Andre Jones

My name’s André and you can call me Dre. I am a first-year writing instructor and PhD student in Rhetoric and Writing at Virginia Tech. This is my sixth year teaching and this class marks the end of my coursework. Research-wise, I am interested in the seductiveness of resilience rhetoric and the ways in which it’s employed and taken up. A better understanding of both will help us know the difference between resilience rhetoric that is meant to be beneficial and that which participates in capitalism, attaching nobility to struggle.

Paying it Forward Through Rhetorical Velocity

Rhetorical velocity (Ridolfo & DeVoss 2009) for the sake of generating plagiarizer-friendly texts that can be recomposed for additional purposes perhaps outside the intentions of the original rhetor or rhetors is a nifty pedagogical strategy for teaching students about the vulnerability of their texts, interconnectedness of their rhetorical subjectivities, and the impact of the dromosphere…

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How To Actually Do Something

Actually Doing Something – 10/23/2023 Throughout my reading of Jenny Odell (2019) I kept thinking about David Foster Wallace (2005), his speech “This is Water”. Lo and behold it appears in chapter 5, “The Ecology of Strangers”. Doing the kind of nothing that precipitates action/change requires acute awareness of having other options from what you’re…

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The Precarity of Doing Nothing

I’m very sensitive to the precarity of doing nothing for people who are not in a position to do nothing. Jenny O writes that the “removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries” between them and their employers (15). So even in my own experience, I’ve been unfairly berated by union reps for…

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Implications for Resilience

I once wrote about our reliance on depictions of greatness in the wake of failure. Because we’re prone to fail–and failure being verboten, nor accounted for all that well in our social systems, if at all–human beings must bounce back from failure. Bouncing back is hard. Heroes, however, make it look easy. The ease with…

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Rhetorical Unconscious

Movie cameras give us the “optical unconscious” (Benjamin). In a way, they’re like Kenneth Burke’s terministic screens. Because people perceive the world differently through language and symbols that lend themselves to abiding certain beliefs, we could think of Burke’s screens as revealing the “rhetorical unconscious”; or capturing interpretations that we otherwise take for granted. The…

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Big Data Lacks Vision

It’s awfully presumptive of Dataists to say humans would prefer a robot to the same democracy that gave them the robot. The Marvel character Ultron once observed that humans always create things that supplant them: “Men of peace create engines of war and people create children” (Avengers: Age of Ultron). He then turned around and…

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Be a Menace by Taking Selfies at the Circus While Playing Games and Eating Bread; or Is There Room for Joy in Non-things?

It’s funny because I’d been working on my duck face all summer only to encounter Han and get told that my engagement with an informaton turns my countenance in a non-thing that is information, or a digital illusion. But so what? If we must abide a terrestrial order, why can’t our lives be optimized to…

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