|9780822968634|Academic Freedom and Campus Activism| Co-winner, 2025 CCCC Outstanding Book Award 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…

|9780822968191|Global Rhetorics and Power Transformation|All rhetorics function within the dynamics of power. Hua Zhu proposes interconnectivity as a frame of power transformation. Western understandings of power relations as oppositional and essentialist result in the systematic production of the Other—a structure that is reproduced in the West/non-West hierarchy. Interconnectivity as a new conceptual framework, on the other hand, conceives of any dyadic relationship as “relating-yet-separating” and as a resource for interdependence. It fosters a new discursive order where there is no center to imagine from, but subjects of all kinds can coexist and coevolve. To theorize how this discursive order takes…

|9780822949121|Global Rhetorics and Power Transformation|All rhetorics function within the dynamics of power. Hua Zhu proposes interconnectivity as a frame of power transformation. Western understandings of power relations as oppositional and essentialist result in the systematic production of the Other—a structure that is reproduced in the West/non-West hierarchy. Interconnectivity as a new conceptual framework, on the other hand, conceives of any dyadic relationship as “relating-yet-separating” and as a resource for interdependence. It fosters a new discursive order where there is no center to imagine from, but subjects of all kinds can coexist and coevolve. To theorize how this discursive order takes…

|9780822968214|Reckoning with Imperial Legacies in Feminist Rhetorical Theory|Beyond Affirmation inspires feminist rhetorical scholarship to shift attention from the speech and action of individual rhetors to analysis of how and with what consequence rhetorics circulate. The book considers the rise of feminist rhetorical theory and historicizes it within the political moment of the Cold War. Beyond Affirmation attends to the rhetorical legacies of the Cold War and its imperialist project, showing how sentimentality subsumed the US academy and dominant feminist rhetorical method of recovery, resulting in the creation of exceptional rhetorical figures. Demonstrating politics of recovery work, chapters offer new methods…

|9780822947943|Reckoning with Imperial Legacies in Feminist Rhetorical Theory|Beyond Affirmation inspires feminist rhetorical scholarship to shift attention from the speech and action of individual rhetors to analysis of how and with what consequence rhetorics circulate. The book considers the rise of feminist rhetorical theory and historicizes it within the political moment of the Cold War. Beyond Affirmation attends to the rhetorical legacies of the Cold War and its imperialist project, showing how sentimentality subsumed the US academy and dominant feminist rhetorical method of recovery, resulting in the creation of exceptional rhetorical figures. Demonstrating politics of recovery work, chapters offer new methods…