This symposium builds from our discussions about communities, academia, activism, and access as four faculty members with different positionalities and perspectives to advocate for the protection of relations in the face of universities’ demands for access to peoples, communities, and lands. In each of four individually authored reflections, we recount our experiences working with and being in community as part of our academic practice. We extend from work in disability studies to explain that while access is generally understood to be good, and often is, access can also be the precursor to exploitation. We argue that to mitigate that risk, we can take on a positive gatekeeping function as part of being in community with care.

This profile features the authors' shared work to co-create both a community literacy project, Stories from the Flood, and the undergraduate community-based learning courses that supported the effort. Stories from the Flood works to assist community members in southwestern Wisconsin to share their flood experiences, aiming to support community healing and serve as a resource for future conversations about flood recovery and resilience. Our collaboration on Stories from the Flood demonstrates the importance of non-university expertise and aims to daylight and correct structural asymmetries that render these rural watersheds both particularly vulnerable to flooding and absent of government intervention.

This article offers a revision to an existing social science methodology, Q methodology, through “Q-Rhetoric.” After detailing Q methodology’s theoretical underpinnings and practical method, and persistent critiques of the methodology, the article employs perspectives from rhetorical theory and Amerindian anthropology to suggest a methodological correction. It concludes by detailing the use of Q-Rhetoric to intervene in a Wisconsin stream management controversy, proposing Q-Rhetoric as a pragmatic and theoretically sound methodology for working across disciplinary divides.

Graduate programs in the sciences offer minimal support for writing, yet there is an increasing need for scientists to engage with the public and policy makers. To address this need, the authors describe an innovative, cross-disciplinary, National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded training program in rhetoric and writing for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduate students and faculty at the University of Rhode Island. The program offers a theory-driven, flexible, scalable model that could be adopted in a variety of institutional contexts.

There is a necessary and growing preoccupation in rhetoric of science with the real-world consequences of our work and with the mediating role rhetoric should play at the nexus of science-publics-policy. Emerging from these discussions are calls by Gross, Ceccarelli, and Herndl for thoughtful and practical action. This paper builds from this preoccupation with thoughtful praxis, highlighting three funded collaborations that offer a vision for engaged, mutually beneficial, consequential collaborations in rhetoric of science. Taken together, these collaborations constitute an argument for Herndl’s “applied rhetoric of science.” They move beyond transactional models of collaboration and posit a transdisciplinary vision for rhetoric of science as an integral part of the practice of science itself.