3. BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Assistant Professor of English – University of Waterloo
Focuses his work on disability studies – founding editor of the Canadian
Journal of Disability Studies
Author of two books – Disability Rhetoric (2014) & Disabled Upon Arrival:
Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (2018)
4. RHETORIC THROUGH THE YEARS
Some Classical Definitions
The art of persuasion (Aristotle)
A good man speaking well (Quintilian)
Speech designed to persuade (Cicero)
More Recent Definitions
A mode of altering reality […] by the
creation of discourse which changes reality
through the mediation of thought and
action (Lloyd Bitzer)
The art, practice, and study of human
communication (Andrea Lunsford)
The study of the ways that power circulates
through discourse (Dolmage)
6. DOLMAGE
WRITES…
“I will argue for a critical
alliance between disability
studies and rhetoric. Disability
studies would mandate that
rhetoricians pay close
attention to embodied
difference; in return,
rhetorical approaches would
give disability studies
practitioners means of
understanding the debates
that in part shape these
bodies.” Disability Rhetoric (2014)
7. PROBLEMS WITH ACCESSIBILITY
“At the very best, we get digital
‘ramps’ that actually cost people with
disabilities, or that make learning
much more difficult for them -- these
are ramps in the back door of higher
education, not in the front door.”
–Jay Dolmage, in a 2017 email interview with
Inside Higher Ed.
8. HOW CAN
RHETORIC HELP?
“the study of the
ways that power
circulates through
discourse” (Dolmage)
9. IN OTHER WORDS…
Rhetoric can help us understand the issues we
face in modern society by helping us navigate
the discourse circulating the public sphere
According to Dolmage, disability studies is “uniquely
rhetorical”
10. THEREFORE…
Rhetoric is a way of entering a
conversation (in this case, a
conversation surrounding disability
studies).
By entering the conversation, we
can contribute to contemporary
issues in this field of study.
11. APPLIED RHETORIC
Dolmage uses rhetoric…
as a way to enter a conversation
to understand power relations
to advocate for equity, specifically as it pertains
to accessibility
How could we use rhetoric in this way?
What conversations could we enter?
What new understandings about a
social/cultural issue might we gain by applying
rhetoric?
