John Ackerman

John M. Ackerman is an Associate Professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and is jointly affiliated with the Departments of Communication and English. His research reveals the material history, representation, and performance of neighborhoods, cities, and regions in the US northeast and southwest.  His current research explicates  ‘doctrines of discovery’ and other settler colonial technologies that code and contain white supremacy in urban life and set the terms and conditions for anti-racist and uneven economic recovery and renewal.

His co-edited (with David Coogan), co-written collection, The Public Work of Rhetoric, helped to establish critical, urban studies in rhetoric and writing studies since 2010 and led to the Rhetoric Society of American Project in Power, Place, and Publics in Reno, Nevada and to the special issue on “Reconfiguring Dissettlement” in Review of Communication (2022).  His recent essays consider “everyday containment” in bordered communities, peripatetic criticism in the city, “ruination” as a site of recovery, and the afterlife of public protest.  This work appears in edited collections and in Poroi, Works and Days, Review of Communication, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

He has two book projects underway, the first Rhetoric as Everyday Life: Fugitive Bodies, Fungible Places recalibrates continental quotidian theory for the economic struggle and recovery of raced, ethnic, poor, and migrant bodies in uneven economic circumstances, grounded in the greater Cleveland area and the intermountain West. The second book tracks “terra nullius” from the 19th century forward in Washoe and Boulder counties to animate how public and residential spaces are imagined, coded, marketed, and controlled.