Rhetoric Society Quarterly

In response to criminalization, Irish Republican internees in Long Kesh prison began the No Wash protest, smearing shit on cell walls as an anticolonial tactic. This essay offers analysis of the olfactory rhetorics and processes of ruination generated by excrement, utilizing archival documents from the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. While shit is often thought of as discard, excrement is a fundamental signifier of the life form from which it came. Through the excessive use of shit, No Wash protestors rendered their prison internment a failed attempt to contain their liveliness. This analysis traces the institutional management of smell and ruination, showing how protesting prisoners’ strategic use of human waste created a context where prison authorities were forced to participate in the ruination of their own colonial infrastructure via intensive sanitation processes. The effects of the No Wash protest demonstrate the need for attention to waste not just as a byproduct but as a rhetorical resource for resistance and invention.

Kristin D. Pickering’s Environmental Preservation and the Grey Cliffs Conflict: Negotiating Common Narratives, Values, and Ethos is a qualitative, ethnographic analysis of an environmental conflict...

Directly across the street from my childhood home dwells a toxic dump site. Five unlined pits of petrochemical waste, poisons seeping into groundwater, chemicals spilling over during heavy rains in...

Rereading Megan Poole’s Listening to Beauty in my yard the week of the spring equinox, the raucous soundscape of the new season demands my attention. Our loudest chicken is scolding the fish crows ...

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X are widely blamed for the spread of mis- and disinformation, surveillance capitalism, thought manipulation, and the decay of critical discourse, leading critics to argue vociferously for regulation. This essay argues that Hannah Arendt’s conception of “the social” realm reframes the problem of social media not as a contest between free speech and regulation but as a problem of conformism, the dominant mode of discourse in the social. We look to the field of persuasive technology in computer science as illustrative, showing how conformism was merely reverse engineered from society into the platforms themselves. If, as Arendt describes, the social is “a world where speech has lost its power,” then social media is where it has lost its power precisely because the technology engineers speech so exquisitely, makes it so effortlessly consumable, that we fail to perceive we have stopped speaking altogether.

This essay examines Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1949 visit to the United States as an embodied display of postcolonial sovereignty at a key moment of Cold War geopolitics. We argue that Nehru leveraged Truman’s invitation to articulate his own view of India’s role on the Cold War world stage. Rather than adopting the standard bipolar framing of Cold War rhetorical discourse, we make the deliberate choice to read Nehru’s tour as he saw it: a strategic opportunity to secure US economic assistance, affirm India’s independence from British or American ideological influence, and express solidarity with oppressed peoples around the globe. Drawing on governmental and historical archives in New Delhi and Washington and press accounts from India, the United States, and beyond, we show how Nehru’s rhetorical movement through the United States disrupted Cold War scripts and foregrounded an alternative moral politics rooted in decoloniality, racial justice, and global cooperation.

Places of memory have been widely studied, yet dispersed memorials outside Western contexts remain underexplored. In South Korea—a postcolonial, postwar nation marked by rapid development—accelerated urban transformation and conflicted attitudes toward modern history complicate the commemoration of historical places. This essay examines how these challenges are overcome through pyoseok, a city-led, decentralized project of installed stone markers where material traces of the past have disappeared. Drawing on the Korean concepts of han and teo, the essay uses lived experience to argue that pyoseok invite Koreans to remember places rather than securing permanent monuments. In doing so, pyoseok both compensate for the loss of historical sites and render Seoul’s material volatility rhetorically acceptable. The study contributes to rhetorical scholarship on public memory by foregrounding a non-Western dispersed memorial practice and calling for more culturally and globally attentive analyses of memorial rhetoric.

This article investigates how the public circulation of hype functions rhetorically in the context of emerging immersive technologies. Through an analysis of YouTube reviews of Apple’s Vision Pro headset, we examine how rhetorical strategies operate at the intersection of wearable and embodied technology discourse, affect theory, and public circulation. The analysis focuses on four dominant rhetorical strategies that function to intensify anticipation while simultaneously constraining critical evaluation: excitement, exploration, exemplification, and exaggeration. These findings are supplemented with extended-use experiences from multiple sources, illustrating the tension between anticipatory rhetoric and lived experience. By theorizing the embodied and affective dimensions of VR discourse, this article contributes to our understanding of how rhetorical practices in digital environments reshape critical evaluation about technologies.