re:verb

It’s spooky season, and you know what that means: time for another thrilling and chilling re:verb Halloween Special! This year, Alex and Calvin are honored to be joined on the mic by Dr. Bernadette Marie Calafell, Professor and Department Chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at Gonzaga University, and the recent recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Critical Cultural Studies d...

On today’s show, we are joined once again by Dr. John Oddo, Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, for a retrospective discussion of “War on Terror” rhetoric 20 years after September 11th, 2001. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and national news media have consistently used Us and Them categories of enemy- and threat-construction, drawing on a conceptual meta...

It’s common to see tech journalists make proclamations about how the internet has fundamentally changed the ways that we think, interact, and most importantly, argue with one another. It’s also common to see them herald the arrival of a “new science” that promises to provide technical answers to all questions and solve all problems that come with the “disruptive” technologies that have “revolution...

On today’s show, Ben and Calvin have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Richard Purcell, Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. We begin by discussing Rich’s current research on conceptions of work in Black artistic labor, and how that led him back to considering the discursive formations of a Nixon-era economic initiative/slogan known as “Black Capitalism.” We discuss Nixon...

We live in a world of unbridled technological and argumentative advancement. A.I. has learned to debate Thanksgiving-table politics against humans. People may soon be using “argument checks” as well as “grammar checks” on their smartphones. Cats and dogs have finally put aside their differences and learned to live in peace by forming a coalition against postal workers. Welcome to the future . Whet...

On today’s show, the re:verb team gets “meta” - metaPHORICAL, that is! On this re:blurb episode, we discuss the rhetorical and linguistic features of conceptual metaphors, which provide us with a way to make connections between two (often very different) processes. To put it more simply: have you ever heard the phrase “time is money”? Have you ever scolded someone for *wasting* their time, telling...

On this episode, the re:verb editorial team -- Alex Helberg, Calvin Pollak, Sophie Wodzak, and Ben Williams -- kicks back, relaxes, and reflects on three years of podcasting about politics, culture, and language in action. Last Friday, to celebrate re:verb ’s three-year anniversary, we held our first-ever livestream via Zoom / YouTube, complete with special guests, new segments, and a hilarious so...

It’s 2021, science is back in charge in America, and we’re on a clear path to ending the COVID-19 pandemic. But is it really that simple? On today’s show, we talk with Dr. Abby Cartus, a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh, about her thoughts on pandemic rhetoric and policy in the transition from president Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Abby lays out for us the way that the new Biden...

Since our last re:verb episode, the US House and Senate certified Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, paving the way for Biden’s inauguration -- but not before a large crowd of disgruntled Trump supporters descended on the US Capitol building, in a violent conflict that left five people dead and many wounded. Days later, President Trump’s Twitter account had been banned and he was impeached by...

In December of 2005 - 4 years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and just over 2 years after the U.S. launched troops to fight its “War on Terror” in Iraq - journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a bombshell report in the New York Times detailing the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens taking place at the behest of the George W. Bush administration as part of its intelligen...

The inferno rages on as the re:verb team takes on more “hot texts” - arguments and opinions with questionable premises - that have emerged in the wake of the 2020 election. In this episode, we continue to examine the backlash against movements to “defund the police” via some anti-abolitionist rhetoric from the comedy podcast Chapo Trap House , which ironically echoes the Obama critique we discusse...

Do you smell something burning? It must be all these Election 2020 ~ Hot Texts ~! Here at re:verb we try to practice "addition, not subtraction" (to quote former President Obama), so we don’t engage with "takes" anymore. As true postmodernist podcasters, we analyze texts.  On this two-part show, Sophie, Ben, Calvin, and Alex analyze a collection of Hot Texts responding to the 2020 presidentia...

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin have the distinct privilege of speaking with Dr. Karma R. Chávez, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Karma is a scholar whose work runs the gamut from border rhetorics and pandemic discourses, to coalition-building and intersectionality. We begin by discussing Karma’s 2013...

This episode presents another installment in our “re:read” series, in which we take short works of literature and develop them into audio dramas featuring music, sound effects, and dynamic vocal performances. This re:read selection is an ever-timely tale of a post-apocalyptic dystopia: Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950). Taking its title from Sara Teasdale’s 1918 poem o...

On today’s show, we sit down with Dr. Britt Paris, an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, and an affiliate with the nonprofit research institute Data & Society. Dr. Paris studies how groups build, use and understand information systems according to their values, and how these systems influence evidentiary standards and policy actions. This...

On today’s show, Alex and Ben speak with Dr. Bret Vukoder about his recently defended dissertation, an investigation into the United States Information Agency’s (USIA) filmic and televisual propaganda output during the Cold War. Due to a domestic production ban, the massive archive of over 20,000 films has been relatively unknown in media scholarship, until now. To investigate this rich but little...

On today’s episode, Sophie speaks with author and artist Frank Santoro about his recently published graphic memoir, Pittsburgh . Santoro gives us a tour of how growing up in the city of Pittsburgh and experiencing its art scene from a young age influenced his unique comic style, as well as how he interprets the ascendency of comics as a form of mass pop culture. As an arts educator, he also offers...

This week’s episode of re:verb is presented as part of The 2020 Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival , a weeklong podcast series centered on a common theme: “the digital future of rhetoric and composition.” Other featured podcasts include the Global Rhetorics Podcast , Kairoticast , Rhetorically Yours , Rhetoricity , RhetoricLee Speaking , Writing Remix Podcast , and The Big Rhetorical Podcast itself....

On June 19, Rutgers University's English Department announced a slew of actions it would be taking in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement , including incorporating critical grammar into its pedagogy. As department chair Rebecca L. Walkowitz explained, this new approach seeks to foster "a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to [students] w/ regard to micro-level [gram...

The president and his administration use rhetoric every day in speeches, press conferences, and written texts like executive orders and proclamations, but the material effects of this discourse can sometimes be difficult to observe. Today, however, the United States is the epicenter both for the COVID-19 pandemic and an unprecedented wave of civil resistance against local police departments and fe...

Today marks the inauguration of a new style of episode we’re trying out called re:read , in which we bring you sonic re-imaginings of literary works, featuring dramatic vocal performances, sound effects, and music. Each of the works we re:read will include themes related to current political and cultural events, and will be bookended by brief reflections on its implications for contemporary audien...

Current protests fueled by the murder of George Floyd represent a reckoning with the US’s long history of racism, settler colonialism, and oppression as codified in institutions of policing and governance. In today’s episode, Calvin and Ben explore this fraught history as a way of contextualizing recent protests against anti-Black police violence in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. We begin by re...

On today's show, Calvin and Ben speak to our friend, colleague, and former re:verb producer Dr. Ryan Mitchell. Recently, Ryan defended his dissertation, a rhetorical history of the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and he will join Lafayette College as an Assistant Professor in the fall. Ryan’s dissertation traces the rhetorical strategies employed by urban gay men in the early 1980s to push b...

In this timely re:joinder episode, Sophie, Calvin, and Alex gather over Zoom to engage with some truly vile COVID-19 takes -- so you don't have to! Calvin shares "The Media Are Embarrassing Themselves Over Trump's Use of 'Chinese Virus'", written by a guy named John at the conservative Federalist magazine, which apologizes for President Trump's strategic framing of the virus as inherently Chinese....

With COVID-19 necessarily reducing our face-to-face interaction, we are increasingly reliant on digital tools -- from conferencing software like Zoom to social networks like Twitter -- to mediate our social, political, and cultural lives. Yet each digital tool brings along specific rhetorical affordances and constraints, a topic that few scholars have studied more closely in recent years than our...