Samantha Senda-Cook

Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest

Social movements often deploy place rhetorically in their protests. The rhetorical performance and (re)construction of places in protest can function in line with the goals of a social movement. Our essay offers a heuristic framework—place in protest—for theorizing the rhetorical force of place and its relationship to social movements. Through analysis of a variety of protest events, we demonstrate how the (re)construction of place may be considered a rhetorical tactic along with the tactics we traditionally associate with protest, such as speeches, marches, and signs. This essay has implications for the study of social movements, the rhetoricity of place, and how we study places.

Rugged practices: Embodying authenticity in outdoor recreation

When people recreate outdoors, they value the quality of the experience. This study examines rhetorical practices that sustain or undermine perceived authentic outdoor recreation experiences. I conducted a rhetorical analysis of my fieldnotes gathered through participant observation and interview transcripts of online and in-person interviews. I suggest that practices of walking in outdoor recreation—such as staying on or going off a trail, running, and wearing inadequate footwear—communicate member status in an outdoor recreation subculture and construct expectations for authentic experiences. My analysis demonstrates how fluid, embodied, repetitive actions can produce or violate abstract constructs such as authentic experiences.

In Situ Rhetoric: Intersections between Qualitative Inquiry, Fieldwork, and Rhetoric

This special issue examines intersections between qualitative and rhetorical inquiry through (re)introducing rhetorical fieldwork. We define rhetorical fieldwork as a set of approaches that integrate rhetorical and qualitative inquiry toward the examination of in situ practices and performances in a rhetorical field. This set of approaches falls within the participatory turn in rhetorical studies, in which rhetorical scholars increasingly turn to fieldwork, interviews, and other forms of participatory research to augment conventional methodological practices. The special issue highlights four original articles that employ, exemplify, and reflect on the value of rhetorical fieldwork as a form of critical/cultural inquiry. In this introduction, we not only introduce the key themes and articles in the special issue but also compile our take on the state of the art of rhetorical fieldwork in an effort to introduce this form of research practice to those who have not encountered it before.

Not just a Place to Park Your Car: Park(ing) as Spatial Argument

In 2005, an art installation transformed, a leased parking space into a temporary park. When the image disseminated online, it sparked a global movement to rethink urban space. The PARK(ing) Day movement enacts a spatial argument at the intersection of localized PARK(ing) installations in particular places and the dissemination of the concept of PARK(ing) Day in online spaces. We show how residual traces of temporary installations exist in online spaces that shape the broad dissemination and development of this movement and its message, which then influence the construction of PARK(ing) installations. In exploring this play between place and space, endurance and ephemerality, we highlight how the movement constrains and enables the tactical deployment of PARK(ing) installations as spatial arguments.

Contemplating the Participatory Turn in Rhetorical Criticism

This essay concludes the special issue on the intersections between qualitative and rhetorical inquiry by responding to each of the essays. We highlight the productive tensions between rhetorical and qualitative inquiry, examine the benefits that qualitative inquiry brings to rhetorical fieldwork while also revealing how rhetorical inquiry can contribute to qualitative inquiry. We ultimately argue that rhetorical fieldwork is form of transdisciplinary research that resists replicating rhetorical and qualitative research by subsuming one approach under the other and instead creates a new form of hybrid research that adopts and adapts both research lineages.

Introduction: Rhetoric’s Ecologies

This chapter introduces the edited collection Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, which draws together work in rhetoric, communication, composition, environmental communication, and environmental studies to advance a rhetorical approach to ecological care. To set the stage for this project, this introduction takes a moment to look back at the recent history of rhetorical studies and environmental communication, tracing the emergence of several complementary but fairly disparate ecological “turns.” The ecological turns identified coincide with a larger turning in recent interdisciplinary work that embraces ecology as distinct from environment. Thus, it first explores this distinctive sense of the ecological via recent “new materialisms.” Next, and for the bulk of the chapter, it traces the emergence of resonant ecological approaches to rhetoric that largely predate discussions of new materialism, including discussions of constitutive rhetorics among communication and environmental communication scholars, ecological models of composition and invention among writing scholars, and practices of in situ methods among rhetorical scholar-practitioners and their objects. As the final section notes, the chapters in Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life intensify those shifts, ultimately cultivating ecological care in three arenas of rhetorical being—those of change, ethics, and justice.

Embodying Resistance: A Rhetorical Ecology of the Full Cycle Supper

This chapter examines the ways practices of resistance within local communities develop and normalize despite global environmental problems. By engaging in a study of a locally sourced dinner called The Full Cycle Supper, the authors examine how resistance takes root in a community. The actions observed at the supper, they argue, rhetorically construct practices of ecological habitual resistance, stemming from the concept of habitus. Ecological habitual resistance is defined as rhetorical practices that push against marginalizing structures while also advancing alternative practices that allow people to act in response to a variety of political concerns. This chapter demonstrates how the structures manifested through the habitus can be used to support resistive actions in addition to dominant structures.

Contrived Making Do As Rhetorical Practice in Outdoor Recreation

Descriptors like “hideous,” “the worst,” “terrible,” and “thrashed” are not the words that most people want to associated with their “usual.” For many outdoor recreators, though, these are things that they learn to live with. But why? Why do they continue to engage in practices that produce these results? I argue that such activities constitute what I call contrived making do and that they function as rhetorical practices that construct identities and parts of the outdoor recreation subculture in three ways: controlling the controllable, walking the edge, and reframing the experience. Contrived making do refers to creating or seeking out situations that necessitate getting by in a physical and/or cultural sense, implying both difficult circumstances and the creativity and wherewithal to figure out improvised solutions. Making do, in this context, depends on privilege, risk—the willingness to take normalized risks and framing risk in culturally expected ways—and voluntarily surrendering some control. This analysis adds nuance and richness to Michel de Certeau’s concept of making do. Whereas de Certeau conceptualized making do as a coping mechanism for marginalized groups, my project illuminates the role that risk plays in making do by showing how a comparatively privileged group of people seek out such experiences. In doing so, this study builds on environmental communication scholarship about risk by demonstrating that mere carelessness may not be the only source of injuries in national parks.

Extending rhetorical criticism’s engagement

I doubt any rhetorical critic would consider what they do socially irrelevant; we see ourselves as fulfilling civic and emancipatory functions through teaching and scholarship. In many ways, contemporary rhetorical critics are engaging in what Robert Ivie calls productive criticism. Positioning interpretation as a commonality that brings together theory and advocacy, Ivie contends that productive criticism “is commensurate with the rhetorical invention of social knowledge.” While it “reveals and evaluates the symbols that organize our lives... and that constitute civic substance,” it also functions as “a form of advocacy... guided by... rhetorical theory.” For Ivie, productive criticism addresses “the double issue of whether scholarship can or should achieve a degree of social significance.” When rhetorical criticism is at its best, it can and does, he argues, by bringing together theory and praxis elegantly and producing mutual benefits. Critical rhetoricians have endeavored to make their scholarship relevant by gaining a deep knowledge of marginalizing discourses and acts of resistance. While we have been successful at bringing together theory and praxis, I suggest that scholars could extend productive criticism along three trajectories to ensure that our scholarship remains socially relevant: (1) participate in social advocacy alongside community members, and make efforts to (2) translate and (3) present theories to lay and diverse audiences. As a discipline, we have become adept at analyzing social issues as a starting point for developing rhetorical theory. Although the extremes Ivie describes (i.e., those who argue for theory sans phronesis against those who contend that enhancing civic life should be our main purpose) still exist, many rhetoricians have embraced Ivie’s sentiment that “we cannot engage in social practice or the criticism thereof absent perspective nor construct theory without interpreting social conduct, and that any interpretation necessarily serves some social interests better than others.”Despite the advances toward productive criticism in our academic writing, scholars may still struggle with how to put political sensibilities into action. A turn to participatory critical rhetoric, as articulated by Michael Middleton et al., may provide a means of combining social activism with academic research. Participatory critical rhetoric is an approach that privileges the political, embodied, and emplaced nature of