First work to couple materialist and rhetorical frameworks with interdisciplinary understandings of precarity to study pressing issues of our time.

First work to couple materialist and rhetorical frameworks with interdisciplinary understandings of precarity to study pressing issues of our time.

Across disciplines, scholars have employed theories of precarity to help explain the pervasiveness of problems related to labor, migration, biopolitics, global and state governance, economies of war and violence, poverty, environmental degradation, and a host of other pressing issues. Precarous Rhetorics is the first work to bring precarity studies to the field of rhetoric and communication—and to couple it with new materialist frameworks—in order to unearth and analyze the material conditions and structuring logics of inequality. This collection features cross-disciplinary contributions from leading scholars, including the editors of the volume as well as James J. Brown Jr., Gale Coskan-Johnson, Ronald Greene, Lavinia Hirsu, Arabella Lyon, Louis Maraj, Sara McKinnon, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Kimberlee Pérez, Margaret Price, Amy Shuman, Kristin Swenson, Becca Tarsa, and Belinda Walzer. Chapters emphasize a materialist-rhetorical approach while also drawing on feminist studies, women of color feminisms, affect studies, critical disability studies, critical race and ethnic studies, medical humanities, sexuality studies, queer migration studies, and human rights and humanitarian studies. While theoretically rich, this volume intentionally features chapters that explore precarious rhetorics as they operate in practice—whether in borderlands, politics, public policy, or the quotidian spaces of human activity, such as school, work, social media, and medicine.

Examines lynching, capital punishment, and torture to investigate how rhetoric and violence work together to sustain inhospitable spaces and create challenges for antiviolence work.

Examines gut microbes, fetuses, and gym-goers in three case studies to critique the discursive practices of inclusion into humanhood.

Scrutinizes spectacular rhetoric, the use of visual images and imagery to construct certain bodies, populations, and nations as victims and incorporate them into human rights discourses geared toward Westerners.

Exposes how humanitarian discourses privilege certain children's lives and rights over others.