Weaving intimacies: Grace and connection in scholarly community

ABSTRACT

This special forum was convened to honor the memory of Dr. Daniel C. Brouwer, who died in May 2021. Each contribution is coauthored to specifically honor his commitments to collaboration as a key form of scholarly inquiry, co-mentoring, ethical relationships, and community building. Each essay focuses on an aspect of Brouwer's scholarship, exploring topical, methodological, and theoretical interventions to generate insights and reflections for the field. The essays assess his body of work, its contributions to the study of rhetoric and communication, as well as other areas of study and disciplines. The forum also articulates future directions for scholarship in these areas drawing on insights from Dan's scholarship, and provide resources for scholars to further engage with the broader questions, problems, and possibilities incited by his published work, his robust practices of living, and his untimely death.

KEYWORDS:

• Community
• intimacy
• relationships
• loss
• mentorship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Boss created the term “ambiguous loss” in the 1970s to refer to the sense of loss felt after direct or indirect trauma, such as natural disasters like hurricanes or pandemics, and human inflicted trauma such as families forcibly separated by migration or incarceration, disappearances or suicides of loved ones. As she summarizes on her webpage, ambiguous loss generates lingering distress over loss that is unclear, undefined, and “accompanied by a loss of trust in the world as a safe space and a loss of uncertainty about … the rebuilding of our lives.” The difference between ordinary loss and ambiguous loss is that the sufferer has no certainty that anyone or anything will ever return to “normal,” and cannot imagine how to rebuild a life without that which was lost. See “Frequently Asked Questions About Ambiguous Loss,” accessed September 27, 2021, https://www.ambiguousloss.com/about/faq/; Pauline Boss, Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change (New York: WW Norton, 2021).

2 See Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, eds., “Special Issue on John Dewey and the Public Sphere,” Argumentation and Advocacy 39, no. 3 (2003): 157–221.

3 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; reprint, Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1954), 151.

4 See Barbara A. Biesecker, “The Crisis of Higher Education and the Rhetorical Vicissitudes of the Common Good,” Review of Communication 19, no. 2 (2019): 111–26.

5 Silvia Cristina Bettez, “Critical Community Building: Beyond Belonging,” Educational Foundations 25, nos. 3–4 (2011): 11.

6 Daniel C. Brouwer, “Communication as Counterpublic,” in Communication As … : Perspectives on Theory, ed. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage), 198, 200.

7 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 12.

8 Hil Malatino, Trans Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 2.

9 Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 195.