Carly S. Woods

Speech and debate have been central in shaping traditions of argumentation in the United States. While much of debate history has focused on individual nation-states, attention to twentieth century intercollegiate debate tours offers one way for argumentation scholars to consider the transgeographic flows of argument exchange. This essay makes the case for thinking about the history of debate across borders. In order to contribute to this special issue’s focus on argumentation in the Americas, I offer the example of the University of Puerto Rico’s 1928 debate tour of the eastern United States, in which student debaters were able to ‘speak back’ to U.S. imperialism through embodied performances that compelled audiences to consider different perspectives on education, language, citizenship, and sovereignty.

TABS: Aids for Ending Sexism in School was a journal founded by Lucy Picco Simpson and the Organization for Equal Education of the Sexes. Attention to this publication sheds light on feminist activism as it transformed in the wake of Title IX legislation in the late 1970s and 1980s. In examining the journal’s ability to facilitate networking, production, and accountability, we gain greater insight into how teachers and students were able to question normative messages about race, gender, class, and ability in educational materials and diversify the range of historical figures discussed in schools.

The pandemic and economic catastrophes of 2020 and the forms of resistance that surged against racist systemic and physical violence indicate, we contend, that studying public address in the present moment requires attention to the mutual contingency of rhetoric and digitality. Relying on interdisciplinary literatures and a global perspective, we direct such attention along three vectors: platforms, commons, and methods. We indicate how theorizing rhetoric and digitality transforms critical and historical traditions. In expanding the purview of the public address tradition while retaining the tradition's hermeneutic potential, we emphasize the need to challenge disciplinary terms and the desirability of expanded analytical methods. We submit that by not attending sufficiently to the advent and diffusion of digital media technologies, public address scholarship misses opportunities to shape ongoing conversations about how rhetoric mediates public affairs; and that insofar as struggles for racial justice are bound up with, not just mediated by, digitality, the prospects of diversifying rhetoric's professoriate increase when research on this topic is central rather than peripheral.