Bathroom graffiti. Podcasts. Skibibi brain rot. Social media activism. Deepfakes. Collages. J.D. Vance Photoshop memes. In this blog carnival, the contributing authors used these ideas to explore the role of circulation in rhetoric and writing studies.
Some authors used the framework of circulation to explore how specific artifacts or ideas circulate through different systems. For example, Alexandra Gunnells, in “Digital Circulation and the Question of Publics,” examines how digital media circulates and constitutes collective identities. Similarly concerned with the influences of digital media on culture and identity, in “The SEO to Skibidi Pipeline,” Sophia Lyons, coins the term “digital linguistic transference” to describe the “reciprocal linguistic exchange between internet users and online content.” Finally, Kyle Cunningham rounds out the conversation with a timely analysis of the power of the ludic in social and political critique in “Play, Rhetoric, and the Circulation of J.D. Vance Photoshops.”
While digital media is a common feature of circulation studies, as Jonathan Marine reminds us in “The Circulation of Rhetoric from Stall Walls to Social Feeds: Notes from the Analog Underground,” rhetorical circulation is a phenomena that pre-dates the digital turn and even “the digital” itself. Drawing attention to analogue examples of circulation, like latrinalia, or bathroom graffiti, Marine makes a strong and linguistically lyrical case for the need for more scholarly investigation of the circulation that happens beyond the screen. Similarly, Stephen Paur invites us to consider not just the circulation of digital media, but also the circulation of ideas, challenging our pre-existing notions of citation and information hierarchies (“Collage as Socialist Circulation”).
Finally, several of the authors included in this collection sought to ground the often abstracted notion of circulation in concrete classroom practices and research methodologies. Lauren Downs calls on writing programs and universities to update their literacy modules to include information on deepfakes and the ways in which they circulate online (“Is This for Real? Implications of Deepfakes on Learning and Research”). Jaclyn Ordway alternatively offers a research method for studying circulation and virality on social media in “Attending to Scales of Intensity: A Viral/Chronological Method for Researching the Circulation of Activist Rhetoric.”
While the study of circulation has evolved and adopted different terms, such as virality or algorithmic studies, it is still a useful area of study for scholars seeking to understand how texts, images, and ideas flow through the ever-expanding systems, networks, platforms, and systems that make up our world. The contributors to this blog carnival each showcased both the impact and range of circulation studies, while making meaningful contributions to the scholarly conversation. Unrestricted by traditional modes of publication, this blog carnival offers readers a series of kairotic posts composed and compiled by emerging scholars in the field.
As emerging scholars ourselves, we (the editors of this blog carnival) learned a lot from this opportunity by stepping into the editor role. In graduate school, we spend much of our time learning—implicitly and explicitly—how to write. However, there are very few opportunities to learn how to edit. While working on this blog carnival, we had many conversations about the “type” of editors we wanted to be, which varied from piece to piece and sometimes from day to day. Often, we felt it was best to act as mentors to members of the academic community who were even newer than us. Other times, our main goal was to simply encourage the authors to take full advantage of the unusual and wonderfully multimodal blog carnival genre. In each case, we thoroughly enjoyed the experience of editing these thoughtful posts. We’d like to extend a massive thank you to the contributing authors for trusting us with your words, in addition to Naomi, Simone, Alyse, and the other graduate fellows!
We hope you enjoyed reading this blog carnival—feel free to circulate!
