This special issue questions current notions and practices of "professionalism" in TPC. Professionalism – whether an identity, a status, or a set of behaviors or conventions – continues to be constructed in white supremacist, ableist, heteronormative, and classist frameworks. The authors in this issue work to reimagine what professionalism means in our classrooms, workplaces, and communities by critiquing the professional practices that uphold oppressive and exploitative structures, inspiring just action and new futures.

The Sloyd Training School, an early twentieth-century private school for teachers in Boston, attempted to legitimize the Sloyd method of handiwork. Specifically, its Alumni Association's publication Sloyd Record brought together educators across the country to make a case for Sloyd's relevancy and impact on the academic and professional development of students, particularly students who were working poor or receiving educations in non-traditional settings. Its contributors painted Sloyd as a form of knowledge and a resource, as a literacy, and their rhetorical effectiveness was predicated upon Sloyd's ability to be painted as such in its far-reaching effects and comprehensiveness.

Grace and Lace Letter was a newsletter by and for transfeminine evangelicals in the 1990s. This article explores the rhetorical approaches contributors used to bridge these seemingly contradictory identities. Through a recontextualization and historicization of Biblical passages and an employment of a "created this way" discourse, these contributors created possibilities for an evangelical transfeminine identity and advocated for trans acceptance within their evangelical communities. However, these strategies also reveal complicity with other marginalizing discourses. Thus, this article considers the rhetorical processes through which transgender religious identities are constructed and the limitations of such approaches.

Articles in the Spring 2024 issue of Reflections engage with the concepts of positionality and collaboration. The authors in this issue recognize their own positionalities as researchers, and they also interrogate the interactions between their own positionalities and those of their respective institutions and communities. As community-engaged researchers, we should consistently recognize how… Continue reading Introduction: Positionality and Collaboration in Community-Engaged Research

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Background:</i></b> Technologies are increasingly being deployed in facilitating participatory healthcare. Global governments developed a variety of digital platforms, such as mobile contact tracing apps, to help the public navigate risks and uncertainties during the COVID-19 pandemic. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Literature review:</i></b> Contrary to normative approaches to information design (IxD), the global spread of COVID-19 revealed the need for an alternative design framework (i.e., concept-driven design) to help develop mobile health (mHealth) apps that can support a broader portrayal of information value in IxD. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research questions:</i></b> 1. In response to COVID-19, what affordances are prioritized by the designers of these global mHealth apps? What do these priorities tell us about design intents and information value? 2. What interpretive framework can we use to understand mHealth designers’ intent across different geopolitical contexts? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research methodology:</i></b> We captured screenshots of the three apps in the US, India, and China, as well as a website in Ghana. Using touchpoints as the unit of analysis, we conducted an inventory and affinity mapping to visualize the architecture of each app and categorize touchpoints based on their affordances. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Results:</i></b> The comparison of apps across countries displays shared and divergent priorities in their touchpoints, affordances, and information depth. We developed an interpretive framework for understanding mHealth design intent across numerous contexts—Common Interpretive Framework for Design Analysis (CIFDA)—incorporating both linear analysis and recursive analysis of touchpoints, affordances, and depth. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Conclusions:</i></b> Touchpoints in mHealth applications can be designed, but they can also be measured and analyzed, and they can in return help us understand the designer's intent and expected user experience.

I last heard from Dr. Lawrence about two weeks before she died when she responded to my request for her expertise: Dr. Neefe, Attached are my comments on the 2 surveys. I'm concerned about the length of the POE survey in particular...It's long and I'm assuming if people are responding to this this [sic] on their way out of the building, they are not going to give it the careful thought and reflection that many of the questions require. But maybe I have the context of the survey wrong... I hope my comments are helpful --- this is such an exciting project, Halcyon

This article describes five first-year writing instructors’ experiences with personalizing shared curriculum across three different course delivery formats (face-to-face, hybrid, online). The data is drawn from teaching journals that the co-authors, a non-tenure track, part-time Lecturer and a tenured Writing Program Administrator, and three Graduate Student Teaching Associates completed throughout Fall 2022. The findings illustrate both benefits and drawbacks related to shared curriculum: discussing and troubleshooting curriculum in a community of practice is highly valuable, but separating course delivery from course design is challenging. In our study, those challenges manifested as disconnects between course content and disciplinary identity, as well as personal feelings of failure. On the other hand, the need to personalize shared curriculum across multiple delivery formats proved productive, especially when instructors used asynchronous online materials as a starting point to develop hybrid and face-to-face lesson plans. Ultimately, we advocate for more conversations about how writing programs can support contingent faculty as they personalize shared curriculum through both course delivery and design, and we offer an example of a successful community of practice that revises shared curriculum in response to community members’ experiences with teaching in multiple modalities.

In Organs for Sale: Bioethics, Neoliberalism, and Public Moral Deliberation, Gillespie examines human organ debates to critique neoliberalism's predominance in and preemption of public moral deliberation. Although organ sales have been previously analyzed by economists and philosophers, Gillespie employs a unique rhetorical lens to discern the positions, justifications, and typical lines of argument representative of each camp. This distinction allows Gillespie to hone in on the argumentative dynamics of public advocates and construct a thorough overview of the debate. The rhetorical landscape is positioned as an exchange between two main camps: the market advocates, who rely on the “autonomy, efficiency, and consistency” allotted by markets, and the altruism advocates, who insist that “virtue, justice, and civic community” are better norms with which to guide the exchange of organs (196–197). This debate is framed in the terms of neoliberalism, a political theory that “asserts the centrality and priority of individual rights, marketization, and free markets in human well-being.” (18) Gillespie argues that the expansion and resonance of neoliberal rhetoric weaken public morality by shrinking the civic duty to deliberate, relegating moral deliberation entirely to supposedly neutral, amoral market forces.In Sections 1 and 2, Gillespie outlines the current organ donation policy and conducts a rhetorical analysis of the main arguments, tropes, keywords, testimonials, horror stories, and urban legends that each camp deploys. The altruistic camp, whose position is reflected in current U.S. law, argues that altruism is “inspirational,” “enacts justice,” and “promotes and performs civic community” (59). The case for the altruistic system is undergirded by an emphasis on civic virtue, an “attitude” that needs to be cultivated and publicized to increase organ supply (55). Official stories, like those on OrganDonor.gov, feature testimonials of organ recipients and public service announcements meant to inspire others to donate. Celebrity organ recipient testimonials, such as those of Alonzo Mourning, Steve Jobs, and Tracy Morgan, give voice to the altruistic system and tend to garner more mainstream attention. Fictional accounts, including films, television shows, and novels, also contribute, albeit in artistic or dramatized ways, to the organ debate. Social media campaigns, either for publicity or crowdfunding, play a similar role in characterizing donors and recipients. These various forms coalesce into a rhetoric of altruism that promotes “a particular view of the virtuous citizen,” who contributes to the organ deficit through the selfless act of donation (51).Market advocates, whom Gillespie contrasts with the altruists, seek to persuade the public that financial compensation for human organs, either through a regulated market or through incentivization, “is rational, efficient, and consistent with public values” (60). Here too, Gillespie conducts a rhetorical analysis of the prominent stories told and language used by market advocates. The horror stories of botched black-market surgeries and deceitful medical malpractice are used ubiquitously by market advocates, implying that a regulated, transparent market would eliminate illicit sales (60, 66). Market advocates also argue that the altruistic system is already undermined by an otherwise thriving market in body parts—like sperm, ova, and plasma—and in the thousands of dollars paid to doctors and medical personnel for transplants. Stories of willing buyers in the United States and of desperate sellers in economically impoverished areas testify to the existence of a market, ostensibly whether altruism advocates like it or not. These arguments, often oriented toward “choice” and “transparency,” make the case for an organ market on the neoliberal premise that it would maintain autonomy, efficiency, and consistency with current practices (83).In Sections 3 and 4, Gillespie crystallizes his critique of neoliberalism, first by providing an overview of the pluralistic dilemma of liberal democracy. Pluralistic democracy demands that “ethically diverse” members of society reconcile their moral doctrines through public deliberation, a perpetual “tension” emblematic of the “cooperative search” for the good life (214). For Gillespie, the quality of contemporary public discourse regarding the morality of the sale of human organs resembles a limp rope rather than a tension. The reason, he argues, is that the supposedly neutral market has become a “default” setting that preempts moral deliberation altogether (177). The neoliberal predominance of the “Civic Restraint Principle,” best known by the colloquial maxim “You do you, and I'll do me,” centers individualism as the essential ethic (99).Dumping the burden of moral deliberation onto the Civic Restraint Principle does not make us principled, Gillespie argues; it makes us pragmatic. This is not to say that neoliberalism is necessarily immoral. Gillespie writes to reinvigorate a public deliberation that “argues about morality—even if those arguments are fierce and at some level intractable,” rather than resigning to individualistic relativism (205). He argues that neoliberalism shouldn't be defaulted to without proper consideration of the ethics of organ sales. If total individualism is taken as an ethic, it effectively opts out of important moral disputes. When “bracketing” is taken as an ethic in itself, the result is a vacancy of any ethic. In this way, neoliberal rhetoric “hijacks the very practice of and space for public moral deliberation,” conceiving it strictly as an individualized affair (201).Gillespie maintains that tolerance is a virtue, albeit a flimsy ethic on its own. Indeed, Gillespie concedes, “the liberal virtue of tolerance is vital” given the dilemmas of pluralism (152). In a healthy democracy, however, citizens owe much more to each other. Moral deliberation cannot be minimized to individualism. In Michael Sandel's words, “‘moral reflection is not a solitary pursuit but a public endeavor’” (16). Moral disputes, which are often categorical, must be justified in the public sphere, given normativity through good reasons. The weighing of reasons is done rhetorically; the stories, characters, and language that make up public moral deliberation have rhetorical force that persuades deliberative participants to make judgments about which reasons matter most. Gillespie sums up his deliberative theory unambiguously: “The search for moral truth, to be codified under law, is collective and procedurally intersubjective, but morality itself is not” (152).Ultimately, whether “dignity is or is not violated by organ sales” represents a key turning point in the organ market debate (158). Markets, even regulated ones, can exploit vulnerable and socioeconomically exploited populations. If a kidney or a piece of liver were worth fifty-thousand dollars, “a struggling low-income person would, ostensibly, be unable to turn down such an offer” (172). The asymmetrical nature of the exchange suggests to status quo altruists that a certain degree of exploitation is taking place. They insist that market mechanisms are blind to the “background condition that makes the actual contractual engagement—even if undertaken voluntarily—morally suspect” (169). Gillespie notes, however, that “the need for an organ by a person in dire straits and facing death is not exactly an empowering situation either” (172).Market advocates use the concept of dignity differently. They consider the blindness of market mechanisms to be a form of fairness and neutrality from the moral paternalism of the allegedly dignified majority, or worse, the state. Dignity, in neoliberal logics, inheres in the freedom to choose whether selling an organ coincides or conflicts with one's own moral compass. Restricting this choice would be to impose a bourgeois definition of dignity on less privileged classes. What dignity means, market advocates argue, may be established by the tyranny of the majority, and thus should remain an individualized, privatized concern.Gillespie ends with a short self-reflection, wherein he acknowledges that, even after gauging the moral complexity of the question of the organ market and criticizing the lethargy with which neoliberalism addresses it, it would make sense, under certain circumstances, to buy an organ. Readers should not look to Gillespie for an answer to the moral question of organ procurement. He insists, rather, on a revitalization of public deliberation on the matter. Public deliberation cannot be reliant on a neoliberal, marketized principle of civic restraint in place of affirmative moral considerations (101–102). Students and scholars of the rhetoric of science, bioethics, and political theory, particularly in the areas of discourse theory and pluralism, would benefit from Gillespie's exploration of the moral deliberation surrounding organ sales.

Assuming the mantle at R&PA was a weighty responsibility for me, personally as well as professionally. Very few people likely know this, but I was a graduate student editorial assistant at Texas A&M when the journal started. Back in the day, I helped vet essays prior to publication, which meant trudging over to the library to pull books and journals off their shelves to check citations. Like many others in the field, I have submitted manuscripts to be considered for publication in this journal and been rejected. One of my greatest professional regrets is dropping a revise and resubmit I received from R&PA while in graduate school—I did so, I told myself, to focus on my dissertation. Never would I have thought I would become the journal's editor. Nevertheless, I am honored to be editor of a journal that has produced so much work that resonates so powerfully in the areas about which I research and write. Its scholarship has proved so influential in my thinking and research over the years that much of the readings I assign to the graduate students in my rhetorical criticism course come from its pages.I had an affectionate, yet sometimes contentious, history with the founder of this journal. Marty was my professor, served on my MA committee, provided a reference to graduate school, published my work, and offered me guidance as I became an editor myself (you have to “ride herd” on reviewers, he told me). I often have wondered what he thought when I was selected as the editor of R&PA; he was still alive at the time.When I first agreed to edit Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I knew I wanted to have an invited issue—something I did not do for either of the journals I edited previously. When the field erupted in a justifiable uproar a number of years ago, I remained silent. I did not do so to be complicit with existing power structures. I did so because others’ voices needed to be heard more than mine; our community did not need my voice merely making noise or filling space. An invited issue—in the journal around which much of the controversy came to the forefront—thus seemed to me a particularly poetic and apt opportunity to provide a vehicle through which I could magnify others’ voices.As I began to conceptualize a special issue, I knew I wanted to do something that gestured to the journal's past while acknowledging our present. I also wanted to do something that would create an inclusive space for voices not typically published within its pages, providing an opportunity for scholars not as advanced in their career trajectory to publish in R&PA. I had an idea to take a page from the journal's (and the discipline's) past and flip the script a bit.In the Spring of 2000, Michael Leff guest edited a special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs (following a presidential rhetoric conference) about what scholars perceived as President Abraham Lincoln's moment of greatest rhetorical leadership. The scholars in that issue approached the question from a wide variety of perspectives. Some analyzed a single text (varying from the famous to the obscure) whereas others used multiple texts. Some discussed the affirmative rhetorical choices Lincoln deployed whereas others discussed how Lincoln effaced himself in his discourse. All focused on the rhetoric of one orator—a celebrated and official leader of the United States of America.Realizing that rhetorical leadership looks different to different populations or within different contexts, I reached out to authors I thought could bring a unique perspective to the conversation. Not all of the scholars to whom I reached out responded. They might have missed my email, incorrectly thought the offer was a widely cast one, did not have the time or the capacity to write something, or did not want to be published in this journal. Some of the scholars who did respond were unable to draft an essay at this time or ended up being unable to do so for various personal and professional reasons. I know readers will wonder why certain voices were not included. Please know that I tried to have more perspectives represented and that I hope more voices that research different populations will be included in the pages of this journal in the future. This one issue is not enough.I invited the scholars within this issue to answer the question, “What does rhetorical leadership look like” to different people or in different contexts? I wrote to the invited authors that rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, can look different to different populations active in the public sphere. Consequently, what constituted rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, were all “open” concepts. What counted as a text, who communicated—or did not communicate—and about what they communicated were left to each scholar to be determined, according to what each would view as appropriate to their area of study. I wanted the call to be cast as widely as possible to allow creativity and agency in authorial response, yet I also wanted to maintain a discernable theme. I did not want my thoughts on the subject to lead, but to provide a site for authors who specialize in different areas of study to formulate the conversation. (This is not to say that I did not provide editorial guidance.) I asked, moreover, for the authors to keep the essays relatively short—shorter than the essays we typically publish—so that more voices and perspectives could be included within the issue. I am excited for the readership of R&PA to engage with the ideas presented by the authors.The essays in this issue of R&PA explode the idea of what constitutes rhetorical leadership. They show us that rhetorical leadership is not monolithic, it does not have an identifiable genre, and it is not speech- or discourse-reliant. Rhetorical leadership enables voices to be heard in transgressive and transformative ways through different channels of communication, through the embodiment of place and ideas, and through actions. Rhetorical leadership can be fluid and/or guided by geographic space. The essays in this issue largely reject notions of leadership that are patriarchal and adhere to traditional leadership structures. The authors often reconceptualize notions of power and forefront discourses that have not received much scholarly attention, have been neglected or silenced, or have been differently empowered. Many essays show rhetorical leadership in communal contexts, rejecting traditional pathways of power that made previously conceptualized understandings of rhetorical leadership possible.In his essay, “Queer Rhetorical Leadership: ‘Ethical Sluts’ in Modern U.S.-American Polyamory as Exemplar,” Thomas R. Dunn queers the idea of leadership, opening leadership up to “possibilities and potentialities” rather than definitive generic markers. Dunn examines how Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton's book, The Ethical Slut, uses “joyful, radical revisioning; the use of transformational vulgarities; and cultivating comfort in irresolution” to enact a form of queer leadership. Queer leadership, Dunn explains, values adjusting to contemporary issues and concerns, enjoys a “colorful linguistic style” some may deem vulgar, and invites ambiguity and a lack of resolution. Although a queer leadership style “is necessary to rethink the social norms that too often constrain queer life and which, when reinvented, can make new ways of living life queerly possible,” Dunn clarifies that queer rhetorical leadership can be used by anyone to address issues that previous understandings of rhetorical leadership have not been equipped to address.In their essay, “Led by the Land: Recovering Land Agency and Interconnectedness in Social Movement Scholarship,” Noor Ghazal Aswad and Michael Lechuga look at social movements that understand leadership through “leaderless,” land-based, shared geographic space. Ghazal Aswad and Lechuga “envision a form of rhetorical leadership that distributes responsibility, risk, and rewards to all members of a group.” Land can create political subjectivities and social connections. Using the Syrian revolution as a case study, they use the people's response to the Assad regime's practice of sieges and land-burning to demonstrate how the reclamation of the land for subsistence can be generative for survival with the land. Through practices of seed-smuggling and bottom-up farming, enabled through a cooperative agrarian network, the community's relationality and subjectivity is created through emplaced rhetoric that is intersectional and connected.Allison Hahn investigates how technology enables marginalized committees to participate in community development planning in her essay, “Rhetorical Leadership of a Data Story.” During the COVID global pandemic, technological advances such as video teleconferencing have enabled traditionally marginalized communities to participate in the deliberative process. Through her analysis of Diana Wachira's presentation of evidence-based research over a Zoom meeting to an international audience about the eviction of the Kariobangi North community in Nairobi, Kenya, Hahn shows how Wachira employs emplaced rhetoric, making known what might be unknown—or at least lesser known—otherwise. In Wachira's case, she used her own research to provide context and information about the magnitude of persons to be displaced as well as their history with the land upon which they live—information not shared via typical news networks. Wachira's emplaced rhetoric provides a powerful example of how a marginalized community can use their own narrative to counter the dominant narrative to protect human rights and to advance environmental justice.Luhui Whitebear uses counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling to examine the ways in which Indigenous rhetorical leadership advocates social change by bridging multiple worlds, across generations and between Indigenous and colonial systems in her essay, “Our Voices Have Always Been Political: Indigenous Feminist Rhetorical Leadership.” Whitebear examines the rhetoric of three Indigenous women—Zitkala-Ša's boarding school era poetry, Laura Cornelius Kellogg's popular press publications, and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland's speech from Alcatraz—to show not only how these women survived settler colonialism, but also how they resisted colonial systems and practices to preserve their own cultural Indigenous knowledge systems and values within “spaces designed to exclude them.” The rhetorical leadership of Indigenous rhetoricians represents their larger tribal community and history, advancing Indigenous rights while preserving and perpetuating Indigenous culture.In their essay, “The Greta Affect,” Justin Eckstein and Erin Keoppen look at how claims to youth get circulated in the public sphere as a rhetorical resource to create an affective response to effect change. The authors use popular memes of Lisa Simpson, projecting the ethos of Greta Thunberg, to show how a hopeful and naïve leader gets deployed in the public sphere to advocate for change by shaming adults for their lack of action. According to Eckstein and Keoppen, “the Greta Affect mobilizes affect through the moral claim of right makes might to move an intimate public.” Within the public sphere, the girl is complemented for encouraging courageous leadership and criticized for her pushy naivete. The authors contend that, although Thunberg was constrained through the Simpson memes, youth framing creates unique parameters for public deliberation, opening space for a consideration of the obligations the current generation of leaders owes to future generations.In his essay, “México Pésimo: Colosio's Metanoic and Magnicidal Leadership,” José Ángel Maldonado analyzes Luis Donaldo Colosio's 1994 Mexican presidential campaign speech, “Yo Veo un México,” that allegedly led to his assassination. In his speech, Maldonado tells us, Colosio uses his head as a metaphor for leadership (since the Mexican language does not have a direct translation for leader), acknowledges the existence of Mexican pessimism while calling for the end of pessimism via a series of opportunities that could lead to reform and transformation in the country. Colosio's speech, combined with his assassination, present a metanoic pessimism that awaits new opportunities for Mexican socioeconomic advancement.In his essay, “Lo Único Que Tengo Es Amor Para Amar: Rhetorical Leadership and the Journalism of Alfredo Corchado,” Richard Pineda investigates how the journalist Alfredo Corchado enacts leadership in the borderlands between two countries and identities. Through an analysis of two of his books, Pineda finds that Corchado advocates hybrid identity, resilience, and accessibility. Through accessible writing that relays common experiences of people living on the border, Corchado provides an example of how to negotiate liminal spaces for his audience(s). He uses personal and communal stories to highlight the reliance of Mexican Americans in the United States and in Mexico. He also uses language that connects his audience to their geographical roots while embracing the challenges of their present existence, which offers hope to his readers that they are not alone in their embodied experience.In his essay, “Legacy Leadership: Elaine Brown's ‘Education for Liberation’ Bolstering the Fight for Black Women,” Darrian Carroll examines Brown's 2014 speech to University of Georgia students to explain how Brown encourages activists to continue advocating for liberation through “legacy leadership.” A commemoration of the successes and struggles of the past, legacy leadership provides a model of Black female leadership by reminding the audience of the movement's ideological commitments, retelling the conditions of the past and present that create the need for liberation, and encouraging her audience to do all they can to fight for liberation. Brown empowers listeners to act in their everyday experiences for Black liberation through her personal narratives of leading the Black Panther Party.From these essays, we learn that rhetorical leaders may be, but they do not have to be, individuals in official leadership positions. Leaders, and leadership, abound around us. These essays help us understand that rhetorical leadership gains force from the communities from which these communications derive. Leaders(hip) thrive(s), encouraging their populations in a multitude of contexts. To see rhetorical leadership at work, we can look to the narratives and the lessons that arise from within our communities, as leadership results from a need to change and to adapt, as well as from our traditions, our geographic spaces, our shared histories, our triumphs and our challenges, our needs and concerns, our future hopes and dreams, and our search for place and belonging. People and things that speak to those things exemplify leadership. The form of leadership looks different, depending on the specific contexts from which the leadership emerges and through the eyes attuned to see it.When I assumed the mantle of editor of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I did so with a commitment to rhetorical studies as a pluralistic effort. The essays in this issue evidence the diversity of work possible. As diverse as this collection is, however, it does not—and cannot—represent the totality of scholarly and personal perspectives. Space in our journals must be opened for additional, new, and emerging voices and perspectives.

Abstract Greta Thunberg became a beacon of hope for many in the face of climate change. While journalists and social scientists attempt to know her influence through quantification popularized as the “Greta Effect,” we understand Thunberg through rhetorical fragments that compose a broader structure of feelings in the public—what we call the “Greta Affect.” Moving from effect to affect, we look to how Thunberg as a “leader of our time” inspires rhetorical leadership grounded in appeals of innocence. Through a rhetorical analysis of a popular mode of response to Thunberg's speeches, the meme, we investigate how comparisons of Thunberg to another popular culture figure, Lisa Simpson, invite a wider manner of engagement tied to a figure of the girl as publics converge around different investments in youth appeals to innocence.

English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ silent expression in writing is often perceived as “indirect” or “inarticulate” in the views of Western rhetoric and academia. However, the meaning of silence and its rhetorical practice can differ from culture to culture, and this difference forms a cultural ethos that is unique and significant to the writer. In response to Anne Gere’s aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of silence, I explore cultural ethos as another dimension to recognize ESL students’ silent rhetoric and to expand the theoretical and pedagogical landscape of rhetoric and composition.

The article discusses the impact of text-generative AI in business communication pedagogy. The onset of open AI, such as ChatGPT, has the potential to transform the way faculty and students approach oral and written professional business communication. Through focus group discussions and netnography, the study employs content analysis to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of integrating AI in the teaching-learning process of business communication in a postgraduate management program. The article strives to reimagine the pedagogical tools and techniques regarding pre-reading assistance, classroom materials, assignments, evaluation, and other learning aids of business communication courses in response to the developments in text-generative AI.

Effective narrative writers create immersive reader experiences through precise linguistic choices. Teachers can support effective linguistic choice-making in young writers through the process of imaginative embodiment, a method of narrative thinking framed by cognitive stylistics concepts and their embodied effects. In this article, I assess the effects of an imaginative embodiment pedagogy on fifth grade writers’ narratives by examining how their linguistic choices contribute to immersion. As part of the study, four Grade 5 teachers attended a training session on imaginative embodiment and applied the approach throughout a nine-week narrative writing unit with 12 students via one-on-one writing conferences. To study the effects of the approach, a linguistic analysis was conducted on student writing completed before and after the writing unit. The analysis was driven by a stylistic checklist that codes grammatical features to embodied effects, as well as an interpretive analysis of these features’ overall effectiveness on immersion. Findings suggested that students’ linguistic choices changed in response to learning the process of imaginative embodiment. Specifically, choices were characterized by their embodied effects, contributing to greater textual immersion. This suggests that teaching imaginative embodiment can improve writers’ narratives by affording them specific strategies for expressing meaning.

Zachary C. Beare is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. His work, which studies how identity and emotion mediate rhetorical activity, appears in College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, the Journal of Cultural Research, Reflections, Writing on the Edge, and in edited collections.Miriam Chirico specializes in dramatic literature and comedy studies at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she is professor of English. She is the author of The Theatre of Christopher Durang (2020) and coeditor of How to Teach a Play: Essential Exercises for Popular Plays (2020). She has written articles about humor for Studies in American Humor, Text & Presentation, and Shaw: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies.Chris W. Gallagher is professor of English and vice provost for curriculum initiatives at Northeastern University. He has published widely on the teaching and assessment of writing and on educational innovation in K–12 and higher education. He is author or coauthor of five books, most recently College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World (2019).Bev Hogue serves as McCoy Professor of English at Marietta College in southeastern Ohio, where she teaches courses in American literature and writing. She recently edited Teaching Comedy (2023), a collection of essays published by the Modern Language Association.Erika Luckert is a PhD candidate in composition and rhetoric at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her research focuses on writing pedagogies at the intersection of composition and creative writing, with an emphasis on social and collaborative practice. Erika's recent work includes articles in JAEPL, the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and Writing on the Edge, as well as poems in Room Magazine, South Carolina Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.Nancy Mack is a professor emeritus of English at Wright State University and author of Engaging Writers with Multigenre Research Projects and two volumes about teaching grammar with poetry. She has published articles and chapters about teaching memoir, emotional labor, and working-class and first-generation students. She has won state and university teaching awards. Her community service projects include partnerships with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, Dayton Public Television, and the Ohio Department of Education.Jessica Masterson is an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Washington State University Vancouver, where her work examines youth literacies and democratic possibilities in K–12 school settings. Her work appears in Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, and Democracy and Education.Peter Wayne Moe is an associate professor of English and the director of the University Writing Program at Whitworth University. He teaches first-year writing, creative nonfiction, composition pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and a course on the sentence. He is the author of Touching This Leviathan, a Seattle Times favorite book of 2021.Shari J. Stenberg is professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her most recent book is Persuasive Acts: Women's Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century (with Charlotte Hogg). Her work appears in CCC, College English, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Studies, and in edited collections.Luke Thominet is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric in the English Department at Florida International University. His work examines rhetorics of health and medicine, user experience in video game development, and applications of design thinking to pedagogy and academic program development. His research has appeared in Patient Education and Counseling, Technical Communication Quarterly, Communication Design Quarterly, and the Journal of Technical and Business Communication, as well as in the edited collections Effective Teaching of Technical Communication, Keywords in Design Thinking, and User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice.

As we enter our fourth academic year impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, we already see evidence of institutional and cultural forgetting, or at least looking away from, the way this virus has changed our institutional (not to mention personal) lives. For most institutions, there has been a mandated return to normal. Gone are masks, more online accommodations, and reentry testing. And fading, too, are the conversations about the long-lasting impacts of COVID-19 on learning and on the mental health of our students, faculty, and staff.It is clear, by now, that there will be no return to “normal.” It is also clear that normal is often a revised history, or a history of omission, that represents a mythical bygone time that served few and denied many. Bettina Love (2020), a scholar of education theory and practice, reminds us how schools were failing “not only children of color but all children” long before COVID-19, citing the “norm” of high stakes testing, disproportionate expulsion of Black and Brown students, scarcity of teachers of color, school shootings, inadequate funding—the list goes on.Conversations in higher ed have also pointed to the labor disparities present in the “before times” that the pandemic has revealed and reinforced. In a Chronicle opinion piece, Emma Pettit (2020) observes that the global pandemic is only deepening pre-COVID-19 labor inequities for women-identified faculty, and especially women of color. And a study during the pandemic shows increased emotional labor required by BIPOC cisgender men, BIPOC cisgender women, white cisgender women, and gender non-conforming faculty, who work overtime to both help students navigate the challenging terrain of learning during COVID-19 as well as to manage their own emotional response to sometimes untenable working conditions (White Berheide, Carpenter, and Cotter 2022).As we embark on another pandemic-impacted semester, we feel, and carry with us, the weight of prolonged emotional labor. We tend to the emotional and material burdens our students experience, answer for and carry out policies we don't agree with, and scramble to adapt to the ever-changing educational landscape. All the while, even on our worst days, we strive to convey to the students, preservice teachers, and the graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) we teach our commitment to the power and possibility of pedagogical work. On our best days, we see this moment as an opportunity. The pandemic has changed us, and it has laid bare what needs to change in our institutions.We are not interested in a return to normal. Instead, we are committed to a process of learning from COVID-19’s shock to our institutional systems. So we turn to three moments in our respective professional lives that expose and survey the tensions and complexities we dwell within, using this upheaval to spur questions and imaginings toward a new way forward.As a junior writing program administrator (WPA) my primary responsibility is the education, mentorship, and support of GTAs assigned to teach in our first-year writing program. At any given time, I supervise approximately fifty different GTAs, who come to us from a range of concentrations in the MA, MFA, and PhD programs. Each fall, I teach a graduate-level practicum that GTAs take concurrently with their first semester as instructors of record. Historically, the course has served as a place to workshop issues that emerge when teaching for the first time (e.g., strategies for engaging a quiet class, approaches to making commenting and grading more sustainable, responding to problematic student comments, incorporating more multimodal work into the classroom, etc.). In the fall of 2021, though, in the first semester of my institution's return to fully face-to-face instruction, these issues took a backseat, and almost every class focused on the ongoing pandemic, rising cases, sick students, contact tracing, and my institution's changing guidelines for how we should act and respond to this moment.My practicum classroom began to feel eerily similar to the White House briefing rooms I spent the last two years watching on my TV, laptop, and smartphone. I'd walk into the room smiling under my mask and feigning enthusiasm for being there. Sometimes I'd be carrying binders or printed copies of policy memos to read from. I'd grip the podium in front of this group of people who were simultaneously my students and my teaching colleagues, and as soon as I opened it up to the floor, I'd be peppered by questions about the latest emails sent out by upper administration. I tried to appear calm and confident, even enthusiastic at times, and performing this emotional labor was increasingly difficult a year and a half into the pandemic. My answers all felt hollow and rehearsed; they were deeply unsatisfying. “The university would like to remind you that you cannot inform your students if someone in your class tests positive.” “The university assures us that they are working to address the problems you all have observed with contact tracing.” “The university is discouraging moving classes temporarily online.” “The university is asking instructors to do all they can to support students during this time.”Even as I said those words, I recognized my deliberate use of metonymy to obfuscate responsibility for decision making. “The university” functioned as a convenient and effective way to strategically divert responsibility away from the chancellor and provost who were making most of these decisions (under pressure, of course, from our conservative state legislature and the university system board of governors they have appointed). “The university” is a collective. It makes it sound like a group decision. That language feels almost democratic. It also operationalizes the ethos associated with “the university”; these are learned people, after all. Surely they must be making the most well-informed decisions, right? And, of course, I was also using “the university” to distance myself from responsibility, to avoid the recognition of my guilt and my own complicity in echoing, implementing, and policing adherence to these policies, which is, of course, partly my job (or at least how those above me would conceive of my job). Indeed, the role of a WPA as a frontline or middle manager tasked with implementing the will of higher administrators and executives has been theorized before (DeGenaro 2018; Heard 2012; McLeod 2007; Mountfort 2002), and much of this scholarship reflects on an identity crisis experienced by WPAs, a tension between how they see themselves (as politically radical system disrupters) and how others are now seeing them (as system maintainers and institutional apologists). Mountfort specifically discusses how WPAs experience less freedom to represent their private points of view because they are called on to speak publicly for larger collective views.About halfway through the fall 2021 semester, as I explained once again that the official university guidance was that instructors should not move a class online simply because the instructor has been exposed to a confirmed case of COVID-19, I heard one of the GTAs say quietly and out of frustration, “This is bullshit.” And, of course, it was bullshit. It was not a policy born out of the most recent public health guidance nor out of a desire to protect the welfare of students and teachers. It was not a policy concerned with pedagogical effectiveness. It was about optics. The university was focused on maintaining the appearance of normalcy and control. The GTAs knew this, and I knew this.This was, of course, not the first time I had announced policy decisions I knew or felt to be bullshit, but what has made the bullshit different during the COVID-19 pandemic is the stakes. We are now talking about people's health, potentially their lives. These are not just issues of ideological tension and debate anymore. They are foundational matters of safety. And as the research has made clear, these are decisions that will disproportionately affect people of color, poor people, women, those with disabilities, and so many other groups lacking privilege and access at this moment. This is why so many people are experiencing what Smith and Freyd (2014) describe as “institutional betrayal.” And that feeling of betrayal was evident in my practicum course. GTAs articulated feeling disposable and unsafe, like the institution had abandoned its investment in science and research for profit and optics, like all that they had been promised during the early days of the pandemic had been retracted. And I have been a part of that betrayal, and the emotional work of processing that is something I feel I will spend the rest of my career struggling with. I also saw my GTAs struggling with this same sense of complicity because, of course, they found themselves repeating university policies to their students. We've all been interpolated into this; it goes all the way down.Two years later, working with a new group of teachers, I continue trying to figure out what my role is, should be, or might be. This will be yet another cohort that feels betrayed by and disillusioned with the institution, though for slightly different reasons. New crises are continually emerging in higher education, wiping old ones from our memory. And while this cohort continues to be frustrated by the legacies of the institutional response to COVID-19, they have been even more angered by the institutional failure to adequately address the student mental health crises impacting our campus and campuses all across the country. In this new crisis, I find myself once again parroting institutional talking points that are, well, bullshit. “Counseling Services is here to support you during this time.” “The university has partnered with an app-based mental health counseling provider to increase access to mental health support.” “The university has not publicly acknowledged the recent suicides this term because of privacy concerns.” With each of these official communiqués, I feel these teachers losing faith in the institution and me. Is it my job to help repair that crumbling trust? Should I be working to build their trust in me? Maybe these are the questions we should be exploring with our GTAs. What does it mean to work in an institution that has betrayed us? One that continues to betray us? How do we reckon with the memory and experience of that betrayal? How should our work and our responses change in the future? How have COVID-19 and the crises that have followed in its wake helped us see the radical work there is to be done?In the second year of the pandemic, I received a small teaching grant aimed at incorporating multimodality into weekly reflective assessments in one of my courses. I was later asked by the granting office to provide a brief presentation about my work to my faculty colleagues during an optional summer professional development series. As an assistant professor of color in a research-intensive institution, I was both apprehensive to “teach” my more senior colleagues, but also a bit enlivened. So, rather than solely discussing my incorporation of multimodal options into my formative assessment structure, I decided to dive a bit deeper and engage the inequitable roots of many taken-for-granted academic practices, spurred on by Joel Feldman's (2018) book, Grading for Equity. In his quest to remove as much bias as possible from the grading process, Feldman notes how practices like assessing penalties for late work, assigning zeroes for missing assignments, and even marking off points for incorrect answers on formative assessments all contribute to the “education debt” owed to minoritized students (Ladson-Billings 2006). Feldman writes primarily for an audience of K-12 educators, and as a teacher educator myself, I was careful to note in my presentation that incorporating Feldman's strategies was part of my own parallel practice, a term coined by Lowenstein (2009) to describe the work of modeling for preservice teachers the same affective, curricular, and pedagogical approaches that we want them to incorporate in their future classrooms.As I shared these points, and specific ways I incorporate both multimodality and Feldman's equity-driven course policies into my teaching, I noticed a colleague of mine, a cis white woman, in the audience visibly fidgeting, her sighs occasionally punctuating my spoken sentences. When I concluded my brief talk and opened the floor to questions, hers was the first hand in the air. “Let me get this straight,” she said, “in addition to everything else, we're now supposed to have multimodal assessments, and no late penalties, and no zeroes, and not take off points for wrong answers? I have a baby at home, and a husband! How am I supposed to find time to do all of this, plus my research, and be a parent?” I understood her question to be mostly rhetorical, but, a bit embarrassed, I did my best to diffuse her frustration and provide actionable steps. I noted that I use only one catch-all for my formative assessments and that the of late penalties made my grading more as to come in that were for me to with. I once again Feldman's that assigning on those with the to solely on school at our the of students is my best these points to and the room I my and off by the this talk had I began to of my in of the larger of the pandemic, and all of the labor and it has to our collective was a in my and me to Feldman's as well as a of I did away with policies, both because I to up to class if felt even slightly and also because I knew mental health days were more and more for my students. I began to classes with the help of an which with and for each class in I and office every out from the of the pandemic least so I have these policies and have even found myself on making copies of course for students who the time or the to copies for and with students as they in my office so many of the long of the pandemic have them in difficult and with students a for our after yet another at a And while this has all a bit difficult to when I to a future in which COVID-19 to be a I am of the that I and many others are in the so many of us have to our students is in addition to with our own and we have felt to deeply the and of our students, and to to our pedagogical approaches As though I feel a of my during my I cannot help but and with her At what do our in the of to the of these practices, and our own called work, emotional labor of these been coined and by or labor and these all describe a of work associated with mostly in which the emotional is to by those in (2018) notes that this labor is in that it for the of the of in so and in the of and that must be by those with minoritized gender This is, in the of and that even after our work has for women and gender of color, our us with and us as more than of affect by a of the university or at it does feel as though much on the work I on of my students to it What is the to days I the of the work I do as a teacher more often I long for a way out of this How can I less of myself and be an present How might in our present and the between our work and our began fall 2021 at my institution in a a or mask The had just to high as the new through the even the campus a mask the instructor or one of the students was at high or to be classes be to My with a of from teachers in my How do I my students if they are at high they want to out is the on teachers and One into the new semester, the a mask which the university to being the was a it the of our of a mask was followed by another student a at a days of student and One of the students in my to and course said her our university in the and the had the same problems as do she with only masks, I saw of my students spent late in the were not because the of their own They just They were also is the chancellor to a We asked What does it mean to and to respond well, to on our that first I the students to me an me why they the class, their for the semester, and if there was I should that would help me support their new to the university said they felt being in after a senior year of classes in their felt new to the university as they and in for the first of them said they from I to each making a to that too, with and to that we in a time of and They were not this have come less to me early in my it felt felt them in their to a we don't have to away our mental health our our in the of an academic or And I I to for students what I myself, especially in the of about a return to normal and to be work through the students as well as be They began to with each each through and when they see And they few students, who were to our class, because of mental health I sent so many to on students that began to in my and did students at all during the we It was The teachers in my program to me with shared They were losing students to mental health students were more They how to how to They were so I now at the of the fall semester, the of COVID-19 but are mostly We have all more but for and are to even as more of us are that those us well, in the first In a recent Chronicle and to the of to will and will not that and our will not the of a will not the inequities this pandemic has laid and the of that has served as its We a way to and a case that after more than two years of “the and all it required of us, we don't more of We to respond with a they “The pandemic is not a nor should we it as We are through an that we our to higher education on every a more and system in its They an of for a from time in our classes to to students about what does and their learning to to on how we are the of the pandemic and what will us in the They are that the is not something to be to our already it about what can be to for on our our of higher education, and for my own we have found it to time to as the during the pandemic to in the or to for a office about a classroom or it to a sense of our collective work with students. When we come we the faculty in my and I also to what it to and to teaching, at this moment. We concluded that it is for us, as a to the emotional labor required to teach at a time when we see on gender and In the of to and we decided that as a we will We will about teaching We will if only for each the emotional labor required of as a I I will work to that work to the We get of the system we are but we are not can by responding from our own of in our and in our than continue to and through the and this pandemic has required of the that is us for something other than a return to “normal.” us to What does it mean to respond well to our students and to each What does it mean to and emotional What of can we do away our not with clear answers but with more questions, and our to a larger What do we for now, if not a return to in the early days of the pandemic, Love (2020) not only a return to but also that for those who have the privilege and a global crisis is time to to Indeed, this pandemic was in so many it only to use of this time to and respond in ways that are, too, time to to on the tensions we have and to and difficult As our on this has us, these questions are asked and on from across institutions, and is that we might engage in more and work to support that emotional labor and research that new responses to For and for COVID-19 has us of our than to to to and our colleagues, to on that to move in and

The letter of recommendation (LOR) is a stylized form of direct sponsorship, a rhetorical appeal that confers favor on a person or object in keeping with the writer’s—or sponsor’s—character, authority, and expertise. In response to Swales’s call to “unveil” the rhetorical features of occluded genres, this research employs a move-step analysis to determine the rhetorical features of a sample of 83 LORs written by college faculty and administrators for a nationally competitive, postgraduate fellowship. This study finds five core moves expressed in its LOR sample: (1) sponsor positioning, (2) applicant performance, (3) applicant attributes, (4) future projection, and (5) audience appeals. Our discussion offers three key insights and provides macro-level takeaways in an effort to raise rhetorical awareness for LOR writers and requestors alike.

Developing academic writers must continually position themselves discursively as they negotiate institutional, programmatic, and disciplinary contexts. The inextricable relationship of writing and identities raises questions of access to social identities in schools, a particularly salient issue when considering the complexities and challenges of the high school to college transition for students from historically marginalized groups. This study focuses on Jain, a first-generation Latino college student, as he positions himself as a writer over 18 months in response to a range of school-based writing tasks. My analysis finds that Jain’s identity negotiations are influenced by a history of social positioning in schools, as his stance-making patterns and sense of self as a writer reflect resources and opportunities he encounters. This study adds to research demonstrating the role teachers and institutions can play in (in)validating certain aspects of students’ identities and influencing belonging in school spaces, indicating a need for educators and researchers across K-12 and college contexts to continue to challenge the standardization of school writing and the prevalence of assessments that limit curricula and constrain identities.

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.

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Editors' Introduction to Issue 6.4

We are excited to publish Issue 8.1, our first as editors of Prompt.During the transitional period, we have been appreciative of the careful and

ABSTRACTProblem-solving is central to technical and professional communication (TPC), but problem-solving's economic roots may not align with social justice. This article introduces socially just creativity: the ability to generate new or unique and effective ideas in conjunction with other members of a community to challenge unjust status quos and tackle wicked social justice problems. The article uses a case study to illustrate that conception. It concludes with recommendations for TPC practitioners to enact social justice creativity.KEYWORDS: Creativityproblem-solvingsocial justicetechnical and professional communication AcknowledgementsThank you to Sylvi for deploying creativity toward social justice and for sharing your story with me. Thank you to Dr. Erin Brock Carlson, Dr. Lynne Stahl, and Dr. Heather Noel Turner for prompting me to think more deeply about the relationship between problem-solving and efficiency (Erin), Uber's complex application of creativity (Lynne), and the relationship between DEI initiatives and social justice (Heather).Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Additional informationNotes on contributorsKrista Speicher SarrafKrista Speicher Sarraf is an Assistant Professor of Technical and Professional Communication at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, where she directs the Technical and Professional Communication Program. Her research draws on the interdisciplinary field of creativity studies to explore how technical and professional communicator use creative thinking to address wicked problems.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher MaggioChristopher Maggio is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where he teaches first-year and technical writing. His research interests include storytelling and antenarrative theory and their applications to community-based writing. He recently co-authored an article for a special issue of 'Communication Design Quarterly' on community-engaged research.