Caddie Alford, Ph.D.

Lab Co-director

Caddie Alford is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her rhetorical studies research interrogates emerging social media forms of persuasion and sociality, such as how the technics of private Facebook groups radicalize publics or how digitality intensifies fascist appeals. Her new book—Entitled Opinions: Doxa After Digitality (University of Alabama Press “Rhetoric + Digitality” series)—addresses social media rhetorics by creating an affirmative theory of opinions to identify and reclaim a spectrum of truths and their actions, from insular opinions to widely held social facts. Some of her work has appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Speech; Rhetoric Review; and enculturation. She served as the book review editor for the journal enculturation for three years. She is currently co-editing a rhetorical studies collection on “post-truth” rhetorics as they intersect with and inform digitality, politics, epistemologies, health, and so on.