In our introduction to this special issue on cultural rhetorics, we as editors recognize that members of the field maintain many different approaches and frameworks. This diversity suggests that the work of prioritizing emplaced stories over universalizing theories brings cultural rhetoricians together, making research and teaching accountable first to communities, rather than the academy, and continuously examining our ethical commitments to O/others. This work, then, requires that scholars situate themselves within networks of places and spaces, cultures and peoples, power and privilege, so that we may practice relationality and accountability, actively seeking to make meaningful connections within and across research sites, and create space for silenced voices while building a more just world and disciplinary community.

This Rhetoric Review Symposium extends long overdue conversations about racism in the discipline begun in a NCTE/CCCC cross-caucus College Composition and Communication symposium titled “Diversity ...

This essay was composed on the historic territories of the Akokisa/Orcoquisa and Karankawa peoples. In 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that what bothered voters most about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was his mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina. The previous November, Trump had ridiculed Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a condition that affects the joints. Footage of the act soon dominated the news cycle, and the Clinton campaign stressed the cruelty of Trump’s caricature to distinguish between the two candidates. Trump’s campaign had already been characterized by racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, but it was his ableism that—ostensibly—threatened to derail his run. Memes circulated on social media advanced sentiments like, “As long as I live I’ll never understand how it didn’t end here. #ImpeachTrump” (Lloyd, 2017).

Attention to disability and undocumented status illuminates the impact of in/visibility on multiply marginalized individuals. Visibility can prove dangerous for vulnerable populations exposed to physical and symbolic violence; yet invisibility also poses risks. Nevertheless, visibility and invisibility can also be useful rhetorical schemes. Here, I focus on branding and non/images to interrogate this ambivalence in the case of Rosa Maria Hernandez, a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy brought to the United States when she was three months old, and that of Eva Chavez, an undocumented activist whose defense campaign publicized her role as primary caretaker of her 11-year-old disabled citizen son. These cases show that, for targeted people, in/visibility is gradated, compulsory, and tactical, producing presence and belonging relative to exposure and risk.

Based in instructors’ embodied perspectives,positionality storiesare a critical methodology that opens space for students to consider academic counternarratives that contest educational conditions and assumptions. Sharing two stories here, we illustrate how educators might use these to help students from marginalized communities develop connections with teachers and navigate academia.

In this article, I argue for pedagogies that explicitly center the embodied perspectives of students and their audiences. Using Stephanie Kerschbaum’s concept of “anecdotal relations,” or orientations towards disability that inform rhetorical transactions, I analyze my academic experiences as a Chicana with “invisible” disabilities to highlight how race and disability are both highlighted and erased in pedagogical contexts. I present two personal stories from my time as a student and as an instructor, respectively, to show how instructors’ orientations towards race and disability are typically based around impressions of deficit even as the importance of race and disability as critical heuristics are overlooked. Then I explain how my students and I attempt to build critical embodiment into our writing to compose more inclusively to suggest how we may all become more attuned to our audiences’ embodied needs.