To be editors in what is now the Age of Artificial Intelligence is not without a feeling of jamais vu.Our practices are predicated upon the existence of the author, which has been called into question by large language models.Although artificial intelligence is not an author because it cannot produce an original text, its texts are, or soon will be, indistinguishable from those produced by an author.In other words, if the original text and the unoriginal text are identical, then any author is simultaneously a nonauthor.We see this paradox, in its mix of the strange and the familiar, as part of an epistemic transformation of our relationship to the text.This paradox is sustained by a cultural resistance to our changing understanding of authorship.Despite the prominence of such essays as Barthes' (1977) "The Death of the Author" and Foucault's ( 1978) "What is an Author?", which dispute historical assumptions about the author as the origin of the text, these theories have never made "the pedagogical turn" (Graff, 1995) into a praxis for relocating the text's origin.Writing is still widely taught as a response to prompts, which locate the origin of the text inside the student.This method of instruction directs attention to the text as it tacitly perpetuates a belief that writing well is a "gift" innate to the individual.Michael Palmquist and Richard Young (1992) observed that this belief does indeed reappear in the writing classroom and pointed out that students who consider themselves ungifted may not pursue opportunities for learning, given the futility of trying to improve an ability they do not possess.There is a symbolic violence to this process by which students embody a belief that they cannot write but are nevertheless confronted with prompts to revise their writing.Consequently, they may avoid revision because they see it not as practice for improvement but as "punishment" (Downs, 2015, p. 67) for being wrong.This symbolic violence can, however, be converted into critical thinking if the text's origin is relocated.Consider an instruction to produce a piece of writing not by responding to the prompt but by replacing its interrogative pronoun (what, which, who, whom, whose) with its antecedent.The student thereby locates the origin of the text outside themself in a preexisting first draft they make present in writing.The instructor, in turn, decides what part of the text is still missing and adds to the draft the interrogative pronoun or proadverb (why, where, when, how) in a prompt for revision.The student, in turn, replaces the interrogative with its antecedent to produce a second draft.And as an interrogative can be addressed to any draft, revision, as a reversal of proformation, is the disclosure of a text that ever exceeds it.Through revision students gradually embody improvement as "a feel for the game" (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 25), a practical sense of which words go where, and through prompts they reflect on how their manipulation of these words enacts meaningful

Keene State College's fact book for 2022–23 notes that 40 percent of the student body at my institution in 2020 identified as the first generation in their family to attend college, yet it's rare that a student discloses this identity in the context of our Center for Research and Writing. It's likely that, in my day-to-day work as the assistant director of the center, I work with first-generation college students every day, but because we don't ask students to disclose this demographic information on our appointment intake form, I rarely know for certain. On the one hand, the invisibility of this identity is surprising: in our writing center we learn a lot about students—they disclose all sorts of things to tutors in their sessions, from the mundane (how much they like or dislike an assignment or their major) to the personal (their work history, hometown, mental health challenges, or linguistic identity). And yet, students’ first-generation status often remains unknown. Such status does not physically or linguistically “mark” a student in the same way as many other identity markers (e.g., race, gender, or socioeconomic status)—first-gen students can, at least sometimes, decide who knows their status. On the other hand, the fact that students don't regularly disclose this information to me, in particular, is probably no surprise at all.As a continuing-gen student myself (my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all graduated from college before I set foot on my undergraduate campus), I know that I speak and act in ways that mark me as an institutional insider and thus potentially, and very unfortunately, as someone who might unfairly judge first-gen students. (When I asked a few of our undergraduate peer tutors whether students ever disclosed their first-gen status during sessions, they reported that it did happen occasionally, most commonly after a good deal of rapport building or when the student was writing a personal narrative.) Beyond the barriers that my identities and positionality might present, however, I also wonder whether the writing center is a fraught space for disclosing a first-gen identity. Because writing centers are often—wrongly—conceived as sites of remediation, a first-generation student struggling with imposter syndrome might worry that accessing our services is an admission that they “don't belong” in our academic community. (Not true!) However, since we don't currently collect this kind of demographic information from students who use our center's services, I can't say for certain that first-gen students are avoiding (or using) our services.This not knowing about our work with first-gen students, along with the intention to design services that are welcoming and supportive to this group, prompted me to read Beyond Fitting In. As a relative newcomer to the first-gen conversation, I wasn't fully ready for the sustained interrogation of term/identity first-generation that persists across the collection. (Silly me: I thought because it is a widely recognized identity category that it was also easy to define.) While the collection is divided into three sections, with only the first dedicated to unpacking the meaning of first-generation, almost every essay it contains addresses the problem of definition. One strength of this collection, then, is that it offers an opportunity to witness scholars actively grappling with meaning while also showing, as Anne Ruggles Gere asserts in her intro/preface, that “first-gen students are a real group” (ix). First-gen student, faculty, and administrative voices resonate throughout the collection, which features qualitative research on the lived experiences and perspectives of members of this group, as well as reflections from the contributors themselves, many of whom claim a first-gen identity.Because the collection resists a unified definition of the term, my conceptualization of first-gen accordioned as I read—expanding, contracting, and expanding again. For example, Christine Alfano, Megan Formato, Jennifer Johnson, and Ashley Newby's essay, “Research-Writing Pedagogy,” shares definitions of first-gen generated by students at Stanford who self-identified this way. Although one of these students had family who attended college, she viewed herself as first-gen because she was the first in her family to enroll at an elite institution: “First-gen is no longer just a first in your family to go to college but more first to reach a new height of educational level” (256). While students can certainly be empowered by fitting this label to their personal experiences, other essays, including Beth Towle's “Finding First-Generation Students through an Intersectional Approach to Institutional and Programmatic Data,” make clear that overly broad institutionally imposed definitions may harm the most vulnerable students by “eras[ing] their unique cultural backgrounds” and making them “even less visible by institutional structures” (101).Towle self-identified as a “poor” undergraduate student but shared the institutionally imposed first-generation label with students of middle-class backgrounds, causing her to feel unseen. In turn, Towle argues, labels like “working-class, low-income, and lower socioeconomic status can serve us better than first-generation when we are talking about specific student needs and cultural experiences” (111). In the case of the Stanford student, the first-gen label seems to have helped her recognize and even embrace her particular cultural circumstances and positionality within her institution. In Towle's case, the first-gen label exacerbated feelings of otherness.While authors in the first section of this collection, “Defining First- Generation Students,” interrogate “first-gen” as an identity category, the second and third sections address questions of literacy education for first-generation students, beginning with a consideration of pedagogies at traditional sites of literacy instruction in part 2 (i.e., the first-year writing classroom, the writing center) and concluding, in part 3, with a series of essays exploring where and how literacy instruction is happening across campus—including within Bridge programs, STEM-intensive programs, and co-curricular and work activities.Part 2, “First-Generation Students in the First Year and Beyond,” includes Shurli Makmillen's essay “First Generation Students at a Historically Black University Talk about ‘Proper English,’ ” which interrogates literacy norms at a historically Black university through the voices of students whose parents immigrated to the United States. One reflects, “You know how recently there have been so many incidents where people or the police are getting mad at people for speaking a different language in public. So that resonates within me because it's almost as if that could happen to me, very easily. Or that could happen to my mom or my dad. It resonates very personally” (201). This example, among many in the collection, impressed upon me that literacy education can be a site of advocacy and empowerment for first-gen students, while at the same time literacies can mark and unfairly disadvantage these students both within and outside the classroom.One thing I appreciate about this collection is that it does not just name the curriculum as a site of advocacy but often provides illustrative examples of how that work might unfold within a classroom. My favorite example of this kind is offered in part 1, in Jenny Rice's “Integrated Regionalism and First-Generation Students: A Place-Conscious Heuristic.” This essay is a tightly woven and sometimes lyrical advocation for and illustration of the generative potential of teaching place-based literacies, focused on regional pedagogies of “teachers in the mountains” of Appalachia. These pedagogies emerge from a specific place, time, and culture, drawing together literacies of home and literacies of school.In part 3, “Writing Contexts for First-Generation Students, Teachers, and Administrators,” Courtney Adams Wooten and Jacob Babb explore how self-identified first-gen writing program administrators (WPAs) see their work as influenced by their identity and educational histories. This essay gently challenges the notion that advocacy efforts are best made at the system level, as many of the WPA participants reflected that they more often pursued “individual rather than programmatic interventions when working with first-generation students perhaps because it is in these interactions that they feel a real difference can be made” (311). It's heartening to read that one-to-one mentorship, of the kind that happens in writing centers every day, can meaningfully impact first-gen students. However, Adams Wooten and Babb's essay also underscores the challenge that WPAs like me have “in wielding their limited programmatic power to make significant changes” (312). And, for this reason, I would argue that this collection might be especially useful reading for those in administrative roles with the power to make curricular decisions or to influence institutional policy; the challenges that face first-gen students are both individual and systemic.Indeed, one of the collection's unifying themes is a call for systemic change and what the collection's editor, Kelly Ritter, calls “concrete, collective action” (2; see, more specifically, essays by Moreland on dual enrollment programs, Towle on institutional and programmatic data, and DeGenaro and MacDonald on institutional messaging). Elaine P. Maimon's afterword focuses mainly on reshaping PhD programs but makes this broader call to action: “New majority students often listen to demeaning and unhelpful internal voices that tell them they are not fit for college because they are too old, too poor, or too different. We must shift the emphasis from what's wrong with students to what's not right with our institutions” (318).Finally, upon closing the book, I found myself lingering over the definitional questions raised within its pages. As many of the essays demonstrate, first-gen status can be empowering when it is defined and claimed by individual students. As William DeGenaro and Michael T. MacDonald argue, “Ultimately, agency and transformation come not from being a first-gen student but rather from claiming an identity as one—there is power in naming oneself” (24). At the same time, institutions have used “first-gen” as a data point and often as a means of counting students served and tracking risk; as Christina Saidy notes in her essay on paired retention and first-year writing courses, “Often, the scholarship and university edicts regarding at-risk students, especially first-gen students, focus on the deficits of these students and the challenges they face in entering higher education. These deficits are tied to measurable data—test scores, high school grades, socioeconomic status, first-gen status—and are measured by attrition rates” (146). It's tempting to ask, after reading Beyond Fitting In, if we can we have one (self-identification) without the other (institutional identification and tracking).Answers to this question may be beyond my pay grade. There are many, many reasons to classify and count students, including those of equity and inclusion. And, in fact, before I started writing this review, I consulted our institutional statistics and noted, with real shock, that between 2012 and 2021 our institution retained less than 60 percent of first-gen students through their fourth year. Those numbers are abysmal and obviously demand a response—and the essays in this collection offer paths forward, ways to support first-gen students and demonstrate their belonging, for institutions willing to invest in this group.What does this discussion mean for my writing center space? I want first-gen students to know they are welcome, that they belong, but I don't want them to take our efforts at inclusion as a prejudgment of their abilities. Come to the writing center, first-gen students! We know you're out there and likely struggling! However, I am not convinced, after reading this collection, that this work should begin with tracking or data collection. Working to track first-gen students’ engagement with our center would require that we settle on a definition that very likely wouldn't accurately or adequately capture the experiences of these students. Instead, I want to continue to work to make our space one that validates the experiences and literacies of all the students who step through our door, to lift up and celebrate the accomplishments of first-gen students—and tutors—as a way to demonstrate their belonging in our space. These efforts necessitate the kind of one-on-one work, as described by Adams Wooten and Babb's WPA participants, that is the heart of writing center practice. And for me personally, it means continuing to do listening work that can fuel change, the kind of listening Christie Toth describes in her contribution to the collection, which requires paying special attention to “perspectives that challenge my assumptions about what we are building together” (174).

Vivian Kao is associate professor of English and director of the first-year composition program at Lawrence Technological University. She teaches courses in writing, literature, film, and the intersection of technology and the humanities. Her courses often feature multimodal assignments that challenge students to think about composition as activity, experiment, and craft. Her other publications include an account of students exploring essay form by building three-dimensional structures, and a forthcoming visual essay on virtual museum exhibits created in response to modernist literary texts.Jessica Masterson is assistant professor at Washington State University Vancouver, where her research concerns the intersections of language, literacy, and democratic teacher education.Sarah Moon is assistant professor of humanities at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where she teaches composition, writing about literature, environmental writing, and American theater. Her scholarly work has been published in Community Literacy Journal, Literacy in Composition Studies, Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts Quarterly. A playwright, she was the 2023 artist in residence for Eastern Connecticut Center for History, Art, and Performance, where she developed the original full-length drama Apostates.Molly Parsons earned her PhD in English and education at the University of Michigan. She is currently assistant director of the Center for Research and Writing at Keene State College, where she has the privilege of learning alongside talented undergraduate tutors. Her research interests include the ethics of writing center practice, grammar instruction for tutors, and, presently, the implications of artificial intelligence for tutoring and teaching. Find her other work in Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Writing Lab Newsletter, and Another Word, a blog from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's writing center.Kevin Piper teaches literature and composition at Madison College and is an honorary fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received his PhD. His recent work looks at how teachers can use student feedback to improve their practice. His literary scholarship has spanned a wide range of areas, including ethnic and Indigenous literatures, postsecular literature, and literary modernisms. He can be reached at kcpiper@madisoncollege.edu.Malini Johar Schueller is professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida. She has been the faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine on her campus for many years and is a member of the organizing collective for the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. She is the author of several books, including U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (1998), Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship (2009), and Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan (2019). She has coedited Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism (2007) and Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (2009). She is the director of the award-winning documentary In His Own Home (2015) about police brutality and campus militarization. In 2019 she was selected to participate in a Faculty Development Seminar by the Palestinian American Research Council. Currently she is working on an essay collection, From Palestine to You. She teaches courses in comparative settler colonialism, including Palestine, and courses in postcolonial theory, Asian American studies, and US imperialism.Elina Siltanen was university lecturer at the Department of English, University of Turku at the time of writing this article, and now works at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research focuses on contemporary American poetry, more specifically on the role of affect in reading complex literary texts, and her article is a part of her research project “Difficult Relations: Reading for Emotion in Recent American Experimental Poetry.” Recently, she has published articles on the connections between conceptualism and confessionalism in poetry in the Journal of Modern Literature and on metamodernism and New Sincerity in English Studies. She has a double doctoral degree from the University of Turku and Luleå University of Technology.D. T. Spitzer-Hanks is an early-career researcher interested in critical composition studies and in transatlantic critical classical reception in the long nineteenth century, specifically in North America and the United Kingdom. Spitzer-Hanks is particularly interested in analyzing how patterns of communication and perception create social structures in which inequity is fostered and sustained and seeks to find ways to intervene in such processes both as a scholar and as a member of society. Trained in gender and ethnicity studies at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, Spitzer-Hanks earned a PhD in English studies from the University of Texas at Austin. In their private life, Spitzer-Hanks enjoys gardening, parenting, and running from their anxieties.

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In response to the increasing alienation from nature exacerbated by digital living, this course design presents an advanced composition “rewilding” course. Combining natural history writing, nature therapy research, and mindfulness activities, the course aims to reconnect students with the natural world. Inspired by Micah Mortali’s concept of rewilding and Barry Lopez’s exploration of inner and outer landscapes, the course emphasizes experiential learning. Through natural history writing, students develop attentiveness to the environment, fostering a sense of wonder and connection. By centering on our innate relationship with nature, rewilding becomes a transformative practice, preparing students for ecological literacy and meaningful engagement with the world.

A large body of literature on writing center pedagogy suggests that serving multilingual student writers requires approaches different from those developed for native English-speaking students, a difference that may pose unique challenges to tutors. To identify and address these challenges, we elicited tutors’ perspectives on their work with multilingual writers as well as examined how these perspectives change as tutors gain experience and in response to revisions in a training curriculum. Specifically, we analyzed survey responses provided by two consecutive tutor cohorts at three points in their first semester working at the writing center. The overriding theme to emerge from participants’ responses was that working with multilingual writers often meant working at the sentence level to help them expand their linguistic and rhetorical choices, but this tutoring was sometimes challenging. The first tutor cohort even described sentence-level tutoring as transgressive, as they struggled to distinguish it from fixing or editing writers’ prose. In contrast, the second cohort, who went through a revised curriculum, treated sentence-level tutoring as acceptable practice, theorized it in richer ways, and expressed themselves as better prepared to support multilingual writers. In addition to describing revisions to the curriculum, this study also provides pedagogical implications for tutor educators.

Guest editors' introduction to The Writing Center Journal 42.1 (2024).

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

Scale Theory embodies its title in every possible way. It offers both a deep dive into and a 10,000-foot view of scale, scalar thinking, and the role of scale in scientific inquiry. The subtitle, A Nondisciplinary Inquiry, is no less apt. Author Joshua DiCaglio blends insights from rhetoric, philosophy, literary studies, and mysticism to create a novel account of scalar thinking. In so doing, he weaves together detailed thought experiments, the work of Gregory Bateson, and Philip K. Dick’s account of an extraterrestrial communication he received while under the influence of anesthesia. Provocatively, Scale Theory treats these diverse intellectual resources as coequal contributors to an emerging theory of scale and scalar thinking. Within this nondisciplinary framework, the book is devoted to advancing two primary theses: (1) Notions of scale are undertheorized in science studies and related strands of new materialisms; and (2) Proper attention to questions of scale within these theoretical traditions should prompt a more thoughtful reconsideration of the merits of mystic holism. Ultimately, Scale Theory makes a compelling case for the first thesis and advances inquiry usefully in this area. With respect to the second thesis, DiCaglio refers to a certain academic “allergy” to holism (99), and I must confess I share this allergy. That said, I assume readers already predisposed favorably toward mystic holism are likely to find Scale Theory’s attention to the second thesis thoughtful and engaging.Scale Theory is organized into three distinct parts. Part 1, “Algorithms for a Theory of Scale,” presents three interrelated thought experiments that call upon readers to imagine themselves at various distances and vantage points with respect to several objects of interest. Part 1 is stylistically Wittgensteinian. Like the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 2013) or Latour’s “Irreductions,” (1993), the thought experiments unfold as a series of numbered and nested propositions, each postulating or interrogating an emerging concept in DiCaglio’s theory of scale. Part 2, “Configurations for a Theory of Scale,” returns the reader to more familiar styles of prose, providing a sort of review of the relevant literature and its relationship to the insights of the thought experiments. Finally, part 3, “Rhetorical Technologies for a Theory of Scale,” reflects on the twin marginalizations of rhetoric and mysticism in mainstream Western academia and argues for a new embrace of disembodied inquiry.The aforementioned thought experiments of part 1 outline DiCaglio’s theories of scale, scalar thinking, and scalar analysis. The discussion makes extensive use of visual and cinematic metaphors to aid the reader’s consideration of scalar questions. Ultimately, DiCaglio posits that scale is a function of the relationship between the “‘being’ of phenomena” and “the one who is measuring” (8). He argues, therefore, that “scale functions at a level above ontology and epistemology: scale is a means of orienting yourself both to experience and the being of things” (8). In making this argument, Scale Theory reflects on a range of scientific practices that require gradients of scale. Microscopy, telescopy, and simulations all provide scientists with tools to escape the mundane scales of embodied human experience. DiCaglio argues that “science must always find itself grouping things together, speaking of species, types, systems, and so on which exist on a different logical type than the individual encounters that make up these groups” (41). The taxonomic activities of scientific practice require shifts in scale to account for kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera, species, and all manner of nonbiological analogs.Within this framework, scale functions as a sort of meta-ontology that allows objects to be provisionally identified and delineated. Echoing Bateson, DiCaglio argues that In order for any thing to be said to exist whatsoever, a differential must exist out of which a difference can be discerned. Every differential occurs on some scale at which a fluctuation or movement is able to make a difference. If one goes to a smaller scale, any given differential is no longer able to be used to register a difference. (51)Thus, any given object only exists at certain scales where differences can be said to make a difference, and any given object also ceases to be an object at higher or lower orders where the differences no longer make differences. DiCaglio leverages the notion of “stability” or “stabilization” to refer to an object’s coming into being at any given scale. The metaphor of photographic or cinematographic “resolution” underwrites DiCaglio’s thinking in this area. Objects stabilize when they resolve relative to an observer’s perspective. While I find this account of stability thoughtful and compelling, it is somewhat unfortunate that it is so beholden to visual metaphors. Humans engage the world through many different senses, and not all humans engage the world with all senses.With his foundational ontology of scale established, DiCaglio proceeds to introduce “scalar analysis,” an approach to reckoning with objects, stability, and systems. The exploration of scalar analysis centers on a series of nested thought experiences and most prominently on a root cause analysis of a disease. Through oscillating our perspective between the whole human body and DNA mutations, DiCaglio shows how the dialectic of “zoom level” and “resolution” can further the analysis of complex systems. This analysis is engaging in many ways but suffers somewhat when addressing temporality. Scale analysis wants to “freeze time” (75) as an initial step, but then finds time “unwittingly introduced” (79) a few pages later. Ultimately, an analysis of causality in complex systems will probably require intentionally attending to the temporal dimensions. In fairness, at one point DiCaglio intentionally maps time to space (68) in an effort to maintain the visual metaphors of zoom and resolution. Indexing time to space is a common move, of course, and will likely only alienate a few passing Bergsonians.While the thought experiments in part 1 offer a number of interesting insights about scalar thinking, it is a bit troublesome that they exist almost exclusively in a vacuum. Aside from the occasional supportive reference to Bateson, part 1 is largely citation free. However, the insights provided seem linked in many important ways to prior efforts to understand complex systems and questions of scale. This includes both the work cited in part 2 and striking (albeit unexplored) parallels between scalar stability and accounts of stabilizing processes in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. The Whitehead parallel is, perhaps, not surprising given Bateson’s engagement with Whitehead and subsequent influence on Scale Theory. Nevertheless, this seems like an important connection and a missed opportunity. I would have very much enjoyed reading a discussion of this connection and/or an exploration of the potential synergies and disagreements between Scale Theory and Marilyn Cooper’s (2019) adaptation of Whitehead and Bateson for rhetorical new materialisms.That said, part 2 engages substantively with much of the related literature on new materialisms, actor-network theory, and cybernetics to explore previous attempts to grapple with many of the same issues of scale and complex systems. In so doing, Scale Theory argues that prior efforts to address these issues are hindered by undue focus on embodiment and embodied epistemology (in the case of feminist new materialisms), an inappropriate ontological flattening of scale (in actor-network theory), and lack of attention to holism (in cybernetics). With respect to feminist new materialisms, Scale Theory is particularly critical of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. While I agree with DiCaglio that too much reliance on epistemology is a problem for some areas of new materialism, I am not sure epistemology is as prevalent in Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad 2007) as DiCaglio suggests. Furthermore, I ultimately agree with Annmarie Mol who compellingly argues that the primarily problems of (post)modern epistemology come from the ways it is rooted in perspectivalism (2003). Thus, given the inherent perspectivism of scale theory, the approach may well replicate some of the issues new materialists most wish to avoid when avoiding epistemology in the first place.DiCaglio’s critique of embodied situated knowledges is ultimately anchored in his penchant for holism. He argues that bodies are properties of individuals, and that they situate perspective in that individual, atomistic perspective. In so doing, he critiques Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge for its overreliance on bodies that only exist at certain scales. As he writes, In scalar views there is something like a transcendent view that moves away from the body itself (2.10–12)1, zeros out the perspective as “mine” (2.9), and dislocates any single perspectival configuration. Thus, when Haraway declares that “feminists don’t need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence” (579), we ought to hesitate. (134)Thus, to understand the universe, as DiCaglio hopes you will, is to shed your corporeal form and embrace some transcendental perspective. Again, my response to this is something like “yes and no.” I am on record agreeing that it is possible for a theory to be too embodied, although I don’t think this applies to Haraway. I have previously criticized some strains of affect theory for their excessive embrace of embodied experience (Graham 2016). Specifically, I argue that affect theory duplicates the problems of epistemology by positing a more authentic infralevel of embodied engagement that replicates the problematic perspectivalism on which (post)modern epistemology is built. The subject-object binary is replaced by a more privileged body-world binary. If this critique is correct (and I think it is), Scale Theory makes a similar error. Specifically, it inverts affect theory’s normative orientation, privileging instead a putatively “higher” level of unembodied binary engagement, a mind-universe binary, if you will.Scale Theory’s rejections of actor-network theory and cybernetics are similar in both tone and content to its rejections of situated knowledges. ANT and related strands of sociology and geography do not account for scale in quite the same way as Scale Theory’s opening thought experiments. Thus “this inability to handle scale confuses the terms at the outset” (162). Similarly, while cybernetics and systems theory have much to offer scale theory, they are ultimately treated as lacking since they don’t provide appropriate tools for appreciating the aggregation to unity. Channeling Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, DiCaglio argues that while systems theory is useful for understanding bodies as ecologies, additional scalar (and perhaps mystical) elements are needed to pivot from bodies as ecologies to an apparently necessary identification of our equal oneness with bacteria and Gaia (173). Ultimately, part 2’s criticisms of prior efforts to address questions of scale proceed as though part 1 has successfully persuaded the reader on the merits of mystic holism. Part 2 takes the insights of the opening thought experiments as true, and recounts how feminist new materialisms, actor-network theory, and cybernetics fail to live up to the putative promises of scalar thinking. This is a risky rhetorical move, because for readers who are not entirely persuaded by the work of part 1, part 2 will come across as an exercise in somewhat uncharitable reading practices.Stepping away from the mysticism and my admitted allergies, Scale Theory also provides some thoughtful considerations on implications for rhetoric of science and science studies more broadly. As DiCaglio notes, “Because scale occurs outside of human experience, it must be re-presented at [human] scale. Inevitably, its representations will be partial and distorted” (183). Recognizing this fact points toward real challenges for scientific inquiry and scientific rhetoric which strives to account for notions of scale that cannot be contained at the scale of human representation. DiCaglio interrogates these challenges through an analysis of different modes of “specification” (193). When discussing specification, scholars of science studies most often consider what he dubs “ontological specifications”—that is, descriptions of objects, processes, and observed reality. We also (somewhat less regularly) attend to “epistemological specifications”—descriptions of knowing practices, sometimes methodology. But, since within scalar thinking, objects only exist at certain specific scales, neither ontological nor epistemological specification are sufficient to describe scientific activity. “Scalar specification” then becomes an essential additional rhetoric for both science and science studies. But scalar specifications are not without challenges.Here, DiCaglio draws our attention to “scale tricks” (228). Since scale must be re-presented, scalar thinking and scalar specifications may mislead readers through rendering scale invisible, presuming it infinite, or blending scales without acknowledging that they have been blended. For DiCaglio, transcending scale tricks is a question of accountability (231). Authors of re-presentations of experience have a duty to be consistent and precise in their scalar specifications. Precise specifications disrupt the potential confusions of scale tricks by making the scale intelligible, reminding readers or auditors that there is a scale, and preventing distortion through blending of scales. In some ways, DiCaglio’s theory of scalar specifications is a more encompassing version of the ethics of information design. Properly labeled x and y axes are critical to effective and ethical communication of charted data. Scale Theory reminds us that data need not be displayed graphically to be subject to scale and to require scalar specifications for interpretation.Part 3 of Scale Theory is devoted to the cosmos seeing itself. That is, it ruminates on possibilities for transcending corporality so as to achieve a perspective that all but transcends scale itself. DiCaglio does not precisely recommend specific techniques to achieve this transcendence, but he does point toward accounts of others that prominently feature hallucinogens, meditative practices, and methodical introspection. I will admit I find myself somewhat mystified by the mysticism that closes Scale Theory. Ultimately, I am pragmatic about theory. For me the utility of a theory lies in what work it does for inquiry, and that work needs to be indexed to a particular task at hand. Scale Theory might, perhaps, be considered pragmatic in this way, but the overriding task at hand is to understand the oneness of the universe. My scholarly aims are rather more modest. I put theory to work in an effort to address much more local tasks. As such, what I can take from Scale Theory for my own work may be more limited than what other readers can take. If you lack my allergy to holism and see the intersection of rhetoric, philosophy, and drug-assisted disembodied consciousness as a potential pathway to universal understanding, then this may well be the book for you. Even so, if your aims are somewhat more modest (like mine), then there is still much of interest in the pages of Scale Theory. DiCaglio adds important new dimensions of analysis to new materialisms and related science studies. Readers might take these dimensions as intended, but I would argue that they are also flexible enough to be read more synergistically alongside Cooper and Whitehead or Barad, Mol, and Haraway. And even if you reject new materialisms entirely, Scale Theory compellingly argues that rhetoricians of science would do well to attend, in more detail, to scalar specifications and the problem of scale tricks.

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.

ABSTRACT Despite the common understanding of kairos as a temporal concept, it also harbors a spatial notion that holds particular significance in relation to Greek visual arts. The inquiry into its primary role in the formation of aesthetic beauty requires a phenomenological reading of the Lysippan personification of the concept, as it resonates with its counterparts in the fields of philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. Using Andrew Stewart’s suggestion as a starting point—that the Lysippan Kairos may serve as the artist’s manifesto, consciously constructed in response to the earlier Polykleitan Canon—the evidence for kairos as the sire of beauty is shown to reside not only in its principal role in characterizing the perfect proportion and harmony, but also in its relationship to somatic intuition and sensory understanding, implicating the viewer as a key participant in the process.

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

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.

As the technical and professional communication (TPC) field has evolved in response to broader changes in the world economy, numerous professions have arisen within its ranks that coexist with the traditional roles of technical writer and technical editor. These include instructional design, content strategy, and user-experience (UX) design [1], [2]. A unique challenge for TPC is to include training in numerous professions within a single college major or program. Some programs have chosen to focus on specific professions, even going so far as to rename their program around that profession. Others have continued to focus broadly on the overall field while updating their curricula as needed to serve students seeking training in a particular career path.

In this symposium, seven community college transfer students present their perspectives on Guided Pathways curricular reforms. Drawing on published scholarship and policy documents as well as their own lived experiences, they identify positive aspects of the Guided Pathways model as well as shortcomings in its conceptualization and local implementation.

This is an excellent, well-constructed set of essays focused on the intersection of decoloniality, the posthuman, and new materialist rhetoric. While each essay focuses on different topics, the central themes are consistently covered throughout, making this a more unified set of contributions than one might otherwise find in an edited volume. The text includes a Foreword, an introductory essay by the co-editors, and eight individual essays. The authors are primarily from English rhetoric and writing programs; several have backgrounds as Indigenous scholars and/or a focus on including Indigenous voices in their work. The importance of this text—especially for those of us fully ensconced within interconnected colonial worlds from our campus to the community and on to the nation and beyond—cannot be underestimated. The continued dismissal of Indigenous voices remains a critical issue and one this text addresses in a provocative and compelling manner. The co-editors recognize that two limitations of the volume are a focus on North America as the primary geography from which issues are taken and that Black scholars are not represented.The Foreword, by Joyce Rain Anderson, a founding member of the CCCC American Indian Caucus, sets the stage for an argument that resonates throughout the text: the need to move from a dominant “settler colonialism” mind-set that ignores Indigenous voices, to an embracement of “Indigenous ways of knowing” (xi) that allows for a de-colonizing perspective to take hold.1 A key move is to “delink” from colonial practices and engage with a perspective that promotes universal relationality between the human and the non-human. The co-editors’ introductory essay further elaborates this argument. A Eurocentric view devalues or dismisses any role for the non-human and posits a view in which animals, plants, and nature in general have no role in the construction of knowledge. To re-engage a more diverse set of voices, including what the non-human might tell us if we were to listen, is a challenge that requires a willingness to move out of our comfort zone and recognize that white, heteronormative voices represent only one vision of reality and our place within it.The first essay, “The Politics of Recognition in Building Pluriversal Possibilities,” by Robert Lestón, begins by denoting what ‘decoloniality’ represents—neither a research area nor a discipline. It is the “struggle” those who have lived under colonization endure (22). Lestón presents two primary issues—that as educators we have the possibility of bringing excluded knowledges to the surface so their influence can be felt, and that the content of our own classes be transformed by the inclusion of “ancestral, border and non-Western cultural knowledges” (23). He presents a trenchant critique of “posthumanism”: it “still works within a tradition that is founded on a humanism that is part and parcel of modernity, and a humanity that is anything but humane” (29–30). He notes it yet may have a positive role, but it needs to question its own grounding in a worldview that excludes significant others. His first extended example is the Zapatista movement—it succeeded in establishing a different reality for people long oppressed by the State by reversing the leader/people position: “it is the people who lead and the leaders who obey” (35). The second extended example considers revisions to the Ecuadorian constitution by a coalition of Indigenous people who re-establish a sense of “living well” that incorporates a commitment to basic social rights [Buen Vivir] such as housing, education, etcetera, as well as a recognition that nature has rights that must be appreciated and maintained (38–39).The second essay, “Performing Complex Recognitions,” by Kelly Medina López and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, brings “Western theories of complexity . . . into conversation with . . . Indigenous epistemologies and decolonial projects” (57). The authors focus attention on “recognition” and “misrecognition” in mentoring relationships—who gets mentoring in order to further their ability to be recognized via a demonstration of their “fitness” to be a recognized part of an academic setting (59). From an Indigenous perspective, what is missing in colonial recognition is a sense of relationality, not just between humans, but with respect to the non-human as well. Their story revolving around “misrecognition” concerns an “Indigenous Maya Guatemalan” student who was taking Chicanx courses but did not see herself in those classes, yet was recognized as Chicanx. Her “research interests were (mis)recognized” as she was seen in “institutional terms,” where Chicanx was a “catchall for relations among the Americas” (49).Essay number three, “Listening Otherwise,” by Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder & Shannon Kelly, proposes that we expand our listening practices beyond normal communication expectations and engage in an “arboreal rhetoric,” listening for what trees might tell us. Their review of current research that argues against the dismissal of “plant rhetorics” is well done. Accepting non-human rhetorical influences is a move that may be difficult for some to embrace as it challenges conventional thinking on human communication. The argument in this essay, to “listen otherwise,” is one well worth the time.Christina Cedillo's essay (#4), “Smoke and Mirrors,” argues convincingly that reminding “whitestream activists that the dominant culture ignores Indigenous ecological wisdom to its own detriment” (92) is a critically important task. The essay focuses on a mythic story (Tezcatlipoca) that frames the discussion of a petrochemical explosion in Houston, Texas, and the resulting failure to meet the needs of both human and non-human in response to the crisis. A. I. Ramirez's essay (#5), “Perpetual (In)Securities,” examines the “global border industrial complex” (GBIC) (115) as it is exemplified in the border murals on the U.S./Mexico border. She applies conceptual framing drawn from Gloria Anzaldúa's “theory of la facultad” plus a pluri-versal theory of ‘facultades serpentinas’ in discussing the impact of the murals. Her application of a ‘serpentine’ method of analysis works well as does her ‘sensing the skin’ of the wall. As she notes, “Embodied knowledge, learning through the skin, through the body, is an ancient or traditional knowledge that has long been ignored” (125). Seeing the murals “as sensual and sensational rhetorics” (127) challenges the dominant approach taken by the “GBIC.”“Corn, Oil, and Cultivating Dissent through ‘Seeds of Resistance’” (#6) by Matthew Whitaker focuses attention on social movement rhetoric and protest assemblage in resistance to the projected XI pipeline. The only reservation a reader might have about this essay is that the pipeline project was abandoned in early June 2021. That, however, does not diminish the reasons for objecting to its potential existence. To begin, the essay focuses on the Cowboy Indian Alliance and its members’ act of resistance in planting corn where the pipeline was projected to be built. Since 2014, the Alliance has convened in a “Seeds of Resistance” ceremony that “is a deeply rhetorical event that brings together plants, people, soil and sky” (148) to remind people of what the pipeline could represent.In “Top Down, Bottom Up” (#7), Judy Holiday & Elizabeth Lowry focus attention on the possibility of granting legal “personhood” to non-human objects. The Deep Green Resistance environmental group filed a suit that sought to “confer personhood on the Colorado River ecosystem” (181). While the suit was dismissed, it raised awareness of the issue. As the authors note, New Zealand conferred personhood on the Whanganui River. They examine the human/nonhuman interaction and present, from a feminist perspective, the possibilities for embracing an Indigenous understanding of the co-relationship between living and ‘non-living’ entities.The final chapter is, in my view, one of the best in the text. Andrea Riley Mukavetz and Malea Powell's “Becoming Relations” uses a narrative approach in “Building an Indigenous Manifesto.” The authors utilize the role of ‘braiding sweetgrass’ as integral to their story of how Indigenous knowledge is created as “constellated, relational, and nonhierarchical” (195). The authors move away from Western/Eurocentric perspective of knowledge that is to be found someplace else toward a sense of knowledge as built on relations between human and non-human, including the role of plants. A key phrase encompasses a consistent theme throughout the text: “all our relations.”While much more could be said about each contribution, Decolonial Conversations reminds us that we are, all of us, interconnected via our relations, and that means giving respect and space to both Indigenous and Western/Eurocentric voices at one and the same time. As such, the edited collection is vitally important in bringing awareness to the presence and significance of Indigenous voices. It would be an excellent addition to any course that serves to review material rhetorics.

Rhetorical critics have often explored the dualism present in identification. Namely, that identification is intimately linked to division. Coming together involves some undoing of the previous identity; the creation of new material and symbolic connections. While identification has been theorized in the past by Burke, Black, and Ratcliffe, today's scholars of national identity and identification include Khan, Engels, Mercieca, and Stuckey (plus, so many more!). Lee and Atchison enter this conversation on the side of separation and division. We are Not One People: Succession and Separatism in American Politics since 1776 by Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison provides a necessary challenge to theories of identification by underscoring the rhetorical work of division within U.S. politics. We are Not One People is a fascinating interrogation of secession as such practices have appeared diachronically across historical contexts from the nation's founding to the present. This book offers readers an astute understanding of the rhetorical tactics that anticipate, desire, and/or negotiate separatism.The structure of We are Not One People is far-reaching in scope and discussion. This is a comparative volume, a long durée historical analysis that offers global insights both within and across rhetorical discourses and practices of secession. In a prologue along with seven chapters, Lee and Atchison walk us through practices of secession and union across U.S. history. The volume begins its analysis chapters with libertarians who “opted out,” or created a separate community, followed by a chapter on Confederate secessionists. Later chapters include discussions of Marcus Garvey's UNIA, lesbian separatist communities of the late 1970s and 1980s, as well as Mormon exodus during the early-to-mid 1800s. Insights gleaned from this volume demonstrate the paradoxical relationships between secession and union; separation and division. We are Not One People is a wonderful contribution to how political communication scholars understand political division and identification in and through the lens of rhetoric.One of the most prominent features of this volume is that Lee and Atchison offer rich histories of separatist rhetorics within each content chapter. For instance, the chapter on lesbian separatism incorporates work on engineered communities of the period, as well as broad-ranging historical discourses that may have inspired or guided actors in the 1970s and 1980s. The range of discourses supplied in this volume offers readers an accessible chart of how efforts to build communities are predicated on removal of existing communities. For instance, chapter two, on libertarian opt out, is a sweeping history of libertarian thought as such philosophy applies to community building. Yet, Lee and Atchison do not allow libertarian thought to be presented without a necessary corrective: that when libertarian idealism is challenged on principle, attempts to “opt out” reveal an unstated desire to oppress and/or enslave minoritized populations. Lee and Atchison both explain the rhetorical tactics that libertarians use to demonstrate their resistance to authority, while also elaborating on an exceptionalism founded on brutality. Lee and Atchison continue that line of reasoning to demonstrate how contemporary island homes engineered by Silicon Valley libertarian ideologues are efforts to ignore federal law and power, to escape the destruction wrought by climate change. The work of resisting authority within the confines of the state is fully actualized as an extra-juridical, rhetorical maneuver, an ongoing set of escapes rather than a singular action.Rich histories of secession are connected tightly to the political and rhetorical maneuvers of division and identification. We have long been a nation of separatism, imagined as a necessary condition for distinctions between groups and the basis of personhood and citizenship. Even the Declaration of Independence was understood as a paradoxical document—with beliefs that espouse both a rejection of taxation and state authority, as well as an embrace of the nation to come. The dualism, even dialectic, relationship between separation and union, is at the heart of this volume. Lee and Atchison weave the nature of this dualistic relationship throughout the text, highlighting how the desire for separation co-emerges alongside the desire to connect with others. Carefully engaging each of the case studies, this volume neither praises nor blames separatists but rather analyzes the rhetorical maneuvers of separatist discourses within the political motivations of the times. In this way, Lee and Atchison study both the contextual reasons that motivated secession and the larger political contexts that suggest how exit plans were predicated on exceptional exit. The exceptional exit is to create a selective utopia after decimating shared resources and habitats. This book offers a powerful way of engaging with rhetorical tactics of separation and exceptionalism.This volume presents useful critical approaches for scholars to follow. For instance, one way to extend the arguments presented in this book is to consider how the relationships between union and secession may also be constitutive of certain historical erasures. That is, there are moments in this book, where—if Lee and Atchison had an infinite number of pages (unlikely)—they might have had time to extend their argument that rhetorical devotion to utopia is based in dystopia. In chapter six, on the numerous exoduses of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (CLDS), Lee and Atchison analyze records from the Council of Fifty from the 1840s. In these documents, the Mormon church debated where the community might find safe harbor after genocide in Missouri, murder in Illinois, and wars in Utah. In We are Not One People these debates are focused on theocracy, with Mormon leaders, or Saints, arguing that the Kingdom of God needed separation from the United States of America as an enemy nation. Undoubtedly, the Mormon leaders of the Council of Fifty desired the Kingdom of God on earth as—Lee and Atchison demonstrate—the CLDS, like many other religious communities in the nineteenth century, believed that Jesus would eminently return. The Saints needed to be ready, spiritually but also tactically if they were to live. Lee and Atchison provide exceptional history and rhetorical analysis of these documents.Yet, the Council of Fifty documents are also a vision of utopia that does not simply imagine a future but also manufactures a CLDS history that erases and devalues broader church histories. Lee and Atchison write that Council of Fifty documents show a church built on Joseph Smith and his legacy. Smith, often worshipped as a utopian visionary, eventually became corrupt and demanded the community capitulate to his whims. Lee and Atchison highlight that Smith would, in his final decades, encourage church members to submit their wives and children to him. Smith wielded sweeping power over the church. Smith's unwavering authority derives from a discovery he made on September 22, 1827. On that day, Joseph Smith was said to have arrived on Hill Cumorah where he received a set of golden plates, telling him of Jesus's arrival in the Americas and the inspiration for a new church. In all of church lore, that discovery is announced as Joseph's alone. Such a singular position was fully realized by 1844, when the Council was convened. Yet, Smith was not alone in his discovery. His future bride, Emma Hale, was often with him. She relished in his discovery and helped Smith translate the Book of Mormon. Emma was also an early Saint. Yet, Emma's place in church history is a hotly contested topic. The official history created by the Council of Fifty elides a much more foundational violence. In this history, the Saints claim all the glory, and their children and wives are written out of this narrative. It is this erasure of others that allows Smith, Young, and others to create a utopian vision for CLDS.The utopian/dystopian dualism demonstrates the wealth of ways We are Not One People can inform rhetorical methods. Using the theocratic principles enunciated by the Council of Fifty allows Lee and Atchison to explicate a double movement: First, there is the erasure of much of the content of upon which Mormon belief is based, namely that Joseph Smith had been guided by the angel Maroni, who was described as Indigenous, and told him about the golden plates. Maroni is the one who tells Smith that Jesus had appeared in the Americas. In response to these revelations, Smith expended huge efforts to unsuccessfully minister to First Nations, who immediately recognized that Smith wanted to “save them” as they were “red sons of Israel.” By 1857, Mormon poisonings and murders of native peoples demonstrated the nastiness of the Saints exceptionalism—that if Indigenous peoples did not capitulate to the one true faith, violence was justified.Second, as a function of the Council's theocratic principles, women were erased from their part in church history and made explicitly subservient within the structures of the church. Emma Smith was present at many of Joseph's significant revelations—or later shared in those discoveries—but the power of women to receive the eucharist, to be a Saint, is fully denied in church structure. Saints are men, and women are allowed access to the Priesthood of belief only through their fathers, their husbands, or their Elders. It is the submission of women—to marry whomever she is told, to bare as many children as possible, and to do whatever her Priesthood holder commands—that allows the church to grow throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mormon adoption of women's lack of access to God—to a literal divorce of women from their heavenly father—is how Saints create their theocratic future. For the Saints to march into Zion, they demand full authority over those seen as lesser members of the community and against the peoples who do not adopt Maroni's vision of the new Israel.This brief example is meant to show the dexterity of We are Not One People. Its method's portability enables this volume to be exceptionally useful. We are Not One People is accessible for seniors, graduate students, faculty, and readers of popular press political communication scholarship. Readers will discover that the concepts in this book and the careful nuances supplied by the authors allow for extension and commentary. Indeed, some of the topics are so rich that, on their own, they merit full elaboration and present significant opportunities for further research. We are Not One People should be assigned reading for scholars invested in political communication, polarization, identity politics, U.S. politics, and national identity. Lee and Atchison are in conversation with the work of Paul Elliott Johnson, Mary Stuckey, Kevin Musgrave, E. Cram, Joshua Trey Barnett, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Christian Lundberg, and so many others. Lee and Atchison generate deep and wide understandings of national identity as already imbricated in division and secession. As founders dream of the utopian future, Lee and Atchison take care to show how idealistic visions and initiatives are necessarily based on divisive, often violent, actions. Here is where the method of rhetorical history illuminates the intricacies of secessionist motivations. Whereas Confederate secessionists were motivated by greed and avarice, Marcus Garvey's motivations were based on survival and the need for Black futures. Lee and Atchison draw attention to these distinctions and their rhetorical and political functions. Being able to read secession as a dualistic rhetorical action is what enables such flexibility. Identification and division remain a central paradox that actors must nevertheless negotiate.

Rhetoric and psychoanalysis have a long history of entanglement. As Patrick Mahoney wrote, it would be “hard to exaggerate the historical and intrinsic significance of rhetoric for psychoanalysis”; Aristotle's Rhetoric could even be said to constitute “the first major psychological treatise in the West.”1 Diego Enrique Londoño, drawing on Juan Rigoli, has documented the influence of rhetoric on eighteenth and nineteenth century alienism,2 while Michael Billig, Risto Fried, and others have sought these links in Freud and later theorists.3 Although Jacques Lacan gets most of the credit, two pioneering women beat him to the punch in systematically introducing rhetorical concepts (especially metaphor): Gertrude Buck and Ella Freeman Sharpe.4 Rhetoricians, in turn, have enriched their craft through psychoanalytic thinking—first with Sigmund Freud (most notably in Kenneth Burke), then Carl Jung,5 with a great deal of later work inspired by Lacan,6 although authors like Heinz Kohut and D. W. Winnicott also make occasional appearances.7Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric is the latest effort to find resonances between rhetoric and psychoanalysis to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. The book is quite short and by necessity focuses on a few key thinkers—Burke represents rhetoric, while Freud and Lacan epitomize the psychoanalytic tradition. Although Adleman and Vanderwees find some connections that are sure to be of interest to psychoanalytically inclined rhetoricians, they unfortunately do so while almost entirely omitting decades of significant work forging these links. Todd McGowan's blurb declaring the book “a miracle” for describing connections between rhetoric and psychoanalysis that “now seem clear and self-evident, but only because [Adleman and Vanderwees] have written this pathbreaking work” is sustainable only if one discounts the work cited above, plus many dozens of articles and books published by graduate students and junior rhetorical scholars. Lundberg's Lacan in Public, which undertakes a much more comprehensive study of the connections between rhetoric and psychoanalysis, is cited only to support a minor claim about Quintilian; if one were to ask a rhetorician working with psychoanalysis today to recommend a single volume on the topic, Lacan in Public might very well be the choice, whatever the rhetorician's opinion of the book. While it is always easy to lodge criticisms based on the omission of one's idiosyncratic favorites, the absences in Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric may set limits on the execution of its ambition. Rather than a continuation of scholarship on its overall topic, this book is a commentary on Lacan, Burke, and Freud narrowly, which does not diminish its contributions to that end but does make plain a missed opportunity to accomplish a larger goal.8Adleman and Vanderwees begin with a brief account of the “missed encounters” of psychoanalysis and rhetoric. Their central premise is that the two disciplines, “when closely scrutinized, often appear, uncannily, as each other's doppelgangers” due to their inquiries into human motives and their “perennial struggles with legitimacy” (1). This “peripheral status” as “third-class” denizens of “the republic of knowledge” is a major theme in the book (27). The authors claim that rhetoric disproportionately focuses attention on “pragmatic compositional concerns” while “almost none is allocated to bringing rhetorical theory to bear on . . . persuasion, influence, identifications, and propaganda” (9). This misconception is perhaps a product of the authors’ thin engagement with contemporary journals in the field (including this one), many of which do precisely this and few of which are cited. The phrase “new rhetoric” in the book's title might suggest some engagement with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Chaïm Perelman, but their work is not discussed—a particularly surprising choice because Lacan's own essay “Metaphor of the Subject” (which is cited) was written in direct response to Perelman. This is in line with a greater emphasis on the influence of psychoanalysis on rhetoric, rather than the converse or cross-pollination. Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric therefore repeats the “missed encounters” it identifies rather than benefiting from this “unending conversation.”Despite the decision not to deeply commit to the literature about the intersection of its two primary fields of interest, Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric makes a number of contributions to rhetorical scholarship. The first four chapters of the book engage with Burke fairly extensively. Chapter 1 explores the resonances between Burke and Freud, while Chapter 2 focuses closely on the concepts of symbolic action and attitude. The equation of attitude with Lacan's objet petit a, the “hallucinatory motor of desire” (45), is particularly interesting as an approach to the perennial problem of the relation between rhetoric and desire. Chapter 3 deals with identification as a concept in Freud and Burke with special reference to Burke's “Rhetoric of Hitler's ‘Battle,’” perhaps a particularly timely work which can be appreciated differently through a more thorough exposition of Freud's conceptual influence on Burke. Chapter 4 applies Burke's thought to conspiracy theories, an area where others have already leveraged psychoanalysis to good effect.9The last three chapters are somewhat more theoretical and, while the thread of Burke's thought persists, they lean toward Freud and Lacan. Chapter 5, about the origins of Freud's free association, is primarily of historical interest (and could perhaps benefit from engaging work on the pre-Freudian influence of rhetoric in psychology). Chapter 6 engages listening from rhetorical and psychoanalytic perspectives. Chapter 7 is less a Lacanian theory of rhetoric than an engagement with Lacan's own rhetoric and its implications for theory. It ends with a fine aphorism, borrowed from Simone Weil, about how the wall dividing rhetoric and psychoanalysis might also be the medium of communication between them.Taken as a whole, Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric is a worthwhile exposition of its specific foci, even though many other potential symbioses are left unexplored in this short text. For scholars of rhetoric whose familiarity with psychoanalysis is limited, but for whom Kenneth Burke or the topics of each chapter are of interest, this book can serve as a valuable place to begin thinking about psychoanalysis's confluence with rhetoric. Those knowledgeable about psychoanalysis outside the rhetorical tradition will likely find it helpful as well, especially because its treatment of rhetoric is accessible to non-specialists and forgoes the opportunity to grind intradisciplinary theoretical axes. Rhetoricians more extensively versed in psychoanalysis, however, will find particular points of interest, but may be somewhat frustrated by the book's failure to intervene in any of the important conversations happening at an intersection that Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric may seem to inaugurate, but in fact is simply compelled to repeat.

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.

Editors' Introduction to vol. 6 issue 3

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ABSTRACTThis essay examines the lives of two pianists with significant impairments of their right arms: Paul Wittgenstein, a classical pianist who lost his right arm in World War I, and Horace Parlan, a jazz pianist who lost full use of his right hand due to childhood polio. Drawing on theories of mêtis and passing developed by queer theory and disability studies scholars, we theorize aural passing to examine how Parlan and Wittgenstein differently navigated the rhetorical constraints of their respective musical genres. Engaging a rhetorical biography of each performer’s unique mêtis, we compare how disabled forms of passing are not equivalent across all instances and conclude by meditating on the entrenched ableism of musical pedagogy and performance.KEYWORDS: Aural passingclassical musicdisabilityjazzmêtis AcknowledgmentsWe thank Michael Lechuga, Emma McDonnell, Mark Pedelty, Kate Rich, and Aubrey Weber who all provided feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Normate is a term developed by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson to mean “the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8). Throughout this essay, we draw on this term to reference the link between the social construction of normative ablism and embodied standards of self-expression (Dolmage, “Back Matter” 351–52).2 Deleuze and Guattari admit that “becoming-imperceptible means many things” and, in a close parallel to the animal (fox, octopus) metaphors for cunning intelligence invoked by the term mêtis, reference “the camouflage fish” to describe the act of blending in through an overlay of patterns. They also describe “becoming-imperceptible” as “to be like everybody else,” “to go unnoticed,” and as having a “essential relation” to “movement,” which is often “below and above the threshold of perception” (279–81).3 One colleague and pianist of mine responded with the singular word “VERBOTEN!” when asked if he had ever heard of the piece played by a performer using two hands.

ABSTRACTThis article engages with TPC scholarship that calls for increased attention to agency as distributed and interdependent. This study analyzes 320 postings in one online health forum to better understand how patients come together to collaborate with one another, distribute information, and make health decisions. I argue that viewing crowdsourced forums as agentive assemblages may help researchers explain both the agency of individual actors as well as the collective agency of groups over time.KEYWORDS: Agencyassemblagescommunityembodimentempowermentonline health AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Katherine Fredlund, Alexandra Russell, Elizabeth Lane, Bess Myers, William Duffy, Edward Maclin, Kimberly Hensley Owens, and Julie Homchick Crowe, as well as the two anonymous reviewers and the editorial staff at TCQ, for their kind and valuable suggestions on early drafts of this article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Additional informationNotes on contributorsShanna CameronShanna Cameron is a Ph.D. candidate in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication program at the University of Memphis. Her research interests include feminist theories and practices, digital rhetorics, and the rhetoric of health and medicine. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication.

When we enter an empty classroom, what do we see? Desks, a board, and, if we're lucky, some collection of functional technology (and if we're luckier, windows). The classroom space operates through standardization, each element of the classroom designed to regulate the transfer of knowledge. When we enter a classroom full of students, what we see might subordinate to another question: what do we feel? Those quiet moments before class begins, as we mentally prepare, are ones dominated by feeling. (In my case, these are often the most uncomfortable moments of my teaching days.) They are moments of affective uncertainty in which a variety of feelings—chief among them, anxiety—enter the classroom along with us, through the many operating screens, and even as we look through doors and windows.1We may find ourselves at odds with the space's arrangement. Often to the criticism of contemporary pedagogical theory, the traditional classroom installs clear hierarchies of power that teachers decide either to work within or, in a now well-established attempt to subvert these hierarchies, to “flip.” Placing students in a circle, grouping them into pods, inviting them to the front of the room—these are all practices that defamiliarize what can become a practiced (and tired) method of knowledge transfer for students and teachers alike and engender a more dynamic and fruitful experience for all. Rather than allowing students to sit back and receive knowledge that they will apply somewhere else, flipping the classroom originated to encourage students to apply concepts immediately and see teaching and learning as reciprocal activities that require their participation on both sides (Brewer, McCook, and Halasek 2018: 484). If classroom structures exist to make learning more predictable, then flipping the classroom is an action that allows us to remain open to surprises.What is affect if not something that arrives to our surprise and, potentially, our transformation? Affect “arises in the midst of in between-ness,” demanding of us that we remain open to its grip and potentially allow it to “drive us toward movement . . . that can likewise suspend us” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1). Understanding affective meaning is curious in that it requires us to be attuned to the background of experience. While it might seem strange to suggest that the classroom should be remade through the affects that undergird our experience, it is just as strange to turn to models that presuppose that we are never surprised, interrupted, or moved by affect.The humanities classroom, furthermore, is a space particularly well suited to unpack moments of affective rupture because our pedagogical goals—to reshape students’ understanding of the textual, political, and mental worlds through which they move—depend on being moved in unexpected ways. Noticing and reading the affective material of the classroom pushes us down fascinating paths, and it can dramatically and helpfully expand our pedagogical methods. Indeed, deriving meaning from the seeming interruption of affect allows us to reassess the very foundations of what Lynn Worsham (1998) calls “dominant pedagogy,” or the structures of the classroom setting that themselves produce the very notion of a “legitimate point of view” (221). Worsham's definition of legitimacy evinces how dominant pedagogy is inseparable from hegemonic structures of power, and she proposes that we turn to what she suspects “we already know but have learned to forget”: that our pedagogical commitments to social change “must occur at the affective level” (216). To fail to recognize our affective experience in the classroom is to prohibit the project of social change. Recognizing the place of “the tight braid of affect and judgement” places teacher and student in a collaborative project of reimagining social relations (216).In an effort to examine what it looks like to teach through feeling, we seek to better understand how affect shapes our encounters with not only our students but also our objects of inquiry. While there is a large and diverse body of work examining how affect relates to reading practices (Sedgwick 2002; Felski 2008, 2015; Anker and Felski 2017; Best and Marcus 2009; Love 2010) as well as how the act of reading might buttress empathetic feelings (Keen 2007; Hogan 2016), we redirect these differing but linked conversations toward different inquiries. Some essays in this cluster explore how our embodiment in the classroom creates moments of rupture that reshape our textual encounters and methodologies. Embodiment is a capacious concept, and we consider what it means when we and our students cannot find a full reckoning with our own embodiment in critical theory. Other essays explore how nonhuman beings and objects themselves shape our affective experience in the classroom. In both cases, the intersection of affect and embodiment raises questions about how we see and treat one another. Likewise, some contributors examine how the political worlds that surround the classroom shift the affective direction of our teaching by putting undue pressure on students and teachers, a lesson that has only become clearer since the spread of COVID-19. Increasingly, those political worlds enforce censorship and surveillance, influencing what students and teachers can do in classroom spaces that are either entirely virtual or shaped by their potential digital afterlives. As pedagogy continues to shift toward digital models that archive and preserve the classroom far beyond the ephemerality of class discussion, we must begin addressing how those models shape our pedagogic affects. Finally, while scholarship on the affective displacements of critique is well underway, some of the essays here help bridge the divide between critique and postcritique by locating the compatibility of affect and critical reading in our pedagogy. Across these varied approaches and inquiries, essays frequently return to a tension that emerges as a guiding thesis: the seeming disruption of affect is a productive site of learning for faculty and students alike.The concept of affective rupture is central to the work that follows. Even though we do not take rupture as an intrinsically good pedagogical event, we do hold it as one that reveals much about both the conditions in which we teach and learn and the methods of humanistic inquiry on which we most frequently rely. Much has been written about affective rupture by critics in affect studies. Rarely has this work been more compelling and urgent than in Lauren Berlant's (2011) analysis of an untitled John Ashbery poem. Berlant seizes on a moment of rupture to examine how it makes us feel “lost but alive and unvanquished” (25). “Life has been seized . . . by an event that demands fidelity” (25). Anna Ioanes picks up on nonliterary ruptures in the classroom, exploring the importance of other moments of interruption—when a bug floats through the room, a student drops a book, or the weather changes suddenly. Particularly when such moments involve nonhuman things, they offer ways to answer questions about how we treat others, both human and nonhuman, while also bringing into focus the affects circulating in the classroom all the time. In this way, Ioanes reminds us that affect is not merely bound up in interactions between people but also a dynamic part of how we see the nonhuman things that populate the classroom. She argues that we must resituate external forces—a pandemic and political protest, most recently—as sites of learning, action, and civic responsibility.Just as Ioanes insists that we should focus on the affects produced through interruptions, Lauren Silber takes seriously her students’ feelings of discomfort that emerged when discussing affect theory alongside race. Silber examines how the presence of affect theory itself can produce an interruption that shifts our inquiry away from our material and toward institutional structures and even the whiteness of critical theory. Silber explains that, somewhat paradoxically, it is in becoming better interpreters of affect that students were able to critique the limiting structures of education and their discipline, which frequently enjoins them to focus (only) on the text. Just as Silber asserts that the study of affect interrupts models for knowledge production in the humanities, Aaron Colton examines how attention to sincerity helps bridge a similar divide between critique and postcritique. If proponents of postcritical reading hold that a critical hermeneutics obscures superficial or literal readings, others argue that critique might help render “feelings as objective structures (rather) than subjective dispositions” (Rasmussen and Sharma 2017: n.p.). Colton explores how a course examining the New Sincerity movement—a post-1980 amalgam of realist fiction, sentimental film, and indie music emphasizing themes of authenticity, enthusiasm, and vulnerability—primed students to regard texts not only as subjects for suspicious interrogation but also as historical and structural catalysts for affective response. Colton argues that prompting students to identify and interpret the mechanisms by which texts might speak sincerely can help them discern the compatibility of affective and critical reading practices.Silber and Colton explore whether pedagogical models organized around feelings such as empathy and sincerity are suited to break down colonial, heteronormative, neoliberal frameworks in the classroom or whether these feelings might themselves collapse important differences into sameness (Palumbo-Liu 2012; Dischinger 2018). Likewise, Tiffany Diana Ball explores the limits and uses of other structuring feelings—namely, paranoia—when teaching queer theory in China in front of a state-required classroom camera. Ball argues that, strange as it may seem, even paranoia can produce an affective community, however tenuous that practice might feel. Teaching and learning under clear surveillance opened the space for deep investigation into how paranoia feels without placing it into clear opposition with alternative reading practices.The contributors to this cluster represent different segments of an increasingly contingent profession. The teaching of humanities courses has long been shifting toward contingent labor, hybrid teaching, split administrative-faculty positions, and interdisciplinarity—itself an imperative, albeit one that many scholars embrace, to cover ever more terrain. The casualization of labor began long before Marc Bousquet's (2008) landmark book described it through the notion of organizational flexibility or the institution's preference to hire part-time to tenure-track labor. That preference led to a situation in which “the holders of a doctoral degree are not so much the products of the graduate-employee labor system as its byproducts” (21). In the thirteen years since Bousquet wrote those words, conditions have consistently worsened. While the contributors to this essay cluster represent far from every type of labor model in the profession, they come from a variety of institutional settings: an assistant professor teaching interdisciplinary writing and literature courses, a scholar-administrator teaching literature and writing at a liberal arts institution, a lecturer teaching multimodal communication at a research institution, and a postdoctoral scholar teaching queer theory in China. These settings help us illustrate how the position in which we teach shapes our pedagogical practices.Different as these essays are, they work backward from the same question: when we encounter affect in the classroom, will we avoid that encounter or be changed by it? While nearly everyone who has taught has had the experience of what they might call an affective interruption, we sometimes think of these moments as obstacles that must be worked around with quick solutions. When we think of affective rupture as an unwelcome and momentary distraction from the task of teaching and learning, that is, we are ill prepared to think through the felt conditions of pedagogy and labor.Having moved through over a year of teaching fully online during a pandemic, we now realize that the affective obstacles of the digital classroom are legion. Far from these ruptures being limited to moments when technology fails us, we spend much of our time lamenting the unrelenting reliability of the digital classroom. As we begin to realize how exhausting it can be to work in exclusively online spaces, the questions of this essay cluster—how we interact with nonhuman elements, how we come up against institutional and disciplinary structures, how paranoia and suspicion can be worked with or against—are more urgent now than ever. If we teach students to interpret the affective materials of the classroom and remain open to working through them ourselves, we preserve the opportunity to teach with humanity and generosity. In doing so, we gain access to an important path for our students, and we redirect our pedagogy as the foundations of higher education continue to shift.

Tiffany Diana Ball is a lecturer at the University of Michigan. She has held academic positions at Kalamazoo College and Tsinghua University where she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Tsinghua Society of Fellows. She published a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion.Sheila T. Cavanagh is professor of English at Emory University and director of the World Shakespeare Project. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, she has also written many articles on early modern literature and pedagogy, among other topics. She is currently writing a monograph entitled “Multisensory Shakespeare for Specialized Communities.”Aaron Colton is an associate teaching professor and the director of first-year writing in the Department of English at Emory University. His current research examines the critical and pedagogical dimensions of writer's block in post-1945 US fiction. His scholarship has appeared previously in Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, College Literature, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and Postmodern Culture.Matthew Dischinger is a program advisor for the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University.Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of comparative literature and African studies at the University of Georgia, where he teaches courses on modern African literatures, postcolonial theory, and world literature. He previously taught at the American University of Beirut and the University of Edinburgh. He is particularly concerned with designing courses and curricula that introduce students to the powerful conceptual and theoretical work that is carried out by literary forms from the global south.Amy Kahrmann Huseby is an associate teaching professor, media director, and online literature program coordinator in the English Department, affiliated faculty in gender and women's studies, and honors college fellow at Florida International University. Huseby's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, Women's Writing, South Atlantic Review, and several edited collections. Her own poetry has been published and anthologized by the Atlanta Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Pearl, among others. Together with Heather Bozant Witcher (Auburn University), she is coeditor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020). She also serves as editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Anna Ioanes is assistant professor of English at the University of St. Francis (Illinois). A scholar of post-1945 American literature and culture, her research interests include affect studies, aesthetics, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Her scholarship appears in American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, the minnesota review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and ASAP/J, where she is also a contributing editor.Heather McAlpine is an associate professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature.Lauren Silber is the assistant director of academic writing and an assistant professor of the practice at Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in English and American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her scholarship emerges at the intersection of migration studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, gender studies, and affect theory, with interests in narrativity and storytelling.Jennifer Stewart is an associate professor of English and director of composition at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, including teaching college writing, workplace literacies and project management, and the rhetoric of popular culture heroines. Much of her scholarship draws from her work in the writing program and in the classroom. Recent projects discuss incorporating diversity-themed common readers and multimodal composition into writing programs as well as the use of institutional ethnographic methods to investigate standard writing program practices.Doreen Thierauf is assistant professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in composition and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work on pedagogy, sexuality, and gender-based violence has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Women's Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. With Erin Spampinato and Michael Dango, she is preparing an edited collection for SUNY Press entitled New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions, slated for publication in 2024. She also serves as Reviews editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Theresa Tinkle pursues a broad range of interests in the humanities. She holds a BS in elementary education from Oregon College of Education, an MA in English literature from Arizona State University, and a PhD in English literature (medieval) from UCLA. Since 1989, when she joined the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has researched and taught in the fields of medieval literature and drama, manuscript and textual studies, writing studies, writing placement, and disability studies. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. In this capacity, she leads collaborative research in writing placement, writing in the disciplines, and community college transfer. She has published in a number of journals, including ELH, JEGP, Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Speculum, and Assessing Writing.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> The relationships between US government emergency management agencies and the public they serve are fraught with distrust and tension. This distrust can be attributed to past disaster responses and a lack of transparency with emergency information. Emergency managers work as technical communicators to share information through multiple platforms and digital spaces. Public trust can be increased by improving communication strategies within emergency management organizations. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Research to improve communication between emergency management agencies and the public calls for more trust and transparency within government organizations. However, little research has been conducted about the ways an organization's structure and workflow influence communication practices/strategies. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How do emergency management organizations share information about natural disasters with the public? 2. How can communication strategies and workflow in emergency management organizations be improved? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> Clay Spinuzzi's topsight is used as a framework to conduct an organizational analysis of North Carolina Emergency Management (NCEM) response to Hurricane Florence in 2018. Interviews were conducted and artifacts were collected to investigate Spinuzzi's three levels of activity and create corresponding workflow diagrams. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Results indicate a need for standardized emergency management training and additional resources to support emergency managers. Interventions from technical and professional communicators can assist in developing communication strategies and problem-solving techniques. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> Developing informed communication strategies within an emergency management agency is a complex problem because of the numerous factors that play into the organizational structure and existing protocols. Technical communication scholars can help improve communication practices through local community outreach and additional organizational analyses.

Reviewed by: Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric by Michelle Bolduc Denise Stodola Michelle Bolduc, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, Studies and Texts 217. Toronto, CA: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2020. 443 pp. ISBN: 978-0-88844-217-8. Many scholars have worked to uncover the transmission of rhetorical texts over time, which is important but nothing new; however, this book takes a novel and illuminating approach in examining a specific case of the transmission of Cicero diachronically by delineating its transmission from Cicero to Brunetto Latini's translation of Cicero and then to Jean Paulhan's translation of Latini's translation of Cicero, and finally, to Perelman's and Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric Project. Significantly, the book posits a close relationship between rhetoric and translation, and does so by exploring the different meanings of the medieval term of translatio and using the notion of translatio as the organizing metaphor overall. Indeed, the work argues that the New Rhetoric Project grew out of this line of transmission and did so through both the literal and metaphorical meanings of the notion of translatio. In order to support these assertions, Bolduc presents us with very thorough and meticulously documented research. She provides an extensive bibliography of seventy-one pages, which is subdivided into two major categories: "Pre-Modern Works (before 1800)" and "Modern Works (after 1800)." Her bibliography includes works in many different languages, and she herself, as indicated in "A Note on Translation," has performed all of the translations unless indicated otherwise in the text. Moreover, each chapter includes numerous notes, each of which is painstakingly thorough. Just as an example, the first chapter contains one hundred twenty-one notes, while the second contains two hundred and sixty-five. In addition to using such high-quality scholarship methods, Bolduc does a good job of organizing her chapters: before launching into the chronology of the transmission in the third chapter, her second chapter conveys the different facets of the word translatio and exactly what that term brings to the discussion of the roots of the New Rhetoric Project. As Bolduc points out, translatio means not only the act of literally putting a text written in one language into a different language, but it also takes on additional types of meanings as generated in the Middle Ages. In fact, in the Middle Ages, translatio also included the metaphorical meaning of the [End Page 446] term. In other words, the term takes on the meaning of transcultural transmission of ideas and a sort of recontextualization of those ideas. Moreover, the act of translating a text includes this kind of transcultural transmission and recontextualization. In showing the chronological movement of the argument she is making, chapters two through five are in chronological order. In the first of these chronological chapters, entitled "Cicero: Rhetoric and Translation for the Roman Republic," Bolduc focuses on Cicero's translation of Greek sources and the manner in which he was integral in the "transfer of knowledge from Greece to Rome" (58). Cicero's translation and translation function to show that Latin, as a language, could transmit knowledge as readily as Greek, that the Romans were legitimate heirs of Greek knowledge, and could ultimately move even beyond what they inherited from the Greeks. Ultimately, however, Cicero's political aims despite, and perhaps because of, his renowned eloquence, led to his execution after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Cicero thus became synonymous with the demise of the Republic itself. This focus on the connection between rhetoric and civic concerns persists throughout the rest of Bolduc's chapters. The focus on the metaphorical meaning of translatio and its application to this line of transmission becomes clearer as the chapters progress. Chapter three is entitled "Bringing Ciceronian Rhetoric to the Florentine comune: Brunetto Latini's Translation of Cicero," and in it Bolduc posits that Latini's translation of Cicero is done as a response to his exile, which occurred for political reasons: he was a leading figure of the Guelph party, which suffered a defeat at Montaperti. As such, La Rettorica was shaped metaphorically by Latini's political context. As Bolduc asserts, "Latini transfers the Roman story of the conspiracy of...

Reviewed by: Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities by Stephen M. Monroe Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Stephen M. Monroe, Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2093-5. How much do we know about our own university and its past? Stephen M. Monroe asks this question of his university—University of Mississippi—as well as a few other peer southeastern U. S. schools. Monroe examines how these universities "have struggled with their linguistic and [End Page 452] symbolic inheritance" (1). The controversies covered in the book are shown to have deep roots in the Lost Cause ideology that developed almost immediately after the Confederacy surrendered to the Union in the Civil War. Monroe explores how the Lost Cause formed, and continues to inform, notions of race and identity in universities of the American South and beyond. Monroe builds a conceptual frame called "confederate rhetoric." Put simply, confederate rhetoric "is historical, gathering any and all symbolic behavior that is rooted in or that recalls the Old South" (2). The concept extends beyond just Lost Cause discourse in its attention to a larger variety of texts, objects, and sources. As Monroe explains, "confederate rhetoric encompasses many modes of communication, including words, sounds, colors, statues, flags, photos, architecture, and more" (2). The widening of the communicative aperture allows Monroe to study less traditional forms of discourse, like ephemera, collegiate fight songs, and nicknames, as well as more traditional forms such as public arguments and deliberations. Heritage and Hate is composed of seven chapters, along with a preface, introduction, epilogue, and postscript. Most books do not have all of these sections preceding and proceeding the numbered chapters of a book. The various entry and exit points of the book express the recurring relationship amongst racism, identity, and tradition. Chapter one and two analyze vernacular discourses from the University of Mississippi. Chapter one traces the contested meaning of the nickname of the University, "Ole Miss." Originally the name given to the first University of Mississippi yearbook in 1897, Monroe explains that the quick uptake of the term as a nickname for the school owes to the racialized hierarchy of the late nineteenth century. The person responsible for suggesting the name noted that they often heard Black people working on southern plantations "address the lady in the 'Big House' as 'Ole Miss'" (25). Monroe builds upon this origin story to show how "'Ole Miss' has been invoked to glorify and defend the Old South and its outmoded way of life, used to punish and exclude Black people, … and served as code, container, and protector of nostalgic feelings for the Lost Cause" (20). Monroe tracks the various public debates about whether to keep the nickname, showing how appeals to unity and tradition betray a sympathy to the past rather than an effort at inclusion. Chapter two also takes up a vernacular discourse at the University of Mississippi, specifically the school cheer known as "Hotty Toddy." The central question posed in this chapter is, "how should southern university communities (and other intuitions) handle expressions or symbols less glaring than Confederate statuary but perhaps just as troubling?" Monroe makes the case for why "Hotty Toddy" rises to the same level of scrutiny by examining six moments in which the chant was "weaponized as a racial taunt" (63). Chapter three and four focus on controversies that feature an inciting event and significant discursive responses. In chapter three, Monroe analyzes a 2015 incident in which Black students at Missouri staged a peaceful protest and white spectators used the traditional M-I-Z-Z-O-U chant "to [End Page 453] drown [the protestors] out and to communicate anger and disapproval" (91). Monroe draws from newspaper articles, social media posts, and institutional responses to capture the intense emotion of the discourse from various individuals and groups. Chapter four moves back to University of Mississippi to address a controversy based on the response of students to the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012. On November 7, when the election was called in favor of Obama, many students took to public spaces and yelled racial...