#BlackLivesMatter and a Woke Rhetorical Ecology

During the protests over the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, #BlackLivesMatter activists like Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, Johnetta Elzie, and DeRay McKesson used an African American rhetoric of design to transform Twitter into a platform for social protest. The transformative digital rhetoric of these activists, and activists in other movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street has increasingly become the focus of scholars in critical race studies, English studies, communication, and many other fields, but the emerging field of digital rhetoric—introduced by Elizabeth Losh, Douglas Eyman, Crystal VanKooten, and others—lacks frameworks necessary for engaging with these activists’ rhetoric in relation to its complex contexts. This project proposes a conceptual framework—what I call a woke rhetorical ecology—that provides the methodological sensitivity necessary to analyze the transformational rhetoric of activists like those in the #BlackLivesMatter movement