Seminar 17: What Counts: Rhetoric, Economics, and Technologies of the Decision Shaping Planetary Crisis

Leaders: Timothy Johnson (University of Louisville) and Gwendolyn Inocencio (Tarleton State University)

Crisis has become our ambient condition. Pandemic, climate collapse, political polarization,
extinction, precarity, and more. These situations anchor much of what rhetoricians study, and
each reaches us already translated into an economy: of attention, of health, of nature, of security.
Before we can analyze a crisis, economics has often already decided what about it counts,
rendering some harms, actors, and timescales legible as a cost, a risk, an asset while others go
unpriced, externalized, and silent. Economics, in other words, operates as one of rhetoric’s most
pervasive rival technologies for guiding decision-making: it performs the world-shaping,
boundary-drawing, consequence-assigning work rhetoric has long claimed, yet does so with the
exclusion of rhetoricians.

We need rhetorical interventions, and we need them now, and the need is not abstract. Over three
and a half days, we ask what it means that rhetoric is being contested as a technology and what
rhetoricians can do in response. Rather than survey a single crisis, we invite participants to bring
their own: the critical juncture at the center of their research. Together we interrogate it through a
series of shared questions: How are crises made legible or illegible, and by whom? How might
scholars of rhetoric produce work that engages with economic reason either directly or as context
for a larger project?

There will be no A/V equipment available in this seminar. The seminar leaders encourage participants to bring charged devices with their preferred hardware and software pre-loaded, especially for any participants who have accessibility needs. You should indicate any accessibility needs on your registration form.