Radical rhetorics at/and the world’s end: epistemologies, ontologies, and otherwise possibilities

Abstract

ABSTRACT This short essay introduces the special issue, “Radical Rhetorics at/and the World’s End,” which features original short essays that offer bold, risky, and provocative perspectives that share the general belief that we can no longer afford safe, incremental, or mechanical solutions and responses to the profound challenges that confront our planetary community/ies today. Rather than a new set of universals, or proscriptive, prescriptive, or diagnostic solutions, the essays included herein open an in/coherent political horizon and gesture to a diverse set of tools, concepts, and approaches that might help re-think what meaningful social change, world-building, and the pluriversal present and future might look like in all of its diversity, unpredictability, and in/coherence. This forum emerged from a roundtable discussion at the 2022 National Communication Association convention and was developed through a collaborative peer review process that involved all contributing authors. This introduction establishes the disciplinary, conceptual, and personal context surrounding this forum before providing a brief overview of the essays.