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Inclusive leadership is most commonly conceptualized as a behavioral style, psychological climate or managerial practice that promotes participation, belongingness and recognition. While these approaches have generated important insights, they provide only limited explanation of how inclusion is communicatively sustained within organizations. This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding inclusive leadership as a discursive-rhetorical practice of power. Drawing on a critical narrative synthesis of rhetorical theory, discourse studies and leadership scholarship, the article argues that inclusion is not a stable organizational condition, but a communicative accomplishment. The study proposes a three-dimensional framework composed of discursive construction, identity formation and power mediation that explains how rhetorical mechanisms (particularly logos, ethos and pathos) shape the meanings of inclusion, legitimize organizational identities and regulate participation under different institutional conditions. By integrating classical rhetoric and contemporary leadership theory, the article contributes a more precise account of how inclusion is rhetorically enabled, constrained and contested.

This text outlines a rationale for a concerted, interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research agenda, called “Democracy Rebound,” as a reaction against contemporary autocratization and the rise of authoritarianism. The agenda proposes research activities that explain the historical and political contexts and the social, discursive and psychological drivers of authoritarian tendencies in Europe today. It recommends four steps towards explaining how authoritarian projects mobilize identity and affect via digital discourse to normalize leader-centered power and illiberal, anti-rational ideologies, often disguised as tradition. The agenda is rooted in a comprehensive literature review and motivated by the need for Europe-wide actions and research-based recommendations that equip policymakers, journalists, educators, and civil society with actionable intelligence, tools, and early warnings to detect and reverse democratic backsliding.

Discussions of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) focus on describing AI as either a tool or a collaborator. Such discussions do not fully grasp GenAI's transformative impact. This article proposes a model of cyborg learning that outlines the skills necessary for using GenAI effectively: background knowledge, critical evaluation of AI output, and rhetorical integration of AI output. Presenting multiple use cases from the literature in technical and professional communication and the author's own experience, the article illustrates how to write as a cyborg.

This article revisits Richard Weaver’s concept of spaciousness as a rhetorical effect and repositions it within contemporary visual rhetoric, particularly data visualizations. Although Weaver’s account of spaciousness is rooted in a political ideology that presumes shared cultural values, the concept offers a useful lens for understanding how style operates in visual communication. Drawing on the classical Ciceronian styles, this article argues that spaciousness functions as a visual analogue of the grand style, emphasizing abstraction rather than detail. Analyses of sparklines, cartographic maps, network visualizations, and metaphor-based displays show how plain style prioritizes instruction and transparency, grand style cultivates openness and shared meaning, and middle style modulates between visual scales through perceptual or interactive zooming. The article demonstrates how stylistic spaciousness in data visualization reinforces cultural assumptions about connectivity, complexity, and knowledge, offering a rhetorically grounded approach to studying visual style.

In Unorganized Women, Jane Greer compellingly argues that low-wage, white women workers deployed activist, repetitious rhetorical labor at the turn of the nineteenth century to shape public percept...

This article historicizes the emergence of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as an Islamic counterpublic in the U.S. public sphere prior to 9/11. The study analyzes how CAIR functioned as an Islamic counterpublic to contest entrenched Islamophobic rhetorics that positioned Muslims as collective threats to U.S. public safety. It highlights how CAIR performed counterpublic rhetorical moves by using oppositional interpretations to construct Muslim ethos and moral identities; coalitional rhetoric to highlight Muslims’ civic engagement; and world-making to advance new ways of seeing Muslims. The study provides a critical history to CAIR’s contemporary advocacy, contributing to scholarship on Islamic/Muslim counterpublicity.

I contracted Lyme disease when I was thirteen years old. I struggled with vague symptoms for nine months (maybe my busy parents assumed my fatigue and headaches were normal complaints for a teenage...

This study examines how design thinking (DT) can function as a conceptual and analytical framework for supporting students’ critical AI literacy practices in writing and technical communication classrooms. Drawing on focus group interviews, individual reflection essays, and design artifacts from undergraduate technical writing students who collaboratively designed and customized AI chatbots using Poe, the study explores how students enacted responsible and user-centered design practices through each stage of the DT process. Findings reveal that 1) the empathize and define stages helped students identify algorithmic biases and frame inclusivity as part of user-centered design; 2) the ideate and prototype stages translated critical awareness into design decisions around prompt engineering, knowledge base curation, and visual accessibility; and 3) the test stage allowed students to revise their chatbot design through iterative usability testing and user feedback. Collectively, the DT process positioned students as human-in-the-loop co-creators who exercised rhetorical agency through prompt design, knowledge curation, and bias mitigation while designing customized chatbots. The article ends with pedagogical implications for integrating DT into critical AI pedagogy, chatbot design, and composition instruction.

How does writing with generative AI transform our experiences as thinkers, learners, and communicators? This study investigates the question through threshold concepts, transformative ideas that prove troublesome yet shape disciplinary participation, previously identified in writing studies through retrospective analysis. We propose that technological disruption creates conditions for observing new concepts as they emerge within communities of practice. To test this approach, we designed an experimental “AI and Writing” course. Across two iterations (Fall 2023 and Fall 2024), 38 undergraduate students from 22 majors engaged in scaffolded challenges and self-directed projects, developing strategic approaches to AI-assisted composing. Analysis of students’ final reflections, using Meyer and Land’s characteristics as sensitizing criteria, revealed three concepts essential for productive AI engagement: writing with AI is an experimental process; writing with AI requires expertise and dialogue; and writing with AI should augment rhetorical agency. These transformations prove troublesome because they contradict expectations shaped by prior experience: better tools should require less effort, linguistic fluency signals substantive knowledge, and assistance either wholly helps or harms learning and development. The findings show how AI transforms perennial questions in writing studies and composition, and they offer insights for navigating the threshold between productive collaboration and problematic dependency.

Building on Nancy Fraser’s (1990) theorization of transnational public spheres, this study examines protest rhetoric of Ghanaian environmental activists who use social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter to protest illegal mining (galamsey). I argue that these activists, locally in Ghana and across the diaspora, construct what I call a Transnational Environmental Counterpublic (TEC) to mobilize, raise awareness and influence policy decisions in Ghana. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, I examine protest rhetoric across hashtags, viral posts alphabetic and visuals, and non-human materialities (colors, paper, cloth) to understand how networks of activists contest environmental injustices. This analysis shows that protest rhetoric is not only shaped by embodied and material actants, but they also contest the dominant narrative of land exploitation, extractive capitalism, and ecological responsibility in Ghana. I call on the field to recognize the value of transnational rhetorical practices and their role in shaping global conversations on environmental justice, digital activism, and transnational coalition building.

This essay examines three iconic photographs of “The 15 White Coats” who are a group of fifteen African American medical school students and emerging physicians who posed in solidarity in front of a former slave cabin in Louisiana. Although the photographs generated wide acclaim regarding underrepresentation in medicine, I argue that the performative goal of The 15 White Coats was to subvert any standard images of physicians as white and to underscore past and ongoing exploitation of Black bodies in medicine. More specifically, I demonstrate through these images a methodology of “visual counterstory,” which serves as a form of resistance to anti-Black sentiment while reinforcing positive images of Black physicians. Ultimately, I show how “visual counterstory” makes an important intervention in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine scholarship, thereby, raising consciousness of the disparities occurring in the contemporary discourse of health and medicine.

Becoming an AARP-designated “age-friendly'' state is a five-year project, and states who choose to do so, often create a website devoted to policy efforts and initiative updates. On these websites, visual rhetoric and writing play a central role in communicating with the public. These websites have implications for how aging is represented and who is included in this online space, both in photographs and in a website’s alternative text (alt text). To conduct my analysis, I selected three “age-friendly” state homepages and used a framework of text and image integration (Shriver, 1997) and accessibility (Horton & Quesenbery, 2013). My analysis revealed that “age-friendly” state pages must provide greater representation of what aging can look like and should include informative and useful alternative text. I also analyzed the Age-Friendly Minnesota site for the network of digital tools (Spinuzzi, 2015). Through this analysis, I found evidence of an ethos of transparency being developed through a large amount of content being made available online, including meeting videos, which captured both efforts to be accountable to the public and moments of adapting to technology. In giving users access to the unedited meetings, they gain access to the mundane and necessary coordination of technology as well as a greater understanding of the process for developing policy.

Following Gogan (2014), this article outlines how shifting emphasis from persuasion to participation as the desired “end” of public writing can help scholars, teachers, and students better conceptualize public rhetorical work. To better understand the range of “participation,” I argue that scholars and teachers might consider three separate-but-overlapping formulations of public writing participation: 1) participation as confronting—accessing and inhabiting places of institutionally-sanctioned rhetoric through agonistic presence, 2) participation as conditioning and coordinating rhetorical action and engagement within broader ecologies, and 3) participation as constructing and creating through future-building and the assembling of publics. To describe these formulations, I outline the rhetorical work of “copwatching,” the organized effort to monitor policing through video documentation and other routinized tactics. Functioning within the contemporary ecology surrounding police reform, copwatching’s diverse activities help illustrate the realities of public rhetorical work as forms of strategic participation across times and spaces.

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.

Although the aesthetic dimension of charts and graphs is widely acknowledged, with principles of beauty and composition providing a touchstone for design and analysis, the qualities and functions of aesthetic elements are highly variable and mutable, both culturally and rhetorically. Culturally, data design has undergone radical shifts in taste—from elaborate Victorian designs to streamlined modernist forms to today's complex interactive displays. Rhetorically, aesthetic elements also vary in their impact: embedded in genre conventions, they foster audience expectations; they also enhance audience engagement and memory, and they generate emotional and epideictic appeals. The chief variations in the theory and application of aesthetics center on the use of ornament, especially pictorial elements. Varying perspectives on their use stem from differing cultural values and rhetorical situations—factors that provide a flexible framework for navigating the spectrum of design principles and practices.

Abstract This paper advances a unified account of how argumentative influence can align with epistemic agency by reframing the distinction between invitational and persuasion rhetoric. Drawing on Foss and Griffin’s (1995) influential articulation of invitational rhetoric as grounded in equality, immanent value, and self-determination, I argue that invitational communication inherently positions addressees as reason receivers —agents capable of understanding, evaluating, and endorsing reasons through their own rational capacities. In such settings, perspective change, when it occurs, constitutes rational self-persuasion , an internal process grounded in the addressee’s judgment of the speaker’s reasons. Foss and Griffin contrast this with persuasion rhetoric, holding that persuasion aims to modify others’ attitudes and thereby risks producing compliance under influence through pressure amplified by unbracketed power differentials. I contend, however, that this criticism targets only a subset of persuasion: persuasion that is purely uptake-driven. Building on insights from Gearhart (1979), Tindale (1999), and contemporary persuasion theory (e.g., O’Keefe 2016), I defend the rational persuasion thesis, according to which a speaker’s intention to rationally persuade is the intention to have addressees persuade themselves by judging the speaker’s premises to be reasons they themselves have. When persuasion is so understood, the speaker’s intention is inherently aligned with epistemic agency and motivates the creation of rhetorical environments marked by safety, value, and freedom—conditions Foss and Griffin take to be distinctive of invitational rhetoric. I conclude that argumentation respects epistemic agency not by forgoing influence, but by aiming at rational self-persuasion, thereby distinguishing rational from merely causal forms of rhetorical efficacy.

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...

This qualitative, triple case study reveals how policy reports function as enduring rhetorical resources beyond publication. Textual-intertextual analysis of three antimicrobial resistance reports—including 23 interviews and more than 700 related texts—illuminates how the reports enable subsequent persuasion by filling information gaps, supplying authoritative citations, and representing landmarks. Leveraging theories of circulation, recomposition, and extended delivery, the article offers heuristics to help writers design reports that better equip others to argue in policy contexts over time.

As ChatGPT is increasingly used in second language (L2) writing practice and research, its potential to provide feedback and revision has attracted much scholarly attention. However, it remains largely unknown whether and how ChatGPT revision can influence rhetorical move-steps. This study investigates the effects of ChatGPT revision on rhetorical move-steps in English personal statements (PSs) written by L2 English undergraduate students, using a combination of corpus data and stimulated recall interviews. Based on an unstructured prompt, our analysis revealed significant reductions in the rhetorical efforts devoted to five rhetorical steps. Students’ responses highlighted both benefits and concerns regarding these revisions, illustrating how AI-generated changes can alter textual features and affect writer-reader communication from the writers’ perspective. The findings highlight the importance of students’ critical evaluation of AI-generated revisions and iterative engagement with them.

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.

Barbara Konat offers in Emotional Appeals in Argumentation an helpful synthesis of many years of research on emotional appeals in argumentation, notably the project "Computational Pathos", supported by the Polish National Science Centre, of which she was the principal investigator.Although the title unsurprisingly echoes, given the series in which the volume appears, the terminology of argumentation theory and of so-called fallacies of "appeals to emotion", the central concern of this 160-page book, published in 2025 in the Argumentation Library series, is more specifically-and more appropriately-the rhetorical question of pathos.The volume crowns the work carried out by the group behind the "Computational Pathos" project, but it also perfectly illustrates, through its alignment with contemporary research orientations, the renewal of the field that has become visible in recent years and that rests on at least three foundations.First-and this has become self-evident, although it still struggles to penetrate certain mindsemotions should not be reduced to fallacious appeals, but should be regarded as an integral part of the means of persuasion, inseparable from reason and comparable in this respect to the construction of self-image (ethos).Second, especially when a computational dimension is introduced, analyses and models need to be grounded in texts as they actually occur, rather than in fabricated, stylized, or simplified examples.Third, due attention must be paid to the emergence of innovative methods capable of investigating fields that were once largely inaccessible.The book, however, does more than testify to the modernity of its research agenda.Across three parts, it establishes a descriptive model for the analysis of pathos, moving, as the subtitle indicates, from Aristotle to generative artificial

This paper offers a programmatic agenda for de-centering humans in one of the last bastions of academia that has resisted an animal turn in its pedagogical practices: writing and rhetoric studies. Non-human animals enjoy robust systems of communication and meaning-making, which they transmit through their cultures and which they evolve in constant dialogue with other species, humans included. As academics who teach language arts, we can and should use rhetorical tools to dismantle speciesism in the classroom. The four pillars of the nonspeciesist rhetorical pedagogy outlined in this article are rhetorical listening, reframing speciesist linguistic scripts, considering animals as rhetorical agents and putting ecosophy at the center of human and nonhuman animal rhetorics.

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.

From a national study on graduate student writing pedagogy in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies, 203 participant responses show the value of faculty mentorship, learning to write outside of coursework, and the importance of understanding rhetorical genre systems. Participants largely report not having taken a course on writing in graduate school. This article concludes that more should be done in coursework to mediate the needs of graduate student writers.

Doctoral dissertation writing is a demanding process requiring writers to navigate complex rhetorical, disciplinary, and institutional expectations. This study examines how doctoral writers perceive and handle these challenges. More than 1000 reflections were collected from 278 participants across seven years of dissertation writing retreats. Through their reflections, writers articulate how they negotiate the dissertation's distinctive parameters, particularly in adapting writing practices to new rhetorical contexts, managing complex research tasks, and developing sustained project timelines. Participants’ reflections also illustrate three distinct approaches to managing writing tasks: strategic problem-solving, affirmative progress recognition, and responsive integration of both approaches. Writers demonstrating a responsive approach, combining practical solutions with positive self-acknowledgment, showed enhanced goal completion compared to those employing strategic approaches alone. This research extends current theoretical frameworks of genre use by considering the relationship between metacognitive problem-solving and positive affect during dissertation drafting. Data suggest that successful genre navigation of dissertations often depends on writers' ability to develop compensatory mechanisms when faced with the tacit or occluded nature of the dissertation expectations. These findings contribute to writing theory by exploring how writers manage complex genres and offer principles for structuring doctoral writing support.

This article focuses on teacher educators’ approaches to supporting discipline-specific undergraduate writing at the University of Strathclyde, the largest provider of initial teacher education (ITE) in Scotland. Although the Scottish Enlightenment had a substantial influence on positioning language, and therefore rhetoric, as a field of study ( Shieber, 2023 ), contemporary Scottish higher education—including teacher education—has no teaching of rhetoric or composition and no formalised general writing education (e.g., first-year composition). Yet, ITE students are expected to write in a variety of genres throughout postsecondary education. We position writing instruction as part of socially just teacher education. Our qualitative study investigates how university teacher educators conceive of student writing and enact these conceptualisations in practice. This study offers insight into how teacher educators evaluate the role of writing in teacher education and how they connect it to professional practice, positioning writing instruction as part of socially just teacher education.

This article presents findings from an ethnographic, rhetorical study of children's experiences with free-time writing in so-called author schools for children in Denmark. The study is guided by two research questions: What characterizes writing enjoyment in the context of free-time author schools for children, based on children's own experiences? and How can insights from children's writing experiences in author schools inform broader pedagogical considerations about writing in formal school settings? The aim of the article is to contribute empirically grounded knowledge about writing enjoyment in an out-of-school teaching context and to explore how such knowledge might inspire broader considerations about a pedagogy for enjoyable writing experiences. Findings point to four core dimensions of writing enjoyment as expressed by the children: (a) writing together with others in a community of writing, (b) being free in writing and experiencing agency, (c) using imagination in writing to explore ideas and stories, and (d) being taught by an author, someone who is herself a writer. These insights are considered in relation to existing understandings of writing enjoyment and discussed as inspiration for a writing pedagogy that is experience centered rather than performance centered.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Background:</i></b> While corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting has been widely studied, fewer works have systematically examined how legitimation strategies are discursively constructed across generic structure in energy-sector disclosures. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Literature review:</i></b> Prior research has explored microlinguistic features and move structures, but little attention has been paid to how rhetorical strategies of legitimation are embedded across generic stages. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research questions:</i></b> 1. How are the five major legitimation strategies linguistically realized across the move-step structures of Chinese and American energy CSR reports? 2. How do legitimation strategies co-occur with different discourse types of Chinese and American energy CSR reports? 3. How do the external factors influence the selection of legitimation strategies in CSR reporting practices? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Methodology:</i></b> This study analyzes 40 CSR reports (2020-2023) from Chinese and American energy companies using a corpus-assisted and move-step-based approach that integrates critical genre analysis and an integrated analytical legitimation framework. Lexical bundles and grammatical features are annotated across generic stages and discourse types to identify legitimation strategies and trace how they vary by national context and external pressures. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Results and conclusions:</i></b> This study identifies eight moves and 13 steps—including a newly observed move, M8: Elaboration of performance in the public health crisis—as well as four discourse types. Chinese reports emphasize authorization and moral narrative, while American reports favor rationalization, analogies of moralization and cosmos narrative. These strategies are embedded across moves and discourse types, adapting to institutional logics and external pressures.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Background:</i></b> The strategic use of positive and negative language is important to stance and credibility construction in professional communication. Academic writing is a primary mode of expert-to-expert communication, where linguistic sentiments reflect authorial negotiation and knowledge presentation. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Literature review:</i></b> While prior research suggested a linguistic positivity bias in specific contexts, diachronic trends in positivity and negativity across disciplines remains unexplored, particularly regarding how such shifts reshape communicative functions. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research questions:</i></b> RQ1. What are the diachronic trends of linguistic positivity and negativity in academic writing across soft and hard sciences? RQ2. How do communicative functions of sentiment-laden sentences evolve across the two disciplinary groups? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Methodology:</i></b> A corpus of 3000 articles published between 1974 and 2023, from soft and hard sciences was compiled. Computational sentiment analysis was combined with manual rhetorical coding to identify sentiment trends and communicative functions. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Results:</i></b> Soft sciences become more neutral over time. Hard sciences remain stable in negative sentiment, but show an increase in positive sentiment scores. Functionally, soft sciences favor positive evaluations when introducing prior studies and attenuate sentiment in conclusions. Hard sciences increasingly introduce prior work critically and frame conclusions positively. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Conclusion:</i></b> These findings reveal evolving disciplinary norms in professional communication, where sentiment is strategically employed to construct knowledge and persuade peers. Writers may amplify innovation through positive framing or signal research gaps through critique. Such insights inform professional communication pedagogy by guiding students to balance critique and promotion to enhance professional authority and disciplinary alignment. Future research may examine sentiment patterns in other professional genres, such as corporate social responsibility reports and popular scientific texts.

Transnational and multilingual writing data are characterized by mobile practices that rarely hold still for study. As individuals form and re-form communities in the process of migration, their language and literacy paths increasingly diversify forms of language sociality, goals, or expectations. In such cases, a priori community knowledge around genre use becomes tenuous or nonexistent. Yet, many default methodological orientations in Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) have tended to emphasize agreement, recognizability, and community cohesion, focusing analysis especially on textual typicality. This article attends to this methodological issue by resurfacing and extending a discussion of the centrifugal nature of genre. To demonstrate this shift, the article enacts a genre analysis of a multilingual community-based writing workshop, showing how centripetal and centrifugal forces run through workshop participants’ creation of a language portrait. Ultimately, the article shows that tracking genre’s stabilizing and destabilizing forces, particularly from a human perspective, provides an analytic guide to writing practices as they fragment and re-coalesce. It further demonstrates how centering the human handling of genre can orient writing researchers to the instability that is often the reality of transnational and multilingual writing.

This article’s author situates late 19th-century essays by Andrew Carnegie within the rhetorical history of business and professional communication (BPC). A close analysis of the essays reveals that Carnegie relied on rhetoric to shape his public image as a benevolent business leader during a period characterized by significant socioeconomic divisions in the United States. Three primary themes— wealth , labor , and democracy —emerge, which the author argues animated Carnegie’s reasoning and arguments throughout the essays. The author concludes by recommending greater attention to the rhetorical history of BPC in future research and teaching.

In 1996, Stuart Hall published his important essay, “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” Against the one-dimensional critiques of postcolonial studies, Hall (1996) argued that the framing of the “post” in postcolonial studies was neither a temporal reference to a simplistic “before” and “after” colonialism, nor a celebratory argument that colonialism was fully over. Instead, the “post” for Hall referred to the new claims about Western knowledge that had to be addressed in the wake of important scholars like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Building off Hall, Raka Shome would similarly note that “the prefix ‘post’ used in such a theoretical vocabulary [as postcolonial studies] does not mean a final closure, nor does it announce the ‘end’ of that to which it is appended; rather it suggests a thinking through and beyond the problematics of that to which it is appended” (Shome 1998, 204). Even as the work of Western scholars like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida would be important for postcolonial studies, Western thought itself could not remain the same after postcolonial studies. Postcolonial studies set an agenda that had yet (and remains) to be adequately addressed in thought.Three years before Hall made this argument about postcolonial studies, another related intellectual gauntlet was thrown down in 1993. In that year, R. A. Judy (1993) published (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular. This text marked a shift in African American literary studies, in particular, and Black studies, in general. Judy’s book was arguably overshadowed by the release of Paul Gilroy’s important Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness in the same year. But the questions Judy raised in (Dis)Forming would not go anywhere. We might say that Judy set an agenda for Black literary studies (and I argue beyond) in 1993 on par with the earlier agenda setting work of postcolonial studies, though I would argue Judy’s agenda would fracture the very terms of Western thought in ways that postcolonial studies could not fully get to. In many ways, that fracture Judy would initiate in Western thought boils down to one seemingly simple question that I would argue permeates Judy’s writing to this day: Can speech and writing bring Black people into humanity, as such humanity is defined under Western thought? Though with some nuance, an important cohort of African American literary studies scholars largely answered in the affirmative by the middle and latter end of the twentieth century, establishing an African American literary studies canon, by using figures like Frederick Douglass and his writing and speeches as proof of Black humanity on Western terms.Judy returns us to the particular context of this African American literary canonical formation, while forcing us to ask more questions about this canonical formation itself. For example, what language must Black people speak and write in to illustrate humanity? Invariably for this new canon, the answer was North American and European English, suggesting that those enslaved Africans who could speak and write in a variety of other languages, such as Arabic, were less important to canonical thought. What must one say and write in English to prove said humanity? Largely, one must write and speak of one’s capacity to transcend the limitations set on one by racist violence. Thus, Judy suggests that the terms of Black humanity for much of the African American literary canon revolved around similar terms of humanity long laid out in European, liberal, democratic Enlightenment thought: the capacity for nationalistic languages to cohere a people and to assist in their transcendence of hardships. In other words, a particular epistemology and ontology bled into African American literary thought, placing a Black face on liberal humanism. But such English-focused logics do not fully follow the historical record. As scholars like Sylviane Diouf (2013) estimate, 15 to 20 percent of enslaved Africans brought to the New World were Muslims and thus speakers and writers of Arabic. Two decades before Diouf, Judy illustrated that the African American literary canon is disformed when we reconstruct, for example, Arabic and Islam as central to African American literary thought. It is to formerly enslaved Muslims like Ben Ali that Judy turns his attention, not to rewrite Black humanity away from English speaking and writing or to argue that Black humanity is demonstrated via surpassing racist violence, but to show that Black humanity just is in and of itself.Importantly, in its application of liberal Enlightenment concepts of humanity (or the tools someone like Douglass had at his disposal in nineteenth-century North America), this African American literary studies canon of the mid- and late-twentieth century would arguably diverge from some components of the Black studies tradition of the mid-twentieth century. Or, maybe more accurately, this African American literary studies canon would accept some modes of Enlightenment thought as foundational. In contradiction to the radical goals of the late 1960s Black studies movement, the African American literary canon of the late twentieth century largely remade Blackness as reactionary: Blackness becomes largely a response to white supremacy, an attempt to prove humanity on white terms.Twenty-seven years later, in Judy’s latest book, Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black, we are given yet another masterful move beyond reactions to Euro-American white supremacy. To say “beyond,” here, we must again invoke the “post” concept that Hall and Shome outlined for us in the beginning, as Judy’s work assumes neither a simplistic end of white supremacy nor a refusal to engage in Euro-American white supremacist thought, as though it is irrelevant to our current context. Here, white supremacy does not refer to white people’s violence against nonwhite people, per se, but, as Judy notes in an interview that Fred Moten conducted with him, white supremacy is about the preservation of “the place of that transcendent subject and filling it with a different color, or a different ethnicity” (Judy and Moten 2020, para. 66). Thus, white supremacy is the replication of Western man beyond himself, the presumed universality of Western being, as though it is applicable to Black and Brown people. Sentient Flesh pulls in Arabic and Black studies thought, while also deeply engaging in Euro-American thought to illustrate its white supremacist limits and residue for some components of contemporary African American studies. If we accept Judy’s definition, then we are met with another difficult, yet related, question (if not multiple) at the start of Sentient Flesh: What happens if we do not reduce Blackness to questions of essence or existentialism (different iterations of Western being), but we reconsider Blackness in relation to poiesis, or creative motion and emergence? Sentient Flesh picks up where (Dis)Forming left off, in the sense of pushing beyond one mode of epistemology or ontology. Further, the questions Judy asks are difficult to answer because to do so would be to force many positions to be rethought. We would have to begin again.For the audience of Philosophy & Rhetoric, a journal that historically connected the scholarship of rhetoricians and philosophers (Oliver 1997), these assumptions outlined by Judy in both 1993 and 2020 remain critically relevant. Speech and writing, of course, remain central aspects of study under the journal, and, in a highly rhetorical and philosophical fashion, Judy points us less to the content of speech and writing and more to their form. Further, Judy guides us toward criticism of problematic assumptions that many make about what it means to be Black, an answer that scholars continue to reduce to geographic borders, linguistic patterns, and white supremacist thought, under Judy’s definition of white supremacy. Put differently, there is no shortage of contemporary scholarship on Blackness and rhetoric that positions Blackness as merely a response to Euro-American geography, Euro-American language, and Euro-American being. But Judy argues that Blackness must be (and always is) much more than reaction. In the process, Judy illustrates that his discussion is not merely about Black people, but about Western forms of thought and humanity themselves, which, if he were taken seriously, would cause a reckoning within a multiplicity of academic disciplines.In many ways, Judy’s problematization of essence and existentialism in Sentient Flesh points to a problem of assumed purity in Western thought in general. In other words, this is not a problem solely associated with conservative or progressive thinkers—we find problems in both Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, though from different perspectives. Unlike the logic of transcendence, what Judy is positing is that there is no pure Black subject, lost to slavery, ready to be awoken and returned to via their mastery of Western forms of writing and speech. Likewise, there are no pure subjects alienated from themselves as selves based on the fabrication of an essence, and if we could just do away with all essences, we could all return back to a time when we were just humans, all as one. In some ways, to hold such positions is to accept Euro-American ontology and epistemology as organizing principles for all humanity, which is again Judy’s definition of white supremacy. But rather than simply refuse this position, there is a concern with the para throughout Sentient Flesh, building to and away from the work of Nahum Dimitri Chandler (2013), or a concern with thinking with or alongside of Western ontology and epistemology to understand that they are not all-encompassing and other forms of thought and life exist. This leads to what Judy calls poiesis in Black, or the fostering of “the formation of certain ways of thinking and conceiving, indeed perceiving the world—let us say imagining the world” (Judy 2020, 16). More specifically, it appears as a “thinking-in-disorder,” or the rejection of thinking as merely the mediating relationship between experience and knowledge (Western consciousness).By my reading of Sentient Flesh, Judy’s Poiesis in Black takes seriously the trouble of Euro-American humanism—as soon as the Negro is introduced into Euro-American epistemological and ontological frames, the universality of these frames is found wanting. However, to reject that universality ignores that it had an impact on not merely Europe and European self-conceptions, but European racial classificatory projects as well, which would also impact the ways that non-Europeans existed and thought about themselves in the world. Rather than the purity of European being, Judy notes throughout Sentient Flesh that poiesis exists in apposition to Euro-American humanism, which is not opposition, but side by side, close to one another. This speaks, in part, back to Judy’s (2000) long engagement with W. E. B. Du Bois, which we can find in Judy’s work on “Sociology Hesitant.” For both thinkers, “the mind” is not within you but constituted contextually, through the disorder that exists in the world. Euro-American humanism, too, is not distinct from a particular context, of which the fabrication of the Negro was also central, just as the imagination of other forms of Black life and thought, irreducible to Europe’s Negro concept.It is here that we really see the work of Judy adding to the potential work we can do in journals like Philosophy & Rhetoric. The Negro functions not merely as a descriptor of Black people fabricated by white people, but as media, in the sense that the Negro construct serves a purpose for Euro-American self-imaginations. Following Judy, I have elsewhere referred to similar discussions of the Negro as a media function (Towns 2022). Such media, of course, do not fully correspond to the multiple forms of living of Black people (Poiesis in Black). In fact, the Negro construct ignores that Black people have opened up “infinities of other ways of being human in community becoming, ever becoming” (Judy 2020, 19). What I am calling a post-Judy moment, a thinking in disorder, is a call to take Judy seriously for scholars of rhetoric, English, philosophy, and communication studies—those closest to Philosophy & Rhetoric. To do so is to think about Blackness beyond anti-Blackness, beyond reactions to white supremacy, beyond inhumanity, and toward a concern with other forms of being and knowing. This is not to say that such thought did not exist before Judy or that it exists only after. Again, as per the postcolonial studies moment, this post-Judy moment is no simplistic end to all studies of Blackness or the Negro prior to Judy, but a call to rethink the terms of knowledge about both going forward. In doing so, we would have to have new conversations about what it means to be human in general, of which Blackness would be a central part of the discussion.

ABSTRACT In The New Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca challenged the Cartesian understanding of the reasonable within philosophy with an expanded understanding based on types of agreements linked to types of audiences. They brought this same perspective to an analysis of values and value judgments in an attempt to respond to the logical empiricists’ critique. While scholars have examined the first of these goals, they have not attended to their analysis of values. This article addresses that neglect. It proposes that the way to understand Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s reevaluation of value judgment is to place The New Rhetoric in the context of the nineteenth-century discourse on values within philosophy. While rejecting the a priori ontology that characterizes most axiology, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca nonetheless employ the concepts and technical vocabulary of the philosophers’ paradigm to transform the axiologists’ logic of values into their rhetoric of the preferable.

ABSTRACT The article distinguishes between “anthropomorphism” and the “anthropomorphism accusation,” a term coined to describe the value-laden assumption that using so-called human terms to talk about nonhumans is always inaccurate and always to be avoided. Analyses of scientific papers and op-eds in botany, evolutionary biology, and microbial science reveal an almost pathological avoidance of anthropomorphism as well as the deeply political foundation of the avoidance—that is, while critiques of anthropomorphism are couched in concerns for accuracy, the critics themselves generally give up a measure of accuracy and instead make a morality case. Analyses of posthumanist rhetoric and science studies texts reveal a tendency to deflect the anthropomorphism accusation without consideration for the conceptual ground that is being ceded in the deflection. The article calls for posthumanist writers not to deflect, but rather to accept the accusation in order to begin making space to deploy the affinity-seeking moves that get called anthropomorphism.

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of globalization, the increasing diversity of languages and cultures has underscored the pressing need for cross-cultural comprehension and effective communication. This article stands at the junction of argumentation theory and translation studies, exploring their interrelationship. Using the “Hao Bridge Debate” as a case study, the article adopts a rhetorical perspective to explore the challenges of conveying ideas across linguistic and cultural barriers. By analyzing varied translations and interpretations of the debate, considering source language expressions within their historical and cultural contexts, this article discusses the multifaceted challenges faced by translators in bridging linguistic and cultural gaps and emphasizes the inherent deviations in translations. Moreover, this article examines the impact of cultural elements, such as metaphor interpretation and utilization in argumentation, influencing argument transmission and comprehension. This research also illustrates the importance of rhetoric to translation in the study of argumentation, which has further implications for understanding cross-cultural argumentation.

This article positions rhetorical attunement—defined by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard as an “ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity”—as a valuable methodological practice for community-engaged research (CER). In CER, rhetorical attunement can help researchers remain responsive to difference and complexity, supporting a range of ethical and practical goals: enacting reciprocity, pivoting when priorities shift, listening well to unspoken concerns, and sustaining relationships over time. In this article, we focus on reciprocity as one key goal of CER in order to demonstrate how Leonard’s rhetorical attunement can operate in practice. While reciprocity is often defined through formal agreements or mutual benefit, we examine how it can also surface through indirect, situated expressions that require careful listening. Drawing from a multisite project on water resilience in Arizona, we reflect on how rhetorical attunement enabled us to enact reciprocity in moments of misalignment, redirection, or informal connection, and how we attuned and responded. We conclude by offering a typology to support researchers in practicing rhetorical attunement as a method for sustaining ethical, reciprocal relationships across difference.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies are increasingly marketed to knowledge workers as productivity tools for focused, immersive work. Yet little empirical research examines the lived experience of sustained VR use for complex academic writing tasks. This study presents a 10-week diary study of a doctoral candidate using VR to compose her dissertation during summer 2025. Through weekly reflective entries, screen recordings, and artifact analysis, we examine the user experience dimensions of immersive academic writing. Our thematic analysis reveals six major findings: (1) technical infrastructure constraints dominated the writing experience; (2) embodied discomfort consistently limited sessions to 30–50 min; (3) affective dimensions shaped productivity; (4) learning curves remained steep throughout the study; (5) task type significantly influenced success, with structured administrative writing outperforming open-ended academic drafting; and (6) technical disruptions fragmented flow and made momentum recovery difficult. We argue that VR writing tools require task-appropriate design, realistic session expectations, and user agency to discontinue when needs are not met. These findings contribute user-centered evidence to technical communication scholarship on emerging composing technologies and offer practical guidance for graduate writing programs.