Public Address Scholarship and the Effects of Rhetoric

In this essay, I argue that public address scholars should reengage with the effects of rhetoric through attention to reception and circulation/re-circulation. Doing so will deepen our understanding of context and agency, and strengthen our scholarship by lending support for the very premise on which our field is based: that rhetoric has consequences. This essay discusses why public address scholars have retreated from effects, the impact of this choice on our understanding of context and agency, and how attention to reception and circulation/re-circulation could amend this state of affairs both in more traditional studies and in field research. I close with some thoughts on what a shift toward examining rhetoric's consequences more closely could mean for public address scholarship.