A Charge for Change

​​A CHARGE FOR CHANGE brings together eighteen essays from the Rhetoric Society of America's 20th Biennial Conference, held at the end of the pandemic period. The Conference call asked for participants to "engage with rhetoric's purposes, demands, and energies" as the world moved toward a "post-pandemic" world. The first section of essays confronts issues that existed long before the COVID-19 pandemic but were exacerbated by it: race and colonialism. Each essay offers suggestions on confronting biases too common in the world. The essays in the second section confront how rhetoric has impacted various concerns of the early twenty-first century, including the pandemic, the political world, and housing insecurities. Essays in the third and final section explore eternal issues from a kairotic perspective as they celebrate and reconsider people and elements of the field of rhetoric. In sum, the collection shows how rhetoric can change the world-even as it offers instructions on how to do so.

Essays are short, accessible, and appropriate for integration into undergraduate classes seeking to integrate examples from across the spectrum of work in rhetorical studies (rhetorical history, theory, and criticism especially), engaging the most pressing issues of our day. Arising from the flagship conference in the field, these essays are also touchpoints with the best work in the discipline today.

Contributors include Janet M. Atwill, Jennifer L. Bay, David Beard, David Blakesley, keondra bills freemyn, Daniel A. Cryer, Richard Leo Enos, Wallace S. Golding, Heidi E. Hamilton, Aaron Hess, Mohammed Sakip Iddrisu, Patricia Roberts-Miller, Thomas J. Rickert, Andrew L. Sigerson, Ryan Skinnell, Jeffrey St. Onge, Leah Senatro, Jason Michálek, Kathryn Lambrecht, Amy J. Lueck, Keith D. Miller, Elizabethada A. Wright, Richard E. Young, and M. Elizabeth Weiser.