Between campus and planet: toward a posthumanist paideia

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, humanities advocates have called for public support of liberal arts education, noting the vital contributions of the humanities to local, national, and global conversations. At the same time, systemic public problems have energized serial community discussions on campuses across and beyond the U.S.A. In the contexts of corporatized higher education and posthumanism, this essay suggests specific contributions rhetorical education can make in the service of human welfare and democratic life. We contribute a defense of rhetorical education by tracing its humanist foundations to revivify its promises for the global multiversity poised between campus and planet. We advance a posthumanist paideia, a rhetorical education that builds on the best of the humanist rhetorical tradition while including a plurality of historically distant and contemporary theories of rhetoric oriented toward feminist, antiracist, and posthumanist perspectives on citizenship, civic engagement, and “the public.” We advance a posthumanist paideia that takes campus public problems seriously and equips students with the collaborative habits and ethical communication practices necessary to respond to the calls of posthumanist democratic life. Our posthumanist paideia fosters the collaborative habits and practices of posthumanist public scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• paideia
• communication
• rhetorical education
• posthumanism

Acknowledgments

Consequent of paideia, this essay crosses the theory–practice bridge: Alt was a student in Eberly’s large lecture History of Rhetorical Theory class in 2010 as well as her Foundations of Civic and Community Engagement class in 2013. Both scholars are passionate about using the abundant storehouse of communication theory to address public problems on their campuses and in their shared worlds. Alt would like to thank her many teachers and mentors at both Penn State and Maryland. Without their teaching, this article would not be. Eberly would like to thank her teachers and students, whose collaboration and company have made her a better teacher and a better person. Both authors would also like to thank the editor, the anonymous reviewers, Damien Smith Pfister and Michelle Murray Yang for their insightful thoughts and suggestions for improving this manuscript.

ORCID

Rebecca A. Alt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9963-4980

Notes

1 Richard Fausset and Serge F. Kovaleski, “Officials Decline to Call Fatal Stabbing of Black Student a Hate Crime,” New York Times, May 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/us/black-student-stabbed-maryland.html; Lynh Bui, “U-Md. Student to Face Hate Crime Charge in Fatal Stabbing on Campus,” The Washington Post, October 17, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/u-md-student-to-face-hate-crime-charge-in-fatal-stabbing-on-campus/2017/10/17/a17bfa1c-b35c-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html?utm_term=.8da6f7af1597.

2 For a summary of recent incidents and a history of campus racism on the University of Maryland campus, see Daniel Greene, “It Runs Deep and We Can’t Talk It Out: On Campus Racism and the Murder of Richard Collins III,” Medium, May 22, 2017, https://medium.com/@dan.greene10/it-runs-deep-and-we-cant-talk-it-out-on-campus-racism-and-the-murder-of-richard-collins-iii-86f8fe0dde4c.

3 Andi Cwieka, “UMD Community Shares Experiences of Racism and Hate on Campus with #FearTheTurtle,” The Diamondback, May 22, 2017, http://www.dbknews.com/2017/05/22/umd-homicide-bowie-state-richard-collins-sean-urbanski-racism-feartheturtle/.

4 Jay Reed, “Hatred and Tragedy: Following the Homicide of Richard Collins III,” The Diamondback, May 23, 2017, http://features.dbknews.com/2017/05/23/university-of-maryland-homicide-richard-collins-death-sean-urbanski-bowie-state/; Christine Condon, “UMD President Loh Announces 5-Step Plan to ‘Combat Hate and Create a Safer Campus,’” The Diamondback, May 24, 2017, http://www.dbknews.com/2017/05/25/umd-loh-action-plan-combat-hate/.

5 Christine Condon, “There Have Been 27 Hate Bias Incidents Reported at UMD This Semester,” The Diamondback, December 8, 2017, http://www.dbknews.com/2017/12/09/umd-hate-bias-incidents-swastika-diversity-police/.

6 See, for example, Jon Hurdle and Richard Pérez-Pena, “Former Penn State President Gets Jail Time in Child Molestation Scandal,” New York Times, June 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/us/penn-state-graham-spanier-child-molestation-sentence.html.

7 Murray A. Sperber, Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).

8 Jericka Duncan, “Video Footage Captured Penn State Frat’s Behavior as Pledge Was Dying,” CBS News, May 9, 2017, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/video-footage-captured-penn-state-frats-behavior-as-pledge-was-dying/.

9 “Penn State Fraternity Pledge’s Family Calls Hazing Death ‘Murder’ and ‘Torture,’” CBS News, May 15, 2017, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/penn-state-fraternity-hazing-death-timothy-piazza-family-speaks-out/.

10 Craig Turpin, “They Laughed after Video of My Dying Son Was Shown in Court, Says Dad of Penn State Teen,” NJ.com, June 13, 2017, http://www.nj.com/hunterdon/index.ssf/2017/06/they_laughed_after_video_of_my_dying_son_says_fath.html; see also “Hazing Deaths on American College Campuses Remain Far Too Common: The Biggest Cause is Alcohol Poisoning,” The Economist, October 13, 2017, https://www.economist.com/blog/graphicdetail/2017/10/daily-chart-8.

11 For a summary of what has been attempted over the last year, see Eric Barron, “Penn State President Looks Back Over 12 Months of Sweeping Change in Greek Life,” http://diggingdeeper.psu.edu/2018/02/penn-state-president-looks-back-over-12-months-of-sweeping-change-in-greek-life/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=psu%20official.

12 Rape and sexual assault are often not reported to universities or the public, even when victims report crimes to police. See Christine Vendel, “Police Didn’t Report Sex Assaults at Frat Houses to Penn State,” Penn Live, December 20, 2017, http://www.pennlive.com/news/2017/12/penn_state_sexual_assaults_not.html.

13 In January 2018, 19-year-old William Denton was found dead in his room in Eastview Terrace as a result of a multidrug overdose. Denton was a member of fraternity Alpha Tau Omega. See Mikayla Corrigan, “Centre County Coroner’s Office Releases Cause of Death of William Denton,” The Daily Collegian, February 10, 2018, http://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/campus/article_49dad256-0e8d-11e8-ac23-e3b6a55cd51d.html; Alison Moody, “Remembering Penn State Sophomore William Denton,” The Daily Collegian, January 18, 2018, http://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/campus/article_0f7c99d6-fc05-11e7-a4e6-d318acba9fb5.html.

14 “Corporatized higher education” references a body of scholarship describing academic capitalism. See Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Market, State, and Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). They define the “neoliberal state” as focused not on social welfare for the citizenry but on enabling individuals as economic actors (8, 20). See also Masao Miyoshi, “Ivory Tower in Escrow,” Boundary 2 27, no. 1 (2000): 7–50; Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 17.

15 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 110–11.

16 Craig Rood, “Rhetorical Closure,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2017): 313–34.

17 Rosa A. Eberly, “Consider an Educational Memorial for the Tower Shootings,” Austin American-Statesman, March 25, 2016, in Towers of Rhetoric: Memory and Reinvention (Intermezzo, 2018) http://intermezzo.enculturation.net/05-eberly/eberly-contents.html.

18 Jeffrey Walker, The Genuine Teachers of this Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011), 285; “What Difference a Definition Makes, or, William Dean Howells and the Sophist’s Shoes,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36, no. 22 (2006): 149.

19 Gerard Hauser, “Teaching Rhetoric: Or Why Rhetoric Isn’t Just Another Kind of Philosophy or Literary Criticism,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2004): 52; William Denman notes that traditionally, the teaching of rhetoric “was an instrumental part of the development of the civic persona, the ‘citizen orator,’ whose skills were at the service of the community” (“Rhetoric, the ‘Citizen–Orator,’ and the Revitalization of Civic Discourse in American Life,” in Rhetorical Education in America, ed. Cheryl Glenn, Margaret Lyday, and Wendy Sharer [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004], 3). See also Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert, “Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Cultural Literacy,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, no. 3 (2013): https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2242.

20 Jaś Elsner, “Paideia: Ancient Concept and Modern Reception,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 20 (2013): 139.

21 Wendy B. Sharer, “Civic Participation and the Undergraduate Curriculum,” in Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Andrea Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, and Rosa A. Eberly (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 375.

22 Rosa A. Eberly and Brad Serber, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of … ,” The Journal of General Education 62, no. 4 (2013): 282. See also Rosa A. Eberly, “Rhetoric and the Anti-Logos Doughball: Teaching Deliberating Bodies the Practices of Participatory Democracy,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5, no. 2(2002): 277–96.

23 Jeremy Cohen, “A Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy,” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 2006, no. 105 (2006): 7–15. Cohen is following U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262 (1932).

24 Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 109.

25 Ibid. “Call and response” stems from a robust tradition of African American rhetoric. See also Ronald L. Jackson II and Elaine B. Richardson, eds., Understanding African American Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations (London: Routledge, 2003). Although call and response has been “most carefully preserved in the church” setting, it is also a “basic organizing principle of Black American culture generally, for it enables traditional black folk to achieve the unified state of balance or harmony which is fundamental to the traditional African world view” (Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin, 104).

26 Sharer, “Civic Participation and the Undergraduate Curriculum,” 375.

27 Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 293–304. Eberly implores communication scholars to rescue the basic course “from the same market pressures that have turned many of our majors into assembly lines—churning out smiling interchangeable parts for business and industry—and to return to rhetoric’s origins in democratic praxis” (“Rhetoric and the Anti-Logos Doughball,” 290). Sharon Crowley offered a similar critique of introductory courses in writing in Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998).

28 Craig Rood, “The Gap between Rhetorical Education and Civic Discourse,” Review of Communication 16, no. 2–3 (2016): 139.

29 Ibid., 146; Timothy Baruch and Brett Ommen, “The Constrained Liberty of the Liberal Arts and Rhetorical Education,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 47, no. 2 (2017): 158–79.

30 Rood, “The Gap between Rhetorical Education and Civic Discourse,” 147.

31 Critical history or historiography emphasizes that rhetoric’s past is “a myriad of specific articulations of rhetoric, all of which tell us something about the historical conditions in which they were articulated” (Carole Blair, “Contested Histories of Rhetoric: The Politics of Preservation, Progress, and Change,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78, no. 4 [1992]: 419). In advancing the idea of a critical history of rhetoric, Blair argues that the influence and systems models of rhetorical history are problematic, as they “advance attitudes of complacency and caution about change in rhetorical theorizing” (417). See also Michelle Ballif, ed., Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).

32 Hayden V. White argues that the contemporary historian has to establish the value of the study of the past, not as an end in itself, but as a way of providing perspectives on the present that contribute to the solution of problems peculiar to our own time (Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978], 41). See also Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997).

33 One example of the kind of posthumanist paideia we have in mind is the interdisciplinary collaborative work to re-establish a student farm at Penn State. Students, faculty, and staff from departments and disciplines across the university have participated in discursive and material work toward sustaining the new student farm. See studentfarm.psu.edu.

34 Elizabeth Asmis, “‘Psychagogia’ in Plato’s ‘Phaedrus,’” Illinois Classical Studies 11, no. 1/2 (1986): 153–72; Harvey Yunis and Plato, Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Takis Fotopoulos, “From (Mis)Education to Paideia,” Democracy and Nature 9, no. 1 (2003): 15–50; Werner Jaeger, Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens, vol. 1 of Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

35 The original meaning of paideia should remind teacher–scholars of rhetoric that those of us who teach undergraduates between 18 and 22 years of age encounter students whose brains are not yet fully formed; nonetheless students of this age are uniquely prepared to begin the practice of civic and community-based communication. See Constance Flanagan, “Public Scholarship and Youth at the Transition to Adulthood,” in A Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy, ed. Rosa A. Eberly and Jeremy Cohen, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 105 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 41–50.

36 Jaeger, Archaic Greece, 286.

37 Jaeger notes that Plutarch illustrates the lasting influence of culture through the agricultural metaphor (Archaic Greece, 312). “The essential thing is to begin work at the most educative moment—which in the human species is childhood, when nature is still pliable, and whatever is learnt is absorbed, easily but permanently, by the soul” (Plutarch, Moralia, Volume I: The Education of Children, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt. Loeb Classical Library, Lcl197 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927]).

38 Ibid., 290.

39 Scholars have since recovered the voices of women in the tradition, though it is unclear what their involvement was in paideia. See Andrea A. Lunsford, ed. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Glenn, Rhetoric Retold.

40 Russell H. Wagner, “The Rhetorical Theory of Isocrates,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 8, no. 4 (1922): 323.

41 Ibid., 327.

42 The sophists were viewed with suspicion for several reasons. See Susan C. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).

43 Wagner, “The Rhetorical Theory of Isocrates,” 331; Takis Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates’ Rhetorical Education (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997).

44 Roderick P. Hart, “Why Communication? Why Education? Toward a Politics of Teaching,” Communication Education 42, no. 2 (1993): 101.

45 Bruce E. Gronbeck, “Rhetorical Criticism in the Liberal Arts Curriculum,” Communication Education 38 (1989): 185; Michael Leff, “Isocrates, Tradition, and the Rhetorical Version of Civic Education,” in Takis Poulakos and David J Depew, eds., Isocrates and Civic Education (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 235–54.

46 Richard Leo Enos, “Quintilian’s Message, Again: His Philosophy of Education,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 19, no. 2 (2016): 117; Gronbeck, “Rhetorical Criticism in the Liberal Arts Curriculum,” 185.

47 Isocrates, “Antidosis,” in Isocrates II, trans. George Norlin (London: William Heinemann, 1928): 168–365; Josiah Ober, “I, Socrates: The Performative Audacity of Isocrates’ Antidosis,” in Isocrates and Civic Education, ed. Takis Poulakos and David J. Depew (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 29.

48 Enos, “Quintilian’s Message, Again,” 116.

49 Robert E. Terrill, “Reproducing Virtue: Quintilian, Imitation, and Rhetorical Education,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 19, no. 2 (2016): 157. As such, Quintilian sought an educational system that would cultivate the best version of his students as civic leaders within society. Enos, “Quintilian’s Message, Again,” 117; David Fleming, “Quintilian, Progymnasmata, and Rhetorical Education,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 19, no. 2 (2016): 135.

50 Michael Mendelson, “Quintilian and the Pedagogy of Argument,” Argumentation: An International Journal on Reasoning 15, no. 3 (2001): 290. Quintilian included the stases, the enthymeme, the epicheireme, as well as controversia and progymnasata in his curriculum. See also Enos, “Quintilian’s Message, Again,” 121.

51 David Fleming, “Rhetoric as a Course of Study,” College English 61, no. 2 (1998): 178.

52 Enos, “Quintilian’s Message, Again,” 118.

53 John Milton, Areopagitica and Of Education (San Francisco: Wiley, 1951); Hoyt Hudson, “The Field of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 9, no. 2 (1923): 167–80.

54 Crowley, Composition in the University, 34.

55 James L. Golden and Edward P. J. Corbett, The Rhetoric of Blair, Campbell, and Whately (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 1; Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005).

56 Douglas Ehninger, “Dominant Trends in English Rhetorical Thought, 1750–1800,” The Southern Speech Journal 18, no. 1 (1952): 3–12.

57 Mark Garrett Longaker, “One Republic, Many Paideiai: Political Discourse, Publicity, and Education in Early America,” in Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 50. In capitalist societies, “the republican civic-virtue tradition is often replaced by a civil-society tradition, in which bourgeois citizens imagine themselves as autonomous actors encountering others in a free space of discursive or monetary exchange.”

58 Ibid, 66–67.

59 Denman, “Rhetoric, the ‘Citizen–Orator,’ and the Revitalization of Civic Discourse in American Life,” 4–7.

60 William M. Keith, Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 21. “This ideal is fundamentally individual rather than social and civic.”

61 Crowley, Composition in the University, 34.

62 See Herman Cohen, The History of Speech Communication: The Emergence of a Discipline, 1914–1945 (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1994); Hudson, “The Field of Rhetoric”; “Rhetoric and Poetry,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 10, no. 2 (1924): 143–54.

63 Gert Biesta, “Becoming World-Wise: An Educational Perspective on the Rhetorical Curriculum,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 44, no. 6 (2012): 815–26.

64 Douglas Ehninger characterizes 20th-century rhetoric as a “sociological system,” which contrasts with earlier grammatical (ancient) and psychological (modern) systems (“On Systems of Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 1, no. 3 [1968]: 131–44).

65 Marie Hochmuth, “Kenneth Burke and the ‘New Rhetoric,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38 (1952): 133–45; Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969). On the constitutive effects of rhetoric, see James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 193; Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133–50.

66 Glenn, Rhetoric Retold; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); Michele Kennerly and Carly S. Woods, “Moving Rhetorica,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2017): 1–25.

67 Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, “A Feminist Perspective on Rhetorical Theory: Toward a Clarification of Boundaries,” Western Journal of Communication 56, no. 2 (1992): 333; “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 2–18. In composition studies, see Andrea Greenbaum, Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibility (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

68 Lunsford, Reclaiming Rhetorica; Glenn, Rhetoric Retold; Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her; Shirley Wilson Logan, We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999).

69 Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162; Foss and Griffin, “A Feminist Perspective on Rhetorical Theory.” See also Shirley Wilson Logan, “‘To get an Education and Teach My People’: Rhetoric for Social Change,” in Rhetorical Education in America, ed. Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 36–52.

70 James R. McNally, “Toward a Definition of Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 3, no. 2 (1970): 80. McNally discusses syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic concentrations of meaning and argues that although most symbolic action has meaning, rhetorical action has meaning that invites change. See also Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 159.

71 Blair, “Contested Histories of Rhetoric,” 420.

72 Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert, “Revisiting the Rhetorical Curriculum,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 44, no. 6 (2012): 727–43.

73 Diane Davis and Michelle Ballif, “Guest Editors’ Introduction: Pushing the Limits of the Anthropos,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 47, no. 4 (2014): 348.

74 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 188. Damien Smith Pfister argues that “rhetorics of critical posthumanism approach new technologies recognize that the human animal is embedded in and co-constructed by a vast network of technological, cultural, economic, and political forces” (“Against the Droid’s ‘Instrument of Efficiency,’ for Animalizing Technologies in a Posthumanist Spirit,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 50, no. 2 [2017]: 204).

75 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 193.

76 Nathan Snaza and John Weaver, eds., Posthumanism and Educational Research (London: Routledge, 2015), 3; Laszlo Versenyi, “Protagoras’ Man-Measure Fragment,” The American Journal of Philology 83, no. 2 (1962): 178–84. Rosi Braidotti argues that the structural anthropomorphism of the humanities is hostile/incompatible with the culture, practice, and institutional existence of science and technology (“Yes, There Is No Crisis: Working towards the Posthumanities,” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 1, no. 2 [2013]: 190; “Posthuman Humanities,” European Educational Research Journal 12, no. 1 [2013]: 1–19).

77 Brad Petitfils, “Researching the Posthuman Paradigm: The ‘Subject’ as a Curricular Lens,” in Posthumanism and Educational Research, ed. Nathan Snaza and John Weaver (London: Routledge, 2015), 34; Casey Boyle, “Writing and Rhetoric and/as Posthuman Practice,” College English 78, no. 6 (2016): 539; Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 286.

78 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 193. Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle advance the term “rhetorical ontology,” which highlights how various material elements—human and nonhuman alike—interact suasively and agentially in rhetorical situations and ecologies. See Scot Barnett and Casey Andrew Boyle, eds., Introduction to Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016), 2.

79 Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric, 103. This parallels the trend in other fields to take up new materialism as a critical framework; to understand “the human species as being relocated within a natural environment whose material forces themselves manifest certain agentic capacities.” See Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 10.

80 Eberly and Serber, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of … ,” 280; Debra Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Keith Gilyard, Composition and Cornel West: Notes Toward a Deep Democracy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).

81 Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 2–18. Foss and Griffin’s invitational rhetoric is based on equality, immanent value, and self-determination. Miqqui Alicia Gilbert’s coalescent argumentation also fits in the feminist paradigm; she asserts that “the most crucial element in coalescent argumentation” is empathy (“Coalescent Argumentation,” Argumentation: An International Journal on Reasoning 9, no. 5 [1995]: 845; “Feminism, Argumentation and Coalescence,” Informal Logic 16, no. 2 [1994]: 96). Gilbert contends that arguments are multimodal, that there are dominant modes of argument beyond the logical mode such as the emotional, the visceral (physical/material), and the kisceral (spiritual).

82 Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister, eds., Ancient Rhetorics & Digital Networks (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2018). See also Collin G. Brooke, who examines the ancient canons in light of new media and proposes a transformation of each (proairesis, pattern, perspective, persistence, and performance) Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media (New York: Hampton Press, 2009); Barnet and Boyle, Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things; Pfister, Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014); “Against the Droid’s ‘Instrument of Efficiency,’ for Animalizing Technologies in a Posthumanist Spirit.”

83 Brooke, Lingua Fracta, 28.

84 Chávez urges scholars to look beyond the narrative of citizenship as rhetoric. She recommends instead a postmodern form of citizenship—global or cosmopolitan citizenship. See Renato Rosaldo, “Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 402–11; Toby Miller, The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Danielle S. Allen encourages an orientation toward “participatory readiness” instead of “civic engagement” (Danielle S. Allen, et al., eds., Education and Equality [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016], 27–50). Pfister argues that networked rhetorical theory must develop a conception of cosmopolitan citizenship (Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics, 192).

85 Boyle, “Writing and Rhetoric and/as Posthuman Practice,” 532.

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid., 533. Boyle follows Laura R. Micciche as seeing writers and writing—in our context rhetors and their communication—as “codependent with things, places, people, and all sorts of others,” thereby working against the subject/object divorce inherent in humanist practice (“Writing Material,” College English 76, no. 6 [2014]: 488–505).

88 Ibid., 544 original emphasis.

89 Ersula Ore, “Pushback: A Pedagogy of Care,” Pedagogy 17, no. 1 (2016): 12, 25.

90 PetitfIils, “Researching the Posthuman Paradigm,” 35.

91 Students can realize “the particular and situated nature of rhetoric and the need for rhetoric to respond to particular needs of particular publics at particular times” (Eberly, Citizen Critics, 169).

92 The ancient principle of phronesis manifests as “social knowledge” in 20th-century rhetoric scholarship. Michael Leff characterized the epistemic turn as the major thread of 20th-century rhetorical theory (“In Search of Ariadne’s Thread: A Review of the Recent Literature on Rhetorical Theory,” Central States Speech Journal 29 [1978]: 73–91). See also Lois S. Self, “Rhetoric and Phronesis: The Aristotelian Ideal,” Philosophy & Rhetoric (1979): 130–45; Richard Cherwitz, “Rhetoric as a Way of Knowing: An Attenuation of the Epistemological Claims of the ‘New Rhetoric,’” The Southern Communication Journal 42, no. 3 (1977): 207–19.

93 Kenneth A. Bruffee, Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 12. In contemporary higher education research, this practice is known as Problem-Based Learning. See Deborah E. Allen, Richard S. Donham, and Stephen A. Bernhardt, “Problem-Based Learning,” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 128 (2011): 21–29.

94 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of RHETORIC: The Quest for Effective Communication (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 11. Its opposite is “win-rhetoric.”

95 Ibid.; Eberly and Serber argue that “deliberation in general education classroom settings has the advantage of instructors who can model real-time information-seeking behaviors and who can act as collaborative learners” (“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of … ,” 280). This is not the same kind of “problem-solving” that is driven by the neoliberal agenda. See Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

96 Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture, 1. See also Andrea A. Lunsford, Kirt H Wilson, and Rosa A. Eberly, Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, xxi.

97 Learning outcomes are increasingly significant in higher education broadly. Wendy Sharer has urged the field “to determine and describe the rhetorical abilities we want students to have as a result of an undergraduate curriculum that integrates rhetoric and civic engagement” (“Civic Participation and the Undergraduate Curriculum,” 387). See also William Keith and Roxanne Mountford, “The Mt. Oread Manifesto on Rhetorical Education 2013,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2014): 1–5.

98 Murphy reminds us that contemporary U.S. society calls on communication educators to cultivate in their students an increased appreciation for the ways issues of social and political importance are shaped through processes of communication and interaction (“Deliberative Civic Education and Civil Society,” 89).

99 Eberly and Serber, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of … .,” 292.

100 Eberly, Citizen Critics, 1.

101 Sharer, “Civic Participation and the Undergraduate Curriculum,” 385.

102 Flanagan, “Public Scholarship and Youth at the Transition to Adulthood,” 42.

103 The slogan “Fearless Ideas” at Maryland represents the university’s dedication to “entrepreneurship, innovation, research, and leadership.” The slogan appears on shuttle buses, flags on campus light poles, and on fundraising materials sent to alumni and donors. See “Fearless Ideas: University of Maryland,” Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/52110970 (accessed January 24, 2018).

104 In April 2018, University of Maryland President Wallace Loh announced that Collins will be honored with a physical memorial (Leah Brennan, “UMD Will Have a Memorial to Richard Collins on Campus,” The Diamondback, April 10, 2018, http://www.dbknews.com/2018/04/10/richard-collins-murder-memorial-umd-wallace-loh/); Christine Condon, “UMD Plans Remembrance of Richard Collins as Anniversary of Killing Approaches,” The Diamondback, May 7, 2018, http://www.dbknews.com/2018/05/07/richard-collins-umd-anniversary-remembrance-memorial-chapel-sean-urbanski/.

105 See Greene, “It Runs Deep and We Can’t Talk it Out”; Jenna Johnson, “Students Trace the University of Maryland’s Slavery Ties,” Washington Post, October 10, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/09/AR2009100904061.html.

106 Richard Collins III is not the most recent student to die on Maryland’s campus. As a result of negligence, 19-year-old offensive lineman Jordan McNair died of heatstroke during a summer football workout (Jonas Shaffer, “Maryland Offensive Lineman Jordan McNair Died of Heatstroke, According to Family’s Foundation,” The Baltimore Sun, July 16, 2018, http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/terps/tracking-the-terps/bs-sp-maryland-jordan-mcnair-heatstroke-20180716-story.html).

107 Mark Scolforo, “Timeline: Stunning Details in Penn State Frat Death,” Associated Press, June 12, 2017, http://6abc.com/news/timeline-stunning-details-in-penn-state-frat-death/1976183/.

108 As of August 2018, the most serious charges in this case had been dropped four times (Matthew Stevens, “Piazza Family Attorney Says ‘No Surprise’ after Judge Dismisses Charges for Fourth Time,” WAJCTV.com, June 8, 2018, http://wjactv.com/news/local/piazza-family-attorney-says-no-surprise-after-judge-dismisses-charges-for-fourth-time; Bret Pallotto, “Highest Graded Charges Again Dismissed Against Former Penn State Frat Brothers,” Centre Daily Times, August 24, 2018, https://www.centredaily.com/news/local/crime/article217155085.html), but three former fraternity members had pleaded guilty to lesser charges (Mikayla Corrigan, “Penn State Hazing Death: A Third Beta Theta Pi Brother Pleads Guilty,” https://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/crime_courts/article_554540e2-ac5b-11e8-8b59-03f7bff5c738.html).

109 Lori Falce, “Beta Theta Pi Says Renting Frat House Is a Tradition, Not a New Use,” Centre Daily Times, October 27, 2017, http://www.centredaily.com/news/local/education/penn-state/article181307506.html.

110 Micciche, “Writing Material,” College English 76, no. 6 (2014): 501.

111 Lunsford, Reclaiming Rhetorica, 6.

112 Such as colleges and universities investing less in their historic, democratic missions of providing increased access and upward mobility for less advantaged populations of students and instead emphasizing revenue generation (Slaughter and Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, 308).

113 Rood, “The Gap between Rhetorical Education and Civic Discourse,” 143.

114 Eberly, “Rhetoric and the Anti-Logos Doughball,” 294.

115 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 180.

116 Henry A. Giroux, “Liberal Arts Education and the Struggle for Public Life,” in The Politics of Liberal Education, ed. Darryl Gless and Barbara Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 121. Giroux invokes Ernst Bloch’s notion of the utopian impulse of daydreams (The Philosophy of the Future, trans. John Cumming [New York: Herder and Herder, 1970], 86–87).