OUR MISSION
Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture (RPC) is a peer-reviewed, bi-annual journal that embraces a pluralistic approach to rhetorical scholarship. The journal is open to a variety of methodological approaches, from close textual and/or historical analysis to critical/cultural, ethnographic, performative, artistic, and/or theoretical work. The journal invites scholarship on rhetorics of marginalization, structure, materiality, and power; politics, advocacy, and activism; and beyond. Foremost to its mission is featuring perspectives that question in/justice, in/equity, power, and democracy and that attend to interlocking structures of power within their geopolitical and historical contexts. This journal also invites rhetorical scholarship that archives, documents, theorizes, or participates in forms of individual and collective public interventions, advocacy, activism, and resistance to such structures.
RPC represents critical philosophies of academic publishing. We uphold double-blind peer review and work to ensure that our peer reviewers are dynamic in their political and intellectual pursuits. We do not treat peer-review as an exclusionary practice but rather as a way to be accountable to our mission: namely, to uphold collective public interventions, advocacy, activism, and resistance. Read below for the central elements of our review philosophy.
seeing what is there |
As reviewers of research and scholarship, we often begin by minutely picking apart all of the mistakes in a text. We see this as one of the ways that the academy promotes an antagonist, competitive culture that is at odds with communal care and valuing. Because we want reviews to be part of a wholistic, pedagogical apparatus, we ask that reviewers instead offer critiques that are generous and formative—even for those pieces that seem hopeless or are problematic. We thus ask reviewers to begin by first doing what runs quite opposite to academic culture: pause, breathe, and ask yourself: What IS here in this article (as opposed to what is NOT here)? What is the author trying to do and create?
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social impact and intellectual scope |
As you will see and hear repeated across our multiple platforms, RPC was born from activist origins. Therefore, we emphasize social impact for communities, not simply peer rankings, in what we publish. To that end, at RPC we thus ask:
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citationality politics |
We ask that authors and reviewers be mindful of citational practices. We mean something more rigorous than current perfunctory performances where BIPOC scholars are added as a sidebar to the centering of canonical scholars (usually without much attention to the ways that divergent ideas are running at politically opposite ends). Again, because this journal is the progeny of activism regarding, among other things, matters of canon and representation, it will be important that RPC serve as a tangible expression of radical democratic values. At RPC, we thus ask: Is the author engaging a critically relevant scholarly conversation? What is this writer’s citation politics--- who are they speaking with? Who and what is at the center? How and why?
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positionality politics |
As this journal highlights rhetorical scholarship that archives, documents, theorizes, or participates in forms of individual and collective public interventions and advocacy work, we ask that authors situate themselves politically. We want to ensure that authors are not “othering,” or worse yet colonizing, the communities and research “subjects” they are presenting in their scholarship. At RPC, we thus ask: what is the author’s relationship to their work? How does the author engage in subaltern, intersectional, and/or anti-racist work in real ways?
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Prose, presentation, and style |
We envision a journal that re-energizes critical scholars, activists, and organizers. As such, readability and flow of ideas are important to us. By readability, we are not asking for simplification as theorizing social change is never a simple endeavor. Instead, we are asking that authors engage their writing style meaningfully. At RPC, we thus ask: Does the writer offer us an interesting flow of argument and thinking? Who is the writer speaking to and how does this rhetorical strategy shape the overall arguments?
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