Rhetoric Across Borders

RHETORIC ACROSS BORDERS features twenty-one essays and six excerpts from the "In Conversation" panels convened at the sixteenth Biennial Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) Conference. Participants engaged the conference theme of "Border Rhetorics" in ways that not only reinvigorated the border as a conceptual metaphor but also challenged boundaries within rhetorical scholarship. Although the volume includes only a select representation of the work presented at the conference, each section features the diverse perspectives offered in Composition and Communication. The first section, Between Materiality and Rhetoric, explores points of interface between rhetoric and materiality. Working from diverse periods and disciplinary orientations, the authors illuminate how attending to the mutuality between materiality and rhetoric engenders a productive revision and/or expansion of our approaches to essential aspects of rhetorical inquiry. The second section, Crossing Cultures: Refiguring Audience, Author, Text, and Borders, explores how various forms of translation, migration, and liminality can refigure our understanding of the interplay between audience, author, and text. Essays in the third section, Remapping the Political, examine the diverse genres that broaden our understanding of the res publica and the tactics employed to circumscribe politics. In the fourth section, Contesting Boundaries: Science, Technology, and Nature, authors consider how shifting notions of expertise and competing epistemologies alter our conceptions of science and the environment. The selected essays in the final section, Teaching Across Divides, explore the different boundaries that shape teaching in rhetoric and composition. Here, the authors reflect on the challenges and rewards gained by explicitly engaging the borders and boundarywork that often remains invisible to our students. These organizational groupings reflect thematic through-lines in the submissions as well as a confidence in Burke's perspective by incongruity as a method fitting the exploration of various borderlands. The volume concludes with fragments from select "In Conversation" panels that cover a range of issues from activism and intersectionality to publishing and rhetorical theory. ABOUT THE EDITOR: Anne Teresa Demo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. A past recipient of the National Communication Association's Golden Monograph award, her articles have appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and Women's Studies in Communication. She is the coeditor of Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form: Sighting Memory (Routledge, 2012) and The Motherhood Business: Communication, Consumption, and Privilege (University of Alabama Press, forthcoming).