Co-edited with Jennifer Clary-Lemon. This collection offers rhetoric scholars multiple instances of attending to materiality in ways that also seek to enact decoloniality. That is, it asks how we might continue rhetorical investigations of the vibrant materiality surrounding us while also acknowledging not just other cultural views on that materiality but also that those views are not “alternative” or ancillary to standard, Western arrangements between nature and culture. In the presentation of material projects from and with colonized, indigenous, mestiza, and subaltern people, this volume opens space for research and teaching that productively intervenes and invents as rhetorical responses to a planet in crisis. 

This monograph project focuses on indigenous philosophies of relations to re-examine theories and applications of rhetoric that move beyond construction, constructivist, and other metaphors of building and linear cause and effect. I take a comparative approach to show potentials and pitfalls in aligning indigenous relations with process-relational philosophies of EuroAmerica. While both admit relata as emergent from prior relations, easy comparisons are dangerous as EuroAmerican philosophies like new materialisms are still subject to the extractive tendencies of settler colonialism. The project mitigates those dangers through revising rhetorical pedagogy as cultivating potential in one’s availability to the emergent. This decenters agency, looks to the ecology of exigence, and understands rhetoric in a more complex, virtual temporality.