Although it is well known in other fields, the concept of “resilience” has not been addressed explicitly by feminist rhetoricians. This collection develops it in readings of rhetorical situations across a range of social contexts and national cultures. Contributors demonstrate that resilience offers an important new conceptual frame for feminist rhetoric, with emphasis on agency, change, and hope in the daily lives of individuals or groups of individuals disempowered by social or material forces. Collectively, these chapters create a robust conception of resilience as a complex rhetorical process, redeeming it from its popular association with individual heroism through an important focus on relationality, community, and an ethics of connection. Resilience, in this volume, is a specifically rhetorical response to complicated forces in individual lives. Through it, Feminist Rhetorical Resilience widens the interpretive space within which rhetoricians can work.

A careful analysis of the rhetorical thought of René Descartes and of a distinguished group of post-Cartesians. Covering a unique range of authors, including Bernard Lamy and Nicolas Malebranche, Carr attacks the idea, which has become commonplace in contemporary criticism, that the Cartesian system is incompatible with rhetoric. Carr analyzes the writings of Balzac, the Port-Royalists Arnauld and Nicole, Malebranche, and Lamy, exploring the evolution of Descartes’ thought into their different theories of rhetoric. He constructs his arguments, probing each author’s writings on rhetoric, persuasion, and attention, to demonstrate the basis for rhetorical thought present in Descartes’ theory of persuasion when it is combined with his psychophysiology of attention.

This book examines how we design and deliver health communication messages relating to outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. We have experienced major changes to how the public receives and searches for information about health crises over the last twelve decades with the ongoing shift from text/broadcast-based to digital messaging and social media. Both health theories and practices are examined as it applies to testing, tracking, hoarding, therapeutics, and vaccines with case studies. Challenges to communicate about health to diverse audiences (including the science illiterate) and across (both Western and developing economies) have been complicated by politics, norms and mores, personal heuristics, and biases, such as mortality salience, news avoidance, and quarantine fatigue. Issues of economic development and land use, trade and transportation, and even climate change have increased the exposure of human populations to infectious diseases making risk and resilience more pressing. The book has been designed to support health communicators and public health management professionals, students, and interested stakeholders and university libraries.

Rhetoric for Radicals is intended for college-aged activists and organizers, and for the most part it's written in a relaxed, approachable style. It does get a bit cerebral and academic in places - in demonstrating how the book builds on the previous literature - but this material is kept to a minimum. On the whole, Rhetoric for Radicals is an invaluable, comprehensive how-to book that will greatly benefit beginning and seasoned rhetors alike. Rhetoric for Radicals concludes on a hopeful note, with the wish that its activist readership will internalize the book's rhetorical tools and tactics, and will be that much better equipped to become "the rhetors of the past who created the future." And indeed, there can be but little doubt tht this thorough, well-organized, accessible - and even personal - little handbook is the best instrument imaginable for fulfilling this purpose. - Frank Kaminski, EnergyBulletin.net Radicals have important messages to deliver, but they are often so caught up in the passion of their causes that they lose sight of effective communication—which is their most powerful tool. The ability to speak with clarity and intelligence, without underestimating the challenge of breaking new ground and winning new converts, is crucial. Activists often suffer from a credibility gap because of their lack of a coherent message and strategic delivery. Rhetoric for Radicals addresses and helps solve these problems. It provides the tools to develop the all-important communication skills necessary to be effectively heard. If you accept that communication creates the social world, then you will agree that changing the way we communicate can change the world. Rhetoric for Radicals provides practical guidelines for public speaking, writing, conversation, persuasion, political correctness, propaganda analysis, street theatrics, and new languages. Chapters include: Streets, Rhetoric, and Revolution A Call for Rhetorical Action Skills for the Multitude The Power of Language Body Rhetoric Twenty-First Century Radical Rhetoric Geared to college-aged radical activists and organizers, this book will also appeal to activists of any age who want to sharpen their message. Jason Del Gandio is a lecturer at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is a post-Seattle activist who has worked on globalization and free/fair trade issues, anti-war campaigns, and Latin American solidarity.

Building on various feminist theories of ethos, the authors in this collection explore how North American Catholic women from various periods, races, ethnicities, sexualities, and classes have used elements of the group’s positionality to make change. The women considered in the book range from the earliest Catholic sisters who arrived in the United States to women who held the Church hierarchy accountable for the sexual abuse scandals. The book analyzes women such as those in an African American order who developed an ethos that would resist racism. Chapters also consider better known Catholic women such as Dolores Huertas, Mary Daly, and Joan Chittister.

Offers a radical re-appraisal of rhetoric's relation to literature, with fresh insights into rhetorical sources and their reception in Roman poetry.

What explains the "triumph of capitalism"? Why do people so often respond positively to discussions favoring it while shutting down arguments against it? Overwhelmingly theories regarding capitalism's resilience have focused on individual choice bolstered by careful rhetorical argumentation. In this penetrating study, however, Catherine Chaput shows that something more than choice is at work in capitalism's ability to thrive in public practice and imagination—more even than material resources (power) and cultural imperialism (ideology). That "something," she contends, is market affect. Affect, says Chaput, signifies a semi-autonomous entity circulating through individuals and groups. Physiological in nature but moving across cultural, material, and environmental boundaries, affect has three functions: it opens or closes individual receptivity; it pulls or pushes individual identification; and it raises or lowers individual energies. This novel approach begins by connecting affect to rhetorical theory and offers a method for tracking its three modalities in relation to economic markets. Each of the following chapters compares a major theorist of capitalism with one of his important critics, beginning with the juxtaposition of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who set the agenda not only for arguments endorsing and critiquing capitalism but also for the affective energies associated with these positions. Subsequent chapters restage this initial debate through pairs of economic theorists—John Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen, Friedrich Hayek and Theodor Adorno, and Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith—who represent key historical moments. In each case, Chaput demonstrates, capitalism's critics have fallen short in their rhetorical effectiveness. Chaput concludes by exploring possibilities for escaping the straitjacket imposed by these debates. In particular she points to the biopolitical lectures of Michel Foucault as offering a framework for more persuasive anticapitalist critiques by reconstituting people's conscious understandings as well as their natural instincts.