Water, Rhetoric, and Social Justice

Casey R. Schmitt is assistant professor of communication studies at Gonzaga University.Theresa R. Castor is professor and department chair of communication at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.Christopher S. Thomas is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the College at Brockport.

• Introduction: Stirring the Waters: Justice, Injustice, and the Springs of Rhetorical ResponseChapter 1: Water is Life: Shared DestiniesChapter 2: When Water is Energy: Tracing Mediatized Discourses in Chile’s Mega-Hydro DebateChapter 3: Culture-Jam or Log-Jam?: Rhetorics of Spectacle Protest in the Free the Snake FlotillaChapter 4: Reimagining Dam Removal to Resist Settler Colonial Logics, Chapter 5: Water for the “Community” Good: Contested Meanings of Stakeholder Interests in Great Lakes Water Diversion ControversiesChapter 6: Kansas and the Ogallala Aquifer: Greenwashing Attempts to Balance Water Conservation with Free Market PrinciplesChapter 7: Naturalizing Environmental Injustice: How Privileged Residents Make Sense of Detroit’s Water ShutoffsChapter 8: Reviving Sister Water: Hydro-Anthropomorphism, Catholic Social Justice, and Pope Francis’ Eco-Rhetoric for the Care of CreationChapter 9: Copious Dwelling in a Sinking LandscapeChapter 10: It’s All Child’s Play: Flint’s Water Crisis,

Water, Rhetoric, and Social Justice: A Critical Confluence is a timely anthology that takes on an issue of great importance for the more-than-human world: water justice. The relationships between water, rhetoric, and social justice in the Anthropocene must be understood, analyzed, challenged, and reimagined if we are to have any chance of intervening on systems of colonialism, privatization, inequity, poverty, and racism that have shifted our understanding of water from universal right to an earned privilege. The chapters in this volume illuminate the many ongoing struggles over water injustices and highlight the important role that rhetoric has to play in promoting water justice.