Bridging the Gap: Speculative Roles of Specific Intellectuals in Climate Justice

Abstract

The climate change crisis is a matter of increasing concern to rhetoric and composition. Some scholars in the discipline, specifically on the new materialist turn, have engaged and accounted for the damage through methodologies of ontological entanglement and relationality. The potential of ontological accounts to facilitate global activism faces the obstacle of scalar derangement. By acting as Foucauldian specific intellectuals, rhetoric and composition scholars may employ new materialist ontological projects to bridge the gap between local accounts of climatological damage and a global, pluralist assemblage of climate activists.

Notes

1 The author wishes to express his deepest gratitude to his RR manuscript readers, Donnie Johnson Sackey and Madison Jones.

2 See Sidney Dobrin’s introduction to Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media for more on this.

3 Dobrin and Weisser’s Natural Discourse, it should be noted, defined ecocomposition before “Anthropocene” was coined, and before the internet reached its fully democratized status as we know it today. Activism was a necessarily local undertaking, and so I will forego rigorous critique of their project in this regard.

4 At the time of this writing, Facebook has rebranded to “Meta,” a change correlating with the emergence of increasingly serious accusations of betraying public trust and other scandals (Roose).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Purfield

John Purfield is a graduate student at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. He studies and works in the Department of English Language and Literature and is a Doctoral Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition. His focus of study in in Anthropocene studies.