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Pinpoints the persuasive strategies that typified Wells’s efforts to shape broader cultural conversations concerning the causes of racial, social, and gender inequity

Born into the brutal reality of slavery, Ida B. Wells rose to become an audacious journalist, teacher, and activist for racial and gender justice. In Radical Advocate, Mary E. Triece examines the rhetorical strategies employed by Wells to challenge deeply rooted systems of oppression, strategies that remain powerful and relevant today.

Triece introduces the concept of “radical embodied advocacy” to give an account of Wells’s unique position as a Black woman whose personal encounters with white violence were palpable, experienced physically and mentally. White men lynched Wells’s friends and threatened her own life, forcing her into exile after destroying the very press on which she wrote and edited. From this perspective, Wells understood lynching as linked to white economic and political control. Through a close analysis of Wells’s speeches, writings, and journalism, Triece reveals how Wells pioneered a form of “intersectional journalism” that centered the voices of those marginalized by race, gender, and class.

By examining Wells’s work through the lens of philosophy, rhetoric, and Black feminism, Triece underscores the epistemic challenges faced by marginalized advocates and the importance of their perspectives in shaping social change. Radical Advocate ultimately positions Wells as a prophetic figure whose insights into the systemic nature of racism remain profoundly relevant in today’s world.

Radical Transparency brings together candid, powerful accounts of what it means to live, work, and labor as a graduate student in writing studies in today’s academy. At a moment when higher education is defined by precarity, burnout, widening inequities, and political uncertainty, this collection names, without sanitizing, the emotional, embodied, and institutional realities that shape graduate education.

Blending scholarly analysis with personal narrative, the chapters document graduate student experiences across writing studies, rhetoric and composition, and related fields. Contributors take up issues often rendered invisible in official program materials and institutional discourse, including disability and access, queer and crip temporalities, financial and labor precarity, mentoring breakdowns, emotional labor, care work, grief, and the hidden curricula that govern graduate life. Together, these chapters reveal how graduate students navigate systems that demand resilience while frequently withholding transparency, support, and care. Organized around three intersecting threads—navigating precarity, building networks of care, and reimagining academic work—Radical Transparency also introduces an emotional-labor tagging system that allows readers to trace recurring forms of labor and affective demand as they surface in different institutional contexts.

Whether read cover to cover or approached nonlinearly, the text invites readers to see connections accumulate—and patterns emerge. Radical Transparency is for graduate students who suspect they’re not broken. It is for faculty and administrators willing to sit with discomfort, accountability, and complicity. And it is for anyone who believes that transparency without action is insufficient and that telling the truth, collectively and aloud, is a form of resistance.

Winner of the 2023 National Communication Association's American Studies Division Outstanding Book Award

News media and popular culture in the United States have produced a conventional narrative of the outcomes of sexual abuse: someone perpetrates sexual violence, goes to trial, and is then punished with prison time. Survivors recede into the background, becoming minor characters in their own stories as intrepid prosecutors, police officers, and investigators gather evidence and build a case.

Leland G. Spencer explains how the stories we tell about sexual assault serve to reinforce rape culture, privileging criminal punishment over social justice and community-based responses to sexual violence. Examining a broad range of popular media, including news coverage of the Brock Turner case, Naomi Iizuka’s popular play Good Kids, the television program Criminal Minds, and the book turned television show 13 Reasons Why, Spencer demonstrates how these representations shore up the carceral state, perpetuate rape myths, blame victims, and excuse those who harm. While increased discussion about sexual violence represents feminist progress, these narratives assume that policing and prosecution are the only means of achieving justice, sidelining other potential avenues for confronting perpetrators and supporting victims.

Reaction and Revolution situates the resurgence of far-right movements and thinkers within a longer intellectual history that emerged primarily in interwar Germany—a philosophical conversation centered on political theology. Arguing that the more radically democratic modes of political theology offer better ways to understand and to counter the far right’s rhetorical appeal, this book offers a rhetorical-intellectual critique of three key thinkers and their allied movements: Paul Gottfried and the American paleoconservatives, Guillaume Faye and the French Identitarians, and Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment. Kevin Musgrave argues that a radical political theology of race offers meaningful ways of challenging the right’s efforts to build a global imperium of whiteness and of reclaiming the promise of human dignity.