Author: Jialei Jiang

As their time with the DRC draws to a close, the 2019-2020 DRC Fellows offer reflections on their experiences, what they’ve learned, and where they go from here. This year has presented numerous crises and challenges, and it has also highlighted the many ways that digital rhetoric can respond with an eye toward a more just society. We are grateful to the 2019-2020 Fellows for their presence, dedication, and insight. Nupoor Ranade A big thanks to the DRC team Jathan, Naomi, Anne, Simone, and to the wonderful fellows in my cohort for not just enriching my academic community experience through…

Acknowledgment We thank all contributors of the 17th Blog Carnival for their insightful perspectives, discussions, and examples of rhetoric and communication in the time of COVID-19. In our CFP for this blog carnival, we called upon contributors to “explore the rhetorics, discourses, and perspectives around COVID-19, to examine the potential consequences and ramifications of the pandemic, and/or to create possible action plans at the individual, local, national, and global levels.” We are grateful for the examples provided by the contributors intersecting theoretical explorations and pedagogical practices. Entries in this blog carnival offer a good mix of transnational conversations, personal and…

Dear DRC Community, These painful past few weeks have called on those of us at the DRC to reaffirm: Black Lives Matter. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, David McAtee, Nina Pop, and countless others are symptoms of deeply entrenched white supremacy in the United States. Our country and its institutions—including academia—are founded on and sustained by white supremacy. We recognize that these murders are not isolated incidents, but articulations of an ongoing epidemic of violence sustained by anti-Black racism. When we say Black Lives Matter, we condemn not only individual murders, but also the…

Rhetoric and Communication in the Time of COVID-19: A Global Pandemic and Digital Rhetoric as Praxis Editors: Jialei Jiang and Soyeon Lee The COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic is not simply a scientific or health crisis, but a phenomenon of global significance that cuts across social, political, cultural, bioenvironmental, and ethical domains. The crisis has spurred multi-disciplinary conversations in both academic and public spheres, ranging from viral modernity (Peters, Jandrić, and McLaren, 2020) and open science (Kupferschmidt, 2020), to post-truth conditions (Fuller, 2020) and misinformation (Mian & Khan, 2020). Also worth mentioning is the urgency to protect ethnic minority populations…