How Political Pornification Harms Women

"How Political Pornification Harms Women" examines the “pornification” of candidates and voters in the 2008 and 2016 election cycles. #RhetoricsForAll

Civil Discourse Lab

The Civil Discourse Lab at the University of New Hampshire provides training and opportunities for students and community members to conduct meaningful conversations, collaborate, and make decisions. #RhetoricsForAll

Humanities in the Wild

Humanities in the Wild is a monthly event series that features humanities topics geared for the outdoor community such as the environment, adventure, and nature. #RhetoricsForAll

Feminism, Rhetoric, & the Internet

Feminism Rhetoric, & the Internet is home to text-based and multi-modal projects about rhetoric, feminism and digital spaces.

DC/Adapters

Adapting the Flag: Documenting the District

DC/Adapters documents graphic adaptations of the Washington, D.C. flag. With over 950 individual artifacts (and counting), DC/Adapters features street art, political advertisements, commercial signage, and more. The project focuses on the interactions between residents of Washington, D.C. and one of the city’s most recognizable symbols. It encourages residents to adapt the flag as a strategy of cultural acupuncture.

Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman

Edited by Chris Mays, Nathaniel A. Rivers, and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins

“Persuasively, often surprisingly, this volume transforms Burke to show how his rhetorical project responds to our post/humanist condition.” --Rhetoric Review

From Hysteria to Hormones

A Rhetorical History

“Koerber challenges the view of medical discovery and practice as an ever-ascendant trajectory, invoking instead the philosophical concept of topological time as a nonlinear folding and twisting of expert and popular concepts of biology and behavior. Recommended.”—S. W. Moss, Choice

Museum Rhetoric

Building Civic Identity in National Space

“M. Elizabeth Weiser crosses more national and disciplinary borders than any previous scholar in the search for unifying analyses of the identity work of museums. She investigates a wide array of material and a multidimensional set of productive dilemmas. The result is a complex, innovative, and yet clear and elegantly presented analysis of the work done by and through museums in placing their orchestrated and authorized rhetoric in dialogue with the experiences of visiting citizens.” —Peter Aronsson, coeditor of National Museums and Nation-Building in Europe, 1750-2010: Mobilization and Legitimacy, Continuity and Change

Sign of Pathology

U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s

Much of the political polarization that grips the United States is rooted in the so-called culture wars, and no topic defines this conflict better than the often contentious and sometimes violent debate over abortion rights. In Sign of Pathology, Nathan Stormer reframes our understanding of this conflict by examining the medical literature on abortion from the 1800s to the 1960s. Often framed as an argument over a right to choose versus a right to life, our current understanding of this conflict is as a contest over who has the better position on reproductive biology. Against this view, Sign of Pathology argues that, as it became a medical problem, abortion also became a template, more generally, for struggling with how to live—far exceeding discussions of the merits of providing abortions or how to care for patients. Abortion practices (and all the legal, moral, and ideological entanglements thereof) have rested firmly at the center of debate over many fundamental institutions and concepts—namely, the individual, the family, the state, human rights, and, indeed, the human. Medical rhetoric, then, was decisive in cultivating abortion as a mode of cultural critique, even weaponizing it for discursive conflict on these important subjects, although the goal of the medical practice of abortion has never been to establish this kind of struggle. Stormer argues that the medical discourse of abortion physicians transformed the state of abortion into an indicator that the culture was ill, attacking itself during and through pregnancy in a wrongheaded attempt to cope with reproduction.

Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue

Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment

During the British Enlightenment, the correlation between effective communication and moral excellence was undisputed—so much so that rhetoric was taught as a means of instilling desirable values in students. In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker explores the connections between rhetoric and ethics in the context of the history of capitalism. Longaker’s study lingers on four British intellectuals from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century: philosopher John Locke, political economist Adam Smith, rhetorical theorist Hugh Blair, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. Across one hundred and fifty years, these influential men sought to mold British students into good bourgeois citizens by teaching them the discursive habits of clarity, sincerity, moderation, and economy, all with one incontrovertible truth in mind: the free market requires virtuous participants in order to thrive. Through these four case studies—written as biographically focused yet socially attentive intellectual histories—Longaker portrays the British rhetorical tradition as beholden to the dual masters of ethics and economics, and he sheds new light on the deliberate intellectual engineering implicit in Enlightenment pedagogy.