English 564—Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: Theories & Praxes in Rhetoric, Culture, and Materiality
This course engages interdisciplinary conversations on rhetoric, culture, and materiality. Among other things, these conversations attune us to the complex interconnections of language, culture, power, and material conditions and to the entangled agencies and relationships among human and non-human beings, built/natural environments, bodies, matter, objects, stories, lifeways, and all manner else within various ecologies.
While these conversations will help us engage in disciplinary concerns about what happens to our research questions, objects of study, theories, and method(ologies) when we focus on rhetoric’s relationship to materiality, this course also seeks to foreground inquiries that respond explicitly to our most urgent collective problems. For example, how might rhetorical-material-cultural-discursive frameworks help us better understand and respond to persistent human and planetary precarities (environmental, political, economic) and to forms and logics of racism, colonialism, oppression, and other intersectional violence we all experience and participate in reproducing in everyday life, albeit variously, unevenly, and inequitably? How might regard for rhetoric and materiality inform praxes grounded in place and guided by relational and ethical orientations? Or help us imagine better ways to negotiate a life in common across radical difference, power imbalances, complexity, contest, complicity, and uneven vulnerabilities?
While centered in rhetorical studies, this course draws on interdisciplinary scholarship and may resonate with students working across various disciplines and fields (such as Literature & Culture, Composition & Writing Studies, Communication, Geography, Political and Social Science). Students will be supported in developing projects rooted in their own goals, which might include seminar papers, pedagogical projects, public writing and scholarship, portfolios, community-engaged or field research, and more.
Key Words: Rhetorical, cultural, & political theory; (new) materialisms; critical place-based, ecological, anti-colonial & geographical approaches; embodiment & affect; ethical/relational praxes across difference; social justice