Gwendolyn
Inocencio

Rhetoric & Nonhuman Agency

Developing theoretical frameworks that account for the rhetorical capacities of nonhuman actors — plants, animals, ecosystems — within shared communicative environments.

Ecosemiotics

Applying semiotic theory to ecological contexts to examine how meaning is produced, circulated, and interpreted across species boundaries and within more-than-human assemblages.

Environmental Communication

Situating rhetorical inquiry within the broader interdisciplinary project of environmental communication, attending to questions of ethics, justice, and cohabitation.

Ecocriticism

Reading literary and cultural texts for their representations of the natural world, and examining how such representations shape environmental attitudes and practices.

Rhetorical Ecologies

Exploring the distributed, networked nature of rhetorical situations — attending to the material, spatial, and temporal dimensions of communicative environments.

Convivial Ethics

Theorizing modes of ethical cohabitation and reciprocal communication that honor the agencies and expressions of all participants in shared ecological communities.

Legibility

Book Chapter, Penn State University Press

Contributing to Witnessing Loss: Notes and Inquiries for Climate Rhetorics, a transdisciplinary collection on posthuman witnessing and climate ethics. This chapter considers whether making legible creates possibility—for witnessing differently, for expanding sensory attunement, for responding with greater care. Explores how the banana plant scarred by invasive species, wind patterns at sea, and eroded soil become texts through which we might develop new literacy practices acknowledging nonhuman agency and communicative capacities. Legibility becomes a reciprocal practice—not just reading the more-than-human world, but allowing ourselves to be read by it.

When Frameworks Flatten Worlds

Book Chapter, Bloomsbury

Accepted contribution to After the Crisis: Make, Do, and Mend and/as Rhetoric of Science collection. This chapter interrogates a paradox at the center of The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review (2021), which sought to persuade financial institutions that nature ought to be treated as economic capital. While this translation made biodiversity loss legible for Treasury officials, it produced an 'ecological flattening' wherein complex multispecies relationships are compressed into standardized economic metrics. Through rhetorical analysis of the Review's legibility practices, the chapter reveals how the biodiversity crisis is manufactured as an economic category, rendering some solutions visible while sidelining reciprocal obligations and ecological temporalities. Developing the concepts of 'legibility-making' and 'scalar justice,' the work recovers alternative governance models that operate at ecological scales economic reasoning cannot accommodate.

Wikipedia as Editorial Microcosm

Teaching Applied Comprehensive Editing

Co-authored webtext published in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (Fall 2022). Provides pedagogical materials and theoretical analysis for teaching applied editing through Wikipedia. Recipient of Computers & Composition Michelle Kendrick Outstanding Digital Production/Scholarship Award (2025).

Digital Design for Student Success (D2S2)

State-Wide Composition Innovation Initiative

Three-phase collaboration with Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to innovate design and delivery of introductory composition courses. Roles: technical editor for OER, content creator for AI literacy modules, researcher across universities and community colleges.

Navigating AI in the Classroom

Workshop Series on AI Integration in Writing Instruction

Developed and facilitated multiple workshops (2023-2025) through Center for Teaching Excellence. Topics include LLM attribution, co-intelligence in composition, audit trails, and stasis theory for interrogating AI content.