MSU Press and the Rhetoric, Politics & Culture editorial team and executive board are pleased to welcome Ersula J. Ore, PhD, as the new incoming coeditor of RPC. At the beginning of 2024, she joined current coeditor Bryan J. McCann, PhD, fulfilling the journal’s foundational aim of being managed by two coeditors, one in communication and one in English. Ore and McCann will serve as coeditors through the publication of volume 4, planned for release in 2025.
Ersula J. Ore is associate professor of African and African American studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is a rhetorician who researches and teaches in the areas of African and African American studies, rhetoric studies, and racialized violence. Her book Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric & American Identity (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), which received the 2020 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award, examines lynching as a rhetorical strategy and material practice interwoven with the formation of America’s national identity, and the precursor to antiblack policing today. Her current work examines how appeals to civility, civility discourse, and civilizing strategies racialize the civic performances of Black women as they operate in public space. Ore’s work can be found in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Women Studies in Communication, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Pedagogy, Present Tense, Critical Discourse Studies, and RPC, among others.
Launched in 2021, RPC embraces a pluralistic approach to rhetorical scholarship. The journal is open to a variety of methodological approaches, from close textual and/or historical analysis to critical/cultural, ethnographic, performative, artistic, and/or theoretical work. The journal invites scholarship on rhetorics of marginalization, structure, materiality, and power; politics, advocacy, and activism; and beyond. Foremost to its mission is featuring perspectives that question in/justice, in/equity, power, and democracy and that attend to interlocking structures of power within their geopolitical and historical contexts. This journal also invites rhetorical scholarship that archives, documents, theorizes, or participates in forms of individual and collective public interventions, advocacy, activism, and resistance to such structures.
RPC Volume One can be read on Project MUSE. Volume Two is planned for publication in spring 2024. A special issue entitled “Abolitionist Horizon: Endings, Openings, Ruptures, Beginnings” is also underway and is expected to be published later in 2024.
If you’d like to learn more about the story of RPC’s beginnings and mission, check out our “Meet the Editors” roundtable discussion and Q&A, which took place during the Rhetoric Society of America Conference 2020. It features RPC’s editorial team and executive board discussing their vision for the journal.
Submissions to RPC are open! Submission guidelines and instructions can be found at the submission portal here.