Some critics have theorized redemption in prison memoir as capitulation to prison’s disciplinary gaze. But a closer look at African-American memoirs emerging from the War on Drugs reveals that redemption is not an artifice of oppression or a singular destination but a topic for rhetorical invention. This essay shows how two memoirists—Jeff Henderson and Susan Burton—formed narrative identity from traumatic experiences and oppressive conditions of poverty and racism that led to crime and incarceration. Redemption begins when they question interpretations of that experience and create new narrative identities in the social worlds of upward mobility, recovery, and emancipation. Inventing redemption does not relieve them from the burdens of their histories but gives them new ways of relating to their histories and, in this way, new hope in controlling their futures. The rhetoric of redemption in African-American prison memoir is a powerful counterweight to the rhetoric of mass incarceration depicting African-Americans as unredeemable.

Agency in prison writing is often theorized as resistance to the material conditions of incarceration and the ideological forces of the State. Situating agency in the larger history of mass incarceration (1970 – 2010) and in the memoirs of those who lived through it, however, shifts the focus from the prison writer as subject resisting an oppressive system and toward the prison writer as rhetor navigating the changing discourses and material conditions of mass incarceration in registers of agency that include resistance, self-determination, and recovery.

Imprisonment in America has become a form of civil death that blocks the capacity of ordinary people to develop intellectually, creatively, and ethically in ways more harmonious with the polity. Prison paideia in the grain of the sophists reconnects the imprisoned with the polis by challenging all assembled to inquire freely about the nomos that has shaped their perceptions of things; to make the weaker cases about those things, including themselves, stronger; and through dissoi logoi, to discover a culturally diverse aretê animating the demos they could become.

Rhetorical theorists have argued that agency is a communal experience, but material conditions in jail and society often prevent prisoners and college students from experiencing it in meaningful ways that embrace difference. Challenging those conditions by bringing both groups together in a writing workshop enables everyone to resist discourses that would name them and to inquire, collaboratively, about pressing social problems like gun violence. This essay shows how a prisoner and a college student sustained that inquiry in writing, moving from metanoia or regret into kairos—the seizing of their day and the experience of agency. The ultimate value of that experience transcends the here and now of the workshop to become the building block of a better public sphere.

A materialist rhetoric in service learning is needed to teach students how to discover the arguments that already exist in the communities they wish to serve; analyze the effectiveness of those arguments; collaboratively produce viable alternatives with community partners; and assess the impact of their interventions. Through a discussion of a project that attempted but failed to increase parent involvement in Chicago’s public schools, this article shows why rhetorical production needs to be supported by the kind of rhetorical analysis that reveals how institutions exercise power. Materialist rhetoric challenges students, teachers, and community partners to write for social change and define change concretely, in terms of institutional practices or policies that they wish to influence.

Describing a service-learning project in Chicago public housing, the author argues for a reconception of counterpublics that takes the individual (and individual development) as the primary unit of analysis. The real question for service-learning educators, he suggests, is not whether the private and the public can inform each other, but whether we are prepared to discern the ways in which they already do inform each other in the communities we wish to serve. The students in the project developed a much broader conception of themselves as members of the human family, with the consequence that, although social problems in public housing were not changed, public discourse and private convictions about race in those communities were altered, suggesting that cultural difference may be less of a problem and more of a resource in service learning courses.

This article compares three rhetorical approaches to accident analysis: materialist, classical, and constructivist. The focal points for comparison are the two accident reports issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)—reports that attempted (and failed) to persuade the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) to change a problematic policy about rail communication alongside its technology for rail communication. The central question the article asks is, How can rhetorical theory help explain the CTA”s inaction, which ultimately led to property damage, injury, and death? Classical and constructivist approaches, emphasizing rational deliberation between equals, on one hand, and the social construction of technical knowledge between professionals, on the other, offer plausible explanations for what went wrong. But only the materialist approach appears capable of discerning the ideological nature of the CTA”s resistance to the NTSB”s recommendations.