Podcasts about rhetoric society quarterly

Keywords: Digital Rhetorics, Infrastructure, Digital Writing, Sensory Rhetorics, Pedagogy. Hannah Hopkins is a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research engages the material infrastructures of digital writing, extending from the personal device to the vast landscapes of server farms and data centers that support and circulate digital texts. Her work offers that rhetoric's multimodal, more-than-visual sensing practices help us attune to the fundamental extractivist logics of all writing and the ethical and pedagogical dilemmas that result. Hannah's research and reviews are published in Technical Communication Quarterly, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Communication Design Quarterly, and elsewhere. Visit thebigrhetoricalpodcast.weebly.com and follow @thebigrhet.

This episode features an interview with Jennifer Lin LeMesurier. The conversation, recorded at this year's Conference on College Composition and Communication, focuses on her 2023 book Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption. That book explores how the rhetorical framing of food and eating underpins our understanding of Asian and Asian American identity in the contemporary racial landscape. Dr. LeMesurier is Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Colgate University. Her areas of expertise include bodily and material rhetorics, genre theory, discourse analysis, qualitative research, and affect theory. In addition to Inscrutable Eating, she co-edited Writing in and about the Performing and Visual Arts: Creating, Performing, and Teaching with Steven J. Corbett, Betsy Cooper, and Teagan E. Decker. To date, she has published articles in College Composition and Communication, Peitho, POROI, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. This episode features a clip from "Just a Taste" by Beat Mekanik. Episode Transcript

Episode 122 serves as the Season 8 Premiere of The Big Rhetorical Podcast (TBR Podcast) and features an interview with Dr. Eric Detweiler. Eric Detweiler is an associate professor in the Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University, where he also directs the Public Writing and Rhetoric program. His book Responsible Pedagogy: Moving Beyond Authority and Mastery in Higher Education was published by Penn State University Press in 2022. His work has also appeared inRhetoric Review, Pedagogy, Tuning in to Soundwriting, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and he runs a podcast about rhetoric called Rhetoricity. In addition to rhetoric and writing pedagogy, he researches and teaches classes on public writing, podcasting, video games, and the history and theory of rhetoric.

Deborah Sampson could count William Bradford and Myles Standish in her family tree. That tree didn't include Robert Shurtlliff; that was the alias Deborah used to enlist in the Continental Army. Research: "Deborah Sampson." Encyclopedia of World Biography Online, vol. 37, Gale, 2017. Gale In Context: Biography, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1631010696/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=67aa7490. Accessed 13 June 2022. Cowan, Leigh Alison. “The Woman Who Sneaked Into George Washington's Army.” New York Times. 7/2/2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/arts/design/the-woman-who-sneaked-into-george-washingtons-army.html Davis, Curtis Carroll. “A ‘Galantress' Gets Her Due: The Earliest Published Notice of Deborah Sampson.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society  1981-10-21: Vol 91 Iss 2. https://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44517675.pdf Foner, Philip S. “Black Participation in the Centennial of 1876.” Phylon (1960-) , 4th Qtr., 1978, Vol. 39, No. 4 (4th Qtr., 1978). https://www.jstor.org/stable/274895 Gannett, Deborah Sampson. “Diary of Deborah Sampson Gannett in 1802 (facsimile).” Facsimile by Eugene Tappan. 1901. https://archive.org/details/diaryofdeborahsa00gann/ Grant De Pauw, Linda. “REPLY: Deborah Sampson Gannett.” H-Minvera Discussion Logs. 2/9/2000. https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-minerva&month=0002&week=b&msg=7zkXCrd1QbfeT5kbVeln8A&user=&pw= Hiltner, Judith. “'The Example of our Heroine': Deborah Sampson and the Legacy of Herman Mann's The Female Review.”  American Studies , Spring, 2000, Vol. 41, No. 1. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40643118 Hiltner, Judith. “She Bled in Secret': Deborah Sampson, Herman Mann and ‘The Female Review.'” Early American Literature , 1999, Vol. 34, No. 2. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25057161 Hiltner, Judth R. “'Like a Bewildered Star": Deborah Sampson, Herman Mann, and ‘Address, Delivered with Applause'.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly , Spring, 1999, Vol. 29, No. 2. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3886083 Historic New England. “Gown.” https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/189811/ Katz, Brigit. “Diary Sheds Light on Deborah Sampson, Who Fought in the Revolutionary War.” Smithsonian. 7/2/2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/diary-sheds-light-deborah-sampson-who-fought-revolutionary-war-180972547/ Lafleur, Greta L. “Precipitous Sensations: Herman Mann's ‘The Female Review' (1797), Botanical Sexuality, and the Challenge of Queer Historiography.” Early American Literature , 2013, Vol. 48, No. 1. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24476307 Letter from Paul Revere to William Eustis, 20 February 1804. Transcript. https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=326&img_step=1&mode=transcript#page1 Mann, Herman. “The female review: or, Memoirs of an American young lady; whose life and character are peculiarly distinguished--being a Continental soldier, for nearly three years, in the late American war. During which time, she performed the duties of every department, into which she was called, with punctual exactness, fidelity and honor, and preserved her chastity inviolate, by the most artful concealment of her sex. : With an appendix, containing charcteristic traits, by different hands; her taste for economy, principles of domestic education, &c..”  1797 . https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N24494.0001.001?view=toc Michals, Debra, editor. “Deborah Sampson.” National Women's History Museum. https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/deborah-sampson Michals, Debra.  "Margaret Cochran Corbin."  National Women's History Museum.  2015. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/margaret-cochran-corbin. Nell, William C. “Colored Patriots of the American Revolution.” Robert F. Wallcut. 1855. https://archive.org/details/coloredpatriots00stowgoog/ Nellis, Rachel. “Deborah Sampson at War.” The American Revolution Institute. May 15, 2020. https://www.americanrevolutioninstitute.org/video/deborah-sampson-at-war/ Norwood, William Frederick. “Deborah Sampson, Alias Robert Shirtliff, Fighting Female of the Continental Line.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine. March-April 1957. Via JSTOR. http://www.jstor.com/stable/44443973 Phoner, Philip S. “Black Participation in the Centennial of 1876.” Phylon (1960-) , 4th Qtr., 1978, Vol. 39, No. 4. Via JSTOR. : https://www.jstor.org/stable/274895 Roberts, Cokie. “Founding Mothers.” Excerpted at the Museum of the American Revolution. https://www.amrevmuseum.org/read-the-revolution/founding-mothers Serfilippi, Jessie. “Deborah Sampson.” George Washington's Mount Vernon Center for Digital History. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/deborah-sampson/ Sharon Historical Society. “Publications of the Sharon Historical Society of Sharon, Massachusetts.” 1905. https://archive.org/details/publicationsofsh02shar/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kyle Stedman (@kstedman) reads the bad idea "Secondary-School English Teachers Should Only Be Taught Literature" by Elizabethada A. Wright. It's a chapter first published in Bad Ideas about Writing, which was edited by Cheryl E. Ball (@s2ceball) and Drew M. Loewe (@drewloewe). Don't miss the joke: the author of the chapter is disagreeing with the bad idea stated in the chapter's title. Keywords: secondary English education programs, rhetoric, AP Central, writing pedagogy, first-year writing Professor at University of Minnesota Duluth, Elizabethada A. Wright teaches in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies and is a member of the faculty at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities' Literacy and Rhetorical Studies Program. She is co-editor and contributor to Catholic Women's Rhetoric in the United States: Ethos, the Patriarchy, and Feminist Resistance. She has published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, College English Association Critic, Studies in the Literary Imagination, as well as in a number of other journals and books. (2022 bio) As always, the theme music is "Parade" by nctrnm, and both the book and podcast are licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. The full book was published by the West Virginia University Libraries and Digital Publishing Institute; find it online for free at https://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/badideas. All ad revenue will be split between the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and the Computers and Writing Graduate Research Network.

Claudia talks to Jeremy Gordon about the concept “Republic of Noise”. They discuss the relationship between noise and politics and think through how noise might be used as a tool that enables listening and democracy. They “riff” with each other trying to think through the tensions between noise and harmony as well as whose sounds are considered pleasant or not and how that shapes how one belongs to place.   Date Recorded: 9 February 2022 Jeremy Gordon is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Gonzaga University who studies and teaches where environmental communication, environmental studies, and critical animal studies get entangled. He is obsessed with questions of how ecological relations are “rhetorically” animated – by human and more-than-human messmates. Specifically, how urban ecologies and feral spaces are, and should be, shaped by everyday creaturely encounters. Jeremy has co-edited a special volume on “animal rhetoric” for Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and is currently enchanted by, and kinning with, the feral chickens of Tampa, Florida's Ybor City. Those chickens have scratched and strutted their way into The Journal of Urban Affairs and Dr. Laura Reese's edited book on Animals in the City. Find out more about Jeremy on his University website. Featured: A fowl politics of urban dwelling. Or, Ybor City's republic of noise; Of fowl feet, beaks, and streets: eyes on the ground in Ybor City by Jeremy G. Gordon; Ybor Chicken Society ; The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening by Jennifer Lynn Stoever; Practices of Space and Walking in the City by Michel De Certeau; The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram; Wild dog dreaming: Love and Extinction by Deborah Bird Rose; When Species Meet by Donna Haraway Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; the Sonic Arts Studio and the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab) for sponsoring this season; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John (Website) for the logo, and Hannah Hunter for the Animal Highlight. 

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.

Just in time for a Labor Day weekend, we're back in your feeds with another episode! This time, Eliza Gellis, a fourth-year PhD Candidate in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University stops by to chat about her dissertation project bridging rhetorical studies with Jewish studies through a focus on the rhetoric of the Tanakh (or the Hebrew Bible). Specifically, she examines encounters with the Divine as a framework for understanding Otherness and the rhetorical encounter using a transdisciplinary methodology. Eliza, who was a third-year doctoral candidate at the time or recording, chats about the project, but also the broader implications of her work regarding historiography, comparative rhetoric, classical and/or ancient rhetoric, and bringing rhetorical studies into conversation with Jewish studies. For those of you who find yourselves wondering about what the past reveals about today—and vice versa—or how to use our training in classical rhetoric to envision new avenues for work, this is the episode for you! You can reach out to Eliza on Twitter (via DM) at @ElizaGellis or via email at egellis@purdue.edu. Read more about her work and projects at her website, available at this link. If you'd like to learn more about the show, find links to things we talked about, find transcripts, or sign up to be a guest, please check out tellmemorepod.com. Feel free to follow us on Twitter at @TMM_Pod, too. Well wishes and safety to you all as we make our way through the fall semester. References to Things Mentioned in this Episode: Enos, Richard Lee. Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle, Revised and Expanded Edition. Parlor Press, 2012. Geiger, Joseph. “Notes on the Second Sophistic in Palestine.” Illinois Classical Studies, vol. 19, 1994, pp. 221–230. Katz, Steven B. “The epistemology of the Kabbalah: Toward a Jewish Philosophy of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1-4, 1995, pp. 107-122. ---. “The Kabbalah as a Theory of Rhetoric: Another Suppressed Epistemology.” Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and Literacy, edited by John Frederick Reynolds, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995. Magonet, Jonathan. A Rabbi Reads the Bible, 2nd ed. SCM Press, 2004. Loewen, James. Lies Across America. New Press, 1999. Porter, James I. The Sublime in Antiquity. Cambridge U Press, 2016. Rickert, Thomas. “Parmenides: Philosopher, Rhetorician, Skywalker.” Logos Without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language Before Plato, edited by Robin Reames, University of South Carolina Press, 2017. Versnel, H.S. “The Poetics of the Magical Charm: An Essay in the Power of Words.” Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World, edited by Paul Mirecki, Brill, 2015. Walker, Jeffrey. Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity. Oxford U Press, 2000.

We live in a world of unbridled technological and argumentative advancement. A.I. has learned to debate Thanksgiving-table politics against humans. People may soon be using “argument checks” as well as “grammar checks” on their smartphones. Cats and dogs have finally put aside their differences and learned to live in peace by forming a coalition against postal workers. Welcome to the future.Whether this sounds like an irenic utopian ideal or an Orwellian dystopia to you, it is the subject of today's episode! In the first installment of our newest re:joinder series, Disciplining Disciplinary Boundaries, we take aim at an article that feels designed to make humanists pull their hair out: Benjamin Wallace-Wells's “The Limits of Political Debate,” published in The New Yorker. This article tells the story of Project Debater, an artificial intelligence designed to compete in political debate competitions against humans using mountains of empirical evidence and “fifty to seventy” prefabricated argument structures. As we read through the dramatic tale of P.D.'s inception to it's first high-profile defeat in public debate by Harish Natarajan in 2019, we discuss the way that science journalists (and scientists themselves) make strange and fascinating assumptions about the humanities.We also frame our reading of the article with two critical pieces of rhetoric scholarship that help illuminate its various rhetorical pitfalls and spurious assumptions. Jeanne Fahnestock's 1986 classic “Accommodating Science” lays the groundwork for studying science journalism by taxonomizing some typical rhetorical appeals and information transformations journalists use to make hard science more appealing for public audiences (e.g. sacrificing technical details at the expense of telling a dramatic narrative of “discovery”). Finally, we end with Carolyn Miller's 2007 article “What can automation teach us about agency,” and reflect upon the ways that A.I. can only have rhetorical agency if an audience attributes it. This article helps us better understand why Project Debater suffered defeat at the hands of a human, and why this article tells us more about the limits of artificial intelligence rather than “rhetorical persuasion.”Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode:Fahnestock, J. (1986). Accommodating science: The rhetorical life of scientific facts. Written communication, 3(3), 330-350.Miller, C. R. (2007). What can automation tell us about agency?. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37(2), 137-157.Plato. (2008). Gorgias (B. Jowett, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. (Original published c. 380 BCE). Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1672/1672-h/1672-h.htmSlonim, N., Bilu, Y., Alzate, C., Bar-Haim, R., Bogin, B., Bonin, F., ... & Aharonov, R. (2021). An autonomous debating system. Nature, 591(7850), 379-384.Wallace-Wells, B. (2021, Apr. 11). The limits of political debate. The New Yorker. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-populism/the-limits-of-political-debate

On today's show, Alex and Calvin have the distinct privilege of speaking with Dr. Karma R. Chávez, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Karma is a scholar whose work runs the gamut from border rhetorics and pandemic discourses, to coalition-building and intersectionality. We begin by discussing Karma's 2013 book Queer Migration Politics, considering how the issues of immigration and queer liberation have intersected rhetorically, in particular as a coalitional response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Then, Karma explains her critical views on how scholars engage with embodiment, and we brainstorm new possibilities for studying the nuances and particularities of hegemonic bodies. Finally, Karma shares her experiences visiting the West Bank of Palestine, as well as her time recording interviews about the Palestine/Israel conflict for her public radio show in Madison, Wisconsin, all of which is documented in her 2019 book Palestine on the Air. We unpack how academic freedom functions as a problematic ideograph in conversations about this issue, and close by considering intersections between struggles for Palestinians' and immigrants' rights.Karma Chávez publications referenced in this episode:Chávez, K. R. (2013). Queer migration politics: Activist rhetoric and coalitional possibilities. University of Illinois Press.Chávez, K. R. (2018). The Body: An Abstract and Actual Rhetorical Concept. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 48(3), 242-250.Chavez, K. R., & Ezra, M. (2019). Palestine on the Air. University of Illinois Press.Luibheid, E., Chavez, K.R., Brown, A.J., Capo, J., Carastathis, A., & Caraves, J. (2020). Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation. (1 ed.). Champaign: University of Illinois Press.Additional references:American Studies Association Resolution Endorsing BDSAnderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso books.Brooks, M. P., & Houck, D. W. (Eds.). (2011). The speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To tell it like it is. Univ. Press of Mississippi.Chávez, K. R. (2015). The precariousness of homonationalism: The queer agency of terrorism in post-9/11 rhetoric. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2(3), 32-58. [Discusses “Barney Frank's role as congressman, his position as only the second openly gay person to serve in the U.S. Congress, and I offer some history of the 1990 Immigration Act and Frank's role in both its construction and in its passing,” p. 35.]Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Duke University Press.Habermas, J.. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press. [Canonical work of public sphere theory.]Kaplan, S. (2015). “University of Illinois censured after professor loses job over tweets critical of Israel.” Washington Post. [Discusses the academic freedom case of Steven Salaita.]King, T. L. (2019). The Black shoals: Offshore formations of Black and Native studies. Duke University Press.Luibhéid, E. (2002). Entry denied: Controlling sexuality at the border. U of Minnesota Press.Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics (Vol. 2). U of Minnesota Press.Palestinian American Research CenterYoung, I. M. (1996). Communication and the other: beyond deliberative democracy. In Benhabib, S. (Ed.). Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, 125–143. Princeton University Press.

What do a mid-century photographer, a fresh new work, politics and poop jokes, solitary confinement and a music video all have in common? Why it must be time for a rhetoric journal roundup! This week we are going to take a little journey through the quarter’s last issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, otherwise known as the RSQ. The RSQ is the official publication of the Rhetorical Society of America, otherwise know as the RSA. So the RSA published the RSQ and now it’s time for the intro for you-know-who!   [intro]   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who shaped rhetorical history and I’m Mary Hedengren and I’ve finally finished the spring issue of the RSQ.   Before I give you a summary of this quarter’s issue, let me just give you a little context on the RSQ. The RSQ has been rolling out for decades and is probably one of the most prestigious and longest-running journals for rhetorical studies. If you become a dues-paying member of the RSA--and it’s pretty cheap for students--, you can receive your own subscription to the RSQ, and you’ll find that it has some of the same focus as the RSA conferences held every other year--it’s focused on the rhetoric side of comp/rhet, usually with a big dose of theory. You won’t find a lot of articles in the RSQ about first-year composition, but you will find archival research, cultural artifacts, history and more.    So let’s take a walk through the Spring 2020 issue of RSQ.   First off, we have an article from PhD candidate Emliy N. Smith because, yes, grad students can get published in RSQ. Smith has looked into the photograph of Charles “Teenie” Harris, an African American photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier. Smith argues that Harris’ photography counters other mid-century depictions of Black people in two important ways: first, the iconic form of photography--iconic photography, as Smith points out, are high performance. Think, as Smith says, of the photograph of raising the flag on Iwo Jima. It’s dramatic, semi-staged and capital M Meaningful. Harris had some pictures like that, but Smith is more interested in the other type of photography he did, the so called idiomatic image, colloquial and conversational. She describes photographs of Harris’ that show Black people creating their own lives as they are “simply moving about in a world suffused with structural racism” (85) like one picture showing kids at a Halloween party, part of their own community, and that community building its own future through its children. The “idiomatic, everyday work of building and sustaining ...Black community,” Smith argues, is itself a powerful mode of visual rhetoric, not less than the iconic mode.   Romeo Garcia and Jose M. Cortez wrote  the next article “The Trace of a Mark That Scatters: The Anthropoi and the Rhetoric of Decoloniality.” If you wondered what a third of those words mean, you are not alone. I had to read the abstract three times before I understood what the article was about, but then I began to see that those words I didn’t understand were exactly what the article was about. In rhetoric we talk a lot about postcolonialism, but these authors are seeking new theories andnew terms--one term is decoloniality. Instead of positioning, for example, the Latin American experience in terms of its difference from Europe, how about just “actually theorizing  rhetoric from the locus of non-Western … space” (94)? The authors give an example of the kind of contrastive rhetoric that really gets their goat. Don P Abbott wrote an article about rhetoric in Aztec culture where he  says, “It is possible that Aztec discourse, both practical and conceptually, would have continued to evolve as the culture itself developed” (qtd 99) and Garcia and Crotez are like…”wait what…? So you think Aztec culture was ‘undeveloped’? Do you think that logocentrism is the only way to figure rhetoric? Uh, no..!” This brings us to the other term in the title that might not be familiar--anthropoi. As you might guess, this word has a connection to anthropology, with the idea that the anthropoi are people you study, “that which cannot escape the status of being external to the subject and being gramed as object/nature” (97).  But wait! de-Colonialism has its own flaws. How can modern rhetoricians ever hope to reconstruct the rhetorics of people in radically different cultures living thousands of years ago? “Decoloniality,” the authors say, “cannot carry out its promis of decolonization while adopting the language and conceptual apparatus of propriety” (103)  If post-colonial thinks about the other and decoloniality gets caught in a loop of using western logocentrism to approach non-Western rhetorics, what’s the solution? Well….they propose an alterity symbolized in the letter X, both as the end of Latinx, and also as in the symbol you use to signify your name if you aren’t literate. They “move past decoloniality without completely giving up on its ground of intervention” seeking “ (104). Whew. That is some heavy stuff!   Don’t worry, the next article includes potty humor! Richard Benjamin Crosby at Brigham Young University (Go Cougs!), digs into the Rhetorical Grotesque, especially in the 21st century policial arena. He argues that leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro and Hugo Chavez and Silvio Berlusconi all “enact in rhetoric the kinds of incongruous combinations, comis distortions and corporeal excesses that scholars in art and literature have long associated with grotesquerie” (109, original emphasis). The grotesque, if you remember your Baktin, focuses a lot on the body, and bodily excess--eating, pooping, reproducing. As Crosby says. “The groteque’s only true allegiance is to transgression of the presumed order of things” (112) and it is in this way that politicians like Trump exemplify the grotesque-- positioning themselves as transgressive, shaking up the old foundation, and being grotesque is part of that. “A political cutlass” (112) as “a mode of communication, the essence of which is transgression of or deviation from and degradation of that which is presumed to be normal” through being 1- incongruous, 2- mocking, and 3- corporal. Crosby gives examples of political discourse of the grotesque from several different countries and political positions, but Trump is the clearest example for us, especially during the Primary campaign. Trump’s grotesque rhetoric argued that “Trump is real, because he is uncontained” (115) as Trump mocks  accusations that he calls women he doesn’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals” and says “the big problem this country has is being politically correct” (116). Distrust in political institutions have led, says Crosby, to a “grotesque kairos” (119) of wanting to mock and dismantle social norms. And although we rebel-rousing rhetoricians often get excited about breaking social norms, Crosby points out that demagogues like Trump demonstrate that the grotesque is “a neutral tool that can be wielded by anyone skilled enough to use it” (120) and sometimes it can be disasterous.   From Trump’s consolidation of power we then move to the powerless--prisoners on hunger strikes in California’s Pelican Bay Prison. Chris S Earle writes an article called “‘More Resilient than Concrete and Steel”: Consciousness-Raising, Self-Discipline and Bodily Resistance in Solitary Confinement” where he argues that the “widespread, multiracial coalition emerged through years of organizing between prison cells, a process rendered nearly impossible by solitary confinement” (124). “Against the odds,” he relates, these prisoners “created a discursive space” in prison across racial boundaries in three collective hunger strikes opposition prisoner conditions (125). These hunger strikes took place in a Supermax prison and solitary confinement, among the prisoners termed “worst of the worst,” yet they exemplified “strict regimes of self-discipline” (132) as the prisoners “turned their bodies into weapons of resistance” and made “a moral critiques of solitary confinement” (133). Earle concludes his article by saying that making distinctions between nonviolent and violent offenders undermines prison reform efforts and justifies “even more inhumane conditions for many people in prison” (134).   In the next article, Jennifer Lin Lemesurier (li-mis-i-ur) walks us through the “racist kinesiologies” in Childish Gambino’s “this is America.” If you haven’t seen the music video of “This is America,” pause this podcast, fire up the YouTube and watch it now. You’ll thank me. [....] Aaaaaand we’re back. Lemesurier describes what Childish Gambino’s body is doing in this video as embodying two racist assumptions about black male bodies--that they are hyper talented and hyper violent. She takes us deep into the history of Black dance as seen through the filter of white eyes, as slavers demanded slaves dance on demand across the middle passage (141) and slave owners exhibit the “savage wildness” of Black dance (142), but it’s one figure of the Black male body that Childish Gambino especially channels--the 1889 figure of The Original Jim Crow, a minstrel figure who danced with a knee bend, elbow bend and naive amusement. Lemesurier, a dancer herself, describes how uneven the position is in body weight and posture, how it “does not valorize linear pattern or gentle arcs” (144)--it is a stark and mocking other. As all of my listeners have now seen the video--RIGHT?!-- you know that in the video Childish Gambino transitions seamlessly between depictions of performance and violent. “The emphasis on dance,” Lemesuir writes, “is key to the critique of how Black embodiment serves white audiences” (145). “Gambino’s chorerographed performance of violence is a metaperformative moment that asks viewers to question the naturaizationof Black bodies as always dancing or shooting and the impact of such portrayals on  broader relations that are possible between racialized bodies” (146). Lemesuir ends by recommending that we in rhetoric continue studying moving bodies, “Rhetoric needs more clarity on how bodily hierarchies are always present, not only in visuals or discourses, but in the very steps we take through the world, toward or away from one another,” (149).   And there you have it! Those are the main articles from RSQ this quarter. I’m skipping over the book reviews, even though it includes a review by my Casey Boyle, one of my faves from the University of Texas at Austin (go Longhorns!), Dana Cloud and Steve Mailloux’s new book. But you, as they say, don’t have to take my word for it!    

The president and his administration use rhetoric every day in speeches, press conferences, and written texts like executive orders and proclamations, but the material effects of this discourse can sometimes be difficult to observe. Today, however, the United States is the epicenter both for the COVID-19 pandemic and an unprecedented wave of civil resistance against local police departments and federal enforcement actions authorized by the president. So, how is the current administration's rhetoric implicated in the pandemic, policing, and protest?To help us navigate these questions, our guest today is Dr. Cameron Mozafari, who uses methods from corpus linguistics to analyze emotional appeals and other rhetorical patterns in presidential speeches. First, Cameron walks us through his recent Trump-COVID 19 Corpus project, in which he has collected and organized all of the Trump Administration's public statements about the Coronavirus crisis. Based on initial analyses of this data, we discuss Trump's treatment of the virus as a war (as opposed to more typical framings of pandemics as water or natural disasters); the differences in register and epistemic certainty between the language employed by Trump and that of Drs. Fauci and Birx; as well as how (in)frequently Trump and Pence use the words "mask" and "social distancing" vs. words related to war.Next, we analyze a related instance of problematic presidential rhetoric: the recent “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence." We talk through how the order constructs a dichotomy between US national identity & "property" vs. Marxism / Anarchism & "crime" / "violence." This dissociation, we argue, is an attempt to shore up the administration's and local police departments' legitimacy at a time of unpopularity and unrest. It also serves to mask the state violence that has incited recent popular unrest and been wielded in response to it. Finally, Cameron tells us about a violent incident earlier this summer at a protest in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we consider how clashes like this one are revelatory of the material effects of presidential rhetoric.Works referenced in this episodeBlaire, C. (1999). Contemporary U.S. memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric's materiality. In J. Selzer & S. Crowley (Eds.), Rhetorical bodies (pp. 16-57). Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P.Fairclough, N. (2003). Intertextuality and assumptions. Analysing discourse:Textual analysis for social research (pp. 39-62). New York, NY: Routledge.Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think. New York: Perseus Book Group.Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P.Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. (J. Wilkinson & P. Weaver, Trans.). London, UK: U of Notre Dame P.Roberts-Miller, P. (2019). Rhetoric and Demagoguery. SIU Press.Skinnell, R. & Murphy, J. (2019). Rhetoric's Demagogue | Demagoguery's Rhetoric: An Introduction. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49:3, 225-232.Stefanowitsch, A. (2007). Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy. In A. Stefanowitsch & S. Th. Gries (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy (pp. 1-16). Boston, MA: de Gruyter.Sweetser, E. (2006). Negative spaces: Levels of negation and kinds of spaces. In S. Bonnefille & S. Salbayre (Eds.), Proceedings of the conference "Negation: Form, figure of speech, conceptualization" (pp. 313-332). Tours, France: Publications universitaires François Rabelais.Thibodeau, P., & Boroditsky, L. (2011, February). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PLOS One, 6(2), 1-11.Links & resources related to Albuquerque, NM protestsNews coverage of the Albuquerque statue protest shooting perpetrated by Steven BacaDonation page for Fight For Our Lives (FFOL), an Albuquerque-based Mutual Aid organizationNational list of local bail funds and other related resources

On today's show, Calvin and Ben speak to our friend, colleague, and former re:verb producer Dr. Ryan Mitchell. Recently, Ryan defended his dissertation, a rhetorical history of the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and he will join Lafayette College as an Assistant Professor in the fall. Ryan's dissertation traces the rhetorical strategies employed by urban gay men in the early 1980s to push back against totalizing, dehumanizing discourses of HIV/AIDS prevention. According to Ryan's analysis of texts like Callen and Berkowitz's 1983 manual How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, the success of these texts' rhetorical strategies depended heavily on their viscerality -- their illumination of subjects' lived, bodily experiences of porousness and permeability -- to both illustrate and justify various intersubjectively-oriented safe sex protocols. Ultimately, Ryan argues, texts like Callen and Berkowitz's served to protect urban gay men from the worst ravages of the disease while also, crucially, affirming their communal identities and agency. After talking through the major rhetorical concepts Ryan employs in his work, we shift into a discussion of how this all might relate to current discourses surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. As Ryan wisely reminds us, no two disease crises are identical, and there are many mismatches between the early years of HIV/AIDS and where we are currently. Even still, as we discuss, the rhetorics that Ryan has studied emphasize the visceral embodied experiences of those most victimized by public health crises while also promoting social practices, norms, and policies to foster intersubjective ethics of care -- all of which may be worthy of consideration as we navigate the social and political upheaval of our present moment.Works Referenced in this EpisodeCazdyn, E. (2012). The already dead: the new time of politics, culture, and illness. Duke University Press.Hauser, G. (2012). Prisoners of conscience : moral vernaculars of political agency. University of South Carolina Press.Hawhee, D. (2011). Looking into Aristotle's eyes: Toward a theory of rhetorical vision. Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 14(2), 139-165.Johnson, J. (2016). “A man's mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(1), 1–20.Kennerly, M. (2010). Getting Carried Away: How Rhetorical Transport Gets Judgment Going. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40(3), 269–291.Larson, S. R. (2018). “Everything inside me was silenced”:(Re) defining rape through visceral counterpublicity. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 104(2), 123-144.Mitchell, R. (2019). Decoupling sex and intimacy: the role of dissociation in early AIDS prevention campaigns. Argumentation and Advocacy, 55(3), 211-229.Rice, J. (2017). The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More: On Archival Magnitude. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 50(1), 26-49.Rowland, A. L. (2020). Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood. Ohio State University Press.

With COVID-19 necessarily reducing our face-to-face interaction, we are increasingly reliant on digital tools -- from conferencing software like Zoom to social networks like Twitter -- to mediate our social, political, and cultural lives. Yet each digital tool brings along specific rhetorical affordances and constraints, a topic that few scholars have studied more closely in recent years than our guest this week, James J. Brown, Jr. (@jamesjbrownjr), Associate Professor of English and Director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers University.In remote conversation, Calvin and James discuss the continuing relevance of notions of digital hospitality and ethos from James's 2015 book Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software, as well as new research James is conducting on the problem of harassment on communication platforms -- from early-20th-century phone network subscribers to today's Twitter trolls. As part of this work, James's new piece in Amodern, "Epicrisis for an Epic Crisis", analyzes rhetorical strategies used by women and people of color to comment on and catalogue instances of bad communicative behavior on platforms and networks. Along the way, we touch upon the value of records, fantasy baseball, and videogames at times like these, as well as why Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is the undisputed master of the quote-tweet.@tressiemcphd's quote-tweet-thread in response to James's articleReferencesBrock Jr, A. (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (Vol. 9). NYU Press.Brown, J. J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software. University of Michigan Press.Brown, J. J. (2020). Epicrisis for an epic crisis. Amodern, 9.Campbell, K. K. (2005). Agency: Promiscuous and protean. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2(1), 1-19.Derrida, J., & Dufourmantelle, A. (2000). Of hospitality. Stanford University Press.Hyde, M. J. (Ed.). (2004). The ethos of rhetoric. University of South Carolina Press.Lanham, R. A. (1991). A handlist of rhetorical terms. Berkeley: University of California Press.Rollins, B. (2005). The ethics of epideictic rhetoric: Addressing the problem of presence through Derrida's funeral orations. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(1), 5-23.Rosenfield, L. W. (1980). The practical celebration of epideictic. Rhetoric in transition: Studies in the nature and uses of rhetoric, 131-55.Walker, J. (2000). Rhetoric and poetics in antiquity. Oxford University Press.

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"

General Summary: In this podcast, we talk with Professor and Director of the University Writing Center, Patricia Roberts-Miller. Interviewing is University of Texas student, Jacob Miller. The two go on to discuss over her article, Demagoguery, Charismatic Leadership, and the Force of Habit and other topics related to her work and studies. The podcast includes a narrator, Cole Burke, and occasional comments made by students of the RHE 321 class in connection to discussion points that talked about throughout the podcast. Detailed Summary: The podcast begins by Professor Roberts-Miller introducing her background, where she studied and taught in the past, before she came to the University of Texas(01:07-01:54). She jokes about her previous works as “trainwrecks in public deliberation” and other topics that she tended to study (02:05-05:24). She then goes on to talk about previous courses she has taught, and currently teaching at the University of Texas (05:25 -07:02). Jacob then goes on to ask the Professor the hard-hitting question of “What is a Demagogue?” (07:04-07:34). What follows next focuses on the in-class discussion over the article, raising questions from students and having Professor Roberts-Miller respond to them and give insights (08:12-25:04). Within this discussion, Jacob asks about engaging in demagoguery (08:12-09:36), a clip of a discussion point by classmate, Dabaya Alrefaei and Professor Roberts-Miller's thoughts on the topic (10:20- 14:22). We then get to hear some insight by fellow classmate, Cason Hunwick and his discussion over the media related to her article (14:55-15:55)as well as Professor Roberts-Miller and her response (16:04-17:50). Then we hear a deep conversation over the followers of demagogues and follow up questions by Jacob to finish the interview (17:59-25:04). The podcast then goes to the final statements, conducted by Cole Burke, and the music fades into the ultimate ending of the podcast (25:05-26:41). Scholarly Article Informing this Production: Patricia Roberts-Miller, “Demagoguery, Charismatic Leadership, and the Force of Habit.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 49:3 (2019): 233-247. Credits: This podcast was produced by Cole Burke, Jacob Miller, Jose Morales Mendez, and Parker Neri , with resources and assistance provided by the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. The production of this podcast was in part due to the teachings of Professor Mark G. Longaker of the University of Texas at Austin. It features the voices of Cole Burke, Jacob Miller, Particia Roberts-Miller, Cason Hunwick, and Dabaya Alrefaei. Music featured in this podcast, were given to the students of RHE 321 by Professor Mark G. Longaker for intended use in this podcast. Additionally, conversation.wav was adapted and incorporated under Creative Commons 1.0 license . Finally, the full class conversations were recorded by the Digital Writing and Research Lab.

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.

On today's show, Alex and Calvin discuss demagoguery and far-right rhetoric with CV Vitolo-Haddad, a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Director of Debate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In particular, we discuss CV's recent publication in Rhetoric Society Quarterly - “The Blood of Patriots: Symbolic Violence and “The West” - which focuses on the rhetoric of the far-right group known as the “Proud Boys.”This article explores how the Proud Boys are motivated by an imagined, at-risk spatial terrain of whiteness known as “the West” (or “Western civilization”). In our discussion, CV explains what such groups' demagogic rhetoric can teach us about the paradoxes of demagoguery more broadly: from their vacillation between a rhetoric of strength and violence to one of victimization and precarity, to their attachment to “a libertarian aesthetic of freedom” which often occludes their truly authoritarian politics. We also discuss the pros and cons of publicly debating the far-right, with CV sharing some best practices from direct experience.Works & Concepts Cited in this EpisodeRoberts-Miller, P. (2017). Demagoguery and democracy. The Experiment.Roberts-Miller, P. (2019). Rhetoric and demagoguery. SIU Press.Vitolo-Haddad, C. V. (2019). The blood of patriots: Symbolic violence and “the west”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49(3), 280-296.Walden, D. (2018, 28 June). Dismantling the “west.” Current Affairs. Retrieved from: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/06/dismantling-the-westCV's TwitterCV's Medium

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like you just had to say something -- where the words came to you so naturally, they almost felt like they were being dictated by your circumstances? Or, have you ever struggled over how to respond when people around you don't quite see things the same way you do? In each of these instances, you might've been reckoning with a rhetorical situation.In our latest re:blurb mini-episode, Colleen, Calvin, Alex, and Caitlan break down this core concept from rhetorical scholarship. We begin by discussing Lloyd Bitzer's original framework, in which he lays out the three key components of a rhetorical situation: exigence, audience, and constraints. Then, we chart the ways in which Richard Vatz's rejoinder to Bitzer's model challenges its assumptions about the origin point of meaning, introducing the idea that speakers and their rhetorics control how we understand situations, and not the other way around. Then, we discuss two attempts to reconcile the Bitzer-Vatz disjunct: Barbara Biesecker's integration of Derrida's concept of différance and Jenny Rice's “rhetorical ecologies” framework, both of which are designed to further problematize our assumptions about rhetoric, language, and communicative responses to exigent circumstances.Finally, we put the concepts we've discussed into practice through an analysis of three different responses to the recent attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand: from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Australian Senator Fraser Anning. We show how each of these public figures frame the situation facing New Zealand (and the world) differently. In the case of the latter two speakers, we examine how an “affective ecology” of white nationalist and Islamophobic sentiments emboldened them to circulate discourse purporting to mourn the loss of life in Muslim and immigrant communities while also blaming them for other problems -- including, absurdly, the attack itself.Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode:Biesecker, B. A. (1989). Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of 'Différance'. Philosophy & rhetoric, 22(2), 110-130.Bitzer, L. F. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy & rhetoric, 1(1), 1-14.Edbauer, J. [now Rice, J.] (2005). Unframing models of public distribution: From rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(4), 5-24.Vatz, R. E. (1973). The myth of the rhetorical situation. Philosophy & rhetoric, 6(3), 154-161.New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's initial statement on the Christchurch attack: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/one-of-new-zealands-darkest-days-jacinda-ardern-responds-to-christchurch-shootingU.S. President Donald Trump's comments on the Christchurch attack (both his tweets and his press conference) can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2019/mar/15/christchurch-shooting-injuries-reported-as-police-respond-to-critical-incident-live?page=with:block-5c8c218fe4b016d23425cef2Fraser Anning's official statement on the Christchurch attack can be found here: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/new-zealand-mosque-shooting-outrage-as-farright-australian-senator-fraser-anning-links-massacre-to-a4092421.htmlTranscript of this episode

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.

A Book at Lunchtime Seminar with Terrence Cave, Deirdre Wilson, Ben Morgan (Worcester College, Oxford), Professor Robyn Carston (Linguistics, UCL). Chaired by Professor Philip Bullock (TORCH Director). Is language a simple code, or is meaning conveyed as much by context, history, and speaker as by the arrangement of words and letters? Relevance theory, described by Alastair Fowler in the LRB as 'nothing less than the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle's', takes the latter view and offers a comprehensive understanding of language and communication grounded in evidence about the ways humans think and behave. Reading Beyond the Code is the first book to explore the value for literary studies of relevance theory. Drawing on a wide range of examples-lyric poems by Yeats, Herrick, Heaney, Dickinson, and Mary Oliver, novels by Cervantes, Flaubert, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton-nine of the ten essays are written by literary specialists and use relevance theory both as a broad framing perspective and as a resource for detailed analysis. The final essay, by Deirdre Wilson, co-founder (with Dan Sperber) of relevance theory, takes a retrospective view of the issues addressed by the volume and considers the implications of literary studies for cognitive approaches to communication. Edited by Terence Cave, Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow, St John's College, Oxford, and Deirdre Wilson, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, UCL and Research Professor in Philosophy, IFIKK, University of Oslo. Terence Cave is recognized as a leading specialist in French Renaissance literature, but has also made landmark contributions to comparative literature and the history of poetics. His most recent work focuses on cognitive approaches to literature. Deirdre Wilson's book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, co-written with Dan Sperber, was described in Rhetoric Society Quarterly as 'probably the best book you'll ever read on communication.' Translated into twelve languages, it has had a lasting influence in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics and is now regarded as a classic. Contributors: Kathryn Banks, Elleke Boehmer, Guillemette Bolens, Terence Cave, Timothy Chesters, Neil Kenny, Raphael Lyne, Kirsti Sellevold, Wes Williams, Deirdre Wilson.

What is reality? According to whose version of reality does society function? This week, Alex and Calvin sit down to discuss these and other questions with Dr. Dana L. Cloud, Professor of Rhetoric & Communication and Director of Graduate Studies at Syracuse University, and author of Reality Bites: Assessing Truth Claims in the Time of Trump. In her book, Cloud argues that fact-checking and rational argumentation are not effective persuasion strategies, and she suggests other ways of responding to the rise of white nationalism in the Trump era. As a critic, Cloud adopts an approach called rhetorical realism: examining discourse from marginalized groups' perspectives and experiences in order to introduce new realities and truths, legitimize them, and position them strategically in the public sphere.The episode opens with a discussion of academic freedom, as we analyze a timely address given by conservative activist Ben Shapiro at the University of Pittsburgh the night prior to our recording. Shapiro's speech exemplifies how the ideograph of is opportunistically used against university administrators by the far-right. Our conversation then moves to what Cloud calls “the Big 5” rhetorical strategies -- affect/emotion, embodiment, narrative, myth, and spectacle. In using these aspects of discourse, the Left can exhibit fidelity to the experiences of ordinary people and, potentially, build a mass movement for social justice. Finally, Cloud reminds us that while we have all of these ways and more to call audiences to action, we must be aware of the unavoidable ideological and material constraints of contemporary U.S. rhetorical situations.Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:Brennan, T. (2014). The Transmission of Affect. Cornell University Press.Butler, J. (2002). Gender Trouble. Routledge.Cloud, D. L. (1996). Hegemony or concordance? The rhetoric of tokenism in “Oprah” Oprah rags‐to‐riches biography. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 13(2), 115-137.Cloud, D. L., Macek, S., & Aune, J. A. (2006). "The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra": A Reply to Ron Greene. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 39(1), 72-84.Cloud, D. L., & Thomas, R. K. (2011). We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Cloud, D. L., & Feyh, K. E. (2015). Reason in Revolt: Emotional Fidelity and Working Class Standpoint in the “Internationale”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 45(4), 300-323.Cloud, D. L. (2018). Reality bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing.Edelman, M. (1988). Constructing the Political Spectacle. University of Chicago Press.Fisher, W. R. (1985). The narrative paradigm: In the beginning. Journal of communication, 35(4), 74-89.Fisher, W. R. (1986). Judging the Quality of Audiences and Narrative Rationality. Practical Reasoning in Human Affairs, 85-103.Foucault, M. (2013). Archaeology of Knowledge. Routledge.Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.Gramsci, A., & Hoare, Q. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Vol. 294). London: Lawrence and Wishart.Greene, R. W. (1998). Another materialist rhetoric. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 15(1), 21-40.Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Harvard University Press.Hedges, C. (2009). Empire of illusion: The end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle. Knopf Canada.Kelly, C. R., & Hoerl, K. E. (2012). Genesis in Hyperreality: Legitimizing Disingenuous Controversy at the Creation Museum. Argumentation and Advocacy,48(3), 123-141.McNally, M., & Schwarzmantel, J. J. (2009). Gramsci and Global Politics: Hegemony and Resistance. London: Routledge.Paine, T. (1792). Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America. Philadelphia: W. & T. Bradford. [Full text available online at: https://www.bartleby.com/133/]

On this week's show, we change things up a bit and bring you the first in a new series of mini-episodes entitled re:blurb, where we break down concepts from rhetorical theory and history in practical terms and use contemporary examples to illustrate their usefulness in examining language in action.For this first installment, Alex takes the mic to explain stasis theory: a set of concepts reiterated throughout rhetorical history that help speakers and writers both analyze and invent arguments. This theory holds that all arguments contain “stasis claims” about the facts at hand in an issue, the definition of key terms and elements in the debate, the evaluation of those elements, and prescriptions of action. Using the stases, we can see how arguers try to “get ahead of” different potential points of disagreement and address specific audiences. In addition, we can think about how we can make better arguments by predicting how others might view each stasis category of a particular issue. This is especially useful when analyzing why arguers choose to stay at a particular stasis level to reach a specific audience.To illustrate how stasis theory can widen our understanding of an arguments and their audiences, Alex uses the stases to analyze Brett Kavanaugh's Wall Street Journal op-ed “I Am an Independent, Impartial Judge,” published in the wake of his and Christine Blasey-Ford's testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, prior to his confirmation and appointment to the Supreme Court.Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode:Fahnestock, J., & Secor, M. (1988). The stases in scientific and literary argument. Written communication, 5(4), 427-443.Hohmann, H. (2001). Stasis. In T. O. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (741-745). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Kavanaugh, B. (2018, Oct. 4). I am an independent, impartial judge. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-am-an-independent-impartial-judge-1538695822Further Reading on Stasis Theory:Braet, A. (1987). The classical doctrine of status and the rhetorical theory of argumentation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 20, 79-93.Heath, M. (1994). The substructure of stasis-theory from Hermagoras to Hermogenes. The Classical Quarterly, 44(1), 114-129.Jasinski, J. Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2001.Liu, Y. (1991). Aristotle and the stasis theory: A reexamination. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 21(1), 53-59.Nadeau, R. (1959). “Classical Systems of Stases in Greek: Hermagoras to Hermogenes.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 2(1), 51–70.Pullman, G. L. (1995). Deliberative rhetoric and forensic stasis: Reconsidering the scope and function of an ancient rhetorical heuristic in the aftermath of the Thomas/Hill controversy. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 25(1-4), 223-230.Thompson, W. N. (1972). Stasis in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 58(2), 134-141.

This episode features two interviewees: Dr. Jonathan Alexander and Dr. Jackie Rhodes. Rhodes and Alexander are not only prolific writers and media makers, but prolific collaborators. Together, they’ve edited The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric as well as Sexual Rhetorics: Methods, Publics, Identities. In this episode, we discuss two of their other collaborative projects: On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies and Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self. Techne won the 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship.  Beyond their co-creations, Jonathan Alexander is the Chancellor’s Professor of English and Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. He’s also the current editor of the journal College Composition and Communication and the author of the critical memoir Creep: A Life, A Theory, An Apology, which is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and being turned into a podcast. Jackie Rhodes is a professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University and the incoming editor of the journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly. She’s also currently working on a documentary called Once a Fury, which is about a 1970s lesbian separatist group called the Furies. The following interview was recorded at the 2017 Conference on College Composition and Communication in a defunct alcove that was once full of pay phones. In addition to Techne and On Multimodality, Drs. Rhodes and Alexander discuss the creepiness of academic disciplines, why it’s important to understand the history of media forms, and the personal, narrative, and scholarly possibilities of digital publications. This episode includes clips from Techne and Tony Zhou's "How to Structure a Video Essay" as well as various sound effects from freesound.org.

This week, Alex and Ryan sit down with Dr. Jenny Rice (Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky) and discuss the rhetoric of “alternative researchers” (i.e. conspiracy theorists), particularly how their practices mirror our own as we construct knowledge in our academic and personal lives. In Dr. Rice's forthcoming book (tentatively titled Awful Archives) she outlines how “archival” practices – broadly defined as the accumulation, organization/categorization, and referencing of information – are often shaped by our sense of what is “beautiful” or “repulsive,” and argues that we can better understand collective knowledge-making processes if we examine “evidence” for its aesthetic dimensions. In essence, the constant accumulation of evidence into an archive of knowledge can give us a sense of satisfaction, in that it feels like we are “making sense” of a chaotic and complex world – continuously forming it into a coherent narrative that helps explain events occurring around us.In exploring this idea through examples ranging from 9/11 “truthers,” the Sandy Hook “crisis actor” conspiracy theory, and the TV show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, we try to work toward a better understanding about how our social & cultural practices shape the kinds of evidence we consider beautiful or ugly, and discuss how to use this understanding for productive ends when communicating among people with whom we disagree.Works & concepts cited in this episode:Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Stanford, N. R. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.Aristotle. Poetics (trans. S.H. Butcher). The Internet Classics Archive. Retrieved from: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.html [where Dr. Rice draws on the concept of Megethos or “magnitude” – n.b. Section 1, part VII]Bitzer, L. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 1(1), 1-14.Edbauer, J. (2005). Unframing models of public distribution: From rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(4), 5-24.Grassi, E. (1980). Rhetoric as philosophy: The humanist tradition. State College, PA: Penn State University Press.Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303-330. [Study on the “backfire effect” re: political beliefs]http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdfRice, J. (2012). Distant publics: Development rhetoric and the subject of crisis. University of Pittsburgh Press.Rice, J. (2017). The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More: On Archival Magnitude. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 50(1), 26-49.Schrag, C. O. (1992). The resources of rationality: A response to the postmodern challenge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

In part two of our series on Rhetorics of Place, Alex and Calvin squeeze into a 5x5 sound booth (reminiscent of a $1,000/month+ studio apartment, or perhaps one floor of a Tiny Home, in a gentrifying Pittsburgh neighborhood) with CMU Master's Candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies Scott Reiss to talk about the politics of urban development. We map out some of the different social, economic, and political factors in gentrification, and how these are specifically playing out in the city of Pittsburgh. We also discuss how the frontier metaphor is used by developers and in the news as a way of justifying the influx of "urban pioneers" to impoverished neighborhoods. Finally, we conclude with some thoughts on different actions that can be taken at a local level to resist gentrification and/or make redevelopment policies that bring wealth to impoverished communities without displacing their residents.Cover image: A “tiny home” designed and sold in the neighborhood of Garfield by Eve Picker, developer and landlord of the East Liberty “Last Billboard” space discussed on our previous episode. Post image: “Keep Pittsburgh Shitty” bumper sticker spotted by a user on the r/pittsburgh subreddit (t-shirt here).Works, Concepts, and News Items Cited in this Episode:Dionne Jr, E. J., Ornstein, N. J., & Mann, T. E. (2017). One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-yet Deported. St. Martin's Press.Edbauer, J. (2005). Unframing models of public distribution: From rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(4), 5-24. [Discusses how the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” was appropriated by developers in Austin.]“Future of Manufacturing To Rise Within Abandoned Steel Mill.” [CMU website article describing the university's new development in Hazelwood.]Glass, R. L. (1964). London: aspects of change (Vol. 3). MacGibbon & Kee. [Coins the term “gentrification.”]Harvey, D. (2008). “The right to the city.” The City Reader, 6, 23-40.Kelly, M. & McKinley, S. (2015). “7 Paths to Development That Bring Neighborhoods Wealth, Not Gentrification.” yes! Magazine.Moore, D. (5/8/2018) “Secrecy surrounding Amazon HQ2 bid will help Pittsburgh win, Allegheny Conference CEO says.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.Smith, N. (1996). “‘Class struggle on Avenue B': The lower east side as wild wild west.” The New Urban Frontier. New York, NY: Routledge, 3-27.St-Esprit, M. (5/8/2018). “As Bloomfield weighs new development, residents seek to prioritize affordable housing.” Public Source. [Note for Pittsburghers: “The BDC will hold another public meeting regarding affordable housing options in the community at 6:30 p.m. May 24 in the West Penn School of Nursing auditorium.”]

On this episode, Katie is joined by Dr. Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University, where he teaches courses in rhetoric, new media, and technical and science writing. He has a a PhD in rhetoric and composition, with a focus in technical writing, from Purdue University, an MA from Case Western Reserve University, and a BSE from Slippery Rock University. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, Ehren now calls Corvallis, OR home. His research has appeared in the journals Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Kairos, College English, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Communication Design Quarterly. His monograph, Communicating Technology and Mobility: A Material Rhetoric for Transportation has recently been published for the Routledge series Studies in Technical Communication, Rhetoric, and Culture.   Segment 1: Ehren's Research on Mobility and Technology [00:00-15:12] In this first segment, Ehren shares about some of the questions driving his research on mobility and technology. Segment 2: The Future of Mobility [15:13-26:45] In segment two, Ehren discusses self-driving vehicles and flying cars. Bonus Clip #1 [00:00-11:06]: Ehren's New Book Project on Bioengineering Bonus Clip #2 [00:00-07:02]: Ehren's Research on Reddit To share feedback about this podcast episode, ask questions that could be featured in a future episode, or to share research-related resources, contact the “Research in Action” podcast: Twitter: @RIA_podcast or #RIA_podcast Email: riapodcast@oregonstate.edu Voicemail: 541-737-1111 If you listen to the podcast via iTunes, please consider leaving us a review. The views expressed by guests on the Research in Action podcast do not necessarily represent the views of Ecampus or Oregon State University.

This last year I adopted a dog, a scruffy grey schnauzer mix. I call him Pip. I talk to Pip all the time. But I don’t expect Pip to talk back to me, and I don’t think about what Pip calls himself. Maybe I should. The rhetorical power of non-human animals, this week on Mere Rhetoric. Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginner and indisers about the people, ideas and movements who have shaped rhetprical history. I’m Mary Hedengren   Today we start a new type of episode of Mere Rhetoric. In the past, I’ve given you the low-down on books and movements, scholars and terms, and now I’m going to expand on that to give you the heads-up on some of the most recent issues of major journals in the field. Consider it a sort of Reading Rainbow, a teaser-taster of what’s showing up in rhetorical scholarship today.   Reading journals is one of those activities that I was encouraged to do when I first became a grad student in rhetoric and I’m always surprised how useful what I read ends up being: sometimes I find scholarship that relates directly to what I’m working on, sometimes I find stuff that comes up in conversation, but it’s rare that I regret reading an issue. I recommend reading them to everyone interested in the field, partially because it gives a good sense of what our field actually is these days.   The first issue I’m going to feature, I’m willing to admit though, is a little weird. It’s a the special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly that came out this summer, and special issue usually means that there’s a theme that all of the articles are about, but even this special issue is special--it’s a Quote rhetorical bestiary unquote. A bestiary is a sort of encyclopedia of the animals, usually loose on the science and loaded on moralizing for a human world, but this rhetorical bestiary is specifically trying to break away from a human-centric orientation towards entering with animals more on their terms.   Within the bestiary, there are mini-essays on children raised by wolves, salmon spawning, a town full of roosting vultures and the cunning of snakes. These essays are an unusual lot for a scholarly journal: rich, imaginative, personal and poetic. They are grounded in theory, but are also beholden to activism, creative writing, and --as might be expected--animal behaviorism. One impetus for this collection is the 25th anniversary of George A. Kennedy’s “A Hoot in the Dark” article in Philosophy and Rhetoric.   Kennedy’s “Hoot in the Dark” isn’t included here, but it’s worth checking out on its own merits. George Kennedy was a tweedy classical rhetorician, translating, for example, the definite edition of Aristotle’s rhetoric. So it was a bit of surprise in 1992, when he argued that rhetoric is not an exclusively human endeavour, but that rhetoric “is manifest in all animal life and [that] existed long before the evolution of human beings” (4)... for instance “A rattlesnake’s rhetoric consists of coiling or uncoiling itself, threatening to strike and rattling its tail, which other creatures hear, even though a rattle-snake [sic] is itself deaf” (13). Pretty wild stuff. And the response, as Diane Davis writes in her afterward for the bestiary, “was to basically wonder what Kennedy had been smoking” (277).   But even if Kennedy’s work was out of character, some rhetorical scholars embraced the non-human animal turn. For instance Debra Hawhee, who also writes an afterword for the issue, has written such works like Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw and Moving Bodies, which explores “the places in rhetorical theory that are infested with nonhuman animals” (“towards a bestial rhetoric” 86). Looking at non-human animal rhetoric is a humbling practice that opens up our field and colors our received rhetorical traditions. That being said,I was most impressed by the foreword by Alex C. Parrish and the afterwards by Hawhee and Diane Davis. Davis’ afterward is  espeically illuminating in highlighting that “there is no single, indivisible line between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’” (278). She also provides a useful dichotomy between two threads in researching non-human animals in rhetoric. One is “studying human discourses about other animal species” --the way we use non-human animals in our human rhetoric--while the other involved “engaging the specific rhetorical practices of other species” (279).  This latter area of research is particularly interesting to me.   When Pip barks at a strange dog, or drops his ears backwards, or lulls his tongue out in a squinty-eyed smile, he is using symbols just as effectively as Burke’s “symbol using (symbol making and symbol misusing)” human agent. I mean, I can testify that he symbol misuses all the time, especially in his clumsy attempts to make friends at the dog park. Dogs are especially interesting because they are attuned to cross species communication: for millenia, they’ve been learning to read our weird symbols, like me pointing to Pip’s crate, and respond with their own communication, like Pip’s resulting “hangdog” expression. It’s almost like he’s telling me “I don’t want to go to my room.” But sometimes when you discuss communication with, or among, animals, you’ll be accused of anthropomorphism. Certain, I don’t think Pip communicates the same things in the same ways as he would if he were another human, but, as Davis points out, instead of throwing around accusations of  anthropomorphism, we would be better served by recognizing that communication is beyond the “anthro” and rather something inherent in creatures that live in proximity with other creatures.   If you have a great dog story, or other kind of animal communication story, why not drop us a line at Mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? Also, let me know what kind of journals you’d like me to be checking in with. I can’t promise I’ll read every issue of every rhetoric journal for you because there’s a lot out there--and you don’t have to take my word for it.    

This week on Theology on the Go, our host, Dr. Jonathan Master is joined by Dr. Calvin L. Troup.  Dr. Troup is the president of Geneva College (Beaver Falls, PA). Before becoming Geneva's twentieth President since 1848 Dr. Troup was Associate Professor and Director of the Rhetoric Ph.D. Program in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA. He earned his B.A. from Geneva College (1983) and the M.A. (1991) and Ph.D. (1994) degrees from The Pennsylvania State University. His communication research agenda focuses on the rhetoric and philosophy of St. Augustine and Rhetoric of Technology from media ecology perspectives informed by the work of Jacques Ellul and Walter J. Ong. His published work includes Augustine for the Philosophers: The Rhetor of Hippo, the Confessions, and the Continentals (2014), Temporality, Eternity, and Wisdom: The Rhetoric of Augustine's Confessions (1999), scholarly book chapters and articles in journals such as Communication Quarterly, Explorations in Media Ecology, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, The Journal of Communication and Religion, and The Journal of Business Ethics. Dr. Troup has edited the Journal of Communication and Religion and is the editor-elect of Explorations in Media Ecology the international journal of the Media Ecology Association.  Dr.Troup entered the academy after serving as a press aide in the U.S. House of Representatives and working as an association executive for a national non-profit organization in Washington, D.C. Today Dr. Master is going to talk with Dr. Troup about the office of the ruling elder.  Dr. Troup is well suited to discuss this topic since he has served as a ruling elder in three different Presbyterian congregations.  He is currently a ruling elder at Grace Reformed Presbyterian Church in Gibsonia, PA. So, grab that cup of coffee and join us at the table! The book Dr. Troup mentioned in the podcast is: The Elder's Handbook: A Practical Guide for Church Leaders by Gerard Berghoef and Lester DeKoster  

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

  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.    

Dewey aesthetic Today on Mere Rhetoric, we talk about John Dewey. John Dewey was a big ol’ deal, even back in his day. Just after his death in 1952, Hilda Neaby wrote”Dewey has been to our age what Aristotle was to the later Middle Ages, not just a philosopher, but the philosopher.” And what does a person have to do to be compared to Aristotle? I mean to be compared in a serious way to Aristotle, because I’m like Aristotle because, you know, I enjoy olive oil on occasions, not because I’m the philosopher. I think one thing Neaby means is that Dewey was involved in everything. Just like how Aristotle had huge impact in politics, theology, science and rhetoric, John Dewey seemed to have a finger in every pie. By the time he died at age 92, he had written significantly on education, politics, art, ethics and sociology. But it’s not enough to be a big freakin’ deal a hundred years ago, but Dewey is a big deal in rhetoric today. It’s rare to search too many issues back in Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly or Rhetoric  and Public Affairs without hitting on an article either directly about or draws on Dewey, and books about Dewey are popping up all over the map. John Dewey is hot real estate.   So because John Dewey is such an important thinker for rhetoricians today, we have to take more time than today to talk about him. That’s right-- a Mere Rhetoric two-parter. A to-be-continued. A cliffhanger. If that cliff is carefully divided, I guess and that division is this: today we’ll talk about John Dewey’s contribution to aesthetics, his book Art as Experience  and responses to that book from contemporary rhetoricans. Next week we’ll talk more about his politics, the dream of his pragmatism, what he means by Individualism Old and New  and the famous Dewey-Lippmann debate. So that’s what we’ll be doing the next two weeks. So let’s get started on the first part of this Dewey-twoey.   Like many great thinkers, Dewey started his career by realizing that what he thought he wanted to do, he  really, really didn’t. In Dewey’s case it was education. It’s ironic that Dewey became one of the 20th century’s most important voices in education because he did not teach secondary or primary school for longer than a couple of years each. Good thing he had a back-up plan as a major philosopher. He joined the ground floor of the University of Chicago and became one of the defining voices of the University of Chicago style of thinking, although he eventually left, somewhat acrimoniously, and taught at Columbia for the rest of his career. Somewhere along the way, though, he became president of the American philosophical association and published Art as Experience.   The title kind of gives away Dewey’s claim--he situates art in the experience which you have with art. As he says “the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience” (1). But he also means the opposite, that experience can be art. Instead of thinking of art as something that happens in rarified situations behind glass and velvet ropes, Dewey opens up “art” to mean popular culture, experiences with nature and even just a way of living.   Being in the moment is a big part of this artful living. If you’re experiencing or rather, to use the particular philosophical parlance Dewey insists on “having an experience” then you are totally being in the moment: “only when the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturning is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive. Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what is now is” (17). In such a view, any time we live the moment artfully, in full presence of being, we’re having an artful experience. In having an experience, you have some sort of awareness and some kind of form.   As Dewey says, “art is thus prefigured in the very processes of life” (25).   This idea may sound radical. How can sitting in a crowded bus be art the way that the Mona Lisa is art? But Dewey is insistent. He sighs, “the hostility to association of fine art with normal processes of living is a pathetic, even a tragic, commentary on life as it is ordinarily lived” (27-28).   That’s not to say that there can’t be objects of art that concentrate the sensation of having an experience. But it’s the whole experience. For example, “Reflections on Tintern Abbey” isn’t really about Tintern Abbey any more than it’s about Wordworth and evenings and homecomings and 1798 and that sycamore and all of it. It expresses a complete experience of Wordsworth. And that expression is always changing as times change.“the very meaning,” Dewey writes “of an important new movement in any art is that it expresses something new in human experience” (316). Meanwhile the art that remains after the moment passes and the movement becomes cliche. “Art is the great force in effecting [...] consolidation. The individuals who have minds pass away one by one. The works in which meanings have received objective expression endure. [...] every art in some manner is a medium of this transmission while its products are no inconsiderable part of the saturating matter” (340)   And the value of art is moral. First off, Dewey says that“The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive. The critic’s office is to further this work, performed by the object of art” (338).   Pretty cool stuff, huh? But wait, there’s more. The process of having an experience, that complete being, has its own moral value, or so argues Scott Stroud in John Dewy and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, aesthetics and morality. There he claims “I want to examine how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation” (3) because“At various places, Dewey’s work provides us with tantalizing clues to his real project--the task of making more of life aesthetic or artful” (5) Put in other words: “art can show individuals how certain value schemes feel, how behaviors affect people, etc.--in other words, art can force the reflective instatement (creation) of moral values” (9)   Stroud connects the pragmatists like Dewey with mysticism in Eastern philosophy and medieval monastic Christianity. Remember how Dewey is all about having an experience, really being in the moment? So Stroud says, “The way to substantially improve our experience is not by merely waiting for the material setup of the world to change, but instead lies in the intelligent altering of our deep-seated bahits (orientations) toward activity and toward other individuals” (11). “The important point,” writes Stroud, “is that attentiveness to the present is a vital way to cultivate the self toward the goal of progressive adjustment and it is also a vital means in the present to do so” (69)   For Stroud, as for Dewey“the art object [...] imbued with meaning partially by the actions of the artist, but also because of the crucial contributions of meaning that a common cultural background contributes to the activity of producing and receiving art objects” (97)--the way that the artistic object is received popularly and by critics. And for that aim “criticism does more than merely tell one what an important work of art is or what impression was had; instead, it gives one a possible orientation that is helpful in ordering and improving one’s past and future experiences” (122). And in that, criticism, or even appreciation, is also a moral act. Stroud’s argument has immediate application of the artful life. He ponders “How can we render everyday communication, such as that experiences in mundane conversations with friends, cashiers, and so on, as aesthetic?” (170). To answer this, he draws on dewey to suggest that we avoid focusing on a remote goal, cultivate habits of attending to the demands of the present communication situation and fight against the idea of reified, separate self (186-7). Next week we’ll continue our Dewey Twoey by talking about Dewey’s political and educational contributes and Individualism Old and New and modern responses to it. Between then and now, I hope you have the chance to enjoy some great art, even if that great art is popular art, or even just this moment you’re in ...right ...now.

    Henry Hume, Lord Kames (1696-1782)       Henry Hume, Lord Kames was a distant relative as well as friend to David Hume, although they spell their names differently.  David Hume changed the spelling so that his English readers would pronounce it properly.  Henry Hume kept the original spelling H-O-M-E.               Unlike David Hume, Lord Kames did not go to university nor even have the benefit of a sojourn to France to broaden his education. Much more like Jane Austen’s Lizzie Bennet, Kames was born the third son out of nine children to a heavily indebted but well-respected family.  He was educated at home with his siblings and was apprenticed as a solicitor.  Unlike Lizzie Bennet, who faces limitations due to her gender, Kames was able to participate in a number of philosophical societies and gentlemen’s clubs.  He further expanded his knowledge through jobs such as Curator of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh which gave him access to a wealth of books.        There are a number of factors contributing to Kames success.  Clearly two of these factors were his talent and his drive.  Another was the luck of a long life.  Kames was born in 1696 and lived through much of the eighteenth century to the ripe age of 86.  Contemporaries commented on his remarkable good health in old age, the longevity of his memory, and his feisty personality.  Kames is quoted as saying of old age “why should I sit with my finger in my cheek waiting for death to take me?’  He did not specify which cheek.        After his apprenticeship he worked his way up through the judicial ranks to become a highly respected judge, which is how he acquired the title Lord—it was not a hereditary title but an honor associated with his work as a judge.  Lord Kames again like Lizzie Bennett benefited from a lucky marriage.  He waited until age 47 to finally decide to marry.  His bride, Agatha Drummond, an attractive socialite eleven years his junior came from the wealthy Blair Drummond family.  James Boswell’s journals praise her for her looks, conversational skills and sense of humor—high praise from Bozzie.  Agatha’s original marriage portion was a moderate £1000 without any prospects due to an older brother with a family of his own.  However in 1766, Agatha unexpectedly became heiress to the entire Blair Drummond estate upon the unfortunate death of her brother and his son.  Thereafter, she and her children styled themselves Home-Drummond to acknowledge her family’s legacy and her husband Kames actively worked to enjoy and care for the sumptuous estate.       The inheritance impacted Kames’ work by providing a country writing retreat.  He was a prolific writer with 8 legal histories, plus books on diverse subjects like agriculture, and political science.  His book with the greatest impact on the history of rhetoric and the subject of our talk today was Elements of Criticism.  Published in 1761, Elements of Criticism brought the Enlightenment’s “scientific” view of human nature to the critical evaluation of the fine arts.  I would like to highlight how this interesting eighteenth century text connects to some very recent conversations about multimodal, visual and spatial rhetorics.                 Elements of Criticism made a splash and was a bit controversial due to its expansive inclusion of the visual arts with belle lettres.  Developing a theory of criticism for the fine artsrequired Kames to take sides in debates about human nature, beauty, and human nature.  He is participating in these with writers like Frances Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and Edmund Burke.  At the time he was writing the orthodox and moderate factions of the Presbyterian church were vying for power in Scotland.  Based on theological ideas going back to the Reformation, both sides had mixed feelings about the impact of visual arts like paintings and sculpture on the viewer. In some areas theater was illegal.          Most of Elements of Criticism engages with literary texts for its examples and illustrations but his methods take into account the multimodality of the work.  For example, Kames takes encourages readers to take into account the musical and melodic qualities of poetry in his analysis of meter.  In spite of the disapproval of theater in Edinburgh, he works in criticism of plays and operas—not just the librettos but also of the staging and sets tacitly indicating through these inclusions his views on theater debate.       For those listeners interested in spatial theory or rhetorics of space, Kames applies the final chapter of the book the criticism of gardening and architecture.  The chapter thinks about how progression through space and the arrangement of objects in space can influence the mind and especially the emotions.  Kames emphasizes the natural style of gardening over more ornate or fantastic styles.  He presents the ornate French gardens as an example of what not to do, and praises the harmony of Chinese models.       Many of Kames’s proscriptive and prescriptive critiques participate in a larger Scottish Enlightenment conversation about taste in which moderates posed that fine arts were acceptable if morally improving to the audience or reader.  In this argument the wealthier members of society had an obligation to develop their taste as a sort of moral education.  For Kames, taste could also be developed by the lower classes through proximity to and observation of tasteful public works.  This idea represents a synthesis of ideas about the human tendency towards imitation and new concepts of the moral sense.  This chapter along with Sir John Dalrymple’s Essay on Landscape Gardening popularized the natural garden trend in mid-eighteenth century Scotland.               Elements of Criticism had a lasting impact as a textbook well into the 19th century and was by no means confined to Scotland.  The work was quickly translated into German and appeared in the library of Emmanuel Kant.  It crossed the Atlantic where it was taught in rhetoric courses at Yale side-by-side with texts by authors like Hugh Blair and George Campbell, according to the research of Gregory Clark.         To close our discussion of Elements of Criticism I would like to bring things back to the author himself.  Lord Kames, after all, did not have the benefit of a formal education, nor did he have the restrictions.  Although his writing is clear, he does not aspire to the heights of rhetorical eloquence.  In his judicial practice he was well known for using casual and even ribald language with his colleagues.  According to local legend, Kames at his retirement took leave of his colleagues with a cheery “Fare ye a’weel, ye bitches!”       Thanks for listening to our podcast today.  This is Connie Steel at the University of Texas for Mere Rhetoric.           Chambers, Robert.  Traditions of Edinburgh, Vol 2.  Edinburgh:  W. & C. Tait 1825, p 171.   Googlebooks Web.        Clark, Greg.  “Timothy Dwight's Moral Rhetoric at Yale College, 1795–1817.” Rhetorica:  A Journal of the History of Rhetoric.  Vol. 5, No. 2 (Spring 1987) pp 149-161.   Home, Henry, Lord Kames. Elements of Criticism.  Edited with an Introduction by Peter Jones (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). 2 Vols.  www.libertyfund.org May 31, 2015. Web.       Lehmann, William C. Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Study in National Character and in the History of Ideas.  The Hague:  Martinus Hijhoff, 1971.  (International Archives of the History of Ideas.  Info on Agatha and the family, on Agatha p 64-65.  “Bitches” 135 (from Chambers).       Miller, Thomas.  “The Formation of College English:  A Survey of the Archives of Eighteenth-Century Rhetorical Theory and Practice.”  Rhetoric Society Quarterly.  Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer, 1990) pp 261-286.                          

Our guest is Carolyn Skinner. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University, where she teaches courses on women’s rhetoric and the history of rhetoric, as well as courses in writing. Prof. Skinner is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the speech and writing of nineteenth-century American women physicians. Prof. Skinner’s work has appeared in Rhetoric Review and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.We discuss Prof. Skinner’s article “‘She Will Have Science’: Ethos and Audience in Mary Gove’s Lectures to Ladies” published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39.3 (July, 2009): 240-259.

In his research, Keith Miller mainly focuses on the rhetoric and songs of the civil rights movement. He is the author of Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources, which was favorably reviewed in Washington Post and is widely cited. His essays on Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Jackie Robinson, Frederick Douglass, C.L. Franklin, and Fannie Lou Hamer have appeared in many scholarly collections and in such leading journals as College English, College Composition and Communication, PMLA, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, andJournal of American History. His essay “Second Isaiah Lands in Washington, D.C.: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ as Biblical Narrative and Biblical Hermeneutic” was awarded Best Essay of the Year in Rhetoric Review in 2007