Rhetoricity
Rhetoricity is a quasi-academic podcast that draws on rhetoric, theory, weird sound effects, and the insights of a lot of other people. It's something that's a little strange and, with luck, a little interesting. The podcast's description will evolve along with it. Most episodes feature interviews with rhetorically oriented rhetoric and writing scholars.
The podcast is a project of Eric Detweiler, an assistant professor in the Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University. If you are interested in more information, you can get in touch by using the contact information included on his website or sending a direct message to @RhetCast on Twitter.
Transcripts are available for some episodes. Click "Episode Transcript" link at the end of individual episode descriptions to access the corresponding transcript. If you would like a transcript of an episode that doesn't appear to have one, feel free to get in touch.
Rhetoricity has received support from a grant from the Humanities Media Project.
This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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Podcasting in the Classroom: A Roundtable on the Humanities Podcast Network’s Teaching Manual
12/15/2023
Podcasting in the Classroom: A Roundtable on the Humanities Podcast Network’s Teaching Manual
This episode features a roundtable conversation by contributors to , an open-access, lesson plan-based manual on integrating podcasts into humanities courses. That manual was written by members of the 's pedagogy working group. The discussion features six of its coauthors: , , , , , and . They discuss how they came to podcasting and teaching podcasts, their respective sections of the manual, and the possibilities and challenges of having students make podcasts in courses in and around the humanities. This episode features a clip from Ketsa's
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"The Path Chose Me": Keith Gilyard on His Career, Writing, and Legacy
10/06/2023
"The Path Chose Me": Keith Gilyard on His Career, Writing, and Legacy
This episode features an interview with conducted by guest host during the 2023 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute at Penn State University. They discuss Gilyard's path to a career in rhetoric, writing, and composition studies; his writing process and creative writing; academic mentorship and leadership; and his legacy and contributions to the field of African American rhetoric. Keith Gilyard is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University. He formerly was a member of the faculty at Syracuse University and at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. He served as Thomas R. Watson Visiting Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville and as Presidential Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Oklahoma. The author of twenty-four books, his works include the education memoir Voices of the Self (1991), Composition and Cornel West (2008), On African American Rhetoric (with Adam Banks, 2018), biographies of John Oliver Killens (2011) and Louise Thompson Patterson (2017), the novella The Next Great Old-School Conspiracy (2015), and the poetry collections Impressions (2021) and On Location (2023). Gilyard is a former Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English. He is the recipient of two American Book Awards, the CCCC Exemplar Award, the NCTE Distinguished Service Award, and the RSA Cheryl Geisler Award for Outstanding Mentor. This episode features a clip from by Plushgoolash.
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Food, Feelings, and Other Rhetorical Sensitivities: An Interview with Jennifer LeMesurier
09/16/2023
Food, Feelings, and Other Rhetorical Sensitivities: An Interview with Jennifer LeMesurier
This episode features an interview with . The conversation, recorded at this year's Conference on College Composition and Communication, focuses on her 2023 book . 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 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 by Beat Mekanik.
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AI Goes to College: Large Language Models and the Teaching of Writing
08/30/2023
AI Goes to College: Large Language Models and the Teaching of Writing
This episode of Rhetoricity features members of the : , , , , and . The task force also includes Leonardo Flores, David Green, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and A. Lockett. In July 2023, that task force published a laying out issues, principles, and recommendations related to the effects of generative artificial-intelligence tools on the college writing courses. In this episode's roundtable discussion, these task force members clarify some of the terminology around AI technologies, reflect on the process of writing the working paper, and discuss the pedagogical, historical, and labor implications of large language models for students and teachers working in higher education. This episode is part of Carnival 2023, which runs from August 28–31. The theme of this year's carnival is "Artificial Intelligence: Applications and Trajectories," and it features a keynote by . Other participating podcasts include 10-Minute Tech Comm; Defend, Publish and Lead; Kairoticast; Live Theory; Neurodissent; Pedagogue; TC Talk; and Writing Remix. Here's a list of some of the materials referenced in this episode: The task force's , including Antonio Byrd's chapter Anna Mills's Kate Crawford's The White House's Kathryn Conrad's The Wall Street Journal's The Washington Post's Memes of This episode features a clip from by Smoked Meat Fax Machine.
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Rhetoricians Assemble: A Roundtable of Black Rhetoric Faculty
08/24/2022
Rhetoricians Assemble: A Roundtable of Black Rhetoric Faculty
This is the third Rhetoricity episode guest-hosted by . It's also part of . The episode was recorded at the 2022 Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, and marks the two-year anniversary of the protests against anti-Black police violence that took place in the summer of 2020. Moderated by Dr. Handley, it features a roundtable of Black rhetoricians: , , , , and . They share the paths and choices that led them to become rhetoric scholars, reflect on the limitations of antiracist initiatives in higher education since 2020, and discuss the extra work colleges and universities often demand of Black faculty as well as the ongoing work and importance of supporting Black students and faculty across educational institutions. This episode features clips from the following: from The Muppet Movie
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Futures in the Present Tense
11/01/2021
Futures in the Present Tense
Today's episode was originally broadcast as part of The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2020, but is finding its way to the Rhetoricity feed in full for the first time. Focus on the carnival's theme of "The Digital Future of Rhetoric and Composition," the episode draws on shows like Adventure Time and Lovecraft Country as well as the present and future realities of the COVID pandemic, racism, and climate change to consider what our disciplinary futures might hold. This episode includes clips and quotations from the following: – Adventure Time – James Baldwin – Uuriter – Chad Crouch – Lately Kind of Yeah – N. K. Jemisin – Sergey Cheremisinov – Adventure Time – Lovecraft Country
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Crossing Over with Cedric Burrows
06/01/2021
Crossing Over with Cedric Burrows
This episode features an interview with conducted by guest interviewer . Their conversation focuses on Dr. Burrows' 2020 book . Along with many other topics, they discuss his writing process, the music and social movements he takes up in his research, the role of personal stories in theoretical writing and Black intellectual traditions, and how he decided to pursue a career in rhetoric and composition. Dr. Burrows is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Marquette University. In addition to being the author of Rhetorical Crossover, he has published work in an array of scholarly journals and was the winner of Marquette's 2020 Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion Faculty Award. Dr. Derek Handley is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he is also affiliate faculty in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies. He is currently working on a book project that explores the rhetorical and civic actions taken by African Americans in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 1950s and ‘60s as they attempted to protect their communities from urban renewal. This episode includes clips from the following:
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Demanding Black Linguistic Justice: An Interview with April Baker-Bell
04/11/2021
Demanding Black Linguistic Justice: An Interview with April Baker-Bell
This episode features guest interviewer speaking with . They discuss Dr. Baker-Bell's book as well as her work on such projects as the and Dr. April Baker-Bell is a transdisciplinary teacher-researcher-activist and Associate Professor of Language, Literacy, and English Education in the Department of English and Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. A national leader in conversations on Black Language education, her research interrogates the intersections of Black language and literacies, anti-Black racism, and antiracist pedagogies, and is concerned with antiracist writing, critical media literacies, Black feminist-womanist storytelling, and self-preservation for Black women in academia, with an emphasis on early career Black women. Baker-Bell’s award-winning book, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, brings together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism (a term Baker-Bell coined) and white linguistic supremacy. The book provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts, and it captures what Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy looks like in community with Black youth. Linguistic Justice features a range of multimodal examples and practices through instructional maps, charts, artwork, and stories that reflect the urgent need for antiracist language pedagogies in our current social and political climate. Baker-Bell is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's New Directions Fellowship, the 2021 Michigan State University's Community Engagement Scholarship Award and the 2021 Distinguished Partnership Award for Community-Engaged Creative Activity, the 2020 NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, the 2019 Michigan State University Alumni Award for Innovation & Leadership in Teaching and Learning, and the 2018 AERA Language and Social Processes Early Career Scholar Award. Dr. Derek G. Handley is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he is also affiliate faculty in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies. He’s currently working on a book project that explores the rhetorical and civic actions taken by African Americans in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 1950s and ‘60s as they attempted to protect their communities from urban renewal. He is also collaborating on a digital public humanities project with his UW-Milwaukee colleague Anne Bonds entitled “Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County.” That project uses GIS mapping and rhetorical analysis of racial housing covenants and African American resistance to them in Milwaukee County. This episode contains a clip from Podington Bear's
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Writing After Writing: An Interview with John Gallagher
04/06/2021
Writing After Writing: An Interview with John Gallagher
This episode features an interview with conducted by guest interviewer . The interview focuses on Gallagher's 2020 book . Gallagher and Riddick discuss the labor and upkeep involved in the digital writing practices of journalists, Amazon reviewers, and redditors, the methods and questions that inform Gallagher's work, and that work's implications for scholarly writing. John Gallagher is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He studies interfaces, digital rhetoric, participatory audiences, and technical communication. He has been published in Computers and Composition, enculturation, Rhetoric Review, Transformations, Technical Communication Quarterly, and Written Communication. In addition to Update Culture, he co-edited a 77-chapter collection with Dànielle Nicole DeVoss titled . As he mentions in the episode, he's also part of a team working on a National Science Foundation grant entitled Sarah Riddick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she directs the degree-granting Professional Writing program and teaches courses about rhetoric and writing. Her research focuses on the intersections of rhetorical theory, digital rhetoric and cultures, and emergent media. She is currently exploring how social media offers new methodological and pedagogical opportunities for rhetorical studies, with a particular emphasis on how online audience engagement can inform and enhance methodological approaches to rhetorical audience studies and digital rhetorics. This episode features a clip from YACHT's
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Unflattening Global Rhetorics and Archival Pedagogies: An Interview with Tarez Samra Graban
02/23/2021
Unflattening Global Rhetorics and Archival Pedagogies: An Interview with Tarez Samra Graban
This episode features an interview with , an associate professor in the Department of English at Florida State University. Dr. Graban was also the keynote speaker at Middle Tennessee State University’s annual in February 2020. This interview was recorded just after that keynote, which was titled “Rhetoric, Feminism, and the Transnational Archive.” In this interview, Dr. Graban discusses her work on global and transnational rhetorics, archival methods, and rethinking the role and structure of rhetoric and writing majors at US universities. In particular, we discuss four of her projects. First, Alternative Sources for Rhetorical Traditions, an collection coedited by Graban and Hui Wu. Second, Teaching Rhetoric and Composition through the Archives, another collection Dr. Graban is coediting, this time with Wendy Hayden. Third, her 2017 article which was published in the African Journal of Rhetoric. And finally, a chapter she cowrote with Meghan Velez for the , which came out last year. This episode features a clip from Mystery Mammal's
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The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2020
08/31/2020
The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2020
This is a short episode to make a quick announcement: Over the last week, a bunch of rhetorically inclined podcasts have been putting out new episodes as a part of The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2020. Organized by ’s Charles Woods, the carnival’s theme was "The Digital Future of Rhetoric and Composition," and its multitudinous episodes will be music to the ears of many Rhetoricity listeners. You can find those episodes via The Big Rhetorical Podcast's page or account. In addition to plugging the carnival, this episode features a clip from Rhetoricity's contribution, which is entitled "Futures in the Present Tense" and weaves together reflections on the pandemic, Adventure Time, Afrofuturism, and rhetoric and composition.
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Rhetorical Juxtapositions
07/14/2020
Rhetorical Juxtapositions
This episode of Rhetoricity features contributions from four rhetoric scholars: , , , and . Their pieces address questions asked by Damien Smith Pfister: "What juxtapositions in rhetorical studies have you found fruitful, generative, aiding in the process of invention or theorizing, and/or what juxtapositions ought we have? Is there a juxtaposition of two things that we ought to explore but we’re not currently exploring?" The contributors respond to Pfister's questions from a variety of angles, touching on memoir, sonic rhetorics, everyday life, visual rhetoric, discriminatory design, cartography, and indigeneity. You can find the photos referenced in Pierce's piece . This episode features clips from the following songs: by Ketsa "Azimuth approx." and "Finally Falling" by
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Race, Motive, and the Rhetoric of Display: An Interview with Ersula Ore
06/29/2020
Race, Motive, and the Rhetoric of Display: An Interview with Ersula Ore
This episode features an interview with , recorded at the 2020 Modern Language Association Convention in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Ore is the Lincoln Professor of Ethics in the School of Social Transformation and associate professor of African and African American Studies at Arizona State University. Her research explores the suasive strategies of Black Americans as they operate within a post-emancipation historical context, giving particular attention to the ways physical and discursive violence influences performances of citizenship. Dr. Ore received the 2018-2019 Outstanding Mentor award from Arizona State’s Center for Global Health, and her book received the 2020 Book Award from the Rhetoric Society of America. Her current research investigates the ways civility discourse masks misogynoir and how such masking reinscribes civility as the racist articulation of a past that expresses the desire for a particular kind of quote-unquote “ordered” present and future. You can check out some of this thinking in her 2019 Organization for Research on Women and Communication keynote entitled as well as “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatio-Temporal Politics of Breathing,” a co-authored piece with Matthew Houdek that is forthcoming this fall in . In this episode, we discuss Lynching, focusing on the circulation of lynching photographs as a form of epideictic rhetoric, the relation between racism and intention, and experiences that informed Ore's book and her perspective on rhetoric. A heads-up to listeners that this episode includes extensive discussion of anti-Black violence. This episode includes a clip from Daniel Birch's
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Call for Rhetorical Juxtapositions
03/19/2020
Call for Rhetorical Juxtapositions
Note: The deadline for submissions has passed. But please feel free to get in touch if you have ideas for segments and collaborations, whether related to this call or not! This is more of an invitation than a regular episode. I'm interested in hearing listeners' responses to the question posed by Damien Smith Pfister and Michele Kennerly at the end of the previous episode. Here is that question: What juxtapositions in rhetorical studies have you found fruitful, generative, aiding in the process of invention or theorizing, and/or what juxtapositions ought we have? Is there a juxtaposition of two things that we ought to explore but we’re not currently exploring? I'll be taking proposals for short audio essays responding to that question through April 3. Listen or read the transcript for more details!
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The Available Memes of Persuasion: Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister
02/17/2020
The Available Memes of Persuasion: Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister
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 . This episode features and , co-editors of the 2018 collection . 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 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 . 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 , 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:
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Little Worlds About Writing: An Interview with Laura Micciche
01/21/2020
Little Worlds About Writing: An Interview with Laura Micciche
This episode features an interview with Laura Micciche. It was recorded during her visit to Tennessee for the 2019 . Dr. Micciche was the keynote speaker at the symposium, an annual event hosted by the Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Each year, a rhetoric and writing scholar delivers a talk about their research and facilitates a workshop based on that research. will take place on February 28, and will also host the annual meeting of MidSouth WPA, an affiliate of the Council of Writing Program Administrators. is a professor in the English Department at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on writing pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and writing program administration, and she’s the author of the books and . The latter is available as an open-access book through WAC Clearinghouse. Dr. Micciche has also written copious articles, including a recent coauthored piece for College English entitled a College Composition and Communication article entitled and an article in the journal WPA entitled She recently completed a six-year tenure as editor of the journal . Her current research is on the mundane aspects of academic writing, which she focused on in her presentation at MTSU. In this interview, Micciche discusses Acknowledging Writing Partners, the concept of slowness in relation to teaching and WPA work, the importance of methodological inclusiveness, and her interest in the mundane, including the nonhuman animals and objects that populate the places where academics write. This episode features a clip of the song by Ketsa.
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Rhetoric, She Wrote: Andrea Lunsford on the Discipline and its Histories
12/02/2019
Rhetoric, She Wrote: Andrea Lunsford on the Discipline and its Histories
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 . This episode of Rhetoricity features an interview with , interviewed by 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 (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 about the materials that just came out in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. And 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 by Chad Crouch.
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The Weird Possibilities of Academic Podcasting
06/19/2019
The Weird Possibilities of Academic Podcasting
Edit (08/07/2019): The CFP for the 2020 Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing Conference is now live! Check it out . --- Just in time for the , this Rhetoricity episode features . . . an audio recording of Eric Detweiler's . A majorly revised reiteration of this presentation came out last year in volume 5 of . In short, this episode/presentation makes the case for embracing weirder conventions in academic podcasting, drawing on the popular podcast as a model. Because the episode is a recording of a presentation, it's more monologic than the interview-centered episodes of this podcast. But it does come with circus music, sound effects, a parodic advertisement, traffic update, and weather report, so give it a listen if you're up for a slightly odd episode. Finally, this episode is also a chance to announce two other sound-related happenings in rhetoric and writing studies. First, the official launch of the new sonic projects section in . The first two pieces in that section were just published as part of the journal's 28th issue. Second, the Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing Conference in Detroit, Michigan. That conference will happen from October 1-3, 2020, and builds on last year's Symposium on Sound, Rhetoric, and Writing. The CFP should be available in the next week or two, and this blurb will be updated with a link to that CFP once it's ready. This episode uses the following sound clips:
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Trumped-Up Rhetoric: An Interview with Ryan Skinnell
01/28/2019
Trumped-Up Rhetoric: An Interview with Ryan Skinnell
This episode features an interview with , assistant professor at San José State University and editor of the recent collection . 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 , coeditor of a forthcoming collection called Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, and an editor for the website , 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 by Literature.
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Writing Our Discipline, Writing Ourselves: An Interview with Christine Tulley
10/25/2018
Writing Our Discipline, Writing Ourselves: An Interview with Christine Tulley
This episode features . Dr. Tulley was the invited speaker at the , an annual event hosted by Middle Tennessee State University's . Each year, the symposium features a rhetoric and writing scholar who gives a keynote talk on their research, then facilitates a workshop based on the classroom applications of that research. This interview was recorded the day before Dr. Tulley's talk, which focused on the findings of her recent book, . That book features interviews with fifteen prolific and well-established rhetoric and writing scholars, focusing on how they develop ideas, conduct research, draft, revise, and pursue publication. In addition to writing How Writing Faculty Write, Christine Tulley is the founder and director of the and Professor of English at the University of Findlay. Her current research focuses on faculty writing within rhetoric and composition, and she partners with , a UK-based research group that studies academic productivity. She has a forthcoming book project entitled "Rhet/Comp Moms: Parenting, Publication, and Professionalism," which we also discuss in the episode. In addition, we talk about Dr. Tulley’s own writing process, what led her to study how writing faculty write, her writing advice for graduate students and junior faculty, and how learning to play guitar has changed the way she composes. Oh, and Lunchables. This episode features clips from the following songs: by Gillicuddy by Doctor Turtle
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Dissertation Dialogues, Vol. 3: John Schilb and Collin Bjork
10/02/2018
Dissertation Dialogues, Vol. 3: John Schilb and Collin Bjork
This is the final episode in Rhetoricity's "Dissertation Dialogues" series, which features conversations between PhD students at Indiana University and some of their dissertation directors and committee members. This particular episode features Collin Bjork and Dr. John Schilb. is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at IU. His dissertation develops a theoretical framework for better understanding how rhetoric functions over time. His article just came out in a special issue of Computers and Composition. He has taught courses in sonic rhetoric, visual rhetoric, service-learning writing, online composition, multilingual composition, and cross-cultural composition. Collin has also worked as an online instructional designer and as a program assistant for multilingual composition. As a Fulbright English teaching assistant, he taught at the University of Montenegro in Podgorica. John Schilb is Culbertson Chair of Writing and Professor of English at IU. While at IU, has also served as editor of the journal , director of first-year composition, and director of writing and rhetorical studies. He teaches writing, literature, rhetoric, and film. Before coming to Indiana, he taught at Carthage College, Denison University, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and the University of Maryland. From 1984 to 1990, he was vice president of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, a Chicago-based consortium of liberal arts colleges. His book won the Modern Language Association’s Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize. He is also author of and coeditor of four volumes: , , , and . In addition, he has published many articles and contributed chapters to several collections. His current book project is a study of nuance as rhetoric. He has a short piece on that topic that just came out in in Rhetoric Review. In this episode, the pair discusses John Schilb’s past and present work between the lines of academic disciplines, his time as the editor of College English, and his current work on nuance as a rhetorical virtue. They also talk about inductive approaches to developing scholarly projects as well as Indiana University’s recently created rhetoric program. This episode features a clip from the song by Glass Boy.
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Dissertation Dialogues, Vol. 2: Jennifer Juszkiewicz and Dana Anderson
08/21/2018
Dissertation Dialogues, Vol. 2: Jennifer Juszkiewicz and Dana Anderson
This is the second episode in a late-summer series: the Dissertation Dialogues. These episodes feature conversations between PhD candidates from Indiana University and some of their dissertation mentors. For more context, check out . This particular episode features Jennifer Juszkiewicz and Dana Anderson. Jennifer Juszkiewicz is a PhD candidate at IU who studies composition theory and rhetorics of space and place. Her dissertation focuses on simultaneously digital and material locations where writing happens. She'll be defending that dissertation in the coming academic year, during which she'll also be joining the faculty at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, to serve as writing center director and assistant writing program coordinator. is an associate professor at IU and also serves as Director of Composition. He received his PhD from Penn State, published his book in 2007, and coedited the 2013 collection with Jessica Enoch. His coauthored article was recently published in the journal Entertainment Values. Among other things, Juszkiewicz and Anderson discuss the role of the rhetorical tradition in contemporary rhetoric and writing instruction, strategies for training new writing instructors, and the continuing relevance of Maurice Charland's 1987 article Ryan Juszkiewicz contributed extensive editorial work to this episode. The episode features clips from the following: by InspectorJ by Ikebe Shakedown
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Dissertation Dialogues, Vol. 1: Scot Barnett and Caddie Alford
08/07/2018
Dissertation Dialogues, Vol. 1: Scot Barnett and Caddie Alford
This is the first in a series of special late-summer episodes of Rhetoricity. At the 2017 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, some graduate students at Indiana University helped coordinate and conduct interviews with scholars who attended that institute. Those students also pitched another idea: a series of conversations between PhD candidates and their dissertation advisors. This episode features the first of those conversations. My hope is that these episodes, which are more akin to dialogues than interviews, will not only give listeners a sense of the interlocutors' research interests, but provide a window into the advisee-advisor relationship. To that end, I encouraged participants to take some time to discuss academic mentorship. This episode features a conversation between Caddie Alford and Scot Barnett. Scot Barnett is an associate professor in the Department of English at IU. He's the author of the book and coeditor of the collection . Caddie Alford, who was a PhD candidate at the time this episode was recorded, has since accepted a position as an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of and has an article in a forthcoming special issue of Rhetoric Review on the topic of virtue ethics. In their conversation, Alford and Barnett discuss their interests in rhetoric and embodiment, the ways digital technologies speak to and shift longstanding rhetorical concepts, and how they approach the advisor-advisee relationship. This episode includes clips from the following:
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Multimodality Pulling into a Station: Jonathan Alexander and Jackie Rhodes
05/30/2018
Multimodality Pulling into a Station: Jonathan Alexander and Jackie Rhodes
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 as well as . In this episode, we discuss two of their other collaborative projects: and . Techne won the 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship. Beyond their co-creations, 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 , which is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and being turned into a podcast. 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 as well as various sound effects from .
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Lichtenberg: A Cross-Section
05/07/2018
Lichtenberg: A Cross-Section
This episode of Rhetoricity is a collaboration with Rhetorics Change/Rhetoric's Change, the digital proceedings collection from the 2016 Rhetoric Society of America conference. You can download a free copy of this open-access collection via or . In 2014, Verso Books published , which contained English translations of radio plays that critical theorist helped write and produce in the 1920s and '30s. I was fascinated with these plays as a sort of precursor to the audio projects scholars and theorists are producing today. So at RSA 2016, rather than give a traditional academic presentation, I staged and recorded a live performance of one of the pieces in Radio Benjamin. Titled "Lichtenberg: A Cross-Section," the play is about an eighteenth-century physicist and satirist named . This episode is also included as part of a chapter in Rhetorics Change/Rhetoric's Change, along with an essay in which I discuss Benjamin's radio plays and the possibilities of audio scholarship. The collection also includes a set of soundscapes that I edited, so there's plenty to interest the sonically inclined scholars. So check it out! This episode contains clips from the following: George Frederic Handel's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Kamasi Washington's cover of "Clair de Lune" (from ) various sounds from All clips are used under the fair use provisions of US copyright law.
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Rhetoric and the Art of Bicycle Racing: An Interview with Bill Hart-Davidson
03/13/2018
Rhetoric and the Art of Bicycle Racing: An Interview with Bill Hart-Davidson
In this episode, which was recorded at the , guest interviewer Jennifer Juszkiewicz speaks with Michigan State University's Bill Hart-Davidson. They discuss the relationship between technical communication and rhetoric, the challenges of revision and the related work of , and what the ancient Greek practice of agon has to do with riding a bike. Special thanks to , who manned the audio controls and took the lead on mixing and editing this interview. Dr. Hart-Davidson is a professor in the at Michigan State University. He studies computational rhetoric, technical communication, and user experience, and was at RSA Summer Institute to help lead a workshop called . Along with many other projects, he coedited the collection and helps run Eli Review. Hart-Davidson’s scholarship has also appeared in journals like , , the , and . Jennifer Juszkiewicz is a PhD candidate in the Composition, Literacy, and Culture program at Indiana University. She specializes in writing program administration and composition studies as well as spatial, computational, and collaborative rhetorics. She’s been published in and has a forthcoming co-authored chapter in a collection called Rhetorical Machines. Her dissertation is entitled "Writing Spaces of Writing." This episode includes a clip from
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Planting Rhetoric's Future: An Interview with John Muckelbauer
01/24/2018
Planting Rhetoric's Future: An Interview with John Muckelbauer
This episode is the first in a series recorded at the in Bloomington, Indiana. The interviews featured in these episodes were conducted by graduate students who are part of Indiana University's Rhetoric Society of America student chapter. First up is an interview with John Muckelbauer conducted by Caddie Alford. is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, where he has taught for thirteen years. He’s the author of the book . His writing has also appeared in journals like and enculturation, and he contributed a chapter entitled “Implicit Paradigms of Rhetoric: Aristotelian, Cultural, and Heliotropic” to the collection . His current book project engages with style from a Nietzschean angle. Caddie Alford is a PhD candidate at Indiana University. She is completing her dissertation, which recuperates the concept of doxa for rethinking invention, argumentation, and emergent rhetorics in terms of social media platforms. She has a forthcoming article in an upcoming special issue of Rhetoric Review that is focused on virtue ethics. She has also published on hashtag activism and choric invention in . In this interview, they discuss invention, plants, posthumanism, the limits of rhetorical theory, and the possibility of new rhetorical paradigms. This episode features a clip from the song by Borrtex.
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Talking #TacoLiteracy with Steven Alvarez
01/04/2018
Talking #TacoLiteracy with Steven Alvarez
This episode features an interview with , an assistant professor in the English Department at St. John's University. The interview was recorded at the 2017 Modern Language Association Convention, where Alvarez gave a presentation entitled He has also published on the topic in the journal . If you're interested in learning more about his research and teaching on taco literacy, you can check out , , and . In addition to studying the relationships between food and literacy, Dr. Alvarez is the author of , , and . In our conversation, we discuss Alvarez's books, the connections between research on foodways and research on literacy, and the relationship between food and emotion. This episode features a clip from the song by Satellite 4.
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CFP: Symposium on Sound, Rhetoric, and Writing
07/10/2017
CFP: Symposium on Sound, Rhetoric, and Writing
NOTE: THE SYMPOSIUM HAS PASSED, BUT THE CFP REMAINS HERE FOR SONIC POSTERITY. This is not a typical episode of Rhetoricity. No, this is a call for proposals for the Symposium on Sound, Rhetoric, and Writing. A written version of this CFP is available below, and it's also available as a Google Doc . Scroll to the bottom of this post for the audio version. Call for Proposals: Symposium on Sound, Rhetoric, and Writing ***UPDATE (12/11/17): Out of respect for the slew of deadlines that comes with the end of a semester, the organizers have extended the submission deadline for this symposium till January 1, 2018.*** We invite proposals for the first-ever Symposium on Sound, Rhetoric, and Writing, to be held in the cities of Nashville and Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on Sept. 7 & 8, 2018. From Belmont University’s to historic recording studios like , from Middle Tennessee State University’s to its , these two cities are home to a wealth of sound culture and music history, making them a fitting place for a gathering of sonically inclined rhetoric and writing scholars. Over the past decade, sound has become an increasingly popular topic for rhetoric and writing scholars working in both English and communication (see ). Rhetoric and writing scholars have approached sound from a number of angles, often in ways that resonate with interdisciplinary fields like sound studies and disability studies. This work has appeared across print-based and digital journals in the field, frequently gathered in special issues like enculturation’s (1999), Computers & Composition and C&C Online’s (2006), Currents in Electronic Literacy’s (2011), and Harlot’s (2013). This symposium aims to provide a dedicated space for rhetoric and writing scholars to present and discuss scholarship focused on sound. While we invite a wide range of proposals that take up expansive conceptions of “sound,” “rhetoric,” and “writing,” we offer the following as potential starting points: Sounding out the disciplinary relationships between rhetoric, writing, and sound studies Sound and/as accessibility Listening as a rhetorical practice How histories of rhetoric, writing, and composition can speak to current studies of sound Sonic archives and the history of sound Rhetorical aspects of/approaches to sonic environments The possibilities of sound as a scholarly medium/mode The relationship of sound to other media/modes/modalities Interdisciplinary possibilities for rhetorical work on sound Voice as a sonic phenomenon Empirically and/or theoretically informed approaches to integrating sound into rhetoric and/or writing classrooms We anticipate a relatively small symposium (<100 attendees), and we encourage submissions that will maximize the number of participating voices—roundtables and dialogue-based sessions, for example. While senior scholars are welcome to propose more traditional presentations, we especially encourage them to consider collaborative proposals and presentational formats that also involve junior scholars and/or graduate students. In addition to traditional presentations, we encourage the proposal of experimental, performative work. This work might include (but is not limited to): Short (5-10 minute) pieces of pre-produced audio scholarship Short films or documentaries that explore some aspect of sonic experience Soundscapes Musical or other creative-critical sonic compositions/performances Sonic games that take advantage of the affordances of locative or related media Gallery-style installations that blur the line between scholarship and sound art A note on the installation option: depending on the volume of installation submissions we receive, some portion of the symposium will be set aside for participants to tour a gallery of accepted installations with their creators on hand for Q&A. While collaborative proposals are encouraged, individual proposals are welcome. The deadline for proposals is January 1, 2018. Individual proposals are limited to 500 words. Roundtable or other collaborative proposals are limited to 1,250 words. No more than two proposals per person. Due to the time constraints of a symposium, anyone who has two proposals accepted will be expected to choose only one of them to present at the symposium. Submit proposals by visiting . Proposers will be notified of organizers’ decisions by March 1, 2018. Additional questions about the symposium should be sent to eric [dot] detweiler [at] mtsu [dot] edu. Symposium Organizers: Steph Ceraso (University of Virginia) Eric Detweiler (Middle Tennessee State University) Joel Overall (Belmont University) Jon Stone (University of Utah) The audio version of this CFP opens with a clip from
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Collaborating on Digital Rhetoric: A Roundtable
06/03/2017
Collaborating on Digital Rhetoric: A Roundtable
This episode of Rhetoricity brings you something a little different. It's not an interview with one person, but a roundtable discussion featuring five members of the (DRC): , , , , and Adrienne Raw. Dr. Silver is the associate director of the University of Michigan's , which supports the DRC. The rest of the roundtable participants were DRC graduate fellows at the time of this conversation. At the 2016 Computers and Writing Conference in Rochester, New York, where this episode was recorded, the DRC won the . I sat down to talk with these five members about the work of the collaborative, including the way it's shaped their view of rhetoric and digital rhetoric, as well as what the DRC's approach to cross-institutional collaboration makes possible. This episode features clips from by STEREORESONANCE and .
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