This webtext juxtaposes six exercises in place-based writing, locative, media, and creative methods during a “BioBlitz” held at a nature reserve. Four frameworks inform the six educational interventions: “creative-critical electorate fieldwork,” Indigenous environmental justice, deep mapping and critical cartography, and analog/digital/post-digital writing. Readers can explore descriptions of all six workshops, authored by the facilitators. Together, the pieces that make up the “North Woods Project” show the array of paths that researchers and practitioners in arts, sciences, and technology can take when united by a single location and a shared theoretical framework.

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

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.

ABSTRACTThis article explores rhetorics connected to the 1918 graduation of Korea’s first women’s college. The study examines textual and visual archives from the early 1900s to 1965, drawing on scholarship in colonial studies, Korean studies, history, and rhetoric. I argue that Japanese, Koreans, and US missionaries competed at this college’s 1918 commencement to define and take credit for the school’s work. I show how weather constrained Koreans and missionary leaders as they leveraged visual rhetorics for divergent objectives. I analyze how the Korean valedictorian employed the English language and US cultural references to compose anticolonial mimetic rhetorics. Finally, I examine how Japanese and US spatial rhetorics worked to displace Koreans and erase their history. This study suggests how traditional textual sources might be complicated by considering mundane meteorological, sartorial, linguistic, and spatial details. The article also seeks to demonstrate the importance of broadening our field’s languages and regions of study.KEYWORDS: Colonialismcommencement rhetoricsmimesisspatial rhetoricsvisual rhetorics AcknowledgementsI thank the reviewers for encouraging and challenging suggestions that advanced and clarified my arguments. My thanks to the RSQ editor and staff for their patient support. I am deeply grateful to experts in archives, libraries, and museums in Korea and the US who generously located and helped me secure permission to use textual and visual primary sources—this project would have been impossible without them: to 손현지 Son Hyunji at the Ewha Archives and 서은진 Seo Eunjin at the Ewha Museum for years of invaluable assistance; to Candace Reilly, Manager of Special Collections at the Drew University Library; to Alex Parrish at Drew University’s United Methodist Archives and History Center; to Frances Lyons at the United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History; and to the staff at Research Information Services at the National Library of Korea.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1 “梨花 學堂 卒業式 [이화학당 졸업식] (Ewha Academy graduation).” Here and throughout, I have modernized the obsolete vowel • to its modern equivalents (toㅏ when it appears alone and to ㅔ or ㅐ when it appears as part of another vowel).2 This and all translations are mine, except for the titles of Korean-language works in the bibliography.3 For example, see Finnegan “Doing Rhetorical History” and “Studying Visual Modes”; Gries, Still Life; Hariman and Lucaites.4 Campt; Coronado.5 See especially Hyaeweol Choi, “Visual” and Heejeong Sohn; also, Clark, Missionary Photography.6 See 김윤 Kim Yun; Chung; Hyaeweol Choi, New Women and Gender; Yoo.7 Quoted in Bordelon 511.8 Kim Hwallan, Grace 44.9 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim 116; McKenzie 292–93.10 In 1952, for instance, Frantz Fanon famously observed the rhetorical power of seeing Martinicians return from France wearing European-style clothing and speaking European languages (18, 20).11 In rhetoric, see Enoch, Domestic 9–10; Jerry Won Lee and Jackie Jia Lou; Eun Young Lee 2. In other disciplines, see Qian; Wright; and Yeoh.12 See Hsia for Japanese architecture in Taiwan.13 See, for example, Fuller on Italians’ “dehistoricizing” of Ethiopia (401–02). Fuller cites Nezar AlSayyad’s characterization of this phenomenon as a colonialist “myth of the clean slate, the need for dominance to wipe out and rewrite history” (416 n. 17).14 https://sunrise.maplogs.com/seoul_south_Korea.84.html?year=1918.15 See the records at the Korea Meteorological Administration: https://data.kma.go.kr/data/grnd/selectAsosRltmList.do?pgmNo=36.16 Many thanks to 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum for extensive help interpreting this picture. To help me establish the compass directions of the photograph, she identified the buildings on a historic campus map (https://www.ewha.ac.kr/ewhaen/intro/history-campus.do). Main Hall in the foreground (which no longer survives) was southeast of Simpson Memorial in the background. Students are therefore staring nearly due east. The sun appears to be shining directly in their faces, and there is almost no shadow cast from the Simpson Memorial roof on its walls, suggesting that the sun was still somewhat low in its ascent toward the zenith and that this was sometime in the morning. My conjectures are based on the assumption that we can take the caption on Figure 2 literally and conclude that “at commencement” means 27 March 1918.17 Main Hall, on the left, was the campus’s first Western-style building, completed in 1899 (Conrow 6). Simpson Memorial, on the right, had been completed in 1915, just three years before this photograph (Conrow 14).18 박인덕 Bak Indeok/Induk Pahk recalls her winter clothing at Ewha in the 1910s: “In the winter we wore padded blouses made from ten to twelve pieces of cotton or silk for the outer part and seven pieces for the lining” (47).19 In Figure 6, women wearing caps are visible immediately stage left of the open church door and through the top and bottom window panes stage right of the door. According to 김희정 Kim Hee Jung, traditional fur caps including pungcha and 남바위 nambawi fell out of fashion after the mid-1920s, but both should still have been a viable option for Ewha students in 1918, had students been permitted to wear them (ii, 131).20 See Clemente for a study of the ways women students and school leaders engaged public perceptions about dress, higher education, and gender roles in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.21 Kim Seok-hee (11); Pahk (18); 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim (54).22 Kim Hwallan Rural 37; Grace 97; “女學生 (Problems)” 13; 김윤 Kim Yun 40, 50–52.23 Classical Chinese: 內鮮一体, Korean: 내선 일체, “[Japan] and Korea, one body.” For an overview of the campaign, see Uchida 137. On “cultural genocide,” see Clark, Living 197, 210. See Yoonmi Lee for a recent study of how convincing this campaign was to idealistic young Japanese elementary school teachers tasked with implementing it in rural Korean schools.24 Kang 111.25 Personal correspondence with 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum, 30 November 2021.26 김윤 Kim Yun 51–53; 김활란 Kim Hwallan, 그빛속의 [Little life] 209; Grace 97. See 윤주리 Youn Ju Ri 8 for images of students wearing mombbe at Ewha and elsewhere; see 김윤 Kim Yun 51 for images at another women’s school.27 Without further evidence, of course, these are speculations. It is possible that participants of that year’s commencement were unconscious of any politicization of color, although this ignorance would have been despite government proclamations. But these ideas were a growing component of Japanese assimilation-minded colonial discourse—and Korean resistance to it.28 In addition to Kohl and Fanon cited above, see (among the extensive literature on mimicry) Bhabha; Ferguson.29 See the discussion of Japanese restrictions on missionary schools in notes 39 and 40. See also Marker et al. 40–41 for Ewhaians’ struggles to obey Japanese language regulations in 1913.30 See, for example, the colonial government’s 1920 English-language publication Manual of Education in Chosen [“Chosen” is the English spelling of the Japanese term for Korea at the time], especially pages 60–61; see Heé on similar Japanese propaganda relating to Taiwan.31 For example, see Enoch, Domestic, chapter 3.32 In addition to the Manual of Education in Chosen mentioned above, the Japanese colonial government published the English-language Annual Reports on Reforms and Progress in Chosen between 1907 and 1945, propagandizing its rule of Korea: see Dudden 20; Grunow 86–87.33 Kim Hwallan, Grace 38.34 “국내 최초의 여학사들, 조국의 미래를 위해 헌신하다!” Ewha University Blog, 19 November 2012, https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.naver?isHttpsRedirect=true&blogId=the_ewha&logNo=20171598761.35 See Kwon; Choi Gender, chapter 7.36 I have so far been unable to locate their names—a fact that underscores Koreans’ marginalization.37 Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, “Mission Photograph Album—Korea #5 Introductory Page,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed 22 June 2023, https://catalog.gcah.org/images/items/show/10841.38 Harris delivered words of “commendation and encouragement” at commencement (Frey et al. 48).39 In its first decade following annexation, the Japanese government forbade the teaching of Christianity at missionary schools and required them to achieve stringent certification standards—actions that led to the closure of nearly 50% of such institutions by 1919 (Yoo 62–64).40 See Andrew Hall for Sekiya’s role in formulating Japanese educational policies in Korea. In 1913, Ewha leaders had described Sekiya as having “been most kind to us. He has been very much interested in our school and we are sure after talking with him a number of times that nothing will be done to hinder us in our … work” (Marker et al. 41). Given the broader US-Japanese conflicts that had defined the first years of Japan’s occupation—in addition to the educational conflicts described in footnote 39, the Japanese had imprisoned a missionary during the so-called Conspiracy Case just a year earlier (Clark, “Surely” 50; Jun 51–58)—it is tempting to read this statement as masking anxieties that had led to the fear of the government “hinder[ing]” Ewha’s work. Whatever their real feelings, Ewha’s leaders and Sekiya evidently kept up a working relationship for at least two years until he delivered his speech in 1915.41 Nordlund provides a recent study.42 See 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun 96 for a map.43 For studies of Gojong’s reforms in Jeongdong district (where Ewha Hakdang and the First Methodist Church were located), see김현숙 Kim Hyeonsuk and 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun. In English, see Clark, Living 13; and Henderson (although this source is very dated).44 In 1912, for example, missionary William Elliot Griffis (admittedly a Japanophile) expressed his contempt for the common one-storey Korean buildings, which he derided as “the squatty native structures in use from king to coolie” (209).45 In 1954, Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim remembered Gojong’s death as murder by poisoning by the Japanese (102). In their 2011 study of Gojong’s death, 이해웅 Hai-Woong Lee and 김훈 Hoon Kim “assume that the possibility of poison murdering is high” (125, 132). In her own 2011 study, 윤소영 Yoon So-young disagreed. Recent fictional depictions also reveal the continuing importance of Gojong’s death in South Korean thought and culture—see his implied poisoning by a Korean collaborator with Japan in the film 덕혜옹주 The Last Princess (2016).46 For one example of this translation into English, see Clark, “Surely” 53. For a modern, English translation of the full declaration, see Han-Kyo Kim. An original document can be viewed at https://www.heritage.go.kr/heri/cul/culSelectDetail.do?pageNo=1_1_1_1&sngl=Y&ccbaCpno=4411106640100.47 Clark, “Surely” 53.48 Clark, “Surely” 53; Kim Hwallan, Grace 40.49 On US colonial rule in the Philippines, see Jimenez. See Desser for a rhetorical study of the United States in Hawaiʻi, and Enoch, Refiguring, chapter 3, on US schools for Native Americans.

ABSTRACTThe former Badger Army Ammunition Plant in rural southern Wisconsin has long been a landscape mired in settler colonial and industrial attempts to sever social and cultural relations between land and bodies. After the plant was decommissioned, the community decided it should be ecologically restored given the landscape’s legacy of harm. Through inter views with 17 local stakeholders and storytellers, this essay reveals how toxic containment as both metaphor and topoi, grounded in the materiality of toxins, brings visibility to the landscape’s history while at the same time providing a model of local resistance. For those in the Badger landscape, metaphor and topoi lead to personal and social actions that support culturally conscious relationship building with a direct impact on the scientific restoration process. Ultimately, this essay argues that how stories shape spatial experiences matters, especially given the way communities are guided by the metaphor-turned-topoi process.KEYWORDS: Environmental rhetoricmetaphorspatial rhetorictopoitoxic AcknowledgmentsI thank Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Morris Young, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback in developing this project.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Locals widely refer to the plant’s footprint as “Badger”; however, there is a developing effort to call it by its Ho-Chunk name, Mąą Wakącąk (Maa-wa-kun-chunk), which means “Sacred Earth.”2 “Re-story-ation” is a term theorized by ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan (p. 4) and Potawatomi and environmental biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer (p. 9) to represent the need for ecological restoration to better account for the relationships between landscapes and people. Stories play a central role in bridging scientific and cultural perspectives.3 The committee was biased in favor of US governmental officials while the remaining seats were distributed between cultural and advocacy groups. Although I hoped to include more Ho-Chunk participants than the original committee (one seat), I was only able to interview two storytellers given limitations related to funding, time, and COVID-19.4 Industrial solvents from a deterrent burning ground plume of toxins discharge to Weigand’s Bay, which connects to Lake Wisconsin and the Wisconsin River.5 Documented health complaints by workers at the plant included headaches and chest pains due to nitroglycerin exposure, as well as cancer deaths (Citizens for Safe Water; Gould).6 Community Conservation Coalition for the Sauk Prairie.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as well as the Department of English, The Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center, and the Center for Culture, History, and Environment, all of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

This essay shows the rhetorical and material process of regendering and forgetting that accompanied the downsizing and tearing down of U.S. progressive-era settlement homes founded by female maternalists who lost their ethos by mid-century in the U.S. The regendering of place by mid-century urban renewalist’s rhetoric, policy and culture enabled the elimination of neighborhoods. It made vulnerable the concept and material space of the neighborhood as a headquarters for community engagement, and denied the emotional attachment to homes that Progressive-Era maternalists embraced. The legacy of maternalist placemaking layered into Detroit’s contemporary social service agencies embodies the impact of this regendering.

This article highlights the role of place in understanding problems, specifically within community-engaged projects in upper-level technical and professional communication courses. Drawing on a year-long participant-generated imagery study with students, instructors, and community partners, the authors argue that photographic research is effective in helping participants and researchers tune to place. Taking photos offers opportunities for documentation, individual interpretation, and collaborative reflection, resulting in a deeper, more nuanced sense of place. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how a greater awareness of place, cultivated through reflecting on visual evidence, enhances engagement projects and helps technical communicators address complex problems.

In the winter of 2022, I had planned a place-based literature course on Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design. A series of outings formed the backbone of the class: my aim was to have students connect to the place where they lived through experiences like standing atop the landfill to understand the afterlife of their waste and touring a colonial house to trace the violent foundations of the city's wealth. Instead, due to the omicron-variant surge, the course was largely conducted over Zoom and all but one outing became virtual. I found that a disorienting, nearly absurd sensation clouded the course when we discussed places that we should have been inhabiting together; instead of bridging the distance between the texts and the world, in the end, the course only accentuated that distance.Postcolonial/ecocritical place-based teaching is challenging for the precise reason that it is based on place and our places are changing now more than ever. And yet, as the kind of teaching the planet needs becomes more difficult, it also becomes more essential. In his foreword to Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, Graham Huggan asserts that “teaching is the most valuable thing we postcolonial/environmental scholars do” (xiv). Amid global health and ecological crises that perpetuate, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is a collection invaluable for its compilation of teaching ideas, resources, and commentary on the field of postcolonial environmentalism. But perhaps more importantly, it is invaluable for the sense of community it creates among educators who continue to dedicate themselves to a livable future.At its core, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media aims to show the analytical and pedagogical import of considering social and environmental injustices together through postcolonial ecocriticism. Editor Cajetan Iheka writes about the collection this way: “Taken together, the growing interest in postcolonial ecologies and the demand for a diversified curriculum addressing social concerns, including the climate crisis, makes this book a crucial contribution to the environmental humanities” (5). The majority of the essays are field-tested success stories of teaching postcolonial ecocriticism that offer a snapshot of the contributor's course. Most courses are literary, and while some are more typically environmental and others postcolonial, all experiment with the overlap of the two in exciting ways. The collection is particularly useful for teacher-scholars who know one side of the critical conversation—either postcolonialism or ecocriticism—and are wanting to bring the other to bear on their thinking and teaching.In recent years, postcolonialism has advanced the field of ecocriticism, a field long dominated by a Euro-American epistemology that put forth romanticized imaginings of pristine nature and prioritized wilderness conservation. While this hegemonic strand of environmentalism was challenged by scholars from a range of social and disciplinary perspectives, stoked in part by the US environmental justice movement in the 1990s, the conspicuous dearth of postcolonial analysis from ecocriticism remained. Due in part to the contributions of major critics like Graham Huggan, Rob Nixon, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, the second decade of the twenty-first century has come to mark what Iheka calls “the ecocritical turn in postcolonial studies,” characterized by increased critical attention to “the inextricability of colonial plundering from environmental conditions” (1). The recognition that colonialism and neocolonialism—and the world order they uphold—are dependent on land theft, resource extraction, and the degradation of Indigenous cosmologies with devastating consequences for people and the environment has fundamentally impacted both postcolonial and environmental studies, leading to the rise of postcolonial ecocriticism.This collection contributes to the critical project of postcolonial ecocriticism by emphasizing the practice of teaching it (even as you will also learn much about postcolonial ecocriticism itself from this impressive group of scholars invested in advancing and diversifying the field). Although there is now a number of major works that take up the study of postcolonial texts and environmental concerns, Iheka points out in his introduction that “none of them explores teaching postcolonial environmental texts” (3). Published in 2021, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is especially timely, as it responds to the growing demand by students that their education attend to past and present environmental and racial injustices. Uniquely positioned to expose these injustices, postcolonial ecocritical texts can help us teach the afterlives of colonialism that dually exploit local communities and environments.As you might expect from a collection that spans two fields, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is impressive in its scope and breadth: twenty-seven essays are organized into six sections. The geographic diversity of the literary and other cultural media analyzed in the book, and to a lesser extent the classrooms themselves, soundly positions the project in a global context. Together, the contributors draw on an “expanded sense of the postcolonial” (9) by including colonized spaces from the Global North in their discussions of the Global South. This approach is important, as it underscores shared systems of exploitation and solidarity outside region or nationhood. The collection also features canonical ecocritical and/or postcolonial texts like Indra Sinha's Animal's People and Ken Saro-Wiwa's Month and a Day alongside newer ones like Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, making it valuable to faculty who teach introductory and advanced literature courses. Finally, as the title emphasizes, the book examines media other than literature, and several key articles focus on teaching visuals, a crucial component of many environmental humanities courses.The first five essays, which constitute “Part I: Background and Theoretical Foundations,” showcase the intersections among postcolonial ecocriticism and other major theoretical frameworks, including environmental justice, Indigenous, queer, disability, and place studies. In the opening essay, Byron Caminero-Santangelo is motivated by “the unique contributions that postcolonial ecocriticism could make to transformative ways of imagining the world and to possibilities for action” (23). Arguing that environmental justice struggles in the Global South “are neither belated nor peripheral” (24), he shows instead that these struggles foreground fundamental elements of injustice, such as the role of multinational and transnational actors, too often ignored in US-centric conversations of environmental justice. Even as Caminero-Santangelo writes toward a global conceptualization of environmental justice, he acknowledges the equal importance of paying attention to specific and local circumstances. Throughout, the collection is animated by this “generative tension” (26) between the universal and the particular that centers the field of postcolonial ecocriticism.Together the contributors to section 1 unsettle the United States and Europe as epistemological strongholds in mainstream environmentalism. In “Finding Balance: Disability and the Ecocritical Lens,” Roanne L. Kantor describes the limitations in how disability is generally studied in the Global North. When disability is approached as socially constructed, in which “impairment happens offstage, such that its causes cannot be politicized or legally redressed” (55), it elides bodily harms inextricable from environmental hazards and disparities in medical care, as in Sinha's Animal's People and Rohinton Mistry's Fine Balance. Similarly, Brady Smith's “Place and Postcolonial Megacities: A Project-Based Approach” redresses the historic exclusion of urbanity in Euro-American literary traditions of “place” through a project-based course that examines how Okorafor's Lagoon complicates many students’ preconceived ideas of the environment.Pedagogy takes center stage in “Part II: Global Ecologies and Uneven Flows.” Each contributor shows how the study of postcolonial environmental literature necessarily shapes the structure and aims of their courses. Examples include creating opportunities for students “to discover their own power” through assignments like an open-ended field journal (81). In Margaret Anne Smith's “Decolonizing the Environmental Classroom: Increasing Student Agency through a Journal Assignment,” excerpts from these journals enable student voices to dominate that essay. Perhaps most radical, Elaine Savory describes a course that integrates lecturers from various environmental fields in the close reading of literary texts. Together, the essays in part 2 demonstrate how postcolonial ecocriticism is by definition interdisciplinary and intersectional because, as Savory puts it, “to think about the environment in postcolonial space is to think globally and locally at once, beyond disciplines and across time” (105).More localized considerations of postcolonial ecocriticism are featured in “Part III: Regional and Local Perspectives,” and Christina Gerhardt opens the section with a region that exemplifies climate injustice: the Pacific Islands. In her environmental humanities course, students explore the threat of sea level rise and the politics of representation as they view map collections and read Pacific Island literature, including Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner's Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter and Craig Santos Perez's From Unincorporated Territory [Hacha]. In choosing an island to represent in both essay and map form, students in the course are primed to think through ideological questions like who and what is centered in each representation and to what effect. Other essays develop these themes of positionality and audience. I particularly appreciate Salma Monani's honest appraisal of her pedagogical decision, as a woman of color in a majority-white classroom, to begin her introductory environmental course with “voices and situations familiar to [her] students” (132), even as the choice delays introducing Indigenous perspectives (Yurok, Hoopa, and Karuk) until a case study on water wars in the Klamath River Basin.While the third section brings together essays on a range of regions, from the Pacific Islands to the Caribbean to Latin America, it concludes with the challenges of using region as an organizing principle. There needs to be more attention on the Global East as colonizer and as colonized, Simon C. Estok insists, at the same time that teacher-scholars need to acknowledge the vast heterogeneity among East Asian nations. This work includes serious obstacles, not least of all because “teaching postcolonial East Asian ecocriticisms outside the region means teaching in a language and culture not of the region” (172). While most of ecocriticism is conducted in English, Estok includes untranslated Korean to highlight how “an inability to read something means an inability to receive the information contained in that writing” (172). Readers will find that Estok's essay resonates with critical linguistic conversations outside of this collection, including those on the politics of language in postcolonial writing, the traditional ecological knowledge embedded in Indigenous languages, and the need to diversify standard academic English in composition studies.“Part IV: The Lives of Animals” introduces the more-than-human community as an essential element of postcolonial environmental teaching. Although animal rights are often pitted against human rights—with one taking precedence over the other—essays by Jonathan Steinwand, Amit R. Baishya, and Jason Price eschew the hierarchal thinking that justifies environmental, racial, and (neo)colonial violence. Instead, both Steinwand and Baishya formulate courses that emphasize multispecies entanglement and, as Baishya defines, “the mutual constitutiveness of the human and the animal” (199). Price confronts the vexed animal studies debate on how to interpret cultural renditions of animals by teaching animist-realist African literature. Instead of reading animals as wholly outside symbolic meaning or not, Price helps students work toward “metaphoric-material approaches [that] successfully blend treatments of animals as literal and nonliteral without denying or backgrounding the animal” (221).Rhonda Knight and Mary Laffidy, a professor and a student, respectively, open the next section with a question that many of their co-contributors in the Global North grapple with: what scaffolding is required to help Western students engage responsibly with literature from other parts of the world? Their course focuses on speculative petro-fiction, in which new worlds are built on African and Caribbean cultures. Knight and Laffidy choose not to provide contextual resources directly but to create a multimodal assignment that guides students to fill in their own knowledge gaps. Students keep a reading journal and then rewrite parts of their journal for a public blog, building their capacity for research and communication in global digital contexts.The essays in “Part V: Extractive Ecologies, Environmental Justice, and Postcolonial Ecomedia” experiment with media that allow for new forms of storytelling. To understand art as a tool of empire and resistance, students compare hegemonic representations of the Caribbean with Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié’s exhibit Imagined Landscapes, in which bright colors are notably absent from his paintings and glitter reflects viewers’ faces, details that lead students to consider their own role in the exoticism and exploitation of the Caribbean landscape (Charly Verstraet). (This essay immediately made me want to learn more about the exhibit and to incorporate more art in my classes.) Another course describes the digital project Colonize Mars, “part choose-your-own adventure novel, part nonfiction account of Mars exploration past and future, and part video game” (273), created by Rachel Rochester (and now available to the public) for students to contend with interplanetary colonization and terraforming, as well as to envision alternative, sustainable futures.What will strike you over and over as you move through Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is the reminder that the stakes of our teaching are high. “Effective environmental pedagogy,” Rochester writes, “must expose the ideological miasma that normalizes colonial violence and its trail of environmental and social catastrophe while invigorating learners to identify alternative means of inhabiting the world” (274). The final section of the collection, “Part VI: Place-Based Approaches,” highlights pedagogical methods that engender these alternative means of inhabiting the world by rooting students in place. In “Ecocriticism in Nigeria: Toward a Transformative Pedagogy,” Sule Emmanuel Egya outlines the challenges and rewards of teaching ecocriticism in a country where the field remains relatively new and of incorporating place-based practices. Class trips to “ecological zones” around campus cultivate students’ concern for local environmental conditions alongside the desire to become agents of change. Additionally, in their significant contribution to the collection, Kristin Lucas and Gyllian Phillips contemplate how to resist a place-based pedagogy that reinforces settler colonialism by centering Indigenous texts that ask their settler students in Canada to engage with the continuance of colonization, as well as restorative human-land relations.Far from being provincial or parochial, the place-based courses shared in the last section illustrate the relevance of the local in studies of the global and offer expansive imaginings of what place-based education can be. For example, comparative learning is presented as place-based when images of oil spills in Ogoniland and writings by Saro-Wiwa lead students in Malaysia to make connections between the power structures that govern both postcolonial places in what Shalini Nadaswaran describes as a “text-to-world-to-self sequence” (324). In the final essay, Sarah Dimick and Cheryl Johnson follow a similar sequence in writing about students in a postcolonial literature course visiting a Chicago-based environmental justice organization. The experience is guided by pragmatics—bringing students to locales depicted in the literature would have required international travel—but also politics: “Without domestic context, students from relatively unpolluted areas of the United States who enroll in a postcolonial environmental literature course may inadvertently come to associate sacrifice zones . . . with distant geographies” (349). For faculty or administrators who need to be encouraged to include field trips in university courses, this concluding essay showcases the critical, reciprocal, and hopeful learning that can happen when students engage with environmental justice community work.While too often “place” is reserved for the rural and place-based teaching as excursions into “nature,” this collection integrates throughout pedagogical methods that invite the careful study of varied places, including urban and built environments. In her book that asserts the specificity of global connections, Anna Tsing (2005: 3) asks, “Where would one locate the global in order to study it?” We might read each essay in the collection as a response to that question. In fact, one of the most provocative moments in relation to place-based approaches appears outside the section labeled as such in “The Colonial Relation between Digitization and Migration in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West” when Sofia Ahlberg asks students to track their online activity, calculate its corresponding carbon footprint, and “imagine which part of the world their finger actually affects as they click and drag on their devices” (246). While it is difficult to find any serious shortcomings with this smart and capacious collection, brushes with the virtual world like this one made me wish that explicit discussion of online courses had been included, especially given the challenges of making local, material environments come to in virtual Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media will teacher-scholars in the fields of ecocriticism and postcolonialism to bring students to the place where the two to For an this collection, not only in the need for more postcolonial ecocritical teaching but also in the capacity to make to own course or the book, you will as you are in a of their and and, because course and are you will that it is more than to For the of the the contributors to this collection that you

A lot has happened in Indian Country recently: water protectors and the NoDAPL movement brought international attention to Native sovereignty and ongoing resistance to settler forms of violence against Indigenous ways of being; a settler public became aware of the MMIW movement and the ongoing assault on the lives of Indigenous women; an apology was given by executive order for a genocide that occurred in California and a Truth and Healing Council was created to investigate the historical relations between California Indians and the state of California; and Native identity is “complex” and certain people seek to profit from that complexity by duplicitously or erroneously claiming Native identity, to name a few. To be sure, these are all issues long addressed by Native people (Indigenous movements, in particular, always have a long arc), but it sure feels like these are events that happened within a recent timeframe.The feeling that these are events and not manifestations of continuing struggles that go back hundreds of years is related to the well-documented fact that settler discourses on Native peoples often still represent us as existing in the past. A settler public, almost ritualistically, gets reminded of the existence of Native people and is seemingly perpetually surprised. This condition for Rifkin, while representing a significant problem on its own, also represents a double bind for Indigenous people. The long-standing and common response to these discourses of Native pastness has been to assert Native contemporaneity and/or modernity, but, for Rifkin, such a response participates in the very terms set forth by the discourses by contesting them within a linear, developmental, and rationalistic temporal framework. Rifkin rather seeks to dispel the idea that such a response adequately contests continuing settler domination and to show that it appeals to and bolsters a deeper settler framework.The double bind is a familiar ruse first theorized by Gregory Bateson in communication theory as patterns of confusion, a general condition for him for PTSD and schizophrenia, and popularized by Michel Foucault’s analysis of two opposing forms of power that together enmesh unsuspecting and well-meaning subjects further into power’s snares. In brief, Foucault argues that repressive power, the blunt, straightforward, top-down, and usually explicit kind, elicits an antagonistic response from the subjugated that surreptitiously turns them to directly face the repression or exclusion, speak up and against it, and, in order to be intelligible, and this is the twist, assert themselves within the terms of a growing if dispersed productive power that works through them. Rifkin links the double bind to claims that modernity is a collaborative construction between the West and the rest. In this case, for Rifkin, a generative knowledge production on Native contributions to modernity both depends on and bolsters what he refers to as the “background” of a shared temporal framework, asserting a common container in which events take place, which contests narratives of Native disappearance and vulgar forms of archaism and yet contributes to national and global narratives of historical progress, wedding Native assertions of contemporaneity to state interests.Rifkin’s answer to this dilemma is Beyond Settler Time, a long, theoretically expansive, wide-ranging, and erudite book on what he calls “temporal sovereignty,” which he contrasts to “temporal recognition,” the institutional and assimilative mode through which Indigenous peoples get brought/bring themselves into the present. Temporal sovereignty, on the other hand, engages “the texture of Indigenous temporalities” (Rifkin 2017, 7–8) and Native collective experiences of becoming. Echoing Glen Coulthard’s distinction between a politics of recognition (mediated by the settler state and its epistemic frames) and grounded normativities, “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time” (cited in Rifkin 2017, 207–8), Rifkin’s argument likewise emphasizes a form of self-determination that refuses external legitimation, flowing directly from Indigenous experiences, forms of governance, and social relations, but in temporal terms.Rifkin’s turn to time isn’t an obvious one for Native studies considering the intense and persistent focus the field has on “the land question.” Though, from at least the publication of Vine Deloria Jr.’s God Is Red, in which he asserts that Indigenous epistemologies have a spatial orientation in contrast to Western, Christian orientations to historical, linear, and teleological/eschatological time (which Deloria claims undergirds an inherent colonial imperative uprooting a lived sense of place) to the recent publication of Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes’s analysis of the longue durée of Native resistance up to Standing Rock, scholarship in Native studies has had an abiding interest in theorizing time. This includes the heavily populated list of Native scholars that Rifkin draws on to make his argument, including those whom he critically locates as being Native theorists of modernity (Philip Deloria, Scott Lyons, Jean O’Brien). But Vine Deloria’s lesson, drawing on years of Indigenous struggle, has been influential, with the most recent and visible manifestation being the LandBack movement. In this sense, Mishuana Goeman’s Mark My Words is another important touchstone for Rifkin, linking as it does Indigenous modes of storying to practices of grounded normativity, distinguishing between Indigenous place making and settler-colonial space making, or, as Robert Nichols calls it, the (violent) production of land as property. Goeman writes, “Stories teach us how to care for and respect one another and the land. Responsibility, respect, and places created through tribal stories have endured longer than the Western fences that outline settler territories and individual properties that continue to change hands” (cited in Rifkin 2017, 59–61). To Goeman’s abiding sense of storied Indigenous place, Rifkin offers a storied, collective, and experiential Indigenous sense of duration.The structure of Rifkin’s book is a familiar one, beginning with a brief preface; followed by a long first chapter that details the primary argument and the theoretical and methodological investments of the book, and then three chapters that develop the argument through close readings of texts, heavily weighted by novels (where the rubber hits the road, so to speak); ending, finally, with a coda that critically reflects on the relation between the book’s argument and U.S. Indian policy as it affects Native American sovereignty. Because this is such a theoretically rich text, and because Rifkin takes great pains to develop a powerful if complex argument on Native conceptions of time, in this review I primarily focus on the first chapter. For those interested in Native American literature and other forms of Native writing, Rifkin is a consummate literary scholar, and it is certainly worth reading his continuing engagement with the work of Native authors in the last three chapters, where he offers fresh takes based on his theorizing of temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty of largely canonical Native literary texts and authors. Each of these chapters engages a different aspect of temporal recognition as the means through which more radical temporal formations in the form of sovereignty are managed or silenced.In brief, chapter 2, “The Silence of Ely S. Parker,” addresses U.S. historical narratives of developmental progress through the rhetoric of a perfecting union. Beginning with a meditation on the silent, onscreen presence of Haudenosaunee politician, Ely S. Parker, in the Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner film Lincoln, Rifkin addresses the imposed temporal formation of the expanding and perfecting rule of law and its relation to violence by juxtaposing two concurrent wars caused by uprisings, the Civil War, and the lesser-known Dakota War. Attending to the writing of Parker as well as Dakota scholar Charles Eastman, Rifkin analyzes the temporal formations of the treaty and reservation systems as outcroppings of the rule of settler law. Chapter 3, “The Duration of the Land,” focuses on John Joseph Mathews’s novel Sundown, set in an Osage community during the allotment era. Analyzing the temporality of U.S. Indian policy and its focus on resource development (allotment and the petro-economy here), Rifkin notes how Mathews’s novel represents and disrupts a maturational and heteronormative conception of social reproduction. To do so, he juxtaposes reproductive futurity to the queerness of the main character, Chal, whose Indianness acts as an opening onto a sense of place-based duration. The final chapter, “Ghost Dancing at Century’s End,” addresses the almost excessively researched social, political, and spiritual response to settler invasion, the Ghost Dance. Removing it from the sociological interpretations it has been subjected to and restoring its affective and everyday aspects, Rifkin discusses two novels in which the ceremony features prominently, Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes. Referencing the version of the ceremony envisioned by the Paiute Doctor, Wovoka (there have been others), the ceremony, as made clear by Rifkin’s readings of the two novels, is both a hopeful vision for a future restored to Indigenous peoples, with the dead returning to live with the living in many interpretations, and a messianic manifestation of Indigenous rage through the prophesied disappearance of all white people. This affective ambivalence is summed up by Rifkin through the emotions of anger and longing, which, he argues, open up cross-time proximities based in prophetic temporality and its everyday manifestations.Rifkin lays out the book’s theoretical and methodological infrastructure in chapter 1, “Indigenous Orientations,” where much of his aforementioned argument and the basis for his notion of Indigenous duration reside. Ambitious and just a bit irreverent, the chapter ranges across a bewildering set of philosophies, concepts, and theories: Native and Latinx philosopher V. F. Cordova’s vitalist philosophy; Sarah Ahmed’s queer phenomenology (from which Rifkin draws the term “orientation”); Native theorist, memoirist, and poet Deborah Miranda’s archival meditations on the afterlife of annihilation in the wake of the California missions; theories of Native modernity; decolonial theories of coloniality (which get lumped in with the previous group); postcolonial critiques of the enlightenment; Native studies critiques of recognition politics; queer theories of time; Einsteinian relativity; Henri Bergson’s philosophical concept of duration; Native theorist Dian Million’s felt theory (along with non-Native queer theorists of affect); and Native conceptions of storying. It’s honestly a bit overwhelming; however, Rifkin’s erudition together with a conceptually tight argument hold it all together.After establishing the broad parameters of temporal recognition, described above, Rifkin explores a variety of theoretical conceptions of temporal plurality, what he calls being-in-time, as alternatives to dominant settler time. As a subjective form, being-in-time is a phenomenological orientation drawn from past experiences that frame possible future experience, turning one toward the future through interest and momentum in the form of a trajectory. The phenomenological experience of time organizes much of the chapter, though it takes different faces with Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, Bergson’s theory of duration, and Merleau-Ponty’s more canonical philosophy. What this step does is specify the experience of time away from abstract, common time. Threaded through this argument is the question of collective (as opposed to common) and therefore Indigenous experiences (which are not just subjective or intersubjective). To begin to answer the question, Rifkin turns to Native scholars: Cordova’s notion of communal frames of reference and Miranda’s and Dian Million’s respective theories of collective storying. Rifkin ends the chapter by staging a conversation between Indigenous storying as collective and affective frames of reference and queer theorizations of temporality. This last section is the only one in the book where non-Native theories are directly questioned through a Native critical lens and is, for that reason, one of the more robust moments of theorizing in the book. It is also very much in Rifkin’s wheelhouse, hearkening back to his earlier work on intersections of queer and Indigenous studies.The hinge between temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty in the chapter, perhaps surprisingly, is physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and his idea of frames of reference. In Einsteinian relativity, Rifkin finds a conception of time that breaks with natural time, the common temporal experience of the present as an “unfolding, universal line of development” (Rifkin 2017, 34–35). Frames of reference, on the other hand, are based on one’s relative position and make the idea of a universal time impossible. Turning to theoretical physics in order to understand temporal sovereignty, though, carries a number of risks, which Rifkin acknowledges by noting the limits of Einstein’s theory for discussing Indigenous experiences. While, according to the theory, there is no possible universal time, what makes a frame of reference intelligible is having a common measure to compare frames, in this case mathematics itself (it also helps to have a common perspective, the absolute speed of light). One can understand differences between frames by comparing them according to this measure, each having internally consistent relations to time that onto each The of is that this for different experiences, a problem that philosopher Henri out to with his theory of duration. To and notion of time, offers a and notion of duration. It is, the and subjective of relativity, a philosophical to Einstein’s physics if the that had with was of the for to the between the two conceptions of time is to Rifkin’s distinction between temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty. Bergson’s of and experiential duration from time much of the critical of Rifkin’s a that the book. than time as an abstract, measure of universal movement a can of it as as temporality than temporalities” The term is as Bergson’s notion of duration is up with the question of in two against theories that human is of asserting a of human of Bergson’s and and, perhaps as a response to the by of that is an if one takes the that space is This of space and time to assert a of experiential duration, and from abstract, had significant on American such as as well as American and It’s a critical that has had and has as a form of critical common sense, as by this by V. F. is an from the fact that there is and change in the (cited in Rifkin 2017, in this distinction Rifkin’s as It like this settler time, as a of and is a that a temporal experience for temporal such as Indigenous that this are through temporal recognition, through a conception of shared modernity and the however, time is and the of settler time is a a of experiential time. The step that Rifkin takes is to this to show that Indigenous peoples within that are at also with the individual of Western Indigenous forms of temporal sovereignty, as within the settler framework. Attending to these for Rifkin, is a to time and open space for “Indigenous forms of collective and modes of One to do this is to the texture of temporal formations in Rifkin turns to physics and a philosopher of to Native temporal sovereignty, because to made but in to Indigenous and also as a of earlier discourses of social development and a time that between peoples according to a though the make is often as a spatial one, as opposed to to Rifkin’s very rich concept of temporal sovereignty into what has as I the Western Rifkin draws on for an conception of time, do not are more than the while certainly directly with Indigenous formations of and experience, of whom theorized in ways that themselves to Rifkin’s obvious answer is that and are interested primarily in time within a Western framework, to the critically turn makes to an of the West such a still makes and then of out into and and so This is of what Rifkin refers to on as his to Western formations of in order to make open and make visible the texture of Indigenous of an critical within a dominant framework. The other obvious answer is the of by Native that it a notion of that in if not Indigenous people into of a different notion of This version of pastness is largely for the idea of a against which Native people are to the common that is a Indigenous people not just in time or but also in does the question of in relation to time discussing for in as an time (Rifkin 2017, the aspect of into Rifkin how is a concept that temporal recognition through the lens of and its and relative to Indigenous time against the of settler time. But there a between Rifkin’s notion of temporal and relativity that I I it has to do with the complex between the of the and as and by Tony the concept and the of on its and more by as of an that and and through the of subjects the in the different of between and the links this and to the of the term which the question of how and, in Rifkin’s conceptions of temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty. how do these conceptions on or and for a book review if are to it back in a the and Rifkin’s book that it Rifkin’s on a double bind of its only was a philosopher if there was one, but Rifkin’s on phenomenology a form of human of the Western a number of Native in order to this sense of time as Rifkin gets there by first the problem of settler time and then it within the of Western the and its out time as a in order to the double bind of historical and assertions of Native modernity another one in relation to the of the human as a of an as is, does Rifkin the Native people are of modernity all with Native people are also complex To begin to answer this the colonial and of and its in the of to peoples, as described by and how that undergirds a sense of the This is a question that on the of from to and a that to how in social, and and interest in epistemologies and is at as made clear by the of of Indigenous What if Indigenous epistemologies and are not in the Western What and make possible another of In his engagement with the work of Deborah Rifkin offers a possible on the of the of Rifkin notes that Miranda’s work in the of the of people in the face of such a notion of turning away from a in which Indigenous people up of for an and within a Miranda’s rather the very and of through storying as of our was to the I to that the of was but other Indians California Indians been a the a lot power to or (cited in Rifkin 2017, What is is the of the term with Miranda’s the and of as well as its an or in seemingly form, perhaps through and This isn’t against the such as the but it also have the It’s at this Rifkin’s of Indigenous takes and of Indigenous as the of land or modes of governance, Rifkin finds in Miranda’s conception of a to the of Indigenous and In the of and recognition, acts as a that the itself of an Indigenous through an sense of different and ways of living that into are an affective of experience, what Dian calls felt and in often and The one is the to which, according to like water flowing the of our (cited in Rifkin 2017, in the form of and temporal experiences. For Rifkin, this sense of storying a of a lived that back against the of imposed settler forms of recognition and that from Indigenous governance, to relations to to social and and the of the time of in Rifkin 2017, is at his this sense of into conversation with queer theories of time, his earlier work on imposed forms of settler through Indian the of of Native and and with settler in other of settler as a and the of in of recognition settler and Rifkin this question to on the possible of queer to and the of time to the and through for this of queer temporal conceptions for on of and investments in the of the settler these theories against the terms of addressed by and the for collective to in the face of and Rifkin both takes the from queer temporality and also asserts that Native temporal formations are not to non-Native (which includes non-Native queer It’s a of living with the and in an of Rifkin does with queer theory what he do with Western his notion of on this powerful of storying in and through Rifkin, through us toward another of and making making in other do take up this

The writing center (WC) is simultaneously an educational space and a specific place co-created by the consultants and students using it. Dedicated as it is to writing, the center offers an academic location physically distinct from home and the classroom. The COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered this separation of spaces and places, collapsing many (or all) of them into the virtual realm, all to be accessed from (often) one place: home. This paper considers the theoretical discussion surrounding notions of home in the WC and recontextualizes said discussion in the wake of the WC gone virtual during a pandemic. Reflections on the authors’ experiences in this new space and the resulting sense of place are included, resulting in a framework that considers the nature of online synchronous WC work being undertaken in our home and a call for WCs to not simply seek to return to a supposed normal when our institutions call us back to campus. Keywords : space, place, virtual asynchronous tutoring, online writing centers As writing consultants working during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become very familiar with the feeling of brewing tea in the kitchen between appointments, shushing loud housemates, and angling our computers’ cameras to frame ourselves against the one clean(er) corner of our rooms. We have long since decamped from the physical writing center (WCs), a workspace for writing consultants, for an altogether different place: home. Space is open and undifferentiated; place is known and associated (Tuan, 1977). And WCs are themselves designed to be welcoming places, to set students at ease, to evoke that which they cannot be—home (McKinney, 2005). What, then, are the impacts of moving the WC into the home? For all that they promise the capability for connections across vast distances, digital spaces are still inherently material. They are built on infrastructures of wires, cables, metals, and plastics; we connect to them through devices made of the same materials. The work that we do is mediated by the spaces and places in which we exist, something made all the more apparent by the pandemic. Digital spaces have allowed us to keep in contact with friends and family throughout the pandemic, valuable lifelines in deeply uncertain times. Such spaces have the capacity to foster new intimacies (Gallagher et al., 2020), but the prevalence of “Zoom fatigue” serves as a reminder that digital methods affect us differently. We take up the question of how a WC formed through the space of digital infrastructures, server rooms, and homes (or the various places we find ourselves and our clients videoconferencing in from) alters the sense of place that WCs evoke and the consequences of this alteration. To do so, this work pulls from a theoretical framework to inform later personal reflections on our experiences as writing consultants gone online during a pandemic. We find this to be a kairotic moment for WCs to reconsider and reform our thinking on and understanding of place, a moment wherein consultants and administration alike can and should reconsider what the space of a WC can/should aspire to be. Space and place are frequent subjects of debate—partially because of their inherent resistance to concrete definition, partially because of the terms’ prevalence in understandings of the world. Space, broadly speaking, is open, potential, abstract; place is known, (more) defined, (more) concrete (Tuan, 1977). Further, “space is unstable, uncertain because of the possibilities it contains for occupation. Space is yet-to-be written” (Dobrin, 2011, p. 41). “Home,” for example, is a place that has become so through occupation of and association with space. In Arendt’s (1958) words, “[to] live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it” (p. 52); Tuan (1977) argued that the presence of any other human beings (even just one) “has the effect of curtailing space and its threat of openness” (p. 59). Any discussion of solitude and openness is now (doubly) grimly ironic in light of the ongoing mental and physical effects of prolonged separation and isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Tuan (1977) invited his readers to consider “the sense of an “inside” and an “outside,” of intimacy and exposure, of private life and public space” (p. 107). The home is (generally) understood to be the place in which we live our private lives, while outside in other spaces (and places) we live our public lives, occluding—even masking—elements of ourselves. The distinction between public and private life is inherently a problematic one because there is no neat separation (Arendt, 1958, p. 72). Elements of both intrude on each other in ways both tangible and intangible, but there was previously a semblance of spatial separation that allowed for the maintenance of veneers, however fragile, unreal, occluding, and deeply problematic they could be. Yet, home is not mere association with that space (i.e., the space we occupy for housing), but associated with various place-based ideals beyond faulty notions of privacy. These place-based ideals are essential to forming the notion of home. As bell hooks (2009) established, “A true home is the place—any place—where growth is nurtured, where there is constancy. As much as change is always happening whether we want it or not, there is still a need we have for constancy” (p. 203). The association of constancy with home that hooks established here is troubled further when considering the idea of being at home during a pandemic. Assuming an individual even has the necessary means and ability to conduct education and consulting work from where they live, the notion that they are taking appointments from the comfort of their own home ignores the way that bringing the many spheres of life into their lodgings disrupts the constancy that they wish for when occupying their home. Further, the physical and mental stressors of trying to do much of anything during a pandemic seep into and destabilize our sense of home. Our conceptualization of constancy often hinges on the sensory experiences that come to define our perceptions of home. Jenny Odell (2020) has written about the importance of attentiveness to one’s time, space, and place, advocating for deliberate use of the five senses. She approached this through a multi-scalar lens and a deep concern for the impact(s) of social media and the attention economy, which thrive on constant intrusion, constant interaction, and superficial engagement. These methods manifest as a constant fracturing of attention and energy; equally problematic in both public and private – although it is important to note that Odell is not uniformly negative in her view of social media. In keeping with her overall argument, she argues that it can be a positive force, but should be used and engaged with deliberately. These issues of deliberate intent, attention, and focus are also very much at play in WCs. The places in which we write and consult have become increasingly of interest to WC scholars and practitioners in recent years; however, many of these discussions focus on the practical aspects of the objects that make up a space. Despite the work that has been done by WC scholars who have taken up this mantle through their research on digital studies and multiliteracy centers (e.g. Fitzgerald and Ianetta, 2015; Del Russo et al., 2019; Balester et al., 2012; Dunn and Dunn de Mers, 2002; Hamel, 2002; Hitt, 2012; Naydan, 2013; Sheridan and Inman, 2010; Trimbur, 2016), there remains a need for WC practitioners to recognize and consider WC spaces as something we both experience and create as opposed to something we simply take in visually. Hadfield et al. (2003) explained that “the environment where interaction between and among people occurs is crucial as it affects the way people feel and, therefore, the way people interact. A well-designed writing center has an identity that speaks implicitly to its patrons” (p. 175). Echoing this idea and building upon it further in her call for a more critical examination of WC spaces, McKinney (2005) specified that “In terms of the writing center, critical geographies would not merely state what objects occupy the space. In addition, the focus would include the human experience in use of space and objects” (pp. 10-11). This need to think critically about how our WC spaces are experienced becomes all the more urgent as we pause to consider various ways that spaces shape our experiences as complex and dynamic individuals. This phenomenon is often intensified in academic spaces, especially when they are utilized for the vulnerable act of sharing one’s writing. For example, Lockett (2019) argued location “must be considered as one of the major factors that obscures the relationship between race and how students are socialized to understand graduate writing conventions.” She continued, contending that, for graduate students, learning how to write “depends on moving through clandestine places like faculty offices, selective reading groups, and brief cubicle chats among peers, as well as publicly sanctioned intimate spaces like coffee shops where graduate students may be meeting with their mentors and colleagues.” This audience awareness that Lockett spoke to extends to the question of how WCs construct a sense of place in the midst of a pandemic. Further, it points to the need to recognize that those logging into our virtual WCs may not have access to the assumed space of their living space. Factors like race, class, and residency status can greatly impact whether that is indeed possible. These are variables that need to be structurally addressed, but what can WCs do? Boquet (1999) asked whether the WC is “primarily a space , a “laundry” where work is dropped off and picked up, where students are brushed off and cleaned up? Or is it primarily a temporality, an interaction between people over time, in which the nature of the interaction is determined not by site but by method?” (p. 464, emphasis in original). Lockett (2019) argued that it is both, following her academic ghetto metaphor; “[the] kind of place a writing center is perceived to be—by its tutors, clients, director, and administrative assistants—affects what will happen there”. We agree with this assessment, with the added valences that have arisen due to the pandemic and the move to wholly online consultations. At least one of us has been managing laundry timing around scheduled appointments, and the question of time’s “realness” continues to haunt conversations, calendars, and affects as we continue to cope with the dissolution of, and attempts to reimpose, flimsy and inflexible external structures. As a result, these issues of space, when compounded with the additional variables of race, class, residency status, sexual orientation, and ability, culminate to become inextricably linked to issues of labor in the WC, a correlation that has become painfully real for many of us consulting and writing during the COVID-19 pandemic. That space relates to labor concerns is well established in considering how the planning of space can subconsciously reinforce the exploitation of laborers (Harvey, 2010). Although discussions of labor have been taking place for quite some time among WC practitioners and scholars, the COVID-19 pandemic has made these all the more salient and unignorable. Labor is a complex concept in WCs as it takes many forms—emotional, mental, and even sometimes physical (moving to a new space, rearranging furniture, cleaning at the end of the day, etc.). This labor, especially the emotional and mental labor that is so often exerted by WC consultants and administrators, is often invisible and thankless, and although the labor itself is often unseen, the symptoms of an over-exertion of labor are often all too real and visible. As Giaimo (2020) pointed out, “Labor and wellness are inextricably bound. In an ideal situation, our work would be Meaningful, Engaging, Stable, Safe, Ethical, Fairly compensated.” However, even in the most ideal WC, operating with full funding and without the chaos of a pandemic, labor is never all of these at once, and this can have substantial impacts on those of us working as consultants. Giaimo (2020) clarified that labor concerns are wellness concerns, as the precariousness of one’s labor conditions can lead to physiological problems and different manifestations of human suffering. Further, Giamo was explicit in making the connection between precarious labor and “minorities and minimum wage workers.” One of the primary casualties of the pandemic has been so-called “third spaces.” These are not instances of Soja’s notion of thirdspace (e.g., 1996, 1999), but rather a division of spaces into spheres (e.g., Sloterdijk, 2011, 2014, 2016), with home as primary, work as secondary, and then third as elsewhere, such as in coffee shops or libraries. Indeed, for a not insignificant portion of the population—including many students—the pandemic effectively collapsed many (or all) of these spaces into one physical place: home. As people distanced from each other, their senses of space and place (sometimes simultaneously) contracted, expanded, and fragmented. Digital spaces, especially virtual meeting software and social media, experienced massive surges in engagement and numbers of active users as many aspects of life shifted to be mostly online. The nature of—and divide between—social relations via digital modalities vs. physical ones is frequently presented in generational terms, with Millennials and younger generations stereotypically preferring everything digital, while older generations favor the “real” world. Regardless of the actual truthfulness of this presentation, people from all generations have had to navigate the complexities of virtual platforms, even as others have had to contend with the necessities and present dangers of being “essential” workers. Quarantine entails a curtailing and control of movement and mobility, especially as empirical reality and embodied experience. It is a (re)definition of many spaces—particularly public or communal—as hostile/dangerous. Russell (2020) has proposed envisioning this shift as a sphere eversion, a rather complex topological concept that has interesting implications for notions of exposure. Eversion is the process of turning something inside out, in this case squishing and folding a sphere. Spheres are inherently boundaries, things capable of being seen by external observers, while observers of everted spheres must, by definition, “take up a position on it” (p. 276). Within this framework, she pondered hands and elbows as “touched touchers;” hands are more likely to touch the world than elbows, but both are part(s) of the body, covered in the same skin, exposed to the same air (p. 276). We can wash our hands diligently, but what about the rest of the body, or clothing, or the air introduced to an enclosed structure or common area through doors or windows? The core idea of the commons is that of a shared public space which can become a public place through interaction and association. Since the commons is shared, it remains inherently open, able to be engaged with and left alone easily. In much the same way, digital places are inherently permeable due to the configuration of digital space. For the user, this is simultaneously a strength and a weakness, especially with the heavily increased use of video chat platforms by businesses, schools, friends, and families. Interaction through a screen is not the same as in-person interaction, even from a safe distance. It can feel awkward and impersonal at times as physical distance creates emotional distance, making it difficult to read and interpret body language. However, despite these limitations, screen-to-screen interaction has offered important opportunities for (re)connection. Indeed, digital means’ capacities for connection, what Gallagher et al. (2020) have called “new intimacies,” allow people to interact, link, and communicate across counties, states, and countries. These connections can also be extremely beneficial for students for whom the normalized physical classroom environment is difficult, including students with anxiety, disabilities, or off-campus jobs. Of course, as with any technology, digital spaces carry the capacity to reproduce some existing inequalities and introduce others. Users become dependent on connection speed and stability, compression algorithms, and server/software uptime (Burroughs and Rugg 2014). Digital access takes place over (fractions of) milliseconds, accelerating time and decoupling it from physical concerns (Barlow and Drew 2020; Chan 2020). Care and intent are key. Through our dependence and constant use of these digital spaces, the issue of Zoom fatigue has become a commonplace point of discussion in day-to-day life for the authors. Our days feel full of Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings, WC Online appointments, and emails. Our homeplaces become saturated not only with work concerns, but also the digital platforms that convey them. To return to hooks’ (2009) discussion of home as constancy, labor in the home breaks up that constancy that informs our homeplaces. In a sense, it breaks into the ambient sense of calm and security that we strive for our home to be, instead saturating it with workplace concerns. This discussion of saturation connects well to Sidney Dobrin’s (2011) discussion of saturation as it “suggests a sense of overwhelming (as in saturation bombing)” (p. 183). The ambience of our homeplaces has been, essentially, saturation bombed with a different place context, thereby disrupting and recontextualizing our living rooms and bedrooms into a space of workplace activity. As mentioned in the introduction, we consider this to be a kairotic moment for reflecting on understandings of space and place in WCs. Particularly as many of us begin to transition back to hybrid (or wholly in-person) modalities, we should be deliberate and careful in just how we effect that return. To that end we offer these individual discussions both as reflections on our own experiences and as considerations of place and community in remote and hybrid WCs. For the first two months of lockdown, my scheduled writing consultations were one of the primary things I relied on to keep myself going (those, and my weekly movie nights with my roommate). I joined our WC partway through the fall 2019 semester and immediately received training in using WCOnline for consultations. I primarily consulted in-person, but I was already used to a hybrid modality so the switch to fully online was, for me at least, not a huge practical shift. It was just that it felt like everything around me shifted too; I was probably in a constant state of mild shock for the first couple weeks. In the Before Times, all of my work with clients, face to face and online, took place within the physical place of the WC. Its building was (and is) not adjacent to my department, so even if I was already on campus, I had to budget a few minutes to walk there if I was already on campus, or about 30 minutes if I was walking from home. Once I retreated into my home and lost all of that interstitial time, I fully realized how much I’d been relying on it to help physically and mentally organize my day. I was fortunate enough to live with roommates who I generally got along with, but being thrown into a situation where they were the only people I felt comfortable physically being around was a major adjustment, as was realizing the true thinness of the house’s walls and doors (accidentally dueling phone and Zoom call speaking volumes were a weekly occurrence). The time I’d spend walking was one of the primary ways I’d move myself into and out of my consulting (or more generally academic) headspace and back into a “home” mentality – one in which I was more agreeable to working with and around my roommates. I have since slowly (and, I will admit, grumpily) adjusted to this “new” situation. This has partially been a mundanely practical matter, since the pandemic is still a long way from being resolved, but it was primarily a matter of replacing old mental habits and spatial pathways with new(er), (more) specific, (intensely) local habits and pathways. I have a browser that I use almost exclusively for consultations, so that opening it signifies in some small way that I am going into “consultant mode.” I will usually make a cup of tea before my first appointment so that I have something to keep my hands occupied, which also gives me a ready-made excuse to stand up from my chair and walk to the kitchen after each appointment to make more tea and unplug for the brief window of time between consultations. And while I certainly miss the opportunity to hang out with my colleagues in the break room in between appointments, I feel that we’ve still been able to maintain a semblance of community through our weekly colloquium. It was very difficult at the beginning; I felt like I was consoling clients as much as they consoled me. In some ways it’s still difficult, just in different ways. Realistically, I barely made it to the end of the spring semester, and still don’t know how I finished papers and tests. Somehow, I did, and I kept consulting through it all. For better and for worse this fall semester seemed like an improvement, which I’ll attribute mostly to the fact that I could prepare (to a certain extent) for a fully online modality and the mental weight of the pandemic before it even started, as opposed to having to adjust in the middle of everything. The current spring semester has been overall better for me, perhaps because I’ve adjusted to conducting classes fully online – an alarming thought – and perhaps because I’ve finally started feeling the slightest bit optimistic about vaccination rates. But I’m still exhausted, still worried, just doing my best to muddle through. My fellow consultants have been integral to my persevering, as they’ve variously offered advice, support, commiseration, and openness to frank discussion. For me, the online space has felt simultaneously too lonely and too crowded. Thankfully, my graduate program had always been hybrid, allowing the flexibility for students to meet in-person and online in the same place by incorporating Zoom as a fundamental component of the course. However, I was someone who had never consulted synchronously online before, so when the COVID-19 pandemic halted life as we knew it, I was thrown into the (new to me) online place of WCOnline. And like many writing consultants (and people around the world in general) as quickly as I settled into a new rhythm of working and learning online from home, I became acutely aware of challenges posed by the online space. For one, the notion of working from a “homeplace” had become a little complicated for me. My partner had been unlucky enough to finish his graduate degree the spring semester that COVID-19 rearranged the world. After struggling with unemployment, we were forced to move days before the beginning of the fall semester to a new city with a better job market to stay afloat. This move was a culture shock to me as I had always been a small-town gal. Additionally, the pandemic made it challenging for me to get out and participate in my new community. Ultimately, I was cooped up in an unfamiliar apartment in an unfamiliar city, feeling isolated as I tried to conduct writing consultations through an unfamiliar modality in a home that did not feel like home. As I did my best to adapt to a new consulting modality, feeling a bit lonely in my new home, a feeling familiar to many these days began to creep in: Zoom fatigue. Although video conferencing had become the primary way for me to relieve my feelings of isolation by connecting with clients and colleagues, I began to feel isolated and socially overloaded at the same time. I felt I was expending much more emotional labor than I had when consulting face-to-face, checking in with students and doing my best to encourage and support them during these trying times. This became problematic for me, however, as I began expending emotional energy that I did not have. Unfortunately, at the end of the previous spring semester, the semester that everything got rearranged, life as I knew it was rocked by my mother’s death. I had finished that the spring semester and begun the subsequent fall semester in the midst of enormous grief. Consequently, I would lie down after even just one online writing consultation, emotionally exhausted. Before COVID-19, I did not consider myself as someone who was that affected by space and place. Although I was consciously aware that our spaces and places indeed have a great influence on us, I was lacking the context to really discover how these affected me personally. The pandemic made this all too clear for me. Place has immense power to shape feelings, attitudes, and even behaviors. This is true for us as students, colleagues, and writing consultants. Knowing this, WC practitioners should take care to create space for these influences, especially as we continue to contend with a pandemic. Losing the connection with clients and colleagues that many consultants experience from face-to-face consulting, we must be mindful to acknowledge and embrace feelings of isolation and burnout. Our goal as WC practitioners must not be for things to return to normal, but to normalize the oftentimes taboo yet all too familiar feelings of emotional exhaustion that academia has become increasingly hostile to. Right before lockdown began, my partner and I signed a lease in Lubbock, Texas. The plan was for me to move onsite for my doctoral program (Technical Communication & Rhetoric) that I’d be entering my second year of. While I had enjoyed being a distance student my first year of said program, I hoped that moving onsite would allow me to reduce my workload (I was working full-time as a lecturer and WC coordinator at Texas State University), increase my class load (I was taking two courses a semester, instead of three), and give me more time for projects. The reality of course was that, while my class load certainly increased, the Graduate Part-time Instructor (GPTI) and Graduate Writing Center (GWC) work I took on felt not all that different in time commitment when navigating teaching and consulting in a virtual environment. In Spring 2020, the potential of a lockdown led to me and the directors of the Texas State University Writing Center building out what the WC would look like when gone virtual. We did not have WCOnline in the WC for scheduling or synchronous online appointments, though we had started piloting Zoom for our limited synchronous appointments (that were, prior to this, held with the consultant in the WC). This experience coupled with my own use of Zoom in my doctoral studies resulted in our building the center’s plans around a common Zoom link with a main area (the virtual front desk) that could check writers in before moving them to their appointments (using the breakout rooms function). That it was all under one Zoom meeting link created a sense that we were still part of the center, even though we were video conferencing in from our home offices, bedrooms, living rooms, and backyards. That I had a small part to play in forming this system made the transition to online WC administration work smooth for me. This is not to suggest that there was not a shock to the system for me, as academia’s demand for continued productivity left me feeling even more frustrated with the world around me. I would say that it took me a while to shake it off and return to a sense of normalcy, but that would suggest that I ever have fully shook it off. Then, I started at Texas Tech University as a GWC consultant. The system was different (WC Online). There was no clicking over to someone’s breakout room when they weren’t in an appointment. We do have a weekly colloquium over Zoom which has helped get a sense of my fellow consultants, but in WC Online there is no sense of the space of the WC; there is only the sense of WC Online, the video feed of me with my mess of a kitchen behind me and the video feed of the client’s surroundings. As for those clients, those writers seeking to bounce ideas and strategies off me? I often find myself rushing through appointments, distracted by the need to later attend to household labor demands that surround me and are even at times clearly reflected in my video feed. Likewise, writers once willing to sit through the entirety of an appointment to discuss and strategize are seemingly also distracted as they have to deal with internet concerns and cooped up children. That’s assuming they can videoconference from their home, as I have had appointments where clients have been driven to whatever open space with decent internet connection they can access; cars, bars, and cafes are now normal backgrounds I spot in appointments. All of this is in the context of me feeling what some would call Zoom fatigue (let’s call it that, though it is a mix of videoconferencing platforms that I use daily). My partner and I moved to a new city in the middle of a pandemic. They still haven’t found work. We’re coming up on the deadline to renew our lease and we haven’t even seen the inside of our favorite local restaurants. Everything social we do is via videoconferencing. All my classes that I take are via videoconferencing. All my appointments are via videoconferencing. The conference I attended recently was via videoconferencing. Funerals are via videoconferencing. These are necessary precautions, but I am tired. And that tired is only heightened as academia pushes us to keep going on like this is all perfectly normal, to proverbially be the person jogging through a pandemic. In doing so, though, we are creating a damaging new normal where the homeplace can easily and readily be overtaken and replaced by the workplace. Although the three authors’ experiences discussed here are deeply personal, they reflect issues dealing with labor that many writing center workers have dealt with working from “home” during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pressure to continue to perform within the various academic, WC, and personal communities in which each of us participates has felt unbearable and unreasonable for many. Oftentimes this pressure stems from a societal desire to keep on working as if nothing is wrong because acknowledging that, in fact, so much is wrong can be incredibly painful. Much of the messaging in academic spaces encourages us that if we just log onto the home computer and smile, then class, work, happy hour, funerals, etc. can continue as usual. However, we must accept the reality that these are highly unusual circumstances, and that ignoring the painful reality of this situation only serves to compound and invalidate the mental and emotional labor being extended by WC workers. Because of the collapsing of learning, working, social, and private spaces into the homeplace due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ideas of space and place in the WC have only become more complex. As we attempt to mediate professional and personal identities through our laptops and phones, framed against the clean(er) areas our rooms, we are reminded that “[labor] is shaped/motivated by complex and unique combinations of requirements, expectations, values, perceived strengths, interests and desires, identities, and knowledge” (Caswell et al., 2016, p. 10). COVID-19 has made it impossible to ignore the way that our spaces shape and are shaped by our experiences, and we must acknowledge and address these issues in our WCs, whether in-person, online, or somewhere in between. While WC consultants and administrators struggle with increased workloads and personal stress, oftentimes in isolation, we must take steps to create WC places that are not just safer physically, but emotionally and mentally as well. As Degner et al. (2015) found years before the COVID-19 pandemic ever began, the fact is that “mental health concerns and illnesses are indeed affecting our centers… 56% of respondents said their symptoms affected their tutoring abilities (either slightly, moderately, or significantly).” The creation of safer places in the WC must involve resisting the urge for life and work to go back to “normal;” instead, it must involve normalizing and embracing the feelings that make our consultants, administrators, and clients human—in an echo of Illich’s (1973) conviviality. Simply trying to make our spaces feel like home will prove all the more problematic as many of us begin to transition back to our distinct physical spaces and have the residual exhaustion of our homeplaces being saturated by workplace activities. Giaimo (2020) has established solid moves we can make—lean on the larger WC community through online resources and organizational supports; be more flexible with technology alternatives and time off; share resources on wellness, mental health, and labor; and advocate for consultants. That said, this must be a learning opportunity for the WC community, one in which we can and should ensure that the different spheres that inform our lives as consultants and WC administrators are better protected from the threat of our workplaces saturating our homeplaces. There is certainly a need for further method-driven work to ascertain sustainable and equitable approaches toward this, work that needs much more room than the size of this piece allows. That said, we hope this will serve as a call for such work to find what is sustainable in writing centers of all types and sizes. As Claire speaks to above, our goal must not be to simply return to a supposed normal. We must work to transform our WCs to better value the placeness of our spaces and ensure that the various stakeholders of WCs (e.g., consultants, clients, and administrators) are valued as not just productive laborers and ready consumers, but also as whole people deserving of emotional, physical, and mental wellbeing.

Book Review| May 01 2021 Review: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, by Jessica Enoch Jessica Enoch, Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780809337163 Kate Rich Kate Rich University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (2): 240–242. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.240 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kate Rich; Review: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, by Jessica Enoch. Rhetorica 1 May 2021; 39 (2): 240–242. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.2.240 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article examines the rhetorical framing of San Jose’s “Winchester Mystery House” house tour to consider the role of spatiality in shaping the ethos and subsequent public remembrance of women. Built in the late nineteenth-century by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune, the sprawling Victorian mansion is now a popular tourist attraction that has become a metonym for the architect herself, whose memory remains shrouded in stories of séances, seclusion, and mystery. The article traces the image of Winchester as a bizarre and spooky widow to the public tour and the spatial rhetorics of her house itself. The house challenges our limited notions of space—particularly domestic space—with implications for other sites of women’s public memory and the ethos of the woman rhetor.

Reviewed by: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work by Jessica Enoch Kate Rich Jessica Enoch, Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780809337163 Some interventions are long overdue, and Jessica Enoch knows how to make valuable interventions in the overlooked localities of gendered ideas. In Domestic Occupations, she attunes rhetorical studies to a historiography of where women work. Across the humanities, the spatial turn to recognize the politics of place considers race, gender, and sex.1 Yet, we still lack a lexicon for how places might transform the labor of marginalized people over time. Enoch approaches this task with rhetorical theory to examine how the domestic duties within private spaces, like a home, were rhetorically extended to less traditionally feminine tasks in public spaces. [End Page 240] The book begins with a rich variety of scholarly work in rhetoric, geography, and gender studies to make the case for the gendered and rhetorical history of spaces. For Enoch, “There is no arhetorical space” (9). Throughout the book, her archival work attends “to the material, ideological, pictorial, emotive, discursive, and embodied site of the home and the ways this site’s spatial rhetorics constrained and made possible women’s work outside the domestic arena” (171). These texts are representative of dominant discourses that centered white middle-class women and excluded what she calls other women. She cleverly guides readers through the spatio-rhetorical transformations of the schoolhouse, the laboratory, and the child-care center, making a notable claim in each case. Her first transformation is centered around New England schoolhouses in the nineteenth century. The notable claim that arises in this chapter is the idea that spaces perform gender like humans do. Aligning herself with Judith Butler, she argues, “when a space takes on new gendered meanings, the bodies expected to inhabit it and the identities constructed within it also change” (33). Initially, the home was imagined as offering a feminized place of stability and comfort while the classroom was likened to a masculinist prison wherein students were harshly disciplined. When the harshness of the schoolroom was critiqued and remodeled, the classroom gradually became a space for women once it was reconfigured to be more like the feminine home. The subsequent entry of women into the teaching profession resulted in class mobility for some women while also devaluing the teaching profession as a whole, due to its perception as a form of feminized labor. Domestic scientists towards the end of the nineteenth century serve as the second transformative case study. The notable claim here is that ethos can be revised through spatial rhetoric. Domestic scientists, Enoch argues, revised the home into a site of scientific complexity. While these women, often conservative and white, frequently distanced themselves from the women’s rights movement, Enoch insightfully points out that their cautious rhetorical reconfiguration of the home allowed many women to pursue science education. Through domestic advice manuals and public kitchen demonstrations, homemaking was transformed into a practice that required a laboratory. Enoch acknowledges that this transformation was very white and relied on some normative conceptions of femininity, but it raises an intriguing set of implications. Of all the chapters in the book, this is perhaps the richest in scholarly opportunities. Those invested in how white women engage in rhetorical strategies of whiteness may find this chapter useful. Additionally, scholars in the rhetoric of science, medicine, and technology might see potential to approach their objects of study with spatio-rhetorical analysis. The final case study is devoted to how the wartime child care center was transformed into an acceptable place to offset domestic labor and how it reverted back to an undesirable place at the end of World War II. In this chapter, Enoch makes the notable claim that spatial rhetorics are capable of being emotive. The maternal qualities of the home had to be rhetorically [End Page 241] transferred to the wartime childcare center to get women working during the war. Enoch skillfully asserts that visual rhetorics and the enargeia of childcare employees cuddling with children communicated that the center could operate as a secondary home To convince women to return to...

While online learning and community engagement are not necessarily adversarial, this article explores the tensions between the two and how an online rhetoric course adapted place-based pedagogy to explore the idea of belonging. The assignment described here leverages online learning while sponsoring community engagement. The assignment invites students to learn about and participate in social justice action that, while accomplished virtually by way of Web 2.0 technologies and spaces, still connects students to the places that are significant to them. Such an approach is inherently invested in place-based pedagogy that frames social justice as abstract and complex issues that not only affect nation-states, but that also have tangible implications for privileged and marginalized groups in local communities (Flynn et al., 2010).

This assignment deploys place-based pedagogy in a basic writing course, and enacts it through first-person research in the form of a walking tour of a university campus. Students first read and discuss two texts about their campus: an article analyzing campus architecture and a philosophical treatise about the campus park. Students then marshal evidence gathered through a walking tour to argue with one of these texts. In addition to bolstering students’ confidence for contesting claims advanced by authorities, this assignment encourages students and teachers alike to cultivate a more deliberate awareness of their surroundings. Because this assignment is meant to be grounded in a specific locale, instructors adapting this prompt are encouraged to seek out texts addressing their own institutional settings.

This essay develops the concept of material inertia, a lens for studying artifacts of material and spatial rhetorics with a focus on long durations. The essay uses the case study of the DeWitt Clinton High School building, constructed in 1906 in New York City and still in use at CUNY John Jay College, to demonstrate how friction between the building’s design and use is exacerbated over decades. The essay argues for reading long-lived spaces via material inertia to understand the rhetorical force of non-human actors across time, and calls for scholarship in material rhetorics to take specifically durational approaches.

ABSTRACT Pandemics and plagues function rhetorically, by doing violence to the structures of discourse, sociality, hospitality, and mutual engagement that characterize ethical human interaction. They infect us, as rhetorical subjects, and reorient our capacity for engagement. The coronavirus's “novelty” renders it uncertain as to how long it will last or who will be infected next; the near-uniform response to it has been a forced distance of ourselves from others and a displacement from our itineraries and our locations. Through COVID-19 we are learning that pandemic does violence to our sense of place, to how we think of respite, and has highlighted our sense of vulnerability in the midst of others.

O’Connell’s Rhetoric of Seeing joins a growing list of titles interested in restoring performance and visuality to our understanding of ancient Greek culture and, especially, political and legal culture. This work distinguishes itself through its limited focus on the rhetorical function of seeing and visuality in extant forensic speeches. Each chapter addresses a different kind of seeing, often beginning with an overview of the relevant secondary literature, then considering other ancient genres or fields—Plato and Aristotle, poetry or history, medical or rhetorical treatises, and finally examining two or three important or representative examples from legal speeches. O’Connell divides the work into three “kinds” of seeing.First, he looks at what the audience can literally see. Part 1, “Physical Sight,” considers examples of visual bias concerning the physical appearance of litigants or others. This includes familiar arguments from probability (eikos) based on appearance: one need only look at Antigenes to know that he could not have overpowered Pantainetos (Demosthenes 37, Against Pantainetos); a glance at the pensioner’s disability and we can see that the charge of hubris is ridiculous (Lysias 31, For the Disabled Man). It is surprising here that O’Connell does not do more with the visual aspect of eikos arguments, which are said to have begun with Hermes’ infantile appeal to his own youth in his defense speech against Apollo: “Do I look like a cattle driver to you, a burly fellow?” (Hymn to Hermes 265). This is a central and well-trod aspect of ancient rhetorical theory that seems to call out for inclusion and that could have been given a new layer of interpretation through O’Connell’s visual approach. Counter-probability is rare in legal arguments but equally important in the development of rhetorical theory and with similar implications for visual rhetoric. The strong (or young) man who asserts that he would not have assaulted the weak (or old) man because he would be the first suspected depends in part upon similarly visible features of his person (Antiphon 2.2.3; cf. Aristotle 2.24.10–11).The final chapter of Part 1 takes up issues of movement and gesture, with references to gesture in Plato and Aristotle, a brief review of physiognomy, and then a discussion of Aeschines’ widely studied Against Timarkhos. There is brief mention of the rhetorical cannon of delivery or hupokrisis and the recommendations of Cicero, Quintilian, and Dionysius and more recent work on categories of gesture by Karsouris and Hughes, but O’Connell does not take up the rhetorical canon of delivery (hupokrisis) in depth. His discussion of delivery faces the same problems that most scholars face: there simply is no good way to talk about it as a general category. Either atomize the body to talk about hands, then faces, then movement, or settle for vague gestural and expressive categories and recommendations: modest and appropriate or excessive and inappropriate. Attending to specific cases and speeches is often more successful. O’Connell’s discussion of Aeschines’ speech Against Timarkhos goes further toward demonstrating his overall thesis than do his general comments.Second, we can observe the language of visuality in the speech itself, when the speaker asks the audience to look at something literally and directly as visual evidence, or figuratively or indirectly through terms of demonstration, display, and witnessing. Part 2, “The Language of Demonstration and Visibility,” looks at terms of seeing in the orations: deiknumi (demonstrate or display) and its variants (apodeixis, epideixis, endeixis, etc.), phaneros and phainomai (visible) and their variants (kataphanēs, apophainō, etc.), and martus (witness) and its variants. Chapter3 considers the language of display and witnessing, where speakers seek to prove their case by describing what has been shown and seen by witnesses, or where they demand witnesses to prove what has been asserted. “How else,” says Antiphon in On the Chorus Boy, “can I make true things trustworthy” except through the consistent affirmation of witnesses who were present? (Antiphon 6.29). This section is valuable for bringing into focus the centrality of visibility and sight to notions of truth, a factor that can easily be lost in translations. Thus, the speaker of On the Chorus Boy emphasizes not only that he was appointed a counselor and entered the council-house as such, but that he was seen (horōntes) and was visible (phaneros) doing so. O’Connell does not claim, but he enables one to conclude, that the infamous dichotomy between truth and probability in rhetorical theory typically devolves into these two kinds of seeing: what has been witnessed (and is therefore true) and what the situation “looks like” to the audience (and must be probable).Included here is a section on medical and philosophical interest in the visible as an epistemological link to the invisible. O’Connell quotes Anaxoagoras’ maxim, “Visible things are the face of things which are unclear” (101). This could lead to a discussion of the complex and rhetorically important doctrine of signs as tools of rhetorical argument. Instead, O’Connell moves on in chapter four to discuss how speakers use the language of visibility and demonstration to describe arguments. This, argues O’Connell, places jurors into the position of virtual witnesses themselves of something publicly known, as it was known that some grain dealers had been changing their prices over the course of a day (Lysias 22, Against the Grain Dealers). Or they are witnesses of arguments as demonstrations (epideixō). Speakers contrast what the opponent simply says (legei) with what the speaker will “demonstrate in an evident manner” (110). The language of display is thus used to differentiate mere telling from showing. This reference to visual metaphors for the persuasive effects of argument suggests a larger connection with rhetorical argument generally and the role of vision therein.Third, we can attend to imagination as internal sight, or what O’Connell calls “shared spectatorship,” when speakers “try to make the jurors visualize their version of events and accept it as true” (123). This includes a discussion of techniques of vivid description like enargeia, hyptyposis, or ekphrasis via detailed description. O’Connell looks specifically at described scenes of civic suffering, as when Lycurgus describes the panic after the Athenian defeat at Chaeronea. Shared spectatorship can also occur through the construction of “internal audiences—characters in a narrative who witness what is being described and whose reaction can function as a prompt and model for the jury, as when, in the speech Against Diogeiton (Lysias 32), the speaker recounts Diogeiton’s daughter speaking to the family about her father’s embezzlement and lying (150). Visualization can also be heightened through deictic pointing to the persons in court whose actions or suffering is being described, fusing what is physically seen (demonstratio ad oculo) with what is imagined (deixis ad phantasma): “this man here they seized and tied to the pillar” (Lysias fr. 279, 155). This takes us back to the beginning, which addressed seeing in performance space itself. This last section was for me the most interesting and informative, and it seemed the most widely applicable to forensic, and indeed all genres of oratory. Here too, I saw connections to a basic category of rhetorical discourse: narrative and narrative theory, to notions of realism and verisimilitude, to the conjuring of story worlds and the work of narrative inference.Certainly, anyone interested in visual and spatial rhetorics, bodily rhetoric, performance, and related topics will want to be familiar with O’Connell’s work. I found much to admire in every chapter, and more so as the book advanced to later sections and chapters. At the same time, in each section I found myself thinking about some clear and relevant connections to fundamentals of rhetorical theory—theories of probability and signs, of argument and narrative—that the work brushed up against but did not explore. Of course, O’Connell writes as a classicist, not a rhetorician, and we cannot expect any work to follow up every thread that it pulls on, particularly those outside the author’s bailiwick. So, we might rather say that this work promises to amply repay the attention of scholars of rhetorical history and theory for its insights into the operation of sight and seeing—physical, lexical, and imaginary—in Attic forensic speeches.

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

This article is an investigation of composing practices through which people create networks with mobile phones. By looking through the lens of actor-network theory, the author portrays the networking activity of mobile phone users as translation, what Latour describes as an infralanguage to which different disciplinary perspectives can be appended. Given how much mobile phone use is information-based, the author describes how five people composed on mobile phones to create coordinated networks of professional and domestic activity. To arrive at this discussion, the author first considers the objectives of mobile networking, which include creating a sense of place and coordination within that space. The author then describes the findings of a case study of mobile phone users who build translational networks. The discussion focuses on the participants’ composing practices.

Abstract Although scholars recognize the importance of recovery projects that aim to recenter women’s roles in black freedom struggles, when it comes to these memory practices, the “woman problem” of civil rights memory is more acknowledged than understood. This essay argues that memories of civil rights movements are mapped spatially and rhetorically to depict correlations among Jim Crow contexts and acts of black resistance. The relationship among these spatial and rhetorical configurations is termed the “rhetorical geography of memory.” Through an account of the rhetorical geography of memory of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, this essay posits that place, violence, and masculinity animate a relationship between exigency and response, producing a gendered landscape of memory that limits at the outset the conditions and possibilities for women’s emergence.

Looking back at my four years as editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric, I am thankful to all the authors, reviewers, and special issue editors whose hard work we see represented in volumes 15 through 18. I am also proud of the diversity and high quality of scholarship included in these volumes. I think that the journal’s contents prove that the history of rhetoric as a field has evolved beyond its original preoccupation with ancient and medieval rhetoric into a robust scholarly enterprise that illuminates rhetorical theory, practice, and pedagogy in all historical periods. What binds this diverse set of studies together is the historical lens, a perspective that is sensitive to discontinuities and disruptions, to power struggles, and to the performative complexity of rhetoric as an embodied practice.This is not to say that we all abide by a fixed methodology. On the contrary, historians of rhetoric do not take their approach for granted but instead continue to debate how their scholarly habituation and lived experiences influence their theories and methods of historical research. Witness, for example, Practicing Histories: On the Doing of History and the Making of Historians in Rhetoric, a special issue guest edited by Christa J. Olson (volume 15, number 1, 2012). As Olson remarks in her introduction, “historiographers take aim at points of disconnection” (3) and stitch together places and moments that may not appear related.That this sort of opportune stitching together can generate powerful insights is apparent in the journal’s special issues, most of which began as American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) symposia. Rhetoric and Its Masses (guest edited by Dave Tell) and Rhetoric and Freedom (guest edited by Susan C. Jarratt) offer not only broad-ranging explorations of their respective topics but also demonstrate the value of historical inquiry into some of the most abiding issues in rhetorical studies. ASHR symposia and special issues that grow out of them allow us to bring together the work of established and young scholars alike, and as such they illustrate the value of ASHR and its journal as sites of scholarly training of historians of rhetoric.In addition to themed special issues, I would like to highlight some of the exciting trends that I believe are gaining prominence in the history of rhetoric. One such trend is the exploration of spatial and visual practices in different historical periods. For example, Diana Eidson’s study of the Celsus Library at Ephesus probes the power of spatial rhetoric to address its historical audiences, both elite and nonelite. Or take Julia Marie Smith’s article on The Book of Margery Kempe, in which she examines the contributions of multiple hands to this medieval manuscript’s central narrative. Not incidentally, both authors use images to support their arguments. Although Advances can accommodate only black-and-white illustrations in print, the journal’s online version allows one to view their color versions.Another trend is the investigation of the relationship between rhetoric and religion in diverse historical and cultural contexts. In the past three years, the journal published studies of theological influences on rhetorical theories and pedagogical doctrines of such figures as Augustine, Austin Phelps, and William Enfield; analyses of the argumentative strategies used by medieval rabbis and Jaina mystics; and essays on the use of religious appeals deployed by nineteenth-century African American speakers. Besides being “sermonic” to begin with (Johannesen, Strickland, and Eubanks 1970), rhetoric often derives much of its poignancy from a connection to religious rituals and imaginaries. Examples of this connection are ubiquitous in contemporary culture; consider President Barack Obama’s spontaneous singing of “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for the slain parishioners of a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, or Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on climate change. Historians of rhetoric are particularly well positioned to shine the light on such interventions.I do not mean to suggest, of course, that classical and medieval rhetoric have been exhausted as areas of inquiry; quite the opposite. If recent publications are any indication, we still have much to learn from reinterpreting Plato and Aristotle as well as from revisiting the Middle Ages. As someone who is personally invested in regarding afresh rhetoric’s ancient heritage, I wholeheartedly agree with Olson’s (2012) claim: “we look again at old ideas and find ourselves with new questions” (7).This is why I am thrilled to welcome Art Walzer, a renowned scholar of Greek and Roman rhetoric and a beloved mentor to many historians of rhetoric, as the journal’s incoming editor in chief. I am confident that under Art’s guidance the journal will continue to deepen our understanding of traditional sites of historical inquiry as well as grow in promising new directions.Ekaterina V. HaskinsRensselaer Polytechnic Institute

This piece discusses the use of sense of place as a focal point for studying literature to lead students to consider the complexity of the human relation to the physical world, the universal connections between people and landscapes, and the reciprocal impact of these relationships. The intent is to create fertile ground through the literature, class discussions, journal writing, and personal action for an environmental consciousness to emerge. Too, as students study literary characters’ interactions with places, they become more aware of their own developing relationships with their shared city and their place in, for many college students, their new community. The author presents these ideas from a pedagogical perspective that lays the foundation for such a literature course, including defining the concept “sense of place,” selecting texts, and creating assignments that encourage student involvement in the local community. The ideas covered are not limited to a literature course, however, and might be applied to writing classes and interdisciplinary disciplines.

ABSTRACT Building upon the insights of historians of rhetoric and architecture, this study examines the Celsus Library at Ephesus through the lenses of literacy studies and hegemony. By drawing on first-hand observations of the extant structure and historical studies that re-create its original appearance and relationship with its architectural context, the author speculates on the uses and functions of the library during the early second century CE. While the library's elite patrons experienced its instrumental impact, passersby from all levels of society witnessed the building's hegemonic display of Rome's cultural and political power.

Space matters, and regardless of our commitments to one theoretical framework or another, we should continue to invite students to write about space and about their embodied experiences with/in space. In so doing, however, we should be mindful of the worldviews our spatial rhetorics and pedagogies present and authorize, however implicitly.

The influences of Stoicism on the historical development of rhetorical theory are deeply interwoven into the history of rhetoric, from Cicero to the Enlightenment.1 In recent years, interest in the Stoics has enjoyed a revival in conjunction with discussions of cosmopolitanism, most notably the lively debate surrounding Martha Nussbaum's (2002) proposal for a cosmopolitan education, and some of the articles presented in this issue remind us of the connection between the Stoics and certain conceptions of cosmopolitanism. My interest in the convergence of these conversations stems from my own work on the possibilities and necessity of a cosmopolitan rhetoric for our time, a time characterized by massive displacements: the movement of people through geographical and social space, the homogenization of space, and the technological abolition of space (Darsey 2003).Nussbaum's inquiry into cosmopolitanism is occasioned by an urgent sense of movement across boundaries. Our time has been described as one in which “rootlessness, movement, homelessness and nomadism are the motifs of the day” (Skribs, Kendall, and Woodward 2004, 115). bell hooks begins her recent book, Belonging: A Culture of Place, with this poignant observation: “As I travel around I am stunned by how many citizens in our nation feel lost, feel bereft of a sense of direction, feel as though they cannot see where our journeys lead, that they cannot know where they are going. Many folks feel no sense of place” (2009, 1). As Pico Iyer puts it: For more and more people … the world is coming to resemble a diaspora, filled with new kinds of beings—Gastarbeiters and boat people and marielitos—as well as new kinds of realities: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland. One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese pho cafés; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the furthest point is just a click away. (2001, 10–11)So Nussbaum, drawing from Stoic sources, feels the imperative to move beyond the borders of the nation state (2002, 3).In the world described by hooks, Iyer, and Nussbaum, the question for rhetoric is this: What is the proper rhetorical response to an increasingly globalized and cosmopolitan world? In a world in which place is rapidly disappearing, from where do arguments come? How can an audience be addressed? About this aspect of radical displacement, Iyer writes: “The Global Soul may see so many sides of every question that he never settles on a firm conviction.” The answer to the question “Where do you stand?” is, for Iyer, “treacherous” (2001, 25). Place has historically been inextricably connected to meaning-making and has, at least prior to very recent time, been the most convenient site of “culture.” As evidence of this relationship, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson point to world maps on which the world is represented as a collection of countries, “inherently fragmented space, divided by different colors into diverse national societies, each ‘rooted’ in its proper place… . It is so taken for granted that each country embodies its own distinctive culture and society that the terms ‘society’ and ‘culture’ are routinely appended to the names of nation-states” (1997, 34). The mapping described by Gupta and Ferguson suggests two things: (1) a deep desire for definition, the dual and simultaneous operation of inclusion and exclusion; and (2) the conceit that the borders marked by the colored patches are as stable and constant as the mountains, rivers, and other geographical features that populate the map.The fiction of stability presented by the cartography exposed, where, then, do we find grounds for argument in a world in which stable ground has disappeared? What are the bases for argument? Where are the places we search for arguments in a world of flux? Are there any more commonplaces? One temptation, evidenced in the summer 2010 “Restore America” rally in Washington, DC, is to retreat into provincialism. Any cursory survey of recent news stories provides a disheartening number of examples of attempts to reconcile conflicting ethical claims too often retreating to a reassertion of the local. At the time of this writing, those stories include the passing of legislation in the Slovak Republic making that country the only European country to require that its national anthem be played daily in schools, at each town council meeting, and on all public radio and television programs. This, along with the requirement that all state business be conducted in the Slovak language has created concern among the Hungarian minority that these laws are part of a movement to ostracize ethnic Hungarians. In March 2010, a group of Latin American nations joined in a new bloc that excludes the United States and Canada, and in April, investigators found evidence of the revival of human sacrifice among Kali worshippers in Bolpur, India. Throughout the spring of 2010, the revival of Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq threatened the U.S. hope of establishing a stable government there, and a conflict between Google and the government of the People's Republic of China over access to information assumed the dimensions of an international crisis.In the United States in the spring of 2010, Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigration became the focus of a nationwide debate, revealing a concern with the movement of people across boundaries. At the same time, a new battle in the ongoing war over sex education revealed concern with the movement of ideas across boundaries. Ross Douthat, in the New York Times, described the latest battle as “at heart … a battle over community standards. Berkeley liberals don't want their kids taught that premarital sex is wrong. Alabama churchgoers don't want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation” (2010, 16). Finally, in a case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court in April, 2010 the justices were asked to consider whether a Christian organization of law students at the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco could be allowed to discriminate against students unable or unwilling to affirm the group's statement of faith, which includes the promise to refrain from sexual conduct outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. That is, the court asked to what degree should those sharing a public space and resources be required to adhere to the same values?The examples of retreats into parochial sureties can be multiplied almost indefinitely: burkas in schools in France; the continuing controversy over how to handle Eritrean families living in the United States who insist on subjecting their daughters to what, for them, is a religious ritual, but which we call female genital mutilation; states such as Oklahoma and Wyoming drawing up bans on Sharia law. And so on.On October 16, 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made international news when, in a speech to young members of the Christian Democratic Union, she declared multiculturalism to be an utter failure in Germany (Weaver 2010). The following week, William Falk, in his editorial in The Week, wrote: The boundaries between cultures are eroding, due to widespread immigration, economic interdependence, and the Internet, forcing modern societies into an uncomfortable paradox. We believe that every cultural group, religion, and nation has the right to self-determination. But we also hold as a bedrock principle that every human being is born with inalienable rights—including the 50 percent of us who are women. Is it our business to free Muslim women from their shrouds and subservience, to bring a halt to female genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East? Do we have the right to object to China's insistence that democracy and human rights do not apply there? Genteel tolerance alone will not resolve these questions. The collision of values has begun. How that conflict plays out will determine the shape of the next half-century. (2010, 7)As Falk's editorial suggests, each of the conflicts referred to here is the symptom of a contested boundary: in some cases a boundary that has been transgressed, in other cases a rampart being built against the barbarians who are perceived to be at the gate. These fragile walls and fences have failed to maintain what Gupta and Ferguson call the “play of differences” necessary to meaning-making. “The structures of feeling that enable meaningful relationships with particular locales, constituted and experienced in a particular manner, necessarily include the marking of ‘self’ and ‘other’ through identification with larger collectivities,” they write. “To be a part of a community is to be positioned as a particular kind of subject, similar to others within the community and different from those who are excluded from it” (1997, 19). Rhetorically, these examples represent instances in which enthymemes have failed to cross borders, geographical propinquity without community; those with no shared grounds for agreement find themselves having to share the same social space.The alternative to provincialism as a response to an increasingly complex and integrated world is cosmopolitanism. In 1998, Ulrich Beck published in The New Statesman a “Cosmopolitan Manifesto,” declaring that, just as 150 years prior the moment had been ripe for The Communist Manifesto, the moment was ripe, at the dawn of a new millennium, for a cosmopolitan manifesto: The Cosmopolitan Manifesto is about transnational-national conflict and dialogue which has to be opened up and organised. What is this global dialogue to be about? About the goals, values and structures of a cosmopolitan society. About whether democracy will be possible in a global age… . The key idea for a Cosmopolitan Manifesto is that there is a new dialectic of global and local questions which do not fit into national politics… .These questions are already part of the political agenda—in the localities and regions, in governments and public spheres both national and international. But only in a transnational framework can they be properly posed, debated and resolved. For this there has to be a reinvention of politics, a founding and grounding of the new political subject: that is—cosmopolitan parties. These represent transnational interests transnationally, but also work within the arenas of national politics. (1998, 28)Beck's call repeatedly draws our attention to place and to the necessity of transcending place. Beck is concerned with the issues of a world in which our fates are bound together but our focus too often remains stubbornly local. Consider the recent climate talks in Copenhagen and the ongoing debates over global warming, what to do about it, and who ought to do it.But Beck's manifesto is notable more for its representativeness than for its originality. Seventy-one years before Beck published his manifesto, Hugh Harris, writing in the wake of “the great war” and two years after the First International Conference on Child Welfare, surveyed the calls for cosmopolitanism among his contemporaries. Harris noted that, while the events of the early years of the twentieth century had done much to give the ideal of cosmopolitanism its “present intellectual currency,” the ideal itself “is not merely ephemeral doctrine, but one that has been transmitted to us through the ages” (1927, 1). Harris notes the “prevalent opinion” that cosmopolitanism in the Western world begins with the Stoics (2). Though Harris sets out to correct what he identified as the “prevalent opinion … that prior to the Alexandrian age and to the foundation of the Stoic school, Greek thought had not advanced beyond the conceptions of a narrow city-state patriotism and of an irreconcilable barrier between Hellenes and barbarians” (2). Harris locates the Greek origins of the cosmopolitan ideal much more broadly—in poetry, science, philosophy, and religion.The prevalent opinion, fueled by the proclamation of Diogenes of Sinope that he was a “citizen of the world,” is tenacious, and it was given a major infusion of new energy when Martha Nussbaum published her article “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” in 1994 in the Boston Review. There were 29 responses to Nussbaum's article published along with the article itself, and two years later the article was republished in book form along with eleven of the original responses and five new ones (Nussbaum 2002, 3). For all of the various responses the article has provoked, it is notable that almost no one takes issue with Nussbaum's claim that the intellectual lineage of cosmopolitanism in the West runs from Diogenes the Cynic through the Stoics to the Immanuel Kant of Perpetual Peace. I want to suggest that, as students of rhetoric, perhaps we should.From a rhetorical perspective, Nussbaum's proposal for a cosmopolitan education presents at least four problems. First, Nussbaum celebrates the Stoics as champions of a universalizing and antiprovincial rationality, but the emphasis on rationality, necessarily if paradoxically, is exclusionary. As Peter Euben has noted in his cross-examination of Nussbaum's proposal, Stoicism sponsored “a new exclusiveness based on differential commitment to and practice of rationality… . Very few exceptional humans could be full members in the community of reason,” Euben goes on to argue (2001, 266, 268–270). Rhetoric has long been identified with democracy and inclusiveness, and contemporary work—beginning with Stephen Toulmin and extending through Walter Fisher's work on narrative and Michael Billig's work on argument—has made great strides toward maintaining and even extending that tradition through the articulation and legitimation of mundane forms of argument that are not necessarily logical. Work by Sally Planalp and others has extended our understanding of the role of the emotions in persuasion.Second, Nussbaum's proposal neglects the praxis of real political contention. As Fred Dallmayr has put it: “[I]t is insufficient—on moral and practical grounds—to throw a mantle of universal rules over humankind without paying simultaneous attention to public debate and the role of political will formation” (2003, 434). Dallmayr goes on to remind us that Diogenes the Cynic, whose example was followed by most of the Roman Stoics (Cicero being the exception), “was described as an ‘exile’ from his city who paid little heed to ‘political thought’ and adopted a ‘strikingly apolitical stance’” (435). Gertrude Himmelfarb notes that Nussbaum “quotes the Stoics at some length as proponents of the idea of a universal ‘moral community’ and ‘world citizenship.’ But she quotes Aristotle not at all. Yet Aristotle's dictum, ‘Man is by nature a political animal,’ has proved to be far more prescient than the Stoic doctrine” (2002, 74). While the question of nature in the human political character has been contested ground at least since Hobbes, we have, whether by nature or by necessity, historically found our existence as part of a polis, and there can be little contesting of Aristotle's asseveration that “politics is the master art,” and rhetoric its ethical branch. A rhetorical theory that neglects politics be no rhetorical theory at and a cosmopolitan that neglects politics be of many of the issues our world within itself a toward the very that the call for a cosmopolitan to to the one the to all human as of their shared for against based on or the other of is by extending to only in the in which they are with (2003, and Nussbaum's proposal for a cosmopolitanism based on universal reason is to our in the degree that it is itself in it is the of our that the grounds of reason itself have been reason has no from which to if we to the claims of against the of the the universal As puts it, of and the cultural of the universal work against its claim to a (2002, as Gertrude Himmelfarb of the universal values and of are not only in practice by a part of they are not in all of in perhaps even Western (2002, response to the of the universal is to it as an of of and … an alternative to Nussbaum's I am to a as the for a theory of rhetoric, a theory of rhetoric that can the world of and and among The of were early in a they were citizens of the and though they were notably by for their as they the of and it was their from that allowed them to put moral questions at the of public Harris includes the in his survey of the of cosmopolitanism in them with the and the and in particular to the of While most of the the of among them only a few of those an between the of the and their Harris Yet it is that is in a of and their to the Western intellectual tradition may be a rhetorical practice with this cosmopolitan following the of that the while they may be and are for a cosmopolitan rhetoric their multiculturalism into or a kind of that the were of the point of or that their were based on is not by the and contemporary find evidence of ethical in the of the the of concern with in interest in the social of proper the in which the to rhetoric bring about for the and us that there is evidence for all of the that they were in politics, often at very necessarily then, making ethical and that or four of the as a of the political they represented beyond the the evidence even more if we include who for the of over war and for a who to his what in to as of It is not that the any idea of but that they it as “the of of in to the Stoics who to and that the case can be a cosmopolitan rhetoric based on the have these over Nussbaum's First, it be a deeply or not the were of rhetoric, they were inextricably with the rhetorical and political of their The were of a rhetoric, being in displacement, ought to the of a world with the of The were and as as as the were also as and is not to the movement of but as Kendall, and Woodward is about of and just as much as it is about of is not only but also and As a rhetoric in displacement, a rhetoric should the of a rhetoric, not bound by a universal ought to be to forms of argument and the possibilities for argument and in that a Stoic rhetoric is not and as and others have us out of the of a alternative for in the between the two world and in that to our own moment in Hugh Harris the poignant for a cosmopolitan understanding that he found in the intellectual of There is, on the one a to see our historical as in of there is, on the other a to historical for our as that we have this before and that our will see us through In a rhetoric represent a with the of but one that has never enjoyed widespread this is its perhaps this time we can it

Research Article| April 01 2006 Place-Based Pedagogy for the Arts and Humanities Eric L. Ball; Eric L. Ball Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Alice Lai Alice Lai Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2006) 6 (2): 261–287. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2005-004 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Eric L. Ball, Alice Lai; Place-Based Pedagogy for the Arts and Humanities. Pedagogy 1 April 2006; 6 (2): 261–287. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2005-004 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Editors’ Note: This photo essay, created by an undergraduate student at Howard University enrolled in a service learning class taught by Arvilla Payne-Johnson, preserves and documents the graffiti at the now closed Washington D.C. area Lorton Prison. The essay highlights a genre of hidden literacies claimed by inmates even in spaces of vast power differentials and exaggerated social control. We suggest that readers inspired by this project to pursue similar work also consult Jeff Ferrell’s Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (NY: Garland, 1993), Ralph Cintron’s Angels’ Town : Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday, and Pete Vandenberg et al.’s “Confronting Clashing Discourses: Writing the Space between Classroom and Community” in Reflections 2.2 (Spring 2002): 19-39.

Globalization, or “fast” capitalism, has changed the workplace and writing in it dramatically. Composition epistemologies and practices, elaborated during the twentieth century in tandem with Taylorized workplace literacy requirements, fail to embrace the complexities of writerly sensibilities necessary to students entering the new workforce. To update these epistemologies and practices, MA students in professional writing were positioned as autoethnographers of workplace cultures, reporting to classmates on organizational structures and practices as they affected discursive products and processes. Their studies produced a database of petits recits on workplace cultures, and their work is analyzed for the ways in which it forecasts subjective work identities of writers in the years ahead. Implications are drawn for composition administration, curriculum design, course design, and collaborative work among academics and writers in private and public spheres.

(1990). A sense of place, a spirit of adventure: Implications for the study of regional rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 225-232.