Rhetoricity Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth: Afterwords
This special episode of Rhetoricity features a roundtable that also serves as the "Afterwords" for a forthcoming collection entitled Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth. That collection is edited by Scott Sundvall, Caddie Alford, and Ira Allen and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2026. The featured panelists are James Ball, Barbara Biesecker, Omedi Ochieng, Robin Reames, and Ryan Skinnell. See below for more detailed bios of the panelists.
The roundtable focuses on key questions from Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth: what we mean by "post-truth," how it intersects with rhetoric, and what challenges that intersection poses for us in the world to come.
James Ball is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and author, a fellow of the think tank Demos, and the political editor of The New European. Ball also played a key role in The Guardian's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden. He is the author of multiple books, including Post-Truth and The Tangled Web We Weave: Inside The Shadow System That Shapes the Internet. His most recent book, The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated The World was published by Bloomsbury in July 2023.
Barbara Biesecker is Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia and author of the recently published Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including the National Communication Association's Douglas Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award, the Francine Merritt Award, and the Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division's Outstanding Mentor Award and Distinguished Scholar Award. She served as editor-in-chief of the Quarterly Journal of Speech from 2013–2016 and continues to serve on multiple editorial boards.
Omedi Ochieng specializes in Africana philosophical and intellectual thought, Black radicalism, and criticism. He is the author of two books: Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy and The Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy. He is currently working on a project on Black insurgent ecology.
Robin Reames is the Culbertson Chair of Writing in the Department of English at Indiana University's College of Arts and Sciences. Her research explores the relationship between language and metaphysics in ancient Greek rhetoric. She explored aspects of this relationship in her first book, Seeming and Being in Plato's Rhetorical Theory and her book of essays Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language Before Plato. She is also one of the editors of the third edition of The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Her most recent book, The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times is written for a general audience and introduces key concepts from the ancient rhetorical tradition that can help readers navigate today's complex and polarizing politics.
Ryan Skinnell is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at San José State University. His current research investigates authoritarian, demagogic, and fascist rhetoric, particularly in the early 20th century, and its relationship to global politics in the 21st century. He has published six books, including Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump and Rhetoric and Guns. He's also published more than two dozen articles and book chapters in top scholarly journals and edited collections, as well as essays in popular press outlets including the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Salon. He is currently writing a book about Adolf Hitler's rhetoric.
This episode features a clip from "Truth" by Masteredit.