Rhetorical, Material, Critical Bodies: An Interview With Christina Cedillo

This episode features an interview with Christina Cedillo. Dr. Cedillo is an associate professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, where she recently won the 2024 President's Research Award. Her research lies at the intersections of race, gender, and disability. She examines how legal, scientific, and popular discourses circumscribe the embodied lives of marginalized populations, and how those populations enact rhetorical presence and engage in rehumanization practices using multimodality and digital technologies. In this episode, she discusses a number of her projects. Those include a 2023 special issue of College Composition and Communication focused on cultural rhetorics that Dr. Cedillo coedited, her 2021 Journal of the History of Rhetoric article "Unruly Borders, Bodies, and Blood," a coauthored piece on critical race theory bans in Texas, and an in-process edited collection entitled Rhetorical Approaches to Critical Embodiment. This interview was conducted at the 2024 Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. If you are interested in the 2025 Peck Research on Writing Symposium, which is mentioned in the episode's outro, registration is open as of this episode's release. This episode includes a clip from Aldous Ichnite's "Our Entire Bodies Have Always Been the Most Powerful Form of Visual Expression." Episode Transcript