This year’s Kenneth Burke lecture unfolds amid profound ruptures and existential crises—in higher education, democratic practice, and life on Earth itself. Rhetoricians encounter these disruptions personally, communally, and professionally, and our discipline has long been attuned to moments of upheaval and change. From social movements to catalytic images and presidential rhetoric, our critical interests have favored dramatic transformations. Yet this focus has often left us less attentive to the quiet persuasive force of familiarity and what comes to feel normal. Paradoxically, moments of crisis reveal a human capacity to adapt, domesticate rupture, and evade sustained change. Drawing on the crises of climate collapse and democratic backsliding, this lecture invites rhetoricians to attend to the persuasive pull of the familiar and to consider the rhetorical energy required to keep change in view.

Christa J. Olson is chair of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Majorie and Lori Tiefenthaler Professor of Composition and Rhetoric. A rhetorical historian studying transamerican visual cultures, nationalism, and public discourse, she is the author of Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador and American Magnitude: Hemispheric Visions and Public Feeling in the United States, and co-author, with Brandee Easter, of On Visual Rhetoric. Starting in July 2026, Olson will be President-Elect of the Rhetoric Society of America.