Author: Jianfen Chen

Editors: Jianfen Chen and Danielle Koepke The spread of COVID-19 across the nation and the globe has posed unprecedented challenges to teaching, learning, and researching rhetoric, composition, writing center studies, languages, and communication in institutions of higher education. With social distancing, quarantine, hybrid and virtual teaching and learning becoming part of the new normal, we are being continuously pushed to find new adaptations and create innovative ways of thinking and doing as scholars and researchers. While the pandemic is tearing us apart, empathy could be part of the solutions to generate a trusting and compassionate relationship with one another to…

I understand digital rhetoric as a creative extension of traditional Aristotelian rhetoric thanks to digital technologies, but with more heuristic and persuasive powers given to the three canons of invention, memory, and delivery. Because of this, I am particularly interested in how digital rhetoric is creating new avenues for persuasion, ethical advocacy for the public good, life-long education, and effective and efficient global communication. My broad interests in digital rhetoric began with my first semester in the master’s program of technical communication in 2017. Even without a clear idea about what digital rhetoric was, I started my first ever professional…

Among many tools used by humans to contain COVID-19, face masks have been the most important in China since the outbreak of this pandemic. COVID-19 has empowered face masks to take the form of an assemblage and agglomerate with other human and non-human assemblages.  Such assemblage rhetoric has changed the way we think, communicate, and organize our lives as face masks are coded into social rules and people’s daily lives and disclosing their eventfulness. The outbreak of COVID-19 has caused face masks to get entangled into larger assemblages beyond medical facilities, especially the power assemblage. On Feb 15th, 2020, the…