The Activist’s Antiseptic: Transnational Feminist Rhetoric as Harm Reduction in the Face of Isolationist Nationalism
Amaya Kodituwakku
How can we turn to histories of feminist movements to provide treatments for isolationist infections under global capitalism and nationalism? This presentation examines the rhetoric of security moral panics and community organizing to see how transnational feminist thought can offer harm reductionist approaches to rebuilding global solidarities.

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AI Educators and the Rhetoric of Apologia
Andrea Valente
This presentation aims to explore AI educators as modern secular apologetics who defend GenAI from accusations of threatening the future of teaching and learning. I use classical rhetoric and Kenneth Burke’s dramaticist framework to offer an integral approach to analyze the complexity of AI Educators’ social media posts in relation to ethos, logos, topos, and Kairos for assessing trustworthiness.

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Synthetic Experts: Trust and Expert Ethos in the Age of AI
Ashley Mehlenbacher
We examine how generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) creates new rhetorical challenges for experts. Specifically, we look at how expert credibility is challenged by genAI. First, through the “hallucinations” of entirely bogus synthetic experts. Second, we look at how genAI systems can be used to intentionally create “experts” in service of dis- or misinformation efforts. Third, we examine how genAI use can undermine actual experts.

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Working Women: Narrative & Affective Rhetorics of Tradwife Influencers
August Aden
This presentation brings together scholarship rhetorical genre studies and multimodal public rhetorics in order to analyze the use of narrative and affective appeals by tradwife influencers. Studying these strategic, multimodal compositions allows us to explore the role of everyday genres in the production of political discourse by examining the appeals and strategies used to promote conservative gender ideologies.

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Shadow CVs: The Rhetoric of Failure
Brittany Amell
This presentation focuses on a rhetorical analysis of scholarly failure (via an analysis of 63 shadow CVs). We propose that scholarly failures recur and leave marks or imprints, one of which is the shadow CV.

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The Rhetoric of Deradicalization
Bruce Dadey
This paper examines the rhetorical aspects of deradicalization programs for violent extremists, suggesting that effective programs employ rhetorical strategies that both combat doxastic closure and enact logics of influence and articulation.

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Protest Rhetorics: Resist, Resee and Reshape – Canadians Take A Stand Against COVID-19 Measures
Carolyn Eckert
**Rhetorics of Trust: Pandemic Communication and Protest in Canada**    This presentation examines the breakdown of public trust in Canadian health risk communications during COVID-19, focusing on protests like the Freedom Convoy. Using rhetorical theories of ethos, it explores how distrust in authority, amplified by digital misinformation, shaped resistance and proposes strategies for health communicators to rebuild trust and sustain public engagement during future crises.

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Knights of the Table Round: Stock Phrases, Plot Threads, and Chiasmus at a Distance in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur
Cathal Twomey
Malory’s Le Morte Darthur features many stock phrases that reoccur verbatim or varied. This paper explores Malory’s use of chiastic variation (ABBA, as in ‘Round Table … Table Round’), and reveals specific patterns in his use of this variation-type.

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Raising awareness on the climate crisis. An analysis of written texts in Italian at the interplay between rhetoric, argumentation theory and text linguistics. First results of the project
Daria Evangelista
The presentation will offer the first results of a 3-year project on climate crisis communication in Italian at the interplay between rhetoric, argumentation theory and text linguistics. The project focuses on persuasive communication strategies that allow to effectively raise awareness on the issue of climate change.

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Perspective by Incongruity in Peer Review in Narrative Medicine
David Beard
This paper will question the benefits and the costs of academic peer review from the perspective of ten years co-editing the medical humanities and narrative medicine journal Survive and Thrive.  He will also advocate for a peer review method aligned with the Burkean “perspective by incogruity,” initiated within a journal created by a rhetorician and now largely co-edited by rhetoricians.”

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When It Is Not Public Intoxication: Ableism, Analysis, and Training Options
Erin Wais-Hennen
A Burkean perspective on why “Karens” in America call the police against the wishes of those who exhibit symptoms of progressive neurological illness such as MS or Parkinson’s disease in public. This presentation will discuss what has been done and what should be done to de-escalate these situations that cause humiliation and taxpayer dollars.

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(Re)Annotating Rhetoric: How Argument Mining Annotation Schemes (Re)Configure AI-Powered Natural Language Argumentation
Fatima Zohra
How can natural language argumentation annotation schemes exacerbate inconsistent, biased, and unethical argument classification for AI-trained models? Through a close examination of annotation schemes, this presentation examines how deducing the strength of a rhetorical argument is inevitably prone to confirmation biases, making the widespread impact of biased argument mining (i.e., “bad” arguments classified as “strong”) catastrophic for ethical rhetoric.

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Quantum Mechanics at the Frontier and in Retrospect: Rhetorical Hidden Variables
Fiona Thompson
How do we imagine cutting-edge scientists-and how do they imagine themselves? A close reading of Freedman and Clauser’s “Experimental Test of Local Hidden-Variable Theories” (1972) in comparison to the pop-sci publications written about Clauser’s Nobel Prize in Physics (2022) reveal a decades-long rhetorical disagreement.

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Rhetoric and Masculinity: Burkean Identification as a Rhetorical Intervention in Navigating Mental Health Stigma in Hegemonic Societies
Fortune Lavie
This paper examines Ghana’s 2024 mental health campaign targeting men, applying Burke’s theory of Identification. It argues that, in societies shaped by hegemonic masculinity, Burke’s theory offers a powerful rhetorical tool to challenge harmful perceptions of mental health while respecting cultural norms, potentially reducing stigma and addressing rising suicide rates among men.

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What Are You Doing When You Get Married?
Gabriel Kitsos
An essay on both social reality and speech-act theory and how they affect the construct of marriage.

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Identity and ethos in border media representations of national identity
Jeffrey Orr
Border security reality television structures the presentation of the border for different national audiences in Canadian, USA and Australian markets, determining which elements of national identity and consciousness are worthy of attention. In doing so, the genre operates as a template of self representation of national identity by the implied viewer that imposes identity structures (ethos) on the travelers depicted.

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A Pedagogical First-Aid Kit for GenAI Abuse
Jonathan Doering
How can we pedagogically mitigate abuse of GenAI in writing assignments in high-risk demographics? This presentation considers this question from rhetorical and empirical angles, drawing on interdisciplinary studies. 

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Using Rhetorical Figures to Test Large Language Models’ Grasp of Forms and Meanings
Kavi Duvvoori
Our pilot study explores how effectively English language linguistic constructions and rhetorical figures are processed and produced by Large Language Models (LLMs). Evaluating PLMs on both offers a testing ground for how well they process the formal and conceptual dimensions of rhetorical and linguistic patterns. Our results raise the question of why rhetorical figures present such a challenge for LLMs.

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n+1 Degrees of Trans: On Sorites and Anti-Trans Rhetoric
M. Remi Yergeau
This presentation examines sorites and other rhetorical tactics of anti-trans actors who are working to write transgender people out of existence.

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Follow who know Road”: Communality, Social Influence and the Rhetoric of Health Campaigns
Mary Adeyemo
Engaging influential personalities during the peak of the coronavirus served as a rhetorical anchor for combatting vaccine hesitancy in Nigeria. During a public health emergency, it is important to prevent misconceptions from resulting in distrust in public interventions. Despite unreceptive scholarly positions on the engagement of influencers for health communication, this paper argues that communal rhetoric can shape productive health discourse within communities.

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A Friend to Everyone: A Rhetorical Analysis of Cautiously Optimistic Reactions to ChatGPT
Mary Germane
While the AI text generator ChatGPT seemingly threatens to render writing studies obsolete, many post-secondary students and instructors have responded by trying to make friends with this new technology. This presentation details the rhetoric of friendship in users’ perceptions of ChatGPT and analyzes the implications and consequences of this personification.

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A Rhetorical first-aid-kit for the Crises of our Times: Scientists, Politics, and Publics
Pamela Pietrucci
This presentation, building on the past work done to connect scholarly conversations from the fields of rhetoric of science, political rhetoric, and local modalities of public engagement, explores their productive encounters in the contexts of public science and activism. Here, we share the lesson-learned from an upcoming edited volume on the intersections of science and politics for our current moment of crisis.

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A critique of rhetorical advice for people living with chronic pain and contested illness: The case of fibromyalgia
Philippa Spoel
Our presentation critiques advice in North American self-help books and websites for how people suffering from fibromyalgia should communicate with their healthcare providers and their families and friends. Making effective communication the personal responsibility of people living with chronic pain and contested illnesses is problematic because it increases the burden of “invisible work” they are expected to undertake.

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The iconicity of schemes of repetition: A new model
Randy Harris
Rhetorical schemes leverage iconicity and neurognitive pattern biases to appeal and persuade. Enriching Winfried Nöth’s theory of endophoric iconicity with Halliday and Hasan’s work on textual cohesion, I propose a new model of endophoric iconicity in light of the ‘credibility bonus’ conveyed by aesthetic language.

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Chiastic Figuration in The Analects
Rency Luan
Chiastic figuration is among the most heavily investigated stylistic phenomena and The Analects of Confucius is among the best known, most beloved texts in the world. We examine antimetabole in The Analects of Confucius, both in its original Classical Chinese version and in the most respected scholarly translation into English (Lau), to probe Jeanne Fahnestock’s (2004) claims that figures robustly encode argumentative and therefore resist alteration changes of mode, register, and genre.

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Driving Distrust: Assessment and Damage-Control in the Rhetoric of Self-Driving Cars
Sarah Casey
This paper employs rhetorical assessment to a study of recent efforts at damage-control by developers of self-driving cars and argues that it participates in a historical pattern of technologists blaming the public for public distrust (Slovic) and forecasting a future techno-utopia while obfuscating or minimizing the already-existing negative or destructive effects of their development process.

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 “I Hear You”: The Potential and the Limits of Rhetorical Listening
Sean Zwagerman
Much of what is called “rhetorical listening” in contemporary scholarship is not listening at all, but close reading performed on human subjects. In recognition of the importance of listening but the shortcomings of this scholarship, this paper describes the steps by which “being heard” can indeed lead to personal and social change.

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Pedagogues as Procedural Rhetors: Reframing the Composition Classroom Experience
Shannon Lodoen
This presentation invites pedagogues to reframe their role in the writing and composition classroom as that of a procedural rhetor—that is, of one who imparts messages specifically through the procedures and processes they model for students.

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The Politics of Death and Sovereignty: A Rhetorical and Political Perspective on Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics is a Necessary Extension of Foucault’s Biopower
Steven Joseph
A reflection of Foucault’s biopower and its political and rhetorical importance as well as Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics and how the poltics and soverignty of death extends Focault’s biopower in a rhetorical and poltical fashion.

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Rhetorical uncertainty, fear, and normalization in scientific attacks on a thyroid pharmaceutical, 1961 to 1984
Tania Smith
This study examines how four medical journal articles (1961-1984) used rhetoric to discourage physicians from prescribing desiccated thyroid extract (DTE) for hypothyroidism. Rather than addressing manufacturers and regulators with their complaints about variable potency, scientists framed DTE as obsolete and risky. This analysis highlights how scientific authority shapes treatment and how past choices and biases persist in medicine.

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Crisis as Rhetorical Category: Ultimate Discourses and Warrants
Taylor Morphett
What happens when the term ‘crisis’ is applied to long-ranging problems (eg. the university in crisis, the financial crisis, climate crisis)? This paper considers how the framing of ‘crisis’ functions rhetorically. Through careful consideration of stasis theory and a look underlying warrants, this paper will argue that the category of crisis prevents actionable solutions to large systemic problems.

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A “natural period of transition,” or “heresy in the female body”? Exploring the rhetorical connotations of “menopause as natural”
Tess Laidlaw
Women navigating menopause are discursively positioned in an impossible situation. Medical authorities warn against seeing it as “a disease of oestrogen deficiency” (Lancet), yet from a societal perspective “the decline of estradiol in the female body is seen as … a heresy” (Martin, Sontag and Zita, 1993). Drawing upon Kenneth Burke, this paper will seek to explore the rhetorical mechanisms of the “menopause as natural” frame.

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ChatGPT and the Rhetoric of Job Applications: Balancing Automated Assistance with Human-Centered Discourse Analysis
Tharwat El-Sakran
This study explores ChatGPT’s role in crafting internship and job application letters (IJALs) through rhetorical theory and discourse analysis. Using Aristotle’s ethos, pathos, and logos, it examines how ChatGPT enhances credibility, logic, and emotional resonance, emphasizing the writer’s and system’s reliability, expertise, and knowledge as key to persuasive communication.

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Rhetorical Figures During Crisis: An Analysis of Michelle Obama’s Speech at Kamala Harris’ Kalamazoo Rally
Zoya Randhawa
How do rhetorical figures function outside of their argumentative functions? Is it possible for an argument to be both a weapon and a healer at the same time? Through an analysis of Michelle Obama’s speech at Kamala Harris’ Kalamazoo rally, this presentation explores how rhetorical figures perform multiple functions at once.