This book brings rhetorical, legal, and professional communication perspectives to the discourse surrounding policy-making efforts within the United States around two types of violent crimes against women: domestic violence and sexual assault. The authors propose that such analysis adds to our understanding of rhetorical concepts such as kairos, risk perception, moral panic, genre analysis, and identity theory. Overall, the goal is to demonstrate how rhetorical, legal, and professional communication perspectives work together to illuminate public discourse and conflict in such complicated and ongoing dilemmas as how to aid victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, and how to manage the offenders of such crimes—social and cultural problems that continue to perplex the legal system and the social environment.

Winner of the 2022 Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ARSTM) Book Award Winner of the 2022 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition What It Feels Like interrogates an underexamined reason for our failure to abolish rape in the United States: the way we communicate about it. Using affective and feminist materialist approaches to rhetorical criticism, Stephanie Larson examines how discourses about rape and sexual assault rely on strategies of containment, denying the felt experiences of victims and ultimately stalling broader claims for justice. Investigating anti-pornography debates from the 1980s, Violence Against Women Act advocacy materials, sexual assault forensic kits, public performances, and the #MeToo movement, Larson reveals how our language privileges male perspectives and, more deeply, how it is shaped by systems of power—patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and heteronormativity. Interrogating how these systems work to propagate masculine commitments to “science” and “hard evidence,” Larson finds that US culture holds a general mistrust of testimony by women, stereotyping it as “emotional.” But she also gives us hope for change, arguing that testimonies grounded in the bodily, material expression of violation are necessary for giving voice to victims of sexual violence and presenting, accurately, the scale of these crimes. Larson makes a case for visceral rhetorics, theorizing them as powerful forms of communication and persuasion. Demonstrating the communicative power of bodily feeling, Larson challenges the long-held commitment to detached, distant, rationalized discourses of sexual harassment and rape. Timely and poignant, the book offers a much-needed corrective to our legal and political discourses.

Homeless Voices: Stigma, Space, and Social Media argues that the best sources for how to address issues of homelessness are people experiencing homelessness themselves, particularly as they express their experiences through personal blogs and memoirs. Mary L. Schuster discusses how space and land have been historically denied to marginalized communities who still feel the effects to this day, along with examining the conditions and limitations of common spaces often assigned to those experiencing homelessness, culminating in an analysis of how the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has impacted homelessness. Schuster focuses on two vulnerable groups that often experience homelessness: victims of domestic violence and unaccompanied youth, particularly those who struggle with gender identity and unstable housing. This book includes a variety of case studies, examining public meetings and court decisions, public policy symposiums, and personal interviews, and ultimately finds that intersectionality—specifically age, race, gender identity, and ethnicity—plays a large part in understanding and experiencing homelessness. By shifting our attention to the diverse voices who experience homelessness themselves, Schuster claims, we can finally begin to remedy this crisis. Scholars of media studies, sociology, and urban development will find this book particularly useful.

In this book, Dirk Remley applies his model of integrating multimodal rhetorical theory and multi-sensory neural processing theory pertaining to cognition and learning to multimodal persuasive messages. Using existing theories from multimodal rhetoric and specific findings from neurobiological studies, the book shows possible applications of the model through case studies related to persuasive messages such as those found in political campaign advertising, legal scenarios and general advertising, including print, videos, and in-person settings. As such, the book furthers the discussion of cognitive neuroscience and multimodal rhetorical theory, and it serves as a vehicle by which readers can better understand the links between multimodal rhetoric and cognitive neuroscience associated with persuasive communication in professional and educational environments.

Exploring the relationship between postindustrial writing and developments in energy production, manufacturing, and agriculture, Michael J. Salvo shows how technological and industrial innovation relies on communicative and organizational suppleness. Through representative case studies, Salvo demonstrates the ways in which technical communicators formulate opportunities that link resources with need. His book is a supple articulation of the opportunities and pitfalls that come with great change.

This book focuses on the uses of scientific evidence within three types of environmental discourses: popular nonfiction books about the environment; traditional and social media texts created by a grassroots environmental group; and a set of data displays that make arguments about global warming in a variety of media and contexts. It traces the operations of eight commonplaces about science and shows how they recur throughout these contexts, starting with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and ending with contemporary blogs and social media. The commonplaces are shown to embed ideological assumptions and simultaneously challenge those assumptions. In addition, the book addresses the potential dangers involved in relying too heavily on aspects of these commonplaces, and how they can undermine the goals of some of the writers who use them.

The Victim’s Voice in the Sexual Misconduct Crisis investigates how a victim’s voice, identity, credibility, and proof are challenged or established in the current sexual misconduct crisis. Using communication and rhetorical analysis, gender studies, and law and society perspectives, Mary Schuster examines concerns such as victim impact statements offered in sentencing hearings of convicted offenders, due process and Title IX requirements in campus sexual assault investigations, and laws and Title VII standards governing workplace sexual harassment complaints. Schuster also analyzes the testimony offered in the 1991 and 1998 U.S. Senate Judiciary Hearings regarding the Supreme Court nominations of Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, social movements such as #Me Too, and global activists’ efforts to challenge gender stereotypes and hierarchies. This book argues that we cannot outlaw or legislate away sexual misconduct, but must instead focus on cultural, social, and systemic changes in order to change the current climate. Moreover, the author argues for zero tolerance for sexual misconduct, but recommends a gradation of punishment or sanctions for offenders, offering examples of successful educational and therapeutic efforts to alter misconceptions regarding sexual misconduct. Scholars of gender studies, communication, legal studies, and rhetoric will find this book particularly useful.

This book addresses the roles and challenges of people who communicate science, who work with scientists, and who teach STEM majors how to write. In terms of practice and theory, chapters address themes encountered by scientists and communicators, including ethical challenges, visual displays, and communication with publics, as well as changed and changing contexts and genres. The pedagogy section covers topics important to instructors’ everyday teaching as well as longer-term curricular development. Chapters address delivery of rhetorically informed instruction, communication from experts to the publics, writing assessment, online teaching, and communication-intensive pedagogies and curricula. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book takes a close look at systems and rhetorics of silencing in sports training. Using the case study of the Larry Nassar abuse scandal at Michigan State University and within USA Gymnastics, the book explores multifaceted problems of speaking, silencing, and listening in youth and college athletic organizations, investigating the cultures of abuse and discursive practices that silence victims while protecting abusers. The author foregrounds the victims’ voices through an analysis of victim impact statements and victim interviews, while examining other textual artifacts to understand the institutional behaviors and actions both before and after the case caught public attention. Exploring the issue far beyond the single organization, the author discusses the norms, values, ideologies, and expected behaviors of youth and college sports programs as institutions to help describe “rhetorical cultures of champion-building.” This innovative study offers new perspectives that will interest students and scholars of sport communication, rhetoric, organizational communication, criminology, and feminist theory.

Gender in Communication: A Critical Introduction embraces the full range of diverse gender identities and expressions to explore how gender influences communication, as well as how communication shapes our concepts of gender for the individual and for society at large. Authors Catherine Helen Palczewski, Danielle D. McGeough, and Victoria Pruin DeFrancisco equip readers with the critical analysis tools to form their own conclusions about the ever changing processes of gender in communication. This comprehensive gender communication book is the first to extensively address the roles of religion, the gendered body, single-sex education, an institutional analysis of gender construction, social construction theory, and more. The Fourth Edition has streamlined the text to make it more accessible to students without sacrificing the sophistication of the book′s trademark intersectional approach.