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In this essay, we describe how rhetoric’s theories of temporality can inform ongoing urban development. We examine a transportation planning case to suggest that urban development must value contri...

This essay contributes to scholarship on precarity and rhetoric by exploring how participatory epideictic rhetorics, data, and infrastructure contribute to precarity. We concentrate on how shared d...

Histories of information help clarify the values and intellectual commitments of the discipline. This study takes a rhetorical history approach to better understand the development of information studies as a discipline. Information studies historians have identified that the Cold War period was critical for the development of information science and consequently of its modern-day incarnations. Due to post-World War II prosperity, the 1960s saw a surge in interest in scientific and technical information. Many from government, education, and private sectors took interest in developing new ways to compete with Soviet science. This interest led to the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Georgia Tech conferences of 1961 and 1962, which are analyzed here. I find that concerns about the “science information problem” provided language that was critical for transforming some of the information studies’ central concepts. In particular, I find that the idea of an “information scientist” was made possible by national funding for science information. I suggest that attending to the discursive traffic between public and disciplinary discourse of information studies can better attune the field to its intellectual commitments.

This article examines how sensation and affect make different kinds of resilience meaningful to communities. Through a case study, we analyze public deliberation about a proposal to expand interstates in Tampa, Florida. We describe how evidence introduced by opposing sides foregrounded conflicting sensory experiences. The resulting sensoriums upheld different aspects of the city’s identity as worth maintaining. Drawing from recent scholarship defining resilience as something that can always be done otherwise, we suggest that resilience is better understood as entangled with public affect. We argue that a key point for rhetorical intervention in city planning is considering which futures and visions of resilience are being imagined for publics.

Enhancing the Epistemological Project in the Rhetoric of Science: Information Infrastructure as Tool for Identifying Epistemological Commitments in Scientific and Technical Communities. Article discusses how the STS concept of infrastructural provides a mesolayer approach to understand global issues in science with rhetorical methodology.

This article describes protocological rhetoric as a conceptual tool for exploring and changing institutions. Protocological rhetoric is an extension of two lines of thought: Porter, Sullivan, Blythe, Grabill, and Miles's institutional critique and Science & Technology Studies's (STS) concept of information infrastructure. As a result, protocological rhetoric imagines institutions as networked information infrastructures. This article describes the method and provides an example through historical case study. I suggest that the approach provides methods for actively transforming institutions.

This research argues that documents can become intermediaries which affect the relationships between disparate groups. Through a critical analysis of materials distributed during an online protest, the author traces the life of a single technical document, simultaneously describing how it was described during deliberation between several groups. Marcusean critical theory and rhetorical criticism framed the analysis. It is suggested that certain documents act as a locus between otherwise unaffiliated groups and that those documents become agents who can mediate deliberation. Further, it is suggested that document analysis can become an important aspect for interpreting group relationships. Future research examining the agency of documents is suggested.