Understanding how rhetoric, and environmental rhetoric in particular, informs and is informed by local and global ecologies contributes to our conversations about sustainability and resilience — the preservation and conservation of the earth and the future of human society. This book explores some of the complex relationships, collaborations, compromises, and contradictions between human endeavor and situated discourses, identities and landscapes, social justice and natural resources, movement and geographies, unpacking and grappling with the complexities of rhetoric of presence. Making a significant contribution to exploring the complex discursive constructions of environmental rhetorics and place-based rhetorics, this collection considers discourses, actions, and adaptations concerning environmental regulations and development, sustainability, exploitation, and conservation of energy resources. Essays visit arguments on cultural values, social justice, environmental advocacy, and identity as political constructions of rhetorical place and space. Rural and urban case studies contribute to discussions of the ethics and identities of environment, and the rhetorics of environmental cartography and glocalization. Contributors represent a range of specialization across a variety of scholarly research in such fields as communication studies, rhetorical theory, social/cultural geography, technical/professional communication, cartography, anthropology, linguistics, comparative literature/ecocriticism, literacy studies, digital rhetoric/media studies, and discourse analysis. Thus, this book goes beyond the assumption that rhetorics are situated, and challenges us to consider not only how and why they are situated, but what we mean when we theorize notions of situated, place-based rhetorics.

Rhetoric Across Borders features a select representation of 27 essays and excerpts from the “In Conversation” panels at the Rhetoric Society of America’s 2014 conference on “Border Rhetorics.”

Understanding how rhetoric, and environmental rhetoric in particular, informs and is informed by local and global ecologies contributes to our conversations about sustainability and resilience -- the preservation and conservation of the earth and the future of human society. This book explores some of the complex relationships, collaborations, compromises, and contradictions between human endeavor and situated discourses, identities and landscapes, social justice and natural resources, movement and geographies, unpacking and grappling with the complexities of rhetoric of presence. Making a significant contribution to exploring the complex discursive constructions of environmental rhetorics and place-based rhetorics, this collection considers discourses, actions, and adaptations concerning environmental regulations and development, sustainability, exploitation, and conservation of energy resources. Essays visit arguments on cultural values, social justice, environmental advocacy, and identity as political constructions of rhetorical place and space. Rural and urban case studies contribute to discussions of the ethics and identities of environment, and the rhetorics of environmental cartography and glocalization. Contributors represent a range of specialization across a variety of scholarly research in such fields as communication studies, rhetorical theory, social/cultural geography, technical/professional communication, cartography, anthropology, linguistics, comparative literature/ecocriticism, literacy studies, digital rhetoric/media studies, and discourse analysis. Thus, this book goes beyond the assumption that rhetorics are situated, and challenges us to consider not only how and why they are situated, but what we mean when we theorize notions of situated, place-based rhetorics.

Labels traditionally ascribed to women—mother, angel of the house, whore, or bitch—suggest character traits that do not encompass the complexities of women’s identities or empower women’s public speaking. Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric redefines the concept of ethos—classically thought of as character or credibility—as ecological and feminist, negotiated and renegotiated, and implicated in shifting power dynamics. Building on previous feminist and rhetorical scholarship, this essay collection presents a sustained discussion of the unique methods by which women’s ethos is constructed and transformed. Editors Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones identify three rhetorical maneuvers that characterize ethos in the feminist ecological imaginary: ethe as interruption/interrupting, ethe as advocacy/advocating, and ethe as relation/relating. Each section of the book explores one of these rhetorical maneuvers. An afterword gathers contributors’ thoughts on the collection’s potential impact and influence, possibilities for future scholarship, and the future of feminist rhetorical studies. With its rich mix of historical examples and contemporary case studies, Rethinking Ethos offers a range of new perspectives, including queer theory, transnational approaches, radical feminism, Chicana feminism, and indigenous points of view, from which to consider a feminist approach to ethos.

Rhetorical scholarship has for decades relied solely on culture to explain persuasive behavior. While this focus allows for deep explorations of historical circumstance, it neglects the powerful effects of biology on rhetorical behavior – how our bodies and brains help shape and constrain rhetorical acts. Not only is the cultural model incomplete, but it tacitly endorses the fallacy of human exceptionalism. By introducing evolutionary biology into the study of rhetoric, this book serves as a model of a biocultural paradigm. Being mindful of biological and cultural influences allows for a deeper view of rhetoric, one that is aware of the ubiquity of persuasive behavior in nature. Human and nonhuman animals, and even some plants, persuade to survive - to live, love, and cooperate. That this broad spectrum of rhetorical behavior exists in the animal world demonstrates how much we can learn from evolutionary biology. By incorporating scholarship on animal signaling into the study of rhetoric, the author explores how communication has evolved, and how numerous different species of animals employ similar persuasive tactics in order to overcome similar problems. This cross-species study of rhetoric allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing us with a deeper history of rhetoric that transcends the written and the televised, and reveals the artifacts of our communicative past.

Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse seeks to address the current gap in American public discourse between secular liberals and religiously committed citizens by focusing on the academic and public writing of millennial evangelical Christian students. Analysis of such writing reveals that the evangelical Christian faith of contemporary college students—and the rhetorical practice motivated by it—is marked by an openness to social context and pluralism that offers possibilities for civil discourse. Based on case studies of evangelical Christian student writers, contextualized within nationally-representative trends as reported by the National Study of Youth and Religion, and grounded in scholarship from rhetorical theory, composition studies, folklore studies, and sociology of religion, this book offers rhetorical educators a new terministic screen that reveals the complex processes at work within our students’ vernacular constructions of religious faith.

Examining the layers of meaning encoded in software and the rhetoric surrounding it, this book offers a much-needed perspective on the intersections between software, morality, and politics. In software development culture, evangelism typically denotes a rhetorical practice that aims to convert software developers, as well as non-technical lay users, from one platform to another (e.g., from the operating system Microsoft Windows to Linux). This book argues that software evangelism, like its religious counterpart, must also be understood as constructing moral and political values that extend well beyond the boundaries of the development culture. Unlike previous studies that locate such values in the effects of code in-use or in certain types of code like free and open source (FOSS) software, Maher argues that all code is meaningful beyond its technical, executable functions. To facilitate this analysis, this study builds a theory of evangelism and illustrates this theory at work in the proprietary software industry and FOSS communities. As an example of political liberalism at work at the level of code, these evangelical rhetorics of software construct competing conceptions of what is good that fall within a shared belief in what is just. Maher illustrates how these beliefs in goodness and justice do not always execute in replicable ways, as the different ways of decoding software evangelisms in the contexts of Brazil and China reveal. Demonstrating how software evangelisms exert a transformative force on the world, one comparable in significance to code itself, this book highlights the importance of rhetoric in even the most seemingly a-rhetorical of technical endeavors and foregrounds the crucial need for rhetorical literacy in the digital age.

It has become increasingly difficult to ignore the ways that the centrality of new media and technologies — from the global networking of information systems and social media to new possibilities for altering human genetics — seem to make obsolete our traditional ways of thinking about ethics and persuasive communication inherited from earlier humanist paradigms. This book argues that rather than devoting our critical energies towards critiquing humanist touchstones, we should instead examine the ways in which media and technologies have always worked as crucial cultural forces in shaping ethics and rhetoric. Pruchnic combines this historical itinerary with critical interrogations of diverse cultural and technological sites — the logic of video games and artificial intelligence, the ethics of life extension in contemporary medicine, the transition to computer-automated trading in world stock markets, the state of critical theory in the contemporary humanities — along with innovative analyses of the works of such figures as the Greek Sophists, Kenneth Burke, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gilles Deleuze. This book argues that our best strategies for crafting persuasive communication and producing ethical relations between individuals will be those that creatively replicate and appropriate, rather than resist, the logics of dominant forms of media and technology.

This book discusses the use of communication campaigns to promote road safety, arguing that they need to elicit public discourse on issues pertaining to culture, equity, gender, workplace norms, environmental issues, and social solidarity. Increasingly, new media channels and formats are employed in the dissemination process, making road safety-related messages ubiquitous, and often controversial. Policy makers, educators, researchers, and the public continue to debate the utility and morality of some of the influence tactics employed in these messages, such as the use of graphic images of injury or death, stigmatization (or "blame and shame"), and the use of "black humor." Guttman argues that influencing road safety requires making changes in normative and cultural conceptions of broader issues in society, yet the typical discourse on road safety tends to focus on individual attitudes and practices. The book highlights the importance of social and behavioral theory in communication campaigns on road safety, and critiques the tendency to focus on individual cognition, affect, and risk conceptions rather than on normative, structural, and cultural factors. The volume positions the discourse on road safety as a social issue, and treats road safety behavior as a social activity that directly relates to other public issues, social values, and social policy, while discussing potential uses of social media and participatory approaches. The discussion turns to the role of road safety communication campaigns as part of a democratic process of eliciting public discourse, including how contemporary society could address broader issues of risk and safety.

Common topics and commonplaces help develop arguments and shape understanding. When used in argumentation, they may help interested parties more effectively communicate valuable information. The purpose of this edited collection on topics of environmental rhetoric is to fill gaps in scholarship related to specific, targeted, topical communication tactics. The chapters in this collection address four overarching areas of common topics in technical communication and environmental rhetoric: framing, place, risk and uncertainty, and sustainability. In addressing these issues, this collection offers insights for students and scholars of rhetoric, as well as for environmental communication practitioners looking for a more nuanced understanding of how topic-driven rhetoric shapes attitudes, beliefs, and decision-making.