This essay offers a pluralized conception of local rhetorics. The local has traditionally been conceived as the backdrop or flat surface where rhetoric/discourse is situated, or at best as a contextual dimension of rhetorical situations. The history of usage of this term – evoking a fix and inert connotation that often indicates a bounded locality or site – has contributed to its neglect as a tool for rhetorical theory, while its actual use in rhetorical praxis has proliferated in conjunction to the turn to field and site-based methodologies and practices. By drawing on fieldwork about the rhetoricity of a post-disaster locality to ground my theoretical reflections, here I offer a conceptualization of local rhetorics via multiple ontologies and ecological theories. Finally, throughout the essay, I suggest a rhetorical-topographic approach as a methodological orientation to integrate existing theoretical and methodological pathways for exploring the multiple rhetoricity of the local.

In this review essay, we look back at the evolution of the rhetoric of science by reviewing the Case Studies and Issues and Methods volumes edited by Randy Harris. We conclude by reflecting on the past, present, and future of the discipline.

AbstractIn this essay, we analyze the public communication debacle before the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake that led to the infamous trial of the “L’Aquila Seven.” Examining the trial transcripts to extract norms regarding the proper role of scientists in society, we conclude that the first verdict interpellated the figure of the responsible scientist citizen who is expected to perform rhetorical citizenship when communicating with a lay public, while the second assumed a distinction between public and technical spheres that absolves scientists from responsibility to their fellow citizens and reduces their role to performance of an expertise divorced from rhetoric. Tracing the civic outcomes of these conflicting norms, we identify three missed opportunities during the prequake discourse in which the scientists failed to correct statements that they, and only they, knew to be flawed. To prevent future communicative debacles that arise from a dangerous separation of scientists and laypeople, we argue that scientists need to come to see themselves as scientist citizens, experts who take on the civic responsibility of clearly communicating their knowledge to their fellow citizens when such sharing is necessary to the public good.