A Field Guide to Rhetorical Animals Zine and Digital, Collaborative Rhetoric Archive

July 01, 2026

A Field Guide to Rhetorical Animals: The Zine and its companion website, Burke Watching invite broad public audiences to access and engage interactively with rhetorical theory through Kenneth Burke’s animal metaphors. Taking Burke’s animal metaphors as entry points, this project invites public audiences to identify and navigate his major rhetorical concepts – like trained incapacities, orientation, identification and the autonomous, and others – “in the wild.” We believe that our current moment demands the comic frame, and our project encourages an approach to rhetoric oriented towards cooperation and effective communication. This project asks our audiences to identify with our fellow symbol-using animals in the Human Barnyard with an attitude toward “charitable” critique that resists the incentives of fascism in both in-person and digital spaces. 

A Field Guide to Rhetorical Animals: The Zine is a free, downloadable publication that presents a selection of Burke’s major concepts in simple, conversational language, each accompanied by a memorable original watercolor illustration. Burke Watching hosts the zine and expands on the content of A Field Guide to Rhetorical Animals through an online crowd-sourcing platform where students, instructors, and members of the public can share their own “field notes” when they observe Burke’s concepts in real-world and digital spaces as text, images, and/or video clips. Overall, the project offers resources that make Burke’s rhetorical theory more accessible for students, instructors, parents, and broad public audiences who are interested in learning more about how we use and are used by language in everyday life. We hope to expand the site over time to include additional resources for learning rhetorical theory beyond Burke. 

In addition to our hopes that educators will incorporate the zine and collaborative website as pedagogical tools in K-12, undergraduate, and graduate courses, we hope that people will find opportunities to incorporate our project into public events. For example, Parlor Press featured our zine and website at the 2026 San Diego Comic-Con. We believe that the project’s focus on accessibility and audience participation will generate more opportunities to extend the public reach of our project.

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