Embodying and Disabling Antiwar Activism: Disrupting YouTube’s “Mother’s Day for Peace”

YouTube allows activists to broadcast their missions and engage global audiences. “Mother’s Day for Peace,” a 2007 video, features American actresses who recite Julia Ward Howe’s radical 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation and describe their personal thoughts on mothering. Analyzing this video with transnational rhetoric and disability rhetoric frameworks not only illuminates the persuasive possibilities and drawbacks for the video’s normative feminine gender performance and the spectacle of a war-injured Iraqi girl but also models an approach that prompts rhetoricians to examine larger rhetorical concerns revealed by the intersections of disability, race, gender, and globalization

“If I Can’t Bake, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution”: CODEPINK’s Activist Literacies of Peace and Pie

By focusing on the cookbook Peace Never Tasted So Sweet, this article argues that CODEPINK strategically combines peace activist and food literacies to engage audiences in their antiwar efforts, strategies that take on benefits and drawbacks. Although feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines have studied cookbooks, researchers have yet to fully analyze the intersections of gendered activist literacies and cookbooks. Expanding upon arguments promoting food literacies as well as feminist analyses of cookbooks, this article illuminates CODEPINK’s efforts to teach readers how to critique military action, recruit peace-workers, build a movement, and bake pie

Mothers Against Gun Violence and the Activist Buffer

As the epigraph attests, knowledge production by women deserves increased attention; doing so contributes to better interpreting the domains and conditions of our lives. This broad claim may not seem controversial, yet marginalization of African American women’s perspectives continues within academic and popular discourse. One occasion when publics pay attention to African American women is upon the tragic deaths of their children. Specifically, mothers of urban homicide victims face important rhetorical moments that facilitate how individuals and urban communities respond to such violence. Local and national news media sponsor this response as well, as reports feature the reactions of victims’ mothers, placing them in the position of having to make meaning of their children’s deaths and thereby endow these children’s lives with value in a racist culture that devalues African American youth, the most likely victims of gun violence (Beard et al.; Ferdman; Light; Reeves and Holmes; Sugarmann). For the Mothers Against Gun Violence (MAGV) in Syracuse, New York, the organization at the center of analysis here, buffer rhetorics unite individual mothers’ experiences to form a communal activist identity

Diving into Food Justice: Food Waste in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene calls for greater attention to the various and complicated ways by which humans interact with the environment and compels critical dialogue to identify and implement alternative solutions. With few exceptions, organisms (including human and more-than-human) require food as a biological need for survival. The global agrifood system has broad environmental consequences. For example, “getting food from the farm to our fork eats up 10 percent of the total U.S. energy budget, uses 50 percent of U.S. land, and swallows 80 percent of all freshwater consumed in the United States” (Gunders, 2012). Food ranks among the top five energy-consuming industries, including all sectors from farm to table, that together account for 60% of total energy consumption worldwide (US Department of State, 2010). Food uniquely illustrates humans’ impact on natural systems and the environment

Going Multimodal: Programmatic, Curricular, and Classroom Change

AS THE STUDENTS NOTE IN this epigraph, we do not live in a monomodal world. Rather, we experience the world and communicate through multiple modalities. To confine students to learning in only one mode, typically the textual mode in first-year writing courses, indeed limits, students\u27 understanding and creative potential-a point that has reemerged in considerations of education and the teaching of writing..