Over the past few decades, Plato’s Phaedrus has become an important text for scholars interested in tracing new materialist approaches to the history of rhetoric and writing. Drawing on rhetoric and plant studies scholarship, this essay contributes to this conversation by arguing that trees disclose an important layer of irony in the dialogue, producing a deep, if not ambivalent, unity that brings together rhetoric, writing, and discourse. Through a study of trees in the dialogue, this essay demonstrates how the Phaedrus offers rich connections between spatial, nonhuman, and ecological dimensions of writing, rhetoric, and discourse.

Conferences can be sites for learning about contemporary research, socializing, and developing projects. However, they can also orbit around already established forms of knowledge-making, dividing the academic dialogue along sociocultural, racial, gendered, and national lines. Through the concept of conference climate, this article explores the International Rhetoric Workshop (IRW)—an alternative conference site that has sought to empower international and early-career scholars. IRW is designed to address not only the intellectual, but also the social, emotional, and physical dimensions of the conference environment. The article concludes with ways to design interactive and inclusive conferences while sustaining a less hierarchical organization.

After the poststructuralist turn, prominent rhetorical theorists (Davis; Gehrke; Vitanza) invoked Jean Luc Nancy’s philosophy to critique rhetorics of community as a problem of totalitarianism, or immanentism (the drive for oneness). Yet, the perpetual critique of community needs ethical supplementation when an actual, existing community needs to exclude for protection. This article considers how Ibram X. Kendi offers a normative basis through which Black antiracist communities must contextually exclude “nonracist” and racist values for protection and to enable flourishing—thus, putting into tension an influential poststructural theory of community with an actual historical community built on tacit antiracist principles. We compare and contrast Nancy and Kendi’s respective approaches to the challenges of the ethics of community through a discussion of the “Buy Black” economic protections of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street in the U.S. segregation era.

The author draws on Gilbert Simondon’s concept of individuation to theorize “doxastic individuation” as a process of doxa formation in online communities. Doxastic individuation involves the resolution of tensions in the network’s experiences, emotions and values, culminating in multifaceted doxa that render users compatible and promote interchange. The author’s theorization is accompanied by analyses of a populous online community on a major social media platform (AskReddit) and a niche music forum (I Hate Music). At heart, this essay encourages rhetoricians to reassess how doxa form in social media contexts and consider users’ responsible, relational participation in networked doxa.

Rhetoric Re-View was established under the founding editorship of Theresa J. Enos and has been a feature of Rhetoric Review for over twenty-five years. The objective of Rhetoric Re-View is to offer review essays about prominent works that have made an impact on rhetoric. Reviewers evaluate the merits of established works, discussing their past and present contributions. The intent is to provide a long-term evaluation of significant research while also introducing important, established scholarship to those entering the field. This Rhetoric Re-View essay examines the question “How ought we understand the concept of rhetorical agency?” as it was discussed at the September 2003 Alliance of Rhetoric Societies (ARS) conference and has been taken up by numerous scholars since that time.

Because nineteenth-century women were generally excluded from evolutionary research, they had limited options for resisting its claims that women were inferior to men. Antoinette Brown Blackwell presented one means of intervening in the influential discourse of evolutionary science in The Sexes Throughout Nature (1875), where she theorized reception as a rhetorical approach particularly suited to women. Although reliance on reception risks reinforcing stereotypes of feminine passivity, Blackwell’s theorization of reception suggests relationships between audience and rhetor that are not well accounted for by the masculine rhetorical tradition and foregrounds reception as an often overlooked but important counterpart to rhetorical production.

Grace and Lace Letter was a newsletter by and for transfeminine evangelicals in the 1990s. This article explores the rhetorical approaches contributors used to bridge these seemingly contradictory identities. Through a recontextualization and historicization of Biblical passages and an employment of a “created this way” discourse, these contributors created possibilities for an evangelical transfeminine identity and advocated for trans acceptance within their evangelical communities. However, these strategies also reveal complicity with other marginalizing discourses. Thus, this article considers the rhetorical processes through which transgender religious identities are constructed and the limitations of such approaches.