Episode 8: Ersula Ore

Dr. Ersula J. Ore is the Lincoln Professor of Ethics in The School of Social Transformation and Assistant Professor of African & African American Studies, and Rhetoric at Arizona State University. Her work as a race critical rhetorician maps the suasive strategies of aggrieved communities as they operate within a post-emancipation historical context. In Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric & American Identity (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), Ore examines lynching as a rhetorical strategy and material practice interwoven with the formation of America's national identity and with the nation's need to continually renew that identity. Specifically, the book draws connections between the rhetorics and material practices of lynching in the past and the forms these rhetorics and practices assume in the present with the hope of helping readers understand, interpret, and even critique present-day situations involving racial violence. Dr. Ore's most recent publications broadly explore the correlations between race, power and academic space and give particular attention to the rhetorical strategies Black and non-Black rhetors of color use when navigating social space. Publications exploring these issues include "'PushBack': A Pedagogy of Care," Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture (2017), "Whiteness as Racialized Space: Obama and the Rhetorical Constraints of Phenotypical Blackness" in Kris Ratcliffe's Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education (2017), and "They Call Me 'Dr. Ore'," Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society Special Issue: Race, Rhetoric and the State (2015). Dr. Ore is a 2013 Institute for Humanities Research Fellow at Arizona State University and a 2011 Penn State Alumni Association Dissertation Award Recipient. Later this month she will receive ASU's College of Global Health Graduate Mentorship Award from for her work and investment in graduate students.