Inventing Place

“This compelling collection of evocative essays locates not a rhetoric of place but one cultivated by and as place. Moving among such diverse topics as memory, bureaucracy, authenticity, ethnography, and aesthetics, this book’s central premise and payoff is the inventional possibilities for rhetoric to be found in diverse attunements to place.”— Nathaniel A. Rivers, coeditor of Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition

“Like the editors, I grew up in Texas, which like any topos has its affordances and limits. I can’t imagine growing up in any other place at any other time, while at the same time I can barely imagine I ever lived there. Inventing Place captures the deep ambivalence in that disjunction, both a love and a disbelief. Deeply personal and insightfully scholarly, these essays compellingly reveal the becoming-undone of being there.”—Byron Hawk, author of A Counter-History of Composition
 
“Inventing Place is a much-needed rhetorical exploration into the ways that places are invented anew through reflections on body-place relations. With a strong reliance on poiesis—a method for writing with a place that emerges from the event of being there—this collection offers a unique and timely intervention into how place is studied and written about in rhetoric and composition and in writing studies.”—Laurie E. Gries, author of Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics