It is with the deepest sorrow that I write with the news that Erik Doxtader, Philosophy & Rhetoric’s editor, passed away on June 22, 2025, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.Erik was a singular intellectual, teacher, mentor, colleague, and editor. Under his stewardship, Philosophy & Rhetoric did more than maintain its legacy as a unique forum of philosophical and rhetorical invention. He also stretched—indeed reconfigured—our philosophical and rhetorical imaginations in profound and indelible ways. Among many accomplishments, Erik made the journal hospitable to planetary thought; encouraged thoughtful encounters between ancient and cutting-edge theory; deepened the journal’s longstanding commitment to rigorous argumentation as the marrow of academic dialogue; and invited exploratory and experimental essays to the journal’s forums.It is a powerful testament to Erik’s legacy that he leaves behind a robustly healthy journal under the trusteeship of a dedicated editorial team, board, and community of peer reviewers. I am immensely proud to be following in Erik’s footsteps as editor of the journal, working alongside Dr. Freya Thimsen (Essay and Forum Editor) and Dr. Kelly Happe (Book Forum Editor). We are humbled and honored by your continued commitment to the journal. —Omedi Ochieng

ABSTRACT This article identifies a tension between two forms of respect: respect for others’ agency and respect for their rationality. This tension emerges, the article argues, when one person presents another with a nuanced argument on an important topic, thereby complimenting their rationality, but draining their agential resources by demanding their attention. Giving someone an argument can therefore generate a structurally similar double bind to giving them a puppy as a present: Refusing is normatively uncomfortable, but accepting requires a significant sacrifice. The article concludes by considering how certain factors can weaken the double bid, including rhetoric.

It is common for those who live in democratic societies to talk about the importance of speaking to others. But what about the desirability of speaking to others? At first glance, the question appears false, since the answer seems obvious: Of course speaking to others is desirable! Engaging with others who disagree with us is part and parcel of the democratic way of life. And yet, we need not look too far to find the public sphere mired in intense polarization, divisiveness, and a general breakdown of civil discourse. In practice, we appear to set aside what we say we believe and proceed as though we know that dialogue is pointless.What should we make of this gap between, on the one hand, our accedence to the idea that speaking across difference is good and, on the other, our demonstrable lack of attunement to that good in practice?We differentiate two ways of conceiving the gap. One might understand the gap as between a belief in the importance of open dialogue and the willingness to engage in it. Here, the discrepancy between our commitment to the principle and acting on it is easily cleared up by pointing to things that make dialogue ineffective today. We could say that, while we do firmly believe in the principle of dialogue, reality makes it impossible. In this case, the retreat from dialogue is inevitable. We propose an alternative understanding of the gap as one between believing that dialogue is desirable and desiring dialogue. We make the case that while the first framework can excuse the evident tendency to avoid disagreement as a realistic, prudent, or practical choice, it also makes embracing pluralism indefensible. The second approach, we argue, has the potential not only to remind us that the desirability of dialogue is coextensive with the desirability of capacious thought and judgment, but to reattune us to pluralism as an ideal for realizing those desires.Increasingly, citizens, scholars, and civic institutions lament that it has become impossible to disagree with each other. This notion—that democratic dialogue has become an impossibility—comes in different forms. For some, the impossibility is due to contextual developments. We live in a new world in which the conditions that once made speaking to others potentially productive are gone. So, even if we make the effort to speak across difference, our deliberations in the current digital and transnational public sphere cannot consolidate public opinion as they used to. Such explanations, which attribute the impossibility to contextual developments, might be called externalist to distinguish them from ones that attribute the putative impossibility of open dialogue to inherent causes.From an internalist view, developments like the rise of social media, globalization, and the growing role of “big money” in politics have not exactly made the democratic process impossible; they have merely magnified the fact that it was always too flawed to be viable. If it once seemed that democracy—as a pluralist way of life, based on free and shared self-governance—was possible, now we can see more clearly that speaking to others is ineffective in consolidating, or ensuring the legitimacy of, public opinion. Similarly, if it once seemed that the challenge was how to make life in pluralism better, it has become clear that human beings, insofar as we are essentially tribalistic, may prefer not to have to negotiate between different values and worldviews.Whatever form it takes, the idea that democratic dialogue might have been good if it were not impossible—as an explanation of the gap between what we remain committed to in principle, on the one hand, and our readiness to act on it, on the other—has circumscribed our response to the crisis of democratic dialogue by making the importance of democratic dialogue effectively moot.Reflection about the democratic crisis has devolved into a deterministic problematization of free speech itself. In politics, free speech has become a partisan issue, and in academic scholarship, the validity of committing to the protection of free speech has become a matter to interrogate. For example, which views are acceptable to “platform” on college campuses? Does Justice Brandeis’s slogan that the “truth will out” or Mill’s idea of the “marketplace of ideas” have any actual empirical validity? Does free speech in the age of the internet make its abuse too rampant to justify its protection? And so on. However, this concern with the defensibility and parameters of free speech is confused about the stakes of the protection of free speech. It neglects the fact that the commitment to protect freedom of expression is based not on the principle that speech ought to be free, but rather on a commitment to pluralism that, in turn, demands that speech be protected. That is to say, the actual stakes of any argument in support of or against free speech go to the ideal of living with others with whom we are likely to disagree. Concern with the defensibility of free speech fails to recognize, in short, that it is the pluralism itself that needs to be defended.Accordingly, our aim is to shift the conversation about the dysfunction in public dialogue by framing the desirability of speaking to others as an aporia that can be ignored only on pain of rendering pluralism indefensible.To present the desirability of dialogue as a problematic seems odd, especially because the commonplace idea that talking across difference is important seems to already entail its desirability. And yet, if pressed to explain why anyone would want to talk to others, we find ourselves describing instrumental goods. Which is to say, we find ourselves listing things that talking to others is good for: be this cultivating civility and respect, refining our individual beliefs, or arriving at better solutions to collective problems. Indeed, it is easy to recognize the potential benefits, be they civic, social, epistemic, or moral. At that point, the distinction between believing that something is desirable and desiring it for itself becomes clear. In the first case, being in dialogue need not be a desirable prospect so long as the outcome of the process is desirable. In the second case, it is the prospect of dialogue itself that is desirable, notwithstanding its challenges. This distinction is important because the instrumental benefits of dialogue for stability, civility, and cooperation are recognizable in any kind of society or political system. Democratic societies, however, uphold pluralism as an ideal: Disagreement is not merely an instrument to resolve differences; living in difference is an opportunity to disagree. As the timing of this special section suggests, we live in a moment that calls on us to contend with the implication of this distinction for pluralism.The desirability of talking to others is a problematic that emerges specifically from a mismatch between a theory and its practice. Consider the monist-pluralist debate in Anglo-European literary theory from the 1960s up to the 1990s. The debate, which was framed as a contest between critical pluralists (represented by Wayne Booth) and monists (represented by E. D. Hirsch), opened up a discussion about the parameters within which interpretation would realize its aims and optimize its results, about how the aims are to be defined and what the ideal result might be. For Booth, the project of pluralism is one invested in “the public testing of values” through conversation, whereas for Hirsch validity in interpretation required imposing order on “the chaotic democracy of readings” (1979, 4–5). Of course, the debate was not limited to a quarrel between pluralists and monists; it expanded to include critics from numerous emerging “fields” that have since become institutional mainstays (like feminist studies, postcolonial studies, African American studies, queer studies, and comparative literature) who criticized it for various alleged ideological blind spots.What is noteworthy is that, in the exchanges between critics representing presumably irreconcilable views of how best to conduct the critical enterprise, everyone could count on others to be invested in contesting other views. When a monist like Hirsch insisted that critical inclusivity stands to compromise interpretive validity, Booth could, despite warning of monist exclusiveness as a form of “critical killing,” point to how the monist position gains clarity and force when it stands within a plurality of critical views (1979, 259). And Ellen Rooney, who criticized Booth for modeling his vision of interpretive pluralism on liberal paradigms of public reason as persuasion, wrote an entire book to persuade readers otherwise—a critique that was possible and necessary in a historical moment when a rationalist-liberal pluralism could be plausibly posited as hegemonic, whereas a public sphere paralyzed by irrationality and post-factualism calls for a foundationalist, or at least positive, theoretical intervention.Put differently, today a pluralist rhetorical theory like Booth’s would not be in a position to model itself after the openness of public discourse without first explaining why one would want to model critical discourse on a paradigm in dysfunction. Likewise, Rooney could not argue that the same ideological baggage attached to the “colloquial meaning of the term ‘pluralist’ shadows all our theories of interpretation” (1989, 17), not at a time when pluralism is no longer part of our political vernacular. She would have to find positive grounds on which to present an alternative vision of critical discourse. And Hirsch might not want to call for untethering the principles of persuasion in public discourse from the grounds of validity in scholarly criticism, not when translating the value of what literary critics do has become a paramount concern for literary studies as a discipline. In short, at the time of the monist-pluralist debate, the most exclusivist monist could afford to be so because it was possible to take fellow critics’ practical commitment to argue and disagree for granted. Booth, the avatar of critical pluralism, dedicated himself, in Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, to differentiating all the different varieties of monism and pluralism, delineating the advantages and liabilities of each of these critical “attitudes,” and to arguing the faultlessness of critical disagreements, as he did when he proposed Andrew Paul Ushenko’s thought experiment, which imagined “a fixed cone placed among observers who are not allowed to change their angle of vision” (1979, 31), as an apt analogy for “the challenge of pluralism,” all without having to consider what motivates critics to share their opinions. Meanwhile the past two decades have seen literary criticism and theory not just defending the value of interpretive knowledge (literary studies’ perennial institutional challenge) but calling into question the very point of producing interpretations (Lehman 2017).It takes a particular historical moment to push a question like the desirability of speaking to others to the forefront. Hannah Arendt raised the question in the middle of the twentieth century when she believed that the defense of pluralism was at risk, and her search led her to Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy.When we invited our contributors to help us articulate the desirability of speaking to others as a problematic, we presented them the foregoing conceptual framework and offered, as orienting figures, Immanuel Kant, who articulates one of modernity’s most influential philosophical accounts of why disagreeing is good for people irrespective of the result, and Hannah Arendt, who critically revived Kant’s philosophical framework after the rise of fascism.In his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant puts forward the maxim to “think in the position of everybody else” (1790/2000, 5:294). Appearing in the context of his aesthetic theory, the normative requirement to “reflect on [one’s] own judgment from a universal standpoint” is taken to be constitutive of the judgment of taste (5:295). In other words, to declare something to be beautiful presupposes “putting [one]self into the standpoint of others” (5:295). Moreover, our declaring something to be beautiful is to demand that you think so too (5:237). And yet the force of the aesthetic “ought” does not consist in the fact that you will come to agree with us. Rather, the demand makes clear that taste is an inherently social affair, and our judgments on such matters necessarily consider what our interlocutors would say when confronted with the objects that we might designate as beautiful.It is this capacity for perspective taking, exemplified in the aesthetic sphere, that Arendt famously gravitates toward as forming a basis for the political. “[T]he capacity to judge is a specifically political ability in exactly the sense denoted by Kant” precisely because it is the faculty of the mind by which we take into account the perspectives of others (Arendt 1968/2006, 221). In her well-known Kant Lectures (delivered in the Fall of 1970 at the New School for Social Research), Arendt draws out the implications of Kant’s claim that to “restrain our understanding by the understanding of others” is, in fact, a “subjectively necessary touchstone of the correctness of our judgments generally” (Kant 1798/2006, 7:219).Building on this idea, Arendt puts forward the related notions of “representative thinking” and “enlarged mentality,” which involve the ideas not only that it is good to think from the standpoint of others and take their thoughts into account, but that “thinking . . . depends on others to be possible at all” (1982, 40). Whatever her differences with Kant, Arendt is to be credited for highlighting the radical force of Kant’s “belie[f] that the very faculty of thinking depends on its public use,” because it was “not made ‘to isolate itself but to get into community with others’” (40). Kant further warns in his Anthropology (1798) about the dangers of “isolating ourselves with our own understanding and judging publicly with our private representations” (1798/2006, 7:219).Here, the value of dialogue, disagreement, or modes of engagement that involve “thinking from the standpoint of others” does not lie in making our lives with others who are not like-minded manageable, nor even in the prospect of improving our thoughts and opinions by sharpening them against others, but rather because our ability to think and make judgments is most capacious when we are in conversation with others, especially those who might differ. The essays collected in this special section reflect on today’s democratic crisis by returning to the work of Kant and Arendt or proposing alternative sources and frameworks of conceptualization. They approach the problematic we set out from different fields in the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, political science, cultural studies, history, literature, and education, offering a range of historical and theoretical accounts of dialogue and disagreement enriched by interdisciplinarity. Together, they point about the of is, about what or how speech ought to be the question of the desirability of talking with others in the first That this question is is by no taken for granted. As would likely speaking with others may be but it is might to but something that only after have made up mind about after have an opinion about how things in the or about how the world should to others can if is to be by the other. 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In with a long to which we understand each other best by with each from our own us the to see how that understanding people a of that is and or between us of this way of speaking with each other because of the free yet of the human which makes an model of this and the the of how we of the other from perspective we are to For example, do we take up the standpoint of an other, the should we to engage with particular others? For what matters is that we others in their rather their This across the more distinction between and In other words, what is is not the other or but we them in all of their that the of perspective depends on how we the our willingness to them in their and the of interlocutors to In the in draws on the work of Arendt, as as her with to argue that thinking has a particular in In such it may not be possible for people to take views into account in how they judge political as Arendt because to the of who people take to be. But what thinking can do in such is others into as of This through understanding why are for and, in so that others from a different from the that political can be by the or of the other Such can support the to include those others in democratic the to those with whom we Hannah Arendt on and draws to claim that free speech is only when others to what have to this is that speech is not just a but a that makes engagement with others desirable and However, free speech it to a the conditions which speech may become in the first on of the term at once to as as conditions which a lack of what Arendt calls the of the social of a the of in politics, and a social from and the idea that our speech be not as exchanges but as within social and institutional conditions that dialogue. As their the with judgment conditions our normative with the and of democratic and differentiate between and to speak to others. be we should not want to to persuade on a that two of can come into when we engage with others who different views. the one hand, for us to present them with of our own the other hand, for practical us to our so as not to demand too of their and In how we speak with others, we them as interlocutors who our practical as as our for their It to to to the of the debate on the retreat from dialogue in Anglo-European arguing that the solutions they to the dysfunction of public discourse are The is in of an to the of disagreement, or a to the to change their dialogue possible once potential interlocutors to get through conversation or them to good to engage if persuasion is taken out of solutions she because the is not one of but one of to to others with whom we disagree. will not be to talk to others since they can or because they do not being want to talk across differences they be to the of for returning to the literary of the public sphere, about and to political and cultural first made the of Together, and us to think about what motivates and the to speak across it might be reason that us to out dialogue, our willingness to remain in it may on our ability to and aesthetic is that democracy is not so a reality as an ideal to to. This special section is presented with the idea that this may societies that are committed to pluralism as a way of life to the conversation about the to across

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, we explore research article abstracts created by generative artificial intelligence (AI). These synthetic genres—genre-ing activities shaped by the recursive nature of language learning models in AI-driven text generation—are of interest as they could influence informational quality, leading to various forms of disordered information such as misinformation. We conduct a two-part study generating abstracts about (a) genre scholarship and (b) polarized topics subject to misinformation. We conclude with considerations about this speculative domain of AI text generation and dis/misinformation spread and how genre approaches may be instructive in its identification.

This article analyzes the speeches of two U.S. politicians—President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden—to present how they make their arguments about climate change using various frames. While frames are rhetorical acts, they are also a form of persuasion. In particular, the author demonstrates how Trump foregrounded negative frames with fear-inducing elements. He presented job losses and economic harm as consequences of joining the Paris Climate Accord, putting him on the defensive. In contrast, Biden utilized positive frames to strengthen his arguments and aligned more closely with the environmental justice framework. Inspired by the rhetoric of the framing strategies employed by these two speakers, the study suggests that technical communicators should focus on using language that constructs new frames to enhance the success of their argumentations.

To examine the impact of cultural factors on business responses to negative online reviews, we first examined rhetorical moves in business responses to negative online reviews on Chinese B2C e-commerce platforms. Then, we conducted a comparative analysis of the rhetorical moves in this research and those identified in Wang’s research on rhetorical moves identified in business responses to negative online reviews on Amazon.com. Following the framework of social-cognitive system theory, we explained how cultural factors may shape businesses’ responses to negative online reviews and concluded the research by discussing the implications of the research in the context of cross-border e-commerce.

This article demonstrates how an analysis of the net work of medical social work students in an interprofessional Standardized Patient Program (i.e., healthcare simulation) reveals the productive potential of a Critical Disability Studies orientation to writing studies and workplace research. Standardized Patient Programs were created as a method for uniformly assessing healthcare students’ interpersonal interactions with patients. In practice, they evolved to additionally standardize the professional attitudes and behaviors of students. Structured around three emergent claims, this article uses novel and established technical-rhetorical concepts to unpack how social work students comprehend and navigate issues of power, collaboration, and knowledge exchange within a Standardized Patient Program. And when these claims are further analyzed through a Critical Disability Studies lens, they reveal how disability-related disruptions can constructively challenge medicalized stances toward disability as well as understandings of collaborative labor, workplace/simulation-based writing, and professional discourse.

The widespread adoption of GenAI tools has the potential to reproduce hegemonic and colonial discourse as the writing process is radically disrupted. As a writing center in an Indigenous-serving institution, we address GenAI’s reproduction of privileged discourses through framing writing as a conscious political act of survivance and work to re-establishing writers’ rhetorical sovereignty through place-based pedagogy. In this praxis-oriented piece, we demonstrate how writing centers can use their values as a foundation to develop strategies that empower GenAI users to re-enter the writing process and reclaim agency.

This paper explores the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on writing center instructions and presents a professional development workshop designed for writing center tutors to help them discover the affordances and the constraints of using AI in tutoring. Since AI became increasingly integrated in the academic environment, writing center tutors face new challenges and opportunities in supporting the students’ writing. The paper highlights key strategies for tutors to integrate AI awareness into their teaching practices, ensuring they remain effective in guiding students through the writing process while fostering academic integrity. Through a combination of theoretical insights and practical exercises, this professional development initiative promotes a balanced approach, emphasizing both the potential and limitations of AI in the writing center context. The goal is to prepare tutors for the evolving landscape of academic writing and enhance their ability to support students in a technology-driven educational environment. Keywords : AI policy, writing center practices, workshop, AI assisted writing, tutor training In the fall of 2022, a writer visited the Kathleen Jones Writing Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) to schedule a writing tutorial. Their main objective for the session was to ensure that their piece sounded more humane. During the session, the writer disclosed that their paper had been generated by ChatGPT and sought assistance to avoid detection by their professors. Although there was no existing policy on AI at the time, the tutor politely informed the writer that the center only worked with human-authored pieces. Following this incident, the director of the IUP Writing Center established an AI task force, with its first mission being the creation of an official AI policy for the center. As PhD candidates in Composition and Applied Linguistics, the task force members knew their AI policy should not violate the objectives of first-year Composition classes. As a result, the policy recognizes AI as “not reflective of a student’s own understanding and effort and, thus, is not acceptable, unless authorized specifically by the instructor/administrator.” The Kathleen Jones White Writing Center at IUP supports student success and engages in creating AI policies for the departments to implement in their classrooms. While concerns about AI’s potential to reduce students’ engagement with writing are valid, writing center tutors as well as students have also explored its potential benefits. For instance, ChatGPT could serve as a writing coach or a source of inspiration (Kleiman, 2022), or it might “support bottom-up writing skills, freeing up time, space, and energy for more advanced aspects of composition” (Daniel et al., 2023, p. 37). Mollick and Mollick (2023) provide a list of ways students can engage with AI as a partner in their work. For instance, AI can assist students in writing by offering real-time feedback, suggesting improvements in grammar and style, and providing creative prompts, allowing them to refine their work while enhancing their writing skills. Moreover, AI has the potential not only to enhance writing processes, but to transform or even redefine them—much like Google Docs redefined collaborative writing by enabling real-time, location-independent co-authoring (Puentedura, 2013). As a result of this growing body of literature that emphasizes the potential benefits of AI, the writing center held a tutor training about AI to help tutors direct their writers who use AI in the writing session. One of the ways to make writing center tutors aware of students’ challenges and concerns and help them overcome those challenges is to conduct a professional development workshop, which we did at Kathleen Jones White Writing Center. This workshop was designed and led in February 2024 and aimed to highlight the importance of creating a united AI policy to help tutors work with students who use AI tools to write their papers. It also aimed to help tutors discuss possible challenging situations around AI that they might expect in the writing center. One more goal of that workshop was to compare the feedback given by writing center tutors with AI feedback provided by ChatGPT to learn specific features of AI writing and to recognize its rhetorical moves. This workshop was titled Overview of AI Technology and its Relevance to Writing Center Support and consisted of four main parts: (a) discussion of different challenging issues concerning AI technology; (b) lecture and discussion, which focused on the introduction of AI and open discussion about its use; (c) an activity part that focused on proving different types of feedback and comparing human and AI feedback; (d) and creating a brief draft of a united AI policy that would help tutors work with students who use AI to write their papers.

Daniel Libertz Abstract Over the past decade, more attention to data, quantitative, and critical data literacies in writing studies has led to a variety of approaches for getting students to experiment with data in their writing projects. This article explores an approach combining “data feminism” and “quantitative rhetoric” that asks students to consider data literacy […]

The author analyzes two different meanings of the words debate and debating in Polish: as process of collective thinking, searching the best solution of certain problem of community and as a „battle”: confrontation of two opinions. These two faces of debates could be connected with two rhetorical exercises (suasoriae and controversiae), two rhetorical genres (genus deliberativum and genus iuridicum) and two models of modern debates: deliberative debate and Oxford debate. Then two education projects, based on these concepts of debates are presented debates about plastics among pupils of secondary schools in Płock (case study of use the concept of Oxford debate) and Gdańsk Academy of Debate (based on the concept of deliberative debate). Then the author discusses numerous advantages and disadvantages of the use of Oxford debate and deliberative debate as a tools of rhetorical and civil education. Probably these two concepts of using debates in rhetorical education are complementary and should be used together, or a new format of debate, combining „battle” and „brainstorming”, should be invented.

This article investigates how spatial structuring in local memoirs from small towns in the Warsaw region functions as a rhetorical strategy of memory. By analysing how authors organise their narratives around places, use ekphrasis to engage materiality, and revisit locations of personal significance, the study aims to demonstrate how individual memory is shaped and structured through space. The article further explores the tension between past and present in these memoirs, examining whether spatial narratives reinforce continuity or emphasise rupture in personal and collective memory. By embedding memory in physical spaces, the authors reinforce identity, bridge past and present, and pass down knowledge to future generations. Through a detailed analysis of spatial narratives, this article clarifies how memory functions not only as personal recollection but as a strategy for survival and intergenerational transmission.

Traditional models of rhetoric, based on classical and neo-classical texts, have fallen out of favor with some rhetorical scholars. This paper aims to demonstrate that, despite any potential criticisms, they remain useful for the critical examination of contemporary rhetorical artifacts, especially when it comes to the training of students. Herein, I show how Lloyd Bitzer’s “The Rhetorical Situation” (1968) can be applied to a pro-tobacco advertisement/multi-media campaign that appeared in print, video, and other formats in 2021. Said application demonstrates that there is still room in our expanding conception(s) of rhetoric(s) for older models to critique newer forms/types of rhetoric in useful ways. These models and their ease of use can be utilized in introductory, intermediate, and advanced classes on rhetorical theory and/or criticism at the university level. A traditional model need not be a curio relegated to the past. In the hands of an instructor mindful of rhetoric’s history, it can garner appreciation and be embraced by a new generation of emergent scholars.

The aim of the article is to analyze ethos and pathos in the rhetoric of the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. I analyzed 28 speeches delivered before the parliaments and National Assemblies of various countries in the first hundred days of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The results of the study show that Zelensky's rhetoric is geared toward arousing five affects: fear, compassion, anger, shame and sadness. The speaker's credibility, built both in and out of speech, is based on competence, trust and similarity to the recipient.

Tracing the journal’s history from its beginning in 2001 to its present transformation, this essay explores how POROI has shaped and been shaped by broader disciplinary, institutional, and technological shifts. Highlighting key contributions to rhetorical inquiry—spanning science, technology, medicine, and beyond—the issue revisits influential articles that have defined POROI’s mission while inviting scholars to reimagine its future. As POROI embraces new ways of knowing and responds to contemporary challenges, it seeks to foster an inclusive, interdisciplinary space for examining the rhetoric of knowledge production in the 21st century.

ABSTRACTInspired by challenges we faced in an undergraduate community-literacy cohort, we theorize “epideictic listening” as an important concept for articulating the range of listening strategies necessary both for our work in local public schools and for sustaining the cohort’s internal cohesion. Through critical reflection, we (faculty and student coauthors) offer a definition of “epideictic listening” that draws from, but also distinguishes itself from, other theoretical frameworks, such as rhetorical listening and community listening. We situate epideictic listening within the larger rhetorical tradition of epideixis. We end with a concrete application for epideictic listening—the debrief—and gesture toward the larger significance for epideictic listening in community settings.KEYWORDS: Debriefepideictic listeningepideixisethosrhetorical listening Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This essay investigates the contemporary association between attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and delinquent behavior. Long before its diagnostic appearance as ADD in the DSM III (1980), youth behavior associated with hyperactivity and impulsivity was rhetorically situated within an ecology of delinquency science which yoked these behaviors to criminality. Because rhetorics of criminality are profoundly racialized in the U.S., a close study of ADHD and delinquency must contend with the ways racial discourses have determined conceptualizations of juvenile behavior, particularly in educational contexts.  Through an analysis of two rhetorical case studies, I demonstrate how hyperactivity and restlessness were initially associated with delinquency by proponents of the mental hygiene movement in the 1920s. The same behaviors were later imbued with sinister and antisocial meanings by a white public responding to school desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Seen from this perspective, the contemporary rhetoric of ADHD can be understood as a type of delinquency rhetoric from its inception.

Editors' Introduction to Rhetoric of Health and Medicine 8-1.

At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was at war with two seemingly different enemies: the first was Spanish colonial rule in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The second enemy was the yellow fever virus which wreaked havoc on the physical and economic welfare of the U.S. In this essay, I conduct a rhetorical history about how the discovery of the mosquito vector for yellow fever was memorialized as a triumph of U.S. medicine, and how medical-military topoi are deployed to describe “conquest” over the virus. I argue that the nonhuman mosquito vector enables retroactive discussion of victory over an invisible enemy, creating rhetorical space between the realities of U.S imperialism and medical violence. This rhetorical history has consequences for how medical-military topoi continue to influence ways that the U.S. uses border control in response to pandemics, particularly those with nonhuman vectors or origins.

Using the Indiana Medical History Museum’s (IMHM) “Rehumanizing the Specimens” project as a case study, this essay explores the impact of language on rehumanizing human specimens in medical museums. The individuals represented by these specimens are often dehumanized because they are reduced to specific illnesses or injuries and/or because they are viewed as curiosities rather than representations of actual people. Further, the specimens at the IMHM were obtained from former patients of Central State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in operation from 1848 until 1994, so these individuals experienced additional dehumanization due to the stigma surrounding their mental illness diagnoses. To resist these forms of dehumanization, the IMHM launched the “Rehumanizing the Specimens” project, which used historical records and documents to develop narratives outlining the lived experiences of the 48 people represented by the specimens. Particularly, the narratives engaged rehumanizing rhetoric (Winderman & Landau, 2020) and recuperative ethos (Molloy, 2015), and I argue for the effectiveness of these rehumanizing strategies. In addition to offering suggestions for how these strategies can be adopted by other medical museums, I extend the discussion to healthcare providers, applying what was learned from the case study to the contemporary study and practice of medicine.

Abstract In pragma-dialectics, a study of legal reasoning analyses judicial judgements’ dialectical and rhetorical aspects. Most analytical studies of legal reasoning focus on the role of judges and their decision-making mechanisms. In our study, we focus on the strategic manoeuvring of the opposing parties. Depending on the context, parties may have to justify their decision to litigants, a professional audience, and the public in rhetorically and dialectically different ways. What makes strategic manoeuvring special in judicial trials is that rhetorical aims (winning the debate) and dialectical aims (convincing the jury), in contrast with debates where parties dialectically aim at resolving a dispute by reaching consensus, are not in conflict. We analyse the Depp ctr. Heard trial 2022, focusing on the parties’ dialectical potential in cases when rhetorical aspects play an important role in addition to objective evidence required by the legal framework. Depp’s party started the trial with a strategic movement we shall call as a ‘topical shift’, doubling their starting position, aiming at dual dialectical goals, and hence also beginning a new debate parallel with the apparently only one by introducing a not directly relevant factor into the debate. Although other factors also played a role in Depp’s victory, setting up his position in the confrontation stage this way was decisive for the trial’s outcome: Heard’s party, following a traditional route, joined actively in one of the dual debates only, effectively giving up the extra debate started by Depp. This way, analysing the trial offers wider consequences to how to understand strategic manoeuvring in judicial trials, and in general as well.

Abstract: In the early seventeenth century, rhetoric was understood as the art of lying. As poetry was a branch of rhetoric, this perception of untruthfulness made the question of religious poetry controversial. George Herbert confronts the question of religious poetry's moral status as rhetoric, treating the problem of sincerity versus artful language not as an irreconcilable opposition but as a creative tension. Herbert transforms cultural ambivalence about rhetoric into a sophisticated poetics by creating a sincerity effect in his poetry, thereby legitimizing religious verse. In short, Herbert achieves a sincerity effect in his rhetoric by acknowledging rhetoric's limited ability for sincerity.

Abstract: I argue that lists of Sumerian proverbs (mostly ca. 1800 BCE) were not anthologized either as collections of wise sayings nor as curricular tools, but as handbooks used for competitive praise-and-blame debates in intermediate scribal education. Positing a fundamentally dialogic purpose for the collections points us towards rhetorical performance as a goal of Mesopotamian education. A model of the game illustrates how the collections had the capacity to support a wide variety of rhetorical maneuvers. Both comparative and culture-specific evidence demonstrate how the "mixed" material of Sumerian proverbs and the rules it taught were appropriate for the instruction of young Babylonians in the politics of formal speech.

Abstract: Like other ancient and medieval writings, Bonaventure's Soliloquium ( c . 1259) aims not only to instruct, but also to move, exercise, and reform its readers. In fact, it is partly designed as a therapy for moral incontinence. Among its many elements, the therapy predominantly comprises several descriptions of death, judgment, and hell. Yet Bonaventure nowhere elaborates on the disease he is trying to cure nor why or how certain eschatological descriptions are supposed to work against it. Without such understanding, however, readers ignore how to engage with the writing, which makes its projected therapy inconsequential. The question then becomes: How are those descriptions formed to fulfill their role and how should the audience approach them? The present investigation attempts to answer this problem. The hypothesis is that rhetoric, especially its teachings on evidentia , plays a central part in the crafting of the eschatological descriptions and in their ability to function as therapeutic devices. Moreover, in researching this hypothesis, the investigation deals with three broader points. First, it shows the importance of images in Christianity insofar as they lead the attention from the invisible to the visible, instead of the other way around. Second, it argues that rhetoric is fundamental to Bonaventure's overall thinking. And third, it counters the widespread conception of religious fear as synonymous with dread and anxiety. It explains that Bonaventure had a more complex view of fear, which allowed him to help readers navigate through painful eschatological worries slowly toward positive, selfless, and loving fear of God.

This article explores teaching writing with generative AI as critical play where students and teachers engage in an ethically dialectical and aleatory game with generative AI. I qualitatively surveyed 24 writing teachers about how they teach writing with generative AI as well as its advantages and disadvantages. I discovered that teachers used generative AI to teach about the ethics of generative AI's design and rhetorical use to avoid plagiarism. Teachers also critically played with generative AI to teach the writing process of invention, drafting, revision, and editing. Specifically, the critical, dialectical interplay of human and machine invents in aleatory and emergent ways, creating moments of epiphany for students and teachers within the writing process for invention, drafting, revision, and editing while the real time pace of generative AI democratizes education, making writing and teaching more accessible for them.

Abstract Frederick Douglass's Freedmen's Monument Address, delivered on April 14, 1876, at the unveiling of a monument to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, DC, was a complex and extraordinary rhetorical act. This essay argues that Douglass's address created a measured memory of Lincoln by moving the audience through a cycle of experiences that allowed multiple, often conflicting, sentiments to meaningfully coexist. The essay begins with an account of key contextual elements about Douglass, Lincoln, and the events that shaped the address. The next section turns to the text of the Freedmen's Monument Address, showing how Douglass's use of a ring composition served to memorialize both Black Americans and Lincoln in complex ways. The essay concludes with observations about how the address was received, which illustrates the difficulty of maintaining rhetorical complexity in acts of memorialization.

Abstract This article investigates an event in which the crew of Apollo 8 read the first verses of the book of Genesis on Christmas Eve, 1968, to a television audience of half a billion people. Drawing from letters from a NASA official who provided detailed rhetorical advice for the event, letters to the editor and op-eds in local newspapers, and an interview with one of the crew, it examines how the planners and the public assessed the appropriateness of the reading. While many different ways existed to interpret the occasion of the broadcast, we argue that the decorousness of the reading was understood as a function of the magnitude of the mission and the sublime “God's eye” view it afforded.

In The Unlikely World of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Solidarity across Alabama, the United Kingdom and South Africa, author Cole Manley contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the Montgomery bus boycott. The author acknowledges that there continues to be numerous studies on how the boycott influenced the course of the civil rights movement as well as the implications of the boycott on domestic and civil politics (15). However, insufficient attention has been paid to the boycott's international impact. Manley emphasizes that his book does not reiterate the well-established timeline of the boycott or situate it within context of the federal government; rather, it “explores the critical organizing by the Women's Political Council (WPC) during the late 1940s and early 1950s and links this work to the transnational ramifications of the Montgomery boycott” (24). Specifically, Manley contends that the Montgomery bus boycott represented a global and local struggle due to two contributing factors. First, the pacifist advisors of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the organizers of Montgomery connected the boycott to social and resistance movements overseas. Second, the boycott became an international media event which initiated coverage from both international news organizations and independent activist groups.To begin, Manley contextualizes the political and social organizing in Montgomery within a post-war era. The author divides the book chronologically into two sections, each covering an international bus boycott to show the influence of the Montgomery bus boycott on social movements overseas. In the first section titled, “Gandhi, Montgomery, and the FOR Comic Book,” he provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which Gandhian nonviolence and decolonization influenced public perceptions of the boycott organizers. Manley focuses particular attention on Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson, and Dr. Lawrence Reddick and their awareness and articulation of Gandhian nonviolence.Further, Manley acknowledges the influence of the FOR in promoting the Montgomery bus boycott overseas. In 1957, the FOR published a comic book to affirm the movement's theological and nonviolent principles. In this comic book, the FOR strategically and explicitly positioned the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a “Gandhian hero” (53). As Manley writes, “Like Gandhi, King recognized that social movements could transform struggles in faraway places. In his sermons and speeches, King often referenced an interconnected and interdependent world, explaining that out of this ‘world house’ there could emerge a ‘beloved community’” (42–43). Thus, the objective of the FOR's comic book was to provide global activists and nonviolent organizers a handbook to articulate King's philosophy of nonviolent resistance and the social gospel. For Manley, “the global distribution of the comic book is one way of tracing social movements across the Atlantic . . . [and] clearly [seeing] how Montgomery became a reference point for anti-apartheid activists” (57–59).Intended for broad dissemination, Manley reasons, “the comic book created a mythology of the Montgomery boycott that shaped perceptions of King and the United States civil rights movement” (57). By 1958, the comic book began to circulate throughout South Africa, and Manley draws a parallel between the Montgomery bus boycott and the South African Alexandra bus boycott. He argues that, “Like in Montgomery, Black South Africans had, through sheer determination, won concessions despite brutal state violence” (59). However, Manley is cautious to draw similarities between the two bus boycotts as South Africans used the Alexandra bus boycott as a means of both nonviolence and violent resistance, which contrasts with King's nonviolent philosophy. To conclude the first section, Manley acknowledges that Montgomery and South Africa not only aligned through the Black press, but civil rights leaders united themselves with the continued growth of the anti-apartheid movement.In the second section of his book, “Montgomery and Bristol's Transnational Ties,” Manley analyzes the 1963 Bristol bus boycott to exemplify how citizens of other countries interpreted the boycott in Montgomery. To introduce his analysis, Manley draws upon the similarities between Montgomery and Bristol. For example, both cities were tied to transatlantic slavery. By the mid to late 1800s, Alabama had become one of largest slave-owning states with at least four slave depots operating in Montgomery (63). Additionally, throughout the nineteenth century, Bristol ships transported over five hundred thousand slaves from Africa to the Americas (64). Although Manley acknowledges commonalties between the movements, he also recognizes the differences. For instance, the 1963 Bristol bus boycott resulted from the failure of bus management companies to hire Black drivers and negotiations with protesters proceeded without the involvement of courts and legal representation. Additionally, the Bristol bus boycott did not gain broad cultural support or mass participation but gained appeal from white city leaders. However, despite the contrasts between the Montgomery and Bristol boycotts, Manley highlights the global influence of media networks on transnational organizing. The transnational Black press reported on the boycott in Montgomery for activists and readers in the United Kingdom.To conclude, Manley poses questions about the public and collective memory of freedom struggles as forms of social movements. Although Manley cautions that the “stories should [not] be entirely removed from the political context in which they are written” (16), he argues that the lessons from the Montgomery and Bristol boycotts can offer an account of what a globally unified social movement can achieve in a postwar era (16). Manley contends, “Revisiting the Montgomery and Bristol boycotts can help modern-day participants in social movements understand how freedom struggles connect and relate to each other during a political moment” (25).Manley's analysis of the Montgomery bus boycott's international impact in South Africa and the United Kingdom allows for a closer examination of King's nonviolent philosophy throughout his career. As Manley argues, King's nonviolent philosophy serves a unique rhetorical function because of its historical and global context. The origins of King's nonviolent philosophy within and beyond his speeches allow for a wider and global context for examination. However, Manley acknowledges the lack of research correlating Montgomery and transnational boycott events.Manley's analysis carefully articulates the ways in which King's theology was motivated by transnational politics. He reasons, “Anticolonialism and liberation theology inspired King's global thinking and encouraged him to align his public addresses on the [Montgomery] boycott with independence movements overseas. . . . As King understood it, the social gospel was a borderless and transnational concept that could be adapted to interpret political events ranging from the Montgomery boycott to anticolonial wars of liberation” (42–44). Thus, Manley offers justification for how, through the FOR comic book, Montgomery became a reference point for anti-apartheid activists. His book provides a nuanced understanding of how King's theology and philosophical assumptions connect divine power and human agency for the purposes of social change.However, Manley is cautious not to over emphasize a universal claim of King's theology and nonviolent philosophy with the correlation between the Montgomery boycott and the protests overseas. Particularly, he faults the FOR for making King the center of the Montgomery boycott. Apart from a reference to Rosa Parks, there was no mention by the FOR of Jo Ann Robinson and the influential role of the WPC in publicizing the boycott. Manley acknowledges, however, that Jo Ann Robinson insisted that the whole world would be watching (62).Manley's attention to King's nonviolent philosophy and theological teachings throughout the civil rights movement helps him as he attempts to account for King's importance in transnational social movements without overstating his role in the Montgomery boycott. This articulate balance reflects Manley's acknowledgement of King's nonviolent philosophy as well as its expansive presence beyond Montgomery. For “The connections and disconnections between civil rights struggles in the United States and in the United Kingdom, as well as ties between these movements and the anti-apartheid struggle, suggest a complex web of social movements” (86).The Unlikely World of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Solidarity across Alabama, the United Kingdom and South Africa benefits most from the emphasis on King's nonviolent philosophy and theological teachings. Manley's strategic use of the social gospel as well as a detailed contextual history strengthen his argument that the Montgomery bus boycott represented both global and local struggle. Although Manley acknowledges that research continues on how the boycott influenced the course of the civil rights movement, as well as the implications of the boycott on domestic and civil politics, he shifts to examine the effect of Montgomery within a transnational context. The greatest contribution of Manley's book is its articulation and theorization of how social movement research transcends transnational boundaries. Although Manley notes the limits of his research, the book serves to initiate future studies and theorize the ways in which the Montgomery bus boycott influenced global social change.

Abstract In 1906, Eugene V. Debs published the most infamous editorial of his career, entitled “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” Addressing the murder charges against prominent Western Federation of Miners leadership, Debs mobilized threats and rhetorical violence to provoke attention to reportedly unjust legal practices. “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” remains something of a puzzling outlier in Debs's rhetorical canon. Despite his established legacy of peaceful protest and his preference for education toward gradual change, he announced a bold plan in the editorial for violent revolt and immediate upheaval. Through an analysis of “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” in context, I argue Debs invoked rhetorical violence in the service of ultimately peaceful outcomes, suggesting a theory of rhetorical violence geared toward nonviolent social change. This study contributes a recovery of the Haywood-Moyer-Pettibone murder controversy for rhetorical scholars, while providing an expanded theoretical understanding of rhetorical violence to explain Debs's puzzling but successful navigation of an uncharacteristic rhetorical strategy.

In Political Mourning: Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy, political theorist Heather Pool offers a theory of “political mourning” in which publics respond to a highly visible death (or deaths) in ways that challenge the existing meaning of citizenship and the nation's responsibilities towards disenfranchised groups. In the introduction, Pool states, “I define political mourning as an affective communal response to a loss that threatens (or is perceived to threaten) the historical narrative, present expression, or future possibility of the political community and/or the ideals that sustain that political community” (17). While political mourning could be associated with any identity group in the United States, Pool specifically examines the role of racial identity formation. In addition to centering racial identity in the political mourning concept, Pool narrows the focus of her work to the deaths of “everyday people” rather than public figures such as politicians or martyred activists.This book contributes to political theory by building upon past scholarship on mourning and trauma studies. In the introduction, Pool argues, “It is the central claim of this book that the deaths of everyday citizens, at particular moments and in the wake of a contingent process by which these deaths are made political, can move the living to political action” (10). Pool then delineates between three forms of “mourning” in chapter one, including “private mourning,” “public mourning,” and “political mourning” (14–21). The conception of “political mourning” draws from John Dewey's publics and the “barriers to creative democracy.” These barriers—“apathy”, “indirect effects”, “the problem of presentation,” and “development of judgment” (19)—provide the framework in the analysis chapters of Political Mourning. Pool states, “Considering Dewey's focus on mobilizing citizens out of apathy, widely visible losses that prompt discussions of responsibility can be seen as moments when publics are formed. In response to visible losses, citizens and political leaders often propose specific institutional reforms” (20). Additionally, Pool extends theories regarding death and politics, including works by Bonnie Honig, Judith Butler's “mortalist humanism” concept, and Simon Stow's book, American Mourning (21–22). The author traces the political process of “how mourning becomes political by examining several instances where death served as the justification for political calls for change” (33, original emphasis). In Pool's “processual theory of political mourning,” scholars should consider five aspects of a highly publicized death, including: “context”; “visibility”; “agents”; “responsibility”; and “political change” (7–8).The analysis chapters include the following four examples of political mourning in the United States: The Triangle Fire of 1911; the murder of Emmett Till; the September 11 attacks; and the Black Lives Matter movement. Chapter two examines the political mourning surrounding the Triangle Fire, which involved the deaths of 146 young women and girls who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. This chapter critiques the ways in which white racial identity transformed, in part, due to the mourning process and memorials in honor of deceased workers who were mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants. Prior to the Triangle Fire, “white identity” was reserved almost exclusively for Anglo-Saxons (47). When workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory held a labor strike less than two years before the fire, although “non-white” workers received a lot of press coverage, their efforts to unionize failed. According to Pool, the political mourning following the fire motivated the public to support increased worker protections. Pool states, “Before the fire, the immigrant, not-quite-white striking workers were perceived by political elites as attacking American values and cherished ideals of self-sufficiency at the heart of American identity. . . . However, the power and the outpouring of public sympathy after the fire recast the now-dead workers as victims of politically enabled negligence and racialized exclusion” (49). Additionally, she claims that the dead workers’ “youth, femaleness, and ambiguous racial status” transformed them into sympathetic figures in the public's imagination (49). Although factory fires were common during this period, Pool argues that the earlier news coverage of the Triangle Factory workers’ strike created a “visibility” that made the public “predisposed to care about the workers in this factory” after the fire (56–57, original emphasis). Pool claims that the widespread mourning in New York City following the Triangle Fire, including a “March of Mourning” with nearly 400,000 marchers and onlookers, mobilized the public to care for “non-white” laborers (59) and adjusted the public's understanding of non-Anglo-Saxon “whiteness.” Pool claims, “Triangle was a moment when intra-white racial differences were muted, and one of many moments in the long process of reconceptualizing the threat to Americanness as originating not from hordes of immigrants but from blackness” (66). The public began to view the mostly Italian and Jewish victims of the Triangle Fire in New York as “innocent victims,” and their victimhood and status as working-class immigrants “laid the groundwork for a shift from hostile race relations toward friendly ethnic rivalries that helped pave the way to full citizenship for white workers within a racialized democracy” (67).Chapter three explores the political mourning surrounding the murder of Emmett Till. Pool provides a detailed overview of the scene of the murder in Mississippi, the funeral procession in Chicago, and the deep South location for the trial of Till's killers. In this chapter, Pool discusses the primary agent of this political mourning, Emmett's mother Mamie Till-Bradley (more commonly known as Mamie Till-Mobley). Pool argues that Till-Bradley's claim “I know the whole United States is mourning with me” was, in Pool's words, “a powerful rhetorical construction,” that extended a mother's private mourning of her son to a collective mourning for Americans of all races (80–81). Additionally, the author connects the death of Emmett Till and the subsequent failure of the Mississippi court to convict his two murders to sociopolitical contexts, including the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement. Pool claims that the unjust verdict of “not guilty” for Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam (who later confessed to Till's murder) helped propel political change by getting Northern liberal whites to recognize the extreme harms of white supremacy. She states, “A politics of mourning over Till's death gave white American liberals—who had apparently come to accept the Jim Crow status quo—a clear instance to reflect on the calls of the nascent civil rights movement for racial justice and to see how the reality of Jim Crow violated aspirations to actual American democracy” (72–73). Similar to the author's finding in the chapter on the Triangle Fire, some white Americans became motivated to see a racialized community differently once a tragic death received widespread media coverage. This chapter of Political Mourning provides one of the most insightful applications of the political mourning concept that rhetorical critics could use with other civil rights case studies. As Pool states, “Without understanding the politics of mourning, it is difficult to make sense of why some deaths lead to political change while others do not” (90).In chapter four, Pool argues that the United States adopted a skewed version of political mourning following the September 11 terrorist attacks, what she terms “sovereign mourning.” In contrast to the other cases, the author claims that, following 9/11, the American government did not take any responsibility for the events that could have motivated the terrorists, including US military interventions and political intrusions in the Middle East. Furthermore, the news coverage of 9/11 focused on images of planes flying into the Twin Towers and burning images of the Pentagon rather than bodies of the deceased. In the analysis chapters on the Triangle Fire, Emmett Till, and Black Lives Matter, there are detailed descriptions of how images of the dead served pivotal roles in rallying the public toward political change. And finally, the majority of the victims of the attacks on the Twin Towers were white Americans, primarily upper-class white men in the financial industry. These victims were honored along with the New York City firefighters and police officers who responded to the attack on the Twin Towers. Meanwhile, the racialized groups of Middle Easterners, Muslims, and Arabs were constructed as an “Arab Muslim enemy” that could fill the country's need for an external target following the end of the Cold War (97–99). Pool, who witnessed the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers first-hand, provided a compelling description of the context preceding 9/11. This chapter departs in some ways from Pool's theorization of political mourning. It may have been beneficial for readers to learn more about how the patriotism following 9/11 helped draw white racial groups together, compared to other racial groups.Finally, chapter five centers the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the impact of Trayvon Martin's and Mike Brown's deaths. Pool states that while many social media users adopted the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter to push for political change regarding police brutality, the alternative #AllLivesMatter became a backlash against centering blackness. As the author argues, “If, as the data seem to indicate, those using the hashtag #AllLivesMatter are generally white and pro-law-enforcement, #AllLivesMatter seeks to equalize the risk of being a police officer with being a black citizen. . . . It also disregards the long history of law enforcement's purpose: to protect both property and whiteness” (139). It is important to note that both Martin and Brown were killed by individuals who were white-appearing and serving in roles to protect the state. Since Political Mourning was published in 2021 and completed in the spring of 2020, there are only brief mentions of George Floyd's death by strangulation. However, in the case of George Zimmerman (who killed Martin) and Officer Darren Wilson (who shot Brown during a traffic stop), neither of the killers were convicted of a crime. Chapter five instructively synthesizes past studies on the forms of dialogue that social media users engaged in with either hashtag. As the BLM movement is ongoing, Heather Pool's connection of the political mourning concept to this activism could help scholars studying other deaths that have been commemorated by BLM. Pool claims, “The public whose interests the state reflects and whose interactions become predictably ‘canalized’ is a white public, who has rejected both logical and emotive calls to recognize the humanity of blacks and other people of color in the United States. And yet blacks (and other excluded groups) regularly challenge the undemocratic institutional arrangements that define our white democracy” (143, original emphasis).Pool concludes by considering the outcomes of political mourning, whether it will “serve as a powerful resource to demand Deweyan democracy” or “lead the polity down dark roads of xenophobia and the denial of our own role in shaping the world” (153). These two possibilities are reflected in the four case studies. While “political mourning” could help scholars studying public memory, affect, rhetorical history, media theory, and publicity surrounding deaths and tragedies, the concept may be too broad, or stretched to its limits, aligning the aftermath of murders with the aftermath of terrorism and deadly fires.

According to professional correspondence from Harvard, the spring 2024 anti-war and Palestine solidarity protests on campus were “disruptive.”1 UCLA similarly claimed that their students’ encampment was “a focal point for serious violence.”2 Despite these assertions, independent non-profit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project analyzed 533 US campus demonstrations from that spring and found that 97 percent were uneventful.3 Journalist Steven W. Thrasher spent time at four camps and describes these as “beautiful” encounters.4 CNN examined “the role professors have played in the demonstrations,” a facet of the protests that “received comparatively little attention.”5 At my own institution's protest—Virginia Commonwealth University—I watched students set up food and medical stations, deliberate, and intermittently chant at a volume slightly higher than the towering, middle-aged white man who, almost every week, projects a monologue about hell outside the library.When it comes to student-driven political activity on college campuses, charged and widespread commentary often clashes with far more banal and contradictory perspectives. One of John McWhorter's New York Times op-eds, for instance, calls the 2024 student protests “a form of abuse.”6 Online comments on this piece display a range of assumptions about US higher education: someone writes that people with humanities and social science degrees graduate “with zero knowledge.” Another person maintains that the protests “are purely performative.” What I hear in these comments and in the broader narrativizing around college students are resonances of truisms that Bradford Vivian's vital book Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education would categorize as, indeed, misinformation7. To Vivian, such truisms coalesce into an farfetched worldview where college students “crave confirmation” to the extent that they “frequently shut down campus events and even assume power over entire universities,” rendering an alternative reality where college is a breeding ground for extremism.8 As Vivian argues, this implausible perspective grows out of “fixations on the idea of trigger warnings and safe spaces,”9 the circulation of which produces reactionary doctrines like “viewpoint diversity.” These doctrines perform propagandistic moves such as proliferating data to mimic scientific or theological argumentation and appealing to feelings like cynicism as expertise. Vivian emphasizes that casting doubt on the legitimacy of universities “is common in periods of rising authoritarian sentiment.”10 A year after the publication of Campus Misinformation, Donald J. Trump chose Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate—the same man who in 2021 delivered a speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy” for the National Conservatism Conference.11Kendall Gerdes's compelling Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism is a smart analysis of how such misinformation forms. Gerdes's book unpacks public critiques of (over)sensitivity to show how those critiques fuel misinformation about college students and higher ed more generally. Gerdes argues that critiques of sensitivity mark an “ideological discomfort with the idea that language is a form of action” (4). Even though misinformation does not persuade on a purely intellectual level, language is still reduced to mere correspondence. If words are just words, then college students are too sensitive about what texts they're asked to read, what visitors are paid to speak on campus, how violations are managed, and so on. But if words are more than just words—if language is perlocutionary—then language initiates a sensitivity that resonates in far more collective ways than previously realized. As Gerdes articulates, “the sensitivity of rhetorical subjects is a generalized condition of possibility for rhetorical affection” (51). Universities and colleges pose a threat because they reveal how vulnerable or exposed we really are, together, within language.Gerdes's theory of rhetorical sensitivity is revelatory: with each site of inquiry—trigger warnings, sexual misconduct policy, Black student activism, and campus carry policies in Texas—rhetoricity itself is resignified. The book articulates that it is one thing to think of sensitivity as a weakness—it is an entirely different thing to think of sensitivity as “an irremissible exposedness.” “Before symbolic persuasion,” Gerdes writes, “before thinking and knowing, even before the experience of being, a rhetorical sensitivity obtains, opening us to existence as rhetorical subjects” (91). This conception transforms many of rhetoric's givens. If sensitivity is a mutual condition “of one's constitution in language” (38), then “vulnerability and exposedness” are not “simply matters of individual agentive choice” (51). Rather, vulnerability is a radical openness to being addressed. At all times, to be rhetorical existents is to sit in the potential for language to affect.Readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs will be interested in how Gerdes demonstrates that public critiques of sensitivity enlist the topos of academic freedom, often misunderstood as adjacent to free speech. Academic freedom is supposed “to provide insulation for those with less rhetorical power,” since the production of knowledge should be free from hegemonic pressures (9). Still, academic freedom is a baggy topos. In 2025, I think we are more aware than ever that appeals to academic freedom do not always protect against “harassment campaigns” and remain contingent on the governor's board of visitors (9). Infrastructurally, academic freedom is often a tool or gauge of rhetorical power. As Gerdes points out, arguments about curricular changes and practices even put academic freedom in opposition to students. When “trigger warnings” were constructed as a talking point—cherry-picked from isolated contexts—academic freedom was simultaneously turned into an exigence. Gerdes refers to a 2015 Chronicle of Higher Education article that used trigger warnings as evidence of an existential threat to the university (25). Many such opinion pieces not only amplify suspicion of students but also “pit the rights of instructors against the rights of students” (26). I think most rhetoricians would be wary of that dynamic. All told, Gerdes's theory of rhetorical sensitivity provides a nuanced reading of trigger warnings as advocacy for accessibility given that trauma modulates bodily response.Gerdes's third chapter argues that college campuses do not feel safe for historically disenfranchised students. Most campuses, Gerdes argues, are defined by what Louis M. Maraj references as “white institutional defensiveness, policies, and practices that posture tentatively (often in racially colorblind ways) so as to avoid causing racial stress for white individuals.”12 Black student activism that demands “safe spaces,” such as the productive 2015 occupation of the Carnahan Quad on the University of Missouri's campus, is always resistant to Diane Lynn Gusa's conception of “white institutional presence,” which is another example where Gerdes shows how rhetorical sensitivity can be a transformative tactic for invention (63).Sensitive Rhetorics not only takes student activism seriously as institutional critique, but it also implies that college students are uniquely attuned to our shared openness. The issues that college students raise make explicit the “power of language to injure, wound, or harm” (4), implying that the practice of learning sensitizes you, making the address of others more salient and available while you yourself grow more responsive. In this way, Gerdes communicates what many lifelong learners feel: the simultaneous heaviness of beginning to notice differently—notice more—while beginning to feel slightly more responsible. College students are not fragile or self-absorbed. In their quest for trigger warnings and safe spaces, students are practicing ethical sociality. Activism mobilized by sensitivity is not whimsy nor idiosyncrasy—it's an active negotiation with what it feels like to become more responsible for yourself with others.In the book's composition, it is inspiring to witness Gerdes pulling from sensitivity as a resource. If vulnerability is distributed, as Sensitive Rhetorics argues, then even experts on sensitivity are themselves drained, prickled, and agitated, with or without personal permission. While Gerdes shows remarkable restraint referencing egregious arguments as well as questionable decisions to platform speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos outside of “peer review and shared governance” (31), every so often Gerdes delivers a biting critique. In the book's rundown of how students pursuing the Title IX process to address abuses are demeaned, Gerdes writes: “It's worth noting when scholars complain about students acting like consumers but appeal to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ as a justification for academic freedom, as if the metaphor of an intellectual marketplace should only extend to those it figures as merchants, as if the responsibility for rhetorical engagement amounts to something like ‘buyer beware”’ (49). In response to misinformation about trigger warnings, Gerdes sneaks in some fair snark: “This claim implies that the potential for trauma is so regularly inflicted on students that to advise them about it in advance would halt the day-to-day activities of teaching” (35).This book sensitized me. The first chapter on trigger warnings is a tour-de-force and the arrangement of the book is incredibly smart. I'm now wondering what “ambient norms” my pedagogical and professional choices perpetuate (29). I'm struck by what it means to be unendingly affected by others. I'm spinning stories of rhetoric where sensitivity is “a rhetorical term of art” (3). I'm listening for fallacies of false dilemmas or those moments when higher ed values serve misinformation. My antenna is up, I'm reminded of precious commitments, and it's all due to the “uncloseable openness” of Sensitive Rhetorics (4).

In The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO, Jenna N. Hanchey delves into the intricate and often contradictory world of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), focusing on their operations in Tanzania. Blending decolonial and psychoanalytic theory, Hanchey explores the political and social forces that govern the operations of NGOs in Africa. Hanchey's central theoretical contributions are, first, the concept of “liquid agency,” which refers to the fluid ability of individuals to act in varying contexts (17). Such an ability project serves as an interconnection between personal agency, external influences, and environmental circumstances that could cause human agency to shift. Second, the concept of “liquid organizing” refers to the flexible and adaptive approach NGOs take to prioritize relationships with Indigenous people beyond rigid engagement structures (21). This focuses on the collaboration and spontaneity of Western donors to respond to the needs of stakeholders. Hanchey, in weaving the threads of these theoretical ideologies and proving their practicalities, draws on rhetorical fieldwork, ethnography, and rhetorical criticism to examine how Tanzanian NGO workers and communities navigate and resist colonial systems, frequently creating their own “fluid” response to the inflexibility they encounter.The book is made up of two sections. In Part I, comprising the first three chapters, Hanchey explores the theoretical foundations of Western subjectivities, mainly how leaders and volunteers participate in “haunted reflexivity,” as defined by Hanchey (31, 56). This idea draws attention to the struggle between the volunteers’ attempts to distance themselves from neocolonialism and their awareness of their involvement. These silent conflicts demand the volunteers’ acknowledgment of “hauntings” or lingering issues, especially those that unsettle the sense of self or familiar systems of control. Part II, also divided into three chapters, turns to the NGO itself, discussing the conflict between Western organizational theories and the more flexible, relational organizing styles of the Tanzanian people. The chapters examine leadership and land ownership tensions and conclude that when the NGO “falls apart,” the collapse creates new opportunities. The book's primary metaphor—the “center cannot hold”—indicates how neocolonial and decolonial ideas are incommensurate. However, the transformational and adaptive potential that arises from the NGOs’ disintegration, what Hanchey calls “fluidity,” becomes the unifying theme of the conversations across the book.Hanchey's critical examination of how a Tanzanian community was made to embrace modernization principles prompts NGOs to recognize and be mindful of presenting programs that reflect a Westernized gaze. She argues that Western donors provide incentives that eventually lead aid workers to adhere to ideas of altruism and use irony or detachment to avoid responsibility and a confrontation with structural problems. Hanchey states that international aid “offers the opportunity to resecure masculinity through neocolonial relationship” (34). Thus, the core of the first chapter exposes readers to how international aid not only assists but also functions as a means of maintaining power, reinforcing gender hierarchies, and perpetuating unequal relationships between the Global North and South. The rhetoric of help also affirms the provider's sense of masculinity, tied to dominance and control. According to Hanchey, Western subjects—men in particular—reproduce hierarchies under the impression of beneficence. Through the second chapter, Hanchey calls readers to think of how the “subjectivity of Western volunteers is constructed through foreclosure of the neocolonial self” (60) and “how white supremacist and neocolonial attitudes underlie the fantasy of white saviorism counterintuitively providing grounds for volunteers to avoid recognizing themselves as partakers of fantasy” (73). Thus, Hanchey examines how white volunteers perpetuate colonial power dynamics while avoiding self-awareness or accountability. To avoid culpability, these volunteers use denial, which is discussed in subsequent chapters as a means of maintaining subjective coherence.Chapter three concentrates on the haunted reflexivity that leads to the internal change of Western subjects, and focuses on how Tanzanian NGO staff members implement flexible organizing techniques within the inflexible frameworks. Hanchey poses critical questions that challenge “what being reflexive means” (89). By doing this, she compares the effect of colonialism on both the colonized and colonizer: “Haunted reflexivity requires choosing not to turn away, choosing subjective dismemberment over a reprisal of fantasy, choosing to give up the fiction of control” (101). This means that there is a necessary “haunted reflexivity” to be faced due to the abhorrent legacy of colonialism for both the colonized and the colonizer. Hanchey argues that the erasure and pain imposed on their identities must be faced by the colonized, and they must resist the need to romanticize their victimization or pre-colonial pasts. Conversely, the colonizer has to give up moral and political superiority and acknowledge their past and present involvement in oppressive regimes. To do this, Hanchey states that both must relinquish illusions of control or innocence, embrace the discomfort of unresolved histories, and take on the challenge of reevaluating authority, identity, and responsibility.The Center Cannot Hold makes evident that Tanzanian employees are already managing significant inconsistencies through liquid organization, while Western volunteers are “haunted” by their conflicts. The fractures in organizational structures are similar to the breakdown of cohesive Westernization in Tanzania. Hanchey underscores the necessity of these fractures for decolonial transformation in chapters three and four, whether in organizational structures or subjectivity. She alludes to the lack of understanding among the Western organization and Tanzanians, noting that, “without understanding, donors would continually be unable to apprehend how their ideas for the project and control of funds lead to atrophied” relations and disaster (139). Thus, the cracks created by misunderstanding cause foreign organizations to realize the weaknesses of their top-down approach to communication with Indigenous people.Hanchey narrates how the NGO's collapse brings colonialism's fluidity to a logical end. Here, she uses the term “fluidity of colonialism” to describe how the effects of colonialism endure and evolve into other forms, such as neocolonialism, in which outside forces—typically Western governments or organizations—continue to impact former colonies. It might be noteworthy, however, that in grasping liquid agency, Africans have to realize that colonialism's “epistemic injustice is much deeper” than what academics or methods of inquiry have proven (143–5). On this note, Hanchey invites readers to reflect on how colonization has not only disoriented African political, economic, and social structures but also affected Indigenous ways of knowing, appreciating Indigenous practices, and epistemic autonomy. The reflexivity of the NGO presented in chapters four and five serves as a means of negotiating colonial structures that propel the NGO's demise in chapter six. To Hanchey, for “marginalized subjects,” “solidity cannot be trusted” (169). Instead, “organizational ruination figures the possibility for decolonial transformation” (177). In this possibility lies the impetus to create entirely new forms of organization independent of colonial and imperial power dynamics. Hanchey's approach asks readers to view organizational collapse as an opportunity rather than a failure. The collapse of NGOs allows local Tanzanian workers to redefine their positions, reject extra-organizational control, and set a new course in line with their needs, priorities, and values.The Center Cannot Hold's last section explores how “decolonial dreamwork” becomes possible when Western subjectivities and organizational structures finally collapse. As part of this dreamwork, Hanchey argues that “Youth Leaders Tanzania is the product of decolonial dreamwork, and it desires a future where the spark of decolonial dreamwork lights innumerable fires—fires that catch, spread, and change the face of the future” (193). In this, Hanchey highlights the potential of Youth Leaders Tanzania as part of a larger movement towards decolonization, one that envisions a radically different, more inclusive, and more just world. She urges readers to envision and construct previously unthinkable futures due to colonial structures. Thus, Tanzanians need to imagine and actively create alternative realities and systems of existence that colonialism made impossible or suppressed. This is what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o refers to as “decolonizing the mind,” which emphasizes the necessity of dismantling colonial ideologies (52).1These ideologies include gender binaries, racial hierarchies, and patriarchal governance structures that limit how people imagine their lives, relationships, and identities. Ultimately, Hanchey calls for non-Western societies to uphold their Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices to reshape social norms.Regarding the power tension between Western actors and Tanzanian peoples in particular, The Center Cannot Hold offers an extensive and original perspective on the operational difficulties faced by NGOs in postcolonial contexts. Hanchey's work is stimulating, provocative, and timely, as it challenges the underlying assumptions of the role of NGOs in post-colonial societies. It critically explores the dynamics and weak connections between non-governmental organizations and Indigenous societies. Hanchey contributes to growing scholarship on decolonization and empowerment within various sectors, including development and humanitarian aid, especially in Africa. She draws attention to the fact that, although not all NGOs contribute meaningfully to postcolonial societies, they must undergo a decolonial transformation. This involves moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach and fostering genuine partnerships that elevate Indigenous voices, cultures, and knowledge systems.Readers unfamiliar with the decolonial and psychoanalytic theories used by Hanchey may appreciate the book's theoretical richness, which is easy to understand, especially considering how Hanchey infused these frameworks in her analysis to critique the operation of Western NGOs in Tanzania. Hanchey navigates complex territory as a scholar doing valuable work in an understudied African country. Her reflexivity is an advantage as it enables her to expose the hypocrisy of Western benevolence. This self-reflection allows her to critically engage the power dynamics that she encounters in the operations of the NGOs. While she spotlights local and Indigenous perspectives, Hanchey's positionality enables her to critique the Westernized exploitation of African development narratives without obscuring African people's ingenuity and ability to build and sustain the continent. In this way, Hanchey opens a space for vital conversation about the potential for decolonial transformation within the development sector, encouraging readers to reimagine the possibilities of a future untethered from colonial systems of power. The book encourages practitioners, policymakers, and scholars to reconsider traditional paradigms and explore innovative models prioritizing Indigenous agency, sustainable partnerships, and community-driven outcomes.

Abstract Bolivia captured international headlines (and a bit of notoriety) in 2014 when it became the first country in the world to relegalize child labor for ten-year-olds. Originally, the legislature was going to raise the minimum age for child labor from fourteen to sixteen to align with the International Labour Organization's recommendations, but as the Parliament deliberated, they encountered seemingly unlikely opposition, child workers themselves. Child workers led what the New York Timeslabeled the “first ever demonstration by child laborers in Bolivia,” and their advocacy shifted Parliament's trajectory and secured legislative change. This article examines their activism, paying attention to children's voices that are frequently ignored. By examining discourse from the Bolivian Union of Child and Adolescent Workers, local Bolivian news outlets, and international media coverage, I argue that Bolivian child workers privileged their rhetorical agency by redefining childhood, a construct that traditionally denies their voice. They accomplished the redefinition by using dissociation to carve out space for nuance and to combat the incompatibilities mapped onto their position as child speakers. Through their strategy, the child workers recast an Andean childhood in relationship to a Western childhood around the notions of practical needs, work, protection, and education. Their dissociations moved childhood from a temporal frame tied to an individual's age into a cultural frame rooted in place, relationships, and community.

This essay introduces a circulation analysis assignment, blending together insights from multimodal composition, remix/assemblage pedagogy, and circulation studies to encourage writing transfer. The assignment asks students to document the origins and evolution of a cultural meme (as coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins) as it is adapted for different rhetorical situations, modeled for students in the titular documentary film Feels Good Man. By completing this analysis, presenting it in multimodal contexts, and reflecting upon how they adapted that presentation for their audience, students begin to develop the metacognitive, cross-contextual thinking necessary for successful writing transfer.

This assignment, developed for a fall 2023 section of an upper-division undergraduate editing course, asks students to perform a comprehensive edit of a ChatGPT-generated text. The highest stated priorities for the assigned edit were factual accuracy, rhetorical appropriateness, and completeness in relation to user need. Overall, the project successfully developed and assessed the desired learning outcomes, and served as an introduction to generative AI for students whose experience with it was limited.

What are we in rhetoric, writing, and literacy studies currently practicing? What practices do harm and, in contrast, which counter harm? How do we disrupt everyday, cumulative, and structural injustices and instead invest in accountability? In addition to asking these and other questions, this article engages four accountability practices that are necessary for countering the ongoing violence of the mythical norm (Lorde), of domination, and of harm within higher education: (1) resisting denial of ongoing harms; (2) recognizing normalized violence; (3) divesting from whiteness; and (4) investing in a consistent, relational approach to seeking justice. These practices help us tap into and amplify the work of BIPOC feminist and womanist educators-scholars-activists (including Ahmed, Gumbs, hooks, Mingus, and Royster) who have been countering epistemic injustice by building linguistic resources and expanding what we can name. These practices are part of a whole in which taking a piecemeal approach entrenches the current state of affairs: white supremacy status quo and normalized violence. Together, these add up to a call for striving toward justice in a sustained, momentum-gathering way.

This Research Brief provides an overview of the current scholarship on transnational feminist rhetorics (TFR), drawing from interdisciplinary traditions. TFR inquiries should always begin with “a cogent analysis of power” (Dingo et al.), attending to how transnational power dynamics act on gendered bodies and how those bodies engage with and speak back to intersectional geopolitical forces. They rely primarily on the analysis of textual and visual artifacts in historical and contemporary contexts and use a variety of concepts and theories from rhetoric and elsewhere, grounded in the lived experiences of marginalized communities. The Research Brief ends with a discussion of future directions for this field, calling for more interdisciplinary inquiries, continued critical intersectional engagement with diverse transnational communities and subjectivities, reflexive and ethical research practices, and pedagogical applications.

Critiques of neoliberal capitalism have offered a rich vocabulary for the analysis of the political economy of literacy across professional, public, and classroom contexts. Since the Great Recession, commonplaces about work-readiness have been conditioned by economic precarity and changes to the social contract of work that blur the lines between professionalization and exploitation. Looking beyond the confines of the neoliberal present, the uncertain future of work for our undergraduate students will be shaped by what the World Economic Forum describes as the “double-disruption” of the pandemic and the rise of automation. Whereas neoliberal critique offers a vocabulary for describing many job seekers’ experience of the present, this article seeks to recover an element of “literacy hope” (Wan) by looking to speculative and utopian postcapitalist theory to inform and challenge career guidance conversations with students in writing studies. By framing the future as a resource in the rhetorical constitution of present-day workers, this article advances an inquiry-focused career-guidance pedagogy that asks: How do our assumptions about the future of work inform our relationships with employers and each other in the present?

This article examines how Aristotelian rhetorical principles— ethos, pathos, and logos—can help manage social media outrage in complaint handling by translating them into defensive and accommodative response strategies commonly used in service recovery. Two online experiments evaluated four strategies for their effects on complainants’ moods: (a) blame-shifting; (b) promising action; (c) apologizing; and (d) a combination of empathy, apology, and promise. The results showed that accommodative strategies were more effective than defensive ones, with the combination of empathy, apology, and promise as the most effective. The findings suggest incorporating rhetorical training in business communication to enhance response efficacy.

Given the prioritization of video format in social networks, the interest of scholars and managers in the elements that determine their effectiveness has increased. This article analyzes image type (product vs. people) and written text’s role in message reinforcement. Three studies are carried out combining conscious and unconscious responses. We contribute to visual rhetoric literature, affirming image-based videos are more liked and shared versus short videos that are based on written text. Specifically, the images related to the content of the message are more liked than the image of a person that explains the content, although attention is greater when a person appears. As for the overwritten text, it favors the willingness to share short videos, but reduces likeability in videos with images related to content. Additionally, the unconscious response through electrodermal activity shows that short videos with persons and overwritten text achieve more emotional activation and avoid that attention wanes. These findings aid in designing effective short video content for brands and individuals that use social media to communicate.

We argue that calling attention to how workplace writing is constructed in rhetorical contexts is a useful way to disrupt the seemingly “common sense” logic of professional participation. The first part of this article introduces the framework’s questions and explains the purpose of the framework. The second part of the article describes two writing assignments from our classrooms to illustrate how the framework functions as a prefigurative approach.

Misinformation has generated much discussion in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and attendant "Infodemic," as the World Health Organization (WHO) dubbed the challenge of disordered information. Rhetorical genre studies can offer important insights about how misinformation functions within informational ecologies by revealing how typification and recurrence provide opportunities for misinformation to take hold. This article develops a genre-based framework to study scientific and technical misinformation as illicit genres through concepts of genre function and abusability.

This article examines the patient perspective as an emerging feature of medical case report writing, and through analysis of technical reporting guidelines and a corpus of published reports, shows how the biomedical community incorporates patient-authored perspectives into processes of research and publication. The author concludes by discussing the value and complexities of patient inclusion efforts and the potential for scholars of rhetoric and technical communication to take part in shaping those efforts.