Rhetoric and Communication Studies

Rhetoric and communication studies examines how language, images, and symbols are used to persuade, construct identity, and organize collective life—work that sits at the intersection of philosophy, political theory, and cultural analysis. Scholars in this area pay close attention to how public discourse shapes democratic participation, from the speeches of elected officials to protest signs, documentary films, and social media campaigns. Active research is pushing into questions about how visual and multimodal arguments function differently from verbal ones, and how communities use communication to preserve or contest cultural memory across generations. Less settled are questions about whose rhetorical traditions get recognized as legitimate knowledge, and how environmental crises are challenging inherited frameworks for deliberation and public reason.

Works

57,434

Total citations

402,582

Keywords

RhetoricDemocracyPublic DiscourseActivismVisual ArgumentationRace and Identity