Precarious Rhetorics (New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality)

Precarious Rhetorics (New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality)

Wendy S. Hesford (Editor), Adela C. Licona (Editor), Christa Teston (Editor)
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Publication Date: August 29th, 2018
Publisher:
Ohio State University Press
ISBN:
9780814213766
Pages:
312

Description

Across disciplines, scholars have employed theories of precarity to help explain the pervasiveness of problems related to labor, migration, biopolitics, global and state governance, economies of war and violence, poverty, environmental degradation, and a host of other pressing issues. Precarous Rhetorics is the first work to bring precarity studies to the field of rhetoric and communication—and to couple it with new materialist frameworks—in order to unearth and analyze the material conditions and structuring logics of inequality.
This collection features cross-disciplinary contributions from leading scholars, including the editors of the volume as well as James J. Brown Jr., Gale Coskan-Johnson, Ronald Greene, Lavinia Hirsu, Arabella Lyon, Louis Maraj, Sara McKinnon, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Kimberlee Pérez, Margaret Price, Amy Shuman, Kristin Swenson, Becca Tarsa, and Belinda Walzer. Chapters emphasize a materialist-rhetorical approach while also drawing on feminist studies, women of color feminisms, affect studies, critical disability studies, critical race and ethnic studies, medical humanities, sexuality studies, queer migration studies, and human rights and humanitarian studies. While theoretically rich, this volume intentionally features chapters that explore precarious rhetorics as they operate in practice—whether in borderlands, politics, public policy, or the quotidian spaces of human activity, such as school, work, social media, and medicine.
 

About the Author

Wendy S. Hesford is Professor at The Ohio State University and author, most recently, of Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms, which won the 2012 RSA Book Award. Adela C. Licona is Associate Professor at the University of Arizona and author of Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric. Christa Teston is Associate Professor at The Ohio State University and author of Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty.

Praise for Precarious Rhetorics (New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality)

“In deploying precarity as an analytic, the authors in this volume reveal an opportunity not only to recognize the historical conditions and discourses that destabilize our everyday lives, but also to engage ethically and relationally with one another.…Precarious Rhetorics is an important contribution to our scholarly attempts to grapple with the social, economic, and cultural transformations of the twenty-first century and how the inequities, devaluations, and material conditions of precarity might be theorized, made visible, and negotiated.”—Sarah Idzik, Rhetoric Review

 

“Ultimately, this highly recommended collection calls for recalibrating rhetoric toward an ethic of responsibility and relationality as a means of recognizing and cultivating inter-/intra-dependencies across difference and human and non-human agents. This much-needed project forwards rhetorical studies’ renewed focus on materiality and provides a vocabulary and set of critical interventions for unearthing and confronting the structures that enable, produce, and conceal inequities, vulnerabilities, and forms of slow violence, displacement, and dispossession—while never losing sight of the possibilities for resistance and coalition enabled therein, albeit with no guarantees.” —Southern Communication Journal
 

“This volume, the first of its kind, brings together some of the leading rhetorical scholars from both communication and composition in order to provide a comprehensive and compelling exploration of rhetorics of precarity.” —Karma R. Chávez, author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities

 “Compelling, convincing, and of urgent importance to our theorizing of precarity, relationality, rhetoric, affect, and new materialisms—the book is a pleasure to read and will make a vital contribution.” —Aimee Carrillo Rowe, author of Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances

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