Rhetoric & Public Affairs Mar 2021

Digitality, Diversity, and the Future of Rhetoric and Public Address

E. Johanna Hartelius ; Jessica H. Lu ; Damien Smith Pfister ; Carly S. Woods

Abstract

AbstractThe pandemic and economic catastrophes of 2020 and the forms of resistance that surged against racist systemic and physical violence indicate, we contend, that studying public address in the present moment requires attention to the mutual contingency of rhetoric and digitality. Relying on interdisciplinary literatures and a global perspective, we direct such attention along three vectors: platforms, commons, and methods. We indicate how theorizing rhetoric and digitality transforms critical and historical traditions. In expanding the purview of the public address tradition while retaining the tradition’s hermeneutic potential, we emphasize the need to challenge disciplinary terms and the desirability of expanded analytical methods. We submit that by not attending sufficiently to the advent and diffusion of digital media technologies, public address scholarship misses opportunities to shape ongoing conversations about how rhetoric mediates public affairs; and that insofar as struggles for racial justice are bound up with, not just mediated by, digitality, the prospects of diversifying rhetoric’s professoriate increase when research on this topic is central rather than peripheral.

Journal
Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Published
2021-03-01
DOI
10.14321/rhetpublaffa.24.1-2.0253
Open Access
Closed
Topics
digital rhetoric race and writing

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

  1. Steele et al. (2023)
    “I Wish I Could Give You This Feeling”: Black Digital Commons and the Rhetoric …
    Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Cites in this index (1)

  1. Brown (2018)
    Remembering Silence: Bennett College Women and the 1960 Greensboro Student Sit-Ins
    Rhetoric Society Quarterly
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CrossRef global citation count: 1 View in citation network →

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