Awards

• Winner of The National Communication Association Critical & Cultural Studies Division 2016 Outstanding Book Award.

Overview

Increasingly, rhetorical scholars are using fieldwork and other ethnographic, performance, and qualitative methods to access, document, and analyze forms of everyday in situ rhetoric rather than using already documented texts. In this book, the authors argue that participatory critical rhetoric, as an approach to in situ rhetoric, is a theoretically, methodologically, and praxiologically robust approach to critical rhetorical studies. This book addresses how participatory critical rhetoric furthers understanding of the significant role that rhetoric plays in everyday life through expanding the archive of rhetorical practices and texts, emplacing rhetorical critics in direct conversation with rhetors and audiences at the moment of rhetorical invention, and highlighting marginalized voices that might otherwise go unnoticed. This book organizes the theoretical and methodological foundations of participatory critical rhetoric through four vectors that enhance conventional rhetorical approaches: 1) the political commitments of the critic; 2) rhetorical reflexivity and the role of the embodied critic; 3) emplaced rhetoric and the interplay between the field, text, and context; and 4) multiperspectival judgment that is informed by direct participation with rhetors and audiences. In addition to laying the groundwork and advocating for the approach, Participatory Critical Rhetoric also offers significant contributions to rhetorical theory and criticism more broadly by revisiting the field's understanding of core topics such as role of the critic, text/context, audience, rhetorical effect, and the purpose of criticism. Further, it enhances theoretical conversations about material rhetoric, place/space, affect, intersectional rhetoric, embodiment, and rhetorical reflexivity.

Full Product Details

9781498513807

Table of Contents

Reviews

Participatory Critical Rhetoric heralds a watershed moment in rhetorical studies, in which the field is no longer accepting the characterization of such approaches as merely marginal or experimental. Embodying the collaborative spirit they wish to encourage, Middleton, Hess, Endres, and Senda-Cook weave their own fieldwork notes and insights throughout their synthesis of key terms and figures of this scholarly tradition. -- Phaedra C. Pezzullo, University of Colorado Boulder, author of Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice Written by the leading proponents and practitioners of rhetorical field methods, this book combines deep scholarship and the authors' personal experiences to illustrate the scholarly and political importance of studying rhetorical places. I recommend this book to my students and colleagues who are exploring place, space, and progressive political practice. -- Greg Dickinson, Colorado State University Participatory Critical Rhetoric is a timely contribution to the growing conversation surrounding field methods, critical rhetoric, and participatory research. By focusing on four topoi-immanent politics, critical embodiment, emplaced fields of rhetoric, and gaining perspectives from participants-this book elegantly weaves on-the-ground experiences and sense making with conceptual and theoretical understandings of rhetoric. The result is a truly novel accounting of participatory critical rhetoric that illuminates its comprehensive character. -- erin mcclellan, Boise State University

Participatory Critical Rhetoric heralds a watershed moment in rhetorical studies, in which the field is no longer accepting the characterization of such approaches as merely marginal or experimental. Embodying the collaborative spirit they wish to encourage, Endres, Hess, Middleton, and Senda-Cook weave their own fieldwork notes and insights throughout their synthesis of key terms and figures of this scholarly tradition. -- Phaedra C. Pezzullo, University of Colorado Boulder, author of Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice

Author Information

Michael Middleton is assistant professor of argumentation and public discourse in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. Aaron Hess is assistant professor of rhetoric at Arizona State University at the Downtown Phoenix campus. Danielle Endres is associate professor of rhetoric in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. Samantha Senda-Cook is assistant professor of rhetoric in the Department of Communication Studies and affiliated faculty with the environmental science and sustainability programs at Creighton University.

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