Re/Framing Identifications

The thirty-four absorbing essays in this volume are a select representation of the papers delivered at the fifteenth Biennial Rhetoric Society of America’s 2012 conference. Each essay interprets the conference theme of Kenneth Burke’s notion of identification. Additionally, each piece vividly and uniquely ignites interest in ways to name, analyze, evaluate, teach, and take action rhetorically on challenges facing our world. The authors investigate, dissect, and “reframe” generally accepted rhetorical constructions of identity (including those based on race, class, and gender) in historical, contemporary, national, and international contexts. Readers gain fresh insights about rhetoric—its relation to democracy and ethics, its power to frame and reframe history, its ability to enable and deny agency as well as to mark and re-mark bodies, its collusion with barbarism, and its responsibility for social activism.