“I’ve Lost My Rhetoric”: looking back to rethink rhetorical studies in Poly-crisis
Polycrisis is how Ira Allen describes the political economic situation we were in in 2023. Just three years later crises have only ballooned and multiplied—from the rise of global fascism to rampant AI growth, to leadership who neither speak or act well to worsening climate crises, to a national crack down on immigration and even to the creation of a new world order. Because the field of rhetoric is broadly concerned with how messages are crafted and circulated to achieve desired effects in audiences, these global, political, economic, climate, and technological crises unsettle the very foundations of the study of rhetoric. “I lost my rhetoric” makes an argument for reconceptualizations of the project of rhetorical studies. While this reconceptualization must be a multi-prong project, in this paper, I find value in looking back in order to look forward. Turning to a moment when shortly after 9/11, feminist rhetorical scholar Susan Jarratt threw up her hands and declared “I lost my rhetoric” during a particularly fraught feminist CCCC panel, I look back at rhetorical studies last major “crisis” in the early 2000s and consider the simultaneous codification of feminist rhetorical studies, to demonstrate how rhetorical field making might shift in this moment of polycrisis.
Prof. Dingo Bio:
Rebecca Dingo is a Professor of English in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts. She is a recognized national and international scholar who has pushed transnational studies into the forefront of rhetorical studies. In addition to many peer reviewed essays, she is the author of Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing, which won the W. Ross Winterowd Award in 2012. Additionally, with J. Blake Scott she has edited the book The Megarhetorics of Global Development. Her forthcoming monograph with Dr. Rachel Riedner titled Beyond Affirmation: Reckoning with Imperial Legacies in Feminist Rhetorical Theory will be published in Fall 2026. Her work has been well-cited not only in rhetoric, composition, and communication studies, but also across other disciplines and sub-disciplines including feminist international political studies, global education studies, feminist studies, literacy studies, and disability studies. She has also engaged in work that has public value and, for example, was invited by the United Kingdom Parliament of International Development Committee to offer a policy memo that comments on how their disability programs might be more inclusive. Rebecca has been invited to give workshops, seminars, and lectures in the US, South Africa, Lebanon, and Belgium on feminist approaches in rhetoric and writing studies, including faculty writing support and development.
A former Director of the UMass Writing Program (2016–2020), a member of the HERs 2019 cohort, and a former a Chancellor’s Leadership Fellow at UMass, Dingo is currently a Senior Fellow and Associate Director of Faculty Development, where she leads initiatives to assess, build, and sustain robust faculty writing programs across the university working.
Her current research examines the global fall of democracy through a transnational rhetorical lens, analyzing how democratic discourse is increasingly mobilized to justify exclusion, authoritarianism, nationalist backlash, and colonial extraction. This work highlights how rhetorical studies uniquely illuminate democracy’s erosion by tracing the circulation of democratic ideals, the authorization or discrediting of voices, and the affective and material forces that shape public claims about freedom, citizenship, morality, and belonging.