Critical Rhetoric| Toward Social Justice Activism Critical Rhetoric Scholarship

Abstract

Although critical rhetoric scholarship foregrounds voices of oppressed communities and challenges systemic power imbalances, its doxastic and performative potential to affect social justice has lagged behind its conceptual (and, more recently, methodological and empirical) development. One reason is because that scholarship has privileged rhetoricians performing criticism as the end goal rather than using their criticism to conduct activism scholarship by engaging in and studying critically social justice interventions. This essay articulates a social justice activism approach to critical rhetoric scholarship that involves rhetoricians intervening collaboratively with oppressed communities and activist groups to make unjust discourses more just, and studying and reporting those endeavors.