Rhetorical Wastelands is a project funded by the Modern Language Association’s Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship which explores the sonic and cultural affordances of the Trans-Pecos region of Texas for reconsidering the location of responsibility in multimodal communication and pedagogy. 

“This project turns toward the Trans-Pecos—an arid “wasteland” in west Texas, roughly 300 miles from where I study and teach in Austin—as a site where the cultural, ecological, and sonic conditions of the region invite us to rethink how and where responsibility emerges. The half-full basins, abandoned oil drills, echoed springs, and community soundscapes from El Paso to Toyah reveal layered histories of extraction, survival, and adaptation that shape the rhetorical conditions of sound. By gathering sound recordings, field notes, and archival documents from across the region, I trace how the sonic life of the Trans-Pecos can help expand our frameworks for multimodal practice. This project ultimately insists that responsibility in research and teaching must also account for the ways people compose with, across, and through the land—and that multimodality, if it’s to matter now, must be accountable to the places and communities where sound lives.”

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