<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Professional communication researchers have engaged communities through community research and interventions, such as town halls, charettes, and participatory design work. Such interventions rely on community members who are willing to get involved, voicing their perspectives, and engaging in productive dialogue. Yet, some communities do not have these precursor conditions for intervention: they face significant social barriers that make such interventions unlikely to succeed. In an interview- and document-based study, we examine the social barriers described by interviewees in “Permia,” a small town in the Texas Permian Basin region. In contrast to the five other communities we studied, Permia participants demonstrate little readiness to engage in community dialogue. We explore how Permia interviewees made sense of unwillingness to participate in its public life, how their understandings contrasted with the other communities we investigated, and how this research might guide professional communicators as they plan future community-based interventions. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> We review the professional communication research on community interventions as well as relevant sociological literature on boomtowns. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How do community leaders understand their community heritage as constraining or enabling development? 2. Where do community leaders and members see potential for change and growth in community development? Where do they see barriers, threats, and hard choices? 3. How do community leaders describe the relations among community development stakeholders? How do they describe expectations and trust among them on interpersonal, intergroup, and interorganizational levels? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> We collected documents and statistics about six small Texas towns, then interviewed community leaders about the towns’ advantages and challenges. Based on those interviews, we collected further documents. We analyzed the data using deductive and inductive coding, as well as narrative analysis. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> Through coding, we determined that interviewees saw Permia's residents as unwilling to engage in deliberations in traditional forums such as city council meetings, and that their explanations for this unwillingness fell into three categories of barriers: distrust of institutions, dwindling personal ties, and lack of moral expectations for residents to engage in community dialogue. These three categories contrast with the other communities we studied. Through narrative analysis, we identify stories that were told by the interviewees to explain how these barriers developed in Permia. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> We conclude by discussing how professional communicators might survey barriers to community dialogue. Such surveys can help professional communicators choose a pathway for intervention in their community projects.

Inspired by conversations at the 2021 Rhetoric Society of America Institute workshop on Pandemic Rhetoric(s), this dialogue assembles graduate student, early-, mid-career, and established rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and critical health communication scholars to discuss a keyword that has structured political, social, and biomedical thinking about COVID-19: un/precedented. In identifying un/precedented as an organizing temporal rhetoric for the pandemic, we interrogate how recurrent appeals to the pandemic’s novelty both allow for and limit our capacities to meet the pandemic’s tremendous exigencies head-on. Leveraging our unique scholarly and community commitments, we theorize how un/precedentedness 1) becomes complicit in government inaction, 2) (re)asserts conceptual and literal borders, 3) justifies state and national public health mandates, and 4) obscures other historical and contemporary pandemics. We conclude by offering possibilities for interdisciplinary and longitudinal research into the far-reaching effects of contagious disease.

As the discipline of rhetoric and composition engages archival studies, we must not only theorize and narrate primary-source research, but also build archival exhibits. Describing our effort to construct a digital exhibit of primary source material relevant to the history of writing instruction at the University of Texas at Austin 1975–1995 (RhetCompUTX, rhetcomputx.dwrl.utexas.edu), we explain how this project speaks to current historiographic debates about the status and the shape of the discipline. We argue that, to make the shift towards an institutional-material perspective, historians and scholars in rhetoric and composition will need to build our own archives of primary-source material, archives that feature four types of items: items relevant to classroom practice, items documenting the institutional circumstances, items recording the disciplinary conversation, and items capturing the political situation. RhetCompUTX not only features all four types of items, but also encourages the user to see the relations among these layers of practice. By describing this exhibit, by summarizing its argument, and by explaining how we described and assembled its items, we encourage other researchers to build similar archival exhibits and to move towards institutional-material historiography.

This article applies the lens of genre to the social media advocacy of three patient-activists—self-identified “zebras” whose rarely diagnosed conditions are frequently comorbid—who, through performing consistent genre moves, and using the capabilities of social networking to translate personal experiences into public discourse, amplify visibility, and normalize their voices as collective advocacy. Ultimately, through networked communication, these patient-activists perform emergent connections between their conditions outside of the traditional legitimization networks of biomedicine with the aim of gaining legitimacy in public and clinical settings.