Academic Research

Kenneth Rufo

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Georgia's Department of Speech Communiction in 2004. My degree is in rhetoric, which is a rather amorphous term that refers to how language means in its broadest contexts. Most of my academic research focuses on two major areas:

Media ecology, the study of how different media configurations shape the evolution and production of individual consciousness, rationality, social formations, organizational behaviors, and politics. This area of research has garnered much attention in recent years, as people attempt to understand how new media technologies transform lived experience. While there are a number of ways to structure inquiry into media ecologies, I have favored a symptomatic approach, which is to say, that I believe that any text or artifact reflects and transmits the conditions of its own creation, and as such we can view important texts or artifacts as symptoms of their native media ecology. Historically I tend to find that philosophical texts supply some of the best and most interesting examples of this phenomenon, in large part because philosophy works so hard to make the inventional process of thought itself explicit. As such, Plato's decision to describe memory in terms of a book or wax tablet, Nietzsche's turn to graphically pithy aphorisms after starting to use the typewriter, Martin Heidegger's denigration of radio in favor of orality, and Jacques Derrida's shift away from writing about writing as traces to writing about telecommunications media as ghosts, all provide fascinating insight into how the act of thinking and invention mirrors its media environment. Publications dealing with this line of research include:

  • Rufo, Kenneth. (2009). "Shades of Derrida: Materiality as the Mediation of DiffĂ©rance." In Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, eds. B. Biesecker and J. Lucaites, New York: Peter Lang.

  • Rufo, Kenneth. (2005). "Ghosts in the Medium: The Haunting of Heidegger's Technological Question. Explorations in Media Ecology (4). No 1. 21-48.

  • Rufo, Kenneth and DeLuca, Kevin. (2003). "The Mechanical Handmaiden: Rhetoric after Marshall McLuhan." Explorations in Media Ecology (2). No 2. 81-100.

  • Rufo, Kenneth. (2003). "The Mirror in the Matrix of Media Ecology." Critical Studies in Media Communication (20) No. 2. 117-140.

Communication theory, specifically rhetorical theory, which involves certain determinations of the way we discuss, disseminate, and develop different interpretations of the self and the world. I consider questions of theory to be antecedent to any question of empirical application or of product, or to borrow a phrase a friend of mine is fond of using, I believe "there is nothing so practical as a good theory." I have historically gravitated to the theoretical debates prepended with "post-", as in post-modernism, post-structuralism, and so on, though I maintain strong reservations about the utility of those terms as anything other than casual references. Those publications in which theory has been front and center include:

  • Rufo, Kenneth (2008). "Later, Baudrillard." Communication and Critical Cultural Studies. 98-101.

  • DeLuca, Kevin; Harold, Christine; and Rufo, Kenneth. (2007). "Q.U.I.L.T.: A Patchwork of Reflections." Rhetoric and Public Affairs. 627-654. Reprinted in Remembering the Aids Quilt, forthcoming in 2011, Michigan State University Press.

  • Rufo, Kenneth (2007). "The Politics of Capitalization." In Framing Theory's Empire, ed. J. Holbo, West Lafayette: Parlor Press. 374-376.

  • Hyde, Michael and Rufo, Kenneth (2000). "The Call of Conscience, Rhetorical Interruptions, and the Euthanasia Controversy." Journal of Applied Communication Research. 1-23. Reprinted in Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, eds. C.E. Morris and S.H. Browne, State College: Strata Publishing. 224-243.