Review Article| March 01 2018 Materialism(s) in Recent Visual Rhetorical Histories: A Commentary Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression. By Cara A. Finnegan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015; pp. xiii + 240. $50.00 cloth.Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action. By Thomas W. Benson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015; pp. viii + 214. $29.95 paper.Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. By Laurie E. Gries. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2015; pp. xxiii +311. $27.95 paper. Eric Scott Jenkins Eric Scott Jenkins Eric Scott Jenkins is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 157–174. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0157 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Eric Scott Jenkins; Materialism(s) in Recent Visual Rhetorical Histories: A Commentary. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 157–174. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0157 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: REVIEW ESSAY You do not currently have access to this content.

In this article, we examine how Latinitas, a non-profit organization aimed towards empowering Latina youth through multimedia and technology, is a site of resistance. Latinitas provides linguistic, cultural, and technological resources as means to promote empowerment in the Latinx community, thereby creating and nurturing a space for Latinx youth. This article is written by two members of Latinitas: Jasmine Villa, Coordinator for the Youth Editorial Advisory Board, and Taylor Figueroa, a high school senior and Contributing Writer for Latinitas Magazine. Using personal experiences and testimonios, this article highlights how Latinitas sustains social justice efforts by providing an interplay of multimodal spaces (physical and digital) for Latinx youth to use as a platform for self-expression.

Building on interest in writing’s situatedness and materiality, this article stretches conceptions of writing processes with accounts of writers’ unintentional, embodied, and emergent interactions within writing environments, as rendered through reflective multimodal methods combining talk, drawing, photographs, and video.

Johnstone and Graff’s contribution to what they term the “archaeology” of Greek rhetoric is original and significant. By describing the visual and acoustic characteristics of bouleutêrion interiors, they help us to imagine the experiences of both speaker and audience in these spaces. Speeches before boulai could have been performative tours de force. Orators could have taken advantage of the settings to enhance their words’ persuasive force, to present themselves in competition as confident, powerful men, and, perhaps, to generate particular aesthetic effects. Johnstone and Graff’s approach reflects the contemporary trend of trying to situate ancient performance texts within the physical locations for which they were composed. Probably the most successful example of this is Bissera Pentcheva’s work on Hagia Sophia. Pentcheva and her colleagues have demonstrated how the acoustic properties of Hagia Sophia, particularly its reverberation time, would have affected the experiences of hearing and performing hymns, psalms, and the sung sermons known as kontakia during the Justinianic liturgy of the sixth century CE. Hagia Sophia lends itself to this kind of research, since the complete building survives, as does a large and varied corpus of texts written about it or for performance within it. Johnstone and Graff’s project faces the opposite situation. None of the dozens of known bouleutêria survives as anything approaching a complete building, and we have limited specific evidence of what went on within them. This essay considers Johnstone and Graff’s analysis in light of these two challenges.All the bouleutêria Johnstone and Graff discuss are in more-or-less ruined condition. Sufficient remains of the foundations of the Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens survive for us to reconstruct the buildings’ dimensions and floor plans, but we have limited evidence about the heights and materials of the walls and roof and the materials of interior surfaces. It is not even clear whether there were wooden benches for the bouleutai to sit on. Other buildings are better preserved. For the bouleutêrion of Miletus, for instance, we know that the seats and walls were of marble and limestone, and we can reconstruct the exterior walls’ height with reasonable accuracy. Even for the best preserved bouleutêria, fundamental architectural details, including the presence of windows and the materials and pitch of the roof, are matters of speculation. The state of the buildings has important consequences for acoustic analysis, as the example of reverberation time will show.Reverberation time is a measure of how long it takes a sound to die away. Some materials, such as cloth, absorb sound and hasten its decay. Other materials, such as brick or solid wood, reflect sound and prolong its reverberation. To calculate the reverberation time of any room, therefore, we need to know the materials and surface area of every surface that sound could encounter within it, including the walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture. We also need to know the volume of the room. This poses a challenge for bouleutêria. The Old Bouleuterion in Athens is a representative example. Since we do not know the height of the Old Bouleuterion, we cannot calculate with certainty its volume or the surface area of its walls and roof. Chips of yellow poros suggest that the walls were of this material, but neither the walls themselves nor traces of any of the interior furniture survive (Thompson 129–132). Accordingly, Johnstone and Graff have to make inferences about the height and the material of interior surfaces in order to calculate reverberation time. They estimate a wall height of 6 m and a roof peak height of 9.3 m. Different heights would change both the volume and surface areas, and so would result in different reverberation times. In Appendix A, Table 1, Johnstone and Graff base their calculations on “absorption coefficients that most closely resemble the building materials used.” As with the height, if we posit different materials, the reverberation times would change. Other measures, including speech intelligibility, also depend on height and materials. The presence or absence of windows can affect acoustic conditions as well. Georgios Karadedos, Vasilios Zafranas, and Panagiotis Karampatzakis, who have calculated the reverberation times of some Greek bouleutêria and ôdeia, although with very different results from Johnstone and Graff, note that open windows in their reconstruction of the Odeion of Aphrodisias would reduce reverberation time by 20 percent. When Johnstone and Graff praise the acoustics of the Old Bouleuterion, therefore, their conclusion is a possibility rather than a certainty. They are referring to their reconstruction of the building rather than the building itself. The same holds for other bouleutêria. For the bouleutêrion at Messene, for instance, Johnstone and Graff’s calculations depend on a reconstructed wall height of 17 m and a roof peak height of 20.3 m. All of Johnstone and Graff’s assumptions are reasonable, but results based on information that we do not know must always be used with caution.Even though Johnstone and Graff’s results may be uncertain in particulars, they point to conclusions that are generally correct. Greek bouleutêria, especially those whose shapes resemble the Old or New Bouleuterion in Athens, were effective performance spaces for both visual and acoustic reasons. The Greeks themselves seem to have appreciated the functionality of the Old and New Bouleuteria, since, of all the monumental civic and religious buildings of fifth- and fourth-century Athens, their architecture was the most consistently imitated. This contrasts with another Athenian building that hosted oratorical performances, the Odeion of Pericles. Modeled after Xerxes’ tent, it did not become the model for later ôdeia (Camp 347), perhaps because its many columns and sloping, peaked roof impeded visibility and resulted in poor acoustics, especially compared to the simple box-like shapes of the Old and New Bouleuteria.Research on bouleutêria faces a second central challenge besides the scanty archaeological remains. While we know these buildings housed councils of various sorts throughout the Greek world from the archaic through late antique periods, we have little idea of how these councils actually conducted their business. This is particularly true of Hellenistic cities, but it is also true of Classical Athens. We know much about the Athenian boulê’s responsibilities and procedures, but we do not know what the bouleutai did in the buildings we call the Old and New Bouleuteria and what they did elsewhere. The boulê met almost every day. Its published agendas always included the location of the meeting (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 43.3), and that location may have changed often. As Johnstone and Graff note, inscriptions and literary references attest to the Athenian boulê meeting in various places. Similarly, according to Xenophon’s Hellenica 5.2.29, the Theban boulê would meet in a stoa when its usual meeting place on the hill known as the Cadmea was being used for another purpose, and Christopher P. Dickenson (115) infers from two accounts of the same event in Plutarch’s Life of Aratus 40.2–3 and Life of Cleomenes 19.1 that the Corinthian boulê could meet in the Temple of Apollo, even though there was a bouleutêrion in Corinth (Diodorus Siculus 16.65.6).We need to be cautious about references to bouleutêria in ancient sources, since bouleutêrion is both a general and specific term. In Athens, it can refer to the particular buildings that we call the Old and New Bouleuteria, but any other place that any boulê meets is also a bouleutêrion. Hence, there was a bouleutêrion on the Areopagus for the boulê of the Areopagus (Lalonde). Any building where a boulê was meeting could probably be designated a temporary bouleutêrion, just as a stoa could become a dikastêrion while it was being used for trials. Along the same lines, at least some of the buildings designated as bouleutêria would have hosted events besides meetings of the boulê, since, as a general rule, Greek buildings were designed for multiple purposes. As Johnstone and Graff point out, the Old Bouleuterion may have simultaneously housed both the boulê and Athens’ archives. This affects how we think of bouleutêria as venues for oratorical performances. While there can be no question that they did host oratory, we cannot be sure of what else they were used for or how often speeches took place within them, as opposed to alternative meeting places of boulai.By emphasizing oratorical performances in bouleutêria, Johnstone and Graff’s analysis leaves questions about boulê procedure and the buildings’ other purposes unanswered. How often would speakers who were capable of the kind of performances that Johnstone and Graff envision have had the opportunity to speak in bouleutêria? How would the architectural characteristics that made bouleutêria excellent spaces for oratory have affected the other activities that occurred within them, such as subcommittee meetings or debates like the one in Lysias 22, Against the Graindealers, that Johnstone and Graff mention? What was more central to bouleutêria’s roles, their acoustics or the unimpeded sight lines from almost anywhere inside them? In the rest of this essay, I consider Johnstone and Graff’s analysis from the broad perspective of these questions. I will not offer answers, which is probably impossible based on our evidence, but I will show that reconstructions of bouleutêria need to account for other activities just as prominently as for deliberative oratory. Even though Johnstone and Graff do not specifically address other activities, their study points to how bouleutêria would have been more than simply venues for speechmaking. I will focus particularly on Athens, since we know more about the Athenian boulê than the boulai of other cities.Plato’s Gorgias, who surely has Athens in mind, defines rhêtorikê as “the ability to persuade with words dikastai in a dikastêrion, bouleutai in a bouleutêrion, and ekklêsiastai in an ekklêsia, as well as in any other type of political meeting” (452e, my trans.). The Athenian boulê acted as a kind of gatekeeper for the ekklêsia, setting the agenda of topics for each meeting. An item placed on the ekklêsia’s agenda was called a “preliminary resolution,” or probouleuma. Speakers could influence Athenian policy by successfully persuading the bouleutai to pass probouleumata recommending their pet causes. Since the ekklêsia appears to have approved the boulê’s recommendations without changes about half the time (Rhodes 79), a politician who was skilled at manipulating the boulê could wield considerable influence over the policies of Athens. Debates over probouleumata probably attracted the kinds of trained orators that Johnstone and Graff envision taking advantage of the acoustic conditions of the Old and New Bouleuteria. In the Sausage Seller’s description of a chaotic meeting of the boulê in Aristophanes’ Knights, we hear that Paphlagon was “booming with words that struck like thunderbolts” and “hurling mountain crags” at the bouleutai (626–629, my trans.). Although exaggerated for comic effect, this gives us a taste of the kind of oratory that politicians such as Cleon would have practiced before the boulê in the 420s BCE.There were other opportunities for oratorical performance before the boulê besides debates over probouleumata. The boulê had the power to conduct certain types of judicial hearings, most importantly dokimasiai, or “examinations,” of magistrates who were about to take office, as well as of invalids seeking public support. Dokimasiai took the form of trials. The people objecting to the appointment spoke first, and then the prospective officials defended themselves. Of the five surviving speeches that were delivered before the Athenian boulê, four come from dokimasiai (Lys. 16, 24, 26, 31) and one from another type of judicial hearing (Dem. 51). Dokimasiai would have been ideal occasions for what Johnstone and Graff term the “performance of masculine virtue and virtuosity in a competitive culture that prized honor and reputation.” Prospective magistrates and bouleutai had to justify not only their qualifications but also their lifestyles and habits. For instance, in Lysias 16, For Mantitheus, Mantitheus defends his appearance and reputation as an orator and responds to the charge that he served in the cavalry under the Thirty Tyrants.We should not exaggerate the importance of oratory in dokimasiai. Most of the hundreds of hearings the boulê had to conduct each year must have been resolved with rapid approvals or rejections and minimal speechmaking. Furthermore, whenever the boulê acted as a court, we do not know whether it even met in the Old or New Bouleuterion. Pollux 8.86 says that the dokimasiai of archons took place in the Stoa Basileos (Rhodes 36), and the manuscripts of Lysias 31.1 refer to a dikastêrion rather than a bouleutêrion. While the Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens, therefore, seem to have served as venues for oratorical performances during discussions of probouleumata, the boulê seems to have been convened in other places on at least some occasions that may have featured competitive oratory.Even during political debates, prominent politicians could not address the boulê whenever they wished, since only the bouleutai themselves had an absolute right to speak (Rhodes 42–43). As a result, politicians sometimes pursued policy goals through behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Demosthenes (23.9,14), Aeschines (3.125), and the pseudo-Aristotelian Athênainôn Politeia (29.1–3) all describe politicians advancing policies through personal relationships (Rhodes 57). As Josiah Ober has argued, the boulê of the fifth and fourth centuries functioned through a series of interlocking social networks that recognized and relied on individuals’ connections and expertise (142–155). Ober calls this process “knowledge aggregation.” The aggregated knowledge of the boulê and its constituent social networks would have served as a check on the power of rhetoric. When bouleutai voted, their decisions were informed both by the speeches they had heard and by the informed opinions of their expert colleagues. Both the Old and New Bouleuteria, as Johnstone and Graff have reconstructed them, would have facilitated this kind of informed voting. By sitting, or perhaps standing, in what Ober (199–205) calls “inward facing circles,” the bouleutai could have observed each other as they listened to speeches and so reached judgments informed by the reactions of their colleagues. The open space that facilitated oratory would also have encouraged visual communication among listeners and so prevented orators from having too much power.The boulê oversaw many Athenian officials, especially those concerned with finances and the navy. One of the boulê’s most important roles was to supervise monetary transactions. For instance, in the fifth century the boulê observed the presentation of tribute from the allies (Meiggs and Lewis 46), and in the fourth century they watched in the bouleutêrion as the debts of individuals who had paid the money they owed to the state were formally erased from the written record (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 48.1). Duties such as these required seeing as much as hearing, which again indicates that visibility would have been as important as audibility to the design of Athenian bouleutêria. The open space of the Old and New Bouleuteria probably encouraged small meetings of subcommittees as well as mass viewing, especially if there were movable wooden benches. By the fourth century, the boulê conducted much of its supervisory business through subcommittees (Rhodes 143).The Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens were multipurpose buildings whose design facilitated a range of activities besides oratory. We know much less about the business conducted in bouleutêria outside Athens, but they also seem to have hosted both political oratory and other events, some of which had nothing to do with speaking or governing.Inscriptions and literary references make clear that boulai throughout the Greek-speaking world played an active role in political decisions, sometimes through listening to speeches. Polybius, for instance, describes a debate that took place in 226 or 225 BCE in the koinon, here “shared” or “federal,” bouleutêrion of the Achaean League, which was probably in Aegium, on the Gulf of Corinth. At this meeting, envoys of the Megalopolitans read a letter from the Macedonian king Antigonus Doson and urged the representatives of the league to make an alliance with him, but the general Aratus responded “at length,” urging them to continue acting on their own for the time being. The “crowd applauded” Aratus’ speech and accepted his recommendation (2.50.10–51.1). Polybius also paraphrases a speech of the general Philopoemen given in what was probably the same bouleutêrion in 208 or 207 BCE (11.9.1–9), which criticizes the soldiers of the Achaean League for neglecting their armor and weaponry in favor of fancy dress.By the imperial period, bouleutêria hosted performances besides political oratory, including epideictic oratory and musical concerts. Libanius describes the enthusiastic reception that greeted him when he spoke in the bouleutêrion in his hometown of Antioch in 353 CE (Autobiography 87–89), and Dio of Prusa (19.2–3) describes the performance of a lyre player in the bouleutêrion in Cyzicus sometime between 85 and 95 CE. While Libanius and other epideictic speakers probably benefited from the same architectural conditions that Johnstone and Graff show favored deliberative speakers, a focus on oratory alone does not address whether bouleuêtria would also have been effective performance spaces for singers and instrumentalists. Did the buildings host concerts because their acoustics were good for music as well as speech or simply because they were available?Some bouleutêria accommodated events unrelated to government or to individual performances. To take one example, Josephus tells us that the same building in Tiberias was used both for formal political meetings of the Tiberian boulê, complete with oratory and debates, and as a proseukhê, “prayer-house” or “synagogue” (Life 276–298, Rocca 296–300). Other synagogues of the late Second Temple period seem to have been modeled after Hellenistic bouleutêria such as the ones at Priene and Miletus that Johnstone and Graff discuss (Ma‘oz 41, Rocca 305–310). This suggests that the architectural characteristics that Johnstone and Graff associate primarily with oratory would also have been appropriate for the non-oratorical activities in synagogues, the of the the of the and outside and, especially after public while Johnstone and Graff’s specific results need to be used with their analysis of the performance conditions of bouleutêria how skilled orators could have used these buildings to their in the that a At the same time, Johnstone and Graff’s focus on oratory the of their every speech before a boulê would have been delivered in a bouleutêrion, bouleutai had many responsibilities that did not call for and bouleutêria were used for besides boulê The physical characteristics of bouleutêria in Athens and throughout the Greek-speaking world that Johnstone and Graff would have accommodated a range of besides oratorical including visual small musical performances, and religious based on Johnstone and Graff’s may us how the architecture of bouleutêria would have facilitated or these at the of well late because they were multipurpose buildings to many of civic to and whose an of this essay, and to who my to ancient

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

This project describes three pedagogical practices that use storytelling to engage students in exploring and inventing their shared community. Through service-learning stories of community members, self-analyses, stories of work, and TED-style multimodal talks, students at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University South Bend expand and disturb the meaning of their local community and, in doing so, help to rewrite the haunted story of South Bend, Indiana.

Using the mixed media of sketch notes, animation, and voiceover, this video explores the field of composition’s relationship between multimodality and composing. The piece illustrates how multimodal strategies such as sketchnotes can enhance idea generation and learning and provide classroom stategies for multimodal composition.

In this article, I explore normative assumptions regarding multimodality from the perspective of disability studies, and focus particularly on how coherence and wholeness work in disciplinary conversations and professional statements. I offer a reading of the hybrid graphic-written text The Ride Together as a way to resist these normative impulses and to explore a different kind of wholeness at work in the interaction between text and image. I argue for appreciating the rhetorical strategy of dis-closure, which I define as occurring when disability frustrates the normative expectations of multimodal, compositional, and narrative closure in productive and generative ways. I analyze multimodal collaboration and revision in The Ride Together , arguing that insights from comics studies, together with an appreciation of dis-closure, present alternatives to the limiting disciplinary focus on coherence and wholeness.

Informed by my embodiment as a Deaf instructor asking hearing students to challenge captioning conventions, this article shows how hearing composers can reimagine the design of their captioned videos, and appreciate students’ embodied responses to new rhetorical situations. The embodied methodology and methods in this article incorporate embodied differences and are directly influenced by the fields of disability studies, cultural rhetorics, and embodiment. This article foregrounds students’ embodied responses—their individual reactions to the videos and activities—in the form of their reflective letters on the process of designing and analyzing videos with dynamic visual text, or captions that move around the screen in interaction with other modes of communication. In addition to discussing their written responses and the skills they developed, I assess their group videos to show how student composers interpret the process of infusing captions with meaning.

This article proposes embodied and multimodal readings of student compositions from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School as a way to illuminate processes of assimilation and resistance. Drawing on Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance and the ways that the field of composition has taken up Vizenor’s work, I argue that the project remains incomplete if we confine our history of cultural rhetoric to resistant, individual, alphabetically literate voices as the sites of rhetorical sovereignty and rhetorics of survivance.

The language used in digital communication has erroneously been considered a simple extension of spoken language. However, research has established that writers in digital environments reshape orthographies to construct identities and audiences and with the help of other social-semiotic resources such as images, sounds, and hyperlinks, they create new meanings (Androutsopoulos, 2015; Knobel and Lankshear, 2008; Mills, 2010). Such research has not thoroughly examined bilingual populations, who employ their often vast repertoire of language varieties to similar ends. The goal of this article is to explore a specific case of how orality influences writing in the digital spaces of members of a social network of Mexican bilinguals. By studying how these bilinguals communicate on Facebook, we can observe how in relationship to the semi-public platform, they create new meanings through linguistically innovative audience-based writing. This practice aids them in maintaining their bilingualism and their bilingual identity.

Multimodal composing can activate literacy practices and identities not typically privileged in verbocentric English classrooms, and students’ identities as particular kinds of learners (e.g.,“visual artist”) may propel—or limit—their engagement in classroom work, including in multimodal composing. Although researchers have studied the ways multimodal projects can evidence literacy learning and have argued that identity is negotiated, improvisational, and hybrid, they have offered few sustained analyses of the processes by which identities evolve during and across multimodal composing tasks. By examining how students position themselves and one another as particular kinds of learners over time, researchers can better understand the ways in which multimodal tasks help students explore new skills and roles or reify old ones. Drawing on an approach to discourse analysis from the linguistic anthropology of education, we trace the pathways of three 12th graders’ learner identities across two events as they worked in a group to compose visual responses to literary texts for their English class. We examine how one student’s robust identity as an artist emerged in tandem with the devaluing of other participants’ artist identities. Seven weeks later, these positionings led her to act as the painting’s primary author and other students to act in increasingly perfunctory ways. We call for teachers and researchers to consider how students’ identities—interacting with factors such as the teacher’s expectations for group work and the affordances of particular media and materials for collaboration—drive students’ participation in and ownership of multimodal compositions.

I am writing in response to the recent Forum essay “Taking the Long View on Writing Development,” authored by Bazerman, Applebee, Berninger, Brandt, Graham, Matsuda, Murphy, Rowe, and Schleppegrell (2017; and hereafter “The Long View”). I argue that “The Long View” was driven by the aim of identifying consensus rather than working through difference, that the principles represent commonplaces rather than a principled synthesis of research, that questions of epistemology and theory central to research agendas are essentially ignored, and that views of writing as semiotically exceptional and writing development as centered in school represent serious flaws in setting the agenda. The semiotic exceptionalism of “The Long View” represents a serious category mistake (Ryle, 1949). Taking “writing” as the unit of analysis occludes the diverse semiotic activity that necessarily shapes all textual artifacts and acts of inscription. Viewing writing as sharply distinct from orality risks reigniting Great Divide theories that had so many problematic effects on research, pedagogy, and people. Seeing school as the primary context for writing development ignores the rich roles of life outside school. In short, “The Long View” takes too narrow and problematic a view on issues of epistemology, theory, and literate lives to serve as the foundation for the critical research enterprise it aspires to conjure in our collective future. Instead, I suggest that research on the lifespan development of writing needs to begin with embodied, mediated, dialogic semiotic practice as its unit of analysis and to trace what people do, learn, and become across all the deeply entangled domains of their lives.

Laurie E. Gries has written an accessible, clear model of how to employ new materialist philosophy for the rhetorical analysis of what she terms “visual things.” For scholars and students who are l...

This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an argumentative paper, video transcript, multimedia video, interview transcripts, and observation notes. Data analysis shows that her choice and orchestration of modal resources were shaped by her textual identity construction work, efforts to accommodate perceived audiences, and previous experience with the medium. Remediation with multimedia offered the student more semiotic resources to expand authorship, but the contextual forces of audience and medium bounded her authorial expression. The student’s multimodal writing illustrated discursive processes of negotiating and performing authorial positions for rhetorical goals with awareness of the linguistic, social, and cultural contexts of text production. This investigation ultimately aims to expand aspects of multimodal writing and literacy practice by examining the discursive nature of the design process in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts.

In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets himself to a difficult task. He surveys over a half-century of political thought, political discourse, and political imagery in order to examine and evaluate the relationship between visual and political cultures. It is to O’Gorman’s credit as a thinker and as a writer that he does not sacrifice depth for breadth. Indeed, his book is an exemplary work of rhetorical criticism, for it advances not only our understanding of neoliberalism as a rhetorical production, but also, and perhaps more significantly, it advances our understanding of how to do visual rhetoric.As a rhetorical history, the book offers a unique perspective on neoliberalism. Tracing the ideology’s origins to postwar efforts to reimagine the role of the nation-state, O’Gorman establishes that neoliberalism is best understood in the context of broader efforts to redefine what constitutes the legitimate exercise of state power. This history adds nuance to previous accounts of neoliberalism, particularly in its account of neoliberalism’s attitude toward images, an attitude that O’Gorman astutely identifies as iconoclastic. As manifested in images of national catastrophe—the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger disaster, and the 9-11 attacks, among others—the iconoclastic attitude regards as impossible the existence of any image adequate to representing America’s political processes more generally. For his part, O’Gorman demonstrates the error of this attitude by using these same images to represent a particular political process and to make his case for iconic representation as “the means by which we grasp our political existence” (16). This insight into the relationship between political and visual representation frames a series of case studies in which O’Gorman unpacks the ideological valence of images without reproducing neoliberalism’s hostility to visual representation. When understood in the context of rhetorical studies, this is a significant accomplishment. As with any discipline influenced by the linguistic turn, we too often regard images as vectors of oppression and false consciousness and seek to reveal them as such. Bruno Latour characterizes this attitude as a subtle and pernicious form of iconoclasm that reduces the critical operation to the trick of uncovering the trick; by exposing the manipulator behind the image, big ideology, big media, big whatever or whoever, we undermine the truth value of an image (“Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 239–42). However, the ease of the operation precludes deeper insights into images. Specifically, iconoclastic criticism cannot account for the processes by which we come to view certain representations as legitimate. This shortcoming, in turn, makes it difficult to comprehend the role played by images in various fields of human endeavor including, but not limited to, the political.It will come as no surprise to the reader that Kenneth Burke touched on the limits of the iconoclastic attitude, though he didn’t discuss images, at least not explicitly. Rather, he concerned himself with how to confront human error without undermining the belief in human progress necessary to positive social action. He voiced this concern in Attitudes Toward History, where he enjoined critics to strive for a “maximum of forensic complexity” that strikes a balance between “hagiography and iconoclasm” (226, 107). If we extend this call to the task of visual rhetoric, then our goal, to appropriate a phrase from James Elkins, is to make rhetorical criticism “more difficult” (Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, p. 63). O’Gorman does exactly this in The Iconoclastic Imagination.Take, for example, the chapter titled “Zapruder,” in which O’Gorman traces the circulation of the eponymous film to throw light on a productive paradox of iconic iconoclasm. With each appearance—first in Life magazine, later in a television special, still later in the movie JFK—the Zapruder film occasions new efforts to resolve the tension between our collective dependence on representation and our growing distrust of images. In this account, the Zapruder film is the repeated focus of a grand critical effort to uncover the truth behind the image by dismantling it. And in every instance, we see the critics come to a similar conclusion: the film cannot allay suspicions about the official version of events, and neither can it offer a stable alternative. Instead, the film can, and does, signify the inadequacy of images to the task of representation, which in turn supports neoliberalism’s ongoing rejection of images as adequate to representing economic and political processes. The Zapruder film thus becomes an icon of iconoclasm.Ironically, the processes of signification that make the Zapruder film an icon of iconoclasm also make the Zapruder film available to O’Gorman’s decidedly iconophilic critique. As conceived by Latour, iconophilia, like iconoclasm, reveals the human hands behind the creation of images. However, where iconoclasm reveals the work of human hands to expose the image as a vector of false consciousness, iconophilia does so to gain insight into the image as an epistemological resource. And as elaborated by Finnegan and Kang, Latour’s conception of iconophilia encourages a stance on political imagery that does not look for something behind or beyond the image, but instead focuses on the flow of images to account for their function as inventional resources (“‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory, QJS, vol. 90, 2004, pp. 395–396). This is precisely the stance taken by O’Gorman, and in taking it he models what Burke might call a healthy attitude toward images—an attitude that embraces representation as salutary for democratic politics while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which the processes of representation can, and are, used to advance the neoliberal rejection of the same.All that having been said, and as O’Gorman points out in the final pages of his book, this approach has its limits. What happens when neoliberalism’s catastrophes do not yield images? What happens when, as with the 2008 financial collapse, we have no image of failure? Does neoliberalism escape critique? O’Gorman worries that the answer is yes. However, I wonder if this pessimism owes to O’Gorman’s treatment of the icon as the sine qua non of political representation. Perhaps, if we look to a different species of sign, namely the index, we will find cause for optimism.In Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, the index differs from the icon insofar as it signifies not primarily through resemblance, but instead though a causal connection to its referent (Philosophical Writings, 102–103). This is not to suggest that an index cannot resemble that to which it refers, but that it need not resemble it. For example, a fingerprint is an index, but so too is a weathercock; of these two, only the former resembles its referent. Nevertheless, in both cases the indexical reference is a representation amenable to interpretation and critique.O’Gorman suggests the representational possibilities of the index in his chapter on CNN’s coverage of the 9-11 attacks, in which he argues that CNN’s televisual coverage adopted the “style and logic” of the interface. In his analysis, CNN adopted a mode of representation that owed more to the referential logic of the computer interface than to the older, mimetic logic of photojournalism. This leads O’Gorman to posit the interface as a “new sort of icon,” one that does not represent limited or absent information, but instead organizes an abundance of incoming information into a coherent image of catastrophe (144–145). The interface as icon metaphor does important work, as it allows O’Gorman to uncover relationships between new technologies of representation and the neoliberal aesthetic. Nevertheless, it obscures the extent to which we can regard the interface as an index—a representation that reveals not through its resemblance to an event but through its referential connection to the same.With respect to the 2008 financial collapse, I propose we direct some of our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation. For although it might be true that the collapse did not yield an icon of iconoclasm, it did yield an abundance of indexes of catastrophe, signs linked to their objects by a causal connection. These indexes of catastrophe appeared in the form of “For Sale” signs, foreclosure notices, and half-finished housing developments. As critics, we can assemble these materials to create an image of catastrophe that will, in turn, serve as the basis for an iconophilic critique modeled after The Iconoclastic Imagination. It therefore seems to me that we need not worry about a lack of images, though we might need to make visual studies still more difficult. Fortunately, I think we’re up to the task.

Crossing disciplinary boundaries is a common practice for today’s technical writer. The author offers an insightful look at how neurobiological and multimodal rhetorical concepts can inform instructional document design to improve learning. This book addresses an interdisciplinary audience of academic and industry professionals involved in employee training or instructional training material design. The goal here is to answer the question, “How does one learn new technical concepts?. To answer this, the book bridges theoretical concepts in the seemingly dissimilar fields of cognitive psychology, neurobiology, and rhetoric. While there is still much to be discussed within this vast interdisciplinary conversation, the author's synthesis and his resulting analysis model hold workplace and pedagogical value by providing an entry point through a shared goal: cognitive gain through effective technical instructional materials.

Tracing the literacy practices of an Israeli soldier, this case study examines how his engagement in multilingual and multimodal (MML) composing affects his ways of thinking about and doing literacy. It specifically attends to how MML practices dispose writers to certain orientations to reading, writing, speaking, and design.

In this article, I reexamine quality and rhetoric in Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance through Julia Kristeva's semiotic chora. To that end, I review three analyses of Pirsig's novel, reinscribe quality as a prediscursive experience of undifferentiated wholeness, argue that regression back into Kristeva's chora is one way to recover this prediscursive experience, and hypothesize that the rhetoric of Zen is an unstable discourse in which prediscursive energies from the chora disrupt and realign the meanings of signifiers. I conclude by generalizing my work beyond Pirsig's novel to three concepts in rhetorical scholarship.

“Media support particular modalities over others, and formally shape and ideologically infuse products based on their affordances. Hence, students must be able to analyze rhetorical contexts while problematizing simplistic definitions of access and efficacy. The concept of a “multimodal home place” provides a tool to help students become more mindful about technology use.”

“The editors and authors of the chapters included in Multimodal Composing in Classrooms: Learning and Teaching for the Digital World show how multimodal composing has become an indispensible new literacy.”

Methodologically, this webtext takes up a diversity of modes of making, documenting and reflecting on this shared learning journey, including photography, interviews, participant observation, and a documentary film. This is conveyed through a spatial rhetoric that is designed to evince and allow access to different thematics and elements in the interface so that readers—students, educators, researchers—may differentially traverse the multimodal account of the learning journey.

Online course material development requires much writing, often catching faculty by surprise because of either the sheer volume or the specialized role and function of writing in an online only and multimodal environment. technical and professional communication (TPC) faculty are uniquely suited to coach faculty in producing readable writing for online courses. This article explores the professional development strategies and coaching skills necessary for TPC instructors and/or practitioners to serve in this role in online course development training.

Books reviewed: Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics by Laurie E. Gries. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. 324 pp. Dialectical Rhetoric by Bruce McComiskey. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. 228 pp. Hospitality and Authoring: An Essay for the English Profession by Richard Haswell and Janis Haswell. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. 232 pp.

ABSTRACTThe spread of mobile technologies and social media have contributed to making snapshot photography an ordinary part of everyday life. As snapshots become more omnipresent, asking why we take so many photos becomes less exigent than asking what might stop us from doing so. Drawing on insights from affect theory, new materialism, and studies of visual rhetoric, this article argues that deterrents to snapping pictures arise not only from the range of human rhetorics or “laws” that influence our actions or inactions, but also from a dynamic tangle of extrahuman factors, ineffable though this influence may be. Speculating about the implications of these extrahuman deterrents for how we understand rhetoric, I suggest that the ineffable enchantment of certain encounters exhibits a worldly rhetoricity in itself, one that conditions the possibility of—and sometimes prevents—the anthropogenic symbolic actions we are more accustomed to recognizing as rhetorical.

In this entry, we argue that to promote multimodal literacy in online writing classes, instructors should address the following five practices in their course design:• Incorporate multimodal assignments and appropriate scaffolding tools;• Use multimodal instructional tools to teach and model multimodal composition;• Provide multimodal feedback to students' compositions;• "Teach" technology through the use of media labs;• Encourage reflection as a significant part of students' learning process.In so doing, we discuss each practice in depth, addressing the reasons and benefits for incorporating each, as well as advice about how to implement them. By implementing these practices in their online courses, instructors can successfully design classes that promote multimodal literacy.

The notion of translingual practice has gained much currency within college composition and sociolinguistics over the last few years. Translingual practices challenge structuralist conceptualizations of language as discrete, bounded, impermeable, autonomous systems, conceptualizations that unfortunately (1) privilege linguistic codes over nonlinguistic ones, and (2) contribute to the hierarchization and separation of languages, leading some languages and their corresponding users to be valued more than others. To counter such a stance, we advocate the use of translingual pedagogy, which values the fluid communicative practices of learners who mobilize multiple semiotic resources to facilitate communication. By sharing examples from our own classrooms,we also underscore the need for teachers to recognize and expand the communicative repertoires of their students. This pedagogical shift, as we illustrate, is accompanied by an instructional commitment to develop students’ metalinguistic awareness and cultural sensitivities in order to create inclusive and equitable learning environments.

Complexity leadership theory provides a perspective on leadership that values, rather than avoids, the realities of a complex environment. As we are now fully part of an age of networks, facilitating leadership toward collective action means embracing a distributed model reliant on multiple modes of communication distributed over multiple nodes in complex networks. A complexity theory of leadership that is practiced within the context of multimodal authorship favors collective action over individual action, collaboration over centralization, and connectivity over isolation. It is in the power of multiple networks interacting and becoming a complex adaptive system that collective action leads to positive change.

This article examines the teaching of a multimodal pedagogy in an online technical communication classroom. Based on the results of an e-portfolio assessment, the authors argue that multimodality can be taught successfully in the online environment if the instructor carefully plans and scaffolds each assignment. Specifically, they argue for an increased emphasis within the technical communication classroom on teaching the e-portfolio as a genre that not only exemplifies students’ multimodal literacies but also establishes their identities as technical communicators in the 21st century. This article provides a model for teaching multimodal composition in the online technical communication classroom and calls for more scholarship on teaching the e-portfolio in the digital environment.

This article examines multimodal texts created by a cohort of academically marginalized secondary school students in Singapore as part of a language arts unit on persuasive composition. Using an interpretivist qualitative approach, we examine students’ multimodal designs to highlight opportunities taken up for expanding literacy practices traditionally not available to lower tracked students. Findings examine the authorial stances and rhetorical force that students enacted in their multimodal designs, despite lack of regular opportunities to author complex texts and a schooling history of low expectations. We extend arguments for the importance of providing all students with opportunities to take positions as designers and creators while acknowledging systematic barriers to such opportunities for academically marginalized students. This study thus counters deficit views of academically marginalized students’ literacy practices by demonstrating their authoritative stance taking and enacting of layered positionalities through multimodal designs in which they renegotiated ways of knowing and doing in their classroom.

This study describes how members of a transnational social network of Mexican bilinguals living in Chicago manipulate their language on online social media to facilitate and maintain close connections across borders. Using a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, I examine conversations posted on members’ Facebook walls and the contexts in which the discourses are formed. I argue that members of this transnational social network engage in the use of deterritorialized discourse to create chronotopes; that is, through discourse, members connect temporal and spatial relationships and form them into a single constructed context. These chronotopes help members recontextualize Facebook as a unique transnational social place that connects families and allows for the continuation of cultural practices that maintain their transnationalism. This study sheds light on the use of linguistic resources and modes of communication to examine how individuals construct imagined experiences within a real intimate community in the deterritorialized space of online social media.

Communication design specialists have many challenges in the twenty-first century global, online world. Geographically distributed teams must work together efficiently and effectively. People may need to interact across cultures and languages or using a common language like English or Spanish. In order to complete coherent design projects, they often need to negotiate varied communications software. Most important, both to communicate within teams and to clients with widely varied communication skills of their own, engineers and other communication design professionals must be able to engage the basic literacies of reading, writing, and digital (i.e., multiple media like images, audio, or video)---often called multimodal ---composition as a holistic skill set, and they must be able to use them well in online environments. These literacies comprise communication skills learned in school and honed in business settings; they are required for clear communicating whether through alphabetic texts or multimodal compositions.

This article investigates the writing mode, multimodal aspects, and folksonomic elements of digital composition gathered from a WordPress-based ePortfolio platform.* Focusing on the student perspective, data was gathered through both surveys of first year students and text analysis of digital compositions in order to produce quantitative results that can be replicated and aggregated. This research demonstrates the impact of assignment design and platform affordances on student composition practices. Results show that incoming students do not fit the "digital native" myth, nor are they prepared to engage in digital scholarship at the college level without significant guidance and specific requirements that scaffold digital work.

Grounded in a multimodal turn in composition studies, this article reports findings from a quantitative taxonomy analysis of four visual rhetoric and multimodal composition textbooks. This analysis reveals that while theories privilege the production of visual and multimodal compositions, the practices encapsulated in these textbooks promote the consumption of such compositions more so than production. As a result, instructors will have to be mindful about their uptake of visual and multimodal textbooks if they want to teach in ways that are theoretically grounded and rhetorically rich.

Previous research has documented the potential of digital projects for immigrant students to capitalize on their transnational knowledge. Yet, there are only limited insights on the practices and perspectives of immigrant adults in digital/multimodal composition. In this article, we explore how visual media are used by adults and adolescents as resources in the production of digital texts, and as artifacts to elicit accounts and memories. We draw from transnational approaches to theorize the role of technology in facilitating connections with students’ home countries. We use social semiotics and testimonio lenses to examine media they selected to represent their hometowns in (or nearby) the Mexican state of Michoacán. Lastly, we adopt methods of practitioner inquiry and artifactual literacy to elicit information about participants’ understandings and choices in the composition process. Our findings show that while transnational ties were relevant for all participants, their understandings about their hometowns differed across generations. Adults represented the homeland as a source of healing and miracles, while youth focused on concerns about crime and corruption. We also document the complexities of access to visual media through search engines. We show the ways family networks, travel, and media consumption shaped the composition choices students made, as well as how their current circumstances, roles, and concerns led them to share testimonios of struggle and faith. We discuss contributions to digital writing research across generations, and implications for pedagogical practices that leverage students’ transnational ties and migration histories

As theorization of multimodal text processes and productions continues to outpace classroom practices, research that contributes understandings of how composers are living out multimodal processes is needed. In response, we turn to thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) as both a methodological and an analytic approach to understand how multimodal composing processes and products come to be. We provide strategic sketches (Leander & Boldt, 2013) focused on third graders “Efrain” and “Trinidad”, not aiming to display the data in a traditional sense, but instead to ask of ourselves, the data, and theory: What material intra-actions emerge among two young picture book makers? What social, cultural, and material worlds are performed in their final picture book productions? Thinking with theory and data was an effort to experience some of the moment-to-moment nuances of young children’s multimodal processes, to appreciate the lived social, cultural, and material realities animated in their picture books, and to develop sensitivities to the possibilities of the material turn in post-humanist studies for literacy research. The analytic questions produced point to the saliency of diverse literature as aesthetic inspirations for multimodal texts, and of improvisations with varied art tools and media as openings for multimodal processes. This paper advances previous related scholarship through strategic sketches that invite readers to experience the complexity and the cultural significance of the multimodal processes and products that emerge when classroom expectations of a proficient writer include the ability to improvise and become with diverse materials and meanings, not just to command “standardized written English.”

"Assembling Arguments: Multimodal Rhetoric & Scientific Discourse, by Jonathan Buehl." Technical Communication Quarterly, 26(1), pp. 95–96

The rapid increase in online learning programs has led to an increase in the number of students taking composition courses online. As a result, there is a need to develop teaching practices and approaches to feedback designed specifically for online learning environments, which serve a largely nontraditional student population. Addressing a current gap in the literature regarding approaches to feedback that meet the needs of nontraditional students, this quasi-experimental study used a process model of composition and post-positivist and social constructivist epistemological orientations to measure student perceptions and preferences when provided with text-only feedback or a combination of textual and audio-visual commentary. Results indicate that the majority of students, if given the choice, prefer a combination of audio-visual and text-based commentary to textual feedback alone because they consider it helpful and feel that it enhances their overall understanding of instructor feedback by providing more detail and by using auditory and visual modes of communication. Students also liked audio-visual feedback because they considered it a form of personalized and individualized interaction, and some felt that it helped them spend more time and effort on revision.

As technology continues to become more ubiquitous and touches almost every aspect of the composing process, students and teachers are faced with new means to make writing a multimodal experience. This article embraces the emerging sector of wearable technology, presenting wearable writing strategies that would reimagine composition pedagogy. Specifically, the article introduces Google Glass and explores its affordances in reframing student peer-review activities. To do so, the author presents a brief overview of wearables and writing technology, a case study of how the author deployed Google Glass in a first-year writing course, and a set of tips for using wearable technology in general and technical writing courses.

Engineers communicate multimodally using written and visual communication, but there is not much theorizing on why they do so and how. This essay, therefore, examines why engineers communicate multimodally, what, in the context of representing engineering realities, are the strengths and weaknesses of written and visual communication, and how, based on an understanding of these strengths and weaknesses, one can consider using the strengths of each form of communication to address weaknesses in the other. Doing so can possibly enable one to demonstrate for engineering majors how they can, with greater effectiveness, communicate multimodally for representing well engineering realities.

This article considers how contemporary representations of child molesters in scholarly, political, and popular culture participate in projects that revolve around the recuperation of heteronormativity. I argue that these multimodal obsessions with child molestation displace the resilience of entrenched homophobic fears, prejudices, and dispositions, giving the lie to the commonplace that the political advance of same-sex marriage in the United States signals the apotheosis of gay rights. My analysis focuses on two representative popular and scholarly texts: the long-running television series Law and Order: SVU and a scholarly article about the Jerry Sandusky case published in jac. The former capitalizes on a combination of stranger and familiar child molester figures, reflecting a mix of popular sex panic mythology and social reality. The latter reenacts this combination, so the discourse about the Sandusky case becomes imbricated in the convergences between mythology and social reality that characterize the television show.

The work of Carol Berkenkotter and others who have expanded the realm of personal narrative studies over the past several decades would not have been possible without the pioneering efforts of those who first brought the study of narrative to nonliterary discourses. By revisiting what personal narratives were to these pioneers—working outward from William Labov in particular—this article considers how the early expansion of the field helps us to understand the far wider expansion of multimodal personal narrative today. In doing so, I suggest that understanding the notion of a personal narrative requires a twofold commitment to inquiry: first, about what makes it narrative; and second, about what makes it personal. These commitments hinge on two crucial junctures, what I call the problem of scope and the problem of autonomy. Framed as questions, the former asks, When does a narrative begin and end? The latter asks, Whose narrative is it? This recuperative essay shows that the heuristics of scope and autonomy can be useful ways to think about the ongoing complexities of personal narrative and its analysis.

Handwritten texts carry significant information, extending beyond the meaning of their words. Modern neurology, for example, benefits from the interpretation of the graphic features of writing and drawing for the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and disorders. This article examines how handwriting analysis can be used, and has been used historically, as a methodological tool for the assessment of medical conditions and how this enhances our understanding of historical contexts of writing. We analyze handwritten material, writing tests and letters, from patients in an early 20th-century psychiatric hospital in southern Germany (Irsee/Kaufbeuren). In this institution, early psychiatrists assessed handwriting features, providing us novel insights into the earliest practices of psychiatric handwriting analysis, which can be connected to Berkenkotter’s research on medical admission records. We finally consider the degree to which historical handwriting bears semiotic potential to explain the psychological state and personality of a writer, and how future research in written communication should approach these sources.

Digital visualization techniques offer rich possibilities for visual rhetoric and circulation studies. This webtext applies visualization techniques to 1000 various forms of the Shepard Fairey Obama Hope image to reveals wide and diverse circulation and modification beyond its original political purposes, demonstrating how such methods can help rhetoricians better account for the transnational flows, circulation, and rhetorical applications of viral images through iconographic tracking.