Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism (Composition, Literacy, and Culture)

Gerdes, Kendall

ISBN 10: 0822948117 / ISBN 13: 9780822948117

Published by University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9780822948117

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism (Composition, Literacy, and Culture)
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822948117
• ISBN 13: 9780822948117
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Co-winner, 2025 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

Claims that students are too sensitive are familiar on and around college campuses. The ideas of cancel culture, safe spaces, and political correctness are used to shut down discussion and prevent students from being recognized as stakeholders in higher education and as advocates for their own interests. Further, universities can claim that student activists threaten academic freedom. In Sensitive Rhetorics, Kendall Gerdes puts these claims and common beliefs into conversation with rhetorical theory to argue that critiques of sensitivity reveal a deep societal discomfort with the idea that language is a form of action. Gerdes poses important questions: What kind of harm can language and representation actually do, and how? What responsibilities do college and university teachers bear toward their students? Sensitive Rhetorics explores the answers by surfacing submerged assumptions about higher education, the role of instructors and faculty, and the needs of an increasingly diverse student body.

About the Author

Kendall Gerdes is assistant professor of writing and rhetoric studies at the University of Utah, coeditor of Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, and a lifetime member of the Rhetoric Society of America.