Matthew Houdek - Featured Faculty 2023
Matthew Houdek
School of Individualized Study
Dr. Matthew Houdek (he/him) is a critical/cultural communication studies writer, educator, and theorist. His research interests emerge from the generative frictions between various fields and traditions, including rhetorical studies, Black studies, critical respiratory studies, abolitionist thought, Black feminist thought, decolonial theory, social change scholarship, cultural studies, composition theory, and temporality studies.
This transdisciplinary approach reflects his belief that the complex social and ontological crises that face our planetary community demand breaking down disciplinary boundaries, embracing subaltern knowledges, and fostering creative, risky, and transformative scholarship.
In a notable 2023 article published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, for example, Houdek offers a subversive reading of the Allegory of the Cave by giving voice and agency to Plato’s “strange prisoners” and following these “philosophers of shadow” into alternative worlds. Employing a speculative and experimental method he terms “rhetorical slipstream,” Houdek challenges the dualist and elitist assumptions underlying Western knowledge systems and seeks to encourage radical hope and imagination, undisciplined thinking, and pluriversal approaches to the contemporary crises. For open access to this and his other work, visit: https://rit.academia.edu/MatthewHoudek
Dr. Houdek earned a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa (2018), an MA in Communication and Rhetorical Studies from Syracuse University (2014), and a BS in Technical Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Stout (2011). He has published over twenty articles in prominent journals and edited collections and has delivered more than fifty conference presentations on topics related to his research. He has also co-edited five special issues and forums that have contributed to emerging interdisciplinary dialogues on themes such as decolonization, antiracism, non-linear temporalities, abolitionist futures, and the end of the world. He joins the Rhetoric Society of America Board of Directors this fall and currently serves as the First Year Writing Coordinator and a Senior Lecturer in the University Writing Program.
Matthew Houdek
Senior Lecturer
University Writing Program
Academic Affairs