Ex-cite-ing News

Having the chance to say something is one thing, but when someone else uses what you said to help advance the conversation, that's really special.

Two years ago, I blogged about the publication of the paper that I wrote with Dr. Michael Salvador. That was a pretty special moment, particularly after the many years of work that went into writing it. However, the newest development in the history of that article might be even more exciting because I recently discovered that for the first time, a paper citing our article has been published.

Dr. Lawrence R. Frey and Dr. Joshua S. Hanan teamed up to write a paper calling for critical rhetoricians to use their work more for direct social activism, and that piece, titled "Toward Social Justice Activism Critical Rhetoric Scholarship," has now been published in the International Journal of Communication. As they make their case, the authors cite the paper Dr. Salvador and I wrote, saying:

"Recent scholarship reveals that rhetoricians—working in conversation with the ideological, critical, and decolonial turns in rhetorical studies—are poised to engage in social justice activism research. For example, during the past two decades, rhetoricians have studied oppressed communities’ social justice struggles; in part, to “interrogat[e] the underlying impulses of rhetorics that appear to be advocating for freedom” (Hartzell, 2018, p. 13). Using primarily textual methods, that scholarship has offered important insights into intersectional and (neo)colonial workings of power, as well as how discourses of freedom, liberation, and emancipation subtly can reproduce hierarchy and inequality (e.g., DeLaurier & Salvador, 2018; Discenna, 2010; Enck-Wanzer, 2011; Hartzell, 2018; Hasian & Delgado, 1998; Hurt, 2007; Kearl, 2015, 2018; Middleton, 2014b)."

To be honest, it's a very cool feeling to know that someone else thought enough of our work to incorporate it in their own. It certainly provides validation and a nice shot of confidence. What's even more encouraging is the objective of Frey and Hanan's article. The idea of using rhetorical scholarship for social activism is a crucial aspect of the foundation for our article, and to see someone taking it further is very heartening. I think this is an important development for rhetorical analysis, academic scholarship in general, and society as a whole, and I am so happy that I was included in it. To read the entire article by Frey and Hanan, click here.

Building on ideas represents the essence of scholarship to me, so I am very pleased I could play a role in developing these ideas, and I am eager to see where critical rhetoric goes from here.