In this essay, I look back at photographs taken at Ellis Island in the very early part of the 20th century, an era, described by Barthes, as an age of explosions--explosions not only of population and immigration but also of the personal into the public and of technophilia, best metaphorized by the explosion of a camera’s flash bulb illuminating a new world. I am specifically interested in the ways that photography became a rhetorical tool of eugenicists and immigration restrictionists, and the ways that ideas about bodily fitness and defect drove the development of the technology.

For scholars doing work in feminist rhetoric, the exclusionary effects of dominant explanatory frameworks are particularly problematic, given our explicit commitment to producing scholarship that recognizes that which has been silenced, dismissed, and ignored.

It is vital to the study of public rhetoric that we attend to the vibrancy of nonhumans as they shape collective life (even as they cannot be reduced to this work alone).

In crafting “Cotton,” the piece of creative non-fiction she was working on for her graduate course in Education focused on the teaching of creative writing, Lindsey Rachels (a pseudonym) spent several months continually organizing and re-organizing on various flat surfaces around her home pieces of paper containing textual descriptions and images representing some of the most poignant moments of her life—sometimes shuffling them around on her desk, dining room table, and countertops, and at other times taping them up on the walls and windows.

Graduate school is sometimes compared to and treated as an apprenticeship, where faculty members prepare graduate students for similar tenure-track, research-oriented positions upon graduation. Although some students might choose to pursue similar paths to those of their faculty advisors, this analogy implies that career options are limited for recent graduates to those that look like the career choices of the members of the faculty in their programs.