Category: Volume 8

Volume 8.2: Contested Publics

"Showcasing the many intersections of public rhetoric, current controversies, and effective pedagogy, the authors in this issue of Present Tense bring to light some remarkable instances of persuasive techniques and offer nuanced critiques of those moments in less than 2,500 words."

Pushing Back on the Rhetoric of “Real” Life

"This article is a call to interrogate the seemingly mundane terms we use when we talk about online life. The fact that we create hierarchies that oppose the digital to the physical or dematerialize the digital through language is a subtle yet important framing we can push back on in our research and teaching."

Pressurized Rhetorical Bodies: Student-Athletes between Feeling Rules and Affective Publics

"Pitting feeling rules against affective publics, and examining how student-athletes are placed at their center, raises future research questions about pressurized rhetorical bodies and social justice movements. How have student-athletes and professional-level athletes accorded with institutional feeling rules and engaged with the rhetorical-affective work of activists and oppositions?"

The Law-Abiding Citizen as Ideobody

"Ideobodies like the “law-abiding citizen” allow rhetors to establish analogous material claims to others’ lived experiences, serving as a powerful and flexible tool that can be observed and identified in public contestations like the HB-2074 committee hearing, where claims to place rest in asserting one’s lived experience as artifact and argument."

Self-Epideictic: The Trump Presidency and Deliberative Democracy

"Though certainly not new to human experience, President Trump’s self-epideictic does mark cultural shifts in deliberative styles and argumentative proofs that should be of interest to rhetoricians. The proliferation of self-epideictic may signal changes in how we argue public policy effectively, with a potential chilling effect on democratic deliberation."

Viewing Sleep Dealer as Teoria Povera in the Trump Era: Rhetorical Coloniality, Reality Television, and Water Dispossession

"In this Spanish-English film set in the near future, a high-tech border wall seals off the US from México. Mexicanos no longer enter the US to work and instead use virtual labor technologies to perform services from afar, which serves as a techno-futuristic play on the twentieth century bracero program."
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