Coalitional politics have largely been examined across social and cultural differences that serve shared political commitments, and the rhetorical force of situated and material locations remains an open question. To provide a theoretical analytic for these excesses, I offer pluriversal and rhetorical understandings of divergence and diplomacy for coalitional politics. I demonstrate these concepts through a rhetorical analysis of a community organization from San Antonio, Texas, and their coalitional politics, which partially emerge as a response to extreme weather events and urban development. The upshot reveals that rhetorical approaches to divergence and diplomacy can help capture the material obligations and constraints across heterogeneous yet interdependent worlds. Such theoretical tools will be increasingly important for coalitional rhetorics and politics responding to climate breakdown.

Rhetoric is a resilient art.Its stability and mutability across centuries attest to its dynamism as a domain of knowledge production and engaged practice.While resilience is understood differentially across scholarly and popular domains, it nearly always addresses questions of how to respond, adapt, and persist through adverse circumstances (for a review of this diverse literature, see Flynn, Sotirin, & Brady, 2012).For example, resilience has become a key trope for describing the practices of (bio)security, sustainability, human health, child development, infrastructure, technological systems, and other common sites of study in rhetorics of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM).Recently, rhetoricians have also taken up resilience; these scholars are interested both in using rhetoric to understand resilience and using resilience to understand rhetoric.This special issue of POROI is intended to further the scholarly conversation on resilience rhetorics.In particular, we hope to highlight the deeply rhetorical, critical, cultural, and materialsemiotic work being done by and with theories and metaphors of resilience.The collection of articles assembled here initially arose from our experience co-chairing the Association for Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine's (ARSTM) second annual preconference at the biennial Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2018.The ARSTM preconferences at RSA and the National Communication Association (NCA) meetings always focus on a core theme; other themes have included trust, evidence, and translation (ARSTM, 2019).

Recently I was chatting with our environmental science faculty about a monarch butterfly project and the lead scientist exclaimed, “Citizen Science?! That’s a bad phrase around here.” Our conversat...