, a comparative approach (“is new materialism better or worse than historical materialism?”) or analogical reasoning (“is it similar or different from historical materialism?”), Bost asks, instead, how a diffractive reading of Marx and Engels through Barad enables Marx and Engels to “productively speak to those aspects of contemporary global capitalism that Barad and other scholars of the nonhuman have critiqued” (73).In Diane Marie Keeling’s chapter, “Of Turning and Tropes,” she engages in a diffractive reading of disciplinary “turns” in the centennial issue of Quarterly Journal of Speech, examining how tropes of classical physics and dialectical negation collude with neoliberalism in the modern academy to produce disciplinary “turns” as different. As Keeling makes clear, a concept “cannot persist without a set of material–discursive practices—an apparatus—continually reproducing its existence” (54). She argues that neoliberalism, which “values capitalist techniques of accumulation and growth,” acts as an apparatus of academic publishing through classical physics tropes wherein “time is linear; the field is an empirical path; turns are discrete, sequentially patterned, and enable reflection” (54, 56). For instance, her analysis of one contribution shows how its emphasis on “quantification and accumulation . . . attunes us to neoliberalism” (59): This passage exemplifies many of the entangled tropes of the neoliberal constitution of the turn: a “provenance,” which is a place or source of origin; a subject “Raymie McKerrow” who is the creator of an “initial formulation”; a separate object “critical rhetoric” that set a trajectory for “others who were following”; a citation count “178” quantifying value; and credit for “an entire journal” where more research like his can be published. (58)As a corrective to this linear progression of discrete entities, she posits that “tropes of quantum physics can assist in reconditioning a performative orientation to discourse and history” so that we might consider how “turns move recursively through intra-activity, rather than sequentially through interaction” (55). Keeling thus reconfigures turns as “entangled diffractions, indistinct, unpredictable, and always reconfigurable through changes to their apparatus” (55). Reading disciplinary “turns” diffractively—“cultivating a rhetorical physics”—is what allows Keeling to challenge neoliberal progress narratives that would otherwise push us to push for the “new” without considering “turns’” relationality (63). Together, Keeling and Bost demonstrate how Barad’s concept of diffraction can offer a methodological approach to rhetorical analysis that produces insightful ways of engaging figures of entanglements to challenge neoliberalism in the academy or capitalism itself.Annie Hill’s chapter, “Breast Cancer’s Rhetoricity: Bodily Border Crisis and Bridge to Corporeal Solidarity,” offers an astute read of Barad’s agential realism to think through how the materialization of a tumor is never not inextricably linked with multiple apparatuses, particularly the discourses of racialization. This chapter is a go-to for critical scholars interested in how one might do rhetorical criticism in a posthumanist, new materialist vein while also clearing space for a radical politics of solidarity no longer constrained by rigid identity categories. As agential realism challenges the language/matter binary, among many other binaries like human/nonhuman, Hill suggests that “We can better grasp the meaning and matter of disease by tracking how it destabilizes the language/matter divide, rather than erecting this binary before analysis gets off the ground” (18–19). Not only does Hill use breast cancer as a figure of entanglement to illustrate this destabilization, but she also furthers the political implications of what she names transmaterial intra-actionality: “Incorporating the Baradian intra” to build upon feminist theories of intersectionality, writes Hill, “means forcefully underscoring the indissociability and coemergence of identity, power, and oppression while announcing that this analytic includes and exceeds the human” (25). This move underscores how “binary codes of being” are violent, our bodies are not impermeable or “closed,” and “objects” like breast cancer that we have bounded as discrete entities by language do, in fact, emerge from the conditions of rhetoricity (19). We need a new theoretical orientation that allows us to challenge these seemingly sedimented boundaries, and Hill makes a compelling case for how agential realism is one that can offer a very different starting point for transmaterial, transformative politics. Hill’s contribution centers the political implications of what she names “corporeal solidarity” so that we can better account for and “understand how we live and die with disease . . . who and what receives life support, and why” (31).Finally, Laurie E. Gries offers the collection’s afterword, which underscores the productive potential of Baradian new materialism and offers potential lines of inquiry for future scholarship. For her, Figures of Entanglement offers insight into how Barad can help rhetoricians build theory, reimagine disciplinary histories, and invent new approaches to research inquiries. Yet, there is still plenty on the horizon for continual engagement with Barad’s work. First, Gries prompts readers to consider how, “weaved together with new materialisms,” Indigenous philosophies could generate a “powerful analytic” for our field (115). Indeed, as many scholars have already noted, there are striking parallels with Barad’s onto-ethico-epistemology of agential realism and Indigenous thought, and entangling both could provide important insight and contribute to decolonial work in rhetorical studies (115). Second, scholars could build upon the research methods advanced in this collection and offer additional ones that might “productively intervene in the phenomena we aim to study” (116). For example, Gries urges scholars to take Barad’s notion of entangled intra-actions to forge more “collective engagement,” whether scholarly, pedagogically, or through local activism (116). How, she asks, can new materialist-informed research “help us work collectively to address some of our pressing cultural and rhetorical issues today?” (11)—issues that demand the kind of intellectual creativity that new materialist rhetorical work presents us with.Figures of Entanglement is ripe with potential for future rhetorical work, providing scholars with a rich array of theoretical insights and methodologies that all, in different ways, show the promise of Barad’s performative new materialism. This is a particularly compelling read for scholars who are interested in the entangled relationship between “new” and “old” materialisms and the capacity for more robust political engagement. Warranted critiques of new materialisms, broadly, ask about the consequence of fully engaging matter’s rhetoricity in a way that might obscure its social and political implications. Yet, this collection demonstrates the political potential of Barad’s framework for scholars who are committed to examining our entanglement with/in the world and how we might, as Gries writes, “productively intervene” (116). Though I have organized this review by the contributions I found most compelling, readers will no doubt find even more avenues to consider. Whatever readers may find, the that the editors about their to Barad’s work through it

How does one describe a crucial moment, a moment that calls for action? What kinds of time are opened, disclosed, or foreclosed in such moments? This section explores a concept that has a long history in rhetoric and philosophy, but which is urgently called for now, in a time that many think of as critical, catastrophic, or even apocalyptic. Changes in the economy, climate, and the state of our democracies demand urgent attention, and while people disagree on the course to be taken, there is a sense that—this is it!—now is the time. The concept of kairos (from ancient Greek καιρός) comprises both a critical time and a perfect opportunity; it is the right moment to act, even though the word could also be interpreted in a more general sense as referring to the issue of right timing. Considered as “one of the most untranslatable of Greek words,” kairos is perhaps related to the verb kurō, “to meet” or “meet accidentally,” as when an arrow meets a target, suggesting that there is a spatial component in the temporal kairos.1 The spatial dimension shines through in the earliest uses of the term discussed in both SeungJung Kim’s article on ancient Greek visual arts and Robert Sullivan’s article on Isocrates (436–338 BCE). According to Sullivan’s survey, Isocrates most often employs the word to refer to a specific situation, occasion, state of affairs, or set of circumstances.How do you recognize, let alone seize, this kind of moment, though? The best-known depiction of this difficulty is a portrait of Kairos personified that dates back to Lysippos in the fourth century BCE, reconstructed visually in three dimensions in Kim’s essay. In Greek mythology Kairos is the god of golden opportunities, which (as we all know!) tend to pass by too quickly. The portrait shows a winged figure with a flowing forelock that ideally gives you something to hold on to. I like to imagine that if you manage to arrest this passing instant, time itself comes to an abrupt halt, which throws Kairos’s hair out in front of his face.Of course, people do not necessarily see it as positive when someone appears to have captured the moment. At the kairos symposium hosted by art historian Barbara Baert in Brussels in October 2018, W. J. T. Mitchell held up a picture of President Donald Trump’s sculpted forelock to illustrate that it all depends on the perspective. Turning the familiar Greek portrait into an image of the opportunist, Mitchell reminded all of us that had gathered to celebrate the legacy of kairos in iconographic, philosophical, theological, semantic, historical, and anthropological studies, of the ethical issues arising in such moments. The question of moral accountability is bound to come up, whether one takes kairos to refer to the act of seizing the moment, involving some form of decision, or to the moment itself, the kairos, which some might claim just seized upon them and carried them away.As Debra Hawhee and Erik Charles White before her have argued, kairos does not seem to be confined by the subjective reason operating in a “rhetorical situation,” but it depends on “the forces pushing on the encounter,” in addition to instinct and intuition, and possibly on habitual impulses springing from experience (Hawhee 2002, 24–25; White 1987; reconsidered by Brod 2021). Audiences may also have a significant role to play, as Kermit Campbell underscores in his discussion of the symbiosis of call and response in African American churches and his reflection on how Martin Luther King’s speech at the 1963 March on Washington replied to a call: “Tell them about the dream, Martin.”The moment of kairos may appear spontaneous and deliberate, both at the same time. The classical rhetoricians in fact insisted on the value of preparing for the unexpected, as we try to do in our current crisis management plans. In his essay, Sullivan documents the incredibly nuanced instructions Isocrates gave on how to exploit a prospective opening in all sorts of civic settings. From a rhetorical viewpoint, kairos can appear both as a strategic point of intervention and as an empowering outlook and toolbox.This is very far from how the word came to be used in the Greek versions of the Bible, where, as Phillip Sipiora has pointed out, kairos occurs hundreds of times describing the divine disruption and absolute command of worldly time (Sipiora 2002a, 3). According to the ecclesiastical saying discussed in Felix Ó Murchadha’s essay, there is “a season, and a time [kairos]” for everything here on this earth (cf. Smith 2002). And then, when Christ opens his mouth to speak as the anointed messiah, his first words are “The time [kairos] is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15; Sipiora 2002b, 114).It is worth observing that when the classical-rhetorical concept was rediscovered in the Christian Renaissance, the pagan god of opportunity was restored to prominence (Baumlin 2002). In a widespread emblem by Andrea Alciato titled In occasionem, a powerful female goddess named Occasio is holding up a spear-like razor, saying, “I am the moment of seized opportunity that governs all” (Alciato 1531).Skills at recognizing such cutting instants were effective instruments of power for those who had received a classical education and who mastered the rules of decorum and every aspect of society and its institutions. Right timing and attunement to the occasion were important not only in politics, the theatre, and book publication, but even in matters of religious persuasion (Paul 2014; Lewis 2020; Johanson 2023; Skouen 2018, 2023). The moment of conversion coincides with the kairos, an obvious—but strangely unrecognized—case in point being the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which even features an arrow; a classical image of kairos.2Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept has enjoyed a second renaissance. In the 1920s, classicists and philosophers in different European countries started probing the pre-Socratic and theological origins of kairos. The two Italian articles (cited in Kim’s article) by Augusto Rostagni and, respectively, Doro Levi are considered the most important philological studies. In the wake of World War I, several German thinkers were interrogating the idea of the critical moment, not least the theologian Paul Tillich and his circle of religious socialists styling themselves as the “Kairos-Kreis” (Weidner 2020). This crucial development, also involving Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, is the topic of Ó Murchadha’s article. In the classical tradition kairos is contrasted with chronos, representing the common conception of historical and chronological time, although in times of crisis the urgent experience of both these senses of time “intensify each other” (Hawhee 2023, 58). According to Ó Murchadha, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Tillich engaged with kairos in different ways to critique—not just chronos, but historicism, presenting their own respective ideas of a messianic, destinial, and prophetic temporality.With regard to the Christian understandings of kairos, Heidegger appears to have taken an interest in this as early as 1917 when, as a student, he was reading Friedrich Schleiermacher’s writings on religion (Kisiel 1993, 492). According to Theodore Kisiel, Heidegger’s “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” (1920–21) marks his “discovery of the kairological character of lived time,” connecting the parousia and the kairos, which Heidegger translates both here and elsewhere as der Augenblick (152, 185–86; McNeill 1999, 44–45, 124–25).Ó Murchadha shows how Heidegger, Benjamin, and Tillich worked to broaden the conceptual scope of kairos, responding to their own time of crisis and finding kairos to represent something other than krisis. In the process, kairos took on new existential and ontological meanings. As Daniel Weidner has argued, the way in which Tillich and others reconceptualized kairos in light of their modern, historical context also bespeaks the great flexibility of the concept itself. On the one hand, kairos requires one to adapt to shifting circumstances. On the other, the concept itself has readjusted to different contexts of understanding, at times connoting idealism, at other times realism, involving subjective and objective dimensions, and fulfilling spiritual and material needs (Weidner 2020, 86). As Kim points out in her article, the ancient Greek term was already very complex, involving both spatial and temporal dimensions, and having different implications in different domains, such as visual art and aesthetics, ethics, athletics, rhetoric, or medicine.Further proof of this extraordinary adaptability can be found in Antonio Negri’s essential chapter on kairos first published in Italian in 2000 and appearing in English in Time for Revolution (2003). Starting with “the classical image of the act of releasing the arrow,” Negri introduces kairos, “here in postmodernity,” as “an extremely singular force of production of temporality, the reverse of the very sad and naked Heideggerian figures of powerlessness” (2003, 142). To Negri, kairos is not just “the quality of the time of the instant, the moment of rupture and opening of temporality,” but it is also “a fundamental ontology of time” (142, 152). Indeed, it is our very power to experience, grasp, and express temporality, and through it, time is “broken and rendered creative” (152, 159). Expanding earlier notions of kairos, Negri describes how “being opens itself, attracted by the void at the limit of time” and deciding, as it were, “to fill that void” (152). For the Marxist philosopher, it is crucial to ask how “a revolutionary subjectivity” could potentially “form itself within a multitude of producers,” and the concept of kairos inspires hope that many singular kairoi might open up to each other in common acts of naming the void (144, 155).This understanding of kairos emphasizing its ontological aspects contrasts sharply with the current everyday uses of the word. Online, there are many competing companies and services by that name, such as business advisors and career coaches wanting to teach people how to become more proactive. Life in digitized societies offers an unprecedented stream of opportunities and kairos does seem the right word at the right time, even though Isocrates characterized the concept in much the same way about 2,500 years before the digital era began. Yet, the familiar legends of “opportunity” warrant criticism as they emerge from and are associated with a white, Western hegemony. In his essay, Campbell stakes out new directions in kairos theory by comparing earlier notions of kairic time to modes of Black discourse and soul power, and by claiming that Kairos might be the ideal mythical figure representing African American rhetoric.What kind of response does the right moment require? The cluster of essays presented here fills an obvious gap—or what rhetoricians of science such as Carolyn R. Miller (1992) would call “the kairos” demanding new research, for even though there has been an increasing amount of work done in the last decades, no comparable interdisciplinary set of essays yet exists. This special section seeks to reclaim the Greek word from its current limited, instrumental, everyday senses, providing new sources of reference on what kind of moment the kairos really is. The four essays also employ kairos as a conceptual tool for thinking about urgent points in time, which is the kind of time we live in now.

For Megha Sharma SehdevNow days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. —W. B. Yeats, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”Violence is a limit formation. It is neither reducible to a brute fact nor is it ineffably ethereal. To write about violence, then, is to confront—if only as disavowed remainder—critical limits, no less of the writer than of the writing itself. Fewer subjects have proven as confounding for philosophy and rhetoric, this journal’s primary charge. In both its general particulars and its specific manifolds, violence nonpluses philosophical commonplaces, upends rhetorical tropologies.Philosophy imagines itself mediator to reality’s arche, the bedrock of being. Ancient Greek philosophy sought to distinguish necessity from contingency, essence from accident, dialectic from rhetoric, logic from fallacy. Those who took up this intellectual tradition came to conceptualize violence as first and foremost a question of “nature”—more specifically, those marked out by nature to rule (propertied male citizens) and those marked out by nature for subjection (the enslaved, women, nonhuman animals). In the early modern context of European philosophy, still, despite its pretensions, deeply indebted to this Mediterranean legacy, the canonical lexicon of sensemaking centered on legitimacy and its conceptual appurtenances of sovereignty, will, and rights.Strikingly, it is in the opposed registers of analytic and continental philosophy that violence’s cataphilosophic figuration appears most salient. Consider, for example, one such famous symposium convened in the analytic journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, as narrated by political philosopher Michael Walzer: In an earlier issue of Philosophy & Public Affairs there appeared a symposium on the rules of war which was actually (or at least more importantly) a symposium on another topic. The actual topic was whether or not a man can ever face, or ever has to face, a moral dilemma, a situation where he must choose between two courses of action both of which it would be wrong for him to undertake. Thomas Nagel worriedly suggested that this could happen and that it did happen whenever someone was forced to choose between upholding an important moral principle and avoiding some looming disaster. R. B. Brandt argued that it could not possibly happen, for there were guidelines we might follow and calculations we might go through which would necessarily yield the conclusion that one or the other course of action was the right one to undertake in the circumstances (or that it did not matter which we undertook). R. M. Hare explained how it was that someone might wrongly suppose that he was faced with a moral dilemma: sometimes, he suggested, the precepts and principles of an ordinary man, the products of his moral education, come into conflict with injunctions developed at a higher level of moral discourse. But this conflict is, or ought to be, resolved at the higher level; there is no real dilemma. (1973, 160–61)Analytic political philosophy’s resolute disavowals could not be here better splayed. Morality is construed as all-encompassing. The political is not so much effaced as it is rendered derivative to a foundational drama of will, obligation, choice. Analytic philosophy’s oft-preened claim to clear, transparent, terse style proves constitutive of its desire to contain, if it cannot altogether moralize away violence.Where analytic philosophy conceives of violence as an object, its limits defined by morality’s handmaiden, the “well-ordered society” (Rawls 2001, 8), continental philosophy conjures a sublime violence that shatters and transfigures normative violence. Walter Benjamin posits a binary opposition between mythical and divine violence: “If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates, if the former threatens, the latter strikes, if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood” (1978, 297). The mysterium tremendum of Benjaminian divine violence looms transcendent, fathomless, sublime when posed against analytic philosophy’s persnickety morality. But a violence imagined as expiatory, redemptive, and cleansing is still a morality aestheticized. Benjamin’s prose can be surrealistic, by turns slashing and propulsive, slanted and opaque. In its heady movement from repulsion to fascination and back again to repulsion, he is exemplar as few before or after him of the very limits of sustained thought on violence.Rhetorical criticism, for its part, has perfected elaborate apotropaic and piacular rites to govern its discourse on violence. The Aristotelian account of the rhetorical domain as that which is concerned with persuasion, contingency, and audience, “the discourse of the many”—as distinct from dialectic, necessity, and philosophy, “the discourse of the few”—gained axiomatic assent in modern institutional rhetoric. In his influential, field-defining article, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Lloyd F. Bitzer holds that rhetoric is mainly concerned with persuasive utterances. For Bitzer, the realm of necessity is nonrhetorical: “An exigence which cannot be modified is not rhetorical; thus, whatever comes about of necessity and cannot be changed—death, winter, and some natural disasters, for instance—are exigences to be sure, but they are not rhetorical” (1968, 6).One discerns the shape of rhetorical studies’ recoil from any serious reckoning with violence in Bitzer’s staking of the field to suasory discourse. In such an account, violence is nonrhetorical, nay, antirhetorical. Other rhetoricians have departed from Bitzer’s conclusions, though still beholden to many of his premises. In a recent special issue of the journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Jay Childers argues that inasmuch as “rhetoric is human inducement,” (2022, 4) then it follows that rhetorical violence is that which functions as a form of human inducement.Childers anticipates the objection that his definition fails to account for rhetorical inducements from nonhuman phenomena. Acknowledging that these exist, he nevertheless insists that “human inducement is worthy of its own area of study” (2022, 5). His response, however, begs the question in a manner characteristic of disciplinary justifications for research. For what is under contestation cannot be whether human inducement is worth study, but rather if a critic’s presuppositions foreclose insightful etiological routes of understanding; if their definitions naturalize the historical formations from which concepts are emergent; if their rhetorical style deadens imaginative and utopian leaps. Institutional rhetorical inquiry brings violence within its purview by defining violence as acts intended to transmit a message. But in doing so, it mystifies and naturalizes infrafigurations of violence entirely irreducible to communication—epochal ecological devastation; suppurating lesions wrought by imperial, colonial, and insurgent infrastructure; and, for that matter, gratuitous, irruptive, evental coups de force.Roiling beneath rhetorical studies’ monochrome prose—fewer disciplines are as given to the fetish of “effectiveness”—is a desire for a violence that is tractable. Necessity, however, cannot be wished away through compulsive recitations of contingency. This has always been true, perhaps, but it particularly cuts deeply in the epoch of the racial capitalocene. Here, it is foolhardy to be in denial. Racial capitalism necessarily leads to planetary destruction—its circuits of accumulation necessarily drive extinction; its circuits of reproduction necessarily engineer irreversible metabolic rifts; its circuits of exchange necessarily manufacture ruses of adaptation; its circuits of consumption necessarily stimulate toxic cascades. The upshot is just as ineluctable: any serious account of violence must, of necessity, imagine an insurgent abolition against racial capitalism.Analytic philosophy’s banal moralism, continental philosophy’s ecstatic messianism, rhetorical studies’ strategic instrumentalism—these are the nodal points from which a philosophy and rhetoric of violence bump up against its limits. “Violence is never the answer,” so goes the old liberal saw. “But it is a question” has been the inevitable response to liberal sanctimony. This forum suggests it may be neither. Rather, violence contours the very limits of enunciation.The articles gathered in this forum, each in its inimitable dialogic idiom, seek to trouble the limits of violence, such troubling understood in at least three senses. The first concerns the limits that violence exerts on faculties of human sensemaking and worldmaking, how, for example, the concepts and institutions for rendering violence intelligible are revealed to be inadequate or even violent in themselves. The second sense refers to forms of violence that stretch the outer limits of extremity, owing to their cruelty, intensity, and gratuitousness. The third concerns the limits of violence when taken up as a mechanism of world making and unmaking, for instance, practices and concepts that seek forms of living that are non- or anti-violent.Catherine Besteman examines the carceral sublime, the United States’s vast and elaborate punishment system. The kinds of violence that proliferate in the prison industrial complex are as quotidian as they are spectacular. Besteman focuses attention on a particularly insidious kind—the capricious cutting off of the imprisoned from anybody with whom they have made some relational connection. When I initially invited Besteman to write an essay for this forum, she planned to coauthor her essay with Leo Hylton, a long-time intellectual collaborator incarcerated in the Maine Department of Corrections Facilities. That plan in the end did not materialize due to a characteristically cruel and arbitrary decision by the prison authorities to break off all forms of communication between the two writers. Besteman’s essay, then, draws our attention to carceral violence as a structural atrocity not only vile in its scope, intensity, and mercuriality, but also for the manner in which it recursively curls back and strikes at those who would seek to understand its reach and texture.José G. Izaguirre III examines the vexatious solidus rhetoric/violence through the lens of coloniality. Such a lens shatters an oft-assumed narrowing of violence to individual acts. An ineliminably sociopolitical view of rhetoric/violence reveals that the term “nonviolence” is a misnomer. It misleads by characterizing antiviolence as an absence. As against this view, the refusal of violence, robustly understood as antiviolence, demonstrates it as a subversive, indeed revolutionary, form of worldmaking.Alison Yeh Cheung delves into how Asian American vocal performance—and thus, Asian American identity—is rendered impossible. Cheung seeks a nuanced engagement with Asian American subjectivities that can simultaneously register their subsumption in atmospheres of anti-Blackness while ruthlessly critiquing ruses of self-reflexivity that function to foreclose invention and reinvention. Ultimately, Cheung’s call is for a mode of attention that radically destabilizes a representational politics given to the racialization of sound.Kelly Happe and Allegro Wang seek to think with the French polymath Catherine Malabou. Malabou’s concept of plasticity has been extraordinarily generative across the humanities owing in part to its bringing into relief the imbrication of the biological and the symbolic, the neuronal and the mental, the brain and the self. Happe and Wang, however, take issue with Malabou’s eupeptic conceptualization of resilience. In basing it on the deflagration emergent from disaster, such a view occludes the weather and weathering of anti-Black violence. For this reason, Happe and Wang turn to the work of the thinker and writer Christina Sharpe. Her analytic of wake work proffers searing symbolic practices that disrupt and rupture the relentless ongoingness of slavery.Belinda Walzer pushes beyond a representational critique of violence in excavating the illegibility of everyday violence in discourses of human rights. Walzer starts with a critique of Rob Nixon’s influential notion of “slow violence.” Nixon calls for innovative representational techniques for drawing attention to the delayed effects of climate injustices. However, such a stance is unresponsive to the objection that the very mechanisms of recognition exceptionalize, anachronize, and efface everyday violence. Walzer argues that transnational feminism can speak to the multiscalar and multitemporal formations of violence in a way that does better justice to gendered and racialized violence.In our final essay, Michael Bernard-Donals turns to the topic of academic freedom. The last few years have witnessed relentless attacks on universities by right-wing movements. Bernard-Donals calls attention to these forms of institutional violence even as he advances the counterintuitive idea that academic freedom is in and of itself violent. His argument rests on the notion that the very faculty that academic freedom aims to secure—the capacity for critical deliberation—works precisely by unraveling the commonplaces around which the university coheres. His essay, then, invites us to tarry in the aporia of deliberation, which at once reveals our vulnerability and our relationality.You see the great indifference of the godsto these things that have happened,who begat us and are called our fathers,and look on such sufferings.What is to come no one can see,but what is here now is pitiable for usand shameful for them,but of all men hardest for himon whom this disaster has fallen.Maiden, do not stay in this house:you have seen death and many agonies,fresh and strangeand there is nothing here that is not Zeus. —Sophocles, Trachiniae 1266–781I initially met Megha Sharma Sehdev on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Our intellectual interests overlapped across an astonishing range of themes, including philosophical anthropology, the rhetoric of philosophy, postcolonial intellectual histories, Global South feminisms, law, and aesthetics.Megha wrote with devastating clarity on the texture of quotidian violence in India. When I proposed this forum on violence, she was the first person I immediately thought to invite. As we neared the deadline for the submission of essays, she wrote to tell me the essay she’d been writing for the forum had plunged her back to a traumatic past. Her memories, she added, had “thrown off” her relationship to academic analysis. I asked her if she wanted to Zoom. She said she wanted to finish the essay first. She’d call after she was done. Two weeks later, I received the news that Megha had passed away by suicide on August 17, 2023.In the theoretical dominant, violence carves an arc toward either redemption or abjection. Against this imaginary, Megha invites us to tarry in violence’s irresolutions, deferrals, interregnums. In her brilliant ethnography of women’s encounters with the judicial system in New Delhi, Megha writes that women who filed cases against their abusive partners found themselves suspended in an indeterminate temporality of endlessly deferred hearings. The law is not so much “a technology for decision-making,” as it is “coterminous with its ‘other,’ or everyday life” (Sehdev 2017, 8). But for Megha, the interminable duration of Indian law is not simply an absence, an inert zone in which nothing happens as complainants await justice. Rather, it is productive of various forms of intimacy—both familial and public—and generative of a bewildering array of artifacts, documents, and, wondrously, a stunningly beautiful unfoldment of material culture and artistry (Sehdev 2020).Megha had a luminous mind, a resplendent imagination, a heart for the crushed of the earth. “You have seen death and many agonies/fresh and strange/and there is nothing here that is not Zeus,” resounds a threnody in Sophocles’s Trachiniae, a keening as haunting for its uncontainable grief as for its uncanny sublimity. If the abiding hubris of imperial power is the desire for violence made pure instrumentality, that of the crushed of the earth make known an infraconstitutive invention. Here there is no theodicy, no stoicism, not even the ennoblements of tragedy. If this is a violence, it is invention split open, a wail for irreplaceable particularity, a remainder of endless solidarity.2

ABSTRACT This article makes a case for the contemporary relevance of Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of rhetoric and its further fulfillment through biosemiotics and pragmatist-inflected physiological feminisms. It situates itself in an era when rhetoric is undergoing conceptual change, with the social constructivism that guided much thinking since the 1970s supplanted in part by a family of postconstructivisms. In conversation with new materialist, affective, and biological strands of rhetorical theory, the article maps questions and risks involved in developing newer conceptions of rhetoric not limited to discourse, symbolic action, and exclusively human capacities. It argues that Peircean thinking provides resources for nonreductive understandings of how rhetoric emerges from life itself and is pluralistically mediated through the forming conditions and multimodal consequences that materially give it meaning. Contemporary biosemiotics and physiologically oriented feminisms like Teresa de Lauretis’s then move the promise of Peircean rhetoric closer to reality.

In this review of Frost, Kiernan, and Malley's collection Translingual Dispositions: Globalized Approaches to the Teaching of Writing, I propose that the collection fills a necessary gap of augmenting translingualism discourse globally and beyond the classroom. The contributors to Frost, Kiernan, and Malley's collection develop the theory of translingualism as an attitude, lived experience, an advocacy issue, and a classroom practice by showing a myriad of application sites for this concept. In so doing, the collection also demonstrates the messy operationalization and embodiment of translingualism in U.S. academic and non-U.S. academic settings.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research problem:</b> A considerable amount of scholarship has amassed over the last 20 years regarding the teaching of user experience (UX) design, but there has been no systematic attempt to review this literature. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1.What is the definition of UX pedagogy according to technical communication and adjacent fields? 2. What is the state of specific UX pedagogical approaches in technical communication and adjacent fields? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Our corpus contained 76 sources directly pertaining to the teaching of UX. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> The theoretical framework of this study marries rhetorical theory and critical thinking. The former provides technical communication literature reviews with keen discourse analysis and the latter offers objectivity to the evaluation. To use this framework, we sought sources using journals related to technical communication and large databases from adjacent fields, including the ACM digital library and IEEE Xplore. We completed our search using Google Scholar to ensure broad coverage. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results and conclusions:</b> Our review of sources revealed a variety of trends and a remarkably diverse conversation on UX, including various definitions of UX pedagogy, and a large variety of theoretical orientations, educational models, instructional approaches, industry influences, methods, and ethical concerns. From this diverse corpus, we hazard a unifying definition centered on teaching the UX process through hands-on approaches such as engaged learning. We close our article with recommendations for continuing to refine UX pedagogy in the future.

AbstractThis paper aims to discuss a well-known concept from argumentation theory, namely the principle of charity. It will show that this principle, especially in its contemporary version as formulated by Donald Davidson, meets with some serious problems. Since we need the principle of charity in any kind of critical discussion, we propose the way of modifying it according to the presupponendum—the rule written in the sixteenth century by Ignatius Loyola. While also corresponding with pragma-dialectical rules, it also provides additional content. This will be termed the dialectical principle of charity, and it offers a few steps to be performed during an argument in order to make sure that the participants understand each other well and are not deceived by any cognitive bias. The meaning of these results could be of great significance for argumentation theory, pragma-dialectics and the practice of public discourse as it enhances the principle of charity and makes it easier to apply in argumentation.

This essay conducts critical discourse analysis of website landing pages for community college English departments that have explicitly adopted Guided Pathways reforms. The analysis examines how the social practice of teaching English is recontextualized through discourse.

Based on the premise alone, Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen by political communication and mass media scholar Roderick P. Hart confronts an inconvenient truth that many U.S. academics are reluctant to acknowledge—Americans, a whole lot of them, like Donald Trump. As Hart explains, Trump and Us was written to help the left-leaning, academic crowd make sense of the 2016 presidential election, and since its publication in 2020, the book has only increased in relevance. Hart offers important takeaways for anyone interested in preserving American democracy, asking, “How could 62 million Americans—half the nation (or at least half of those who voted)—vote for Donald Trump?” (4). As Hart notes, this is essentially the same question at the center of Hillary Clinton's 2017 memoir What Happened, but Clinton's book offers a more personal, behind-the-scenes account of the leadup and aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. By comparison, Hart zooms out to gain understanding of the cultural environment from which a Trump presidency emerged. Rather than an investigation into what Trump's words led people to think about him, Hart focuses on how Trump made people—especially those who voted for him—feel and what those feelings mean for American politics.For those familiar with Hart's work, it is no surprise that he turns to computer-aided analysis of a large corpus of political texts to dissect and compare Trump's words to those of other political figures. With the help of the programs DICTION 7.0, WordSmith, and AntConc, Hart situates Trump's rhetoric in reference to a database of 70,000 U.S. texts including “speeches, debates, ads, print coverage, broadcast transcripts letters to the editor, polling interviews, and social media exchanges” (27). The book presents his findings organized around six public “feelings”: conflicted, ignored, trapped, besieged, tired, and resolute. For example, in the section “Feeling Conflicted,” Hart describes the 2016 campaign as being fairly normal, if not better than average, in terms of democratic engagement. At first glance, Trump may appear to be “the least mysterious political candidate in human history” (11). However, Hart explains that to dismiss Trump as a political anomaly is to miss something critical to the American electorate and by extension its democracy—something that politicians like Hillary Clinton do not seem to understand. But Trump? He gets it. Americans, particularly those attracted to Trump's rhetoric, appreciate candor. And for the same reason that many find Trump farcical—his lack of decorum, his unfiltered communications, and his incoherent strategy—nearly just as many find him refreshing. Hart calls him an “emotional revolutionary” in his willingness to put his own feelings on display and take seriously the feelings of his supporters. Trump puts words to emotions, or, to put it in current meme-speak, Trump “says the quiet part out loud.” For many Americans in 2016, this out-loud emoting was at least entertaining and, ultimately, persuasive.Hart's second section on “Feeling Ignored” expands on the theme of Trump's ability to engage an audience through simple language and a performative populism. By comparing word size, word variety, words-per-speech, and self-references, Hart finds Trump to be verbose, using more words-per-speech than other candidates. Yet the words he uses are short, simple, and all about himself. The result is a unique rhetorical style that generates feelings of energy, simplicity, and dominance; these were compelling for many voters who previously felt unheard and unnoticed. The same rhetorical characteristics that cause many academics to cringe—his rejection of facts and accountability in favor of anecdotes and hearsay—made many voters identify with Trump, feeling like he was one of them. Through his simple and unfiltered communication style, Trump connected with voters who were put off by the more nuanced, academic, and comparatively elitist rhetoric of the political left. By focusing on “Trump-the-empath” rather than “Trump-the-man,” Hart demonstrates how Trump-the-showman turned feelings into votes. In the latter chapters, Hart details and analyzes how Trump used stories, novelty, and spontaneity to arouse voters’ passions and manipulate the media.While this reviewer found it convincing, some traditional rhetoricians might take issue with Hart's methods. Social scientists of political communication, on the other hand, are likely to embrace his quantitative approach. Either way, one should not overlook his contributions to rhetorical and political theory as well as to the less formal discourse that occurs within the halls of academia. What Hart's work tells us is that Trump is using a presidential style that, whether we find it appealing or abhorrent, resonates with many because it makes them feel important, included, and excited about politics. If the 2022 midterm elections are any indication, it does seem as though former supporters are beginning to distance themselves from Trump (the man), but Trumpism as a rhetorical strategy may have staying power. Trump's peculiar brand of rhetorical inclusion has proven to be an effective tool for building a community of loyal followers and will no doubt be used by future rhetors to do the same. It is critical that we, both as academics and citizens, understand these strategies and employ them to better ends.In the first pages of the book, Hart presents his most important claim: Trump is iconically American. While he may be grandiose, insecure, devoid of aesthetic taste, historically illiterate, and ethically dodgy, to label and dismiss him as anti-American is to misunderstand something about ourselves. Trump may not be the best of us, but he represents the part of our collective identity that we must grapple with if we want to progress as a democracy. Trump and Us is a self-analysis of sorts, raising important questions about who we are as a country and what will be necessary for the survival of American democracy. Unfortunately, Hart offers few recommendations for a path forward. Although he calls for journalists to hold themselves to higher standards and for voters to learn to listen better, Hart admits this book is only meant to be a first step. So, perhaps this is where other scholars and strategists must pick up the baton. Political strategists might ask how candidates can begin to use some of the positive aspects of Trump's rhetoric to be more inclusive, for instance. Critical cultural scholars and political philosophers might weigh in on how to do so ethically and with an eye toward social justice. Scholars of psychology and religious studies may see overlap in terms of groupthink or cult formation; and educators can find ways to increase our capacity for listening.Hart has rekindled a critical conversation to which all academics interested in politics, communication, public address, and indeed the future of American democracy have a duty to contribute. What Trump and Us reveals is our collective American identity reflected in Trump's words. Whether we choose to see beyond the cracks in our self-image or focus only on the good is up to each of us. Either choice will have collective consequences regardless of future White House occupants.

Though persistent failure of clinical trials poses a challenge for multiple conditions, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is especially difficult to study because of its heterogeneity, complexity, unpredictable outcomes, and resistance to definition and classification. This article analyzes published discourse among researchers about the failure of two large trials for progesterone as a traumatic brain injury (TBI) treatment. The analysis specifically examines how researchers respond to trial failure and how TBI functions as a diagnostic construct. I draw on theories of kairos and multiple ontologies to argue that, while evidence-based medicine constructs TBI as a coherent entity in order to study it through randomized controlled trials, this entity breaks down in practice into multiple temporalities and spaces that are not sufficiently coordinated.

During the summer of 1962, news media brought the issue of drug regulation to the public’s attention in a pivotal way when broadcasting journalists reported on Sherri Chessen Finkbine’s decision to terminate her pregnancy after taking sleeping pills containing thalidomide in her first trimester. In this analysis, I draw from New York Times and Arizona Republic coverage of Finkbine’s legal case to demonstrate how the media coverage surrounding Finkbine’s story supported through discursive justification the extensive regulation of women’s bodies in subsequent legislative initiatives. I argue that three argumentative warrants dominated the mediated narratives put forward by this coverage to situate women as: (1) inconsistent and hysterical; (2) overtly dependent on others for guidance and support; and (3) incapable of providing concrete cautionary counsel. Ultimately, I argue that these specific, mediated warrants functioned to define and contextualize regulation and regulatory discourse in the context of women’s health in the years to follow, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade in the twenty-first century.

Time and temporality are variously conceptualized and employed ubiquitously in both theoretical and empirical studies of education and literacy. Since education and learning are inherently defined as change over time, any theory of learning or education makes implicit or explicit claims about the nature of time. In this exploratory conceptual review / theoretical essay, temporal discourse analysis is used to identify the temporal claims operating in six studies drawing on six different theoretical framings: (1) predictive theorizing (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002); (2) developmental theorizing (Sulzby, 1985); (3) sociocultural theorizing (Gonzalez et al., 1995); (4) critical literacy theorizing (Jones & Enriquez, 2009); (5) critical race theory (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001); and (6) queer theorizing (Schey, 2023). Each theorization brings theoretical, methodological, and practical implications related to how research might be conducted, what changes across time, how time operates, and what might be tracked across time. Theorizations of time have substantive implications for what happens in classrooms and how what happens is interpreted by teachers, students, and researchers.

ABSTRACTThis article explores rhetorics connected to the 1918 graduation of Korea’s first women’s college. The study examines textual and visual archives from the early 1900s to 1965, drawing on scholarship in colonial studies, Korean studies, history, and rhetoric. I argue that Japanese, Koreans, and US missionaries competed at this college’s 1918 commencement to define and take credit for the school’s work. I show how weather constrained Koreans and missionary leaders as they leveraged visual rhetorics for divergent objectives. I analyze how the Korean valedictorian employed the English language and US cultural references to compose anticolonial mimetic rhetorics. Finally, I examine how Japanese and US spatial rhetorics worked to displace Koreans and erase their history. This study suggests how traditional textual sources might be complicated by considering mundane meteorological, sartorial, linguistic, and spatial details. The article also seeks to demonstrate the importance of broadening our field’s languages and regions of study.KEYWORDS: Colonialismcommencement rhetoricsmimesisspatial rhetoricsvisual rhetorics AcknowledgementsI thank the reviewers for encouraging and challenging suggestions that advanced and clarified my arguments. My thanks to the RSQ editor and staff for their patient support. I am deeply grateful to experts in archives, libraries, and museums in Korea and the US who generously located and helped me secure permission to use textual and visual primary sources—this project would have been impossible without them: to 손현지 Son Hyunji at the Ewha Archives and 서은진 Seo Eunjin at the Ewha Museum for years of invaluable assistance; to Candace Reilly, Manager of Special Collections at the Drew University Library; to Alex Parrish at Drew University’s United Methodist Archives and History Center; to Frances Lyons at the United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History; and to the staff at Research Information Services at the National Library of Korea.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1 “梨花 學堂 卒業式 [이화학당 졸업식] (Ewha Academy graduation).” Here and throughout, I have modernized the obsolete vowel • to its modern equivalents (toㅏ when it appears alone and to ㅔ or ㅐ when it appears as part of another vowel).2 This and all translations are mine, except for the titles of Korean-language works in the bibliography.3 For example, see Finnegan “Doing Rhetorical History” and “Studying Visual Modes”; Gries, Still Life; Hariman and Lucaites.4 Campt; Coronado.5 See especially Hyaeweol Choi, “Visual” and Heejeong Sohn; also, Clark, Missionary Photography.6 See 김윤 Kim Yun; Chung; Hyaeweol Choi, New Women and Gender; Yoo.7 Quoted in Bordelon 511.8 Kim Hwallan, Grace 44.9 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim 116; McKenzie 292–93.10 In 1952, for instance, Frantz Fanon famously observed the rhetorical power of seeing Martinicians return from France wearing European-style clothing and speaking European languages (18, 20).11 In rhetoric, see Enoch, Domestic 9–10; Jerry Won Lee and Jackie Jia Lou; Eun Young Lee 2. In other disciplines, see Qian; Wright; and Yeoh.12 See Hsia for Japanese architecture in Taiwan.13 See, for example, Fuller on Italians’ “dehistoricizing” of Ethiopia (401–02). Fuller cites Nezar AlSayyad’s characterization of this phenomenon as a colonialist “myth of the clean slate, the need for dominance to wipe out and rewrite history” (416 n. 17).14 https://sunrise.maplogs.com/seoul_south_Korea.84.html?year=1918.15 See the records at the Korea Meteorological Administration: https://data.kma.go.kr/data/grnd/selectAsosRltmList.do?pgmNo=36.16 Many thanks to 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum for extensive help interpreting this picture. To help me establish the compass directions of the photograph, she identified the buildings on a historic campus map (https://www.ewha.ac.kr/ewhaen/intro/history-campus.do). Main Hall in the foreground (which no longer survives) was southeast of Simpson Memorial in the background. Students are therefore staring nearly due east. The sun appears to be shining directly in their faces, and there is almost no shadow cast from the Simpson Memorial roof on its walls, suggesting that the sun was still somewhat low in its ascent toward the zenith and that this was sometime in the morning. My conjectures are based on the assumption that we can take the caption on Figure 2 literally and conclude that “at commencement” means 27 March 1918.17 Main Hall, on the left, was the campus’s first Western-style building, completed in 1899 (Conrow 6). Simpson Memorial, on the right, had been completed in 1915, just three years before this photograph (Conrow 14).18 박인덕 Bak Indeok/Induk Pahk recalls her winter clothing at Ewha in the 1910s: “In the winter we wore padded blouses made from ten to twelve pieces of cotton or silk for the outer part and seven pieces for the lining” (47).19 In Figure 6, women wearing caps are visible immediately stage left of the open church door and through the top and bottom window panes stage right of the door. According to 김희정 Kim Hee Jung, traditional fur caps including pungcha and 남바위 nambawi fell out of fashion after the mid-1920s, but both should still have been a viable option for Ewha students in 1918, had students been permitted to wear them (ii, 131).20 See Clemente for a study of the ways women students and school leaders engaged public perceptions about dress, higher education, and gender roles in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.21 Kim Seok-hee (11); Pahk (18); 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim (54).22 Kim Hwallan Rural 37; Grace 97; “女學生 (Problems)” 13; 김윤 Kim Yun 40, 50–52.23 Classical Chinese: 內鮮一体, Korean: 내선 일체, “[Japan] and Korea, one body.” For an overview of the campaign, see Uchida 137. On “cultural genocide,” see Clark, Living 197, 210. See Yoonmi Lee for a recent study of how convincing this campaign was to idealistic young Japanese elementary school teachers tasked with implementing it in rural Korean schools.24 Kang 111.25 Personal correspondence with 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum, 30 November 2021.26 김윤 Kim Yun 51–53; 김활란 Kim Hwallan, 그빛속의 [Little life] 209; Grace 97. See 윤주리 Youn Ju Ri 8 for images of students wearing mombbe at Ewha and elsewhere; see 김윤 Kim Yun 51 for images at another women’s school.27 Without further evidence, of course, these are speculations. It is possible that participants of that year’s commencement were unconscious of any politicization of color, although this ignorance would have been despite government proclamations. But these ideas were a growing component of Japanese assimilation-minded colonial discourse—and Korean resistance to it.28 In addition to Kohl and Fanon cited above, see (among the extensive literature on mimicry) Bhabha; Ferguson.29 See the discussion of Japanese restrictions on missionary schools in notes 39 and 40. See also Marker et al. 40–41 for Ewhaians’ struggles to obey Japanese language regulations in 1913.30 See, for example, the colonial government’s 1920 English-language publication Manual of Education in Chosen [“Chosen” is the English spelling of the Japanese term for Korea at the time], especially pages 60–61; see Heé on similar Japanese propaganda relating to Taiwan.31 For example, see Enoch, Domestic, chapter 3.32 In addition to the Manual of Education in Chosen mentioned above, the Japanese colonial government published the English-language Annual Reports on Reforms and Progress in Chosen between 1907 and 1945, propagandizing its rule of Korea: see Dudden 20; Grunow 86–87.33 Kim Hwallan, Grace 38.34 “국내 최초의 여학사들, 조국의 미래를 위해 헌신하다!” Ewha University Blog, 19 November 2012, https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.naver?isHttpsRedirect=true&blogId=the_ewha&logNo=20171598761.35 See Kwon; Choi Gender, chapter 7.36 I have so far been unable to locate their names—a fact that underscores Koreans’ marginalization.37 Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, “Mission Photograph Album—Korea #5 Introductory Page,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed 22 June 2023, https://catalog.gcah.org/images/items/show/10841.38 Harris delivered words of “commendation and encouragement” at commencement (Frey et al. 48).39 In its first decade following annexation, the Japanese government forbade the teaching of Christianity at missionary schools and required them to achieve stringent certification standards—actions that led to the closure of nearly 50% of such institutions by 1919 (Yoo 62–64).40 See Andrew Hall for Sekiya’s role in formulating Japanese educational policies in Korea. In 1913, Ewha leaders had described Sekiya as having “been most kind to us. He has been very much interested in our school and we are sure after talking with him a number of times that nothing will be done to hinder us in our … work” (Marker et al. 41). Given the broader US-Japanese conflicts that had defined the first years of Japan’s occupation—in addition to the educational conflicts described in footnote 39, the Japanese had imprisoned a missionary during the so-called Conspiracy Case just a year earlier (Clark, “Surely” 50; Jun 51–58)—it is tempting to read this statement as masking anxieties that had led to the fear of the government “hinder[ing]” Ewha’s work. Whatever their real feelings, Ewha’s leaders and Sekiya evidently kept up a working relationship for at least two years until he delivered his speech in 1915.41 Nordlund provides a recent study.42 See 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun 96 for a map.43 For studies of Gojong’s reforms in Jeongdong district (where Ewha Hakdang and the First Methodist Church were located), see김현숙 Kim Hyeonsuk and 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun. In English, see Clark, Living 13; and Henderson (although this source is very dated).44 In 1912, for example, missionary William Elliot Griffis (admittedly a Japanophile) expressed his contempt for the common one-storey Korean buildings, which he derided as “the squatty native structures in use from king to coolie” (209).45 In 1954, Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim remembered Gojong’s death as murder by poisoning by the Japanese (102). In their 2011 study of Gojong’s death, 이해웅 Hai-Woong Lee and 김훈 Hoon Kim “assume that the possibility of poison murdering is high” (125, 132). In her own 2011 study, 윤소영 Yoon So-young disagreed. Recent fictional depictions also reveal the continuing importance of Gojong’s death in South Korean thought and culture—see his implied poisoning by a Korean collaborator with Japan in the film 덕혜옹주 The Last Princess (2016).46 For one example of this translation into English, see Clark, “Surely” 53. For a modern, English translation of the full declaration, see Han-Kyo Kim. An original document can be viewed at https://www.heritage.go.kr/heri/cul/culSelectDetail.do?pageNo=1_1_1_1&sngl=Y&ccbaCpno=4411106640100.47 Clark, “Surely” 53.48 Clark, “Surely” 53; Kim Hwallan, Grace 40.49 On US colonial rule in the Philippines, see Jimenez. See Desser for a rhetorical study of the United States in Hawaiʻi, and Enoch, Refiguring, chapter 3, on US schools for Native Americans.

This essay initiates a critical conversation about (in)fertility in academia. We argue that four patterns of discourse exacerbate the challenges for women and trans* academics struggling to conceive while navigating so-called “biological clocks” and “tenure clocks” simultaneously: conflicting rhetorics regarding egg quantity and quality in relation to the typical age one starts a tenure-track job; sexist and transphobic rhetorics of fear-mongering in medical and academic settings; rhetorics of silence surrounding the impact of miscarriage, which often accompanies infertility; and cisheterosexist institutional discrimination in the face of exorbitant treatment costs. We use feminist “strategic contemplation” to reflect critically on these patterns of discourse in relation to our lived experiences of (in)fertility. In doing so, we validate those struggling, educate those who are not, and seek a more just reproductive landscape for academic women and trans* people whose clocks are ticking.

I propose Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) as an approach for understanding the discursive and material implications of technical documents in distant sites. I provide a historical vignette of MCDA and exemplify how technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers can critically engage with distant sites through MCDA by analyzing materials about GhanaPostGPS, a geolocation technology. I conclude by discussing limitations of MCDA – access to archives – and propose the creation of crowdsourced technical documentation archives.

This pair of complementary books, Debasing Political Rhetoric: Dissing Opponents, Journalists, and Minorities in Populist Leadership Communication together with Political Debasement: Incivility, Contempt, and Humiliation in Parliamentary and Public Discourse, charts a comprehensive and highly informative review of such subjects as impoliteness, incivility and political debasement in the contemporary democracies consistently remaining under the threat of opportunistic strongmen.While the former collection concentrates on statements of specific national leaders in the public realm (even taking into consideration the politicians' informal activities when these statements are voiced), the latter is devoted to analyzing the language of selected political leaders, such as Donald Trump (USA), the recently re-elected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan, together with the former presidents Rodrigo Roa Duterte (Philippines), and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil).The latter volume also covers political discourses of parliamentary exchanges, including Spanish politicians' adversity in the parliamentary as well as social media setting resulting in an increased level of incivility (Chapter 2).Chapter 4 traces incivility in the case of British politicians, with a special emphasis on a sample of five (deputy) Prime Ministers addressing the parliament.The focus of Chapter 5 is how irony, ridicule and politeness (or lack thereof) are recruited as frequent rhetorical tools by Japanese politicians sarcastically addressing specific social groups.In Chapter 6, the study interrogates the manners in which the derogatory language of Chinese leaders has changed after Mao Zedong.The contributions also include Hindu political context (Chapter 7) showing the extent to which Indian culture supplements the literal denotations of class, origin and gender, thus influencing the overall level of political debasement.In Chapter 8 the analysis

Guided by argumentation schema theory, we conducted five psychological studies in the United States and China on arguments about vaccination. Study 1 replicated research about arguments on several topics, finding that agreement judgments are weighted toward claims, whereas quality judgments are weighted toward reasons. However, consistent with recent research, when this paradigm was extended to arguments about vaccination (Study 2), claims received more weight than reasons in judgments about agreement and quality. Studies 3 and 4 were conducted in the United States and China on how people process counterarguments against anti-vaccination assertions. Rebuttals did not influence agreement but played a role in argument quality judgments. Both political position (in the United States) and medical education (in China) predicted differences in argument evaluation. Bad reasons lowered agreement (Study 5), especially among participants studying health care. Political polarization apparently heightens the impact of claim side in the argumentation schema, likely to the detriment of public discourse.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> There is a growing need for Chinese state-owned enterprises (CSOEs) to utilize Twitter, as an effective communicative tool in the professional business context, to build a credible image to the global community. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Little attention has been paid to measuring the discursive construction of message credibility through corporate Twitter. Therefore, based on the theoretical insights of message credibility from existing literature on communication and information science, our study has conceptually developed a broad framework to measure the message credibility of CSOEs’ Twitter discourse from two general aspects (content and form), four separate levels ({thematic}, {intrinsic}, {contextual}, and {representational}), and nine specific dimensions (<capability>, <morality>, <objectivity>, <authority>, <accuracy>, <informativeness>, <timeliness>, <consistency>, and <persuasiveness>). With the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and corpus tools (MAT, CLA, TAALES, GAMET, SÉANCE, and TAACO), the framework has been practically operationalized by a total of 62 discursive features, including 18 content-based themes (thematic features) and 44 form-based features. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What themes do CSOEs develop, and how do they express these themes to establish message credibility in their tweets? 2. Which dimensions of message credibility are significantly highlighted in CSOEs’ tweets? 3. Which enterprises establish the highest message credibility in their tweets? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> We collected tweets during the year 2020 from the official Twitter accounts of 15 CSOEs and applied our operationalized framework to conduct nine separate One-way ANOVAs, a principal component analysis (PCA), and a mean-value based descriptive statistics comparison, respectively. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> First, CSOEs developed themes including strength, power, cooperation, and legitimacy, among others, and used discursive features including nominalizations, mentions/@ , word length, time adverbials, hashtags/#, and semantic overlaps, among others when expressing these themes to establish message credibility. Second, CSOEs significantly highlighted the <capability>, <authority>, <informativeness>, and <consistency> dimensions of message credibility in their tweets. Last, China National Machinery Industry Co. (Sinomach), China Datang Co. (CDC), China Railway Engineering Co. (CREC), and China State Construction Engineering Co. (CSCEC) were found to have established the highest message credibility in their tweets. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Discussion and conclusion:</b> Our study may be the first to generate an NLP-cum-corpus-operationalized framework to quantitatively measure the discursive realization of message credibility in the context of business communication on social media. It also provides some practical insights into how relevant business professions can utilize certain discursive resources to establish message credibility in the B2C communication on social media.

AbstractIn ‘The making of argumentation theory’ van Eemeren and van Haaften describe the contributions made to the five components of a full-fledged research program of argumentation theory by four prominent approaches to the discipline: formal dialectics, rhetoric/pragmalinguistics, informal logic, and pragma-dialectics. Most of these approaches do not contribute to all components, but to some in particular. Starting from the pragma-dialectical view of the relationship between dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness – the crucial issue in argumentation theory – van Eemeren and van Haaften explain the positions taken by representatives from the approaches discussed and indicate where they differ from the pragma-dialectical approach. It transpires that approaches focusing on dialectical reasonableness are, next to pragma-dialectics, formal dialectics and informal logic; approaches focusing on rhetorical effectiveness are, next to pragma-dialectics, rhetoric and pragmalinguistics, and the informal logician Tindale. When it comes to the relationship between dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness, some interest in it is shown in rhetoric and pragmalinguistics, but only in pragma-dialectics and in Tindale’s work is it a real focus. The main difference between Tindale’s view and the pragma-dialectical view is that in pragma-dialectics the decisive role in deciding about reasonableness is assigned to a code of conduct for reasonable argumentative discourse and in Tindale’s approach this role is assigned to Tindale’s interpretation of the Perelmanian universal audience.

AbstractConditional constructions (if–then) enable us to express our thoughts about possible states of the world, and they form an important ingredient for our reasoning and argumentative capabilities. Different types and argumentative uses have been distinguished in the literature, but their applicability to actual language use is rarely evaluated. This paper focuses on the reliability of applying classifications of connections between antecedents and consequents of conditionals to discourse, and three issues are identified. First, different accounts produce incompatible results when applied to language data. Second, a discrepancy between theory and data was observed in previous studies, which sometimes discard existing classifications for being detached from actual language use. Finally, language users construct various cognitive relations between clauses of conditionals without being able to rely on overt linguistic features, which poses problems for the annotation of conditionals in argumentation and discourse. This paper addresses these issues by means of comparing theoretical types and actual uses of conditionals, by inspecting the dispersion of types in natural-language corpora, and by conducting an experiment in which the inter-rater reliability of classifications was assessed. The results show that the reliability of classifications of conditionals when applied to language data is low. With respect to the aforementioned issues, different classifications produced incompatible results, a discrepancy between theory and data was indeed observed, and low reliability scores indicated a largely interpretative nature of types of conditionals. Given these results, suggestions for the enhancement of reliability in corpus studies of conditionals and beyond are provided to enhance future classification design.

Reviewed by: The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic by Stephen Howard Browne Tom F. Wright Stephen Howard Browne, The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. 229 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08727-6. Nostalgia about early American history typically comes in a few familiar forms. At the more popular end of work on the Revolutionary Period, there is no shortage of longing glances towards the struggles and causes of that era rooted in attraction to seemingly clear-cut ideological certainties. In a different way, intellectual historians might often seem to envy a period in which men of ideas of the quality of Adams and Jefferson led the nation. In a more tragic key, chroniclers of the continent's indigenous histories are rightly elegiac for the moment before entire worlds were destroyed. Stephen Howard Browne's The First Inauguration occupies another distinct category. It is a category that for obvious reasons is flourishing in our particular political moment and is of particular relevance to a Rhetorica audience. We might call this mode that of "public sphere melancholy." His book claims to speak on behalf of "readership concerned with the tenor of political discourse in our own time … [lamenting] the passing of an age when citizens deliberated as citizens, with speeches, not tweets" (4). To that audience he offers an engaging and readable study of the circumstances and significance of George Washington's passage through the USA to delivery of his first speech as president. But this is not an escapist backward glance. For while it expresses a great deal of wistfulness for the world of the Founders, it is an optimistic book, bringing to life the rhetorical world of the early republic in order to offer readers what Browne calls "vital resources for the reanimation of civic life" (2). In a familiar procedure, his book reads an entire era through the lens of a single speech. In this case, the opening address of Washington's presidency, delivered on 30 April 1789. But what is more striking and ultimately more successful about this book is how it casts its gaze more widely, [End Page 448] devoting as much time to the ritual procession of Washington from his home in Virginia through to Manhattan. This tour is a narrative device that allows for a vivid panorama of a slice of the early republic. Browne brings a novelistic verve to this capsule history, evoking the streets, buildings and rooms and the other landscapes through which Washington moved. Memorable instances here include the political microclimates of Philadelphia and Trenton and the free Black community of New York. With clear relish, he also recreates the parades and banquets and toasts that the almost-president was forced to endure and the many speeches he reluctantly delivered. These chapters are aimed at a broad audience, involving plentiful vignettes and asides that will be of use to general readers, even if unnecessary for the book's scholarly readers. Rather than incidental, however, the context makes the case that rhetorical analysis must always be grounded in granular thick description. If only all contexts were as well-sketched as this. By the time the book turns to the rhetorical analysis of the speech itself, a lot of the key concepts have been well-established. Browne has used his account of the journey to set up the live contexts that animated the key term that he will go on to address. The argument turns on Washington's attempt to "invent" the modern republican state through his framing of its stakes and its values. As in Browne's previous works on Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson, he is a thoughtful and insightful theoretically informed textual analyst, drawing out the complex themes and salient ideas from what has often been dismissed as a rather forgettable speech. He also offers an interesting survey of the speech's afterlives, examining in turn the anniversary years of 1839, 1889, 1939, 1989. In all of this, the nostalgia for an eloquent and dignified form of statecraft is often justified. However, nostalgia can be as wearisome as any banquet. As the analysis...