This Rhetorical Life

This Rhetorical Life


Latest Episodes

Episode 33: Cruz Medina Interviews Ana Castillo
November 21, 2016

This summer, Cruz Medina reached out to This Rhetorical Life to share an interview he had done with Ana Castillo. As Medina states in this episode: As a writer, Ana Castillo’s work is the art that identifies subject matter before those of us who are ac...

Episode 32: Queer Public Cultures & the Rhetoricity of Sex Museums
October 10, 2016

  “Homonormativity has had two kind of strains of theoretical emphasis, one of which has been the focus on neoliberal prerogatives and priorities into institutions and everyday life, and gay and lesbian formations in particular,

Episode 31: An Interview with Ira Shor—Part Two
May 24, 2016

In any event, first [thing] we have to make contact with is the situation that we are entering and what kind of context we are teaching in, and for. And we have to then educate ourselves into the context. In addition, the other thing is,

Episode 30: An Interview with Ira Shor
May 07, 2016

Image of Ira Shor from BBS Radio In part one of our interview, Ira Shor tells us about growing up in the Bronx, his early experiences of education, joining social movements, practicing critical pedagogy, and his first encounters and early collaboration...

Episode 29: Reflections on Rhetoric and Citizenship
October 26, 2015

I just don’t understand why we have to talk about every mode of belonging as some kind of citizenship. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m interested in people’s practices of resistance. I’m interested in people’s practices of belonging.

Episode 28: Transcription // Translation
April 23, 2015

We tend to assume that captioning is objective. It’s just copying down. We tend to privilege speech sounds, and there’s just something about speech that sort of makes it seem easier to transcribe. It’s straightforward and objective,

Episode 27: Addressing Racism in the Classroom
February 20, 2015

I started the research really struggling to understand how seemingly good people could say such awful things, and that’s really what I wanted to understand. I think what I found is that people are not all one thing or another.

Episode 26: Conversations about Academic Labor, Academic Freedom, and Palestine
December 18, 2014

There’s a certain set of conceits around academic freedom that limit its functionality and its practice, and those conceits often have to do with critiques of state power, critiques of colonization, critiques of structural violence. –Steven Salaita

Episode 25: The Pod(cast) People Speak
November 14, 2014

Scholarship is designed to reach some sort of conclusion, even provisional, whereas the podcast because I think it’s still anchored in a kind of entertainment model [stardust clicking] is actually sort of less interested in conclusions and probably als...

Episode 24: On Ferguson
October 24, 2014

Can’t we find more creative ways to report these stories? The story of Michael Brown is so important, but we get trapped, I think, in this narrow narrative that we’ve been telling for a really long time. —Tessa Brown -