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 

Rhetoricity

Crossing Over with Cedric Burrows

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."

Demanding Black Linguistic Justice: An Interview with April Baker-Bell

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 Dánielle 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)."

Writing After Writing: An Interview with John Gallagher

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."

Unflattening Global Rhetorics and Archival Pedagogies: An Interview with Tarez Samra Graban

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.

The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2020

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 

Rhetorical Juxtapositions

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."

Race, Motive, and the Rhetoric of Display: An Interview with Ersula Ore

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!

Call for Rhetorical Juxtapositions

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" 

The Available Memes of Persuasion: Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister

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.

Little Worlds About Writing: An Interview with Laura Micciche

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.

Rhetoric, She Wrote: Andrea Lunsford on the Discipline and its Histories

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" 

The Weird Possibilities of Academic Podcasting

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.

Trumped-Up Rhetoric: An Interview with Ryan Skinnell

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 

Writing Our Discipline, Writing Ourselves: An Interview with Christine Tulley

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.

Dissertation Dialogues, Vol. 3: John Schilb and Collin Bjork

Rhetoricity is a quasi-academic podcast that draws on rhetoric, theory, weird sound effects, and the insights of a lot of other people. It's something that's a little strange and, with luck, a little interesting. The podcast's description will evolve along with it. So far, most episodes feature interviews with rhetoric and writing scholars. The podcast is a project of Eric Detweiler, an assistant professor in the Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University. For more on Rhetoricity and his other work, visit http://RhetEric.org.

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