Featured Works
A curated selection of essays, books, and collaborations that reflect current and ongoing research in rhetoric, biopolitics, and critical health humanities.
But can you kill for justice—or intentionally let others die—and still be just? Answering this question is nearly impossible in a meme world. The answer will be a meme. And it will be a joke.
Mythic Violence, Memes, and the Recursive Rhetorics of Resistance
In Theory & Event
Under contemporary digital conditions, political myth operates through memes that collapse the temporal interval liberal deliberation requires. Reading the case of Luigi Mangione, I show how memetic speech acts convert resistance into spectacle, foreclosing the possibility of revolt. Drawing on theorists of myth, performativity, and revolt—from Sorel and Foucault to Barthes, Butler, and Fanon—I argue that authoritarian myths thrive on virality’s affective compression, while oppositional myths are metabolized as engagement before they can mobilize rupture. The Mangione phenomenon confronts liberal complicity: when systemic violence is normalized as order, refusing counter-violence may become yet another alibi for sanctioned death.
Empathy as Bug: The Rhetoric of MAGA’s “Battle”
Winner of the Charles Kneupper Award, in recognition of the best article published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly
This essay interrogates Elon Musk’s claim that empathy is “civilizational suicide” to expose how MAGA meme culture weaponizes sympathy and identitarian grievance. It traces the algorithmic infrastructures that demand sameness, critiques Left and Right affective politics, and revisits Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem to argue for empathy as agonistic, unsentimental listening across difference. The essay urges rhetorical scholars and citizens alike to reclaim empathy as a vital glitch against today’s post-truth tribalism.
If empathy is a bug, let it be one that corrupts the code of identitarian capture…. Let it be, finally, the thing that undoes us—not in despair, but in the hope that we might be reconstituted otherwise.
“Free speech” has been co-opted by the Right to embolden cruelty, disinformation, propaganda, and authoritarian control. But the Left, too, falters. Moral outrage becomes performative. Identity becomes brand. We conflate vulnerability with virtue, and critique with injury.
Situating Parrhesia: Toward a Chorus of Critical Dissent
In Parrhèsia: Critical Research in Mental Health and Law
[PDF]
This essay rethinks parrhesia—truth-telling under conditions of risk—not as a sovereign act but as a collective, embodied performance. Reading Euripides’s Orestes, it argues that the chorus models parrhesia as relational and rhythmic, not declarative. The chorus stages conditions for truth amid collapse. In an era of defunding, silencing, and weaponized “free speech,” the essay calls for scholarship grounded in complicity, proximity, and risk—a performative model of truth-telling that remains vulnerable and situated.
The Living from the Dead: Disaffirming Biopolitics
Penn State University Press
Arguing that biopower can be fully exposed only through an analysis of those whom society has “let die,” this book employs a series of transdisciplinary case studies to uncover the structural and rhetorical conditions through which biopower works. Murray demonstrates that active resistance to biopower inevitably reproduces tropes of “making live” and “letting die.” His counter to this fact is a critical stance of disaffirmation, one in which death disrupts the politics of life itself.
In a society that aims above all to safeguard life, how might we reckon with ethical responsibility when we are complicit in sacrificial economies that produce and tolerate death as a necessity of life?
Within neoliberal biopolitics, an abstract "life itself" is the ultimate ruse, the disguise, the meme, that obscures the fact that some lives simply—still—do not matter, that some lives will be exposed to death, that some lives will be ritually dispossessed, disappeared, shot, suffocated, and systematically cannibalized.
The Practice of Everyday Death: On the Paratactical ‘Life’ of Neoliberal Biopolitics
In Canadian Review of American Studies
[PDF]
This essay offers a counter-reading of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, arguing that in our current neoliberal biopolitical order, it is death—not life—that has become quotidian. While “life” functions as a memetic ruse of dominant power, conventional tactics of resistance are shown to be complicit and pre-emptively co-opted. Instead, the essay calls for a politics attuned to death as a site of rhetorical agency, particularly through racialized death, offering a rallying cry beyond progressive embourgeoisement.