Following the Kenneth Burke Conference at the University of Ghent, July 1–3, 2026, we are inviting paper submissions for a related special issue of the KB Journal.
What does it imply to study rhetoric today? The current moment is characterized by many societal – often binary – divisions, a lack of identification with others, and an unwillingness to move beyond communicative echo chambers, often confined to the digital sphere. At the same time, many people are increasingly pushing back against these divisions and are exploring ways to move beyond the moral panic and reappropriate digital and real-world affordances to create (digital) spaces for common ground, to react, to create meaning, and to renegotiate our rhetorical understanding of the world.
In this special issue, we aim to explore how the study of rhetoric can respond to and engage with these often contentious dynamics. We aim to do so by moving forward both with and from Kenneth Burke.
We will move forward with Kenneth Burke as his conceptual framework helps us to navigate the current moment. For example, his claim that ‘all human beings are poets’ helps us consider how “the poetic orientation asks people to see the world as a work in progress to which they contribute and, hence, see themselves as composers rather than a passive audience” (George, 86). By redefining humans as poets, Burke argues for moving beyond individual actions or societal structures and for orienting ourselves to the complex networks that create meaning and constitute identities. Indeed, Burke’s lifetime in politico-aesthetic thinking taught him (and us) that “‘citizens in a democracy’ [...] are charged with paying attention to the ‘ambiguities of identification’ that are always inherent in ‘that tiny first-person plural pronoun, ‘we’” (Burke 50, qtd. in Weiser 10). As “we” is promoted as both the problem (us vs. them) and the solution (all of us together) to today’s binaries, how do “we” as rhetoricians understand its changing roles?
We also aim to move forward from Kenneth Burke because – as Richard Lanham famously stated – Kenneth Burke started the rhetorical conversation of our time. We would like to continue this conversation with contemporary rhetorical scholars and critics to explore what is implicated in being (or becoming) symbol-wise in the current moment; (re)conceptualizing concepts from Burke, as well as confronting Burke with insights and theories grounded in our most current rhetorical scholarship.
Submission deadline: Please submit your paper by August 15th, 2026.
Submission: Please use the email dedicated to this issue: movingforwardkb@ugent.be.
Submission Guidelines: Please prepare manuscripts according to the journal’s standard Submission Guidelines.