Speakers: Ashley Beardsley (Western Illinois University), Jason Palmer (Georgia State University), Antonio Hamilton (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
This panel brought together three presentations that, on the surface, may not seem to belong in the same room: a history of Junior League cookbooks, an attempt to define the still-forming category of “AI rhetoric,” and a reflection on invention and writer identity in the age of generative AI. But taken together, these talks formed a productive conversation about how we make meaning across contexts: through food, through machines, and through the persistent, recursive act of writing.
Ashley Beardsley opened the panel with a presentation on the rhetorical and affective functions of Junior League cookbooks, arguing that these objects do more than fundraise: they circulate memory, identity, and place. Founded in 1901 to create space for young women to contribute to community life, the Junior League has long used cookbooks as a fundraising mechanism. These cookbooks often feature simple typed recipes alongside contributors’ names, but Beardsley argues that these texts are metonymic and multisensory: objects that evoke embodied memories through food and design. For example, a 2021 New York volume created during the pandemic includes short stories memorializing individuals, while a 2022 Washington, D.C. cookbook replaced their usual kitchen tours of affluent homes with a virtual text that lacks clear local visual markers. In contrast, a 2021 Denver edition features rich images of the Denver area which elicit an embodied sense of place for Beardsley herself. These cookbooks ultimately function as containers of memory and relational identity, anchoring readers to the past through a shared sense of sensory and social history.
Jason Palmer next offered a presentation that sought to define the emergent concept of “AI rhetoric.” Framing his inquiry through Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as “the available means of persuasion,” Palmer argued that the term “AI rhetoric” is increasingly important but inconsistently defined across disciplines. Through qualitative interviews with scholars in rhetoric and writing studies, Palmer explores how people are currently using (and struggling to use) this term in productive ways. His findings so far suggest that AI rhetoric can be broken into three overlapping categories: 1) rhetoric from AI (computer-generated outputs), 2) rhetoric to AI (human prompts and interactions), and 3) rhetoric about AI (cultural and scholarly discourse). Citing Annette Vee, Palmer also noted that AI rhetoric is best understood not as a unidirectional phenomenon but as a “back and forth”: a dynamic exchange in which human and machine discourse co-evolve. Palmer emphasized the disciplinary stakes of the project, especially as AI-generated language becomes a widespread mode of persuasion. His long-term aim is threefold: to define the term more clearly, to trace its historical and fictional lineage, and to establish AI rhetoric as a crucial component of critical literacy in the 21st century.
Closing out the panel, Antonio Hamilton turned toward pedagogy, asking what does it mean to teach invention in a time when students have access to generative AI? Drawing from rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy, Hamilton framed writer identity through three lenses: 1) agency and voice, 2) rhetorical awareness of genre and audience, and 3) processes of identity formation. He asked: when AI is involved in writing, where does the writer reside? In the process, the product, or somewhere else entirely? Drawing on theories of writerly invention, Hamilton suggested that the use of AI aligns more closely with imitation. While Gen AI tools can help students overcome insecurity and spark ideas, they can also flatten originality and limit student thinking to pre-existing outputs. His research examines how students themselves understand the function of invention when AI is part of their process. Rather than excluding Gen AI from the classroom, Hamilton advocates for pedagogies that teach students to interrogate the technology. For example, asking AI to explain its own rhetorical choices can prompt students to reflect more deeply on audience, style, and purpose. In his view, the goal is not to ban the tool, but to reposition it: to help students reassert their agency in writing processes that now include machines.
Together, the panelists offered an unexpected mashup of themes: the sensory and social labor of print cookbooks, the discursive complexity of AI interactions, and the pedagogical challenges of writing with machines. Whether mediated through food, code, or classroom dialogue, the presentations collectively asked: how do we locate invention in the tools and texts we use to make meaning? And how do we teach others to do the same?
