Relocating Authority
Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration
“This collection will have broad appeal for rhetoric and literacy scholars and for interdisciplinary fields of futures studies and material and popular culture.”
—Peter Goggin, Arizona State University
"We are challenged to forge future practices rather than unearth them, to generate the rhetorics of posterity rather than stumble into them. . . . Rhetorical Speculations proves a valuable contribution toward speculating the future of digital pedagogies."
—Textshop Experiments
"Rhetoric creates worlds, writing creates worlds, and technology creates worlds. This collection encourages us to be bold and recognize the past as we forge ahead. We should consider taking Sundvall’s collection as a blueprint for the future of rhetoric and writing studies, and we should run with it."
—Rhetoric Review
The future of writing studies is fundamentally tied to advancing technological development—writing cannot be done without a technology and different technologies mediate writing differently. In Rhetorical Speculations, contributors engage with emerging technologies of composition through “speculative modeling” as a strategy for anticipatory, futural thinking for rhetoric and writing studies.
Rhetoric and writing studies often engages technological shifts reactively, after the production and reception of rhetoric and writing has changed. This collection allows rhetoric and writing scholars to explore modes of critical speculation into the transformative effect of emerging technologies, particularly as a means to speculate on future shifts in the intellectual, pedagogical, and institutional frameworks of the field. In doing so, the project repositions rhetoric and writing scholars as proprietors of our technological future to come rather than as secondary receivers, critics, and adjusters of the technological present.
Major and emerging voices in the field offer a range of styles that include pragmatic, technical, and philosophical approaches to the issue of speculative rhetoric, exploring what new media/writing studies could be—theoretically, pedagogically, and institutionally—as future technologies begin to impinge on the work of writing. Rhetorical Speculations is at the cutting edge of the subject of futures thinking and will have broad appeal to scholars of rhetoric, literacy, futures studies, and material and popular culture.
Contributors: Bahareh Brittany Alaei, Sarah J. Arroyo, Kristine L. Blair, Geoffrey V. Carter, Sidney I. Dobrin, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Steve Holmes, Kyle Jensen, Halcyon Lawrence, Alexander Monea, Sean Morey, Alex Reid, Jeff Rice, Gregory L. Ulmer, Anna Worm
