Although it is well known in other fields, the concept of “resilience” has not been addressed explicitly by feminist rhetoricians. This collection develops it in readings of rhetorical situations across a range of social contexts and national cultures. Contributors demonstrate that resilience offers an important new conceptual frame for feminist rhetoric, with emphasis on agency, change, and hope in the daily lives of individuals or groups of individuals disempowered by social or material forces. Collectively, these chapters create a robust conception of resilience as a complex rhetorical process, redeeming it from its popular association with individual heroism through an important focus on relationality, community, and an ethics of connection. Resilience, in this volume, is a specifically rhetorical response to complicated forces in individual lives. Through it, Feminist Rhetorical Resilience widens the interpretive space within which rhetoricians can work.

Although it is well known in other fields, the concept of “resilience” has not been addressed explicitly by feminist rhetoricians. This collection develops it in readings of rhetorical situations across a range of social contexts and national cultures. Contributors demonstrate that resilience offers an important new conceptual frame for feminist rhetoric, with emphasis on agency, change, and hope in the daily lives of individuals or groups of individuals disempowered by social or material forces. Collectively, these chapters create a robust conception of resilience as a complex rhetorical process, redeeming it from its popular association with individual heroism through an important focus on relationality, community, and an ethics of connection. Resilience, in this volume, is a specifically rhetorical response to complicated forces in individual lives. Through it, Feminist Rhetorical Resilience widens the interpretive space within which rhetoricians can work.

Rhetoric and Resilience explores discourse produced about and by the women involved in the World War II era Women Airforce Service Pilots program. Aviators such as Jacqueline Cochran and Nancy Harkness Love provided the initial rhetorical boost to successfully launch the program, while countless other pilots such as Cornelia Fort and Barbara Poole wrote to define the significance of the work the WASP were doing. Despite a formidable amount of concrete evidence in her favor, Cochran was unsuccessful in having WASP militarized. After the program's disbandment in 1944, the women of WASP settled back into civilian life but maintained strong rhetorical bonds which served them greatly in the 1970s campaign for veteran status. Using the lenses of both feminist rhetorical theory and classical rhetoric, this book seeks to recover these rhetorics. The chapters illustrate how the women employed a spectrum of strategies carefully designed to provide a fitting response to those both supportive of and hostile to their labor in the arena of military aviation.

Building on various feminist theories of ethos, the authors in this collection explore how North American Catholic women from various periods, races, ethnicities, sexualities, and classes have used elements of the group’s positionality to make change. The women considered in the book range from the earliest Catholic sisters who arrived in the United States to women who held the Church hierarchy accountable for the sexual abuse scandals. The book analyzes women such as those in an African American order who developed an ethos that would resist racism. Chapters also consider better known Catholic women such as Dolores Huertas, Mary Daly, and Joan Chittister.

Craft is a process-oriented practice that takes seriously the relationships between bodies—both human and nonhuman—and makes apparent how these relationships are mired in and informed by power structures. Making Matters introduces craft agency, a feminist vision of new materialist rhetorics that enables scholars to identify how power circulates and sometimes stagnates within assemblages of actors and provides tools to rectify that uneven distribution. To recast new materialist rhetorics as inherently crafty, Leigh Gruwell historicizes and locates the concept of craft both within rhetorical history as well as in the disciplinary history of writing studies. Her investigation centers on three specific case studies: craftivism, the fibercraft website Ravelry, and the 2017 Women’s March. These instances all highlight how a material, ecological understanding of rhetorical agency can enact political change. Craft agency models how we humans might work with and alongside things—nonhuman, sometimes digital, sometimes material—to create more equitable relationships. Making Matters argues that craft is a useful starting point for addressing criticisms of new materialist rhetorics not only because doing so places rhetorical action as a product of complex relationships between a network of human and nonhuman actors, but also because it does so with an explicitly activist agenda that positions the body itself as a material interface.

Resilience discourse has recently become a global phenomenon, infiltrating the natural and social sciences, but has rarely been undertaken as an important object of study within the field of the humanities. Understanding narrative in its broad sense as the representation in art of an event or story, Glocal Narratives of Resilience investigates the contemporary approaches to resilience through the analyses of cultural narratives that engage aesthetically and ideologically in (re)shaping the notion of resilience, going beyond the scales of the personal and the local to consider the entanglement of the regional, national and global aspects embedded in the production of crises and the resulting call for resilience. After an introductory survey of the state of the art in resilience thinking, the book grounds its analyses of a wide range of narratives from the American continent, Europe, and India in various theoretical strands, spanning Psycho-social Resilience, Socio-Ecological Resilience, Subaltern Resilience, Indigenous survivance and resurgence, Neoliberal Resilience, and Compromised Resilience thinking, among others, thus opening the path toward the articulation of a cultural narratology of resilience.

In June 2015, Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole in front of South Carolina’s state capitol and removed the Confederate flag. The following month, the Confederate flag was permanently removed from the state capitol. Newsome is a compelling example of a twenty-first-century woman rhetor, along with bloggers, writers, politicians, activists, artists, and everyday social media users, who give new meaning to Aristotle’s ubiquitous definition of rhetoric as the discovery of the “available means of persuasion.” Women’s persuasive acts from the first two decades of the twenty-first century include new technologies and repurposed old ones, engaged not only to persuade, but also to tell their stories, to sponsor change, and to challenge cultural forces that repress and oppress. Persuasive Acts: Women’s Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century gathers an expansive array of voices and texts from well-known figures including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Malala Yousafzai, Michelle Obama, Lindy West, Sonia Sotomayor, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, so that readers may converse with them, and build rhetorics of their own. Editors Shari J. Stenberg and Charlotte Hogg have complied timely and provocative rhetorics that represent critical issues and rhetorical affordances of the twenty-first century.

This collection brings together ten of the most distinguished feminist scholars whose work has been celebrated for its excellence in helping to lay the foundation of feminist communication and media research. This edited volume features contributions by the first ten renowned communication and media scholars that have received the Teresa Award for the Advancement of Feminist Scholarship from the Feminist Scholarship Division (FSD) of the International Communication Association (ICA): Patrice M. Buzzanell, Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Radha Sarma Hegde, Dafna Lemish, Radhika Parameswaran, Lana F. Rakow, Karen Ross, H. Leslie Steeves, Linda Steiner, and Angharad N. Valdivia. These distinguished scholars reflect on the contributions they have made to different subfields of media and communication scholarship, and offer invaluable insight into their own paths as feminist scholars. They each reflect on matters of power, agency, privilege, ethics, intersectionality, resilience, and positionality, address their own shortcomings and struggles, and look ahead to potential future directions in the field. Last but not least, they come together to discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women, marginalized people, and vulnerable populations, and to underline the crucial need for feminist communication and media scholarship to move beyond Eurocentrism toward an ethics of care and global feminist positionality. A comprehensive and inspiring resource for students and scholars of feminist media and communication studies.

"Based on years of archival work and fieldwork, Climate Politics on the Border distinctly demonstrates why ecological and anticolonial approaches to rhetoric are essential for grappling with climate politics. The book argues persuasively for treating climate and environmental justice through ecology and decoloniality, and it provides rich theoretical language, methodological innovations, and practical insight for engaging these intersections through local climate politics"--

Pivotal Strategies examines the rhetorical contexts and motivations that determine how and why people choose writing studies as a discipline, especially as the field begins to take more seriously an antiracist imperative that requires more conscious listening and promotion of work from scholars representing traditionally underrepresented voices. Because undergraduate degrees in writing studies are relatively new, claiming the discipline has required reinvention and revision at personal and professional levels far different than any other discipline. Suspicions about the viability of the discipline linger in many departments and universities, as well as outside the academy, leading writing studies scholars to develop innovative strategies to deal with covertly hostile attitudes. Within the collection, contributors name explicit claiming strategies from the discipline’s beginnings to the contemporary moment, locating opportune spaces, negotiating identities and fostering resilience, and developing allegiances by foregrounding their embodiment as underrepresented members of academia through a commitment to social justice and equity. Responding to current conversations on the worth of education with honest stories about the burdens and joys of becoming and being an academic, Pivotal Strategies features a spectrum of voices across racial, gender, class, and age categories. This collection not only makes the discipline more visible but also helps map the contemporary state of writing studies.