When tensions regarding the categories of sex in sports are raised, the conversation often focuses on one central concern: fairness. In these exchanges, advocates for fairness often argue that trans girls and women are endowed with unfair bodily advantages—thus, we must save women’s sports through excluding them from game play. In order to consider more fully the ramifications and power of fairness rhetoric, I rely on the concept of the biotrope. Biotropes aid in the perpetuation of genres of the human through repeated patterns of discourses with bodily consequences. In this paper, I use the biotrope of the sex binary to examine how the rhetoric of fairness acts through discourse upon the bodies of trans girls, trans women, and gender non-conforming female bodies as it constructs them as threats and pushes them out of sporting competitions.

This article brings together two distinct fields of scholarship—disruptive innovation and equity-minded student success—to analyze a case study of student affairs practice stimulating organizational change. Utilizing examples from the authors' asset-based peer tutoring initiative in a rural Hispanic Serving Institution in the Southeast United States, the article argues that a new conceptualization of “disruption” is necessary for organizational change that supports students from racially and ethnically minoritized groups. As a starting point, the article outlines Clayton Christensen's influential business-oriented theory of disruptive innovation first proposed in 1997. The article then critically analyzes current rhetoric on disruption in higher education by private consulting firms and leaders who wish to portray “executive disruptions” to higher education institutions as an existential necessity. An analysis reveals that this rhetoric is a cynical appropriation of Christensen that leverages the rhetorical power of disruption as a justification for undermining public higher education through ideologically driven program cuts and attenuated student access. As a corrective, this article therefore proposes a reframing of disruption that builds on equity-minded organizational change literature by Estela Bensimon and Adrianna Kezar, Lori Patton's argument for disrupting higher education through a Critical Race Theory (CRT) lens, Victor Ray's theory of racialized organizations, and Lanford and Tierney's identification of the environmental factors and dimensions which support mindful innovation in higher education. Inspired by this literature, the article proposes a conceptualization of ethical disruption which is considered through six frames: philosophy, discourse, agents, instruments, leadership, and organizational impact. The final section of the article depicts a praxis-oriented institutional case study of ethical disruption by identifying three barriers to organizational equity—and the methods used to disrupt them for the benefit of student success.

ABSTRACT Educators and pundits have declared this a ‘post-literate’ age. On social media, and especially Twitter, the effects of increased illiteracy are exacerbated by context collapse: the further a post gets from its target audience, the more likely its intended meaning will be misinterpreted. But another aspect of tweets, especially joke tweets, makes them difficult to read well: their lyric quality. Whether they appear on a user's page as monologic utterances, in algorithmic feeds that serve as fleeting anthologies, or embedded in a quote-tweet, even tweets framed as direct address are, as J. S. Mill said of poetry, ‘overheard.’ We can't understand each other on Twitter because, when we're shitposting or subtweeting or ‘pleased to announce,’ we're performing a poetic speech act—tweeting into the void—that we often pretend is a purely locutionary one. Literary critics have objected to J. L. Austin's opposition of ‘serious’ speech acts to those in a poem, which do not sincerely express intention and so cannot be meant ‘seriously.’ Tweets are often, understandably, taken even less seriously than poetry. This essay argues that the rhetorical power of lyric poetry and tweets alike derives from their unseriousness: their refusal to commit to anything but a bit.

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the discursive mechanisms that sustain anti-Asian racism in the United States by critically examining the potent and unstable symbol of Chinese. Through historical, ideological, economic, and geopolitical examination, we demonstrate how the conflation of China with Chinese operates discursively to collapse race, ethnicity, and nation-state. We introduce the concept of the China/Chinese discursive construct to reveal instances of intercultural communication where the term Chinese implicitly references Mainland China and to explain how the insinuated affiliation between Chinese and China goes beyond mere factual inaccuracy. By unpacking the strategic deployment of Chinese in public discourse, we expose how the elision of China in Chinese is a crucial feature of contemporary yellow peril discourse — a slippage that evokes the threat of a foreign state without explicitly naming it. Our analysis illuminates the ideological power of rhetoric in shaping harmful narratives and sustaining structures of domination. We conclude by advocating for a critical and reflective mode of communication that resists the normalization of racialized language, positioning the China/Chinese construct as a tool for communication intervention and rhetorical disruption.

Histobots (Harder 2024b), AI-driven chatbots that simulate historical figures, are marketed as tools for education and engagement. They promise immersion but operate within a system of algorithmic mediation that flattens complexity and reinforces dominant narratives. Unlike traditional historical interpretation, which involves deliberate source selection and critical framing, histobots generate responses based on probabilistic patterns, presenting history as seamless, neutral, and objective. This illusion of neutrality conceals deep biases embedded in training data, filtering mechanisms, and corporate imperatives. This paper examines histobots as algorithmic reenactments. It explores how AI reshapes historiography through feminist and queer theoretical lenses. I reflect on my experience developing a histobot of Hedy Lamarr and analyse AI-generated representations of figures such as Anne Frank, Harriet Tubman, and Marsha P. Johnson. These chatbots erase political agency, neutralise rhetorical power, and homogenise voices. They produce a form of historical negationism that tokenises rather than represents marginalised figures. I draw on situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) and critical AI scholarship (Crawford 2021; Felkner et al. 2024) and argue that histobots reproduce epistemic injustices by encoding archival silences and structural biases. They inherit the exclusions of the historical record while reinforcing contemporary inequalities. This paper interrogates whether histobots can be reclaimed for feminist storytelling or whether, as Audre Lorde (1979) cautions, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Can AI-driven history ever be ethical, or must we build new tools entirely?

ABSTRACT Scholars conducting racial rhetorical criticism have led the way in expanding the field’s range and scope. To further elaborate the connection between rhetorical resources, constraints, and racializations, I take up the intersection of the sonic and Asian identity. Specifically, I aim to demonstrate how the childish trope of “ching-chong” exemplifies ever present warrants that underpin beliefs about Asian embodiment, agency, and rhetorical power. Through analysis of prominent entertainment personalities and their use of this trope, I demonstrate the tendency toward linguistic diminishment that emerge regardless of the speaker’s proclaimed intentions. The ching-chong is still rhetorically potent because of the assumed indexical relationship between Asian embodiment and stereotypical voice that motivates both seemingly innocuous offenses like the ching-chong and broader bigoted attitudes toward Asians. It is necessary to address the affective assumptions around vocal performance and style that proclaim neutrality but that are in thrall to tacit beliefs in English supremacy.

This study examines the stylistic features that characterize this online food discourse, with particular attention to some of the ways in which sensory adjectives and persuasive language are used. Utilizing the Appraisal Framework (Martin & White, 2005) as its theoretical lens, this research performs a qualitative analysis and a quantitative analysis of a corpus of 15 food blog entries. The analysis aims to provide an answer to the following important questions: What types of sensory adjectives are most frequently used? How do bloggers use persuasive language to get people to read? And what are the stylistic differences between different authors? The results show a strong focus on adjectives related to taste and texture, with words such as "spicy," "creamy," "crunchy," and "crispy" dominating the sensory vocabulary. Persuasive strategies are mostly achieved through personal anecdotes, direct address, and hyperbole (as a means of building intimacy, authenticity). Furthermore, it is possible to see significant variation in the corpus in terms of style, ranging from highly descriptive, culturally-rich narrative to more direct, instruction-focused texts. This paper concludes that food bloggers are adept at manipulating the resources of the Appraisal system especially Attitude (Appreciation) and Engagement in order to create vivid, multi-sensory experiences and build a strong parasocial relationship with their audience, ultimately leading to participation in culinary activities. This research makes several contributions to the fields of discourse analysis, digital communication and food studies, including a systematic account of the rhetorical power of food blogging in linguistic terms.

The recurring phenomenon of social deviance and moral degradation in society confirms the relevance of studying verses in the Qur'an that contain social criticism in the form of satire. This article aims to analyze social and moral criticism in satirical verses of the Qur'an using a maudhūʿī (thematic) approach and linguistic analysis (rhetoric, pragmatics, and critical discourse). This is a qualitative study analyzing four representative surahs, al-Maʿūn (107:1–7), al-Mutaffifīn (83:1–3), al-Humazah (104:1–9), and al-Munāfiqūn (63:1–3), selected based on their rhetorical power in criticizing deviant behavior. The results show that the Qur’an uses rhetorical devices such as irony, repetition, contrast, and labeling to shame hypocritical, materialistic, and anti-social behavior; for example, Surah al-Maʿūn emphasizes the contrast between ritual piety and social negligence, while Surah al-Mutaffifīn criticizes economic injustice through irony. These findings show that Qur'anic satire not only functions as a moral admonition, but also as an instrument of social discourse that builds collective awareness of justice, caring, communication ethics, and spiritual integrity. This study enriches thematic exegesis by offering a linguistic perspective on reading the function of Qur'anic satire an approach that has been relatively rare in previous studies.

abstract: The Indian Fighter (André De Toth, 1955) was the first picture made by Kirk Douglas's independent production company, Bryna Productions, and is one among a series of mid-century westerns that cast Native Americans as sympathetic rebels in the fight against encroaching Anglo-European colonialism. This article examines how Douglas stood to accrue social capital by representing Natives in a sympathetic light and how the realities of independent production conflict with the film's professed higher ideals. I argue that Douglas and others sought to appropriate the rhetorical power of the Native American fight for liberty while ultimately perpetuating a system of economic exploitation.

At key points of the narrative of the books of Samuel and Kings there are larger passages of women’s speech marked by a high degree of rhetorical skill and eloquence. The Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) translation of these biblical books is characterized by many archaic features, therefore the article aims at exploring the metaphrastic choices of the early Slavonic scribes when translating the speech of women. The examples, drawn from the chronographic redaction of the texts as registered in the Jewish Chronograph, are discussed within the framework of different speech situations. Focusing on the words of Hannah, Abigail, Michal, Tamar, Jezebel and Bathsheba, the study identifies several simple women’s speech markers and traces them out in the Slavonic translation. At some points the specific translation choices have contributed to a subtler depiction of the characters and there are several examples where the translation creates new meaning and adds to the rhetorical power of their words.

Visual symbols such as the rod of Asclepius possess rhetorical power by illuminating core values-in the case of medicine, those qualities that make a good physician.Patients expect their physicians to demonstrate skill and judgment, as well as to comfort with compassion and empathy.With the emergence of artificial intelligence, questions abound about how this technology will transform and disrupt the practice of medicine and, ultimately, the therapeutic relationship between physicians and those whom they are committed to serve.Figure 1.

Aim of the study: The major source of influencing people and shaping their opinion, as well as the channel of expressing political power, is through the political campaign speech. The speeches by the 2024 campaign by Donald Trump reveal the creation of influence through language. This research is primarily aimed at studying systematically how the semantics of power and dominance are semantically constructed in the speeches on the 2024-2025 campaigns of Donald Trump. Methodology: This paper employs the corpus-based qualitative method to analyze the rhetoric of power and dominance by Trump as a word frequency, collocations, and concordance. The dataset will consist of speeches made in the period between January 2024 and January 2025 and obtained in Roll Call / Factbase (https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump), and processed through the use of Wordsmith. The keywords were clustered into six themes, namely, nationalism and patriotism, political leadership and opponents, elections and power, border and immigration, global affairs and influence, and economy and trade. The collocate analysis disclosed fixed and emotionally charged phrases to show that Trump has been dependent on slogans, adversarial framing, and crisis language. Findings: The results reveal that Trump was an invariable tough-talker, portrayer of decline, and aggressor who sought to use these characteristics to seek political influence and power. His rhetoric is trying to paint the impression of him being the only leader capable of halting what he characterizes as the disintegration of America and this is a move to instill more loyalty in his followers. Conclusion: The work under consideration helps us gain a better insight into how the language of political speech is used to create identity, exert authority, and gain a following.

Winston Churchill’s wartime speeches are recognised for their extraordinary rhetorical power and persuasive influence on the British public, combining pragmatic strategies and stylistic devices to rally morale and communicate resilience in times of national crisis. The primary objective of this study is to analyse Churchill’s use of speech acts and rhetorical strategies across five key wartime speeches, while a secondary objective is to compare the linguistic and pragmatic patterns that contributed to the effectiveness of his oratory. This research employs a qualitative, comparative analysis of the selected speeches, examining the pragmatic functions of speech acts, directives, commissive, expressive, and declarative, alongside stylistic features such as repetition, metaphor, and moral appeals, with data analysed to identify patterns and variations in Churchill’s rhetorical strategies across different contexts and audiences. The analysis shows that Churchill consistently employed repetition and parallelism to reinforce key messages and build emotional intensity, with moral and patriotic appeals central in motivating both Parliament and the public. His speeches varied in structure and tone depending on the audience, with parliamentary addresses emphasising factual explanation and public speeches emphasising encouragement and inspiration, while metaphors and imagery were strategically used to frame events as battles for civilisation, enhancing the persuasive impact of his rhetoric. Overall, Churchill’s speeches demonstrate a sophisticated integration of pragmatics and stylistics to inspire, unify, and sustain a nation under threat, and his rhetorical mastery continues to serve as a benchmark for effective political communication.

ABSTRACT While early critics focused on the clarity and lack of artistic flourish in Isaac Asimov’s style, more recent analysis reveals a deliberate and remarkably effective deployment of literary and rhetorical tropes and figures. As discussed in this article, Asimov frequently uses epigrammatic structures that rely upon rhetorical figures, such as antithesis, paradox, isocolon, and antimetabole. Although claiming to eschew craft, Asimov weaponizes clarity, transforming his sprawling galactic narratives into a series of enduring pronouncements. These epigrams, echoed, reinterpreted, and ultimately layered onto the narrative, reinforce the fractally structured repetitions of the series and its sense of spiraling history. Understanding these rhetorical structures can help to illuminate Asimov at work as a stylist who preferred to keep his style invisible, but who could marshal the rhetorical power of language when he chose.

Comments on an article by D. S. Chester et al. (see record 2026-29451-001). Chester et al. raised objections to the use of the term "dark" for describing antagonistic traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Their central claim is that "dark" is stigmatizing, sensationalistic, imprecise, and potentially problematic. While their concerns merit careful consideration, it is notable that the authors provide no scientific evidence to substantiate them. Here, the commentators defend the continued use of this terminology while providing bibliometric evidence demonstrating that the term "dark" has facilitated interdisciplinary scientific progress and helped consolidate a rapidly growing field of research. While Chester et al. highlight the term "dark" as imprecise because of its multiple meanings, its consistent use within personality research, as shown in bibliometric networks, suggests a shared scientific understanding that mitigates ambiguity when applied with conceptual consistency. Abandoning this label would risk fragmenting a field that has achieved rapid and cumulative progress under its unifying influence. Chester et al. caution that "dark" is sensationalistic and risks delegitimizing the study of antagonistic traits. We acknowledge that the term carries rhetorical power, but this feature can be seen as a strength rather than a flaw. Its accessibility has helped consolidate research on antagonistic traits and fostered interdisciplinary dialogue within psychology. Terms that resonate widely often catalyze scientific discourse; the challenge is not to discard them, but to apply them responsibly. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

For decades, the debate over the problem of evil in analytic philosophy has focused on the existence of evil mainly considering God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. But this is neglecting other attributes of God, like justice, mercy, and patience. And this omission of these attributes in the debate is striking because it is not clear how the existence of evil is logically incompatible with a more complete list of God’s attributes. So, this article considers a fuller understanding of God’s attributes to show that the problem of evil is more of a rhetorical than a merely logical problem. After showing that the problem of evil is more of a rhetorical problem, this article emphasizes rhetorical stases that provide a framework for the explanatory and rhetorical power of various theodicies and defenses. Also, this article discusses how including Biblical stories can supplement theodicy by providing emotionally stirring examples of how and why God allows evil. Overall, it will be recommended that Christian philosophers and theologians should be mindful of the rhetorical nature of the problem of evil and of rhetorical strategies that can help with this issue.

ABSTRACTSolidarity has emerged as a vital concept in bioethics. In recent years, the concept of solidarity has transcended domestic boundaries, with its rhetorical power being leveraged across diverse global health contexts. However, despite its prominence in bioethics and its rhetorical use in global health, health solidarity remains largely confined to domestic contexts. This paper fills this gap by exploring the possibility of extending health solidarity on a global level. Rather than pursuing a singular, unitary concept, I propose to conceptualize global health solidarity (GHS) with a multidimensional framework that encompasses four essential modes: prudential, moral, sociopolitical, and institutional. The prudential mode provides a compelling foundation for GHS through self‐interested motivations, emphasizing global health interdependence. The moral mode frames GHS as morally right or good, grounded in relational personhood, functioning either as a duty or a virtue. The sociopolitical mode conceptualizes GHS as a politically significant, prosocial phenomenon in pursuing liberation and confronting injustices, enabling project‐based collaboration beyond identity boundaries. The institutional mode formalizes GHS through established structures, shaping global bioethics frameworks and health governance systems. Recognizing these diverse sources, contexts, and practices of solidarity, the multidimensional framework offers a comprehensive conceptual map for understanding and operationalizing GHS. It provides both analytical clarity and practical guidance for navigating solidarity‐based practices in global health contexts. When compared with established frameworks, such as global health justice, global health governance, global health activism, and global health security, GHS provides distinct added value and deserves a more fundamental place in the current global health discourse.

This paper explores the dialectic of voice and silence in contemporary women’s writing, analysing how selected texts by Margaret Atwood, Arundhati Roy, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reimagine silence as a site of resistance and self-definition. Grounded in feminist and poststructuralist theory (Cixous, Irigaray, Spivak), the study situates silence within the historical discourse of female oppression and reinterprets it as a strategy of empowerment. Through comparative textual analysis, the research demonstrates that silence in women’s narratives functions not as void but as creative agency, mediating trauma, identity, and cultural displacement. The findings suggest that silence possesses its own rhetorical power—constructing alternative modes of expression that challenge patriarchal discourse and expand the boundaries of feminist poetics. Ultimately, the paper argues that to be silent is not to be voiceless, but to reimagine what voice can mean.

The article analyzes Margo Tamez’s artistic, scholarly, and activist work as a decolonial practice of truthing that aims at dismantling contemporary discourses of nation- and border-building as part of rhetorical imperialism that legitimizes the colonially-rooted ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples in the name of the safety and sovereignty of a settler colonial nation-state. I argue that Tamez’s work, be it in the form of the written text, the spoken word, or performance, should be seen as a site of rhetorical power aimed at identifying and confronting the forces that have framed the Lipan Apache people as walled-in and thus non-existent in the state-engineered discourses of border and nation security.

Punitive populism is a political-legal phenomenon that replaces legal rationality and corrective justice with a rhetoric of power that negates the protection of human rights and the rehabilitative function of the criminal justice system. In this context, criminal policy tends to be characterized by a repressive approach that prioritizes symbolic punishment for short-term political legitimacy. Social polarization further strengthens the destructive power of punitive populism by making the issue of crime a symbolic instrument in identity conflicts, thereby losing its autonomy and submitting to an emotional, majoritarian logic. This study aims to analyze how punitive populism, as a product of the interaction between populist logic and social polarization, results in the erosion of the basic values of modern law, particularly the principles of proportionality, legal certainty, and human rights protection. Furthermore, this study also identifies structural barriers that hinder efforts to curb its expansion in criminal policy. The study uses qualitative methods with a conceptual approach. Data were obtained through library research of academic literature, legal documents, and policy analysis, then processed using qualitative analysis techniques and presented descriptively. The research findings show that punitive populism has shifted the orientation of criminal policy from a paradigm of justice and rehabilitation to a logic of punishment that is reactive to public emotional distress. The mass media, particularly within a polarized information ecosystem, plays a role in shaping distorted perceptions of crime, thereby reinforcing public demands for harsh and immediate policies. This situation creates legal vulnerability to political instrumentalism, threatens the principle of the rule of law, and deepens social exclusion of vulnerable groups. To address this, strategic steps are needed, including limiting fear-based political rhetoric, strengthening independent legal institutions, and rebuilding a criminal law paradigm based on substantive justice, inclusivity, and respect for human rights.