header photo

The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

ISSN: 2472-7318





A woman in a blue dress photographs an older woman.   Sheets of white paper with colorful drawings on them.

Creating Our Pasts Together: A Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Memoir

Alexandra Hidalgo, Michigan State University

This video essay applies a Cultural Rhetorics lens to memoir to argue that such stories should take into account the experiences of others, not just the primary author. Given the emphasis that Cultural Rhetorics places on relationality and communal knowledge-making, Hidalgo argues that the construction of meaning that happens within shared contexts can provide for more ethical and complex accounts than those written from an individualistic perspective.

Video Essay | Transcript 

Larger Type Transcript | PDF




Contending with Multimodality 
as a (Material) Process

Lucy Johnson, Washington State University

Anne Frances Wysocki contends that “new media” should refer to texts whose composers recognize and underscore their material contexts and processes as a way to reveal the values that they embody. Such texts are not only digital but represent a variety of modes. In this essay, Johnson builds on this point by providing an overview of multimodal and process theory research to reveal how and why a focus on materiality proves fundamental to such work and to pedagogy.

  HTML | Larger Type Version | PDF



A yellow cake with purple and blue icing around the edges. In green icing it reads




Have Your Epideictic Rhetoric, and Eat It, Too

Rachael Graham Lussos, George Mason University

This article asserts that “occasional cakes,” made for celebratory events, prove material forms of epideictic and activist rhetorics. Analyzing her own occasional cake-making process, Lussos explains how the rhetorical choices she undertakes highlight attention to mode and process, cultural values, and relational ethics. In addition, she demonstrates how the process disrupts epideictic rhetoric’s tendency to center prominent individuals to celebrate vulnerable members of the community.

HTML | Larger Type Version | PDF