Department of English, Fall 2026

Despite debates about whether media “echo chambers” actually exist, few scholars today doubt that communication is echoic—that our statements largely repeat things we have heard from pundits, parents, and peers. When rhetoricians—that is, theorists and teachers of symbolic communication—ignore the fact that signs must point back as they issue forth (deconstruction’s major insight), they risk reinforcing echo-dynamics and contributing to various political ills. To address this issue, my dissertation turns to echolocators: the nonhuman animals who use echoes to navigate, the blind humans who widen the scope of access through this practice, and the scientists who study both groups. From these communities’ practices, I develop a theory of rhetoric as echolocation—as a way of navigating the world’s precarious obscurity via echoes.