front cover of Abducting Writing Studies
Abducting Writing Studies
Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kyle Jensen
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
This collection is organized around the concept of abduction, a logical operation introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce that explains how new ideas are formed in response to an uncertain future. Responding to this uncertain future with rigor and insight, each essay imagines new methods, concepts, and perspectives that extend writing studies research into startling new terrain. To appeal to a wide range of audiences, the essays work within foundational areas in rhetoric and composition research such as space, time, archive, networks, inscription, and life. Some of the essays take familiar concepts such as historiography, the writing subject, and tone and use abduction to chart new paths forward. Others use abduction to identify areas within writing studies such as futural writing, the calling of place, and risk that require more sustained attention. Taken together, these essays expose the manifold pathways that writing studies research may pursue.

Each of the twelve essays that comprise this collection sparks new insights about the phenomenon of writing. A must-read for rhetoric and composition scholars and students, Abducting Writing Studies is sure to foster vibrant discussions about what is possible in writing research and instruction.
 
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front cover of Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric
Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric
Laurie Gries
Utah State University Press, 2018

While it has long been understood that the circulation of discourse, bodies, artifacts, and ideas plays an important constitutive force in our cultures and communities, circulation, as a concept and a phenomenon, has been underexamined in studies of rhetoric and writing. In an effort to give circulation its rhetorical due, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric introduces a wide range of studies that foreground circulation in both theory and practice. Contributors to the volume specifically explore the connections between circulation and public rhetorics, urban studies, feminist rhetorics, digital communication, new materialism, and digital research.

Circulation is a cultural-rhetorical process that impacts various ecologies, communities, and subjectivities in an ever-increasing globally networked environment. As made evident in this collection, circulation occurs in all forms of discursive production, from academic arguments to neoliberal policies to graffiti to tweets and bitcoins. Even in the case of tombstones, borrowed text achieves only partial stability before it is recirculated and transformed again. This communicative process is even more evident in the digital realm, the underlying infrastructures of which we have yet to fully understand.

As public spaces become more and more saturated with circulating texts and images and as networked relations come to the center of rhetorical focus, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric will be a vital interdisciplinary resource for approaching the contemporary dynamics of rhetoric and writing.

Contributors: Aaron Beveridge, Casey Boyle, Jim Brown, Naomi Clark, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Rebecca Dingo, Sidney I. Dobrin, Jay Dolmage, Dustin Edwards, Jessica Enoch, Tarez Samra Graban, Byron Hawk, Gerald Jackson, Gesa E. Kirsch, Heather Lang, Sean Morey, Jenny Rice, Thomas Rickert, Jim Ridolfo, Nathaniel A. Rivers, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Michele Simmons, Dale M. Smith, Patricia Sullivan, John Tinnell, Kathleen Blake Yancey

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front cover of Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition
Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition
Edited by Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

Best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern, Laboratory Life, and Science in Action, Bruno Latour has inspired scholarship across many disciplines. In the past few years, the fields of rhetoric and composition have witnessed an explosion of interest in Latour’s work. Editors Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers have assembled leading and emerging scholars in order to focus the debate on what Latour means for the study of persuasion and written communication.

Essays in this volume discern, rearticulate, and occasionally critique rhetoric and composition’s growing interest in Latour. These contributions include work on topics such as agency, argument, rhetorical history, pedagogy, and technology, among others. Contributors explain key terms, identify implications of Latour’s work for rhetoric and composition, and explore how his theories might inform writing pedagogies and be used to build research methodologies.

Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition shows how Latour’s groundbreaking theories on technology, agency, and networks might be taken up, enriched, and extended to challenge scholars in rhetorical studies (both English and communications), composition, and writing studies to rethink some of the field’s most basic assumptions.  It is set to become the standard introduction that will appeal not only to those scholars already interested in Latour but also those approaching Latour for the first time.

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