Matthew Houdek
Biographic Data
| ID | 5594951 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Houdek |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Houdek |
| SIGNATURE | HOUDEK M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rochester Institute of Technology |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The common wind from below
Through an "inter(con)textual reading" (Maraj), this essay explores the resonances and generative incongruences between two prominent metaphors that reflect the thought/feeling/praxis of two of the modern era's most significant revolutions – "the common wind" from the Haitian revolution and the "wind from below" from the Zapatista revolution. My goal is to think within/across/beyond these revolutions via the methods, epistemologies, and imaginari…
A Rhetoric that Breathes, a Rhetoric that Heals
Radical rhetorics at/and the world’s end
This short essay introduces the special issue, “Radical Rhetorics at/and the World’s End,” which features original short essays that offer bold, risky, and provocative perspectives that share the general belief that we can no longer afford safe, incremental, or mechanical solutions and responses to the profound challenges that confront our planetary community/ies today. Rather than a new set of universals, or proscriptive, prescriptive, or diagno…
On occupying the silent parenthetical
To speak of “the End” as a cataclysmic future event, as depicted in popular apocalyptic genres, oversimplifies the prolonged, multiplicitous character of the End Times as they unfold unevenly across different scales, speeds, populations, and intensities. As many rhetoricians and other critical scholars have noted, an interrelated series of Ends and Endings mark the contemporary conjuncture, disrupting disciplinary traditions and the prevailing ep…
Rhetoric and the Abolitionist Horizon
This essay introduces the special issue, “Rhetoric and the Abolitionist Horizon,” which features essays from emerging communication and composition rhetorical studies scholars Shereen Yousuf, Ashley Ferrell, Dustin Greenwalt, and Gabriella Wilson. Together, they gesture to a diverse set of tools, concepts, critiques, case studies, and approaches that might help to expand rhetorical studies in ways that opens space for abolitionist thought and pra…
Revisioning Rhetorical Violence in the Afterlife
In this essay, we attend to the rhetorical and spatio-temporal contours of how the urgency to recognize Black life and aid in struggle is detached from a recognition of the deep structural and ontological nature of antiblackness. We center on two seemingly disparate case studies to unpack these phenomena. First, we look at the state lynching of Breonna Taylor and the multiracial coalition that emerged around #sayhername, and second, we turn to th…
In the aftertimes, breathe
This essay advances racial respiratory philosophy and calls for an abolitionist rhetorical studies as a response to Ersula Ore and my call for “cultivating otherwise worlds and breathable futures” in the Aftertimes. I draw from respiratory philosophy and communication and transdisciplinary scholarship on the constitutive nature of white violence, cruelty, and antiblackness, their relation to breathing/suffocation, and how the university is implic…
Recontextualizing responsibility for justice
This essay critically engages the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Lynching in America report to illuminate how it uses lynching as a trope to gesture to an otherwise temporality of anti-Black violence that recontextualizes what it means to be responsible for structural injustice. Overall, through my analysis and by engaging theories of justice, racialization, and racialized time, while also centering the language of breathing and suffocation dra…
Metaphors to Live and Die By
Decolonial smuggling is a practice that falls at the intersections of fugitivity (Moten) and delinking (Mignolo, Wanzer-Serrano). It is geared toward disrupting rhetorical studies’ zero-point epistemology to open space to marshal alternative epistemologies—of Black being, Indigeneities, and their relational formations—against the canon to enable more radical, decolonial disciplinary futures. Building on the work of Black, Indigenous, and People o…
Coda
The COVID-19 pandemic marks a temporal rupture that, amid all the tragedies entailed therein, is deeply entangled with one of the largest uprisings in modern history. Not only has the virus disprop
Rhetoric and the Temporal Turn
In September 2019, climate activist Greta Thunberg chastised members of the United Nations over their inaction on climate change. The sixteen-year-old Swedish student emphasized the generation gap
Lynching in Times of Suffocation
Drawing from theories of race and time, this article examines how discourse policing the continuities of lynching’s past and present manifests temporally to construct the hegemony of white national time. This dominant temporal formation materializes in the law and public memory as an institutionalized common sense (of legal time and memorial time) to create “times of suffocation” for Black lives and which perpetuate end-of-lynching sentiments in …
The imperative of race for rhetorical studies
The whiteness of rhetorical studies is outrageous. Outrageous (c. 1300, “excessive, extravagant,” from Old French outrageus, outrajos; “immoderate; exceeding reason or decency; violent,” from Moder
Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence
I theorize how the common sense of racialized violence, manifest in public discourse, is engendered by the rhetorical process of racial sedimentation. This meaning-making process fashions a seemingly legitimate text from a reservoir of historically deposited fragments that congeal in response to racial crises as a means of explaining away the threat to the racial status quo and burying critical counterdiscourses. I demonstrate this sedimentation …
The Mark of Criminality
Despite sporadic uptakes throughout the history of the discipline, rhetorical scholars’ attention to matters of race, racialization, and racial inequalities and oppressions is primarily marked by a
The rhetorical force of “global archival memory”
This essay engages the possibilities and pitfalls of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program for fostering “global archival memory.” Archives function as rhetorical weapons for both political control and social justice within national and regional contexts. The constitution of global archival memory shifts archives’ borders beyond nation-bound contexts, creating space for contention, deliberation, and debate within a presentist transnational arena. …
Once an Eagle, always an Eagle?”
A group of Eagle Scouts protested the Boy Scouts of America’s (BSA) anti-gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and queer policies and heteronormative citizenship ideals by forfeiting their badges, divesting their membership, and writing personal, emotionally charged letters addressed to the BSA to critique the institution from within. Engaging the correspondence illuminates the repertoires of critique and dissent they employ in their in-house protests. To the…
Rhetoric and the Temporal Turn
In September 2019, climate activist Greta Thunberg chastised members of the United Nations over their inaction on climate change. The sixteen-year-old Swedish student emphasized the generation gap
Lynching in Times of Suffocation
Drawing from theories of race and time, this article examines how discourse policing the continuities of lynching’s past and present manifests temporally to construct the hegemony of white national time. This dominant temporal formation materializes in the law and public memory as an institutionalized common sense (of legal time and memorial time) to create “times of suffocation” for Black lives and which perpetuate end-of-lynching sentiments in …
The rhetorical force of “global archival memory”
This essay engages the possibilities and pitfalls of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program for fostering “global archival memory.” Archives function as rhetorical weapons for both political control and social justice within national and regional contexts. The constitution of global archival memory shifts archives’ borders beyond nation-bound contexts, creating space for contention, deliberation, and debate within a presentist transnational arena. …
Recontextualizing responsibility for justice
This essay critically engages the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Lynching in America report to illuminate how it uses lynching as a trope to gesture to an otherwise temporality of anti-Black violence that recontextualizes what it means to be responsible for structural injustice. Overall, through my analysis and by engaging theories of justice, racialization, and racialized time, while also centering the language of breathing and suffocation dra…
Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence
I theorize how the common sense of racialized violence, manifest in public discourse, is engendered by the rhetorical process of racial sedimentation. This meaning-making process fashions a seemingly legitimate text from a reservoir of historically deposited fragments that congeal in response to racial crises as a means of explaining away the threat to the racial status quo and burying critical counterdiscourses. I demonstrate this sedimentation …
The rhetorical force of “global archival memory”
This essay engages the possibilities and pitfalls of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program for fostering “global archival memory.” Archives function as rhetorical weapons for both political control and social justice within national and regional contexts. The constitution of global archival memory shifts archives’ borders beyond nation-bound contexts, creating space for contention, deliberation, and debate within a presentist transnational arena. …
Once an Eagle, always an Eagle?”
A group of Eagle Scouts protested the Boy Scouts of America’s (BSA) anti-gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and queer policies and heteronormative citizenship ideals by forfeiting their badges, divesting their membership, and writing personal, emotionally charged letters addressed to the BSA to critique the institution from within. Engaging the correspondence illuminates the repertoires of critique and dissent they employ in their in-house protests. To the…
The imperative of race for rhetorical studies
The whiteness of rhetorical studies is outrageous. Outrageous (c. 1300, “excessive, extravagant,” from Old French outrageus, outrajos; “immoderate; exceeding reason or decency; violent,” from Moder
Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence
I theorize how the common sense of racialized violence, manifest in public discourse, is engendered by the rhetorical process of racial sedimentation. This meaning-making process fashions a seemingly legitimate text from a reservoir of historically deposited fragments that congeal in response to racial crises as a means of explaining away the threat to the racial status quo and burying critical counterdiscourses. I demonstrate this sedimentation …
The Mark of Criminality
Despite sporadic uptakes throughout the history of the discipline, rhetorical scholars’ attention to matters of race, racialization, and racial inequalities and oppressions is primarily marked by a
Coda
The COVID-19 pandemic marks a temporal rupture that, amid all the tragedies entailed therein, is deeply entangled with one of the largest uprisings in modern history. Not only has the virus disprop
Rhetoric and the Temporal Turn
In September 2019, climate activist Greta Thunberg chastised members of the United Nations over their inaction on climate change. The sixteen-year-old Swedish student emphasized the generation gap
Lynching in Times of Suffocation
Drawing from theories of race and time, this article examines how discourse policing the continuities of lynching’s past and present manifests temporally to construct the hegemony of white national time. This dominant temporal formation materializes in the law and public memory as an institutionalized common sense (of legal time and memorial time) to create “times of suffocation” for Black lives and which perpetuate end-of-lynching sentiments in …
Recontextualizing responsibility for justice
This essay critically engages the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Lynching in America report to illuminate how it uses lynching as a trope to gesture to an otherwise temporality of anti-Black violence that recontextualizes what it means to be responsible for structural injustice. Overall, through my analysis and by engaging theories of justice, racialization, and racialized time, while also centering the language of breathing and suffocation dra…
Metaphors to Live and Die By
Decolonial smuggling is a practice that falls at the intersections of fugitivity (Moten) and delinking (Mignolo, Wanzer-Serrano). It is geared toward disrupting rhetorical studies’ zero-point epistemology to open space to marshal alternative epistemologies—of Black being, Indigeneities, and their relational formations—against the canon to enable more radical, decolonial disciplinary futures. Building on the work of Black, Indigenous, and People o…
Revisioning Rhetorical Violence in the Afterlife
In this essay, we attend to the rhetorical and spatio-temporal contours of how the urgency to recognize Black life and aid in struggle is detached from a recognition of the deep structural and ontological nature of antiblackness. We center on two seemingly disparate case studies to unpack these phenomena. First, we look at the state lynching of Breonna Taylor and the multiracial coalition that emerged around #sayhername, and second, we turn to th…
In the aftertimes, breathe
This essay advances racial respiratory philosophy and calls for an abolitionist rhetorical studies as a response to Ersula Ore and my call for “cultivating otherwise worlds and breathable futures” in the Aftertimes. I draw from respiratory philosophy and communication and transdisciplinary scholarship on the constitutive nature of white violence, cruelty, and antiblackness, their relation to breathing/suffocation, and how the university is implic…
Rhetoric and the Abolitionist Horizon
This essay introduces the special issue, “Rhetoric and the Abolitionist Horizon,” which features essays from emerging communication and composition rhetorical studies scholars Shereen Yousuf, Ashley Ferrell, Dustin Greenwalt, and Gabriella Wilson. Together, they gesture to a diverse set of tools, concepts, critiques, case studies, and approaches that might help to expand rhetorical studies in ways that opens space for abolitionist thought and pra…
The common wind from below
Through an "inter(con)textual reading" (Maraj), this essay explores the resonances and generative incongruences between two prominent metaphors that reflect the thought/feeling/praxis of two of the modern era's most significant revolutions – "the common wind" from the Haitian revolution and the "wind from below" from the Zapatista revolution. My goal is to think within/across/beyond these revolutions via the methods, epistemologies, and imaginari…
A Rhetoric that Breathes, a Rhetoric that Heals
Radical rhetorics at/and the world’s end
This short essay introduces the special issue, “Radical Rhetorics at/and the World’s End,” which features original short essays that offer bold, risky, and provocative perspectives that share the general belief that we can no longer afford safe, incremental, or mechanical solutions and responses to the profound challenges that confront our planetary community/ies today. Rather than a new set of universals, or proscriptive, prescriptive, or diagno…
On occupying the silent parenthetical
To speak of “the End” as a cataclysmic future event, as depicted in popular apocalyptic genres, oversimplifies the prolonged, multiplicitous character of the End Times as they unfold unevenly across different scales, speeds, populations, and intensities. As many rhetoricians and other critical scholars have noted, an interrelated series of Ends and Endings mark the contemporary conjuncture, disrupting disciplinary traditions and the prevailing ep…
Sociology (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (12 works) · Art (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Linguistics (7 works)