I approach knowledge and human experience from the intellectual traditions and theories of “Rhetoric.” This statement begs a straightforward but difficult question: “What is rhetoric?” This question has deep roots, not only in the modern academy but back to antiquity and beyond. The popular culture definition of rhetoric is that rhetoric is a form of audience manipulation–the empty promises of a politician or the use of florid language or oratorical style. Ask any student of public speaking to define rhetoric and they probably will paraphrase Aristotle’s famous statement that rhetoric is “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” The definition I use most often with students is that

Rhetoric is the use or enactment of verbal and nonverbal symbols to make meaning about the world, about human experience, and about human identities. This performance and the symbolic and material formations that result from it have intended and unintended consequences for ourselves and others.

This definition reveals several fundamental assumptions. First, most of my research focuses on questions of representation and interpretation within and through symbolic interaction. Material conditions, communicative technologies, human and non-human ecologies, media circulation, and systems of power are crucial concerns in my research, but I am primarily interested in how those extra-representational elements relate to embodied acts of human communication.

Second, I believe that human experience is broader than our capacity to capture its texture and depth symbolically; nevertheless, the meaning(s) that we attribute to experience require an act of translation, a process of transforming sensation into language and expression that we then share with others.

Third, much of what we do as human beings involves a nearly instantaneous and never-ending process of interpretation and production, reception and articulation, and the words we use and the habits of communication we perform is probably more important than what we typically think of as “thought.”

Fourth, our communication produces affects and effects, consequences and subsequent sensations. We expect and intend only a fraction of the consequences produced by our communication, which is why we spend so much time grappling with the unanticipated results of our communication.

So, when I say that I approach human experience from a rhetorical perspective, I am acknowledging more than one tradition of humanistic and philosophical inquiry that view people as “symbol using animals” that exist within multi-layered contexts of material constraint, cultural belief and value, ideology, and systems of power.