Radiant Figures: Visual Rhetorics in Everyday Administrative Contexts

Radiant Figures: Visual Rhetorics in Everyday Administrative Contexts presents an approach to writing program administration that understands, accounts for, and embraces the rhetorical potential in the creation and circulation of everyday visual artifacts. This edited collection shares visuals (representations of curricula, visual metaphors for administrative work, graphics representing student demographics, etc.) created by contributors within their own contexts, for their own purposes. Each of the twelve chapters included in the collection discusses the visual-rhetorical strategies utilized in the invention of such graphics and highlights the affordances of visuals as administrative tools.

Additionally, Radiant Figures has two hallmark features. The first is a table of contents that offers seven polyvocal paths, and each chapter in the collection is featured in at least two of the paths. These paths, such as “Mapping in/as Administration” and “Visualizing Change,” emphasize the complex and overlapping nature of visual administrative work. Second, each path includes a response from an experienced administrator-scholar in writing studies. These responses draw connections, highlight promising questions, and speculate about possibilities for the update and adaptation of everyday visual artifacts. The collection presents a compelling case for the advantages of visual-rhetorical administrative strategies and offers concrete ways that readers can take up those strategies in their own contexts.