Angela J. Aguayo

Dr. Angela J. Aguayo (she/her) is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a scholar-media maker whose research reflects an interdisciplinary approach to rhetoric, media studies, and critical production practice. Her most recent book Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media (Oxford University Press, 2019) investigates the possibilities for documentary to engage the process of social change. She is also an award-winning writer, director and producer of multiple documentary shorts utilized in community engagement campaigns, screened at festivals and museums around the world. As Director of the Illinois Community Media Project, Aguayo develops community focused engagement projects that center underrepresented voices through media making, community screenings, and archive preservation to develop the infrastructure for more diverse media authorship.

Karrin Vasby Anderson

Dr. Karrin Vasby Anderson (she/her) is Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University, where she teaches courses in rhetoric, political communication, and gender and communication. She is a past editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech and has served as her department’s Director of Graduate Studies and Director of the Public Speaking Course. She is author or editor of three books on gender and political culture and has published articles in scholarly journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Women’s Studies in Communication. Dr. Anderson has received awards for her research and graduate student mentorship from the National Communication Association, the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender, the Organization for Research on Women and Communication, and Colorado State University.

Lamiyah Bahrainwala

Dr. Lamiyah Bahrainwala (she/her, LB) is Associate Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at Southwestern University, and affiliate faculty to Race & Ethnicity Studies and Feminist Studies. Her work develops the novel rhetorical method of anti-Muslim world-making, which exposes anti-Muslim frames in discourses that make no mention of Muslims and Islam. She teases out the role of casteism and global anti-Blackness within such anti-Muslim frames and examines how these rhetorics commute transnationally. Her work has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and Communication, Culture and Critique, among others. She is faculty advisor to Southwestern’s Muslim Student Association, and serves as a mentor on the Faculty of Color CONNECT program through the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS). LB grew up in India and the United Arab Emirates.

Caitlin Bruce

Dr. Caitlin Bruce (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh and co-founder and lead organizer for Hemispheric Conversations Urban Art Project. Dr. Bruce's research is in the areas of visual studies, public emotions, and investigations of space and place including sites in France, Mexico, Colombia, and the United States. She is the author of two books and several articles in venues like Debats, Public Art Dialogue, Geohumanities, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Critical/Cultural Communication Studies, and Women's Studies in Communication. Her work has received awards from the Urban Communication Association and the National Communication Association, and funding by UCF, COMEXUS/Fulbright García Robles, the Grable Foundation, WFI, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Connect at: caitlinfrancesbruce.com and hcuap.com.

José Castro-Sotomayor

Dr. José Castro-Sotomayor (él/he/him) Assistant Professor of Environmental Communication at California State University Channel Islands. He is a research practitioner interested in ecocultural dynamics of policy development, community outreach, environmental education, and climate literacy. He facilitates community-based decision and policy-making processes through the design and implementation of identity-based participatory communication models. He is co-editor of the awarded book Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020), a transdisciplinary volume focused on the experience of ecocultural identities within wider sociopolitical systems. He conceives learning as an organic form of ecological and cultural awareness that grows from students’ everyday experiences with both the human and more-than-human worlds. He is an associate editor of the journal Frontiers in Communication and a member of the editorial boards of the Quarterly Journal of Speech and Environmental Communication. Born in an Ecuadorian Andean valley, he currently breathes life into learning with the ocean breeze and the perfumed aroma of cilantro growing near his home.

Jay Childers

Dr. Jay Childers (he/him) is an Associate Professor and Chairperson in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. His current research and teaching focuses on the intersection of rhetoric, politics, and violence. He is the author of The Evolving Citizen: American Youth and the Changing Norms of Democratic Engagement (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), and the co-author (with Roderick P. Hart and Colene J. Lind) of Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why (University of Chicago Press, 2014). His essays have appeared in numerous journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and Western Journal of Communication.

Josue David Cisneros

Dr. Josue David Cisneros (he/they) is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Center for Writing Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He researches and teaches about public rhetoric surrounding race/ethnicity and immigration as well as social movement and activist communication, especially as they pertain to struggles for racial justice and immigrant rights. He published the book “The Border Crossed Us”: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity in 2014 and numerous other articles and book chapters. His next book project focuses on activist art in the immigrant justice and is tentatively titled "Migrant Arts, Migrant Freedoms: Speculations about the Freedom to Move and the Freedom to Stay."

Lisa M. Corrigan

Dr. Lisa M. Corrigan (she/her) is a rhetorical historian who researches and teaches in the areas of social movement studies, the Black Power and civil rights movements, prison studies, feminist studies, and the history of the Cold War. She is the author of Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation (2016) and Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties (2020).

Emerson Cram

Dr. Emerson Cram (they/them) is an interdisciplinary scholar and Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Their primary areas of research include how race, gender, sexuality, and disability in North America shape environmental relationships. Cram’s expertise includes queer, trans, and disability ecologies, queer & trans public culture, environmental cultural studies, and publicly engaged scholarship. Cram’s award winning first book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, Energy and the Making of the North American West (University of California Press, 2022), examines the history of sexuality in the United States and Canada as a story about cultures of energy. Currently, their work centers queer, trans, and disability environmental futures, recognized with the 2023 Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award by the National Communication Association. Their essays have appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies in Communication, Environmental Communication, among others. Dr. Cram is the 2022 recipient of the National Communication Association’s Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division’s Early Career Award in addition to the 2014 recipient of the Stephen Lucas Debut Publication Award from the National Communication Association.

Matthew deTar

Dr. Matthew deTar (he/him, PhD, Northwestern University, 2012) is an associate professor in Communication Studies at Ohio University. His research and teaching focuses on conceptual history, national identity, circulation, public memory, and anti-colonial rhetorical methods, focusing particularly on Turkey and the Middle East. He is the author of Figures That Speak: The Vocabulary of Turkish Nationalism (Syracuse University Press, 2022), and he has authored essays that have appeared in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Departures in Critical Qualitative Inquiry, Advances in the History of Rhetoric.

Thomas R. Dunn

Dr. Thomas R. Dunn (he/him) is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Monfort Professor, and Presidential Leadership Fellow at Colorado State University. He is also the Founder and Director of the Queer Memory Project of Northern Colorado (http://www.qmpnoco.org), an educational and community-based project to preserve and share the LGBTQ+ past of Northern Colorado. In addition, Dr. Dunn is a fellow in the WICHE Academy for Leaders in the Humanities, a program supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His primary research agenda investigates how LGBTQ+ people use public tellings of their shared pasts to drive social, political, and cultural change in the present. He is the author of several essays, chapters, and the book Queerly Remembered: Rhetorics for the Representing the GLBTQ Past. He is currently at work on two new book projects which each examine facets of the queer memory rhetorics surrounding the persecution of homosexuals by the Nazi Regime.

Suzanne Enck

Dr. Suzanne Enck (she/her) is Chair of the Department of Communication Studies and an Associate Professor of feminist rhetoric at the University of North Texas where she also serves on the advisory committee of the Women’s & Gender Studies Program. She has worked with gendered violence and anti-carceral programs for nearly 30 years. With the support of an ORWAC research grant, she conducted life history interviews with incarcerated women; her first article analyzing these interviews was published in Text & Performance Quarterly. She is currently finishing her book manuscript tentatively titled “Storying Carceral Survival: Exploring Women's Pathways to Incarceration.” She has also published her work in Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Critical Studies in Media Communication. Suzanne was honored with the 2022 Francine Merritt Award for Contributions to the Lives of Women in Communication and the 2016 Outstanding Scholar-Activist award by NCA’s Critical & Cultural Studies Division.

Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz

Dr. Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (she/her) is F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Homeland Maternity: US Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime (University of Illinois Press, 2019), which traces the policing of pregnancy and parenting in the US security state. She has published numerous essays on feminism, rhetoric, and reproductive justice and is currently at work on a collaborative book project that grapples with the politics and possibilities of queer family formation. Her scholarship and teaching emerge from a combination of academic training alongside twenty years of experience in reproductive politics as a community organizer and advocate in a number of local and regional contexts. She is also a co-director of the UI Obermann Working Group on Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice with Professor Lina-Maria Murillo.

Lisa A. Flores (Keynote Speaker)

Dr. Lisa A. Flores (she/her) is the Josephine Berry Weiss Chair of the Humanities and Professor in the Departments of Communication Arts and Sciences and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research and teaching interests lie in rhetoric, critical race studies, and gender/queer studies. Her current work explores the spatiotemporalities of rhetorical race making, asking how we consider the simultaneity of mobility, containment, space, and temporality. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Communication Association, the Rhetoric Society of America 2021 Book Award for Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of Mexican ‘Illegality,’ (Penn State UP, 2020), and the Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award from the National Communication Association (NCA). Her new project, “Static Mobilities: Race, Gender, Sexuality and Containment,” examines what it means to think race at the intersections of mobility and stoppage.

Noor Ghazal Aswad

Dr. Noor Ghazal Aswad (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Alabama. Her research and scholarly activities span several interdisciplinary areas, including rhetorical theory, political rhetoric, immigration, post-colonialism, and environmental communication. Her recent work examines transnational grassroots social movements in the middle east and meaning-making mechanisms for solidarity with those in liberatory struggle. Her published work has appeared in several well-regarded journals, such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Environmental Communication, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Rhetoric & Pubic Affairs, among others.

Logan Rae Gomez

Dr. Logan Rae Gomez (they/them, PhD, University of Colorado Boulder, 2023) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah in Rhetoric and Critical Cultural Studies. Logan’s research and teaching is motivated by abolitionist perspectives, Black feminist scholarship, and social justice orientations. Their current work traces the relationship between gender and racialization, temporality, and violence with respect to Say Her Name discourses, activism and advocacy, and performances. Their previous work has been published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and First Amendment Studies.

Ashley R. Hall

Dr. Ashley R. Hall (she/her, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh) is a sophistiratchet Black queer scholar whose research examines the complex relationship between rhetoric, Blackness, and agentive power as it relates explicitly to Black women’s communicative lived experiences in an anti-black world. She is a rhetorical scholar by training with interdisciplinary specializations in Black American radical traditions, race/gender/sexuality studies, and critical media studies. Dr. Hall's current research interests focus on Black women's public discourse, ratchetness, and worldmaking as they intersect with questions of humanity, citizenship, and power. She has published articles in Quarterly Journal of Speech, QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, Journal of Communication Pedagogy, and Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, among others. Her current work strives to develop Black rhetorical theories of agency, voice, and expression grounded in the everyday realities of Black intersectional life. She is working on a book manuscript entitled “Ratchet Intellectualism,” which brings together Black critical philosophy and rhetorical studies to explore the role of ratchetness in Black women's public life and civic culture.

Leslie Harris

Dr. Leslie J. Harris (she/her) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research focuses on rhetoric in public culture, especially as it pertains to representations of gender. She is the author of The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity (2023) and State of the Marital Union: Rhetoric, Identity, and Nineteenth-Century Marriage Controversies (2014). She is also one of the principle investigators for Voices of Gun Violence, a public humanities project that operates as a living archive of gun violence stories in Southeastern Wisconsin.

Matthew Houdek

Dr. Matthew Houdek (he/him) is a transdisciplinary communication studies writer, thinker, and educator whose interests fall at the productive intersections/tensions between rhetorical studies, Black studies, critical respiratory studies, whiteness studies, abolition, Black feminist thought, temporality, decolonization, memory, and more. This reflects his belief that the depth and complexity of the civilizational crisis manifesting in the contemporary conjuncture requires a broad, "undisciplined" approach to creative/knowledge production and advocacy. His work has appeared in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Women’s Studies in Communication, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and in edited books/collections. His working book project takes an experimental approach to explore questions/themes regarding the End of the World (and what comes next) as he speculatively weaves across world-making/breaking movements and abolitionist projects unfolding in the undercommons and the epistemic south over space and time.

Sarah Hae-In Idzik

Dr. Sarah Hae-In Idzik (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research engages intersections between racial rhetorical criticism, critical adoption studies, and Asian American and Ethnic studies, particularly the relationship between race and empire as it manifests in U.S. public culture. She also researches rhetorics of Asian American adoptees as a form of Asian American worldbuilding. She teaches courses on rhetoric and race and Asian American studies. Her current book manuscript, Odd Hospitality: Race, Kinship, and Rhetorics of Transnational Adoption, traces a genealogy of Asian American adoption discourse from the 1950s to the present in its various racialized, political, and colonial contexts.

Robin E. Jensen

Dr. Robin E. Jensen (she/her) is a Professor of Communication at the University of Utah and series editor for the Johns Hopkins University Press book series in Health Communication. She studies historical and contemporary discourses concerning health, science, sex, and gender, and is the author of Infertility: Tracing the History of a Transformative Term and Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924. Her current book project is a rhetorical history of modern gynecology.

Andre E. Johnson

Dr. Andre E. Johnson, Ph.D. (he/him), is the Benjamin W. Rawlins Professor of Communication and holds a University Research Professorship at the University of Memphis. He is also a Visiting Scholar at Memphis Theological Seminary and an Andrew Mellon Just Transformation Satellite Partner with the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University. Johnson’s research examines the intersection of rhetoric, race, and religion, and he teaches classes in African American public address, religious communication, prophetic rhetoric, and social movements. He is the author of the award-winning No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. His latest book (with Amanda Nell Edgar) is The Summer of 2020: George Floyd and the Resurgence of Black Lives Matter Movement.

Paul Elliott Johnson

Dr. Paul Elliott Johnson (he/him, PhD, University of Iowa, 2013). My work focuses on the influence and character of conservatism in the United States. My Book, I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States offered a study spanning a half century of mainstream conservative argumentation. My research is organized around mapping the ways that conservatism is motivated by a fear and hatred of public culture and the threat of social difference that it carries with it, but also gestures to the ways that these anxieties are rooted in liberalism as much as in a conservative social and political ethic. My work has appeared in Women's Studies in Communication, Argumentation and Advocacy, and Critical Studies in Media Communication. I am currently starting work on a project which considers the role that close readings of dialectical materialism played in configuring the decisions the US made in prosecuting the earliest phases of the Cold War.

Amber Kelsie

Sabiha Khan

Dr. Sabiha Khan (she/her) is Associate Professor of Communication and works on food and environment in documentary film and food systems communication.

Martin Law

Dr. Martin Law (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Philosophy at Utah State University. His research amplifies the disabled, racialized, and irrational bodies in who shape rhetorical culture, composing theory that celebrates the noisy, the ineloquent, and the untimely.

Jennifer Lin LeMesurier

Dr. Jennifer Lin LeMesurier (she/her, PhD, University of Washington) is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Colgate University. Her research focuses on the many different expressions of bodily rhetoric and how they emerge in spaces as different as a ballet class, a restaurant menu, or a medical journal. Her book Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption (Ohio State University Press, 2023) examines what she names as “gut orientations,” the reifying of racial hierarchies through norms of repulsion and consumption. Her work has also appeared in venues including College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Ashley Mack

Dr. Ashley Mack (they/them) is an associate professor of Rhetoric and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University. They research digital media cultures and social movement rhetorics with the purpose of moving us collectively towards anti-colonial, queer, and feminist futures.

Diana Martínez

Dr. Diana Isabel Martínez (she/her; PhD, The University of Texas at Austin) is an Associate Professor of Communication and Assistant Director for Seaver College’s Center for Teaching Excellence at Pepperdine University. Dr. Martínez’s work focuses on Latinx communities, social movements, visual culture, and rhetorical practices. Through this work, Dr. Martínez has contributed to the ongoing efforts to decenter the normative assumptions embedded in conventional definitions of rhetoric. She is the author of the monograph Rhetorics of Nepantla, Memory, and the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers: Archival Impulses and coeditor of Latina/o/x Communication Studies: Theories, Methods, and Practice. Her publications have appeared in journals such as the Western Journal of Communication, Communication Quarterly, The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and edited books.

Faber McAlister

Dr. Faber McAlister (they/them). My scholarly work in rhetorical and critical media studies has been published in a variety of academic journals and books and shared through public media outlets. I am a former editor of Women’s Studies in Communication and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Communication. My visual and spatial studies of tropes of belonging and representation in rhetoric and media call attention to the imprint of gender, sexuality, race, class, and other modes of social location in daily life. I identify as queer in my scholarship, my sexuality, and my gender.

Bryan J. McCann

Dr. Bryan J. McCann (he/him) is a rhetorical critic who writes and teaches about crime and public culture, whiteness, masculinity, and the cultural politics of higher education. His work appears in journals such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Women's Studies in Communication. He is also founding co-editor of the journal Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture.

Raquel Moreira

Dr. Raquel Moreira (she/her/ela/ella, PhD, University of Denver) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Southwestern University. Her current research investigates transnational and hemispheric rhetorical constructions of Latinidad, mestizaje/mestiçagem, and Blackness as they intersect with other colonial systems. Specifically, she is concerned with how Latinidad's assumed racial mixing impacts Blackness. Moreira is also the author of Bitches Unleashed: Performance and Embodied Politics in Favela Funk (Peter Lang, 2021), which explores transnational performances of marginalized femininities and their potential for structural change. The book has received the 2021 Bonnie Ritter Book Award as well as NCA's 2022 International and Intercultural Communication Division Best Book Award.

Tiara Na'puti

Dr. Tiara Na’puti (she/her) is a Chamoru scholar (Guåhan/Guam) who focuses on issues of Indigenous movements, colonialism, and militarism in the Mariana Islands archipelago and throughout Oceania and its diasporas. She is a first-generation college student who earned a master’s and doctorate in Communication Studies and a certificate in Native American & Indigenous Studies (NAIS) from The University of Texas at Austin. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Global & International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. In 2021-2022 she was the recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship and worked in-residence with Independent Guåhan a community group committed to educating the public about the benefits of sovereignty for the island. Her research has been published in venues such as: American Quarterly, AmerAsia, Environmental Communication, Security Dialogue, The Contemporary Pacific, Micronesian Educator, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Omedi Ochieng

Dr. Omedi Ochieng (he/him) specializes in Africana philosophical and intellectual thought, Black radicalism, and criticism. He is the author of two books: Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy (Routledge, 2017) and The Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018). He is currently working on a project on Black insurgent ecology.

Christa J. Olson

Dr. Christa J. Olson (she/her) is chair of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Majorie & Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of Composition and Rhetoric. A rhetorical historian studying transamerican visual cultures, nationalism, and public discourse, she is the author of Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador (Penn State UP, 2014) and American Magnitude: Hemispheric Visions and Public Feeling in the United States (Ohio State UP, 2021), and co-author with Brandee Easter, of On Visual Rhetoric (under contract with U of Michigan P). As a teacher, leader, and scholar, Olson uses the insights of rhetorical studies to place herself in service of more just structures and more sustaining relations.

Catherine Palczewski

Dr. Catherine (Cate) H. Palczewski, Ph.D. (she/her or they/them), is a Professor of Communication Studies and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Northern Iowa, where they also served as the Director of Debate from 1994-2009. Cate was co-editor for Argumentation and Advocacy from 2010-2013 and the keynote speaker at the AFA/NCA Biennial Conference on Argumentation in 2001, a conference they directed in 2013. Cate edited the selected works from that conference (Disturbing Argument) and is co-author of Gender in Communication (4th ed., 2022) and Rhetoric in Civic Life (3rd ed., 2022). Cate’s work focuses on how marginalized groups rhetorically construct their messages to gain access to, and be legible in, the dominant public sphere. For a full list of publications, and syllabi for classes, see http://www.uni.edu/palczews

Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Dr. Phaedra C. Pezzullo (she/her) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication with affiliations in Environmental Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Media Studies. She is founding co-editor (with Salma Monani) of an award-winning University of California Press book series, Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture, and editor of the journal Environmental Communication. She is founding Co-Director of C3BC (the Center for Creative Climate Communication & Behavior Change) and the Just Transition Collaborative. Her latest book, Beyond Strawmen: Plastic Pollution, Impure Politics, and Networked Cultures of Care (University of California Press, 2023), is based, in part, on her podcast, Communicating Care. Her first monograph, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution and Environmental Justice (University of Alabama Press, 2007), won four awards; she also has coedited Green Communication and China (MSU Press, 2020) and Environmental Justice and Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2007), and edited Cultural Studies and the Environment, Revisited (Routledge, 2010).

Damien Smith Pfister

Dr. Damien Smith Pfister (he/him, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 2009) is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Design Cultures & Creativity program at the University of Maryland. Pfister’s research examines the ongoing reception of ancient rhetorics in digital culture, the relationship between rhetorical theory and digital media studies, and rhetoric's relationship to technology. He is the author of Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere (Penn State, 2014) and co-editor of Ancient Rhetorics + Digital Networks (Alabama, 2018). Recent essays can be found in the Journal for the History of Rhetoric, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and the Public, and Philosophy & Rhetoric. He co-edits the Rhetoric + Digitality book series for the University of Alabama Press.

Ariel E. Seay-Howard

Dr. Ariel E. Seay-Howard (she/her), is a rhetoric scholar, and studies how the public remembers slavery and racial violence through memory spaces and material objects. Her research agenda is motivated by the desire to understand how racial violence has and continues to impact the African American community. Her current research investigates the nation’s remembrance of racial violence and how it has impacted African Americans’ experiences in the U.S. She examines how new modes of commemoration, lynching memorials, former slave plantations, now museums and documentary films operate as counter-memories that help the public remember racial violence differently than the sanitized white narrative typically remembered. In exploring these new approaches to remembering, she hopes to create a new paradigm for recalling this violent history and illuminating ways to transform how we discuss the past, present and future.

Rico Self

Dr. Rico Self (he/him or they/them, PhD, Louisiana State University), a native of the Mississippi Delta, is an assistant professor of communication at North Carolina State University at Raleigh. As an interdisciplinary critic, he researches ideological discourses surrounding issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other categories of difference in historic and contemporary American culture. More specifically, his scholarship in these areas analyzes the rhetorical and performative constitution of racialized, gendered, and queer bodies and how they challenge systems of privilege and inequality. Dr. Self’s work can be found in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Women’s Studies in Communication and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. His work can also be found in several edited volumes. In his free time, Dr. Self enjoys traveling and spending time with family, friends, and other loved ones.

Claire Sisco King

Dr. Claire Sisco King (she/her) is a critical cultural scholar of media, celebrity, and visual rhetoric. She is the author of Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (Rutgers University, 2011) and Mapping the Stars: Celebrity, Metonymy, and the Networked Politics of Identity (The Ohio State University Press, 2023). She has been published in such journals as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Feminist Media Studies, and she is a former editor of Women's Studies in Communication. King's new research focuses on the racialized and gendered intersections of art, gentrification, and trauma in Nashville, Tennessee.

Karrieann Soto Vega

Dr. Karrieann Soto Vega (she/her) is a DiaspoRican feminista and cultural rhetorician. "She is assistant professor of Rhetoric in the Department of English at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research and teaching spans Puerto Rican and Latinx studies, anticolonial feminism, activism and social movements, performance, and sonic rhetoric. Some of her work can be found in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture; the Journal for the History of Rhetoric; and CENTRO: Journal for the Center of Puerto Rican Studies.

Mary E. Stuckey

Dr. Mary E. Stuckey (she/her) specializes in political and presidential rhetoric, political communication, and American Indian politics. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of seventeen books and author or coauthor of roughly 100 essays and book chapters. She has received the NCA Distinguished Scholar Award, the Douglas W. Ehninger Award, the Michael M. Osborn Teacher/Scholar Award, the Rose B. Johnson Award (with Zoe Hess-Carney), the Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award, the Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award, and the Bruce E. Gronbeck Political Communication Award. She has served as editor of the Southern Communication Journal, as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech and as interim editor of Rhetoric and Public Affairs. Her current book projects are on the meaning Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence hold—or don’t--for national identity.

Carlos A. Tarin

Dr. Carlos A. Tarin (he/him, Ph.D., University of Utah) is Assistant Professor and Director of Forensics in the Department of Communication at The University of Texas at El Paso. His research spans multiple areas including environmental communication, Latina/o/x communication studies, organizational communication, and forensics pedagogy.

Toniesha L. Taylor

Dr. Toniesha L. Taylor (she/her) is Professor of Communication in the Communication Studies Department in the School of Communication at Texas Southern University and Director of the Center for Africana Futures. Her research melds the boundaries of Womanist Rhetoric, Afrofuturism Studies, Intercultural Communication, Gender Communication, and Digital Humanities. Toniesha’s recent research and conference presentations center on womanist rhetoric as a method and theory, practical social justice pedagogy for faculty and students, and digital humanities methods for activist recovery projects. Recent publications include “Signifying Shade as We #RaceTogether Drinking Our #NewStarbucksDrink ‘White Privilege Americana Extra Whip.’” In Digital Black Atlantic and “World-Making or World Breaking?: A Black Womanist Perspective on Social Media Crises in Higher Education.” Communication Edu cation 68, no. 3. Dr. Taylor is working with colleagues on a Mellon Foundation grant project titled DEF Con to increase collaboration and inclusion of POC scholars in digital humanities. Dr. Taylor is the founding Faculty Director of the Center for Africana Futures at TSU. In addition, Dr. Taylor is an affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies at NYU and a National Teaching partner for the Colored Conventions Project. Dr. Taylor is an active member of the National Communication Association, where she serves as the book review editor for the Quarterly Journal of Speech. Dr. Taylor is a member of the Western States Communication Association, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, and a Life Member of the California State University, San Marcos Alumni Association.

Sarah De Los Santos Upton

Dr. Sarah De Los Santos Upton (she/her, Ph.D., University of New Mexico) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research interests include Chicana feminism, border studies, community engagement and reproductive justice. She is the co-author of Challenging Reproductive Control and Gendered Violence in the Américas: Intersectionality, Power, and Struggles for Rights, winner of the 2018 NCA Feminist and Women’s Studies Bonnie Ritter Book Award, and the co-editor of Latino/a Communication Studies: Theories, Methods, and Practice. Her research is published in the journals Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Women’s Studies in Communication, Development in Practice, Action Research, and Frontiers in Communication as well as various edited volumes.

Pamela VanHaitsma

Dr. Pamela VanHaitsma (she/her) is the author of Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education (University of South Carolina Press, 2019) and The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers (Ohio State University Press, forthcoming). Her work has been recognized with the 2015 Charles Kneupper Award for the Rhetoric Society Quarterly article making the most significant scholarly contribution to rhetoric, as well as the 2021 Randy Majors Memorial Award from NCA’s Caucus on GLBTQ Concerns for individuals who have made outstanding contributions to LGBTQ+ scholarship in communication studies. Currently Pamela serves as an Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. She is working on a new book project that charts queer trails through Rachel Carson’s archives and letters.

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

Dr. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (he/him) is Director of the Race & Ethnic Studies Institute and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism at Texas A&M University. He is also Core Faculty in Latino/a and Mexican American Studies. His research is focused on the intersections of race, ethnicity, and public discourse, particularly relating to shifting cultural and organizational terrains. His last book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Temple University Press), is the first scholarly monograph on one of the most significant organizations of the Puerto Rican diaspora. More recently, he edited a forum in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, for which he penned the introduction, titled “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problems,” which is among top 3 most viewed/downloaded articles in the history of the journal. Currently, Dr. Wanzer-Serrano is conducting critical interpretive research related to the discourse of emerging Hispanic-Serving Institutions as co-PI of the EVOLVE HSIs study.

Kirt H. Wilson

Dr. Kirt H. Wilson (he/him) has published widely in the areas of Black public discourse, collective memory, rhetorical theory, and rhetorical criticism. Dr. Wilson has won several awards for his research, including the National Communication Association’s Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture and the Douglas Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award. Professor Wilson has served as the President of the Rhetoric Society of America, which has honored him as an RSA Fellow. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, he is the author of The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place (2002), associate editor for The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (2009), co-editor of Making the Case: Advocacy and Judgment in Public Argument (2012), and a co-editor for the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing.

Amy Young

Dr. Amy (Anna M.) Young (she/her) is Professor of Communication at Pacific Lutheran University. Her work thinks about how experts can use rhetorical style to more effectively engage public audiences. She worries a lot about the state of democracy and, of course unrelated, spends too much time on Twitter. She's a skier, dancer, food and wine nerd, raconteur and mom.