CFP: Precarious Rhetorics

Co-edited by Wendy S. Hesford, Adela C. Licona, Christa Teston

Wendy S. Hesford

Adela C. Licona

Christa Teston

recarity has become a key concept in scholarly work devoted to the

study of the aective, relational, and material conditions and

structuring logics of inequality. It is an explanatory concept at work
across scholarship attending to labor, migration, biopolitics, securitization,
global and settler-state governance, economies of war and violence, vulnerability,
dierentiated risk, poverty, debility, dispossession, and environmental
degradation. Scholars across a range of fields employ precarity to understand
and analyze politically induced condition[s] in which certain populations suer
from failing social and economic networks of support and become dierentially
exposed to injury, violence, and death (Butler 2009, 35).

This collection couples materialist and rhetorical analytic frameworks with

interdisciplinary understandings of precarity, thereby aording critical attention
to how people, environments, and things structurally condition de/valuation and
the slow death" of particular peoples and populations (Berlant, 2007; Puar,
2010; Cacho, 2012). We are particularly interested in cross-disciplinary
contributions that emphasize a materialist-rhetorical approach while also
drawing on insights from scholars working in feminist and transnational
feminist studies, women of color feminisms, aect studies, critical disability
studies, critical race studies, medical humanities, sexuality studies, queer
migration studies, human rights and humanitarian studies, human and cultural
geography, environmental studies, Native American and indigenous studies,
animal studies, ethnic studies, among others.

We are interested in contributions that draw on materialist economic

frameworks and engage critically with scholarship in new materialisms. New
materialisms posits that all thingshuman, non-human, and extrahuman
intra-act to form the very conditions in and through which human subjects are
incorporated into systems of value (Riedner & Mahoney 2008, 10). Rhetorical
scholarship in new materialisms takes seriously implications for how elements
of a rhetorical situation bleed (Edbauer-Rice). Exploring and analyzing
precarious rhetorics through the lens of materiality requires attunement
(Rickert) to material elements, conditions, and vibrant matter that make
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possible human and non-human action and interaction.

Chapters in Precarious Rhetorics will model rhetorical analysis as a methodology (but might also employ
specific qualitative and/or empirical methods) for elucidating (i) the institutional and materialdiscursive machinations of precarity, and/or (ii) activists strategic, material-discursive mobilizations as
forms of political resistance to precarious conditions. This collection will also feature chapters that
explore precarious rhetorics in practice-oriented fields such as medicine, conflict resolution, public
policy, and sciencefields where the concept of precarity is already in use but might be marshaled
with dierently critical and transformative purchase.

We welcome contributions with U.S., global, international, and transnational foci, and invite inquiries
that, among more, mobilize theories of precarity to...

enhance rhetorical inquiry into structured and structuring inequalities,

understand the de/humanizing rhetorics of il/legality,

challenge or enhance rhetorical approaches to materiality,

highlight how activists and social actors mobilize when resisting social-symbolic injustices (e.g.,
#BlackLiveMatter; die-in demonstrations; #ayotzinapa),

animate anew classical and contemporary constructs in rhetorical theory (e.g., kairos; metis;
techne),

influence how scholars and the biomedical industrial complex understand the body, health, and
technology,

challenge how bodies and populations are managed by settler states, the prison industrial
complex, border militarization and securitization, and/or the cradle to prison pipeline,

critique green technologies, clean oil, and corporatized notions of sustainability (e.g.
Monsanto),

understand and critique the displacement and disappearance of vulnerable communities (both
human and non-human) due to human activity and/or environmental racism,

understand statelessness and migrant crises,

critique material-discursive dimensions of economic instability and financialization (e.g.,

student/debt crises; market eects; bank bailouts; austerity measures).

Deadline for 250-word chapter abstracts and short bio is February 1, 2016. Editors will review
abstracts and invite full chapters (8,000-12,000 words, including endnotes and references) to be
submitted by July 1, 2016. All submissions should be in MS Word format and sent to,
Wendy S. Hesford | hesford.1@osu.edu