Cultivating Home: Nepali Migrants and Gardening as Everyday Rhetoric

Rhetorical knowledge is often discussed through formal institutions and textual traditions, leaving everyday community practices underexamined. This paper engages the theme “Rhetoric from the Margins” by examining how Nepali migrants’ gardening practices in Hooksett, New Hampshire produce knowledge outside dominant academic and institutional frameworks. I ask: How do Nepali migrants use gardening as a way of making meaning, sustaining memory, and cultivating belonging in unfamiliar environments? In what ways does gardening function as a rhetorical and epistemic practice through which migrants carry and transform land-based knowledge across borders? Rather than treating gardening simply as leisure or subsistence activity, I examine it as a form of everyday rhetoric through which migrants interpret place, negotiate identity, and recreate home. Methodologically, the paper draws on community-engaged ethnographic approach, including interviews, conversations, and observations with Nepali gardeners. I read gardening practices—planting, exchanging seeds, sharing labor, and caring for land—as rhetorical acts that circulate knowledge, values, and memories within the community. This approach foregrounds everyday labor and relational practices as sites where knowledge emerges from lived experience. The paper contributes to rhetorical studies by showing how migrant gardening practices generate epistemologies from the margins—forms of knowledge grounded in land, care, and community rather than institutional authority. By centering these practices, the project highlights how migrants actively create meaning and belonging through shared labor and relational knowledge-making, revealing rhetoric as something that unfolds not only in texts and institutions but also in everyday acts of cultivating and caring for land

Using Action Research To Inform Graduate Research Theories, Methods, And Praxis Among Master’s And PhD Multilingual And International Students

In an attempt to provide multilingual and international graduate students food for thought, this work-in-progress presentation examines a day in the life of a multilingual PhD student’s use of action research during the teaching of RWS 1301 in both Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 to better inform his data collection via student questionnaires.   Action research, “generally involves inquiring into one’s own practice through a process of self-monitoring that […] includes entering a cycle of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting on an issue or problem in order to improve practice” (Farrell, 2007, p.94).   My research question answers how using action research informs graduate research theories, methods, and praxis among Master’s and PhD multilingual and international students and how as a rhetorical observation it can guide one towards theories such as Grounded Theory in addition to methods such as anonymous questionnaires.   It is quite common for graduate students to be uncertain of their research goals beyond coursework. Some of my multilingual and international colleagues have expressed to me that they feel higher institutes of learning do not prepare them enough during their first two years. If they knew what they discover upon their third year, some sort of action plan to determine best practices of data collection centered on theory, methods, and praxis, they would be even more ready for data analysis and dissertation writing. Multilingual and international students appear to face the most difficulty due to many factors such as language barriers, differences in academic culture and traditions, and struggles with time management. Perhaps sharing my insights will better prepare graduate students unsure of where to start

From the Margins to the Center: Indian–Nepali Rhetoric as a Constitutive Necessity

Rhetorical studies has historically been shaped by Greco-Roman traditions which often position non-Western rhetorical practices at the margins of scholarly discourse overlooking the intellectual and cultural richness of non-Western rhetorics. While recent scholarship has sought to reclaim these marginalized traditions, the persistent binary between “Western” and “non-Western” rhetorics continues to create a false sense of separation. This presentation moves beyond that bifurcation by placing Indian–Nepali rhetorical practices in direct conversation with Western rhetorical frameworks, highlighting both their distinctive features and the ways they expand the conceptual boundaries of the field. My central argument is that the uniqueness and differences of non-Western rhetorics from the Western rhetorics are not a rejection of something western but a constitutive necessity for a more comprehensive understanding of rhetoric itself. Drawing the insights from the comparative and cross-cultural approach of George A. Kennedy (1998), I make close readings of the non-western and western texts by considering the issues such as influence of religion, the role of the rhetor, the purpose of rhetoric, the use of logical syllogism, and the sources of knowledge. Ultimately, this study makes a double call; it aims to deepen the understanding of ontological boundaries of rhetorics by acknowledging the diversity of rhetorical practices across cultures and advocates for a more inclusive rhetorical framework

Lunch & Keynote Address by Dr. Ramiro De Anda: An Epistemic Architecture of the Unspoken: Reimagining the Margins

Dr. Ramiro De And