Book Reviews

by Kyle Boggs
“Medina’s own background and experiences working with Indigenous migrants, which he details in his forward and throughout, provide a rich, humanized perspective on issues that are often discussed in abstract or policy-driven terms.”

by Prakash Paudel
“Broussard’s cardinal concern in the monograph is about ‘more equitable technology’ and the fairness of its use. She interrogates absolutist and ableist perceptions that are prevalent in the tech universe.”

by Sidra Naveed Arshad
“Khúc urges her students and readers alike to acknowledge that their worth is inherent and thus they deserve a standard of living which responds to any concerns resulting from problematic systems that seek to exploit them.”

by Tommie Leigh McPhetridge
“Wandering Games would be particularly useful for those trying to understand how video games can act as vessels of critical discourses and often engage in theoretical understandings of the world, both fictional and real.”

by Tomas Maldonado
“Relying on what she identifies as ‘shelter rhetorics’—idiosyncratic, everyday rhetorical practices that protect people’s vulnerabilities while also giving them agency in unstable situations—as presented in audio-recorded interviews, resident drawings, and photos, Reyes conducts a thorough case study of what asylees endure through the asylum process.”

by Justin G. Whitney
“Endres helps readers merge the book’s conclusions with the author’s personal experiences but never loses focus on the decolonial struggles of the Great Basin peoples and the agency realized through them—agency we can all learn from.”

by Megan Simmermeyer
“In their book, Hsu examines three distinct, yet interconnected projects that center around stories: the Dragon Fruit Project, the Visibility Project, and the Queer Ancestors Project…Across these chapters, Hsu focuses on themes of love, resilience, and ancestry.”

by Sonia C. Arellano

“Hill makes us consider what happens when flawed logic and rhetoric inform state initiatives. In the current environment where we risk lies propagating policy change, we can learn so much from examining how such rhetoric has impacted policy previously and continues to do so.”

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.”

by Shiva Mainaly
“The practice of materialist rhetorics by the indigenous people of North America since time immemorial illustrates how to push back on the oppressive and exclusionary contours of power, with an intent on making it accountable via shifting the very positionality of any actant within a rhetorical assemblage in a manner most ethical and responsible. In point of fact, this is the pith and marrow of Gruwell’s text being reviewed here.”

by Codi Renee Blackmon
“McIlwain’s archival work illustrates how throughout the history of digital technologies, Black people have always learned how to master technical worlds and make software to help each other, providing more culturally informed narratives to the history of the Internet. Even something as simple as putting their own Blackness and Black interests onto the Web in the 1990s and the 2000s was a radical act.”