Edited by Rick Wysocki and Mary P. Sheridan

About the Authors

Making Future Matters explores the consequentiality of our scholarly activity through examples that both shed light on and enact complex possibilities of mattering. Articulating how our words (or images, videos, design choices, and all communicative practices) matter, are matter, and contribute to the ongoing materialization of the world, this collection suggests ethical and consequential directions for our discipline.

a banner reading Introduction

Introduction

Rick Wysocki and Mary P. Sheridan

This introduction discusses a shared through line across these chapters: making our work come to matter by attending to the consequences, values, and methodologies we use to materialize our work.

a banner image of graffiti art showing swastikas being thrown in the trash

Swastika Monitoring: Developing Digital Research Tools to Track Visual Rhetorics of Hate

Laurie Gries

This essay explores how visual rhetoric scholars can contribute to contemporary hate tracking efforts by inventing data activist tools to trace the recent surge of swastikas surfacing in the United States.

a black banner that reads Listen. Listen. Listen.

Manifesto: It’s Time to Hear Me! I Mean Really Hear me!

Octavio Pimentel

This article brings attention to the various racist discourses that exist within the United States, while challenging individuals to fight against these racist practices in a variety of ways, but especially in the writing classroom.

a banner shpwing of a collage of DMA girls

What Matters in the Worlds We Encourage

Mary P. Sheridan

This chapter provides one example of how we in Writing Studies make our work come to matter by examining both the consequentiality of the work we value and the ways we materialize that work.

banner image of a pair of hands holding a zebra finch

How Do Moments Add Up to Lives: Trajectories of Semiotic Becoming vs. Tales of School Learning in Four Modes

Paul Prior

Contrasting two models of development and discourse around a lifespan case study of one biologist’s becoming, I argue that which account we work from matters theoretically, methodologically, pedagogically, ethically, and politically.

banner image of a red-hot electric stove

Wandering Rhetoric, Rhetoric Wandering

Melanie Yergeau

This webtext perseverates on the following premise: The rhizome is neuroqueer. In particular, this chapter examines what wandering, invention, and errancy might mean for neuroqueer rhetorics.

banner image of sign reading Utopie

Becoming Utopias: Toward a Queer Rhetoric of Instantiation

Jacqueline Rhodes

This essay offers a speculative “think-practice” focusing on the question of 1970s lesbian separatism and queer utopias. The polyamorous embrace of queer time(s) questions old ideas of Subjectivity in the service of ethical entanglement with others, and pushes toward a complicated dis/identification with lesbians before me.

a pixelated illustration of a torture method

Syrians for Truth and Justice: Articulating Entanglements, Disrupting Disciplinarity

Steve Parks

What does it mean to consider ourselves as human rights activists within a transnational framework? What does our field offer to such work? Through my work with Syrians for Truth and Justice I attempt to address these questions.

a banner image of a plaque

Afterword

Gesa E. Kirsch

Kirsch argues that it takes courage, heart, passion, and commitment to make our work matter in challenging times when civil rights and environmental protections are under attack. She aims to strike a balance between caution and optimism, introspection and activism.

banner reading 'Response Essays'

Response Essays

These response essays read across the primary webtexts to question, extend, and re-vision the themes and webtexts themselves.