This article proposes keeping with as a rhetorical practice used by communities to maintain cultural heritages in unfamiliar or unwelcoming settings. Grounded in interviews from participatory research with urban Appalachian advocates in Cincinnati, Ohio, the article provides a view of cultural rhetorics in action at points of community crisis. The article argues that keeping with is a rhetorical migration practice that helps account for a range of rhetorical practices rhetors use to maintain cultural connections to homes and heritages.

This essay explores “viral circulation” and “slow circulation” as two alternate ethics for rhetorical decision making in civic settings. I analyze interviews with media producers from civic organizations in central Appalachia in order to illustrate the ways community and regional-based rhetorics strive for slow circulation through strategies of “rhetorical persistence” in public discourses. I argue that framing “viral” or “slow” circulation as ethical models helps us understand speed of circulation as both an ethical and rhetorical choice. The essay concludes with a discussion of ways that slow circulation offers an ethic better suited to the circulation of civic rhetorics in some community advocacy contexts.