Examining Living Rhetoric in Contemporary Times: A Case for Using Qualitative Rhetorical Methods

Qualitative rhetorical methods guide scholars interested in analysing the active relations among texts, contexts and audiences to account for the experiential, dynamic, and often divergent meaning-making processes that analysis of (re)presentation in static texts cannot do alone. Such an approach asks researchers to (re)consider how we come to understand some meanings as (in)significant and simultaneously invites new understandings capable of shifting our thinking and/or actions over time. Since this complexity is embedded in examination of political, historical and social change processes, treating rhetoric as a “living” part of them requires including both historical analyses of already-produced texts and qualitative approaches to documenting meaning-making “in action”.