re:verb

The spread of COVID-19 has changed the way we see our own relationship to space and mobility. Within this state of emergency, disparities in access are made more stark: as certain sectors of workers are able to continue their jobs under quarantine and observing social distancing guidelines while other sectors are forced into dangerous forms of mobility, borders old and new are being inscribed and...

For the inaugural episode in our new series on Space, Place, and Mobility, re:verb co-producer Sophie Wodzak sits down with Alisha B. Wormsley, a Pittsburgh-based interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Wormsley’s work bridges public art, social engagement, science fiction, and political activism to reveal forgotten histories and imagine alternative futures. Through innovative public works...

Recently, millions of potential US voters heard newly-unearthed comments made in 2015 by Michael Bloomberg -- the billionaire, former New York City Mayor, and current Democratic presidential primary candidate. In his remarks, Bloomberg vociferously defended stop-and-frisk, an NYPD policy directive that disproportionately targeted poor people and minorities for warrantless searches. The controversy...

In this re:joinder episode, Calvin presents Alex and Sophie with a set of op-eds -- all published in ostensibly liberal magazines -- that retroactively justify President Trump’s Jan. 3, 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, major general of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. In our analysis, we expose the presuppositions latent in these articles’ narratives of post-9/11 US foreign policy, fil...

In this re:blurb episode, producers and co-hosts Alex and Calvin are re-joined by contributor and co-producer Sophie to discuss the many kinds of Irony, and the unique ways in which this form of humor manifests itself on our favorite website, twitter dot com. First, we review the three main kinds of irony most often taught in schools--verbal, situational, and dramatic--all of which ask us to hold...

Today we have the distinct privilege of discussing horror cinema, culture, and politics with Kendall Phillips, professor in the department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. Kendall’s work focuses on the ways popular culture intersects with discursive and affective tensions within society, with a focus on public memory, controversy, and popular cinema. Among his other...

This week, we’re keeping the laughs going with the second installment in our Rhetorics of Comedy series! In this episode, Calvin speaks with two comedians he met doing stand-up in Beijing, who are now performing comedy in other international locales: Greg Hutt (in Sofia, Bulgaria) and Paul Creasy (in London, UK). In each of these conversations, Calvin and our guests discuss their experiences perfo...

Who says rhetoric can’t make you laugh? And who says making people laugh isn’t rhetorical? Today’s show is the first in a series on Rhetorics of Comedy, in which we interrogate the connections between humor, discourse, and contemporary life. In Part 1, we bring you a discussion with three local standup comics working in Pittsburgh, PA: Jared Helfer, Tom Higgins, and Lorenzo DiSilvio. We explore th...

In this re:joinder episode, producers and co-hosts Alex and Calvin are re-joined by contributor and co-producer Sophie to roast two op-eds that criticize proposed plans to lower the price of college tuition and eliminate student loan debt. In the first article, Who Will Take a Paycut for Free College , published in the august and impartial Wallstreet Journal, author Joseph Epstein argues that we w...

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin discuss demagoguery and far-right rhetoric with CV Vitolo-Haddad, a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Director of Debate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In particular, we discuss CV’s recent publication in Rhetoric Society Quarterly - “The Blood of Patriots: Symbolic Violence and “The West” - which focuses on the...

In this re:blurb episode, we explore the history and theory of the rhetorical concept of genre. First, we take a tour through the classical genres of forensic, deliberative, and epideictic speech, before moving on to contemporary theories about genres’ profound and complex social functions. In doing so, we describe how genres mediate everyday social interactions through communicative rules and nor...

On today’s show, we’re getting in the summer spirit by firing up the grill and roasting some more scorching hot bad takes with another installment in our re:joinder series. In this episode, Alex and Calvin dish over two articles that make a similar specious presumption: universities are suppressing freedom of speech, and thus need to be stripped of their funding altogether. Or, at least the humani...

This week’s show features a discussion about collective action, solidarity, and labor organizing with Penn State English PhD Student and organizer Doug Kulchar. In this conversation, Calvin and Alex talk with Doug about methods of leveraging employee power in workplaces, why bosses and other people in positions of power are often opposed to unions, and Doug’s own experience organizing a graduate s...

*Content Warning* The article referenced in today’s episode includes vague to explicit misogyny and transphobic discourse, as well as references to sexual violence and assault. *Irony Warning* The producers of this podcast disagree with and strongly condemn the argument set forth in the article referenced in this episode. Any intimations to the contrary are entirely a performance for the sake of c...

On this week’s episode, Alex, Calvin, and Caitlan seek a formal definition of True Crime, identifying the strategies, rhetorical and otherwise, that have elevated the genre and its diverse sub-genres to the realm of cultural obsession. Our hosts discuss what distinguishes True Crime from “untrue” crime shows or other types of “true” content related to crime. They then explore how medium structure,...

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like you just had to say something -- where the words came to you so naturally, they almost felt like they were being dictated by your circumstances? Or, have you ever struggled over how to respond when people around you don’t quite see things the same way you do? In each of these instances, you might’ve been reckoning with a rhetorical situation. I...

If you follow the news, you might have noticed a word coming up more and more frequently: “socialism.” Not only was it name-dropped by the president in his 2019 State of the Union address, but politicians aligning themselves with Democratic Socialism have been winning elections and making headlines, and grassroots socialist organizing has been experiencing a renaissance all over the country. As wi...

On our last episode , Professor John Oddo cited Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in asserting: “When you speak you do not break the eternal silence of the universe. You are not the biblical Adam who is naming and categorizing reality in the virgin world. You are always taking words that taste of prior contexts.” This approach to language as dialogical is the subject of today’s re:blurb. W...

On this week’s episode, Alex and Calvin chat with Carnegie Mellon Associate Professor of English Dr. John Oddo about his most recent work, The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. In the book, Dr. Oddo uses discourse analysis techniques to study U.S. war propaganda. Today’s discussion centers around what makes Oddo’s definition of propaganda unique...

What is reality? According to whose version of reality does society function? This week, Alex and Calvin sit down to discuss these and other questions with Dr. Dana L. Cloud, Professor of Rhetoric & Communication and Director of Graduate Studies at Syracuse University, and author of Reality Bites: Assessing Truth Claims in the Time of Trump. In her book, Cloud argues that fact-checking and rat...

What comes to mind when you hear words like “freedom,” “justice,” or “liberty”? Whether they conjure feelings of patriotism and pride or just sound like overused, empty buzzwords, rhetoricians call terms like these ideographs – words and phrases that serve as the building blocks of our ideologies and identities. On today’s re:blurb mini-episode, Colleen, Alex, and Calvin break down the history of...

*CONTENT WARNING* This episode contains graphic language depicting instances of rape and verbal imagery illustrating acts of sexual violence. On today’s episode, Calvin and Ryan sit down with Dr. Stephanie Larson, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon, to discuss her recent publication in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (QJS), “‘Everything inside me was silenced’: (Re)defining rape th...

On this week’s show, we change things up a bit and bring you the first in a new series of mini-episodes entitled re:blurb , where we break down concepts from rhetorical theory and history in practical terms and use contemporary examples to illustrate their usefulness in examining language in action. For this first installment, Alex takes the mic to explain stasis theory : a set of concepts reitera...

This week’s episode is the second, concluding part of our series reviewing concepts and topics from last season. (If you haven’t yet listened to part 1, you can find it here .) In part 2 of our re:verb “re:cap,” we rekindle the critical ideas brought up in episodes 6 through 9. First, we build upon our discussion of urban renewal and gentrification from episodes 6 & 7, talking through the ongo...

It’s a new academic year, and the beginning of a new season of re:verb ! In our 2-part season premiere, we take a retrospective look at topics in political and cultural rhetoric that we’ve covered over the past year, taking note of the critical concepts and questions still pertinent to our thinking. It’s a re:verb “re:cap,” for long-time fans as well as newcomers to the show who want to get a tast...