Rhetoricity

This episode features an interview with Jeremy Tirrell and Kate Maddalena, authors of the 2026 book Disgustatory!: A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption. In the book, which covers Soylent, nootropics, probiotics, and lab-grown meat, they show how wellness discourse is haunted by Gothic tropes: body horror, hybridity, and existential dread. Wellness culture, they argue, is not merely pseudoscience or fraud but a complex, persuasive rhetoric that blurs science and myth, purity and decay, medicine and mysticism. In this episode, we discuss the book's background, their approach to coauthorship, and the Gothic tendencies of Silicon Valley.

Jeremy Tirrell is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His primary focus is the intersection of technology, rhetoric, and writing, and his scholarly work has appeared in publications including Technical Communication Quarterly, Intermezzo, POROI, Kairos, and Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition.

Kate Maddalena is Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology, at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She researches knowledge-making media, epistemic rhetorics, futurisms, and the popular uptake of science. Her work appears in places like Rhetoric Society Quarterly; Theory, Culture, and Society; POROI; and Feminist Pedagogy.

This episode includes clips from Soylent Green, Tales from the Crypt, and Crowander's "Be My Guest."

This special episode of Rhetoricity features a roundtable that also serves as the "Afterwords" for a forthcoming collection entitled Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth. That collection is edited by Scott Sundvall, Caddie Alford, and Ira Allen and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2026. The featured panelists are James Ball, Barbara Biesecker, Omedi Ochieng, Robin Reames, and Ryan Skinnell. See below for more detailed bios of the panelists.

The roundtable focuses on key questions from Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth: what we mean by "post-truth," how it intersects with rhetoric, and what challenges that intersection poses for us in the world to come.

James Ball is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and author, a fellow of the think tank Demos, and the political editor of The New European. Ball also played a key role in The Guardian's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden. He is the author of multiple books, including Post-Truth and The Tangled Web We Weave: Inside The Shadow System That Shapes the Internet. His most recent book, The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated The World was published by Bloomsbury in July 2023.

Barbara Biesecker is Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia and author of the recently published Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including the National Communication Association's Douglas Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award, the Francine Merritt Award, and the Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division's Outstanding Mentor Award and Distinguished Scholar Award. She served as editor-in-chief of the Quarterly Journal of Speech from 2013–2016 and continues to serve on multiple editorial boards.

Omedi Ochieng specializes in Africana philosophical and intellectual thought, Black radicalism, and criticism. He is the author of two books: Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy and The Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy. He is currently working on a project on Black insurgent ecology.

Robin Reames is the Culbertson Chair of Writing in the Department of English at Indiana University's College of Arts and Sciences. Her research explores the relationship between language and metaphysics in ancient Greek rhetoric. She explored aspects of this relationship in her first book, Seeming and Being in Plato's Rhetorical Theory and her book of essays Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language Before Plato. She is also one of the editors of the third edition of The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Her most recent book, The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times is written for a general audience and introduces key concepts from the ancient rhetorical tradition that can help readers navigate today's complex and polarizing politics.

Ryan Skinnell is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at San José State University. His current research investigates authoritarian, demagogic, and fascist rhetoric, particularly in the early 20th century, and its relationship to global politics in the 21st century. He has published six books, including Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump and Rhetoric and Guns. He's also published more than two dozen articles and book chapters in top scholarly journals and edited collections, as well as essays in popular press outlets including the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Salon. He is currently writing a book about Adolf Hitler's rhetoric.

This episode features a clip from "Truth" by Masteredit.

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This episode features an interview with Dr. Derek G. Handley, author of the book Struggle for the City: Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement.

Dr. Handley is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is also affiliated faculty in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department and in the Urban Studies program. Before that, he was a Chamberlain Project Fellow in English and Black Studies at Amherst College and a Predoctoral Mellon Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. He has taught at Lehigh University, the United States Naval Academy, and the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Currently, he is co-director of the digital humanities project "Mapping Racism and Resistance," which maps racial covenants in Milwaukee County and uncovers Black resistance to such discrimination.

In this interview, we discuss his concept of Black rhetorical citizenship, the role of Black women in the civil rights movement in the urban North, the plays of August Wilson, and housing covenants that prevented Black people from purchasing or renting particular properties throughout much of the twentieth century.

This episode features a clip from the song "The City" by The Kyoto Connection.

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This episode features an interview with Kendall Gerdes. Dr. Gerdes is an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah, where she also serves as president of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors. This interview focuses on her book Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism, which won the Conference on College Composition and Communication's 2025 Outstanding Book Award. In addition to Sensitive Rhetorics, Dr. Gerdes coedited the collection Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies and has published articles in such journals as Philosophy & Rhetoric, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Kairos.

The interview addresses the shifting landscape of rhetorical attacks on college students and higher education more broadly, the role of rhetorical theory in addressing those challenges, and the work of writing a book in the midst of a pandemic.

This episode features a clip of the song "Down in the Basement" by HoliznaCC0.

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This episode features an interview with Dr. Ashley Joyce Holmes. Dr. Holmes is Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University, where she leads the Center for Teaching and Learning in supporting effective, innovative, and scholarly teaching that engages students in meaningful learning experiences.

She has published books, articles, and chapters in writing studies. One of those books is 2023's Learning on Location, which was also the focus of Dr. Holmes' keynote at the 2024 Peck Research on Writing Symposium, an annual event hosted at Middle Tennessee State University. This interview was recorded during her visit for that symposium. In adding to Learning on Location, Dr. Holmes discusses her coedited collection Learning from the Mess and a 2022 Composition Forum article "Multiple Forms of Representation: Using Maps to Triangulate Students' Tacit Writing Knowledge."

This episode includes a clip from Chad Crouch's "Space."

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This episode features an interview with Christina Cedillo. Dr. Cedillo is an associate professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, where she recently won the 2024 President's Research Award. Her research lies at the intersections of race, gender, and disability. She examines how legal, scientific, and popular discourses circumscribe the embodied lives of marginalized populations, and how those populations enact rhetorical presence and engage in rehumanization practices using multimodality and digital technologies.

In this episode, she discusses a number of her projects. Those include a 2023 special issue of College Composition and Communication focused on cultural rhetorics that Dr. Cedillo coedited, her 2021 Journal of the History of Rhetoric article "Unruly Borders, Bodies, and Blood," a coauthored piece on critical race theory bans in Texas, and an in-process edited collection entitled Rhetorical Approaches to Critical Embodiment.

This interview was conducted at the 2024 Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

If you are interested in the 2025 Peck Research on Writing Symposium, which is mentioned in the episode's outro, registration is open as of this episode's release.

This episode includes a clip from Aldous Ichnite's "Our Entire Bodies Have Always Been the Most Powerful Form of Visual Expression."

Episode Transcript

This episode features a roundtable conversation by contributors to Teaching Students to Podcast, an open-access, lesson plan-based manual on integrating podcasts into humanities courses. That manual was written by members of the Humanities Podcast Network's pedagogy working group. The discussion features six of its coauthors: Ulrich Baer, Robin Davies, Eric Detweiler, Emmy Herland, Beth Kramer, and Harly Ramsey. They discuss how they came to podcasting and teaching podcasts, their respective sections of the manual, and the possibilities and challenges of having students make podcasts in courses in and around the humanities.

This episode features a clip from Ketsa's "I Hear Echoes."

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This episode features an interview with Dr. Keith Gilyard conducted by guest host Dr. Derek G. Handley during the 2023 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute at Penn State University. They discuss Gilyard's path to a career in rhetoric, writing, and composition studies; his writing process and creative writing; academic mentorship and leadership; and his legacy and contributions to the field of African American rhetoric.

Keith Gilyard is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University. He formerly was a member of the faculty at Syracuse University and at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. He served as Thomas R. Watson Visiting Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville and as Presidential Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Oklahoma. The author of twenty-four books, his works include the education memoir Voices of the Self (1991), Composition and Cornel West (2008), On African American Rhetoric (with Adam Banks, 2018), biographies of John Oliver Killens (2011) and Louise Thompson Patterson (2017), the novella The Next Great Old-School Conspiracy (2015), and the poetry collections Impressions (2021) and On Location (2023). Gilyard is a former Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English. He is the recipient of two American Book Awards, the CCCC Exemplar Award, the NCTE Distinguished Service Award, and the RSA Cheryl Geisler Award for Outstanding Mentor.

This episode features a clip from "Super Glue" by Plushgoolash.

Episode Transcript

This episode features an interview with Jennifer Lin LeMesurier. The conversation, recorded at this year's Conference on College Composition and Communication, focuses on her 2023 book Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption. That book explores how the rhetorical framing of food and eating underpins our understanding of Asian and Asian American identity in the contemporary racial landscape.

Dr. LeMesurier is Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Colgate University. Her areas of expertise include bodily and material rhetorics, genre theory, discourse analysis, qualitative research, and affect theory. In addition to Inscrutable Eating, she co-edited Writing in and about the Performing and Visual Arts: Creating, Performing, and Teaching with Steven J. Corbett, Betsy Cooper, and Teagan E. Decker. To date, she has published articles in College Composition and Communication, Peitho, POROI, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

This episode features a clip from "Just a Taste" by Beat Mekanik.

Episode Transcript

This episode of Rhetoricity features members of the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on AI and Writing: Antonio Byrd, Holly Hassel, Sarah Z. Johnson, Anna Mills, and Elizabeth Losh. The task force also includes Leonardo Flores, David Green, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and A. Lockett. In July 2023, that task force published a working paper laying out issues, principles, and recommendations related to the effects of generative artificial-intelligence tools on the college writing courses.

In this episode's roundtable discussion, these task force members clarify some of the terminology around AI technologies, reflect on the process of writing the working paper, and discuss the pedagogical, historical, and labor implications of large language models for students and teachers working in higher education.

This episode is part of The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2023, which runs from August 28–31. The theme of this year's carnival is "Artificial Intelligence: Applications and Trajectories," and it features a keynote by Dr. Isabel Pedersen. Other participating podcasts include 10-Minute Tech Comm; Defend, Publish and Lead; Kairoticast; Live Theory; Neurodissent; Pedagogue; TC Talk; and Writing Remix.

Here's a list of some of the materials referenced in this episode:

• The task force's Quick Start Guide
• TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies, including Antonio Byrd's chapter "Using LLMs as Peer Reviewers for Revising Essays"
• Anna Mills's How Arguments Work
• Black in AI
• Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
• The White House's Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights
• Kathryn Conrad's "A Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights for Education"
• Hugging Face
• The Wall Street Journal's "Cleaning Up ChatGPT Takes Heavy Toll on Human Workers"
• The Washington Post's "Behind the AI Boom, an Army of Overseas Workers in 'Digital Sweatshops'"
• Memes of the brawl in Montgomery, Alabama

This episode features a clip from "Artificial Problems" by Smoked Meat Fax Machine.

Episode Transcript