Issue 20
Colorful illuminated LED tubes standing upright on a gravel path inside a weathered stone tunnel or vaulted corridor, creating a light installation in a historic space.
Rhetorics of Visibility
2015

"The shot fake as a gesture requires imagination of possible futures to be used effectively. To fully understand how the shot fake rhetorically functions, we cannot think of gesture as merely an unimaginative part of a delivery or as secondary to voice or oral language. Gestures like the shot fake are inventive, arranged, even stylized; they are creative rhetorical acts in their own right."

—Matthew Newcomb, "The Persuasiveness of the Shot Fake"
Photo by Julia Taubitz on Unsplash

Articles

Words "on being pitied" with text beneath that looks like a dictionary definition.

Weepy Rhetoric, Trigger Warnings, and the Work of Making Mental Illness Visible in the Writing Classroom

Sarah Orem and Neil Simpkins
Within the span of a few months, from late 2013 to mid-April 2014, a cascade of op-eds began appearing in web magazines and newspapers decrying the threat of a new public enemy: trigger warnings, textual tags attached to a variety of media that alert readers and viewers that the ensuing material could spur a mental health crisis.
A motion-blurred dancer mid-movement wearing a white open-weave skeletal skirt or cage structure, photographed from behind on a dimly lit stage.

Chiasms: Pathos, Phenomenology, and Object-Oriented Rhetorics

Scot Barnett
Recent years have seen an increasing (re)turn to materialities in rhetoric and the humanities. Under the banners of object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, new materialism, the posthumanities, and related paradigms, theorists from rhetoric and other disciplines have begun to revisit the question of materiality as a way to rethink assumptions about language, knowledge, agency, and subjectivity rooted in the humanist tradition.
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights with sweeping curved blue glass facades and a tall glass tower rising from the center, framed by green trees under a clear blue sky.

Museums as Material: Experiential Landscapes and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Jennifer Clary-Lemon
In what follows, I map a material-rhetorical approach to analyzing contemporary museum sites, in particular the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, drawing on Vicki Tolar Burton’s notion of rhetorical accretion, and the heuristic work of Carole Blair with memorial sites. By bringing the work of these scholars together, I demonstrate that reading museum sites with material methodology in mind results in tactics for invention that emphasize networks over discrete discursive elements.
Picture of Guantanamo Protesters dressed as detainees, Jan 2015-64 by Debra Sweet

Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif Did Not Go Quietly: Joint Task Force-Guantanamo and a Discourse in Motion

Gale Coskan-Johnson
This article is about ways of reading and ways of writing within and against dominant contemporary US public discourses. The article responds to narratives that circulate in and emerge from post-9/11 discourses of terrorism that have produced, proliferated, and normalized terms such as indefinite detention, enteral feeding, black site, and enemy combatant. Specifically, it provides a critical examination of the rhetorical practices of one JTF-GTMO detainee as they emerge from the gaps, fissures, and silences of hegemonic narratives.
A grid of album covers featuring various artists including Victoria Spivey, France Gall, Transvision Vamp, Echobelly, and Tanya Tagaq, spanning multiple decades and genres.

Participatory Archives and Technological Mediation: A RGS Approach to Understanding Tool Use in Digital Environments

Justin Lewis
This article tries to better understand what Kenneth Burke calls "instrumental causes" or technological tools that mediate human desire. Functioning as conduits that link humans to their lifeworld, instrumental causes are underwritten by agentic capacities imbued over long histories of cultural-historical use; further, as mediating technologies, digital tools provide creative solutions to the contradictions that develop from destabilizations in any activity system.
basketball hoop looking up from beneath

The Persuasiveness of the Shot Fake

Matthew Newcomb
The shot fake is fundamentally rhetorical. It is one individual taking action to cause a particular change in movement in another. For the split second that a defender falls for the fake, the person is doing exactly what he or she thought best at that moment based on the message being gestured by the ball-handler. That feeling goes away once the shot is recognized to be a fake, but the movements of the fake shot, which I discuss in this essay, can be read in the context of a basketball game as a persuasive action.

Reviews

cover of New Literacy Narratives from an Urban University

A Review of Sally Chandler's New Literacy Narratives from an Urban University: Analyzing Stories About Reading, Writing, and Changing Technologies

Published August 31, 2015

Sally Chandler with Angela Castillo, Maureen Kadash, Molly D. Kenner, Lorena Ramirez and Ryan J. Valdez, New Literacy Narratives from an Urban University: Analyzing Stories About Reading, Writing, and Changing Technologies, Hampton Press, 2013, 361 pages, ISBN: 9781612891194

Coauthors
Johanna Schmertz, University of Houston-Downtown
Book cover "Refiguring Rhetorical Education" by Jessica Enoch, featuring historical illustration of woman teaching children.

A Review of Jessica Enoch's Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911

Feminist historiography is a method for "seeing" how women are represented within patriarchal structures and gender hierarchies. It examines the ways in which gender ideology and society has disciplined the subject position of womanhood and regulated the rhetorical behavior of women within the ‘perceived’ dominant discourse of the symbolic.
Coauthors
Romeo Garcia, Syracuse University
Cover of Renovating Rhetoric in the Christian Tradition

Review of Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradition Edited by Elizabeth Vander Lei, Thomas Amorose, Beth Daniell, and Anne Ruggles Gere

Published January 31, 2016

Elizabeth Vander Lei, Thomas Amorose, Beth Daniell, and Anne Ruggles Gere, Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradition, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014, 224 pages, ISBN: 9780822962946

Coauthors
Matthew Boedy, University of North Georgia
Cover image for Technologies of Wonder and download page.

Review of Using All Available Means by Embracing All Available Forms, Bodies, and Spaces: A Review of Susan Delagrange’s Technologies of Wonder

Published 21 May 2015

Susan H. Delegrange, Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in a Digital World, Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press, 2011, ISBN: 9780874218718, http://ccdigitalpress.org/ebooks-and-projects/wonder

Coauthors
Elizabeth Edwards, Washington State University
cover image of Trained Capacities with a row of sharpened pencils at the bottom.

Review of Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice edited by Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark

Published February 8, 2016

Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark, editors, Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice, University of South Carolina Press, 2014, 280 pages, ISBN: 9781611173185

Coauthors
Trevor C. Meyer, University of South Carolina