by Alexandra Hidalgo
“And yet, if you can project it, you can become it. Right? That’s the hope. That’s the theme of the fantastic pieces you’re about to encounter in this issue: The laborious (and we hope rewarding) art of performing the change we want to see in the world. Or at least in our lives.”
by Alicia K. Hatcher
“For Black people in this country whose experiential knowledge has been informed by racial and social contracts (Mills, Charles), the creation of a subaltern counterpublic is a necessary survival tactic, informed by group cultural collective understanding—aka group meta-conceptualization.”
by Clarice A. Blanco
“Language is a distinguishing factor of cultural loyalty. To speak Spanish often means to be less American, and to speak English is to bring shame to my family’s sacrifices because it shows a willingness to assimilate.”
by Eric House
“I became a fan of Rapsody after one verse, and a bigger fan once I went back and explored her catalogue, but I was disappointed to learn that I didn’t know her although she’d been steadily releasing music for the past five years and had worked with many artists that I was familiar with. I began to question why Rapsody had been invisible and unknown to me, an avid and active hip-hop fan, until she appeared on a Kendrick Lamar album.”
by Carlee A. Baker, Amber Buck, Angela D. Mack, James Chase Sanchez, and Jennifer Wingard
Moderated by José Luis Cano Jr. and Daisy Levy
“All rhetoric is laden with and influenced by power, but the stakes feel higher and the power feels heavier when dealing with political rhetoric in particular. I think that political rhetoric looks and behaves differently depending on those who engage in it, the power that they wield and the privileges they enjoy.”
by Stephen Dadugblor, Hazel Elif Guler, Gale Franklin, and Sharon Yam. Moderated by Xiqiao Wang and Andrés C. Lopez
“In international relations, love rhetoric is employed to describe relationships between nations, aiming to foster cooperation, peace, and harmony. However, love is not immune to critique and satire in political discourse, where it can be used ironically or sarcastically to highlight gaps between rhetorical constructions and reality.”
by Joselyne Tellez-Cardenas
“In Violent Exceptions: Children’s Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics, Hesford identifies and examines various international children’s humanitarian cases, in order to inspect how visual and political rhetorics are employed to mark children as “exceptional,” a process that has violent repercussions for those not considered worthy of exceptionalism.”
by Carlee A. Baker
“Crick’s collection paints a broad historical and social picture, featuring in-depth analyses of the rhetoric of fascism from several regions, including the U.S., China, Italy, Mexico, Russia, and Germany. In this way, the collection of essays, taken together, provides a nuanced picture of the contours and features of fascist rhetoric via the analysis of a series of case studies.”
by Alexandria Hanson
“Throughout Optimal Motherhood, Clements and Nixon intertwine their parenting experiences with rhetorical analyses of digital media and multimethod research. Their research considers the experiences of mothers and alcohol consumption, labor and delivery, postpartum medical diagnoses, breast and bottle feeding, infant sleep, and interpreting at-home pregnancy tests.”