Power in Rhetorical Studies

Andy King on the shape of rhetorical studies at the start of the 21st century
from "Scholarship Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow"
Quarterly Journal of Speech
Vol. 101, No. 1, February 2015, pp. 127–131

By the time of my 1998–2001 tenure as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, the field had been utterly transformed. Our gaze was firmly rooted on the fault lines of late twentieth-century society: race, class, and gender. This trend has continued, and although the word is seldom uttered in our journals, much of our scholarship is about power. That is to say, it is about whose voice will prevail, and why and how other voices are silenced. There is a lively sense of the fragility and instability of power and an understanding that there are no final victories in politics, society, religion, or commerce.