Leaders: James Rushing Daniel (Seton Hall University) and Catherine Chaput (Fordham University) This seminar will introduce Karl Marx as a resource for enhancing materialist inquiry, exploring many of his most prominent concepts as assets for the rhetorical investigation of late capitalist crises. We will discuss “historical materialism” as a methodology uniting discursive and material analysis; […]

Leaders: Kristina M Lee (University of South Dakota) and Jonathan J. Edwards (University of South Carolina) This seminar examines how religious rhetorics constitute American identity, highlighting how national identity and ideal citizenship is imagined, contested, and transformed. The seminar will be organized around several interconnected themes that trace the rhetorical construction of U.S. religious identity. […]

Leaders: Matthew Pavesich (Johns Hopkins University), Nancy Small (University of Wyoming) and Michelle LaFrance (George Mason University) This seminar invites participants from many different career stages and institutions to reimagine both public engagement and the work of the public humanities through readings, discussions, and collaborative, hands-on development of projects. Led by three scholars actively engaged […]

Leaders: Anita Mixon Jones (Wayne State University) and Suban Nur Cooley (Michigan State University) What counts as rhetorical theory when we begin with everyday Black life? This seminar explores how Black communities theorize through creative practice, cultural production, care work, migration, memory, neighborhood storytelling, foodways, photography, music, spirituality, and other everyday practices that often remain […]

Leaders: Paul Lynch (Saint Louis University) and Steven Mailloux (Loyola Marymount University and University of California, Irvine) “Rhetoric and the Sacred: Figuring the Extrahuman” studies the phenomenology, history, and theory of extrahuman rhetorics, especially in religious studies, scriptural hermeneutics, and political theology. Under the heading of extrahuman rhetoric—sometimes described as a “rogue category” in rhetorical […]

Leaders: Megan Poole (The University of Texas at Austin), Ariel E. Seay (North Carolina State University), Diane Keeling (University of San Diego) As climate change worsens extreme weather, drowns or burns entire towns, and threatens the material existence of cultural and historical archives, scholars and historians ask: what’s worth preserving? This seminar engages questions of preservation […]

Leaders: Consuelo Carr Salas (San Diego State University), Eileen E. Schell (Syracuse University), Abby M. Dubisar (Iowa State University) and Kelli R. Gill (Montana State University) This RSA seminar will focus on feminist food rhetorics. A feminist approach to studying food examines the rhetorical nature of food, drawing attention to the material and ecological approach […]

Leaders: Cindy Tekobbe (University of Illinois Chicago), Timothy Oleksiak (University of Massachusetts Boston) and Sherri Craig (Virginia Tech) This seminar gathers scholars across the professional spectrum to collectively imagine sex (the experience of bodies experiencing pleasure) as a resource for rhetorical invention. We wish to create an intellectual space to pursue the taxonomies of sex, […]

Leaders: Theon Hill (Wheaton College) and Brynn Fitzsimmons (University of Alabama) Enduring forms of oppression, marginalization, and exploitation challenge us to ask crucial questions regarding the role of rhetorical scholars as participants in organizing and advocacy efforts. Specifically, this seminar questions how rhetoricians might use the tools of the field to do activism and organizing […]

Leaders: Paul Johnson (University of Pittsburgh) and A. Freya Thimsen (Indiana University) This seminar affords the opportunity for participants to develop tools for conducting analysis and criticism of contemporary right-wing rhetorics in the United States. The hegemony of the right and its takeover/destruction of various public institutions challenge some of the core assumptions underwriting the […]

Leaders: Attila Hallsby (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) and Gavin Johnson (Texas Christian University) Why do people opt into technologies they recognize as dangerous? How can we simultaneously name AI's destruction—environmental damage, hypersurveillance, data extraction, epistemic degradation—and still justify the pleasures of using it? Existing scholarship in rhetoric and AI has converged on a set […]

Leaders: Ralph Cintron (University of Illinois Chicago), Tarez Graban (Florida State University) and Shiben Banerji (University of California, Berkeley) This seminar explores methods and problems of comparative rhetoric across media, practices, and languages. Seminarians may take up key concepts from one language/rhetorical tradition and complicate their work with another (e.g., how might the Arabic/Islamic concept […]