Podcasts about rhetoric society

Keywords: Sensitive Rhetorics, Academic Freedom, Rhetorical Theory, Campus Activism, Rhetoric. University of Pittsburgh Press Discount Code 29GERDES for Sensitive Rhetorics active until 12/18/24. Kendall Gerdes is associate professor of writing and rhetoric studies at the University of Utah. Kendall is coeditor of Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies and a lifetime member of the Rhetoric Society of America. Kendall is also the president of her university's AAUP chapter and a member of the U's Queer Alliance for Faculty and Staff. Visit thebigrhetoricalpodcast.weebly.com and follow @thebigrhet.

Keywords: Rhetoric Society of America, Denver, Rhetoric, Academic Conferences, Interviews. Episode 158 of TBR Podcast features interviews and soundscapes from the Rhetoric Society of America Conference in Denver, Colorado, from May 23-26, 2024. For more information visit thebigrhetoricalpodcast.weebly.com and @thebigrhet across social media platforms.

Keywords: Digital Publishing, Digital Rhetorics, Feminist Rhetorics, Pedagogy, Digital Authoring. Dr Brandee Easter is an Assistant Professor in the Writing Department at York University. Her research and teaching focus on digital rhetoric, feminist rhetoric, and software studies, and her work has appeared in Rhetoric Review and Feminist Media Studies. In 2020, she received the Rhetoric Society of America Dissertation award, and her upcoming book, Visual Rhetoric, co-authored by Dr Christa J. Olsen, won the University of Michigan Press and Sweetland Publication Prize in Digital Rhetoric in 2022. For more information visit thebigrhetoricalpodcast.weebly.com and @thebigrhet across social media platforms.

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children's human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional--erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise. Wendy S. Hesford is a professor of English and an Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Since 2018, Hesford has served as faculty director of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme. She is the author of eight books, including Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions and Feminisms (Duke UP, 2011), winner of the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, Emory Law School, and at Yale University as a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children's human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional--erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise. Wendy S. Hesford is a professor of English and an Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Since 2018, Hesford has served as faculty director of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme. She is the author of eight books, including Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions and Feminisms (Duke UP, 2011), winner of the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, Emory Law School, and at Yale University as a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children's human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional--erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise. Wendy S. Hesford is a professor of English and an Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Since 2018, Hesford has served as faculty director of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme. She is the author of eight books, including Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions and Feminisms (Duke UP, 2011), winner of the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, Emory Law School, and at Yale University as a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children's human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional--erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise. Wendy S. Hesford is a professor of English and an Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Since 2018, Hesford has served as faculty director of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme. She is the author of eight books, including Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions and Feminisms (Duke UP, 2011), winner of the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, Emory Law School, and at Yale University as a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children's human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional--erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise. Wendy S. Hesford is a professor of English and an Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Since 2018, Hesford has served as faculty director of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme. She is the author of eight books, including Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions and Feminisms (Duke UP, 2011), winner of the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, Emory Law School, and at Yale University as a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children's human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional--erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise. Wendy S. Hesford is a professor of English and an Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Since 2018, Hesford has served as faculty director of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme. She is the author of eight books, including Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions and Feminisms (Duke UP, 2011), winner of the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, Emory Law School, and at Yale University as a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children's human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional--erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise. Wendy S. Hesford is a professor of English and an Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Since 2018, Hesford has served as faculty director of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme. She is the author of eight books, including Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions and Feminisms (Duke UP, 2011), winner of the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, Emory Law School, and at Yale University as a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children's human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional--erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise. Wendy S. Hesford is a professor of English and an Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Since 2018, Hesford has served as faculty director of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme. She is the author of eight books, including Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions and Feminisms (Duke UP, 2011), winner of the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, Emory Law School, and at Yale University as a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

This episode features an interview with Dr. Keith Gilyard conducted by guest host Dr. Derek G. Handley during the 2023 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute at Penn State University. They discuss Gilyard's path to a career in rhetoric, writing, and composition studies; his writing process and creative writing; academic mentorship and leadership; and his legacy and contributions to the field of African American rhetoric. Keith Gilyard is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University. He formerly was a member of the faculty at Syracuse University and at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. He served as Thomas R. Watson Visiting Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville and as Presidential Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Oklahoma. The author of twenty-four books, his works include the education memoir Voices of the Self (1991), Composition and Cornel West (2008), On African American Rhetoric (with Adam Banks, 2018), biographies of John Oliver Killens (2011) and Louise Thompson Patterson (2017), the novella The Next Great Old-School Conspiracy (2015), and the poetry collections Impressions (2021) and On Location (2023). Gilyard is a former Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English. He is the recipient of two American Book Awards, the CCCC Exemplar Award, the NCTE Distinguished Service Award, and the RSA Cheryl Geisler Award for Outstanding Mentor. This episode features a clip from "Super Glue" by Plushgoolash. Episode Transcript  

Francesca Piazza"Violenza e linguaggio"Festival Filosofiahttps://festivalfilosofia.itVenerdì 15 settembre 2023, ore 10:00, ModenaFrancesca Piazza"Violenza e linguaggio"A partire dai duelli omericiÈ possibile definire il potere violento delle parole, a partire dalle pratiche esemplari dei duelli omerici, che vedono coesistere gestualità e linguaggio verbale?Francesca PiazzaLa parola e la spada.Violenza e linguaggio attraverso l'IliadeEdizioni Il Mulinohttps://mulino.itIl linguaggio è un'alternativa alla violenza o un suo strumento? Mettendo in discussione la separazione tra violenza verbale e violenza fisica, il libro indaga il rapporto che lega linguaggio, violenza e natura umana, nel contesto della madre di tutte le guerre, quella combattuta a Troia e raccontata nell'Iliade, dove armi e parole concorrono a realizzare una violenza distruttiva. Le vicende narrate nel poema omerico diventano allora casi esemplari, utili a illustrare il potere che il linguaggio ha di inaugurare nuove forme di violenza esclusive dell'animale che parla.Francesca Piazza è professoressa di Filosofia e teoria dei linguaggi presso l'Università degli Studi di Palermo. Collabora con il GRAL (Groupe de recherche en Rhétorique et en Argumentation Linguistique) dell'Université Libre de Bruxelles, è membro dell'Advisory Board della Rhetoric Society of Europe e del Consiglio Direttivo della Società Filosofica Italiana. Si è occupata di filosofia delle pratiche verbali, di retorica e teoria dell'argomentazione, di filosofia del linguaggio e psicoanalisi, dei rapporti tra retorica e pragmatica e tra retorica e medicina, studiando l'opera di Aristotele e indagando la relazione tra potere del linguaggio, violenza e natura umana, anche attraverso gli artifici retorici. Tra le sue pubblicazioni: Linguaggio, persuasione e verità. La retorica del Novecento (Roma 2004); La Retorica di Aristotele. Introduzione alla lettura (Roma 2008); Verità verosimili. L'eikos nel pensiero greco (con Salvatore Di Piazza, Milano 2012); Filosofie del Linguaggio. Storie, autori, concetti (con Felice Cimatti, Roma 2016); La parola e la spada. Violenza e linguaggio attraverso l'Iliade (Bologna 2019).IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.itQuesto show fa parte del network Spreaker Prime. Se sei interessato a fare pubblicità in questo podcast, contattaci su https://www.spreaker.com/show/1487855/advertisement

This week I welcome Dr. Patricia Roberts-Miller to the show. We'll be talking about her book, Demagoguery and Democracy and her work on the continued threat a culture of demagoguery poses to democracy, equity, and justice. In Demagoguery and Democracy she writes, "Demagoguery isn't about what politicians do; it's about how we, as citizens, argue, reason, and vote. Therefore, reducing how much our culture relies on demagoguery is our problem, and up to us to solve." Patricia Roberts-Miller, formerly Director of the University Writing Center and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, is a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation—that is, times that communities made decisions they later regretted, although they had all the information they needed to make better ones. In addition to Demagoguery and Democracy, she is the author of Speaking of Race: Constructive Conversations About an Explosive Topic (2021), Rhetoric and Demagoguery (2019; finalist Rhetoric Society of America book of the year), Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus (2009), Deliberate Conflict: Composition Classes and Political Spaces (2004), Voices in the Wilderness: The Paradox of the Puritan Public Sphere (1999), and various book chapters and articles. LINKS Get the book, Demagoguery and Democracy, by Patricia Roberts-Miller: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781615196760 Patricia Roberts-Miller on the web: https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com/ More books by Patricia Roberts-Miller: https://bit.ly/3KK4x7M You can support this show by becoming a patron for as little as $5/month at https://www.patreon.com/rcpress. Don't Let Paul Martino & Friends Buy Our Schools and push extremist politics in our community. Raging Chicken has teamed up with LevelField to launch a truly community-rooted PAC to invest in organizing, support local and state-wide progressive candidates, and unmask the toxic organizations injecting our communities with right-wing extremism. We're putting small-dollar donations to work to beat back the power of Big Money.  You can get more information and drop your donation at  https://ragingchicken.levelfield.net/. Join our Discord to continue the conversation all week long: https://discord.gg/BnjRNz3u  

Out of the lab and onto the screen: how cinematic narratives construct the public image of science & technology AgBioFEWS Cohort 3 Organized Guest Panel with: › Leah Ceccarelli, PhD, Professor at University of Washington › David Kirby, PhD, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cal Poly University - San Luis Obispo Drawing on perspectives from rhetorical criticism and media studies, Drs. Leah Ceccarelli and David Kirby discuss the role of popular science-fiction films in shaping public perception of scientists and emerging biotechnologies. Abstract Dystopias, biological warfare, and near human extinction are common tropes in science-fiction film and television. These representations not only provide entertainment, but reflect deep-seated fears and hopes for scientific and technological futures. This is especially true for biotechnology (think Stephen King's The Stand and Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park), where cinematic narratives can shape the public's imagination of scientists and their practices. Because the interplay of science and media is an important force shaping our understanding of innovation, scientists should be interested in what's playing on the big screen. With that in mind, members of GES's AgBioFEWS Cohort 3 have invited Drs. Leah Ceccarelli and David Kirby to lead a discussion on popular science-fiction films and their impact on the public's orientation to science and technology, with a special focus on scientists' credibility and genetic engineering. Related links: Kirby, D.A. (2007) The Devil in Our DNA: A Brief History of Eugenic Themes in Science Fiction Films, Literature and Medicine, 26(1): 83-108 Kirby, D.A. & L.A. Gaither (2005) Genetic Coming of Age: Genomics, Enhancement, and Identity in Film, New Literary History, 36(2): 263-282. Kirby, D.A. (2004) Extrapolating Race in Gattaca: Genetic Passing, Identity, the New Eugenics, and the Science of Race, Literature and Medicine, 23(1): 184-200. Ceccarelli, L. Scientific Ethos and the Cinematic Zombie Outbreak, Mètode: Science Studies Journal 6 (2016): 107-13. Speaker Bios Dr. Leah Ceccarelli (@leahcecc) is a critic and theorist whose research focuses on interdisciplinary and public discourse about science. She directs the University of Washington's Science, Technology, and Society Studies Graduate Certificate program. Selected as a Fellow of the Rhetoric Society of America, and as a recipient of the National Communication Association's Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar award for her career of research, she has also received national awards for her two books on the rhetoric of science, and for a couple of her articles. She serves on several editorial boards and is co-editor of a book series on Transdisciplinary Rhetoric sponsored by the Rhetoric Society of America and Penn State University Press. Dr. David A. Kirby (@king_gwangi and @CalPolyCLA) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Liberal Arts and Director of the Science Technology & Society Program at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. His research examines how movies, television, and computer games act as vehicles of scientific communication. Several of his publications address the relationship between cinema, genetics and biotechnology. He has also explored the collaboration between scientists and the entertainment industry in his book "Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema." He is currently writing a book titled "Indecent Science: Religion, Science, and Movie Censorship." GES Colloquium is jointly taught by Drs. Jen Baltzegar and Dawn Rodriguez-Ward, who you may contact with any class-specific questions. Colloquium will be held in-person in Poe 202, as well as live-streamed via Zoom. Please subscribe to the GES newsletter and Twitter for updates . Genetic Engineering and Society Center GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM (via Zoom) NC State University | http://go.ncsu.edu/ges-colloquium GES Mediasite - See videos, full abstracts, speaker bios, and slides https://go.ncsu.edu/ges-mediasite Twitter - https://twitter.com/GESCenterNCSU GES Center - Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology. Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

This is the third Rhetoricity episode guest-hosted by Dr. Derek Handley. It's also part of The Third Annual Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival. The episode was recorded at the 2022 Rhetoric Society of America Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, and marks the two-year anniversary of the protests against anti-Black police violence that took place in the summer of 2020. Moderated by Dr. Handley, it features a roundtable of Black rhetoricians: Tamika Carey, David Green, Andre Johnson, Ersula Ore, and Gwendolyn Pough. They share the paths and choices that led them to become rhetoric scholars, reflect on the limitations of antiracist initiatives in higher education since 2020, and discuss the extra work colleges and universities often demand of Black faculty as well as the ongoing work and importance of supporting Black students and faculty across educational institutions. This episode features clips from the following: "Circle Round" by Spinning Clocks "I'm Going to Go Back There Someday" from The Muppet Movie Episode Transcript

Look upon these films, ye mighty, and despair!In this episode, we're thrilled to welcome back Dr. Kendall R. Phillips, Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University - this time, to discuss his hot-off-the-presses book, A Cinema of Hopelessness: The Rhetoric of Rage in 21st Century Popular Culture. In it, Kendall examines how some of the most emotionally-charged moments of 21st century U.S. public memory - from 9/11 to Occupy Wall Street to the presidential election of Donald Trump - have resonated in the biggest box office hits of popular cinema.Within each of these conjunctures of hit movies and widely-felt cultural sentiments, Kendall incisively traces a common theme: “the rhetoric of refusal,” in which characters shout “no!” in the face of the powerful and seek societal destruction rather than reform. We discuss some of the topics and films covered in the book, from the influence of the Occupy movement on films like Snowpiercer, Cabin in the Woods, and The Purge, to Kendall's unique reading of 2017's Joker as a musical, to the themes of betrayal, loss, and nostalgic longing that have permeated both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and post-2016 U.S. national politics. We conclude with some thoughts on the collective, affective power of “movie magic,” as well as how nostalgia might be productively re:imagined to move our political culture forward.Works and Concepts Referenced in this EpisodeAhmed, S. (2013). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge.Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.Biesecker, B. A. (2002). Remembering World War II: The rhetoric and politics of national commemoration at the turn of the 21st century. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88(4), 393-409.Biesecker, B.A. (2004). Renovating the national imaginary: A prolegomenon on contemporary paregoricrhetoric. In K. R. Phillips (ed.), Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press): pp. 212–247.Deleuze, G. (1997). Bartleby; or, the Formula. Essays critical and clinical, 86.Gunn, J. (2008). Father trouble: Staging sovereignty in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(1), 1-27.Keeling, K. (2019). Queer times, Black futures. New York University Press.LeMesurier, J. L. (2020). Winking at Excess: Racist Kinesiologies in Childish Gambino's “This Is America”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 50(2), 139-151.Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural critique, (31), 83-109.Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. John Wiley & Sons.Mitchell, W. T. (2013). Iconology: image, text, ideology. University of Chicago Press.Muensterberg, W. (1985). De gustibus: Notes on the genetics of taste. In Visible religion: Annals of religious iconography (Leiden, NL: E. J. Brill).Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling. Duke University Press.Spinoza, B. (2009). The Ethics (R.H.M. Elwes, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm (Original work published 1677).Villadsen, L. (2017). “Bartleby the Scrivener”: Affect, agency, and the rhetorical trickster.” Presented at Rhetoric Society of Europe conference, Norwich, UK.Williams, C. (2007). Thinking the political in the wake of Spinoza: Power, affect and imagination in the ethics. Contemporary Political Theory, 6(3), 349-369.

Have you ever wondered why some issues are treated as private and personal, while others are self-evidently public concerns? Meanwhile, certain topics are discussed freely and openly, but only among niche subcultures: local interest groups, expert practitioners, hardcore enthusiasts, and even marginalized communities. How can we better understand these kinds of diverse audience groupings, which are so critical to the circulation of political text and talk? On today's re:blurb episode, we address these questions through a deep-dive into the rhetoric of publicity and counterpublicity. In so doing, we overview the landmark public sphere theories of Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt, as well as later feminist, anti-racist, and queer theory contributions from scholars such as Nancy Fraser, Catherine Squires, Michael Warner, and Daniel Brouwer. Finally, we highlight the importance of Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony for unpacking our inherited ideas about “civil society.” To illustrate this point, we offer an analysis of a recent controversy involving Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema, in which activists pursued her into a public restroom to protest her obstruction of immigration reform. Considering the incident and its broader reverberations in media discourses about privacy and civility, we argue that these ideas are contested because hegemony itself is contested. In a deeply unequal society like ours, publicity and counterpublicity are contingent upon groups' positions within hierarchies of power. An early draft of this episode was prepared as a submission for the 2021 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute workshop on “The Trouble with Publics and Counterpublics.” That workshop unfortunately did not take place, due to the unexpected passing of workshop co-leader Dr. Daniel Brouwer. Dan Brouwer was a critical force in rhetorical studies, public sphere theory, and queer studies - a strong mentor, friend, and crucial voice across academic fields. It is in this spirit that we humbly dedicate this episode to the memory of Dr. Daniel Brouwer.Works and Concepts Cited in this EpisodeArendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press.Aronoff, K. (2021, 21 Sept.). Joe Manchin's vote isn't that mysterious. Look to the fossil fuel money. The New Republic. Retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/163723/joe-manchin-vote-fossil-fuelAsen, R. (2000). Seeking the “counter” in counterpublics. Communication theory, 10(4), 424-446.Boguslaw, D. (2021, 26 Sept.). Kyrsten Sinema used the winery where she interned to fundraise with private equity. The Intercept. Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2021/09/26/kyrsten-sinema-private-equity-tax-loophole/Brouwer, D.C. (2001). ACT-ing UP in congressional hearings. In R. Asen and D.C. Brouwer (Eds.) Counterpublics and the State (pp. 87-110). SUNY Press.Cloud, D. L. (2018). Reality bites: Rhetoric and the circulation of truth claims in US political culture. The Ohio State University Press.Cloud, D.L. (2015). “Civility” as a threat to academic freedom. First Amendment Studies, 49(1), 13-17.Davenport, C. (2021, 19 Sept.). Joe Manchin will craft the U.S. climate plan. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/climate/manchin-climate-biden.htmlFraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), 56-80.Gramsci, A. (2011). Prison Notebooks (Vol. 2) (J.A. Buttigieg, Trans.). Columbia University Press.Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press. (Originally published in 1962).Hauser, G. A. (1999). Vernacular voices: The rhetoric of publics and public spheres. Univ of South Carolina Press.Klippenstein, K. (2021, 8 Oct.). Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is literally teaching a course on fundraising. The Intercept. Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2021/10/08/kyrsten-sinema-fundraising-course-asu/Luchetta, J. (2021, Oct. 4). Activists ambush Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in public bathroom over immigration, infrastructure. USA Today. Retrieved from: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/04/sen-kyrsten-sinema-bathroom-arizona-immigration-infrastructure/5990516001/Squires, C. R. (2002). Rethinking the black public sphere: An alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. Communication theory, 12(4), 446-468.Treene, A. (2021, 7 Oct.). Scoop: Sanders' Sinema spat. Axios. Retrieved from: https://www.axios.com/sanders-sinema-spat-harrassment-a8c9f7a2-6579-4800-aa28-43a71fe2639b.htmlWalsh, K. N. (2021, 5 Oct.). Protesters following Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom undermined their efforts. The Independent. Retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/kyrsten-sinema-bathroom-protest-privacy-b1932844.htmlWarner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books.

"Translingual Inheritance: Language Diversity in Early National Philadelphia" tells a new story of the early days of democracy in the United States, when English had not yet become the only dominant language. Drawing on translingual theory, which exposes how language use contrasts with the political constructions of named languages, Elizabeth Kimball argues that Philadelphians developed complex metalinguistic conceptions of what language is and how it mattered in their relations. In-depth chapters introduce the democratically active communities of Philadelphia between 1750 and 1830 and introduce the three most populous: Germans, Quakers (the Society of Friends), and African Americans. These communities had ways of knowing and using their own languages to create identities and serve the common good outside of English. They used these practices to articulate plans and pedagogies for schools, exercise their faith, and express the promise of the young democracy. Kimball draws on primary sources and archival texts that have been little seen or considered to show how citizens consciously took on the question of language and its place in building their young country and how such practice is at the root of what made democracy possible. Elizabeth Kimball is assistant professor of English at Drexel University. She is co-chair of the Philadelphia Writing Program Administrators, an affiliate of the Council of Writing Program Administrators. She is also a member of Rhetoric Society of America and the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Her work involves history, memory, language, and collaborative public life. Description courtesy of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Shownotes and Links Dr. Stephen Carradini Stephen Carradini teaches courses on online professional communication in the Technical Communication program. He uses qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate how people who work outside large organizations use online and offline professional communication to do their work. Musicians are the focus of his most recent research. He also studies disciplinarity in academic fields using corpus analytic methods. He is a member of the Association for Business Communication and ACM SIGDOC. In addition, he has presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society of America, Symposium on Applied Rhetoric, and the Society of Arts Entrepreneurship Educators conferences. Formerly a professional editor, writer, strategist, and consultant, he writes music journalism at Independent Clauses, co-hosts the Winning Slowly podcast, and plays indie pop music on the side. ASU Public Profile Ph.D., Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media, North Carolina State University, 2017 M.A., Technical and Professional Communication, Auburn University, 2013 B.A., Journalism – Professional Writing, University of Oklahoma, 2009 Our Website www.NewValleyChurch.org On YouTube: New Valley Church YouTube Channel New Valley Church Downtown YouTube Channel

This episode features an interview with Dr. Ersula J. Ore, recorded at the 2020 Modern Language Association Convention in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Ore is the Lincoln Professor of Ethics in the School of Social Transformation and associate professor of African and African American Studies at Arizona State University. Her research explores the suasive strategies of Black Americans as they operate within a post-emancipation historical context, giving particular attention to the ways physical and discursive violence influences performances of citizenship. Dr. Ore received the 2018-2019 Outstanding Mentor award from Arizona State’s Center for Global Health, and her book Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity received the 2020 Book Award from the Rhetoric Society of America. Her current research investigates the ways civility discourse masks misogynoir and how such masking reinscribes civility as the racist articulation of a past that expresses the desire for a particular kind of quote-unquote “ordered” present and future. You can check out some of this thinking in her 2019 Organization for Research on Women and Communication keynote entitled “Citizenship, Civility, and the 'Black Looks' of Sandra Bland” as well as “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatio-Temporal Politics of Breathing,” a co-authored piece with Matthew Houdek that is forthcoming this fall in Women’s Studies in Communication. In this episode, we discuss Lynching, focusing on the circulation of lynching photographs as a form of epideictic rhetoric, the relation between racism and intention, and experiences that informed Ore's book and her perspective on rhetoric. A heads-up to listeners that this episode includes extensive discussion of anti-Black violence. This episode includes a clip from Daniel Birch's "History Repeats Itself."

Note: Interested in the intersections of rhetoric and sound? The deadline for submissions to the 2020 Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing Conference is Feb. 21! The CFP and submission instructions are available here. This episode features Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister, co-editors of the 2018 collection Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks. The interview, recorded at the 2018 Rhetoric Society of America conference, focuses on that collection. Kennerly and Pfister discuss the important distinction between "ancient" and "classical" rhetoric, the challenges and possibilities of linking ancient rhetorics to digital networks, and the rhetorical and civic power of internet memes. Michele Kennerly is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State University. In addition to co-editing Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, she is the author of Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics and co-editor of Information Keywords, which is forthcoming this fall. She is President of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric and serves on the Council of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. The interview also features Damien Smith Pfister. He is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, co-editor of Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, and author of the book Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere. His next book project is tentatively titled Always On: Fashioning Ethos After Wearable Computing, and he is the newly minted book review editor for the journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Along with past guest Casey Boyle, Kennerly and Pfister will be editing a new book series for the University of Alabama Press. Entitled Rhetoric + Digitality, the series will provide a home for the best work emerging at the intersection of rhetorical studies and digital media studies. This episode includes clips from the following: Gustav Holst’s “The Planets, Op. 32: IV. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” "Cicada's orchestra" "Simonides Brings Down the House"

For more information on the Rhetoric Society of America's Andrea A. Lunsford Diversity Fund, which is discussed in the introduction to this episode, click here. This episode of Rhetoricity features an interview with Andrea Lunsford, interviewed by Ben Harley as part of the Rhetoric Society of America Oral History Initiative. Over the past year and a half, Rhetoricity host and producer Eric Detweiler has been coordinating that initiative. At its 2018 conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) celebrated its 50th anniversary. As a part of that celebration, the organization sponsored the Oral History Initiative, which recorded interviews with 25 of RSA’s long-time members and leaders. In those interviews, they discuss their involvement in key moments in the organization’s history, the broader history of rhetoric as a discipline, and their expectations and hopes for the field’s future. Since then, Eric has been working with Elizabeth McGhee Williams, a doctoral student at Middle Tennessee State University, to transcribe and create a digital archive of those interviews. The two of them wrote an article about the materials that just came out in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. And the archive of the interviews and transcripts themselves is now available for you to peruse. To help promote that project, this episode features Lunsford's interview from the RSA Oral History Initiative. Dr. Lunsford is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English, Emerita, at Stanford University. She was the Director of Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric from 2000 to 2013 and the founder of Stanford’s Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. Dr. Lunsford also developed undergraduate and graduate writing programs at the University of British Columbia and at The Ohio State University, where she founded The Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing. She’s designed and taught courses in writing history and theory, feminist rhetorics, literacy studies, and women’s writing and is the editor, author, or co-author of 23 books. Those books include Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse; Singular Texts/Plural Authors; Reclaiming Rhetorica; Everything’s an Argument; The Everyday Writer; and Everyone’s an Author. She’s won awards including the Modern Language Association’s Mina Shaughnessy Prize, the Conference on College Composition and Communication award for best article, which she's won twice, and the CCCC Exemplar Award.  A long-time member of the Bread Loaf School of English faculty, she is currently co-editing The Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing and working on a new textbook called Let’s Talk. Ben Harley, her interviewer, is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication Studies at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota. His classes provide students with high-impact writing situations that let them compose useful and interesting texts for their own communities, and his research focuses on pedagogy, sound, and the ways that everyday texts impact the public sphere. He’s published work in The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, Present Tense, and Hybrid Pedagogy. The transition music after this episode's introduction is "Creative Writing" by Chad Crouch.

This episode features an interview with Dr. Ryan Skinnell, assistant professor at San José State University and editor of the recent collection Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump. That collection is the focal point of the episode. This interview was recorded at the 2018 Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Because Faking the News is meant to speak to audiences beyond academia, we tried to approach the interview in a way that would be accessible for those who don't have advanced degrees in rhetoric and writing. We discuss what exactly rhetoric and demagoguery are, what sets rhetoric scholars apart from other academic experts, and strategies for maintaining momentum on writing projects. Oh, and pajama pants. In addition to editing Faking the News, Skinnell is the author of the book Conceding Composition: A Crooked History of Composition's Institutional Fortunes, coeditor of a forthcoming collection called Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, and an editor for the website Citizen Critics, which brings rhetoric scholarship to bear on the news of the day for a mainstream audience. He’s also currently researching and writing about rhetoric and guns and fascist rhetoric. And last but not least, he’s editing a forthcoming special issue of the journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly entitled “Rhetoric’s Demagogue | Demagoguery’s Rhetoric.” This episode features a clip of the song "Grifted" by Literature.

This is the first in a series of special late-summer episodes of Rhetoricity. At the 2017 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, some graduate students at Indiana University helped coordinate and conduct interviews with scholars who attended that institute. Those students also pitched another idea: a series of conversations between PhD candidates and their dissertation advisors. This episode features the first of those conversations. My hope is that these episodes, which are more akin to dialogues than interviews, will not only give listeners a sense of the interlocutors' research interests, but provide a window into the advisee-advisor relationship. To that end, I encouraged participants to take some time to discuss academic mentorship. This episode features a conversation between Caddie Alford and Scot Barnett. Scot Barnett is an associate professor in the Department of English at IU. He's the author of the book Rhetorical Realism: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Ontology of Things and coeditor of the collection Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things. Caddie Alford, who was a PhD candidate at the time this episode was recorded, has since accepted a position as an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of "Creating with the 'Universe of the Undiscussed': Hashtags, Doxa, and Choric Invention" and has an article in a forthcoming special issue of Rhetoric Review on the topic of virtue ethics. In their conversation, Alford and Barnett discuss their interests in rhetoric and embodiment, the ways digital technologies speak to and shift longstanding rhetorical concepts, and how they approach the advisor-advisee relationship. This episode includes clips from the following: "Introducing the co-writer" by Machine, Dear "Messa di Voce (Performance version, 2003)" Noah

This episode of Rhetoricity is a collaboration with Rhetorics Change/Rhetoric's Change, the digital proceedings collection from the 2016 Rhetoric Society of America conference. You can download a free copy of this open-access collection via Intermezzo or Parlor Press. In 2014, Verso Books published Radio Benjamin, which contained English translations of radio plays that critical theorist Walter Benjamin helped write and produce in the 1920s and '30s. I was fascinated with these plays as a sort of precursor to the audio projects scholars and theorists are producing today. So at RSA 2016, rather than give a traditional academic presentation, I staged and recorded a live performance of one of the pieces in Radio Benjamin. Titled "Lichtenberg: A Cross-Section," the play is about an eighteenth-century physicist and satirist named Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. This episode is also included as part of a chapter in Rhetorics Change/Rhetoric's Change, along with an essay in which I discuss Benjamin's radio plays and the possibilities of audio scholarship. The collection also includes a set of soundscapes that I edited, so there's plenty to interest the sonically inclined scholars. So check it out! This episode contains clips from the following: George Frederic Handel's "Suite in A Minor, HWV 437, III. Sarabande" Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Requiem in D Minor, K. 626, I. Introitus and II. Kyrie" Kamasi Washington's cover of "Clair de Lune" (from The Epic) various sounds from Freesound.org All clips are used under the fair use provisions of US copyright law.

In this episode, which was recorded at the 2017 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, guest interviewer Jennifer Juszkiewicz speaks with Michigan State University's Bill Hart-Davidson. They discuss the relationship between technical communication and rhetoric, the challenges of revision and the related work of Eli Review, and what the ancient Greek practice of agon has to do with riding a bike. Special thanks to Ryan Juszkiewicz, who manned the audio controls and took the lead on mixing and editing this interview. Dr. Hart-Davidson is a professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. He studies computational rhetoric, technical communication, and user experience, and was at RSA Summer Institute to help lead a workshop called Computational Rhetoric: Exploring Possibilities, Limits & Applications. Along with many other projects, he coedited the collection Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities and helps run Eli Review. Hart-Davidson’s scholarship has also appeared in journals like Technical Communication, enculturation, the Journal of Writing Research, and Computers and Composition. Jennifer Juszkiewicz is a PhD candidate in the Composition, Literacy, and Culture program at Indiana University. She specializes in writing program administration and composition studies as well as spatial, computational, and collaborative rhetorics. She’s been published in enculturation and has a forthcoming co-authored chapter in a collection called Rhetorical Machines. Her dissertation is entitled "Writing Spaces of Writing." This episode includes a clip from "Queen - Bicycle Race 8 bit."

This episode is the first in a series recorded at the 2017 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute in Bloomington, Indiana. The interviews featured in these episodes were conducted by graduate students who are part of Indiana University's Rhetoric Society of America student chapter. First up is an interview with John Muckelbauer conducted by Caddie Alford. John Muckelbauer is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, where he has taught for thirteen years. He’s the author of the book The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change. His writing has also appeared in journals like Philosophy & Rhetoric and enculturation, and he contributed a chapter entitled “Implicit Paradigms of Rhetoric: Aristotelian, Cultural, and Heliotropic” to the collection Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things. His current book project engages with style from a Nietzschean angle. Caddie Alford is a PhD candidate at Indiana University. She is completing her dissertation, which recuperates the concept of doxa for rethinking invention, argumentation, and emergent rhetorics in terms of social media platforms. She has a forthcoming article in an upcoming special issue of Rhetoric Review that is focused on virtue ethics. She has also published on hashtag activism and choric invention in enculturation. In this interview, they discuss invention, plants, posthumanism, the limits of rhetorical theory, and the possibility of new rhetorical paradigms. This episode features a clip from the song "Plants" by Borrtex.

This episode features an interview with Diane Davis, who also appeared in Rhetoricity's first episode and directed the dissertation of this podcast's host. (This interview was in fact recorded the same day that dissertation was defended.) More significantly, Dr. Davis is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Austin and will serve as chair of that department beginning in fall 2017. She is also the Kenneth Burke Chair and Professor of Rhetoric and Philosophy at The European Graduate School. She's the author of Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter and Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations, coauthor of Women's Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition, and editor of The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell as well as Reading Ronell. Davis's current research focuses on non- and extrahuman rhetorics. Her recent publications in this vein include "Creaturely Rhetorics," "Autozoography: Notes Toward a Rhetoricity of the Living," and "Writing-Being: Another Look at the Symbol-Using Animal." A piece entitled "Afterword: Some Reflections on the Limit" will appear in "A Rhetorical Bestiary," a forthcoming special issue of the journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly. In this interview, we discuss the genesis, development, and future of Davis's use of the term "rhetoricity"; her recent work on non-/extrahuman rhetorics; and two panels she was a part of at the 2016 Rhetoric Society of America conference in Atlanta, Georgia. This episode includes clips and selections from the following sources: Esther Garcia - "Aquarium" from Camille Saint-Saëns' Le carnaval des animaux Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community Emmanuel Levinas's "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights" (included in the collection Difficult Freedom) Arnold Schoenberg's Verkläte Nacht, Op. 4 "Do Plants Feel Pain?" from the Smithsonian Channel and freesound.org

In this episode, we feature an interview with Jeff Rice, inaugural chair of the Department of Writing, Rhetoric & Digital Studies (WRD) at the University of Kentucky. Rice also holds the Martha B. Reynolds Chair in Writing, Rhetoric & Digital Studies, and he’s the author of multiple books and essays, including his most recent book, Craft Obsession: The Social Rhetorics of Beer. Rice recently sat down with John Sloop, Vanderbilt’s Associate Provost for Digital Learning, at the Rhetoric Society of America conference in Atlanta, where the two discussed the mission of “digital studies,” the role of open online education, and the relationship between craft beer and digital communication. More on Jeff Rice and WRD: * University of Kentucky faculty profile: https://wrd.as.uky.edu/users/jri236 * Writing, Rhetoric, & Digital Studies at UK: https://wrd.as.uky.edu/ * Yellow Dog, Jeff Rice's blog: http://ydog.net/ * Jeff Rice on Twitter: https://twitter.com/drfabulous

Bootstraps, Victor Villanueva   What does a rhetorician look like? When you imagine a rhetorician, maybe you see some white-toga-ed Roman, crossing his legs under his seat, holding a stylus to his chin. Or maybe you imagine a tweedy early twentieth century rhetorician, shaking out a newspaper and frowning. Or maybe you even imagine a contemporary rhetorician, presenting at the Rhetoric Society of America in front of a powerpoint presentation. But here’s a question for you--did you imagine a white rhetorician?   Today on Mere Rhetoric, we talk about Victor Villanueva’s book Bootstraps: from an American Academic of Color, which interrogates our discipline’s white privilege and privileging. But before we get to that, let me start out by thanking some people. First off, much thanks to the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas at Austin for supporting the show, including letting me record in this great recording booth with great people like Jacob here to record and edit. Also, thank you to everyone who took the time to leave a review of Mere Rhetoric on iTunes. Also thanks to my fiance Krystian for always believing in me. Know how you feel when you get written comments on end of semester evaluations? That’s how I feel everytime someone leaves a review. Finally, since I just came back from a conference where I got to meet some great people who like the podcast, I’d like to give a big shout out to Clancy Ratliff for showing me a great restaurant in Lafayette and her student Nolan, who let me jabber about the connections between creative writing and composition while he showed me where my next session was. If you have strong opinions about the best place to eat in your hometown, or if you have a suggestion for the next episode, why not drop us a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? Okay, enough business--let’s get to it.   I first became aware of the racial imbalance in rhetoric at my first RSA conference. Sharon Crowley was giving one of the key addresses, talking about racism in our students, in our institutions, and at one point I looked around at the audience--and wondered about racism in our own field as well. There were a few black and brown faces, but almost everyone in the great hall was white. We couldn’t, I realized, talk about racism in our classrooms and our colleges without interrogating our own racial assumptions.   That’s exactly what Victor Villanueva sets out to do in Bootstraps. Villanueva is a hot shot rhetorician, by almost any standard possible. He’s received the David H Russell Award for Distinquished Research, the Exemplar Award and Scholarship in English and was Rhetorician of the Year in 1999. Side bar: I did not know there was an award for being Rhetorician of the Year. Somehow, I imagine a People Magazine spread like for Sexiest Man Alive, but with pictures of academics mid-gesture in a lecture or thoughtfully frowning at a computer. Villanueva has also published and edited over 80 books including the essential anthology Cross Talk in Composition and Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2013 CE. Guy knows his stuff. When you are literally rhetorician of the year, you must be the quintessential rhetorician, confident and poised in your rhetoricianness.   You’d think so.   In Bootstraps, Puerto-Rico-born Villanueva weaves autobiography, scholarship and teacher research together into an exploration of how the academic world can seem uncomfortable and unwelcoming to academics of color. He himself, for his PhD and his 80 books, when he writes about himself in the third person “He still  suffers [the fear that he isn’t as smart as he thinks] today, thirty years later, PhD, publications and all… He has seen the liberal’s fear of being honest with people of color about their abilities; the fear of being considered a bigot .. He has seen that tokenism, even when well-motivated, even though somehow necessary, makes things seem equitable when they aren’t equitable at all… he always wonders if, maybe, he isn’t as smart as people think” (13).   Little commentary here: this feeling, like you don’t belong, is called impostor syndrome and it’s pernicious among graduate students, more especially people who already feel like they don’t belong, as Villaneauva says about his own PhD “I didn’t know what I was getting into, but knew I was getting into something not intended for the likes of me” (xv). I remember when I got accepted at the University of Texas at Austin, I had nightmares that I hadn’t been, in fact, accepted, but had been allowed to complete on a reality to show to gain entrance into UT Austin. “Who Wants to Be a Longhorn?” Other graduate students, professional athletes and actors, and anyone who feels like they got into something for which they secretly might not be qualified suffers from this feeling. We’ll talk about more impostor syndrome in another podcast, but for our purposes here, the key thing to remember is that academics of color, even when they are invited into programs and departments warmly can still doubt the sincerity of the welcome. They can doubt themselves, when the culture has been insisting for their whole lives that academia is “not intended for the likes” of them.      Villanueva’s education in the 60s certainly didn’t forsee a brilliant rhetoric academic career for little Victor. His first school that assumed that “you people need to learn a trade,” in the words of one of his teachers (3) and at the next one the PE teacher shouted “Go home and get a haircut! And don’t come back until you do!” So, he didn’t (38). Yeah, that’s right--Villanueva, probably one of the most important rhetorical authors of the later 20th century didn’t graduate high school, but the high schools he would have graduated perpetually underestimated him. Only through detours in the military did he finally come to Tacoma Community college: “I wanted to try my hand at college, go beyond the GED. But college scared me. I had been told long again that college wasn’t my lot” (66).   So I started this podcast talking about Sharon Crowley’s speech at RSA, and she shows up at a crucial point in Villaneuva’s life because it was Crowley, “the first person he had ever read who had written of the sophists--a bigshot” (118) who offered him a job. It’s not a happy ending though--material conditions are hard for any young academic and more especially those who don’t have large family resources.   One of the reasons why he had been underestimated is that he was a minority in the nation. That’s a word that’s hard to pin down or used too casually, but Villanueva makes a distinction between the immigrant and the minority: “We behave as if the minority problem where the immigrant problem,” (19) and all we need is to make the minority sound or act like the majority. “The difference between the immigrant and the minority amounts to the difference between immigration and colonization” (29). He tells the story of two of his students arguing about English’s role in the composition classroom. “Both are Latinos, Spanish speakers, but Martha is Colombian; Paul is Puerto Rican. Martha, the immigrant. Paul, the minority. Martha believes in the possibilities for complete structural assimilation; Paul is more cautious” (24). “The immigrant seeks to take on the culture of the majority,” he suggests, “and the majority, given certain preconditions, not leaves of which is displaying the language and dialect of the majority, accepts the immigrant. The minority, even when accepting the culture of the majority,is never wholly accepted. There is always a distance” (23).   “The code switcher is a rhetorical power player,” he quips, pointing to how bilinguals recognize intuitively the fluid nature of language, the rhetorical nuances that comes from understanding the inexact nature of self-translation (23).Villanueva points out that we often assume that cultural shifting happens naturally, without any work, when, in fact, it’s very hard to try to keep both of your identities as an other-American.   Villanueva tells of his own personal experience with assimilation when he was drilled into strict prescriptivist English as a young boy in Puerto Rico. He was criticised for speaking with an accent, but “there was no verbal deprivation at play, just a process that takes time, ‘interlanguage’ to use a sociological term” (32). Eventually he read and listened and spoke more in English until “the accent disappeared, and Spanish no longer came easily, sometimes going through French or through Latin in my head, the languages of my profession, searching for the Spanish with which to speak to my family. Assimilation” (33).   But it’s very difficult to try to be perfect at Spanish and perfect and English. “Biculturalism,” he writes, does not mean to me an equal ease with two cultures. That is an ideal. Rather, biculturalism means the tensions within, which are cause by being unable to deny the old, ot the new ...I resent the tension, that the ideal is not to be realized, that we cannot be the mosaic … nor can we be the melting pot if that were the preference” (39). Those old metaphors, the mosaic and the melting pot, don’t do enough to describe all of the cultures in the country and the complex ways those cultures relate.   The first step, it is implied, is just to make the implicit explicit and recognize that culture is necessarily complex and changing. “It is not enough to recognize and make explicit our cultures. We need to recognize cultures in the context of other cultures, since none of us can be monocultural in America. Mexican americans may have a culture in common with many Mexicans, say, but Mexican Americans also have a culture in common with fellow Americans” (57). It’s like the classic 1997 film Selena where Selena’s dad points out the frustration of trying to navigate two culture and two languages, “We have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time! It’s exhausting!”   Selena’s dad is right. It’s additionally important not to essentialize. “Puerto Ricans may be ‘Hispanics.’ Yet our history in general and our history as it pertains to the United States is very different from the histories of both the Mexican American and the Mexican” (57). These differences are sometimes bluntly painted over, through terms like Hispanic or even “minority.” Villanueva tells ruefully of being asked to review an article on Mexican rhetoric, even though he isn’t Mexican, but even if had been Puerto Rican rhetoric, he’s a classicist, working on the sophists. He knows about Isocrates best, so why would he be pigeonholed in this way?   If it’s not obvious by now, Villanueva is also heavily influenced by Marxist thought. He suggests that the ultimate goal of the field of Rhetoric and Composition is to develop the “organic intellectual,” a theory from Antonio Gramsci about the combination of personal experience and academic learning--much like the book Bootstraps itself. Don’t ever say Villanueva doesn’t practice what he preaches. The organic intellectual doesn’t stay in the ivory tower, but “is involved ‘in active participation in practical life’ … an intellectual liaison  between the groups seeking revolutionary change and the rest of civil society” (129).   This perspective should influence everything we do in our weird academic culture--the way we teach our classrooms and the things we research and publish, the way we structure our departments and graduate programs and admissions and graduation requirements.   Villanueva ends the book with a call that I find pretty darn stirring. I’ll give him the last word: “As our status as workers becomes more apparent and as we come more in contact with more of those who are intellectuals from non-traditional backgrounds, we find ourselves in a potentially decisive moment. The  moment is right for America’s intellectuals in traditional academic roles to help organize intellectuals recognize themselves as such and to begin to fuse with them--creating Gransmi’s new intellectuals” (138)

  Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke by Gregory Clark Welcome to Mere rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, terms and movements that shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and if you’ve like to get in touch with me you can email me at mererhetroicpodcast @gmail.com or tweet out atmererhetoricked. Today on Mere Rhetoric I have the weird experience of doing an episode on someone who isn’t just living, but someone who was my mentor. If you’ve ever had to do a book report on a book your teacher wrote, you understand the feeling. But I really do admire the work of Gregory Clark, especially his seminal work in Burkean Americana. Clark is was been the editor of the Rhetoric Society Quarterly for eight years and recently became the President Elect of the Rhetoric Society in America, which means, among other things, he’s responsible for the RSA conference, like the one I podcasted about earlier this summer. He also wrote a fantastic book called Rhetorical Landscapes inAmerica, that became the foundation for a lot of work that looks that the rhetoricality of things like museums, landscapes and even people. In the final chapter of Gregory Clark’s Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke, he poses the question “where are we now?” (147). We’ve certainly been many wonderful places. In Rhetorical Landscapes, Clark has packed up Kenneth Burke’s identification theory of rhetoric and applied it to the national landscapes of America. Clark suggests that our identity as Americans comes, largely, from our experiences with common landmarks. To demonstrate this power of Burke’s concept of identification, Clark has taken us through more than a century of American tourism, from New York City in the early 19th century to Shaker Country to the Lincoln Memorial Highway. We’ve been convinced by Clark of the rhetorical power of these places to create a national identity. We’ve seen how mountains and parks and even people can evoke a feeling of identification. It’s been a long, lovely ramble by the time we get to Clark’s question. Reading his words, one can’t escape the image of a wanderer who, having ambled through one delightful landscape after another finds himself suddenly disoriented as to his current location. Clark himself describes his project as “a ramble” and it is this apt description that encapsulates both the dizzying strengths of the book (147). Surely one of the most striking strengths of this ramble is the remarkable company we keep. Clark has brought the human and extremely likable specter of Kenneth Burke along for this meander through American tourism. The Burke of this book has not only provided us with the language of identification in our community of travelers to “change the identities that act and interact with common purpose;” he’s consented to come along with us (3). Clark presents Burke as one who was “himself a persistent tourist in America” (5). Burke very charmingly has written about his traveling “’go   go    going West, the wife and I/.../ “Go West, elderly couple”’” (qtd. Clark 7). When Burke’s theories of national identification are presented to us chapter-by-chapter, we enjoy their application in the presence of a critic who is not cynically immune to the process of identification, only acutely aware of it. Presented as accessibly and understandable, Clark has written us a Burke we can road trip with. If Clark has presented for us a clear, insightful and accessible version of Burke through this rambleit is because of his own remarkable prowess as a teacher. He is willing to let Burke be a fellow-traveler with us and he is willing, himself, to join us personally in the ramble. We readers are fortunate to have Clark with us, just as much as we are to have his clear explanations of what Burke would say if the deceased were alongside us. Just as Burke is not immune to the seduction of American tourism, Clark gives us ample insight into how the American landscape affected his own identification as an American as a child. In the chapter on Yellowstone, Clark describes how, as a child from “a marginal place in America” he had been taught that “America was in faraway places like New York or Washington, D. C., or Chicago or California” (69). When Clark first went to Yellowstone National Park, he noticed the variety of license plates in the parking lot and could suddenly feel “at home among all those strangers in a new sort of way—at home in America” (69). While Clark gives us every possible reason to respect him as a serious, meticulous scholar of both rhetoric and American tourism history, he never lets us forget that he, like Burke, like us, is also another tourist in awe of the places we define as quintessentially American. With knowledgeable and accessible teachers like Burke and Clark at our sides, we readers feel comfortable seeing how we, too, fit into this landscape. While the scope of the book covers the extremely formidable years of American nation-making (from the days of “these” United States to when the country is solidly coalesced into “the” United States), the institutions then established are still foremost in the psyche of Americans of all generations. Readers of Rhetorical Landscapes in America will be hard-pressed to read a chapter without immediately applying the Burkean theories to their own individual experiences with these ensigns of American identity. Have you been to NYC? Have you been told that you have to see Yellowstone? All of these places are part of how we structure our American identity. Where are we going? Working topically, vaguely chronologically, Clark and Burke accompany us through New York City, Shaker country, Yellowstone, The Lincoln Highway, the Panama-Pacific world’s fair and the Grand Canyon. It’s almost like a car game on a long road trip: okay, what do these six things have in common? While each of these locations lead themselves to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a touring American (eg, in the chapter Shaker country we discover how guides to the region have lead to identification “not with the Shakers, but with the other touring Americans who gather to wonder at the spectacle the Shakers create” and thus objectified Shakers), (52). Including a city, a people, a park, a road, an event and a building in a park could arguably be a way to expand the definition of the “landscape.” Why are we rambling through these American landscapes with Burke and Clark, after all? The argument appears to be, after all, to situate a Big Rhetoric theory of identification into a series of Big Rhetoric artifacts—so big, in fact, that it includes mountains and highways. Those who are resistant to wholeheartedly adopting Burke’s expansion of rhetoric to include not just persuasion, but also identification, will find Clark’s scope of artifacts as unconvincing; those who are frosty towards opening the canon of rhetoric past the spoken word, and past the written word into the very land we travel will bristle at the idea of giving something as Big Rhetoric as a city, a people, a landscape a “meaning.” These two groups of reader are by-and-large impervious to the convincing and meticulous readings that Clark provides of these locations. They’ve already made up their minds and aren’t likely to change them, despite the quality of Clark’s argument. Clark and Burke are observant, meticulous and personable traveling companions, This is an excellent book, one that opens up rhetoric to more than just written texts, but something that can encompass views and groups of people as well. I love thinking about the implications of place on national identity and I’m not the only one: scholars from Diane Davis to Ekaterina Haskin have taken up the idea of how a tour of places and spaces and people can create an argument for national identity. So when you come back from your summer vacation this year, think about not just what you saw, but who it made you become.    

At the 2015 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, Raka Shome led a three-day workshop entitled "'Subalternity' and 'Transnational Literacy': The Significance of Gayatri Spivak's Scholarship for Rhetoric and Communication Studies." In this episode of Rhetoricity, Dr. Shome explores how the work of Spivak, an influential feminist and postcolonial scholar, might speak to scholarship in the fields of rhetoric and communication. First, Dr. Shome discusses the two key terms referenced in the workshop's title: "subalternity" and "transnational literacy." She argues that Spivak's work on subalternity takes up matters of voice and power--issues that rhetoric and communication scholars have long been concerned with--in ways that could challenge and enrich those fields' thinking on such matters. She also argues that Spivak's work on transnational literacy could help rhetoric and communication scholars address the geopolitical and globalized contexts and consequences of their work. Along the way, she discusses the limitations and possibilities of traditional identity politics. Dr. Shome is the author of the book Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture, and she's served as a guest editor for special issues of the journals Communication Theory and Global Media and Communication. She is currently guest-editing an issue of Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies with the theme "Gender, Nation, Colonialism: Twenty-First Century Connections." In fall 2015, she served as a senior fellow at the National University of Singapore. If you're interested in more on the topics discussed in both this episode and Dr. Shome's workshop, check out the 2010 anthology Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea and Spivak's 2013 collection An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. All episodes of Rhetoricity are available via iTunes and Stitcher. Transition Music: "Silence" - Telephantom

This episode of Rhetoricity features not one but two interviewees: Drs. Annette Vee and Jim Brown, who together led a workshop called "Rhetoric's Algorithms" at the 2015 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute in Madison, Wisconsin. They're also co-editing a forthcoming issue of the journal Computational Culture that will focus on rhetoric and computation. Annette Vee is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in such journals as Computers and Composition, Enculturation, and Computational Culture. She's also the author of the book Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing the Terms of Writing, which is forthcoming from MIT Press. Jim Brown is an assistant professor and director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers University-Camden. He's been published in the journals Philosophy and Rhetoric, College Composition and Communication, and Pedagogy. His book Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software, was recently published by the University of Michigan Press. In this interview, I ask Brown and Vee about the subject of their RSA workshop: What exactly do they mean by "algorithms"? What do algorithms have to offer rhetoric and vice versa? They respond by discussing Ada Lovelace, 1970s cyberthrillers, and the French writing collective Oulipo. Before wrapping up, I also ask them to perform some experimental rhetorical algorithms. This episode includes music generated using Musicalgorithms, a resource created by researchers at Eastern Washington University. All Rhetoricity episodes are also available via iTunes and Stitcher.

The classic, the first episode in better form! (Except this transcript is a little was-translated-by-someone-unfamiliar-with-rhetoric-and-American-politics. Thanks, Fivrr!)   What is Rhetoric?                   Welcome to MereRhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, terms and movement that have defined the history of rhetoric. Sponsored by the University of Texas Student Chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America.   I'm Mary Hedengren at the University of Texas Austin and thank you for joining us on our inaugural podcast. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about "What is Rhetoric?"               "No more rhetoric," says a politician or "Let's stop the empty rhetoric. It's time to cut the rhetoric and get to action." These are expressions that we hear all the time. Rhetoric is one of the only fields that's consistently used as a pejorative. We know better than that though. We know that rhetoric is a dynamic field with really important thinkers and a lot of contributions to a lot of other disciplines.               But do we actually know what rhetoric is?               It's hard for us to define what rhetoric is when everybody seems to think that it's something like rhetricory,to use Wayne Booth's term. So what is it? How do we explain to our potential fathers-in-law, aunts at family reunions or hairdressers? What it is that we're doing with our time and our money?               Actually, the history of defining rhetoric is the history of rhetoric. This is a question that's been plaguing people for a really long time. I'm trying to figure out what it is that we're doing and how to describe it becomes an obsession of a lot of the greatest thinkers.               Today, we're going to talk a little bit about some of these thinkers; some of the ways that rhetoric has been defined historically and some things that might be useful for us now as we seek to find an answer to that pesky question, "What is it that you're doing?"               One of the biggest ways to sort of think about rhetoric is through metaphors and we'll talk more about metaphors and the powers that they have in a later podcast. We might think about some of the ones that Plato brings up when he's talking about them in Gorgias. Is rhetoric sugar for medicine? Spoonful of sugar that makes medicine go down; that's able to sort of lighten the load of the hard truths of philosophical or scientific inquiry?               Is rhetoric like fighting in boxing and when we teach people rhetoric, we're only giving them a neutral skill that could be used for positive purposes or negative purposes. These are a few of the many metaphors that come up to sort of try to describe what is that rhetoric is about.               Now, some of the different definitions that have come up have been sort of through the western tradition. Plato for example called rhetoric the art of winning the soul by discourse and we sort of think of Plato as being sort of back and forth from how you felt about rhetoric. Sometimes he seems to think that rhetoric is a really bad idea; other times, he's more concerned about how it can be done well and defining rhetoric can something that can be useful.               So when he says winning the soul through discourse, he's really concerned a lot about how you can talk to somebody who you really love and care for and know a lot about them and sort of have responsible good rhetoric. Aristotle on the other hand – instead of thinking about winning the soul by discourse is more about finding the available means of persuasion.               This is kind of a different switch from Plato where instead of rhetoric being something that you use as an instrument, you have what could really be called defensive rhetoric. Just discovering. It's an act of invention. You sort of see what could be possible.               This is going to be important for a lot of rhetorical history especially if pedagogs you are people are starting to think about how do we do exercises were people try to find all of the available means of persuasion. What could be done? What could be effective? Instead of thinking as purely it’s something that's practical.               You may get this a lot when you're talking to people at parties. Is rhetoric something that you just teach people so that they can use, so that they can give a good speech or give a good presentation? Or is rhetoric also something that you want to study so that people aren't taken in byhuxtorsor are able to weigh an argument, be more balanced about it.               This is a pretty big definition and it bears more conversation than we have time for here but we'll probably talk about that in a later podcast. If not, I encourage you to go through and sort of think about how that definition is going to impact the way that you give an answer and the way that you direct your own work. Now, Cicerodid a lot of different definitions of rhetoric and he's one of guys who's most famous for sort of breaking up this one big art, rhetoric, into these several different sort of sub purposes or canons.   So we have things like invention as being part of rhetoric and all the way back to memorizing the speech and giving a good delivery, pronouncing the words that you say. All of these things, Cicero says, are part of rhetoric.               These distinctions can be important for us as we try to define our own definition of what rhetoric is. Are we going to say that rhetoric is about finding the information? Does it include the research that we go to? Does it include the things that impact the way that we do the research we do? What kinds of inquiry are appropriate through the kind of product that we want to produce?               On the other side of things, how much of rhetoric is delivery? Is the performance of it? In recent times, we sort of stepped away from thinking about performance too much as opposed to sort of what Cicero was thinking about what was actually an oral performance where you stand up and entertain people and sort of get up; many different sort of public speaking elements that you can or sort of hold their interest.               And this becomes something that we could really think about especially this one with whether invention is part of rhetoric. Back in history, this is going to be a big question to sort of define what our field is. Some people are going to put Peter Ramos as sort of the bad guy in the story as somebody who says, "Maybe rhetoric doesn't have to do with invention. Maybe rhetoric is just this other half, this delivery; how you polish it up," Is rhetoric just a pretty face that we put on a good piece of philosophy?               This definition may remind you a little bit about Plato's idea that this is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. But in another sense, it's really taking out any sort of invention and put in that more sort of the business of science as opposed to [00:06:57] philosophy which I think is where some of these other bacon and [00:07:03] are sort of taking it.   This starts to become little bit more upended mostly in the 18th century. We have people like George Campbell who said rhetoric is an art or talent by which discourse is adapted to its end. The four ends of discourse are enlightening the understanding, pleasing the imagination, moving the passion and influencing the will. These four ends of discourse become really important; they sort of trickle down a lot through textbooks during this period.               Is rhetoric something that is going to be involved with literature? And fiction? And pleasing the imagination? Is it going to be something that moves our passions? Changes our emotions? Like a passionate appeal for a political change. Is it going to be something that enlightens the understanding? Do textbooks have rhetoric?               These are some questions that sort of Campbell, his definition, are really going to influence with us. Now, let's move finally to the 20th century and some of the definitions here. Kenneth Burke sort of changes our idea of what is rhetoric. He sort of says, "Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself; a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew."               The use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings by nature respond to symbols. This is kind of a step away from some of the things that even George Campbell was saying. What if rhetoric isn't just about persuasion? What if it isn't just about getting people to think the way you do? What if it has to do with any sort of cooperation based on symbols?               This is a huge break. This sort of breaks away from this idea that it has to be linguistic or that it has to be about achieving some end like George Campbell said. It's an exciting development and we'll talk a lot more probably in an upcoming podcast about Kenneth Burke. By the way, this is a really cool place to start push rhetoric in another direction.               Finally, moving in to people who live today. This is not like we've settled the question of what is rhetoric. There's still lot of people who are trying to figure this out and put different definitions of it. The great leader in composition Andrea Lunsford says that rhetoric is the art, practice and study of human communication.               This is an interesting definition that might come up when you're talking with people. This is really hard problem because sometimes, we're really good at the study of human communication. But as rhetoricians, are we responsible to think about the practice of human communications? How well does rhetorician do standing up in front of an audience talking about their research?               This is something that's making me super self-conscious as somebody who's put in together a podcast. But how much of what we do is sort of divorced from this level where a sister I was talking about it as a performance, a practice; something that's sort of happens out there as delivery. Another major of trend that seems to pop up with a lot of these modern definitions of rhetoric is thinking about what the goal is.               For example, Charles Chuck Bazerman talks about how rhetoric is the study of how people use language and other symbols to realize human goals and carry out human activities. This is something about getting it done. Another definition that's sort of focuses on this is Gerard or Gerry Hauser's definition where he says, "Rhetoric is an instrumental use of language."               One person engages another person in an exchange of symbols to accomplish some goal; it is not communication for communication sake. Rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate social action. For this reason, rhetorical communication is explicitly pragmatic. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention.   This is a really interesting idea and it's what that [00:11:09] thinking about when you're defining rhetoric for your friends and then for yourself. Do you see rhetoric as something that accomplishes goals? Can good rhetoric be ineffective?               A lot of times, people think about this in terms of Edmund Burke who is this great thinker and a fantastic writer. Someday, we'll talk about him. I'd like to think so. If not, go online and check out some of the speeches because this guy is on fire. He's like one of the best speakers to ever come out of England. And he gave one of his like creme de la creme speeches and a really strong one saying, "Hey England. Let's not go to war with America," but what happened, right?               So here's a guy who's really good at what he does and really one of the top retorts but when he speaks, he doesn't bring about change. So, was that good rhetoric? Or bad rhetoric? Does rhetoric depend on its efficiency with audience? Is it all about the ends? Or can it be good rhetoric that does everything that rhetoric should do and is a shining beacon but nonetheless, fails to convince its audience.               Another way to sort of think about this – one of my favorite examples is Eminem's song Mosh. Do you remember that? This is from the second election of George W Bush. It was awesome and passion rap song; sort of tells people to go out and let's not re-elect Bush and let's show him how angry we are. It's such an awesome piece of music.               But you know what, Bush didn't win. And me? I still think Eminem is a great rapper.               So in sum, we've talked about a lot of good questions that you'd think about and making your own definition of rhetoric. Is rhetoric something that you practice? Or is it something that's studied? Does it include invention and coming up with ideas? Does it include delivery and how those ideas are actually presented?               Is rhetoric dependent on being language? Or does it work with any symbol? Does rhetoric always have to involve persuasion? And if so, does it depend on whether or not the goal is achieved; whether or not that was good rhetoric?               As we continue to define and find sort of a definition of rhetoric, the purpose of this podcast is going to be sort of expand on some of these questions about what rhetoric is doing. We're going to talk about some of the most important ideas; some of the most important figures and some of the most important theories and movements that have shaped through rhetorical field.               Decide for yourself. What is rhetoric? Why is rhetoric important to you? What sort of advances in rhetoric are going to be the ones that you want to contribute? You could think for yourself but one sort of one liney, piffy definition of what rhetoric is may be coming from some of these theories.               Practice it for yourself a few times and that way next time, when somebody at a party asks you what it is you study, you could have a good comeback instead of just staring at your punch glass for a few more minutes.               Thank you for joining me today – our first episode of Mere Rhetoric. If you have any questions or suggestions or things that you really would like to hear more about, feel free to email me. My email is mary.hedengren@gmail.com. And I'll try to take some of yourquestions sometimes. Thanks for joining us and remember, rhetoric is not just a pejorative.  

This episode of Rhetoricity features an interview with Victor Vitanza, the Jean-Francois Lyotard Chair at the European Graduate School and a Professor of English and Rhetoric at Clemson University. The interview was conducted at the 2014 Rhetoric Society of America conference in San Antonio, Texas, and originally published as part of the Zeugma podcast's 2014 summer interview series. Dr. Vitanza founded the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design (RCID) program at Clemson, has written such books as Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric and Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing, and serves as editor of Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory. He's currently working on a film and companion book entitled The Returns of Philology: This Time, Anachronistics. In this interview, Vitanza discusses Kenneth Burke and Geoffrey Sirc, rhetorics and media old and new, and Immanuel Kant and Internet cats. There's also, I should promise and advise listeners, quite a bit of talk about scatology. Since this interview is a little longer than other Rhetoricity episodes, I've split it in two. You can find the second half, during which we turn our attention to cats, Sirc, and the RCID program, here. This episode cites the following sources: Kenneth Burke's "Rhetoric--Old and New" Diane Davis's Inessential Solidarity Jacques Derrida's "Mochlos; or, the Conflict of the Faculties" Immanuel Kant's "Conflict of the Faculties" George A. Kennedy's "A Hoot in the Dark" Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech Geoffrey Sirc's "Writing Classroom as A&P Parking Lot" It also includes sound clips from Johann Sebastian Bach's "Italienisches Konzert, BWV 971, Movement 1," the Community episode "Biology 101," and "Who You Gonna Call?" All other music and sound clips are from GarageBand's loop library and the website freesound.org.

This is the second half of a two-part interview with Victor Vitanza, the Jean-Francois Lyotard Chair at the European Graduate School and a Professor of English and Rhetoric at Clemson University. You can find the first half here. The interview was conducted at the 2014 Rhetoric Society of America conference in San Antonio, Texas, and originally published as part of the Zeugma podcast's 2014 summer interview series. In this half of the interview, Vitanza discusses the futures of Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, including upcoming issues on "cat theory," Geoffrey Sirc, and the Italian writer Mario Untersteiner. I also ask him about Clemson's Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design PhD program, and we end with a brief discussion of typos and silence.

This episode of Rhetoricity finds me interviewing Collin Brooke. In March 2015, Dr. Brooke was the featured speaker at The University of Texas at Austin's Digital Writing and Research Lab's annual Speaker Series. He was kind enough to sit down for two interviews--one for the lab and one for this podcast. In some ways, this interview builds on the other one; if you're interested in a little more context and conversation, then, you can find that lab interview here. Brooke is an associate professor of rhetoric and writing at Syracuse University, the Director of Electronic Resources for the Rhetoric Society of America, and author of the book Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media. The talk he gave in Austin was entitled "Entropics of Discourse: Post/Human Rhetorics Amidst the Networks," and a video of it is available via the DWRL's YouTube channel. That talk is part of his current book project on rhetoric and networks, which is tentatively titled Rhetworks. If you're interested in more on networked rhetorics, you can also check out "Bruno Latour's Posthuman Rhetoric of Assent," Brooke's contribution to the recent anthology Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. He'll also be leading a workshop on rhetoric and networks at the 2015 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute in Madison, Wisconsin. In this interview, we talk about the concept of entropy and rhetoric's "master tropes," focusing specifically on the relationship between entropy and irony. We also discuss Rhetsy, a weekly email newsletter of "rhetorical miscellany" that Brooke curates. This and all other Rhetoricity episodes are also available on iTunes and Stitcher.

In this episode of Rhetoricity, I interview Dr. Jenny Rice, an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. In addition to appearing on this podcast's episode on small talk, Dr. Rice has made extensive contributions to rhetorical studies: she’s the author of the book Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis as well as articles in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Argumentation and Advocacy, College Composition and Communication, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly (RSQ, for short). She’ll also be co-chairing the 2016 Rhetoric Society of America conference in Atlanta, Georgia. In this episode, I talk with Dr. Rice about her current book project, which is tentatively titled Awful Archives. In February 2015, she presented part of that project at The University of Texas at Austin's Digital Writing and Research Lab. A video of that presentation, which was entitled "Archival Magnitude: Quantities of Evidence and Insights into Reality," is available here. We also discuss a forum she's organizing for RSQ, an anthology she's co-editing with UT's Casey Boyle, and her approach to social media. This and all other Rhetoricity episodes are also available on iTunes and Stitcher.

Speechwriters & Business Communicators Conference 2014, Thursday, 3 April 2014, Oxford. Jens is professor of rhetoric and visual communication at University of Bergen (Norway). He has written extensively about rhetoric, speech making, speech writing and powerpoint-presentations. He is president of the Rhetoric Society of Europe and co-founder and longtime chief editor of the research journal Rhetorica Scandinavia. For more than 15 years Kjeldsen has done speech writing courses and rhetorical consultant work for CEOs, political parties, and for most of the Norwegian ministries, including Ministry of Trade and Industry and The Office of the Prime Minister. Jens will be asking what's the point of speaking today, in the age of internet, social media, interviews and a constant shrinking of audience attention span? He will encourage speechwriters to reflect on the fundamentals of what they do: What's the point of speeches - and speechwriting?

Speechwriters & Business Communicators Conference 2014, Thursday, 3 April 2014, Oxford. Jens is professor of rhetoric and visual communication at University of Bergen (Norway). He has written extensively about rhetoric, speech making, speech writing and powerpoint-presentations. He is president of the Rhetoric Society of Europe and co-founder and longtime chief editor of the research journal Rhetorica Scandinavia. For more than 15 years Kjeldsen has done speech writing courses and rhetorical consultant work for CEOs, political parties, and for most of the Norwegian ministries, including Ministry of Trade and Industry and The Office of the Prime Minister. Jens will be asking what's the point of speaking today, in the age of internet, social media, interviews and a constant shrinking of audience attention span? He will encourage speechwriters to reflect on the fundamentals of what they do: What's the point of speeches - and speechwriting?