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.

Guest editor's introduction to the special issue on the rhetoric of food and health.

Guest editor's introduction to the special issue on the rhetoric of food and health.

Using archival admissions records and case histories of patients at a British asylum from the 1860s to the 1870s, the authors examine the medical certification process leading to the asylum confinement of individuals judged to be “of unsound mind.” These institutional texts are, the authors suggest, “occult genres” that function as complex acts of argumentation, whose illocutionary force depends on the success of their felicity conditions. Through the lens of Austin’s concept of “uptake,” the authors analyze the role of medical certification in the admissions history of two patients at Ticehurst House Asylum in the 1860s-1870s. The authors contend that historical genre analysis plays an important role in the rhetoric of medicine and health, shedding light on the performative power of medical certification, an act essential to the practice of psychiatry.