Rhetorical Climatology: By A Reading Group

Chris Ingraham · John Ackerman · Jennifer Lin LeMesurier · Bridie McGreavy · Candice Rai · Nathan Stormer

Nov 2023 · MSU Press

About this ebook

What if rhetoric and climate are intimately connected? Taking climates to be rhetorical and rhetoric to be climatic, A Reading Group offers a generative framework for making sense of rhetorical studies as they grapple with the challenges posed by antiracist, decolonial, affective, ecological, and more-than-human scholarship to a tradition with a long history of being centered around individual, usually privileged, human agents wielding language as their principal instrument. Understanding the atmospheric and ambient energies of rhetoric underscores the challenges and promises of trying to heal a harmed world from within it. A cowritten “multigraph,” which began in 2018 as a reading group, this book enacts an intimate, mutualistic spirit of shared critical inquiry and play—an exciting new way of doing, thinking, and feeling rhetorical studies by six prominent scholars in rhetoric from communication and English departments alike.

About the author

Chris Ingraham is an associate professor of communication, and core faculty member in environmental humanities at the University of Utah. His interdisciplinary teaching and research draw on rhetorical theory, environmental communication, and media aesthetics to make sense of the many environments that humans create and inhabit. He is the author of Gestures of Concern and coeditor, with Nicholas Taylor, of LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media.
John Ackerman is an associate professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at University of Colorado, Boulder, and is jointly affiliated with the departments of communication and English. His research reveals the material history, representation, and performance of neighborhoods, cities, and regions in the US Northeast and Southwest. His current research explicates “doctrines of discovery” and other settler colonial technologies that code and contain white supremacy in urban life and set the terms and conditions for antiracist and uneven economic recovery and renewal.

Jennifer Lin LeMesurier is an associate professor at Colgate University who studies the intersection of embodiment, culture, and race. Her scholarship has been published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, and College Composition and Communication. Her book, Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption, analyzes how rhetorics of food dovetail with the portrayal of Asians in Western contexts.

Bridie McGreavy is an associate professor of environmental communication in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine. McGreavy is also a faculty fellow in the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions. She studies how communication shapes sustainability and justice efforts in coastal shellfishing communities, river restoration and freshwater conservation initiatives, and diverse collaborations to address complex problems. Her work has been published in an interdisciplinary set of journals and books.

Candice Rai is an associate professor of English at the University of Washington. She recently coedited Writing across Difference: Theory and Intervention (with James Rushing Daniel and Katie Malcolm) and Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion (with Caroline Gottschalk Druschke), and is the author of Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention. Her work engages in place-based inquiry to study public rhetoric and writing, political discourse and action, and argumentation.

Nathan Stormer is a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine. He has written about the history of abortion rhetoric in the United States and various themes within rhetorical theory.