In Visualizing Captions and Subtitles: The Embodiment of Accessible Multimodal Communication , Janine Butler visualizes captions and subtitles as instruments of connection that embody how we all communicate with each other through multiple modes and languages, including bodies, voices, and signs.

This article engages with rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholarship on embodiment and expertise in online health communication to demonstrate how rhetorical tactics help patients make embodied health decisions. This study analyzes 320 online postings, 84 published narratives, 30 surveys and written reflections, and 10 interviews in an online health community for Asherman syndrome (AS), a rare illness that develops after reproductive surgery. The findings of this study highlight how patients incorporate online information into their decision-making practices by accumulating embodied knowledge, tailoring questions, insisting on specific treatments, and switching healthcare providers. This article argues that patients’ rhetorical tactics, when shared and accumulated over time, can transform treatment outcomes.

Kathleen Lyons Abstract This article explores the role writing teachers play as access-makers. Invoking theories of embodiment, relationality, disability, social justice, and making, the article offers a technē of access as rhetorical framework for developing and implementing accessible writing pedagogies. Technē is often associated with processes of making and knowing; meanwhile, access is a rhetorical […]

This case study demonstrates that user feedback on social media is valuable for informing iterative product design for marginalized populations. Using content analysis, I analyzed 136 posts and comments from the reddit platform of a product (SteadyMouse) designed for people with Parkinson's disease. The analysis revealed four patterns in user feedback that may be useful for product redesign: technological details, embodied experience of the product, usage scenarios, and prioritization. While User Centered Design is often cost-intensive, this study suggests designers can intentionally solicit useful information from users in social media forums by offering a dedicated space on websites where product designers related to these four key topic areas.

I argue that composition studies must build critical awareness about how humans from the Global South train AI with their writing embodiments. To draw our attention to how those working in the Global South train AI in harmful conditions, even though AI companies use algorithms and terms of service to smooth away these embodiments, I adapt the concept of humans-in-the-loop. Critical awareness of humans-in-the-loop moves scholarship in writing studies from a focus on AI-human collaboration that begins after an AI produces a text to one that requires us to see how AI products are always already human authored. Through a case study of Google Translate, I demonstrate how a critical awareness of how AI can erase the writing embodiment of humans-in-the-loop affords me opportunities to ask generative questions: How does language translation play a role in the erasure of embodied writing? Why does AI produce with bias toward marginalized populations when marginalized populations are those that moderate AI? Overall, I ask compositionists to see AI products as already human authored so that writing studies can consider the invisible labor of humans-in-the-loop as the field moves forward in researching AI.

Grace Boulanger Knoblauch, Abby A., and Marie E. Moeller, editors. Bodies of Knowledge: Embodied Rhetorics in Theory and Practice. Utah State University Press/University Press of Colorado, 2022. Bodies of Knowledge: Embodied Rhetorics in Theory and Practice, edited by A. Abby Knoblauch and Marie E. Moeller, is an exceptional survey book for scholars invested in learning […]

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> Modern virtual-reality (VR) systems afford opportunities to study how writers adapt their everyday writing practices to virtual environments while adjusting to real-world materiality. Based on a multi-institutional study of writers’ activities, this tutorial offers recommendations for designing and conducting test sessions to capture the user experience of first-time VR users in simulated writing scenarios. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Key concepts:</b> We situate VR within existing literature regarding design, human–computer interaction, usability, and the notions of presence, embodiment, and materiality. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Key lessons:</b> We present five key lessons to consider for testing writing in VR. 1. Space matters when studying participants writing with technologies. 2. Some VR applications are exclusive to devices. 3. A focus on brief tasks anticipates what writers will encounter when they write with a VR headset for the first time ever or in a professional context. 4. For understanding embodied actions, researchers should also capture the first-person view of the participant wearing the designated headset. 5. Media-rich transcripts create records of what was spoken in the sessions as well as notating, through text and media, what actions were taken by participants. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Implications for practice:</b> VR research depends on institutional infrastructure, embodied participation, and researcher intervention to adjust usability testing and mental models. These challenges provide exciting opportunities for TPC research and classroom projects that introduce VR.

At a time in history when we are faced with an authoritarian, misogynist, racist, imperial regime that has actively dismantled higher education in the USA, what does it mean to stand as an academic witness against the consolidation of white supremacy, of imperial regimes, of the normalization of gender, race, caste and class violence, of religious fundamentalisms and climate disasters, economic dispossession and the carceral state within and beyond the walls of the academy?In this special issue devoted to Transnational Feminist Rhetorical Studies, contributors mobilize critical race theory and transnational feminism to bear witness to the deeply violent, neoliberal, eurocentric narratives of the US academy that objectify, erase, and colonize minoritized international communities from the Global South.Using feminist autoethnography and counter-storytelling, these courageous authors develop complex, theoretically provocative analyses of a variety of rhetorical landscapes in the academy mapping the academic journey of a queer South Asian educator (Saurabh Anand); speculative linking and corporeal rhetorics--the body as the site, producer and consumer of labor in transnational feminist rhetorics (Florianne Jimenez); transnational counterstories and autoethnographies of Bangladeshi women (Abantika Dhar and Ridita Mizan); challenging female fragility and objectification of hegemonic narratives of refugees using counter-storytelling by Syrian Muslim women refugees to develop genealogies of agency and resistance (Nabila Hijazi); and finally, Sarah Cathryn Majed Dweik and Bernadita Yunis Varas' compelling autoethnographic, theoretically and historically grounded analysis of Palestinian feminist survivance rhetorics bearing witness to the profound impact of the occupation, colonization and genocide of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.In speaking back to racist, colonial, objectified hegemonic knowledges normalized by the US academy these young scholars illustrate the profound significance of bearing witness to injustice, just as James Baldwin and many others stood witness to racism and white supremacy.

A digital text adventure, a topographical survey, a chorus of violence: perimortem [in (theoretical) rigor] is a creative-critical parser game that enacts Eelam Tamil diasporic-disabled repairing composition, extending Trammell's (2023) "repairing play": a Black phenomenology of play that begins with the idea that torture is play for people of color who share collective histories and ongoing experiences of racial and ethnic violence. Mapped using kolam geometry, perimortem is a parser game designed to simulate the pleasurable and painful affects of composition and challenge the Euro-Western moral and aesthetic aversion to tortured embodiment in scholarly writing by explicitly, interactively illustrating the presence of torture-and/as-play in academia.

American Kairos: Washington National Cathedral and the New Civil Religion by Richard Benjamin Crosby speaks to multiple areas within rhetorical studies, particularly for researchers interested in U.S. religion and politics, spatial rhetorics, presidential rhetoric, and kairos as a multilayered concept.Crosby is Professor of English at Brigham Young University and has published extensively on race, politics, and religion. American Kairos fits well within his previous work analyzing Mormon, presidential, priestly, prophetic, and civil religious discourse. As he mentions in the preface, some of the archival research for this book took place during his doctoral studies at the University of Washington.Rather than a straightforward rhetorical history or close reading of the cathedral, American Kairos analyzes several rhetorical dimensions of the building's relationship to civil religion in the United States. The book's attention is thus split between two theses. As Crosby states early on, “The main argument of this book is that American Civil Religion, the implicit system of values, ideals, rituals, traditions, and symbols that lend shape and meaning to our citizenship, has never been properly imagined, and that, as a consequence, the nation's past is haunted by ghosts that presently grow louder and more violent” (xii). This set of claims sits alongside what this reader takes to be the overarching rhetorical claim of the book, which appears in the introductory chapter: “The Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul—also variously named the Cathedral at Washington, Washington Cathedral, Washington National Cathedral, or the National Cathedral—is one the of the great, unknown rhetorical triumphs in the history of American religion. Without government mandate or public vote, it has claimed its role as America's de facto house of worship” (6). The two lines of argument surface in each chapter in some form, although they do not fully overlap.American Kairos is structured in an unorthodox manner. It is comprised of eight chapters, not including the introduction and conclusion, and split into two main sections. The first section explores the history and idea of the cathedral as it was conceptualized by prominent figures in its development, including Pierre L'Enfant, Henry Yates Satterlee, Francis B. Syre, and Mariann Edgar Budde. The second section examines the cathedral's “public space,” that is, its most well-known speeches and symbolic artifacts. This section begins with a close reading analysis of the cathedral's symbolism and spatial rhetorics by drawing on the theologically driven architectural vision of Philip Hubert Frohman, who served as the cathedral's principal architect from 1921 to 1972. It then moves into three chapters dedicated to major speeches delivered at the cathedral. The first analyzes Martin Luther King Jr.’s final Sunday sermon, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” given five days before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. The next contrasts the speeches of George H. W. Bush, who dedicated the cathedral in 1990, and George W. Bush, who offered pulpit remarks for the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Closing the trilogy is a chapter dedicated to the 2014 address of Cameron Partridge, an openly transgender Episcopal chaplain, and the 2018 interring of Matthew Shepard's remains within the cathedral, each highlighting the institution's role in promoting LGBTQ+ causes.Drawing liberally from the chapter on Dr. King, Crosby links various elements of the National Cathedral's rhetorical life to the concept of kairos. Building on James L. Kinneavy's theological work, Crosby defines kairos as “not just a moment; it is . . . an opening into what is truly real” (23). For Crosby, American kairos comprises “a sacred space wherein citizens could be moved by their experience of the country's heroes, deeds, and ideals, a space wherein citizenship becomes a holy practice” (23). One of the limitations of this book is that it does not offer precise definitions for these constituent terms—holy, religion, sacred, etc.—and thus does not fully articulate what separates “civil religion” from “religion” proper. By drawing on a wider and more critical literature on the intersection of faith, politics, religion, and society via the work of thinkers like Talal Asad, William Cavanaugh, David Bentley Hart, Kyle Harper, Stanley Hauerwas, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Neuhaus, Charles Taylor, or Joseph Massad, the book's claims regarding kairos and the cathedral might have delineated those concepts more sharply. Regardless, Crosby robustly identifies fractures and inconsistencies within American civil religion and shows how those divisions manifested within the cathedral's rhetorical career, concluding the book with a call for the United States “to imagine itself at the helm of something unique . . . by throwing out all notions that we are a nation with a distinct religious or ethnic past. From there, we will find that we remain as rich as ever in the raw materials of civil-religious potential” (233).Along the way, the book makes several notable academic contributions. First, it provides a first-rate close reading of the National Cathedral itself. Chapter Five, which synthesizes scholarship on spatial rhetorics with Frohman's “fourth dimension” approach to ecclesial architecture that prioritizes “an experience in which the worshipper loses all sense of time and space and becomes co-present with God,” is a major contribution of the book (144). It offers a useful guide for scholars who seek to understand the sacred as it intersects the rhetoric of space and place. Second, the first section of the book offers a fascinating history of the National Cathedral as a rhetorical site, perhaps providing a roadmap for future scholarship that seeks to perform a similar diachronic rhetorical analysis of a specific monument, building, or public space. Third, Crosby's meditations on kairos, particularly in the preface and introduction, offer an insightful and interdisciplinary take on an oft invoked and potentially ambiguous rhetorical concept. Additionally, the book does a good job of situating its criticism of the chosen rhetorical artifacts within their articulatory and civil religious contexts by referencing the cathedral archives and other primary sources. American Kairos is, if nothing else, a work of patient and extensive research that models the best practices of public address scholarship.That said, the book has several areas where it could be stronger. First, the overall structure confused this reader. Perhaps because of its patient composition, the chapter sequencing can jump across historical eras and arguments, making important throughlines between chapters difficult to identify beyond general themes. While beginning with L'Enfant's dream of a national church makes sense chronologically, the result is that the book begins with a detailed, contested history of a rhetorical institution across multiple chapters without fully establishing from the start the rhetorical dimensions of that institution. One of the casualties of this organizational design is that a sustained rhetorical analysis of the National Cathedral's relationship to other spaces in the District of Columbia as they exist today is not provided. This absence seems all the more striking given Chapter Three's focus on anti-Catholic attitudes among nineteenth century Protestants. This chapter could have been expanded by discussing the proximity of the National Cathedral to a major center of Catholic life in the United States—Maryland and northeast Washington D.C.—epitomized by the Catholic University of America (established 1887), which boasts its own cathedral on a rival hill a mere five miles away (The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, consecrated in 1920). That this information is left out seems like a missed opportunity.Second, the wide-ranging organizational structure leads to an attenuated sense of context at times across the book. For example, Chapter Four's discussion of Mariann Edgar Budde, the cathedral bishop since 2011, references several controversies related to President Donald Trump along with McCarthyism, xenophobia, immigration, and standards of civic dignity over the span of three pages. Chapter Three does not reference any anti-Catholic invective from Protestant pulpits prior to the nineteenth century or any of the significant criticisms of liberalism, democracy, and the United States offered by the Vatican during this era. Chapter One describes L'Enfant's vision of a “Great Church for National Purposes” that would be “assigned to the special use of no particular Sect or denomination, but equally open to all” (48–49). Crosby returns to this description in later chapters, even asking, “Was L'Enfant's church supposed to be Christian?” (122). The book would have benefitted from a more thorough explanation of what a non-Christian church would look like and what would differentiate it from another kind of religious gathering. As these brief examples illustrate, while the book ably analyzes the rhetorical figures it selects, it sometimes struggles to capture key elements and the full complexity of the broader context, which may in part reflect the book's ambitious scope.Finally, a main contention of American Kairos is the polemic assertion that “we have never had a coherent civil religion” (230). Likening the National Cathedral's attempt to embody American civil religion to “a charioteer holding the reigns of wrangling horses” (143), Crosby laments the cathedral's serpentine history and mishmash of iconography as “brilliant but unsettling and perhaps nonsensical” (163). Crosby proposes a view of the National Cathedral as an embodiment of a new civil religion: I imagine his [L'Enfant's] church as a place of ritual and memorial, yes, but also a great center of civic education where students and citizens come to study, debate, and celebrate the rights, responsibilities, and implications of their citizenship, including the responsibility to atone for past sins. To this end, such a church might also host schools and libraries, symposia and debates, artists and scholars in residence, and of course great speeches and civil-religious sermons (229).To this reader, this description sounds a lot like a university—an educational institution with many departments that is focused much more on here than the hereafter—and less like a church, mosque, temple, or synagogue. An alternative reading of the “incoherence” of American civil religion as embodied within the life of the Washington National Cathedral might find that its contradictions reflect democracy, in all its messiness, itself. In that sense, it would be difficult to find a building that more perfectly encapsulates the full range of the American experiment than the National Cathedral in northwest Washington D.C.In conclusion, American Kairos: Washington National Cathedral and the New Civil Religion is an insightful book that deserves to be on the shelf of any serious scholar of political rhetoric, civil religion, and religious discourse in the United States. It merits a readership that, like the cathedral itself, seeks to chart a path forward in divisive times.

Communicating the Other Across Cultures by intercultural communication scholar Dr. Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager is a compelling read about how master narratives perpetuate cultural othering discursively, visually, and materially. The author notes that the crux of cultural othering is a systemic and reoccurring process of prioritizing histories with a “capital H,” “written and communicated by the powerful of the world” (e.g., colonizers, enslavers); this, in turn, socially constructs the Other (5). In these, the Other is routinely shown “as unworthy, primitive, barbaric, threatening, even subhuman” (2). In response to such master narratives, the latter half of the book examines how minoritized groups employ resistive rhetoric, specifically through exposure and empowerment, to disrupt oppressive systems and foster social change. The author refers to this process as “communicating other/wise,” which she coins as a “discursive strategy against Master Narratives that perpetuate cultural othering and an alternative epistemology of learning with and from the Other, of gaining awareness and eventually wisdom with regard to Self and Other” (14). Tracing types of rhetorical othering through case studies in the United States, Russia, and Western European countries, the author utilizes a cross-cultural approach and Kenneth Burke's concept of “equipment for living,” which Khrebtan-Hörhager extends to visual and material rhetoric.Communicating the Other Across Cultures is divided into two parts: “Cultural Othering as Equipment for Living” and “Communicating Other/Wise.” The first three chapters demonstrate the embedded nature of cultural othering through verbal, visual, and material artifacts, showcasing how cultural othering is a communicative phenomenon that has no borders. The last three chapters focus on how communicating other/wise is a powerful, subversive tool for the Other to tell alternative stories and conclude by pointing to the necessity of studying cultural othering across disciplines.Chapter 1 offers a comparative study of verbal othering in master narratives through different geopolitical locations. The author argues that the Other is discursively constructed, maintained, and normalized in literary works through binaries, which often endorse Eurocentric values and whiteness. An example of this is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where the racialized good and evil binary emerges as Finn “thinks of himself as a sinner who will go to hell for his choice of not betraying fugitive slave Jim” (25). Twain's characters point to the idea that Finn should not care for Jim's wellbeing, furthering the justification of slavery and colonialism as a U.S. master narrative. Ultimately, this institutionalizes stigmas and reifies oppressive binaries. The Other is characterized as nonhuman and undeserving of inclusion and equality.Chapter 2 focuses on how visual culture transcends certain discursive boundaries, contending that images are powerful as they “demonstrate to us who matters, who does not, who exists in the center, and who struggles on the margins” (67). A significant component of visual othering is through cinematography, which greatly contributed to Nazi Germany's propaganda, supported the National Socialist regime, and justified the Holocaust. For example, the famous 1940 documentary Der Ewige Jude (The External Jew) portrays Jews as an unsanitary pest and “compares them [Jews] to rats, and reminds the audience that rats need to be killed for reasons of public health and safety” (106). Such visuals have the potency to intensify othering of Semitic peoples across geopolitical locations, solidifying ideological and national understandings of the Other.Chapter 3 looks at the relationship between material rhetoric—such as monuments, architecture, and memorials—and cultural othering. The author underscores the importance of attending to artifacts as they “contribute to the creation of a certain worldview that includes our national identities, our heroes, our role models, and our aspirations,” resulting in the lack of representation and even misrepresentation of the Other (111). The nationalist narrative is evident in the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, which celebrates several of America's Founding Fathers, communicates a superior national identity, and upholds patriotism. Mount Rushmore National Memorial especially ignores the United States’ involvement in Indigenous genocide and displacement by depicting the American Dream and freedom as available to all. The author argues that this is a form of strategic othering, a “convenient ideology of the (non-[w]hite, non-Christian, non-male, non-European, non-powerful) Other” (123). Utilizing material artifacts to distort history absolves white guilt and upholds white supremacy.In chapter 4, Khrebtan-Hörhager highlights a collection of alternative stories across the United States, Russia, and Europe that does not reify master narratives but instead exposes and empowers the voices of the Other. Prominent Russian writer, poet, and critic Nikolay Nekrasov, for example, used his works to critique war and suffering—an opposition to Russia's worldview and imperial expansion. As the author posits, writing Other/wise “is about listening to and learning from Other narratives, even if they clash with our existing worldviews and discredit our heroes and role models” (164). Communicating other/wise is a critical tool for reimagining spaces that include perspectives of the voices often silenced, erased, and hidden.Chapter 5 explores visuality through the lens of the Other. A striking example is the artwork Cloud Madonna, which shows a woman of color carefully and intimately carrying a melon while carrying water on the top of her head. The author posits that this portrayal is supposed to contrast Indigenous women's innate and generative connection to the land with a Christian nationalist perspective of the white madonna, who is “primarily defined through her relationship to baby Jesus” (223). Visualizing the Other is rooted in critiquing essentialized identities created by master narratives, which “teach us to see things differently; provide a new look on beliefs, norms, and values; and gradually change our culture” (219).Chapter 6 models communicating other/wise through materiality. The author explains that materiality (e.g., monuments, memorials, museums) crafts and tells our histories, which, in turn, communicates and informs our present and “the future of our children” (261). Because many forms of materiality are told through a homogenous, colonized lens, the goal for this chapter aims “to ‘un-set’ history and culture that is ‘in stone’ and to introduce alternative, culturally sensitive, and inclusive pieces of material rhetoric” (263–264). Khrebtan-Hörhager introduces several examples of how exposure and empowerment are imperative for disrupting homogenous narratives often curated by those in power. One example is the act of literally removing monuments that commemorate a nation's ideological regime. For example, Poles have removed certain monuments that commemorate the Red Army for freeing Poland from Nazi fascism. The author notes that “the removal of such Soviet monuments [is] not only natural but highly necessary as it avoids communicating wrong ideological values and grants Poland a much-overdue chance to achieve its own national and cultural definition as a free European democracy” (279). Materiality can be an especially rich mode for communicating other/wise, as it is often strikingly present even in the most mundane public spaces.Communicating the Other Across Cultures concludes by restating the pervasiveness of cultural othering in verbal, visual, and material forms and their ideological implications. With inspiration from Audre Lorde, communicating others/wise is a strategy for disrupting oppression and, thus, necessary for creating new realities. As the author hopefully asserts, “although othering is still omnipresent, it does not have to remain omnipotent, but the power to change the status quo starts with the critical social self-reflexivity and cultural self-diagnostics” (312). The question, “Whose voices are being prioritized?” is necessary for the unraveling of master narratives. This can be especially useful for undoing hegemonic educational curriculums, instead bringing in alternative histories and voices, such as Toni Morrison, as the classroom is often a formative space for shaping new perspectives and realities. Communicating the Other Across Cultures is extraordinary, grounded in cultural richness with exhaustive examples; it also highlights the voices of Other scholars and showcases the importance of studying cultural othering beyond communication and rhetoric. While the book demonstrates that cultural othering is systemic across cultures and recognizes the destructive patterns of master narratives, it also reminds readers of their agency to listen to the Other, learn from the stories of the Other, and invent ways of living Other/Wise.

The proliferation of materialist perspectives in rhetorical studies has generated feelings of disciplinary crisis and fragmentation. Early materialist formulations of rhetoric, such as those put forward by Michael Calvin McGee and Raymie McKerrow, conceptualized materiality discursively and, thus, maintained continuity with more traditional accounts of rhetoric as a practice of “symbolic action.” However, beginning with texts such as Ronald Walter Greene’s “Another Materialist Rhetoric” and Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley’s edited collection Rhetorical Bodies, scholars began emphasizing the ontological and embodied rhetoricity of physical contexts and environments over discursive and ideological conceptions of materiality. This turn toward the ontological and embodied has rapidly expanded over the past twenty years, with numerous scholars now offering new materialist, postcritical, ecological, computational, and digital perspectives on rhetoric that privilege concepts such as affect, circulation, and assemblage over more traditional rhetorical terminology.It is in response to this tension between standard rhetorical perspectives and materialist rhetorical approaches that we can appreciate the interventions of S. Scott Graham’s recent book, Where’s the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. Rejecting the view that the materialist turns in rhetorical studies (particularly rhetorical new materialisms [hereafter referred to as RNM] and computational rhetoric) have left the discipline more fragmented and less capable of defending a unified perspective on rhetoric, Graham believes it is possible to generate a new unified theory that can affirm the lines of scholarly influence that have given rise to RNM (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “right branch”) as well as the more traditional lines of scholarly influence that have led to a formulation of rhetoric as “symbolic action” (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “left branch”). To accomplish this task, Graham argues that we should avoid the tendency to view RNM as “other” to traditional narratives about rhetoric and, instead, consider how these latter perspectives are compatible with the former. Much like unified field theories in physics that seek to bridge older perspectives on general relativity with newer perspectives on quantum mechanics (e.g., string theory and quantum loop gravity), Graham believes it is possible to achieve similar results in rhetorical studies by approaching standard rhetorical perspectives from the ontological viewpoints enabled by RNM.What makes Graham’s angle on this claim particularly unique is his premise that a proto-new materialist perspective has underpinned some of the most influential left branch approaches to rhetoric all along. While most rhetoricians start from the present when introducing concepts associated with RNM, Graham, following historically informed thinkers such as Scot Barnett, Debra Hawhee, and Thomas Rickert, demonstrates that there is a line of thinking about “symbolic action” as “situated action” that goes back to the relational approach to metaphysics put forward by philosopher Henri Bergson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, as Graham argues, if we begin with Bergson’s relational ontology, rather than the postmodernist and social constructivist philosophies that (explicitly and implicitly) shaped interpretations of rhetoric’s left branch during the second half of the twentieth century, we do not “need to re-engineer rhetoric” to fit the latest trends of RNM (41). From Graham’s perspective, many standard rhetorical perspectives have been hospitable toward new materialism from the outset. To appreciate this fact, we simply need to recuperate the Bergsonian legacy that informs this tradition.To make a case for this Bergsonian approach to rhetoric, the first main chapter of Graham’s book (chapter 2) engages in detail with the work of Kenneth Burke. As a crucial founder of the symbolic action paradigm, Graham believes that if he can show the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thought, he can, in turn, demonstrate how scholarship informed by Burke is also influenced by Bergson. To trace the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thinking, Graham focuses on Burke’s early work, especially Permanence and Change. In contrast to Burke’s later writings (e.g., A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and Language as Symbolic Action), which have been crucial to interpreting him as a theorist of symbolic action, Graham argues that Permanence and Change is directly indebted to a Bergsonian process philosophy that emphasizes the rhetoricity of situations. For the Burke of Permanence and Change (which Graham calls Original Bergsonian Burke [OBB]), there is no ontological or epistemological gap between symbolic action and material situations. Instead, symbolic practices and the situations that underpin such practices (e.g., environmental ecologies, social ecologies, digital ecologies, etc.) can all be conceived immanently, as nested complex dynamic systems that reveal motives toward reality. Hence, according to Graham, available in the writings of OBB is a Bergsonian ontology that emphasizes relational processes all the way down and rejects any Cartesian dualism (or Kantian correlationism) between nature and culture and things and words. For OBB, which is also the Burke Debra Hawhee focuses on most extensively in her book Moving Bodies, symbolic action is the effect rather than the cause of material processes of becoming, and rhetoric is the act of responding to these material processes in a satisfying way that is always itself creative and inventive.After offering a novel way to think about Burke and his materialist contributions to rhetoric, chapter 3 of Graham’s text turns to Carolyn Miller’s highly influential essay “Genre as Social Action” (originally published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1984). As her piece is deeply influenced by Permanence and Change, as well as the writings of Austrian philosopher Alfred Schutz, Graham believes that rhetoricians can also read Miller’s formulation of genre as presupposing a Bergsonian ontology. While Miller does not mention Bergson in her essay, Graham argues that by appreciating the influence of Bergson on Burke and Schutz, it is possible to see that Bergson has indirectly influenced Miller’s account of genre. Graham argues that rhetoricians can also appreciate the link to Bergson in terms of how Miller’s project explicitly rejects “modernist materialism and the postmodern fetishization of discourse” (90). For Miller, the situations that produce genres—as repeated patterns of discourse—are not mechanistic and mechanical but active and dynamic processes that sediment through time (what Bergson calls duration). For Graham, then, the resources for interpreting Miller as “in some ways, the [discipline’s] original rhetorical new materialist” are already at play within her text (90). If we simply expand Miller’s understanding of situation so that, like OBB, it accounts for patterning and structuration not only at the social level but also at the flattened ontological level of movement and becoming, then Miller’s Genre as Social Action (GASA) framework can be reconceptualized in terms of a new materialist method that Graham calls Genre as Process (GAP). Whereas GASA conceives of genres as abstract nouns that emerge out of stable social patterns, GAP emphasizes genre-ing, “[t]he processes of structuring activity that occurs in situational hierarchies and guides situated action” (73). A GAP approach also helps realize Miller’s recent call for deeper engagement with new media technologies. As dynamic structures that are always entangled with their larger contexts and environments, new media technologies, such as Twitter, are best approached through a GAP framework that can appreciate the way these technologies repattern the norms of genre (e.g., letter to the editor genre on Twitter vs. traditional letter to the editor genre). Approaching GASA as GAP, then, allows rhetoricians to conceptualize genre in terms of dynamic patterns of circulation that are continually predisposed toward change and entropy. While effective genre deployment, like Burke’s rhetoric, requires kairotic responsiveness (or what Graham, borrowing from Whitehead, calls satisfaction), this situated responsiveness (especially in digital contexts) is itself inventive and, thus, continuous with the patterns of circulation that makes genre itself possible.Chapter 4 of Graham’s book concludes the conceptual portion of his project. In this chapter, Graham argues that a GAP framework can enrich not only traditional rhetorical (left branch) perspectives but also RNM. While Graham identifies as a new materialist rhetorician who favors the ontological turn in rhetorical studies, he believes that part of what makes the GAP framework valuable is its tendency to move RNM back toward a study of “the recurring experiences of practicing rhetors” (122). Too often, Graham argues, advocates of RNM adopt a “zoom-out” (distributed agency) perspective that makes it challenging to locate rhetorical agents’ strategic, situated practices. A GAP approach, by contrast, returns to the situated rhetor without rendering their agency discrete, atomistic, or self-contained. By conceptualizing rhetorical agency as the accomplishment of “structuring structures” that produce performatively enacted boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, GAP enables both a “zoom-out” and “zoom-in” approach that can account for the rhetorical strategies that satisfy particular human situations and exigencies. Graham’s framework, thus, not only improves traditional rhetorical perspectives by making them more process-oriented but also enriches RNM approaches by making them more suited to analyze rhetorical practices and discourses.The remainder of Graham’s book is a sampling of case studies that apply the GAP framework to cultural artifacts. In chapter 5, Graham discusses the qualitative research he produced studying the work of Brandon, a graphic designer who consults with various companies to create novel digital products. Graham argues that the novel digital products that Brandon produces for these companies can be understood through a GAP framework. Across his consulting work, Brandon must demonstrate an ongoing sensitivity to the genre constraints of various situations (that are ecological, social, and digital) to effectively satisfy his clients and consumers—a practice Graham calls “fit foraging.” Graham argues that a clear example of this approach to “fit foraging” is the holiday e-card video game that Brandon produced for the Ryzex Corporation (a UPC scanner manufacturer). After being asked by Ryzex to create a novel holiday e-card that could satisfy the company’s various clients, “Brandon designed a shooting-gallery Flash game that used Ryzex UPC scanners as ranged weapons and barcode-marked boxes as appropriate targets” (126). According to Graham, this shooting gallery game was an excellent example of fit foraging because it combined the genres of the holiday e-card, shooting gallery games, and Ryzex’s unique brand identity to produce a novel outcome.In chapter 6, Graham turns his attention to scholarship on computational rhetoric. Focusing largely on his own work deploying content-analytic methods, Graham argues that these approaches work through an ongoing dialectic between intuition, which he defines as “an experiential approach to metaphysical inquiry” (139), and abstraction. This Bergsonian framing is valuable, Graham argues, because it locates practices of quantification in a GAP framework that understands data as “aggregations of intuitions rendered symbolically so that the patterns, abstracted for the local sites of situated action, become more clearly visible” (149). Hence, for Graham, computational rhetoric should be approached not as “other” to more traditional rhetorical perspectives but as a distinct genre of rhetorical inquiry that is compatible with his larger GAP framework. Graham’s insights in this chapter also have important implications for scholarship centered on the rhetoric of science. Like content analytic methods, scientific inquiry can be understood generally as a process of abstracting the intuitive and forging a fit with material reality through embodied experimentation. Graham’s Bergsonian approach to the rhetoric of science is, thus, compatible with scholars, such as Bruno Latour and Andrew Pickering, without needing to draw extensively on their distinct science and technology studies vocabulary. If we simply start with a Bergsonian relational ontology, Graham argues, all rhetorical practices emerge out of the nexus between intuition, the patterns of stabilization (or duration) that result from intuition, and the processes of symbolic abstraction that attempt to provisionally capture intuition and duration in a satisfying way.In chapter 7, Graham returns to a more specific case study that deals with the rhetoric of Donald Trump. Arguing that the Trump moment poses a crisis to traditional studies of presidential genre, Graham claims that a GASA framework can help make sense of Trump’s success as a rhetor. Graham’s method for analyzing Trump’s rhetoric works at two registers. First, Graham shares the results of a quantitative study he conducted to test the widely held conviction that “the 2016 presidential primary [featuring Donald Trump was] . . . more negative . . . [than] prior campaign cycles” (165). Contrary to popular perception, Graham shows that his study reveals that a similar level of negativity characterized previous primary debates and that there is no stark difference. Graham then zooms in on the specific rhetorical strategies enacted by Trump during the primary debates, focusing in particular on his infamous exchange with Marco Rubio about hand (penis) size. Graham’s main argument here is that Trump’s communication during this exchange (and others) can be appreciated in terms of a Laconic rhetoric genre that “leverages the powerful organizing structures of reality TV and Twitter flame wars to supplant the traditional genre-ing processes of political oratory” (176). Graham argues, furthermore, that this same Laconic genre did not work when Rubio deployed it because his situated responsiveness did not align with “the media apparatuses that supported . . . [Trump’s] rhetoric” (176). Graham’s case study in this chapter, thus, shows how a GAP approach to presidential genre, especially when paired with computational rhetoric, can reveal illuminating insights about rhetors. While a historical perspective on negativity in presidential primary debates cannot capture, on its own, the qualities that made the Trump presidency unique, Graham’s GAP framework is able to locate the specific “structuring structures” that made Trump such a powerful contemporary rhetor.Chapter 8 concludes Graham’s text by recapping key theses and offering a glossary that defines key terms. My summary sense of the key takeaway is that Graham offers scholars a new materialist perspective on genre (GAP) that can account for the diverse material structures that pattern symbolic meaning in historically specific contexts. Effective responsiveness to this new materialist conception of genre works in terms of Whiteheadian satisfaction, or fit foraging, which I would describe as an ontologically situated enactment of kairos (similar to the account offered by Debra Hawhee in Bodily Arts). In addition to providing a recap of his project and clearly defining key terms in the book, the concluding chapter of Graham’s text notes some of the book’s limitations. Some of the critical limitations raised here include a need for more careful engagement with cultural rhetorics (i.e., rhetorics that study the performance of identity and embodied subjectivity), applying GAP to old media in addition to new media, and considering GAP more directly in relation to sound studies.While Graham does a good job acknowledging the limits of his project, I’d like to conclude this review by discussing what I perceive as a few more limitations. First, in addition to engaging more directly with cultural rhetorics, Graham’s text could benefit from a more robust theorization of power and its effect on the patterning of genre. For example, while I agree that new materialism should explore the processes that produce the situated boundary of the human, I believe, following the interventions of scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Armond Towns, that what constitutes a “fitting” response within this domain is overdetermined by structures of racialization (as well as patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.). Graham’s work does not discuss the boundary of the human in this way, and his case studies seem to overlook the problem of positionality in relation to genre. It would be interesting, as part of Graham’s ontological account of genre formation, if he considered how genres emerge out of historically specific patterns of exclusion and bordering.Second, while I find Graham’s advocacy of “zoom-in” approaches to RNM compelling, I feel that his book could engage more with the nonhuman. Most of Graham’s case studies foreground the materiality of new media, but they say little about concrete extrahuman processes of mattering. I’d like to hear more from Graham about the role of physical ecosystems and nonhuman entities (like plants, animals, and even inorganic matter) in the dynamic materialization of genres. It seems that from an RNM perspective, something as banal as the energy used to power new media technologies would play a constitutive role in genre formation.Finally, there is the question of whether turning to Bergson can resolve rhetoric’s crisis of disciplinary identity. Bergson, after all, is first and foremost a philosopher, and Graham’s project could have benefitted from more argumentative scaffolding to support the case that Bergson was doing philosophy from a rhetorical vantage. Perhaps if Graham returned to some of the earlier disciplinary debates over rhetoric and philosophy that occurred between the late 1960s and early 1980s, he could locate more commonplaces for exploring these tensions and justifying why Bergson’s relational metaphysics should be conceived as an ontological approach to rhetoric.Limitations notwithstanding, Graham should be praised for this important contribution to the discipline. Graham demonstrates a masterful understanding of RNM, computational rhetoric, and thinkers associated with the left branch of rhetoric. And his ability to synthesize all this work into a unified theory is very impressive.I look forward to reading new scholarship in genre studies that builds on this text, and I look forward to following the theoretical debates it prompts with respect to the compatibility between RNM and traditional rhetorical perspectives. I also look forward to future scholarship that situates Graham’s process-oriented account of rhetoric in relation to a larger historical context and disciplinary genealogy. As scholars such as Debra Hawhee, Thomas Rickert, Scot Barnet, and Mari Lee Mifsud have all shown (at least indirectly), perspectives that resonate with the process philosophy of Bergson can be found in Greek antiquity as well as the Homeric period that predates Greek antiquity. More work should be done to connect these historical threads so that rhetoric’s ontological relationship to process, change, movement, and indeterminacy can be fully appreciated.

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

Privacy matters: Conversations about surveillance within and beyond the classroom presents a salient investigation into the impacts of surveillance upon writing education, embodiment, and culture. Authors Estee Beck and Les Hutchinson Campos set out to constellate surveillance-focused rhetoric, writing, and technical communication scholarship to empower educators, administrators, and professionals to "subvert the state" by investigating how privacy and surveillance impact writing practices, agency, community, identity formation, and citizenship. Organized thematically into three parts---surveillance and classrooms, surveillance and bodies, and surveillance and culture---this 2020 edited collection presents a snapshot in time of surveillance in writing technology as it is broadly defined, inviting scholars to continue the discussion as surveillance and cultures continue an entangled evolution.

Using case study methodology, this article analyzes the collaborative writing of three adolescent girls, one Latina and two Black, composing a group poem in an after-school spoken word poetry team. Drawing from literature on distributed cognition and embodiment, we found that participants utilized a system of writing techniques “on the page,” as well as a variety of embodied and social practices “off the page” in their team meetings to collaboratively compose this poem. We argue that focusing on the intersection of distributed cognition and embodiment in collaborative writing allows writing researchers to more fully attend to the collaborative sociality of all writing and allows teachers to support youth writers in recognizing and gaining collaborative writing skills for professional and creative writing contexts.

The Evolution of Pragmatism in India is an evidence-based exploration of philosopher John Dewey's influence on the Republic of India's constitutional mastermind Bhimrao Ambedkar—but such a description understates Scott Stroud's achievement. Drawing on material and archival research, Stroud chronicles Ambedkar's reception, creative appropriation, and reconstruction of pragmatism in the unique context of India's emerging democracy and battle against caste oppression. As a contribution to the global history of pragmatism, and as an extrapolation of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric, Stroud's book speaks to scholars interested in rhetoric, philosophy, pragmatism, democracy, social justice, religion, caste/class, politics, public address, and their complex intersections.From the outset, Stroud stresses the importance of not merely finding similarities between Dewey's work and Ambedkar's. Instead, he reconstructs the actual content and form of Deweyan ideas that Ambedkar encountered while at Columbia University and throughout his life. Stroud's project is to account for Dewey “as Ambedkar knew him” (3, emphasis original). Rather than simply adopting Dewey, Ambedkar also rejected, revised, and synthesized portions of Dewey's thought with his own distinct philosophy. For Stroud, Ambedkar is a pragmatist whose audience awareness and rhetorical practice were likewise shaped by Dewey. Additionally, Stroud suggests that Ambedkar had a deep, early interest in connecting Buddhism to pragmatism as a potential solution for caste oppression. This is a significant reconsideration of the commonly accepted story of Ambedkar, but Stroud offers both tantalizing and compelling evidence that Buddhism was a focus for him while at Columbia from 1913 to 1916 and therefore may not have been a late development for his thought. Stroud is careful to clarify that Dewey was not Ambedkar's only, or perhaps even principal, influence but, rather, contends that Dewey “is the best documented influence on Ambedkar's development at Columbia, the most evident source of inspiration and material for important parts of vital writings and speeches by Ambedkar, and a vivid inspiration to Ambedkar's revisioning of Indian traditions such as Buddhism” (12, emphases original). As Stroud argues, if we take seriously the influence of Dewey and pragmatism on Ambedkar, then we are also in a position to view Ambedkar as a unique theorist of democracy, who ought to be taken seriously in his own right.What classes did Ambedkar take from Dewey while studying at Columbia? What influential insights did he glean from them? How would those matter for this young Indian student, born an “untouchable” Dalit, who would eventually become the central anti-caste activist of the twentieth century in the world's largest democracy? This is the subject matter of Stroud's first chapter. Based on archived syllabi, Dewey's prepared lecture notes, and student-recorded transcriptions, Stroud reconstructs the content of Dewey's Philosophy 231 course that Ambedkar took in the fall of 1914, as well as Dewey's Philosophy 131–132 course, a two-semester sequence on ethics. Many aspects of Dewey's curriculum shaped Ambedkar, including the fundamental vocabulary of individual, society, stimuli, habit, attitude, custom, reflection, force, and freedom. From Dewey, Ambedkar learned that socialized individuals could reform society via reflection, changing problematic attitudes and constructs such as caste through a process of “reconstructive meliorism” (35). Democracy, thus approached, is the “possibility of any individual having a share in this general redirection of society” towards better ends (64). These Deweyan terms and methodologies became important for Ambedkar's later rhetoric and activism.An often-overlooked instance of Ambedkar's early rhetoric and activism is his book review of Bertrand Russel's Principles of Social Reconstruction, which was perhaps his first public attempt to affect change in India. As Stroud argues in his second chapter: “Russell's book gave young Ambedkar a conceptual vocabulary and testing ground to develop the prototype of what would become his fully employed reconstructive rhetoric” (75). This rhetoric is a reform strategy that meliorates the problem of force—namely, that the oppressed easily become oppressors. Dewey endorsed “coercive force,” such as group shaming of individuals; but, since that same type of force perpetuated the caste system, Ambedkar instead drew on Russel's idea of reform as education (93). Stroud summarizes: If “reform can be forcefully and effectively pursued by individuals” and if “reform pursued through rhetorical action could be seen as a form of education,” then “the reconstruction of society” could be “pursued through individual effort” and education (99, emphases original). This type of rhetorical, educative reform is what Ambedkar went on to pursue.In chapter 3, Stroud analyzes Ambedkar's 1919 testimony to the Southborough Committee regarding Indian enfranchisement. Writes Stroud, this “testimony is important [. . .] as the earliest instance of Ambedkar's reconstructive pragmatist rhetoric being applied to a specific situation of caste-based social justice” (104). The testimony employs what Stroud calls rhetorical “echoing,” or Ambedkar's tendency to utilize language, ideas, and even complete paragraphs from Dewey without quotation or acknowledgment (115). As Stroud demonstrates, Ambedkar's choice to cite, revise, or echo Dewey was governed by his audience and rhetorical situation. For example, Ambedkar excised sentences from Dewey about education because he was combatting caste's educative norms. In this way, Ambedkar not only talked about reconstructive social reform but also embodied reconstruction as he engaged Dewey's material. This allows Stroud to outline seven principles of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric that largely summarize the first three chapters regarding: (1) societal reconstruction, (2) the individual-social dialectic, (3) rhetoric and reform as educative, (4) the need for and problems of force, (5) selectivity, (6) reconstruction in and through discourse, and (7) the tentative and impermanent nature of reconstructive efforts. Stroud concludes: “Ambedkar's use of Deweyan text [. . .] not only describes reconstructive method to his audience, it performs reconstruction insofar as his quotational practice selectively adapts and adopts Dewey's ideas to fit a program of caste reform in India” (123–124).Having examined Ambedkar as a student, writer, and rhetor, Stroud next explores Ambedkar as a reader. In chapter 4, he performs an exhaustive analysis of two books that Ambedkar owned, read, and heavily annotated: the 1908 Ethics by John Dewey and James H. Tufts and Dewey's 1916 Democracy and Education. The passages that Ambedkar most heavily engaged with are synthesized, reconstructed, and echoed near-verbatim in his famous 1936 text The Annihilation of Caste, a text that represents a hinge point between Ambedkar's early desire to reform India from within Hinduism and his later advocacy for a complete break from Hinduism. Stroud aptly asks: why would Ambedkar plan to give such an incendiary speech to an audience of high-caste individuals if his radical solutions were unlikely to be accepted? Perhaps, as Stroud argues, this puzzling rhetorical move can be better understood as Ambedkar's personal embodiment of reflective morality; since his audience was not actively reflecting on caste as a habitual attitude, Ambedkar's speech forced them to reflect for themselves. Thus, Stroud demonstrates that large portions of The Annihilation of Caste reveal a dynamic interweaving of Ethics and Democracy and Education aimed to “produce the irritation of doubt” that could expand into “an epochal reorientation within each member of [the caste-based] society” (177). In Stroud's reading, The Annihilation of Caste is a vivid example of Ambedkar's rhetorical project of educative reform that underscores his belief in the power of the individual to enact societal reconstructions.Eventually convinced that Hinduism and caste were inextricable from each other, Ambedkar resorted to a rhetoric of Buddhist conversion as a strategy for annihilating caste. Stroud analyzes this conversion rhetoric in his final chapter, primarily throughout Ambedkar's speeches to fellow Dalits in the 1930s, which often drew on Dewey's 1888 essay “The Ethics of Democracy” and other aspects of Dewey's late 1880s thought. Stroud explains that Ambedkar absorbed Deweyan concepts to inform his rhetoric of conversion—conversion being an individual act of agency and will toward self-flourishing, dignity, and growth of personality. Moreover, conversion is a name change for the individual that reconstructs society into a new religious order (i.e., Buddhism) that avoids social stratification. Buddhism became Ambedkar's new religion of choice, and he staged a highly public conversion that Stroud reads as a profound rhetorical act. Stroud summarizes: “Ambedkar's conversion . . . culminated in something more than his speeches and writings ever intimated: it was the affective living out of what he had preached and argued for in so many previous ways” (221). “In this way,” Stroud continues, “his performance unites the themes of individual reformers mattering, speech as educative to those who hear it, rhetoric as reconstructive, and the value of an agent's willfulness” (224). Stroud concludes that Ambedkar's public conversion was “an absolutely unique event in the evolution of pragmatism, and perhaps philosophy in general”—the climax of Ambedkar's own embodied process of reflection, renunciation, and conversion (231).In his conclusion, Stroud consolidates five tentative propositions that comprise what he calls Ambedkar's “Navayana Pragmatism” (238). Weaving together Ambedkar's 1950s work such as The Buddha and His Dhamma, “Riddles in Hinduism,” and “Buddha or Karl Marx,” Stroud situates Ambedkar's thought in the global history of pragmatism by abstracting its philosophy outside of a caste context, making it applicable even to scholars with no background or geopolitical interest in India. Thanks to Stroud's distillation, Ambedkar's philosophy pertains “to societies pursuing the democratic ideal in light of injustices that may or may not include caste division” (237). Stroud emphasizes Ambedkar's vision for a social democracy that balances the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Importantly for Ambedkar, fraternity is both a means and an ends-in-view that limits the types of force one can employ against oppression to the soft but powerful force of rhetoric and persuasion, always in a spirit of love rather than anger. Stroud summarizes, “Ambedkar's Navayana Pragmatism issues a stern warning: we cannot achieve justice in the sense of a balance among the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity if we sacrifice one of these values” (254, emphasis original). Most importantly, Stroud's reading of Ambedkar enables us to appreciate him not only as “an anti-caste figure” but also as “a theorist of democracy” whose philosophies have rich potential for those pursuing freedom amid rampant and systemic injustice (237).Stroud's work is rigorously researched and exceptionally executed. When it comes to archival and argumentative integrity, Stroud exceeds expectations. His book offers a sophisticated balance of meticulous detail with impressive scope. What I appreciate most, however, is the relevance of his work for contemporary exigencies in rhetorical studies. I am always grateful when scholarship transcends its raw materials in a specific historic or geographic context and yields rich conceptual utility for other situations. While Ambedkar has often been viewed as an anti-caste activist, Stroud re-envisions Ambedkar as a theorist of democracy whose ideas and practices address systematic and social injustice of many kinds: caste, similar, or otherwise. Both Stroud and Ambedkar are full of insights with significant implications for global democracies; and, thanks to Stroud, Bhimrao Ambedkar and his legacy are now poised to facilitate greater equality, freedom, and community—if his work can become more widely known. In an increasingly interconnected society, American academics ought to be familiar with the work of important thinkers and activists from outside the Global North. Stroud models such transnational engagement and illuminates the benefits of taking the resistant ideas of the colonized seriously. In this way, a book like The Evolution of Pragmatism in India can, perhaps surprisingly, offer significant resources for rhetoricians who are engaged in the work of actively reconstructing other, very different worlds.

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

Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, provides a unique opportunity to reexamine how affect, memory, authenticity, embodiment, and authorship are conceptualized and discussed in rhetorical scholarship. This is particularly significant as affective experiences resulting from communication with AI are increasingly normative due to the public-facing nature of many large language model chatbots. Drawing first on a recent case wherein an AI user produced a chatbot facsimile of her childhood self, this article suggests that affective changes facilitated by AI represent not only new avenues for exploring affect, but also how time itself is experienced.

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

Abstract: This article develops “menstrual methodologies” for ungendering menstruation and attending to the chronic pain and dysphoria present in menstrual embodiment. Specifically, it unfolds from the experiences of a nonbinary person with undiagnosed endometriosis through developing a series of menstrual methodologies, including ungendering menstruation; thinking with pain through crip time, crankiness, and autoethnography; and a justice-based approach to menstruation; followed by an application of these methodologies to a recent case study. Following on an autobiographical prelude, I begin with an introduction to menstrual methodologies and next outline each one. Menstrual methodologies, I argue, provide a toolkit not only for those who study menstruation and menstruators but for researchers across disciplines who are interested in questions of gender, embodiment, pain, medical science, justice, and disability.

Privacy matters: Conversations about surveillance within and beyond the classroom presents a salient investigation into the impacts of surveillance upon writing education, embodiment, and culture. Authors Estee Beck and Les Hutchinson Campos set out to constellate surveillance-focused rhetoric, writing, and technical communication scholarship to empower educators, administrators, and professionals to "subvert the state" by investigating how privacy and surveillance impact writing practices, agency, community, identity formation, and citizenship. Organized thematically into three parts---surveillance and classrooms, surveillance and bodies, and surveillance and culture---this 2020 edited collection presents a snapshot in time of surveillance in writing technology as it is broadly defined, inviting scholars to continue the discussion as surveillance and cultures continue an entangled evolution.

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

Scholars have often noted that the Greek rhetorical term, kairos, relates etymologically to weaving. However, many accounts of this connection overlook the weaving technology used in ancient Greece, the warp-weighted loom. Examining this technology alongside archeological experiments, ancient depictions on vases, and references in ancient lexicons, we propose adopting a definition of kairos (in its weaving sense) as a “chained spacing cord” used to ensure balance and evenness. By focusing on kairos’ relationship to weaving, we shift its etymological resonances away from the idea of an opening to be penetrated, reemphasizing a concept of kairos grounded in embodiment, materiality, balance, and due measure. More broadly, attending to the materiality of praxis highlights rhetoric’s connection to other technai and offers an additional way to understand gendered histories of rhetoric.

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

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

Drawing on their embodied experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing a student-founded, student-led community literacy program, this article foregrounds queercrip embodied experiences to reinterpret normative notions of failure in community literacy programs. Using our own experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing the community literacy program, queer and disability theory, and community literacy studies scholarship, the authors unpack their own stories of failure and argue, through queercrip readings of that failure, that failure should be seen as generative, as relational, and as bound by institutional perspective.

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

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

While current approaches to theorizing rhetorical circulation often designate digital rhetorics as their object of study, this designation unintentionally closes off rhetorical inquiry. Analog, material rhetorics, like graffiti, resemble digital rhetoric in the circulation of their rhetorical effects. The study of graffiti rhetorics therefore invites a recursive application of theoretical models of rhetorical circulation. By analyzing examples of bathroom graffiti collected from a large college campus, this essay seeks to inform fresh models of rhetorical circulation that more fully account for the many diverse and interrelated systems from which the full meaning of any one instance of rhetoric is derived.

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

Kevin Musgrave's Persons of the Market: Conservatism, Corporate Personhood, and Economic Theology breaks novel ground in rhetorical studies by unspooling the historical evolution and contemporary significance of a phenomenon so seemingly worldly as corporate personhood. This robust transdisciplinary conversation on economic theology is suasive in arraying its theoretical and methodological provisions for discerning how notions of the sacred are vouchsafed in the secular formations of modern economic life. And too, Persons of the Market is cogent in advancing the claim that by attuning to political economy's theological inheritances, critics can enter into a generative grappling with Western capitalist and racial power in the era of juridical personality.Corporations are people too. If this provocative, vexatious, and even baffling refrain of the neoliberal public sphere is an obvious exigence for this study, then Musgrave pierces its roots by using personhood to rethink historical relations among Christian theology and liberal capitalism. Departing from a common account of political economy, which looks to secularization to explain how an economic order founded on market rationality displaced the sovereign and divine right of kings, his hermeneutics traces “the gradual process of the emergence of a new social imaginary that occurs in and through theological grammars, not against them” (xiv). When we discern how such grammars historically authorize the capitalist order, we discover new relations of persons—between the person of Christian theology and that of political economy; between human and corporate personhood; among the person and an array of human and nonhuman, racialized, social and political, earthly and divine bodies; and more. To re-see political economy as relation rather than negation of theological thought, Musgrave situates the contending legacies of economic theology by taking Foucaultian biopolitics as a theoretical vocabulary for critiquing political liberalisms from within; then repairs against Foucault's atheistic framing with Agamben's reinstatement of the theological; then, finally, works from the current consensus in humanities studies that, one way or another, economic theology must inform political economic critique. Enfolding rhetorical dispositions—Black's cognizance of subjectivity, Burke's socioanagogical sensitivity—within a genealogical approach inflected by Nietzsche as well as Foucault, he offers economic theology as a register of meaning-making. It bears noting that this attunement does not seek “a unified and clear development of its conceptual basis in the teleological or dialectical unfolding of capitalist logic or in the concerted efforts of a unified bourgeois stratum” (xvi). Rather, by accenting rhetoric's ontological and material dimensions, it strives to grasp how notions of corporate personhood are seeded theoretically, supported juridically, and sustained politically in complex, even haphazard rhetorical dances between the theological and the secular, the religious and the rational.How do corporations become persons? In a quick synopsis: When courts rule that for legal purposes they are persons, and social and political worlds fall in line. Prior to, within, and beyond juridical decision-making, the bizarre corporation-to-person becoming has discursive and intellectual co-requisites. Before anything, corporate personhood incubates in the fecund environs of liberal political and economic thought, ripening in rhetorical traditions that—from Roman slave law to Trinitarian doctrine, from Adam Smith to Roberto Esposito—gradually economize the theological heredity of personhood with the recombinant genetics of self-ownership as a contractual right. From this mutative embryonic nurturing, a corporation assays to capture in studied succession the key thematic attributes of personhood: a Body, a Soul, a Voice, and a Conscience. Locating each acquisition at a chaotic yet formative juncture of U.S. political economic history, Musgrave narrates something like the four-stage tour of a body snatcher, the piecemeal making of a Frankenstein, but in this case, the suturing of the animate form strangely does not yield a monster. Quite the contrary, it refigures an entity “once understood as a monster of capital, an alien, and even a worm in the entrails of the nation” (45) as a normative model of personhood so elegant that corporeal persons can only aspire.The Body is, first, seized from the conflicted terrain of the expansion of industrial capitalism in the mid-late nineteenth century. The corporation wrested embodiment from the incorporation conflicts that, emerging around the development of commerce and the amalgamation of actual corpora in the body public, claimed the Chinese laborer as embodied host for rising racio-economic anxiety: “If the nation was civilized, Christian, prosperous, and pure—that is to say, white, in all of its coded language—how could it incorporate a people that was deemed biologically incapable of reaching these statuses?” (29). Musgrave's impressively detailed analysis shows how the corporation, once anathema in Jacksonian democratic sentiments, sails to legal protection thanks in large measure to the theologically-soaked rhetoric of one eventual Supreme Court justice, Stephen J. Field. Through two cases that laid jurisprudential ground for the landmark 1886 Waite Court ruling that corporations are persons under the 14th Amendment, Field liberalized corporate law vis-à-vis the right of Chinese laborers. To be clear, these rulings were far less about protecting the laborer's right to safe and legal working conditions and far more about preserving the industry's right to exploit their productive capacities for profit. How are we not surprised? No synthetic fabrication, corporate corporealization requires the appropriation and expenditure of the actual material bodies of racialized persons. By marking the Chinese worker as “the racial other of the corporation” (51), these legalities stood the corporation as an embodied symbol of white Western capitalist rationality, securing its ascendancy through the symbolic hierarchies of personhood.The Soul is next, as early twentieth century Progressive activism placed the corporation in need of salvation. Musgrave's theologically-attuned economic rhetorical analysis finds early masters of mass communication turning to the cultural power of advertising not only to promote the corporation's commercial products but also to “personalize” the corporation itself. Merging Protestant convictions with free markets ideals, the new discourse of evangelical capital mobilized the “great parables of advertising” within secularized versions of Christian spiritual themes—shepherd and flock, confession, transformation, redemption—to renew the corporation as a “benevolent shepherd” (63), which could minister a lost public to salvation. Then it's Voice, as political antagonism toward the New Deal and the affects of the Cold War vitalized godly libertarian businessmen to better align Christianity with capitalism, launching a new wave of jurisprudential activity that granted the corporation legal voice.Lastly, Musgrave offers Conscience, as the nearly-personified corporation forges from the evangelical neoliberalism of Reagan, to the paleoconservative backlash, to Trump's successful rallying of conservatives around key issues of conscience—that is, “freedom from a godless and all-powerful state apparatus that polices language through a soft totalitarian discourse of political correctness on the one hand, and mandates that companies abandon their religious convictions in the name of state-sanctioned multiculturalism on the other” (140). With each successive acquisition, the corporation more fully realizes personhood, even as personhood is itself flattened and recast as “a mask that never fully adheres to the face that wears it” (3), reordered as a dispositif of techniques and technologies for systematizing biopolitical bodies.The operative claim of this book is that our best hopes for resistance against neoliberalism do not lie with rational persuasion. Rather, they depend on our capacity to enter onto an existential plane where we may query our theological commitments and convictions about human personhood. Rhetorical readers of many persuasions will appreciate this book's potential to incline critique and analysis in various directions, not least into further discussion of the intriguing possibility with which the book closes: the potential for rhetorical thinking on economic theology to instantiate more humane and democratic configurations of personhood by adopting a post-human humanist orientation to life as a gift. If “the cosmic and existential levels of economic theology” (175), as Musgrave argues, suffuse our public and political worlds, then scholars of communications and rhetoric indeed stand to gain by engaging them—as do scholars of economic theology, arguably, by inviting the contributions of communications and rhetoric. What new future may emerge for a rhetorical critique of economy that better apperceives how sacred and secular understandings of the person share affinity? What might economic rhetorical inquiry discover when it looks both at and beyond the clear-cut theologies of evangelical capital discourses? How might theological attunements that surpass Judeo-Christian adherences to also account for non-Western, non-white, and non-dominant belief systems open rhetorical studies to more diversely cultural knowledges of moral and market order, and thus better equip them for critique? Persons of the Market poses these questions; they are ours now to answer.

When the Medium Was the Mission is an account of the ways in which religious discourse and network infrastructure were entangled in popular imagination of nineteenth century U.S. Americans. To trace the “surprisingly religious origin” (1) of communications networks, the author analyzes the case of the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable, a project that exemplifies the utopian hopes undergirding infrastructural developments in the antebellum period. Supp-Montgomerie makes clear from the outset that, as an instance of infrastructural development, the Atlantic cable was an abject failure. It rarely worked and broke down completely after a few short weeks (5). Nonetheless, the “successful” completion of the line, which ran from Newfoundland to Ireland, was heralded at the time by enthusiastic observers as an event of world-historical significance (3–5). Supp-Montgomerie's account is an attempt to understand the roots of public enthusiasm for an occurrence that, on its surface, appears to be no more than a failed attempt at laying an undersea cable. She argues that the true impact of the 1858 telegraph was far reaching and continues to shape our understanding of networks. U.S. Americans, specifically white Protestant Christians, saw the electromagnetic telegraph as a means to connect and thereby “civilize” the world through technology. The work of building telegraphic networks was simultaneously the work of God and the work of the nation since, in the popular imaginary of the time, the two were aligned. According to Supp-Montgomerie, the topoi around which this religious public's hopes and dreams converged—“connection, speed, unity and immediacy” (209)—remain central to how we discuss networks today.At the heart of this work is a theoretical investigation into the ways in which a religious rhetoric of connectivity (i.e., body to soul, believer to God, church to community) preceded the emergence of the electromagnetic telegraph and helped stabilize its symbolic place in the social imaginary (80). The telegraph became the metaphoric embodiment of an overarching worldview concerning the United States’ place in the global community. It was rhetorically framed as the herald of a unified Christian world conjoined by a fast, reliable, friction-free network—a dream that persists to this day (albeit in less overtly religious terms) (11). As the author explains, “Religious actors put telegraph technology in place around the world, religious language described this new mode of global communication, religious imaginaries covered what the worldwide telegraph network would become, and religious forms of communication indelibly marked the idiomatic conventions of networks” (1). According to Supp-Montgomerie, tracing the indelible mark such religious rhetoric left on the social imaginary is crucial for understanding the underlying teleological drive toward ever-increasing connectivity. Namely, this framework erases other important aspects of how networks actually function, including through disconnection (21–23). As she explains, “network disconnections always appear problematic not because they disrupt networks (networks expect and even rely on them) but because they disrupt the religiously empowered myth that networks connect” (3). This persistent “disconnect” between how networks actually function and how they are imagined to work did not arise through sheer chance.Chapter one focuses on the activities of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in the Ottoman Empire. While it may seem odd to begin an inquiry into the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable in Istanbul, Supp-Montgomerie explains that “U.S. religious activity abroad helped form and strengthen emerging—and increasingly protestant—imaginaries of networks at home” (38, emphasis in original). Protestant missionaries saw themselves as “primary agents of the circulation of [U.S. American] ‘civilization,’” (36) and as such their efforts included a healthy dose of technological evangelism. For them, the telegraph was more than a communicative technology, it was “marvelous material evidence of God's work on earth” (37) that could “awe others into a particularly Christian reverence” (37). In this religious framework, telegraphic networks were seen as a vital “partner” (37) in the spread of Christianity. Missionaries treated the Ottoman's embrace of telegraphic networks as proof that “any possibility of Christian conversion required first a step of familiarity with European and U.S. technologies” (44–45). In reality, the Ottoman telegraphic network was both faulty and fractured, and building it helped fuel local resistance against imperial rule (59).Chapter two focuses on the disconnect between public enthusiasm for the Atlantic cable and its technical failure. Supp-Montgomerie argues that the emergence of the electromagnetic telegraph as the telegraph was not the result of its technological superiority or ubiquity, as is popularly imagined. The electromagnetic telegraph was too expensive for the general public (105) and largely unreliable as a communicative medium (115–16). Furthermore, in 1858 the electromagnetic telegraph was simply one of several forms of telegraphy then occupying a place in public discourse. Among these were the “grapevine telegraph” used by Black Americans during slavery (98) and the “optical telegraph,” which often supplemented the less-reliable electromagnetic telegraph (114). By the century's end, however, these other forms of telegraphy had been largely forgotten, swept aside by public enthusiasm for electromagnetic networks. Unlike the other telegraphs outlined above, the electromagnetic telegraph fueled the fantasy of “a divinely ordained human destiny” to unify the world through a combination of U.S. Protestantism and technological know-how (93). By examining electromagnetic telegraphy alongside other contemporary telegraphs, Supp-Montgomerie “complicates the naturalization of a number of characteristics that we now think of as inherent affordances of networks: that they are national, global, politically neutral, technological, connective, and even fully functional” (83). What we learn instead is that networks are as much affective as technological.In chapter three, Supp-Montgomerie turns her attention to the utopian movements of the mid-nineteenth century as a way of further demonstrating how the religious fervor of the period shaped public reactions to infrastructural developments. Rather than attempting to analyze the entire movement, Supp-Montgomerie uses the Oneida Community as a case study in the overlap between “moral and technological perfection[ism]” (128). Utopian communities like Oneida, she argues, may appear the products of fringe enthusiasts but actually serve as a fitting synecdoche for the utopian underpinnings of an emerging global imaginary (127). These experimental communities “organized themselves around the ambitious assurance that they could make a perfect world in the present” (128), thus sharing in the broader “popular imagination of a world united and pacified by electric communication technology” (129). By taking a “highly local” approach to her analysis, the author demonstrates that even the most insular communities internalized the prevailing “religious logic of . . . a world united by communication technology” (135). The Oneida Community members understood the Atlantic telegraph as “a compelling metaphor for their own utopian endeavor, as a sign of the bridging of this world with God's, and as a primary means for the unification of humanity through communication technology” (136). As such, “the Oneida Community represents a broader and emphatically mainstream U.S. movement that saw an ideal reality become accessible in unprecedented ways” (132). In the social imaginary, religion and technology played equal and mutually dependent roles in realizing a unified globe. By negotiating the disconnect between the world they envisioned and the limits of the technology before them, religiously motivated actors like the Oneidans “cemented connection into technological and social forms as a given, no matter the reality of their promise” (160).In chapter four, the author focuses on the “simple signaling” of the Atlantic telegraph (167). As mentioned above, in the rare instances when the Atlantic cable worked as intended, it required slow, painstaking labor to make sense of the garbled messages sent across its expanse (170–72). The overwhelming majority of transmissions consisted of little more than a steady stream of electrical impulses meant to signal that the line had not broken. While these signals were meaningless in and of themselves, “this meaningless telegraphic language bore profoundly meaningful effects” (172) for a public transfixed by the “grand imaginary of global connection” (167). By focusing on this steady stream of content-free impulses, Supp-Montgomerie makes the claim that it was the “infrastructural form” of the electromagnetic telegraph itself that was imagined as meaningful rather than the messages it often failed to transmit (174). Because of the affective, religious meaning attached to the very idea of connectivity, a cable that was “primarily a medium for the failure of communication” (171) was made to stand in as proof of the inevitability, or even immanence, of a global, Christian network. In other words, “the telegraph relocated meaning from content to technology” (167) so that the development of network infrastructure became “both the message and the mission” of its champions (174).When the Medium Was the Mission challenges many assumptions about how we understand the rhetorical relationship between infrastructure and imagination. In a brief epilogue, Supp-Montgomerie explains that her aim in this work was to “sketch out a possible characterization” of “the relationship between the original and contemporary networks” that will “invite further inquiry into this particular genealogy” (204). As she continues, “both the telegraph and the internet are networks hailed through imaginaries that deny some of the most basic elements of their functioning” (204). While our network imaginary pictures a world of ever-increasing connectivity, the spaces between connections are what make networks possible at all. Networks do not only (or even primarily) connect; they also exclude, and the latter is just as important to their overall functioning. It is only when networks “fail”—for example, when we encounter an unexpected and undesired disconnection (Why won't Netflix load? It was working five minutes ago!)—that we encounter this constitutive feature of the form itself. To the author, disconnection should be central to how we understand networks, since “failure is part of how networks work” (206). The refusal to attend to disconnection is problematic since networks are imaginaries as much (or more) than they are infrastructure. This governs how infrastructure serves political ends. When the imaginary of the infrastructure is one of unmitigated, utopian goodness, it can lead to “technological and social practices that feed the omnivorous appetite of connection as such: every element that falls outside the purview of the network must be integrated into the broader structure . . . effectively excluding from recognizable existence anything that breaks from network logic” (206). By attending to the religious origins of this imaginary, we can better understand that the “defining elements of ‘the digital age’ . . . are not contemporary technological affordances but the effects of a habitual set of cultural practices” (209).

AbstractEquitable access to fertility care remains precarious and often dependent upon definitional rhetoric of infertility, which insurance policies and state legislators use to determine access to alternative family building options. This article builds upon prior rhetorical scholarship on infertility by applying an embodied rhetorics framework to capture the resilience infertile persons exhibit when faced with barriers to build their family. To do this, I share a series of texts self-identified infertile advocates produced as they reflected on their encounters with barriers to accessing care and building their families. As a disease that requires self-disclosure as a form of advocacy, I analyze the visual and written texts produced through an embodied rhetorics framework. These texts are forms of public advocacy in that they make visible the multiple embodied misconceptions infertile persons navigate when trying to build one’s family. I discuss these texts as illustrating “misconception fatigue” which is affective toll that accumulates when advocating for one’s reproductive right to have a family. I conclude by encouraging other rhetorical scholars committed to reproductive justice to adopt an embodied rhetorics framework to their scholarship and develop participatory research projects to support the advocacy needs of marginalized reproductive health communities. Notes1 I would like to express thanks to Megan Faver Hartline, Katie Manthey, and Phil Bratta who took time to read this article and provide generous feedback. A heartfelt thank you to RR reviewers Michelle Eble and the two other blind reviewers who took time to engage with the ideas of this piece and construct helpful reviews. Finally, additional gratitude must also be extended to the infertility advocates who decided to participate in this photovoice project and make visible vulnerable moments in their infertility journeys.2 One IVF cycle is defined as ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval and embryo transfer. The cost of those procedures varies by the individual’s insurance coverage, provider, and medication needs. Hence, the range of costs. See Marissa Conrad’s article “How Much Does IVF Cost?” Forbes Health, 28 Sept. 2021.3 RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association offers the most accurate reporting of state-by-state insurance coverage for fertility treatment. For instance, the organization offers up-to-date data on insurance coverage per state on their website under the page “Insurance Coverage by State.”4 The ACA does not cover fertility related treatments as reported by health insurance reporter Louise Norris.5 Alternative family building refers to other methods of conception and/or accessing options such as adoption or surrogacy to have a family. Alternative family building options may be needed for heterosexual couples experiencing infertility but also include queer couples and single parents by choice.6 The Institute for Women’s Policy Research defines reproductive rights as “having the ability to decide whether and when to have children” (n.p.). This definition asserts that there is a fundamental right to have a family/child, if one so desires. This assertion is also supported in a reproductive justice framework which includes the right to a family as one of its three tenets.7 The World Health Organization defines infertility as “a disease of the male or female reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular.” The American Society for Reproductive Medicine defines infertility as “the result of a disease (an interruption, cessation, or disorder of body functions, systems, or organs) of the male or female reproductive tract which prevents the conception of a child or the ability to carry a pregnancy to delivery.”8 To be clear, I am not suggesting embodied identity and embodied rhetoric as interchangeable terms. Rather, my use of embodied identity is informed from how Knoblauch and Moeller define “embodiment”. For them, “embodiment is more than ‘simply’ the experience of being with a body but is instead the experience of orienting one’s body in space and among others…the result of objects and being acting with and upon each other” (8). Embodied identity, in the context of infertility, is the meaning-making of coming to learn/see oneself as infertile. Embodied rhetoric, however, examines the potential actions and production of knowledge that is exerted because one sees identifies as infertile.9 Advocacy Day is an event coordinated by RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association where the infertility community talks to Members of Congress about increasing family building options and access to care (“Advocacy Day,” RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, 2022).10 All photovoice submissions analyzed for this article are included in the appendix.11 I would like to note the distinctions between reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice to be accountable to the individual histories of each term: reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice. My use of the term ‘right to have a family’ is informed from Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger’s definition of reproductive justice that asserts “reproductive justice goes beyond the pro-choice/pro-life debate and has three primary principles: (1) the right to have a child; (2) the right now to have a child; and (3) the right to parent the children we have [in safe communities and conditions]” (9). When I use the term the ‘right to have a family’ it is drawing upon these three tenets central to reproductive justice and acknowledges the history in advocating for the reproductive experiences of women of color and other multiply marginalized individuals.12 It should be noted that other infertility stakeholders have more recently adopted a reproductive justice approach to discussions of infertility. For instance, the March 2023 publication of Fertility and Sterility focused explicitly on moving beyond recognizing the racial and ethnic disparities in women’s reproductive health and have pushed for more action-oriented approaches that seek to align with the reproductive justice movement.13 By collective fatigue, I refer to the multiple experiences of fatigue represented the photovoice submissions. These include financial, emotional, and even physical fatigue. Collectively, they produce the experience of misconception fatigue.14 The toll of various treatments, doctor appointments, and time devoted to attempting to become pregnant can physically impact an infertile person and contribute to fatigue.15 A 2020 Forbes article written by Pragya Agarwal documents the retaliation some women in the workforce face when actively attempting to become a parent and how discrimination is heightened for women who need assisted reproductive technology to become pregnant.Additional informationNotes on contributorsMaria NovotnyMaria Novotny is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research considers how reproductive health patients advocate for health care through her collaborations with The ART of Infertility. Her co-edited collection Infertilities, A Curation portrays the myriad voices and perspectives of individuals who experience infertility and difficulty in family building using art and writing as mediums for personal expression. Other scholarship related to the intersections of infertility, rhetoric, and advocacy has been published in Community Literacy Journal, Peitho, and Technical Communication Quarterly.

In this article, the author theorizes the process that a World Health Organization work group used to update yellow fever risk maps published in the Yellow Book, a handbook created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for international travelers, from a “wicked problems” perspective. She argues that using this model highlights the complexity of nonexperts’ risk assessment practices in this context and that the work group's decision to create vaccination maps demonstrates an increased awareness of the embodied decision-making practices that nonexperts perform, aligning with and contributing to the growing emphasis on creating user-centered risk information that can be seen in some risk communication.

This article reports on an interview-based study with COVID-19 vaccine trial participants (n = 40) and addresses three strategies participants used to localize vaccine communication for their communities: (1) presenting embodied evidence, (2) demystifying clinical research, (3) operationalizing relationships. These strategies contribute to understandings of embodiment, relationships, and localization in technical and professional communication (TPC). They also show how participants used TPC to resist dominant individualist approaches to health and to practice collective care.

This essay argues for a (re)turn to the potential of hypertext by entangling it with/in material rhetorics. A (re)turning—turning over again—troubles and decolonizes traditional understandings of hypertext as either technological product or trope by demonstrating how hypertextuality is [also] a matter of matter. More specifically, this essay uses ethnography as “deep theorization” to extend Angela Haas’s notion of wampum-as-hypertext. I analyze the hypertextual rhetoricity of matter in students’ digital learning environments and demonstrate how these places iteratively become agential and transformative, thus (re)making the digital learning experience. This theorization of digital-learning-spaces-as-hypertexts draws attention to the need to (re)conceptualize digital spaces in terms beyond that of efficiency and carefully (re)consider what it means to [better] teach with/in digitally mediated environments.

Reviewed by: Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran by Bruce McComiskey Robert M Royalty Jr. Bruce McComiskey, Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 231 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-09015-3. This book is a detailed rhetorical analysis of six of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran. Each chapter, focusing on one or two of [End Page 204] the texts, employs a different rhetorical strategy for analysis based on what McComiskey has identified as the "rhetorical ecology" of the text, incorporating the changing material, discursive, and historical elements of the Qumran community rather than only the more static rhetorical situation of each text. The chapters proceed in a roughly historical order. The book achieves its aims of introducing rhetorical scholars to the sectarian scrolls and, with its "case study" approach, religious scholars to new strategies of rhetorical analysis. Key points are the emphasis on rhetorical ecology as an interpretive lens and the argument for hermeneutics/rhetoric in chapter 6. While McComiskey places the diachronic rhetorical development of these texts in the social and political history of the Qumran community, this is a rhetorical, not historical, study. The Introduction argues for the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls not only for Second Temple Jewish history but also for analysis by rhetoricians, given the relative paucity of rhetorical studies of the texts and their evolving rhetorical ecologies. Chapter 1 analyzes the early epistle from the future leader of the Essene Qumran community to the high priests of the Jerusalem Temple called Miqṣat Ma'aśeh ha-Torah, "Some Precepts of the Torah" (4QMMT, following Dead Sea Scroll convention for identifying texts by cave number and site, here Qumran). 4QMMT uses the rhetorics of identification, distinction and persuasion to distinguish the two parties' positions and to try to convince the Temple priests of the validity and urgency of Essene views on the impurity of the Temple. The rhetorical ecology of the text is as important as the rhetorical situation: "only the understanding of texts as situational and ecological will further our understanding of ancient texts such as 4QMMT" (46, McComiskey's italics). The rhetorical ecology of the community shifts dramatically in the next 50 years as the letter does not achieve its persuasive goals. The Essene community, under the leadership of the "Teacher of Righteousness," the putative author of 4QMMT, dissociates from the Jerusalem hierarchy and indeed all non-Essene Jews, founding a desert community outside of Jerusalem by the Dead Sea. Drawing on the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, chapter 2 then analyzes the foundational Rule of the Community (1QS), a performative text using infelicitous speech acts to condemn the Jerusalem authorities and felicitous speech acts to form the Yahad, or congregation, as the Essene community referred to itself. The document ends with a serious of curses, which McComiskey labels as preventing infelicitous speech acts within the initiated community, although he parses the curses, treating the ones for material actions in chapter 4, weakening his analysis. Chapter 3 then analyzes the dissociative rhetoric of the Damascus Document, a text discovered in the Cairo Genizah almost 40 years before copies were found at Qumran, hence called CD. Although the origins and purposes of CD remain less clear than 1QS, the text addresses members of the community who live in "camps" or communities among non-Essene Jews away from Qumran. Using Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric on "the dissociation of concepts," McComiskey shows how CD addresses the incoherence of Essenes living among Jews who [End Page 205] are not "real" Jews.1 He shows how CD divides central concepts of Jewish identity, such as humanity, Israelite, remnant, and Essene, into "real" and "apparent." This rhetorical strategy resolves incoherence for "real" Essenes living among "apparent" Israelites. Chapter 4 turns to the central theme of ritual purity at Qumran. McComiskey chooses two texts focusing on purity, the Purification Rules (4QTohorot A, B) and the Temple Scroll (11QT), which he analyzes using material rhetoric, an alternative to representational approaches to models for words. The symbolic material actions of inspiriting...

Abstract This essay explores coalition-building as a confluence of space and embodiment. In particular, the author studies the relationship between U.S. military Veterans and Lakota protestors during the 2016 and 2017 anti-Pipeline Demonstrations at Standing Rock. A critical analysis of the case study brings to light a set of workable practices that involve situating physical bodies together in space, locating the situated-self relative to other people and the world, and performing an enlarged understanding of the self as always potentially coalitional. Together, these practices contribute to forming not only a functional social alliance but also a transformative coalitional consciousness.

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The architecture of Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), set up under Her Highness Sheikha Moza Al-Misnedd and the Qatar Foundation, spatially embodies new possibilities because AIA Gold Medal award-winning architect Ricardo Legorreta designed buildings that both challenge and encompass Gulf Arabian tradition. The buildings exemplify, enact, and embody new ways of experiencing gendered educational identity that also honors traditional local values. This architecture is important because TAMUQ is a U.S. institution that serves several different international student populations. This article emphasizes how TAMUQ functions as a heterotopia, one which creates embodied experiences of gender, education, and identity and requires what Rogoff termed “a curious eye” to discern how these educational spaces reflect changing identities in the Gulf states.

This article explores an incident of microaggression experienced by an Asian American female professional writing tutor working in a predominantly white institution (PWI). Using the genre of counterstory, the author hopes to show a racial Other’s processing of emotional trauma and its larger implications for anti-racist pedagogies in writing center work. Keywords : Counterstory, Imposter Syndrome, racial Other, anti-racist pedagogies I felt validated when the Rocky Mountain Writing Centers Association (RMWCA) chose to read Counterstories from the Writing Center edited by Wonderful Faison and Frankie Condon for its Summer 2022 Book Club. I had voted for it in RMWCA’s online survey because I believed it would serve as a timely reflection of where the field of writing center is heading in the future. As a feminist of color and a professional writing tutor working in higher education, I am especially interested in exploring the genre of counterstory and its rhetorical purposes in combating institutional racism on all levels. Aja Y. Martinez incorporates this concept and method of counterstory from critical race theory (CRT) to center the “lived and embodied experiences of people of color” (p. 33). Although people of color must confront interlocking systems of oppression on a daily basis, the stories of our struggles are hardly ever heard in a white supremacist society that tends to dismiss such lived experiences, leading to “the everyday erasures, exclusions and repression of narratives…that trouble, challenge, [disrupt] and destabilize ‘meaning in the service of power,’ its frames, its style, or rhetoric” (Faison & Condon, 2022, p.7).  Therefore, Faison and Condon claim that telling counterstories is enacting anti-racist praxis for the following reason: Counterstory insists on the legibility and intelligibility of that which has been treated as illegible and unintelligible under the aegis of white supremacist discourse: the racial Other, her lived experience, her resistance, refusal, survival, her brilliance–and the languages, discourses, genres in which she speaks her being. (p.7) After I re-read this statement word for word, over and over again, it seemed like Faison and Condon were calling out to me to tell my very own counterstory.  In her article “Asians Are at the Writing Center,” Jasmine K. Tang (2022) invites “fellow Asians and Asian Americans at the writing center… [to join] in a conversation we can have together about the multiplicity of our experiences at writing centers” (p. 11).  Although I cannot claim to work in a place called “a writing center,” I hope to use my personal experience to contribute to this critical dialogue, thus continuing Tang’s work. Similar to Martinez’s counterstory that explores Alejandra’s fit in the academy (Martinez, 2014), I explore how well I, as an Asian American woman, fit in my role as a professional writing tutor at a small, private predominantly white institution (PWI).  The conclusion I have reached through exploring my experience of microaggression is that certain historically marginalized bodies do not fit well in the academy, at least not in prescribed roles of authority. Thus, their uncommon presence is manifested through imposter syndrome. What follows is my account of how this incident of microaggression has profoundly transformed me. In Spring 2022, the coordinator at my college’s academic support and tutoring center distributed copies of the manual How Tutoring Works: Six Steps to Grow Motivation & Accelerate Student Learning, for tutors and teachers (Frey et al., 2022) to all the professional math and writing tutors. We were supposed to read the manual in our down time, when we were not working with students, to enhance our tutoring skills. Later in the semester, we would have a staff development meeting to discuss the manual. However, for whatever reason(s), that meeting was never scheduled. Moreover, during the Summer 2022 break, the coordinator informed the tutors through email of his abrupt departure from the center because he had decided to accept another (better) position within the college. As a result, I was left “hanging,” having read the manual but not having had the opportunity to discuss my criticisms of it with the coordinator and my fellow tutors, with whom I had hardly any (in-person) contact since the disruption caused by the COVID 19 pandemic. Although I found that the manual did offer some useful, objective strategies for tutoring in general, I observed that the master narrative embedded in the manual did not address critical factors such as how tutors’ and tutees’ embodied subjectivities could dynamically affect the outcome of a tutoring session. For example, in Chapter One “Effective Tutoring Begins with Relationships and Credibility,” the authors claim that the teacher/tutor’s credibility greatly affects student learning outcomes, and that it is consequently imperative to establish mutual trust between the tutor and tutee.  The authors define teacher/tutor credibility as “a measure of the student’s belief that you are trustworthy, competent, dynamic and approachable” (Frey et al., 2022, p. 20). Furthermore, they elaborate that students are the ones who determine a teacher/tutor’s credibility: “We don’t get to decide if we’re credible. It is perceptual, on the part of the learner. They decide if we are credible” (emphasis in original, p. 20). Finally, the authors offer some cogent suggestions to teachers/tutors to show them how they can effectively try to boost their credibility in their students’ eyes. However, what happens when a student walks into the center with preconceived notions of who is trustworthy and competent based on his own implicit (unexamined) biases? In such a challenging scenario, what can the tutor really do to effectively and efficiently gain the student’s trust when the student is suspicious of the tutor’s competency from the start of the session? As an Asian American woman working as a professional writing tutor at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college, I found myself in such a thorny situation with a young white, male student several years ago. I recall that after I had briefly introduced myself as the writing tutor he would be working with for that hour, the student immediately asked me, “Do you even know what you are doing?” Within the cultural context of the Chinese immigrant community I was raised in, it would be considered extremely rude and inappropriate for a student to question the teacher’s authority.  Therefore, I was very surprised when I was confronted with the doubtful tone in his awkward question.  I was particularly disturbed by the connotation of the adverb “even,” which according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary may be “used as an intensive to stress an extreme or highly unlikely condition or instance,” which implied in that case he did not believe I was even knowledgeable enough to assist him with his written assignment. However, I confidently reassured him of the fine quality of the services offered by the center. (The center has a very strict policy of only hiring professional writing tutors with advanced degrees, although this policy does not extend to math and other subject area tutoring, where there are both professional and peer tutors.) Despite my elaborate explanation, the student still did not seem too convinced of my expertise because he kept repeating the same nagging question throughout our session: “Do you even know what you are doing?” Since the writing consultation was supposed to be a collaborative process, I had to figure out how I should navigate the rest of the session with a student who was stubbornly unwilling to work with me in the first place. After that session was finally over, I had to craft a meticulous note in my client report form on WC Online stating that the writer seemed very reluctant to work with me, harboring serious reservations even after I had explained to him that I was indeed an experienced professional writing tutor with expertise in composition. The client report form would serve as my best and only real defense in case the student ever did file a formal complaint against me, claiming that I was incompetent, or that I failed to address his needs during the session. Since the center, as a designated student support service, is supposed to be student-centered, its most important policy is that the tutor must always strive to reasonably accommodate all the student/client’s needs first and foremost. Simply put, we, the tutors, exist to serve the students who visit the center. At the beginning of every academic year when we complete our hiring paperwork, all tutors must sign the tutor’s responsibilities agreement to acknowledge that we would comply with all of the center’s policies as a condition of employment. As a result, that client report form might be used as written evidence, a record of accountability that would document what occurred during the session, which I could use to support my claims in case of any disputes.

Responding to the call for embracing mêtis in the classroom, this piece puts scholarship on embodiment and emergent gameplay in conversation with one another to explore a potential means of cultivating mêtic intelligence in the composition classroom by empirically examining how the open world game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild ( BOTW ) scaffolds mêtic intelligence and encourages mêtic strategies in its players. Founded in Jay Dolmage’s understanding of mêtis as a means to turn the tables on those with greater bie (brute strength) and Karen Kopelson’s use of mêtis as a means of subtle resistance, this piece takes a mixed methods approach and utilizes interview data to see what design elements of BOTW may be able to be brought into composition course design to help cultivate cunning in our students both inside and beyond the classroom.

Our paper centers embodiment as a theme and a process in research through describing the fine-grained practices and everyday interactions that shape collaborative research in the contexts of watershed restoration and environmental monitoring. We focus on embodiment because it offers a means for attending to the process and politics of knowledge production within and across boundaries. We offer two case studies that focus on embodiment to structure research processes and shape ongoing, emergent, and collaborative research practices. We argue technical communication as a field is well positioned to include embodied practices in research design and writing.

Abstract The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) opened the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History in Dallas, Texas in September 2019. Through immersive exhibits and advanced technology, the museum communicates what ICR purports to be the truth of creation science. Informed by the rhetorical concept of copia, I argue that the Discovery Center deploys sensory evidence to support creationism through the rhetorical strategies of rotation, immersion, and interruption. These material strategies use the senses as vehicles to communicate multiple arguments simultaneously, direct museumgoers’ attention, and amplify lived experiences as valid ways of knowing and evaluating the science of human origins. I conclude by noting the role of sensory rhetorical strategies in other scientific controversies and encouraging additional scholarship into how sensory evidence offers convincing challenges to scientific knowledge.

In this collaboratively composed article, we both theorize and dramatize the act of paying attention to scalar dynamics. In particular, we draw on the concept of transacting scales in order to complicate how “ethics” materialize in technical and professional communication (TPC). Because ethics materialize in relation to particular contexts and events, in the second half of this article, we show affordances of our approach for TPC through case studies animated by personal stories. We hope this will encourage readers to stay attuned to the particularities of embodied experiences as we theorize with unwieldy complex systems. Our cases speak to international student enrollment, matriculation, and retention in TPC programs and also general education TPC pedagogy.

Materials compositions, such as textiles, tell stories and act as data carriers. They persist in speaking even as their makers are erased or lost. When information about a maker ceases to be available, applying principles of storytelling and rhetoric facilitates a possible re–reading of a material composition as a process of recentering the human maker.

Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology is becoming widespread in education, yet research of VR technologies for students’ multimodal communication is an emerging area of research in writing and literacies scholarship. Likewise, the significance of new ways of embodied meaning making in VR environments is undertheorized—a gap that requires attention given the potential for broadened use of the sensorium in multimodal language and literacy learning. This classroom research investigated multimodal composition using the virtual paint program Google Tilt Brush™ with 47 elementary school students (ages 10–11 years) using a head-mounted display and motion sensors. Multimodal analysis of video, screen capture, and think-aloud data attended to sensory-motor affordances and constraints for embodiment. Modal constraints were the immateriality of the virtual text, virtual disembodiment, and somatosensory mismatch between the virtual and physical worlds. Potentials for new forms of embodied multimodal representation in VR involved extensive bodily, haptic, and locomotive movement. The findings are significant given that research of embodied cognition points to sensorimotor action as the basis for language and communication.