Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing
Whitney Jordan Adams is an Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing. She studies the rhetorical construction of white supremacy, focusing on the Alt-Right, Accelerationism, and the rise in white nationalism. Additionally, she studies how symbols reproduce ideology connected to resentment rhetoric. Her courses focus on issues related to race, community activism, anti-racist pedagogy, and the rise in misinformation and the digital divide.
Education
- MBA, Professional Management, Berry College
- PhD, Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design, Clemson University
- PhD Audit, Philosophy, Art, and Social Thought, The European Graduate School
- MA, English, The College of Charleston
- BA, English, Cognate in Biological Sciences, The University of South Carolina
Teaching Interests
- Anti-racist pedagogies and New Dialogism
- Vernacular rhetoric and the community rhetor
- Digital rhetoric and digital humanities
- Ethnography
- Civic rhetoric
- Literature and texts for social activism and change
Research Interests
Dr. Adams is a rhetorician specializing in investigating and combating white supremacy. Her work analyzes the ongoing rise of white supremacy by beginning at the source. For example, she studies Alt-Right, fascist, and white nationalist texts, highlighting ways that these groups practice and produce rhetoric in insidious and irresponsible ways to attract and garner followers. She is also interested in how contested symbols like the Confederate battle flag are reproduced through different contexts and ecologies, eliciting rhetorical force in new environments. Community is also an important concept to Dr. Adams, as she looks for ways to engage her students with their surrounding environment. She believes everyone has the ability to be a rhetor and use the power of rhetoric for positive change.
Selected Publications
Adams, Whitney Jordan. “Book Review: Inclusive and Meaningful Considerations of Failure: A Review of Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail.” Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, Issue 21.1, Special Issue on COVID-19, February 2022.
Adams, Whitney Jordan. “OLD SOUTH RHETORIC RECKONING: The Case of Kappa Alpha’s Old South Balls.” Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric, edited by Christina L. Moss and Brandon Inabinet, University Press of Mississippi, 2021, pp. 209–29,
Adams, W. J. “The Augmentation of Digital Violence During COVID-19: Incel Culture, Anon-IB, and Ideological Extremism”. Papers in Arts and Humanities, vol. 1, no. 2, Dec. 2021, doi:10.52885/pah.v1i2.66.
*Adams, Whitney Jordan, Brian Gaines. “Heil, Twitter: Social Media, Accelerationism, and Extremism.” Proceedings of Mind the Gap! The Sixth Argumentor Conference: September 11-12, 2020, Oradea I Nagyvárad, Romania. Partium Press, Oradea and Debrecen University Press, Debrecen, 2020, pp. 179-196.