Results by title

Offering practical applications of scholarship in spatial theory and rhetorics of space and place, Navigating Space On and Beyond Campus profiles how writing and rhetoric programs across the United States have responded to the spatial challenges and possibilities facing higher education. Exploring how instructors creatively and critically navigate actual, virtual, and inaccessible spaces in the pursuit of effective, ethically informed rhetoric and writing education, this book also reveals how the use of space contributes to the creation and/or denial of equity among students, faculty, and programs.

Contributors document how they have secured and repurposed campus real estate, literally and metaphorically navigated relationships with other campus resources, and responded to austerity measures that have threatened the spaces they have historically called their own. Individual sections focus on the historical pressures that have shaped programs’ locations and resources, developments in the work and design of writing centers, the creation of new labs and centers, and the relationship between writing programs and the broader places and communities with which they are intertwined.

How spaces are allocated, structured, and regulated is a key determinant of access and equity in higher education. Navigating Space On and Beyond Campus offers timely strategies for and reflections on the place of rhetoric and writing on college and university campuses.

Guns hold a complex place in American culture. Over 30,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, and guns are intimately connected to issues of public health, as is evident whenever a mass shooting occurs. But guns also play an important role in many Americans’ lives that is not reducible to violence and death—as tools, sporting equipment, and identity markers. They are also central to debates about constitutional rights, as seen in ongoing discussions about the Second Amendment, and they are a continuous source of legislative concern, as apparent in annual ratings of gun-supporting legislators. 

Even as guns are wrapped up with other crucial areas of concern, they are also fundamentally a rhetorical concern. Guns and gun violence occupy a unique rhetorical space in the United States, one characterized by silent majorities, like most gun owners; vocal minorities, like the firearm industry and gun lobby; and a stalemate that fails to stem the flood of the dead. How Americans talk, deliberate, and fight about guns is vital to how guns are marketed, used, and regulated. A better understanding of the rhetorics of guns and gun violence can help Americans make better arguments about them in the world. However, where guns are concerned, rhetorical studies is not terribly different from American culture more generally. Guns are ever-present and exercise powerful effects, but they are commonly talked about in oblique, unsystematic ways. 

Rhetoric and Guns advances more direct, systematic engagement in the field and beyond by analyzing rhetoric about guns, guns in rhetoric, and guns as rhetoric, particularly as they relate to specific instances of guns in culture. The authors attempt to understand rhetoric’s relationship to guns by analyzing rhetoric about guns and how they function in and as rhetoric related to specific instances—in media coverage, political speech, marketing, and advertising. Original chapters from scholars in rhetorical studies, communication, education, and related fields elucidate how rhetoric is used to maintain and challenge the deadly status quo of gun violence in the United States and extend rhetoricians’ sustained interest in the fields’ relationships to violence, brutality, and atrocity.