En medieprovokatør bliver til: Personakonstruktioner og -transformationer i Eva Selsings retorik

With the concept media provocateur, a personification of Olivier Driessens’ concept media provocation, we refer to debaters who use provocative rhetoric and social media circulation to gain a prominent speaking position in traditional, journalistic mass media. In a close reading of selected texts by Eva Selsing, whom we regard as a paradigmatic case, we show how Selsing constructs and transforms her provocative persona across journalistic genres and thereby establishes herself as a media provocateur in a hybrid media system. In continuation of this, we discuss how provocative style may function as a catalyst for rhetorical agency for media provocateurs, the media they work for, and potentially the general public. However, as we see it, the public’s agency is dependent on publicist mass media to not only offer media provocateurs a platform and fortify the provocateurs’ self-presentation; public mass media must also take responsibility for and play an active role as curators of the public debate that the media provocateurs’ rhetoric creates

Kairos and actio – a rhetorical approach to timing

This article explores timing, kairos, in human interaction by analyzing nonverbal communication. The skill of timing, being able to do “the right thing at the right time,” is important for rhetorical agency. What are the silent processes in human interaction, and how do they influence the possibility for a kairotic moment to occur? Empirical material consisting of theater rehearsals has been analyzed. The findings show that the actio qualities: tempo and energy, as well as phronesis, are important factors for the appearance of a kairotic moment.

Restorying With the Ancestors: Historically Rooted Speculative Composing Practices and Alternative Rhetorics of Queer Futurity

Within literacy, rhetoric, and composition (LRC) studies, composing practices have been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests histories, imagination, and identities through acts of writing. Likewise, in queer LRC studies, the capacity to write with queer rhetorical agency or to recognize the impossibility of composing queer subjectivity has been tied to the living. Scholars have yet to consider with adequacy, however, the ways in which writing is equally bound up with the dead, with ghosts, histories, and ancestors that animate the imagination and attendant composing practices. Tracing the historically rooted speculative composing practices (HRSCPs) of an inquiry group of nine queer composers, this article spotlights queer ancestors as speculative resources for imagining and then composing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Specifically, this article details how three queer composers, Coyote (they/them), Helen (she/her), and Margarita (they/them), restory the imagination, happiness, and reality with the ancestors, doing so to challenge the trope of queer unhappy endings attached to realist genres. This article concludes by inviting LRC studies to explore how HRSCPs might be integrated into future research and pedagogy and thereby pursue healing for communities long marginalized within the field.

Distributed Feminist Rhetorical Agency after a Rape Accusation

This article examines the rhetorical effects of a rape accusation on the survivor and on the survivor’s community of social justice activists. Relying on interviews with the survivor and with the community affected by the allegation, the article analyzes responses to the allegation, articulates how those responses are informed by rape culture, and illustrates how those responses affected the survivor and her rhetorical agency. The article argues that rhetorical agency can be productively distributed across various allies to assist survivors and help restore the rhetorical agency that rape erodes. Establishing sexual assault as a public health issue, the article recommends broad education in rhetorical listening to improve how those entrusted to hear assault stories listen, respond, and, when appropriate, help survivors speak or act.

Making-Do on the Margins: Organizing Resource Seeking and Rhetorical Agency in Communities During Grassroots Entrepreneurship

Innovation and entrepreneurship are important yet understudied pathways in the technical and professional communication (TPC) literature for studying how underresourced people enact agency given weak or absent access to institutions. Despite TPC’s social justice turn and continued internationalization of research and practice, little is known about how economically underresourced entrepreneurs work in the majority world. Drawing on multisited, ethnographic research in communities of such grassroots entrepreneurs in India, the author inquires into the processes by which innovation and entrepreneurship are practiced in extrainstitutional settings of the majority world. Popular and scholarly reports paint a simplistic picture when they claim that grassroots entrepreneurs are resourceful, resilient bricoleurs who possess deep, contextual knowledge of complex problems for which they improvise affordable solutions. Challenging this homogenizing view, the author shares rich accounts of how such individuals navigate the complex sociocultural contexts that constrain and enable bricolage on institutional margins.