This edited volume features essays derived from presentations delivered at the 15th Biennial Public Address Conference held at Syracuse University in October 2016, as well as additional material. The Conceit of Context explores the often invoked¿indeed a central term in the history of rhetorical studies¿but less often engaged concept of context. In this volume, we center the notion of context as the site of engagement, critique, and imagination, seeking to deepen the critical and political promise of context in the study of public discourse.

Acknowledgments - Charles E. Morris III/Kendall R. Phillips: Introduction: Situating the Conceit of Context - Carole Blair: Conceits of Context: Diffident Relations - Lisa A. Flores: Context and the Spatial/Temporal Collapse - Leah Ceccarelli: Temporal Development and Spatial Emplacement in the Dispositional Whole: The (Con)text of Hillary Clinton's "Basket of Deplorables" Speech - Isaac West: Fragments of Winter, 2015: Fragmentation, Popular Culture, and Making a Murderer - Daniel C. Brouwer: Situating Binge Watching as a Context for Criticism - Bryan J. McCann: Finding Time and Space within the Text - Kelly E. Happe: Rhetoric and the Utopian Gesture: Rethinking Context's Spatio-Temporal Logics - Ersula J. Ore: Black Death and the Limits of the Utopian Gesture - Dave Tell: A Brief History of a Utopian Gesture - Karrin Vasby Anderson: "Eloquence" in a Parodic Age - Jay P. Childers: Constructing the Politics of the Absurd - Karma R. Chávez: Parody, Perversion, and the Violence of "Normal" Political Culture - J. David Cisneros: Borders, Bodies, Buses, and Butterflies: Migration and the Rhetoric of Social Movement - Phaedra C. Pezzullo: Moving Contexts of Migration Is Beautiful and Undocubus: On Becoming Butterflies and Transnational Entanglements - Matthew May: The Butterfly in the Machine - Jiyeon Kang: Captivated by Shared Judgment: Image Vernacular in South Korea's 2008 Internet Protests - Claire Sisco King: Speaking of Images: Rhetorics of Captivation and Technologies of Capture - Ned O'Gorman: Translational Rhetoric - Kristan Poirot: Southern Traditions of (Ms.)Remembering: Place, Purpose, & Personae of Black Freedom Commemoration - Mary E. Stuckey: Rethinking Commemorative Context: Local and Global Intersections - Antonio de Velasco: A Cautionary Note on Context, Memory, and the Regulation of Black Womanhood - Samantha Senda-Cook: Place Ballet of Resistance - E. Johanna Hartelius: Three Seeds - Damien Smith Pfister: Rhetorical Field Methods and the Logic of Immersion - Sara L. McKinnon: Dead, Dying & Failing: Violent Mexico in the Context of Transnational U.S. Politics - Annie Hill: Failing State Rhetoric: Sovereign Neomortality and US Diplomatic Dominance - Timothy Barney: Contextualizing State Failure and Necropolitics - List of Contributors - Index.