Sensitive Rhetorics

Claims that students are too sensitive are familiar on and around college campuses. The ideas of cancel culture, safe spaces, and political correctness are used to shut down discussion and prevent students from being recognized as stakeholders in higher education and as advocates for their own interests. Further, universities can claim that student activists threaten academic freedom. In Sensitive Rhetorics, Kendall Gerdes puts these claims and common beliefs into conversation with rhetorical theory to argue that critiques of sensitivity reveal a deep societal discomfort with the idea that language is a form of action. Gerdes poses important questions: What kind of harm can language and representation actually do, and how? What responsibilities do college and university teachers bear toward their students? Sensitive Rhetorics explores the answers by surfacing submerged assumptions about higher education, the role of instructors and faculty, and the needs of an increasingly diverse student body.

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Kendall Gerdes compellingly argues that denigrating sensitivity in debates over trigger warnings, sexual misconduct, safe spaces, and campus carry laws denies ‘our vulnerability to one another as rhetorical subjects.’ With notable energy and lucidity, she contends that demands for sensitivity exemplify the mutual responsibility engendered by our ‘irremissible exposedness,’ and call for rethinking ‘the force and potential trauma’ of affect.

Nathan Stormer, University of Maine

In this timely study, Kendall Gerdes makes a powerful case for sensitivity as an indispensable element of an ethical rhetorical theory. Her scrupulous analyses of recent public controversies over student activism hinge on a compelling redefinition of this human capacity. Nuanced readings of journalism, academic studies, institutional documents, and student demands offer fresh perspectives on key terms of debate and especially on marginalized students’ rhetorical situations and achievements.

Susan Jarratt, University of California at Irvine

Sensitive Rhetorics is a clear, insightful, and timely intervention into the popular falsehood that college students are overly sensitive to new ideas and perspectives. Kendall Gerdes shows how the trope of sensitivity has been used to label students who advocate for social justice, on campus and off, as censorious and closed-minded. In the process, Gerdes offers a refreshing affirmative argument about sensitivity grounded in rhetorical theory: understanding the inherent human exposure or vulnerability to language, Gerdes concludes, is an essential part of teaching and learning.

Bradford Vivian, Penn State University

Academic Freedom and Campus Activism

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152 Pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in.

February, 2024

isbn : 9780822948117

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