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The phrase “It’s just a cycle” is commonly articulated in coastal resilience efforts and it also shapes broader public debates about climate change. Identifying the structure of arguments around cycles is a useful starting point for defining differences in perspective, but there is more to competing claims about cycles. It is this <em>more</em> that this essay aims to explore, starting with an opening example from an engaged rhetorical ethnographic project with Maine’s clam fishery. The example helps set up a methodological orientation to working with cycles within resilience-focused collaborations that draws from aesthetics and poetics. This approach aims to show how cycles shape world making and how attending to cycles as a trope can create a space for critical disruptions of colonial patterns. This is a space of intimate connection that allows cyclical rhythms, like those of tides, to help reveal a passageway to resilience.

Book Review| March 01 2019 Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention. By Candice Rai. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016; pp. xiii + 244. $54.95 cloth. Bridie McGreavy Bridie McGreavy University of Maine Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2019) 22 (1): 149–152. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.1.0149 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bridie McGreavy; Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2019; 22 (1): 149–152. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.1.0149 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT Rhetoric teems with ecologically inclined thoughts. This article's interest in “ecology” arises from the circumstance of rhetoric's multiple ontologies. We revise three commonplaces of theory to support discussions that follow from understanding rhetoric's ontology as an emergent, materially diverse phenomenon, shifting the emphasis from agency to capacity, from violence to vulnerability, and from recalcitrance to resilience. The proposed commonplaces treat ecology as an orientation to patterns and relationships in the world, not as a science. The article is organized by these three interrelated transitions. The first transition defines capacity more fully in contrast to symbol use as human agency. The second moves from thinking of rhetorical force as imposition, which is tied to violence, to understanding it as a distributed sense of capacity derived from mutual vulnerabilities between entities. The third suggests that the persistence of rhetorical capacities stems from systemic adaptability and sustainability (resilience) rather than individuated abilities to resist (recalcitrance).