seminars

Monday June 2 – Thursday, June 5, 2025

The 2025 RSA Institute Seminars at the University of Cincinnati promise to be extremely engaging and generative for participants’ work.

Submit your seminar application HERE no later than October 15, 2024. Note, you may need to create an Oxford Abstracts account. Please make a note of the email address you use for your OA account as this is the email address to which all notifications will be sent. Registration will open in Spring 2025; you can preview the registration rates here.

Seminar 1. Rhetoric and Citizenship

Leaders: Ralph Cintrón and Jeff Bennett

This seminar will engage the opportunities, limitations, and contradictions inherent in the rhetorical production of citizenship. Citizenship is an “essentially contested concept” and there is no universal agreement about its social utility, political expediency, or ethical merits. Discussions of citizenship take on diffuse permutations depending on the emphasis given to the term, the philosophical foundations privileged, and its ideological situatedness. Citizenship’s radical indeterminacy does not suggest it has no material or political capital. It simply means citizenship is a fluid concept whose meaning is habitable, and uninhabitable, in particular historical and cultural contexts. As a fulcrum of meaning production, citizenship authorizes the materialization of specific rights and obligations, even as it sometimes also violently excludes scores of people.

In this seminar, we will explore the ways citizenship has been deployed in humanistic scholarship to more fully understand the relationship among rhetoric and civic identity. We welcome a broad array of topics that might include but are not limited to: ancient conceptualizations of citizenship, legal and cultural understandings of citizenship, the performative enactment of citizenship, Indigenous manifestations of citizenship, disputed and liminal definitions of citizenship, inaccessible modes of citizenship, and the production of citizenship underwritten by globalism and cosmopolitanism. We anticipate seminar participants will submit a short scholarly essay (or draft of an essay) for discussion with the group, engage with a series of guest speakers, and read a number of articles and book chapters that focus on citizenship.

Jeff Bennett is Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University. His research tends to focus on rhetorics of health and medicine and LGBTQ studies. He is the author of two books, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance and Managing Diabetes: The Cultural Politics of Disease.

Ralph Cintrón is Professor Emeritus of English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. His work is ethnographic and transdisciplinary across the fields of rhetoric, philosophy, economics, socio-political theory, and the sciences. He is author of Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday; Democracy as Fetish; joint author of an urban studies report, Puerto Ricans in Chicagoland; and co-editor with Robert Hariman of Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric: The Texture of Political Action. He is a Fellow of the Rhetoric Society of America.


Seminar 2. Practicing the Civic Arts in Public: Academic Freedom and Public Scholarship 

Leaders: Jennifer Mercieca and Ryan Skinnell

In the past decade, rhetoric scholars have increasingly begun to write and speak in public venues for non-academic audiences. The challenges of doing so are legion. Both in terms of genre and style, learning to write and speak about academic research for non-academic audiences is the most obvious, but public scholars also need to learn how to build new networks, identify appropriate outlets, follow news cycles, make their public scholarship legible to academic colleagues, orient to (sometimes very) different kinds of feedback, and more. In other words, public scholarship-–just like academic scholarship—requires preparation, commitment, and effort. 

Given the nature of public scholarship, there will always be an element of learning to build the plane while you’re flying it, but many of the challenges noted above are relatively consistent. Public scholarship takes practice and persistence, but it’s also generally pretty predictable. Therefore, publicly engaged scholars can (1) learn what to expect and (2) develop habits for meeting common challenges thoughtfully. 

In this seminar, we will focus on key concepts and practices for engaging in public scholarship, including pitching editors, writing for non-academics, reading news cycles, and identifying appropriate outlets. Although we will read some scholarship on public scholarship and discuss theoretical concepts, this will be predominantly a hands-on seminar. Our days will be divided between (1) discussions, (2) practice sessions, and (3) workshops. We will allocate a significant portion of our time together to practicing, producing, and workshopping public-oriented writing. We also anticipate hosting one or more editors to talk to us about the process from their perspective. And we will dedicate time to talking about potential obstacles, including backlash, rigid professional expectations, and time constraints. 

Jennifer Mercieca is an award-winning Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism at Texas A&M University. She’s written three academic books and hundreds of articles. She’s been quoted by every major news organization in America, delivered hundreds of public lectures, and has appeared on national and international television. She’s currently writing a book called Fascism is for Losers.

Ryan Skinnell is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Writing at San José State University. He has published six books and more than 100 articles, essays, and reviews in academic and popular outlets, including Newsweek, Salon, and the Washington Post. He is currently writing a book about Hitler’s rhetoric.


Seminar 3: “If They Take You in the Morning, They Will Be Coming for Us That Night”: Rhetoric, Justice, and Critical Relationality

Leaders: Karma Chávez and Carmen Kynard

This session takes its inspiration from James Baldwin’s 1970 letter to Angela Davis when she was falsely incarcerated and targeted by the FBI  for her role in Black Liberation. In his letter, Baldwin criticizes political leaders and U.S. electoral politics and instead situates new consciousness in the worlds Davis demanded.  In his now famous last lines to her, Baldwin states:  “Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own— which it is— and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.” 

In this session, we will take up Baldwin and Davis’s charge to set the very roles of writing, rhetoric, and social action as a challenge to any notion of innocence in the face of the newest criminal powers of white settler colonization and post-plantation logic.  We will read, write, reflect, argue, and scream at the top of our lungs together as we do the material labor of forging paths for justice within our field and in the shared world we exist in. We invite seminar participants who are ready to work, who will confront their own privilege so it does not hinder this collective work, who will center the perspectives and experiences of those most impacted by systems of oppression, who are primed to forgo academic respectability politics, and who believe in and demand that another world is possible and that we all have a crucial role in building it.  

Karma Chávez

Carmen Kynard


Seminar 4. Work and Labor: Research and Praxis in Academic Workplaces 

Leaders: Amy Pason and Seth Kahn

The transdisciplinary study of academic work/labor has often addressed hiring, working conditions, labor relations, and the interaction of higher education with public/private sectors. More recently, the corporatization of the university, neoliberalism, the casualizing workforce, emotional labor, and individual work/life issues have focused and motivated our examinations. Rhetoric scholars study macro-level social-movement-building, local workplace discourses, the precarity of marginalized faculty, graduate student labor, and tenure/contingency.

This seminar will include a brief survey of the extant literature in order to catalyze new thinking for academic workers to constitute and/or organize the workplaces we want. We will work from the following animating questions: 

Although we focus on academic labor, we recognize higher education institutions as sites that depend on many labor forms and occupations (service, healthcare, technical, educational, administrative, etc.); thus this seminar could also apply to other labor contexts.  

Reading and discussions are drawn from scholarship in rhetoric/writing, as well as research in labor studies and workplace sociology, providing participants with conceptual and methodological tools (e.g., institutional ethnography; participatory-action research; oral history; policy analysis) to develop their own projects. We anticipate participants having a basic understanding of labor theory and are open to anyone considering/pursuing new research/praxis around academic labor. Depending on the projects participants are pursuing, the seminar schedule will include individual or small group consultation/workshopping to assist project development. 

Amy Pason has been writing about academic labor since the 2007 American Federation of State, Country and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) worker strike at the University of Minnesota, including collaborations with Seth Kahn. She brings her experience as Faculty Senate Chair at University of Nevada to understand shared governance, higher education systems, and legislative policy. 

Seth Kahn teaches writing/rhetoric at West Chester University and synthesizes research and activism by writing about academic labor organizing and co-editing the book series Precarity and Contingency, while chairing his union’s statewide Mobilization Committee and working with organizations like Higher Education Labor United and Tenure for the Common Good. Google Scholar Page 


Seminar 5. Rhetoric without Nation-States

Leaders: Josue David Cisneros, Rachel C. Jackson, and Christa J. Olson

Christa J. Olson https://english.wisc.edu/staff/olson-christa-j/Rhetorical scholars have challenged our field’s investment in values tied to the Western nation-state, among them sovereignty (e.g. Lyons), citizenship (e.g. Chavez), nationalism (e.g. Dingo), coloniality (e.g. Wanzer-Serrano), white supremacy (e.g., Ore), territory (e.g., Cram), and borders (e.g. Fixmer-Oraiz). Meanwhile, from Standing Rock to Davos, from Cochabamba to Haiti, social movements continue to assert that other worlds and cultural modes of relation matter. Yet, the notion of “nation” continues to dominate within and beyond the field—whether as loci of identification, boundaries for ethical inquiry, lands or locations where rhetoric takes place, or sites of violence.

This seminar invites participants to engage in what Royster terms “critical imagination,” using our skills as rhetorical scholars and our transdisciplinary expertise to bring into being a rhetorical studies without/beyond nation-states. For that visioning, we will move through three questions: First, how should rhetorical scholars understand/address our field’s investment in the nation-state? Second, how do we and our colleagues already push against nation-state forms and ideologies? And third, what will a rhetoric without nation-states look like and do?

Scholars working across time periods, regions, cultures, and contexts who draw from a wide range of subfields and disciplinary perspectives are welcome. Convening a plurality of approaches will catalyze our critical imagining and enable us to build together otherwise and elsewhere.

Our seven sessions will include discussing assigned texts and engaging with each other’s works-in-progress, grouped by research questions and areas. Three goals will inform our time together: (1) creating conversations and making models among scholars working on rhetoric within and without the nation-state, in such areas as decoloniality, transnational rhetoric, borders and migration studies, indigeneity, citizenship, etc.; (2) building intellectual and professional community among rhetorical scholars; and (3) engaging with works-in-progress (conference papers, prospectuses, chapters, proposals, etc.) that resonate with seminar themes.

Josue David Cisneros is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-
Champaign and affiliate faculty in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies & Center for Writing
Studies. He researches and teaches about public discourse about race/ethnicity and immigration as
well as social movement and activist rhetoric.

Rachel C. Jackson (enrolled Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) is Assistant Professor in the Native
American Literatures and Cultural Studies and Rhetoric and Writing Studies programs in the
Department of English at the University of Oklahoma. Her research examines local activist
rhetorical strategies in the context of historical suppression to build collective action toward
decolonial futures. Her community-engagement projects focus on sustaining Native American
languages and cultural literacies and forwarding Indigenous cultural knowledges and practices.

Christa J. Olson is a rhetorical historian studying transamerican visual cultures, nationalism, and
public life. She is the author of two books Constitutive Visions (Penn State UP 2014) and American
Magnitude (Ohio State UP 2021), and co-author, with Brandee Easter, of the forthcoming On Visual
Rhetoric (U of Michigan P).


Seminar 6. Interrogating the Role of the Rhetoric of Science in a Post-Truth, Partisan World

Leaders: Leah Ceccarelli and Natasha N. Jones

A special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly will be coming out in Summer 2025 on the theme of “Rhetoric of Science in (Times of) Crisis.” Just preceding the release of that special issue, this seminar takes on the same timely theme by considering critical questions regarding the role of rhetoric of science in this era of upheaval and uncertainty. We wonder: Can rhetorical inquiry help us as we face the many science-related crises of our times, from global climate change to pandemics to AI? How might scholars of rhetoric help scientists who take on the responsibility of public communication in our increasingly partisan, post-truth political world? How can the rhetoric of science as a field of study engage with applied practices that challenge anti-diversity and anti-intellectual sociopolitical projects and policies? And, importantly, when must we turn the lens of rhetoric toward the critique of science, rather than its defense?

We also ask whether rhetoric of science itself is facing a crisis of definition, identity, and impact in relation to other fields that study the relationship between science and society. What does rhetoric of science have to contribute to ongoing conversations about science in the modern world that other fields do not, and how might we better negotiate our place in the broader academic ecosystem? What theoretical perspectives and transdisciplinary approaches can/should scholars of the rhetoric of science draw upon in order to expand scholarly notions of the disciplinary possibilities for the rhetoric of science? What does public scholarship look like for those doing rhetoric of science research?

In addition to discussing selected rhetoric of science scholarship, we will undertake some collaborative analysis of varied texts and technologies. Seminar participants with relevant research in progress will also have an opportunity to workshop their projects.

Leah Ceccarelli is Professor of Communication at the University of Washington, and also directs a Science, Technology, & Society Studies graduate certificate program there. She is an RSA Fellow, wrote Shaping Science with Rhetoric and On the Frontier of Science, and co-edits the RSA/Penn State University Press book series on Transdisciplinary Rhetoric.

Natasha N. Jones is Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University, co-authored Technical Communication after the Social Justice Turn and is the Immediate Past President of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing. She holds herself accountable to Black women, marginalized genders, and other systemically marginalized communities in examining how texts and technologies impact lived experiences.

Seminar 7. Rhetorical Ecologies of Care and Design

Leaders: Joshua Trey Barnett and Donnie Johnson Sackey

In this seminar, we will listen in on and respond to two conversations: one about care and one about design justice. Both are increasingly recognized as conceptually and methodologically important for scholars of rhetoric committed to addressing ecological harms and environmental injustices. The concept of care encourages us to consider which beings and ways of being are supported into the future, which are abandoned, and which are systematically disappeared from the earth, as well as to trace the material-discursive conditions that animate some regimes of care rather than others. Simultaneously vital yet fraught, care demands attentiveness to the relational and the particular, to the spectacular and mundane ways in which lively entities are—and are not—sustained. Similarly, design justice demands that we attend to systems and technologies, especially those created by well-meaning institutions, as unjust by design. Linking design justice to climate collapse requires us to ask not only what kind of world are we designing, but also who is a part of that world both in the present and future. Such a concern presents opportunities to understand spatial choices, their consequences and correctives at finer levels of granularity as a matter of care. If systems of injustice are designed to harm, they can be redesigned to heal. By placing care and design justice into dialogue, scholars of rhetoric can both understand the (re)production of harmful relations and foster more resilient and adaptive responses to environmental challenges, promoting systemic change that is both socially just and environmentally sustainable. This seminar will provide a space to imagine what that work could look like.  

In addition to questions that participants may bring themselves, questions we interrogate will include:  

Joshua Trey Barnett is an Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence (2022) and the editor of Ecological Feelings: A Rhetorical Compendium (2025). His essays on rhetoric and earthly coexistence have appeared in journals such as Rhetoric and Publics Affairs, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Ethics and the Environment, and Essays in Philosophy. In his current book project, which focuses on the plight of the eastern hemlock, Dr. Barnett is developing a theory of “caring rhetorics.” 

Donnie Johnson Sackey is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, he was a founding member and senior researcher with Detroit Integrated Vision for Environmental Research through Science and Engagement (D•VERSE) and an affiliated senior researcher with Michigan State University’s Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) center. Additionally, he served as an executive board member for the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition. His research centers on the dynamics of environmental public policy deliberation, environmental justice, and environmental community-based participatory research. 


Seminar 8. Digital Rhetorics  

Leaders: Casey Boyle and Anushka Peres

Few things are left untouched by digital technologies. Even what we might refer to as the natural world is itself thoroughly surveyed, monitored, and altered through digital sensing, computational techniques, extraction, and technological detritus. Since such technologies are here to stay, it is not enough to merely point at these tools to define dynamics, assign agency, or tell histories. Given how pervasive such technologies are, we are now called to experience the how of digital rhetorics. How do digital media work to define our political possibilities? How does a platform shape the contours of our social relations? How might our knowledge itself, scholarly and otherwise, be composed in and through digital communications? How might we leverage the dominating logics of digital technologies to speculate alternative futures? These questions require the cultivation of know-how that can only be accomplished through hands-on work. This seminar therefore will offer a digitally inflected version of rhetorical field methods to get at how digital rhetorics shape our knowledge, our relations, our experiences.  

The seminar will explore a mix of theory and practice to get at the know-how of digital rhetorics. We will pair scholarship in digital rhetoric & adjacent fields (experimental ethnography, environmental and digital humanities, queer and trans ecologies,) with practice in a series of themed workshops. Through this combination—an understanding of the technological as both theory and practice—we propose and respond to questions about using digital rhetoric in and through field methods.

Seminar engagement will take two forms: first, a shared reading list, and second, a series of hands-on activities and workshop individual projects. Participants with little or a lot of experience in digital work will be equally welcomed. Ultimately, the seminar offers participants an opportunity to accelerate individual projects as well as to help sketch out an itinerary for advancing digital rhetorical theory and practice through rhetorical field methods.  

Anushka Peres is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Their scholarly and photographic work attends to the ongoing impact of colonial conceptualizations of land and possible interventions. Their work has been featured in galleries globally, the Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetorics, and (forthcoming) in Rhetoric Review.

Casey Boyle is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Writing and Director of the Digital Writing & Research Lab at the University of Texas-Austin. His scholarship and teaching examine rhetorical theory, media studies, aesthetics, digital field methods, and accessibility. He is writing a book about aesthetics, climate change, and Late Humanity.


Seminar 9. Reclaiming the Critical in Rhetorical Methodology 

Leaders: J. Blake Scott and Michael Lechuga

In this seminar participants will collectively develop critical rhetorical methodologies through a combination of readings and discussion around various topoi or nodal points (instead of principles, like McKerrow), collaborative work on an archive and case study that we co-assemble, and extended work on our own scholarly projects. Taking as our launching point longstanding debates about the nature and value of rhetorical criticism (from critiques of under-articulated methodology to the post-critical turn), we will explore possibilities for assembling methodologies for reclaiming the “critical” in rhetorical scholarship that matters in new ways.  

To this end, the seminar co-leaders will provide some starting texts and examples but also survey participants about key readings that resonate with your work, also asking about methodological topoi (e.g., context, materiality, movement, relationality, justice, etc.) you would like to mutually explore. We’ll use the topoi and key readings around them to co-construct an archive and develop multiple methodological approaches to a case study or analysis (around the topical cluster of Decolonization, Metaphor, and Psychedelics). In addition to extended work on the case, we’ll integrate small-group work toward getting methodologically oriented feedback on and advancing your own scholarly projects (at whatever stage they are in). 

Questions we are likely to explore include: 

The seminar will wrap up with a discussion of how and why critical rhetoric can still matter and how rhetoricians might lean into methodologies as a way to jump start this rebrand. We hope to collectively articulate the value of what we do and consider how to “export” what we produce as rhetorical critics to multidisciplinary and extra-academic projects and publics. And of course, we’ll also explore ways we might collaborate on future panels and publications around these larger questions and our more focused individual work. 

Blake Scott is Professor of Writing & Rhetoric at UCF. Most of his rhetorical scholarship has been situated in the Rhetoric of Health & Medicine. He co-founded the journal RHM and now serves as the co-editor of its “Graphic RHM” column. His current critical rhetoric work is focused on analyzing transnational risk conflicts about pharmaceuticals.

Michael Lechuga is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico, he researches and teaches Rhetoric, Settler Colonial Studies, and Cultural Studies. His research broadly focuses on how settler colonial logics are mapped onto Turtle Island (North America) and the interventions anti-colonial agents and thinkers make in resistance.


Seminar 10. Queer Intergeneration

Leaders: Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr. and Charles E. Morris III

This seminar explores lessons learned, relationships and communities formed, and challenges creatively engaged between and across queer generations. Queer intergenerationality from our perspective holds tremendous promise for queer worldmaking despite significant challenges related to multi-dimensional ageism, subcultural change, infrastructural constraints of public memory and pedagogy, race, gender, class, activism, and more. We invite participants to puzzle with us over how to respect but also refuse the familiar and stultifying tropes and embodiments of generation gaps—resentment and righteousness, incommensurability and caricature, temporal unidirectionality, silence and indifference—by means of contributing to what Dustin Bradley Goltz calls queered generativity, a queer turn on the normative gerontological term, “one that moves simply beyond reproduction and inheritance, but also works to question and deconstruct the very limitations of youthism (and ageism) that work to frame our understandings of age, meaning, and value?” We have been heartened and energized, mobilized, by the recent book co-authored by Bryant Keith Alexander, Mary Weems, Dominique Hill, and Durell Callier, Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet, a remix in the context of crisis—pandemic, anti-black violence—of a pathbreaking 1970 volume by emerging Black playwrights, an engagement across generations that they describe as “collaborative spirit-making.”  In their introduction, the quartet offers their vision of intergeneration, writing, 

We re-member ourselves to those times and moments in which the elders narrated the history of Black struggle in America, the banality of everyday experiences of triumph and survival, as well as the close examination of the DNA of generational knowledge about heritage, and relations and relationality, about bloodlines, about disorders and diseases, about psychologies of knowing the self through the history of ‘our people’ and ‘your people.’ And conversely, the intergenerational dialogue in which the young, gifted, and Black move into the White Ivory Tower as a bridge to the Black community, lifting as they climb to give knowledge back and to bring knowledge forward to co-inform the evolving history of Black people on both sides; no longer crabs in a barrel, we stand on the shoulders of one and then reach back for the another. 

The prospects and process of such intergenerational, intersectional collaboration within the disciplinary context of rhetorical studies are fraught and challenging of course. Collaborative spirit-making and worldmaking through intergenerational dialogue and labor is vital but no small undertaking, if the future of this intellectual and political endeavor we call a discipline is to constitute difference as our future beacon through something other than exclusive cleavage of the past. 

Through selected readings and discussion, we hope this seminar may be useful as collaborative dialogue across embodiments of time, politics, culture, and experience. Rather than seeing generational difference in diametrical opposition, we pose to explore what is productively gained when there is dialogue and dynamic interrelation between different queer generations of thought and practice.  

Some guiding questions: 

Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr. is an award-winning author and the lead architect and Founding Chair of the Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. He is also the Frederick Douglass Professor of African American Literature and Culture at the University of Rochester. His works spans Black Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Communication Studies. 

Charles E. Morris III is co-founding editor of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. His books include Queering Public Address, An Archive of Hope: Harvey Milk’s Speeches and Writings, Remembering the AIDS Quilt, and The Conceit of Context. His essays and guest edited special issues and forums have appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies, Text & Performance Quarterly, Women’s Studies in Communication and elsewhere. His current project communes with the million forgotten dead on Hart Island off the coast of the Bronx.