Image Ecology

by Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés
“The family photos and Super 8 footage document the performances of an immigrant, working-class family attempting a higher status. In sharing these, they sought to prove for themselves and, as noted in the video essay, for their/our families back on the island that they were not only surviving but thriving. In using these home movies and photos for ‘Dancing Danny,’ I am telling a story about family, grief, and memory and very much about love.”

by Cristina De León-Menjivar
“While a number of the writers in this study eventually do attempt to rhetorically balance their realities with illness and their roles as mothers, nearly all of the posts initially tackle the cultural discourse surrounding motherhood, illustrating how it has oppressed and marginalized them in their most personal and private moments.”

by Vani Kannan
“This book made me confront the tension between seductive Eurocentric notions of ‘good’/’beautiful’ writing and the cultural rhetorics frameworks that have deeply reshaped my thinking about writing and knowledge-making over the past five years. Reflecting on Lahiri’s journey as a writer asked me to grapple with the kind of writer I want to be, the kind of writing space I want to co-create with students, and how I want them to understand the relationship between identity, land, and knowledge-making.”

by Sarah Klotz

“While off-reservation boarding schools devastated indigenous language and kinship structures, they also generated inter-tribal coalitions that laid the groundwork for new waves of Indigenous activism in the twentieth century. In what follows, I read a series of artifacts from the Carlisle archive to explore how comparative cultural rhetorics work can benefit from the fine-grained inquiry that archival research affords.”

by Alejandra I. Ramírez and Ruben Zecena

“The dirt under her fingernails, the traces of caring for the land, is the metaphor that guides our essay as we retell the memories we have of our migrant mothers, their care, their labor/s, and their fight, as well as the gendered criminalization of migrants in the U.S”

by Shersta Chabot

“Memory spaces are inherently material, requiring us to walk through them, look at them, read and think and use our other senses to understand them. Each of these acts is embodied and carried out in relation to the physical entity or space with which we are engaged.”

by Cassidy Hoff

“The University of Utah Department of Athletics’ (or University of Utah Athletics Department) media guides released from 1990-2016 in the sports of gymnastics, men’s and women’s basketball, and football highlight the way the university utilizes the “Utes” nickname, circle and feathers logo, and Swoop mascot to construct a “Ute” brand. This “Ute” brand encompasses the logo, mascot, and nickname, and also a “Ute” identity that can be assumed and performed by athletes, fans, spectators, and media.”

by Romeo García

“Settler archives haunt us all. In reading its contents, I gain a greater understanding of my brown(ed) body. Settler archives demand a carefully reckoning, to be sure, with erasure, death, terror, trauma, and settler invention practices, all of which affect how and why I speak today from a particular place, out of a particular history, and from a particular community practice.”

by Megan Schoen

“Kagiso as a rhetorical concept allows us to understand a discourse of democracy not grounded solely in the West—and one not tied to the limited binary of democracy as either agonism or consensus. Kagiso offers a powerful, living example of a discursive tradition that transcends this simplistic dichotomy between agonism and consensus because harmony and dissent are held closely in productive contact.”

by Anne von Petersdorff

“The acknowledging of the filmmaker’s body can remind us that the process of cinematic production is dependent on the participation of others: every image carries the footprints of a culturally and historically situated way of knowing, the absence or presence of an agreement between the camera operator and the object of the gaze, the incentive of economic gain, power relations, gender roles, expected ways of behaving, and so on.”

by Jill McKay Chrobak

“The goal of this article is to examine current forms of white privilege through the lens of whiteness studies and Hip Hop pedagogies in writing classrooms in order to begin to dismantle these kinds of damaging rhetoric in our society and ultimately raise student’s rhetorical awareness of the white privilege tropes that surround them.”

by Kelly Medina-López

“Rasquache as cultural rhetorics theory and practice presents a robust approach to meaning making by allowing users to pull from the compendium of theories, ideas, experiences, tangible tools, and intangible epistemologies they can access. Recycling, upcycling, making do, and making new meaning through whatever is available is an explicit performance of rasquache.”

by Mari Ramler

“Beyoncé won the 2017 Grammys in the same way she won the 2016 Super Bowl—by rewriting history with her flesh. To write skin is, like birth, to create futures.”

by Becca Hayes, Violet Livingston, Casey Miles, Jon M. Wargo, Ames Hawkins, Ezekiel Choffel, Steven Hammer, Erin Schaefer, and Les Hutchinson

“We acknowledge the dissonance and disjointedness this project entails. Therefore, we provide no exhaustive remarks or conclusions, but rather a constellation of queer provocations. We work to render the ‘queer’ intelligible by making the piece and our responses to it seemingly unintelligible to heteronormative cultural logics.”