This episode features a roundtable conversation by contributors to Teaching Students to Podcast, an open-access, lesson plan-based manual on integrating podcasts into humanities courses. That manual was written by members of the Humanities Podcast Network's pedagogy working group. The discussion features six of its coauthors: Ulrich Baer, Robin Davies, Eric Detweiler, Emmy Herland, Beth Kramer, and Harly Ramsey. 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 "I Hear Echoes." Episode Transcript

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

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

This episode of Rhetoricity features members of the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on AI and Writing: Antonio Byrd, Holly Hassel, Sarah Z. Johnson, Anna Mills, and Elizabeth Losh. The task force also includes Leonardo Flores, David Green, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and A. Lockett. In July 2023, that task force published a working paper 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 The Big Rhetorical Podcast 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 Dr. Isabel Pedersen. 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 Quick Start Guide TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies, including Antonio Byrd's chapter "Using LLMs as Peer Reviewers for Revising Essays" Anna Mills's How Arguments Work Black in AI Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence The White House's Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights Kathryn Conrad's "A Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights for Education" Hugging Face The Wall Street Journal's "Cleaning Up ChatGPT Takes Heavy Toll on Human Workers" The Washington Post's "Behind the AI Boom, an Army of Overseas Workers in 'Digital Sweatshops'" Memes of the brawl in Montgomery, Alabama This episode features a clip from "Artificial Problems" by Smoked Meat Fax Machine. Episode Transcript  

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

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: “Come Along With Me” – Adventure Time The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin “Future Peace” – Uuriter “Future You” – Chad Crouch “Future’s Entry” – Lately Kind of Yeah “How Long ‘til Black Future Month” – N. K. Jemisin “Our Future” – Sergey Cheremisinov “Simon & Marcy” – Adventure Time “Sundown” – Lovecraft Country Episode Transcript

This episode features an interview with Cedric Burrows conducted by guest interviewer Derek G. Handley. Their conversation focuses on Dr. Burrows' 2020 book Rhetorical Crossover: The Black Presence in White Culture. 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: "Milwaukee" by talons' "Leftovers" by Millie Jackson "What a Difference a Day Makes" by Dinah Washington "Big Long Slidin' Thing" by Dinah Washington The Five Heartbeats "Mrs. Huxtable Goes to Kindergarten" The Story of Funk: One Nation Under a Groove Episode Transcript

This episode features guest interviewer Derek G. Handley speaking with Dr. April Baker-Bell. They discuss Dr. Baker-Bell's book Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy as well as her work on such projects as the Black Language Syllabus and "This Ain't Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!" 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 "Detroit." Episode Transcript

This episode features an interview with John R. Gallagher conducted by guest interviewer Sarah Riddick. The interview focuses on Gallagher's 2020 book Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing. 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 Explanation Points: Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition. As he mentions in the episode, he's also part of a team working on a National Science Foundation grant entitled "Advancing Adaptation of Writing Pedagogies for Undergraduate STEM Education Through Transdisciplinary Action Research." 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 "The Afterlife (Instrumental)." Episode Transcript

This episode features an interview with Tarez Samra Graban, 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 Peck Research on Writing Symposium 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 “Decolonising the Transnational Archive,” which was published in the African Journal of Rhetoric. And finally, a chapter she cowrote with Meghan Velez for the Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics, which came out last year. This episode features a clip from Mystery Mammal's "Archives." Episode Transcript

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 The Big Rhetorical Podcast’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 Anchor page or Twitter 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. Episode Transcript

This episode of Rhetoricity features contributions from four rhetoric scholars: Kati Fargo Ahern, Ben Harley, Lee Pierce, and Rachel Presley. Their pieces address questions asked by previous guest 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 here. This episode features clips from the following songs: "Special Place" by Ketsa "Azimuth approx." and "Finally Falling" by Maps & Transit

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

Note: 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!

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"

This episode features an interview with Laura Micciche. It was recorded during her visit to Tennessee for the 2019 Peck Research on Writing Symposium. 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. This year’s symposium 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. Laura Micciche 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 Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching and Acknowledging Writing Partners. 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 “Editing as Inclusion Activism,” a College Composition and Communication article entitled “Toward Graduate-Level Writing Instruction,” and an article in the journal WPA entitled “For Slow Agency.” She recently completed a six-year tenure as editor of the journal Composition Studies. 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 "Special Place" by Ketsa.

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.

Edit (08/07/2019): The CFP for the 2020 Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing Conference is now live! Check it out here. --- Just in time for the 2019 Computers and Writing Conference, this Rhetoricity episode features . . . an audio recording of Eric Detweiler's 2016 Computers and Writing presentation. A majorly revised reiteration of this presentation came out last year in volume 5 of Textshop Experiments. In short, this episode/presentation makes the case for embracing weirder conventions in academic podcasting, drawing on the popular podcast Welcome to Night Vale 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 enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture. 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: "8 Bit Circus Music" "Submarine Diving Sound" "Breaker-1" "The University of What It Is"

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

This episode features Dr. Christine Tulley. Dr. Tulley was the invited speaker at the 2018 Peck Research on Writing Symposium, an annual event hosted by Middle Tennessee State University's Department of English. 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, How Writing Faculty Write: Strategies for Process, Product, and Productivity. 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 MA in Rhetoric and Writing and Professor of English at the University of Findlay. Her current research focuses on faculty writing within rhetoric and composition, and she partners with Prolifiko, 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: "Adventure, Darling" by Gillicuddy "Thought Soup" by Doctor Turtle

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. Collin Bjork 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 “Integrating Usability Testing and Digital Rhetoric in Online Writing Instruction” 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 College English, 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 Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences’ Expectations won the Modern Language Association’s Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize. He is also author of Between the Lines: Relating Composition Theory and Literary Theory and coeditor of four volumes: Making Literature Matter, Arguing About Literature, Writing Theory and Critical Theory, and Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. 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 a symposium on virtue ethics 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 "Lines" by Glass Boy.

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 Vol. 1. 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. Dana Anderson is an associate professor at IU and also serves as Director of Composition. He received his PhD from Penn State, published his book Identity's Strategy: Rhetorical Selves in Conversion in 2007, and coedited the 2013 collection Burke in the Archives: Using the Past to Transform the Future of Burkean Studies with Jessica Enoch. His coauthored article "Screaming on a Ride to Nowhere: What Roller Coasters Teach Us About Being Human" 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 "Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the peuple quebecois." Ryan Juszkiewicz contributed extensive editorial work to this episode. The episode features clips from the following: "Roller Coaster Screams" by InspectorJ "Supermoon" by Ikebe Shakedown

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

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

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

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

This episode features an interview with Dr. Steven Alvarez, 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 "Taco Literacies: Translingual Foodways Writing in the Bluegrass." He has also published on the topic in the journal Composition Forum. If you're interested in learning more about his research and teaching on taco literacy, you can check out this website, this Instagram hashtag, and this recent Remezcla article. In addition to studying the relationships between food and literacy, Dr. Alvarez is the author of Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies, Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning from Bilingual After-School Programs, and The Codex Mojaodicus. 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 "Street Food" by Satellite 4.

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 here. 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 Gallery of Iconic Guitars to historic recording studios like Ocean Way, from Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Popular Music to its Department of Recording Industry, 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 Gunn et al.). 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 “Writing/Music/Culture” (1999), Computers & Composition and C&C Online’s “Sound in/as Compositional Space” (2006), Currents in Electronic Literacy’s “Writing With Sound” (2011), and Harlot’s “Sonic Rhetorics” (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 ( 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 http://rheteric.org/ssrw2018. 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 "Living Stereo."

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 Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC): Naomi Silver, Jenae Cohn, Brandy Dieterle, Paula Miller, and Adrienne Raw. Dr. Silver is the associate director of the University of Michigan's Sweetland Center for Writing, 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 Computers and Composition Michelle Kendrick Outstanding Digital Production/Scholarship Award. 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 "Recycle System" by STEREORESONANCE and freesound.org.

This episode features an episode with Donnie Johnson Sackey, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Wayne State University. Dr. Sackey is a senior researcher with Detroit Integrated Vision for Environmental Research through Science and Engagement (D•VERSE), an affiliated researcher in Michigan State University’s Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) Research Center, and an executive board member of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition. His research centers on environmental public policy deliberation, environmental justice, and environmental cultural history. His work has appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Computers and Composition, and the collection Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things. Along with Dr. Alex Hidalgo, he co-edited issue 5.2 of Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric and Society, a special issue entitled "Race, Rhetoric, and the State." In addition, Sackey is currently a co-investigator on a grant funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to perform risk communication work around the lead and legionella contamination crisis in the municipal water system in Flint, Michigan. In the following interview, we talk at length about his work with that grant project and on Present Tense. This episode includes clips from and references to the following: Lois Agnew et al.'s "Octalog III: The Politics of Historiography in 2010" Jeff Grabill's "The Work of Rhetoric in the Common Places" Malea Powell's 2012 CCCC Chair's Address print version video version Carlos Saura's "El Manantial" Armond Towns' "Body Camera Remix"  

This episode features an interview with Laurie Gries. Dr. Gries is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she has a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and the Program of Writing and Rhetoric. Laurie Gries researches visual rhetoric, circulation studies, research methodologies, new materialism, and the digital humanities. She's the author of the book Still Life With Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics, which won the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s 2016 Advancement of Knowledge Award and 2016 Research Impact Award. Her work has also appeared in the journals Computers and Composition, Rhetoric Review, and Composition Studies. Most recently, her article “Visualizing Obama Hope” was published in Kairos.   In this interview, Gries discusses the limits and possibilities of new materialism, the importance of method and methodology in rhetorical studies, and her work developing PikTrack, a software that would allow researchers to track online images and create data visualizations of such images’ trajectories. We also talk about monkeys, chimpanzees, and the difficulty of defining the word “rhetoric.” This episode includes clips from the following: "Monkey Gives CPR to Electrocuted Friend" from CNN "Wounda's Journey" from the Jane Goodall Institute "Resonance" by HOME

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

Rhetoricity returns, coming to you from its new home base: Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee! MTSU's Department of English hosts an annual event called the Peck Research on Writing Symposium. In 2016, that symposium featured a presentation by Dr. Derek Mueller, Associate Professor of Written Communication and Director of the First-Year Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University. This episode features an interview recorded during his visit. Mueller's work has appeared in the journals College Composition and Communication, Composition Forum, Kairos, and Present Tense. He has two forthcoming book projects: Cross-Border Networks in Writing Studies and Network Sense: Methods for Visualizing a Discipline. In this interview, Dr. Mueller discusses tracking and studying citation practices in writing pedagogy and writing studies research, the concept of chora, ways of challenging the divide between qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and how visual models can enrich rhetoric, composition, and writing studies. Oh, and Star Wars. This episode features clips from the following: "Strong Bad Email #91: Caffeine" John Williams - "Rey Meets BB-8" Looper Official Trailer "Chicago Teachers Strike is Biggest in a Generation" CBS Sports' coverage of Serena Williams' 2012 US Open victory Lost "Freestyle Finger Snapping" freesound.org

In this episode, Eric tries to discuss the limits of rhetorical mastery as well as a series of rhetorical exercises called the progymnasmata. Then a few unexpected guests show up and things take a posthuman turn. This episode includes brief clips from the following: 2001: A Space Odyssey Alien The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) Ex Machina Blade Runner Futurama Star Wars: A New Hope Terminator 2: Judgement Day and freesound.org  

This episode of Rhetoricity is a rebroadcast of a 2014 interview with Joyce Locke Carter, associate professor at Texas Tech University and chair of the 2016 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Originally, the interview was conducted for and published by the Digital Writing and Research Lab's Zeugma podcast. This week, Dr. Carter will be giving the CCCC chair's address in Houston, Texas. Because she discusses her address and the role of CCCC chairs in this interview, now seemed like a relevant time to circulate it again. Dr. Carter's address is entitled “Making, Disrupting, Innovating,” and will explore strategies for making the case for rhetoric and composition’s value. In addition to her work with CCCC, Joyce Locke Carter is the author of the book Market Matters: Applied Rhetoric Studies and Free Market Competition. Her current book project is entitled Reading Arguments. It focuses on how sophisticated readers engage with documents that ask them to make a decision. The project deals with a significant gap in rhetoric scholarship about what audiences actually do when they read and respond to purposeful rhetorical acts. Additionally, her work has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, Computers and Composition, and Programmatic Perspectives. A transcript of the Zeugma version of the interview is available here.

This episode of Rhetoricity features Steph Ceraso. Dr. Ceraso is currently an assistant professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Starting in fall 2016, she’ll be taking a position as Assistant Professor of Digital Writing and Rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. Dr. Ceraso contributed the entry on “Sound” to the Modern Language Association’s “Keywords in Digital Pedagogy” project, and she presented as part of a panel entitled “Writing with Sound” at the 2016 MLA convention. She's written multiple posts for the blog Sounding Out!, contributed a multimodal piece entitled "A Tale of Two Soundscapes: The Story of My Listening Body" to the collection Provoke! Digital Sound Studies, and--along with Jon Stone--co-edited a special issue of the digital journal Harlot focused on sonic rhetorics. Her work has also appeared in the journals College English and Composition Studies. In this interview, we talk at length about her College English essay. It’s called “(Re)Educating the Senses: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Learning, and the Composition of Sonic Experiences,” and in 2014 it won the journal’s annual award for outstanding articles. We also discuss her current book project, which is entitled “Sounding Composition, Composing Sound: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening.” Dr. Ceraso’s research is tied up with pedagogical questions, so we also talk at length about how she approaches and integrates sound into the courses she teaches, as well as accessibility issues she addresses in both her teaching and her scholarship. Specifically, we discuss a soundmapping project, a multisensory dining event, and one student's attempt to translate the game Marco Polo into the classroom.

This Rhetoricity episode takes a return trip to the 2016 Modern Language Association Convention in Austin, Texas. At the convention, Dr. Byron Hawk presided over a session called "Writing with Sound." In this episode, Dr. Hawk discusses his work at the entangled intersections of sound, composition, writing, and the rhetorical. Byron Hawk is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of South Carolina. Hawk is the author of A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity, and his work has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, Enculturation, Kairos, and PRE/TEXT. His current book project is entitled Resounding the Rhetorical: Composition as a Quasi-Object. That project is the focus of our conversation. Hawk draws the concept of the "quasi-object" from Michel Serres. Two of Serres' essays, "Noise" and "Theory of the Quasi-Object," might make for informative reading before or after listening to this episode. Hawk also discusses the work of Karen Barad and Bruno Latour. As we discuss his book project and what might happen if we were to approach "composition" as a quasi-object, Hawk riffs on soccer, recording studios, the punk band Refused, and the sound art of Thomas Stanley. Throughout, he remains focused on these questions: How is composition and how are compositions co-produced as quasi-objects? How do rhetorical energies circulate through and as sound, exceeding and generating the power of human production? This episode features clips from the following songs and sonic performances: "Machinery" - Our Tragic Hours "Liberation Frequency" - Refused "Lonely Woman" - Ornette Coleman "Bruitist Pome #5" - Refused "MOM2 Live at Conundrum/Columbia SC/12.06.13" - Bushmeat "Apoptosis" - Incapacitants "How to make Noise music" - Project Rainfall "MARK HOSLER of NEGATIVLAND - LIVE IN PROVIDENCE 11.04.2012" "Big Sur" - Janel and Anthony

This episode of Rhetoricity comes to you from the 2016 Modern Language Association Convention in Austin, Texas. At the convention, I spoke with the University of Southern California's Virginia Kuhn. Dr. Kuhn is an associate professor in the Media Arts + Practice Division of USC's School of Cinematic Arts. In this interview, we discuss three of Dr. Kuhn's recent and ongoing projects: First, the Library Machine, which was until recently known as "LibViz." That project is the third case study in a recent article coauthored by Dr. Kuhn: "Coping with the Big Data Dump: Towards a Framework for Enhanced Information Representation." From there, we turn to the Video Analysis Tableau, an online toolkit that makes a vast archive of digital video accessible and searchable for a wide variety of users and uses. Finally, we discuss Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies, an 2015 Parlor Press anthology that Dr. Kuhn co-edited. Along the way, we discuss cinematic conventions, gender, Afrofuturism, YouTube, and how rhetoric and rhetoricians figure in to Dr. Kuhn's various projects. This episode includes a number of clips and samples from other sources: "Time Travel" by Jasmine Jordan "interactive ui in minority report" The Wizard of Oz "Not in Kansas Anymore" Ghosts of the Abyss Inkheart Little Shop of Horrors The Matrix "Baby Laughing Hysterically at Ripping Paper (Original)" "Charlie bit my finger - again !" "David After Dentist" Honey, I Shrunk the Kids The 85th Academy Awards Lincoln Beasts of the Southern Wild trailer Silver Linings Playbook To the People of the United States "I'm not a Doctor, but I play one on TV Commercial 1986 with Peter Bergman Vicks Formula 44" "Pilot" - House M.D. The Last Angel of History trailer Sucker Punch trailer "A Virtual Friend" by Paris La Nuit Various clips from freesound.org

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

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

This episode of Rhetoricity features an interview with Casey Boyle, an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Boyle’s work has appeared in such anthologies as Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities and Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. He serves as assistant editor for Enculturation: A Journal of Writing, Rhetoric, and Culture and has forthcoming articles in both College English and Technical Communication Quarterly. At UT-Austin, Dr. Boyle teaches courses on writing with sound, digital rhetoric, and network theory. He is currently co-editing an anthology entitled Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things with Scot Barnett and working on a monograph entitled Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice. The starting point for this episode's conversation is "The Rhetorical Question Concerning Glitch," an article of Dr. Boyle's that appeared in the March 2015 issue of Computers and Composition. We beginning be discussing points of overlap between "glitch art" and rhetoric. From there, Dr. Boyle discusses how his work with glitch troubles the boundaries between "theory" and "practice" as well as so-called "creative" and "critical" rhetorical work. We wrap up by talking about another of his current projects: a series of interviews with humanities scholars about their failed projects. This episode contains some glitched audio files, so there are a few moments of sudden volume change--not enough to damage listening ears, but enough that it seems worth a warning. Specifically, this episode includes gliched clips from the following: "The Tourist" - Radiohead "The Tourist" - Sarah Jarosz "The Tourist" - Flash Hawk Parlor Ensemble "It just works. Seamlessly." (YouTube video uploaded by all about Steve Jobs.com) "Search and Destroy" - Peaches "Search and Destroy" - Iggy and the Stooges Brazil (film) Spartacus (film) "Crystal Blue Persuasion" - Tommy James and the Shondells "The Internet" (episode of the TV series Computer Chronicle) freesound.org

In this episode of Rhetoricity, I talk with Shyam Sharma about global citizenship, transnational writing, and the globalization of writing classrooms. Dr. Sharma is an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Stony Brook University in New York. His research focuses on writing in the disciplines, but he also studies translingualism and multilingualism, cross-cultural rhetoric, and multimodality in writing studies. He is currently working on a book project about international graduate students in the U.S. and has a piece in the September 2015 issue of College Composition and Communication. In this interview, which was conducted at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), we discuss Transnational Writing, a Facebook group that Dr. Sharma helped launch. We also talk about "Engaging the Global in the Teaching of Writing," a CCCC workshop that he participated in and helped facilitate. Post-introduction transition music: "Eastbound & Down" by Cherlene.

This episode of Rhetoricity, recorded at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication, features an interview with Dr. Justin Hodgson. Hodgson is an assistant professor at Indiana University. He serves as general editor for the Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects and is currently working on a book project entitled New Aesthetics, New Rhetorics. In spring 2015, he and Dr. Scot Barnett organized and hosted the Indiana Digital Rhetoric Symposium (IDRS). We begin by talking about what distinguishes (and doesn't distinguish) "digital rhetoric" from the "digital humanities." From there, Dr. Hodgson discusses what he hoped would happen at IDRS, which had yet to take place at the time of this interview. From there, we turn to digital rhetoric pedagogy. Specifically, Dr. Hodgson discusses Rhetoric, Play, & Games, an undergraduate course he's been teaching for a number of years. In addition to asking students to examine, play, and write about video games, the course functions as a game. We talk about both the possibilities and problems Hodgson sees in current conversations about "gamifying" education. The episode ends with some follow-up reflections on IDRS that Dr. Hodgson recorded after the symposium wrapped. He and Dr. Barnett are currently putting together a special issue of Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture that will build on the symposium's proceedings. This episode features clips from Led Zeppelin's "Rock & Roll," Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings' "Long Time, Wrong Time," and The Pharaos' "Mission Bucharest." The latter tune is licensed under Creative Commons; all other music and samples used within the provisions of fair use.

This installment of Rhetoricity zags away from the interview format of the last few episodes. Instead, I'm bringing you a response to a question I've started getting from a handful of rhetoric and composition scholars: what technologies do I use to put this podcast together? Rather than jumping straight into a pile of microphones, though, I begin with some brief thoughts on the rhetorical decisions that can go into how and why a podcast sounds the way it does. After running through some very quick notes on the history and politics of podcasting (and why the TV show The Good Wife is so great), I use a handful of audio setups to walk listeners through the pros and cons of these different technologies--from clip-on mics and handheld recorders to slightly (but still grad-student friendly) higher-end equipment. Along the way, I offer cursory nods to fair use, Creative Commons, my editing process, and robot chipmunks. This episode includes clips from The Good Wife, the film In a World..., and the songs "Rebel Girl" (Bikini Kill), "Freakin' Out" (Death), "Now I'm Here" (Queen), "Daybreak" (Michael Haggins), and "Wipe Out" (The Surfaris), as well as a quote from Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and various clips from the website freesound.org.

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

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

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

In February, Laurence Rickels stopped by Austin, Texas. Dr. Rickels, who is the Sigmund Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School as well as Professor of Art and Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Germany, was in town as part of the tour for his latest book: Germany: A Science Fiction. During his visit, he also swung by UT-Austin's Digital Writing and Research Lab and was generous enough to sit down for the following interview.In his new book, Rickels focuses on psychopathy as, quote, "the undeclared diagnosis implied in flunking the empathy test." He does so via an exploration of Germany's role in Cold War-era science fiction: from the Thomas Pynchon novel Gravity's Rainbow to B movies like 1962's The Day of the Triffids to the science fiction of Philip K. Dick. In addition to Germany, Dr. Rickels has written numerous works tracing connections between psychoanalysis, popular culture, critical theory, science fiction, and mourning. His books include The Case of California, The Vampire Lectures, a three-volume series entitled Nazi Psychoanalysis, and Spectre, in which Rickels turns his attention to Ian Fleming's James Bond. He's also the author of a recent article entitled "The Race to Fill in the Blanks: On (Animal) Testing in Science Fiction," which appeared in the 2014 issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric touched on in this podcast's premiere episode.In our conversation, I ask Dr. Rickels about his use of the term "psy-fi," the impetus behind his new book, the relationship between his work and that of the late media theorist Friedrich Kittler, as well as the puns and juxtapositions that punctuate his pages. This and all other Rhetoricity episodes are also available on iTunes and Stitcher.

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

This episode features an interview with Dr. Sharon Crowley, an accomplished rhetoric scholar and winner of the Conference on College Composition and Communication's 2015 Exemplar Award. Dr. Crowley is the author of Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays, Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, and coauthor of the rhetoric textbook Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. In this episode, special guest interviewer Kendall Gerdes talks with Crowley about the recent history of rhetoric as a discipline, her advice for rhetoric graduate students, and what she's been reading lately. They even take a moment to talk about their respective experiences playing the video game Skyrim in connection with Umberto Eco's essay "The Return of the Middle Ages." This and all other Rhetoricity episodes are also available on iTunes and Stitcher.  

Small talk: it's both part of the lifeblood and part of the awkwardness of academic conferences. "Is your hometown treating you well?" "How about this weather?" "When did you get in?" The questions and answers are almost predetermined. Pushing the boundaries of this chatter, one might say, is a rhetorical project, and so this episode features two rhetoric scholars doing just that. Nathaniel Rivers (St. Louis University) and Jenny Rice (University of Kentucky) try out an array of alternate small-talk topoi, from questions about crying to old-timey firefighters to blood. This and all other Rhetoricity episodes are also available on iTunes and Stitcher.

In this episode, I explore the concept from which this podcast derives its title and part of its inspiration: rhetoricity. In keeping with a spirit of weirdness, I pursue this by asking a few rhetoric scholars--Diane Davis, Will Burdette, Steven LeMieux--the following question: what isn't rhetoricity? This and all other Rhetoricity episodes are also available on iTunes and Stitcher.