Matthew Houdek Headshot

Matthew Houdek

Senior Lecturer

University Writing Program, School of Individualized Study
Academic Affairs
mthuwp@rit.edu
Office Location
EAS-2238

Matthew Houdek

Senior Lecturer

University Writing Program, School of Individualized Study
Academic Affairs

Bio

Matthew Houdek (he/him) is a transdisciplinary rhetorical studies writer, educator, and theorist whose research and teaching interests emerge from the generative friction between different fields and subjects, including Black studies, critical respiratory studies (breathing/suffocation), abolition, decolonization, writing studies, Black feminist and WoC theory/thought, whiteness studies, temporality, memory studies, critical university studies, and more. His essays have appeared in many top journals in the field of Communication Studies, such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Women’s Studies in Communication, Rhetoric, Politics, & Culture, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication, among others. He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled "Breathing Together, at the World's End: The Origins of the Pluriverse in Abolitionist Love." The book explores breathing as a fundamental site and communal practice for cultivating a pluriversal politics rooted in mutual aid, non-dualist epistemologies and ontologies, and subaltern knowledges. The book offers a structural critique of the polycrises facing the world today as he looks to abolitionist and decolonial movements across space and time for signs of radical hope and to speculate on the possibility of realizing otherwise worlds. He lives in Rochester with his wife/partner, Holland, a renowned metals artist and an associate professor at Nazareth University. 

mthuwp@rit.edu
Personal Links
Personal Website
Curriculum Vitae
Google Scholar

Select Scholarship

Matthew Houdek, “The common wind from below: Unruly metaphors, radical rhetorics, and pluriversal worlds within/across/beyond the Haitian and Zapatista revolutions (Part 2/2),” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 21, No. 2 (2024): 182-197. 20th Anniversary Issue

Matthew Houdek, “On occupying the silent parenthetical: Thinking-feeling after the ends/ings     (Part 1/2),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 110, No. 2 (2024)

Logan Rae Gomez, Matthew Houdek, and Robert Mejia, “A rhetoric that breathes, a rhetoric that heals: In/coherence, storytelling, and abolitionist futures.” Women’s Studies in Communication 47, No. 2 (2024)

Matthew Houdek, “(An) Allegory of the undercommons: A rhetorical slipstream into the fugitivetemporal horizon,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 53, No. 3 (2023): 353-365

Matthew Houdek and Lisa A. Flores, “Revisioning rhetorical violence in the afterlife,” Rhetoric &Public Affairs 25, No. 3 (2022). Lead Article.

Matthew Houdek, “In the aftertimes, breathe: Rhetorical technologies of suffocation and an abolitionist praxis of (breathing in) relation.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 108, No. 1 (2022): 48-74

Matthew Houdek and Ersula J. Ore, “Cultivating otherwise worlds and breathable futures,” Rhetoric, Politics & Culture 1, No. 1 (2021): 85-95

Matthew Houdek, “Metaphors to live and die by,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24, No. 1-2 (2021): 269-290

Matthew Houdek, “Recontextualizing responsibility for justice: The lynching trope, racialized temporalities, and cultivating breathable futures.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, No. 2 (2021): 139-162

Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Phillips, “Rhetoric and the temporal turn: Race, gender, temporalities.” Introduction to the special issue. Women’s Studies in Communication 43, No. 4 (2020): 369-383

Ersula J. Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in times of suffocation: Toward a spatiotemporal politics of breathing.” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, No. 4 (2020): 443-458

Matthew Houdek, "Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence: The case of black church burnings." Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, No. 3 (2018): 279-306

Matthew Houdek, "The imperative of race for rhetorical studies: Toward divesting from disciplinary and institutionalized whiteness." Introduction to the “Race and Rhetoric” forum. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, No. 4 (2018): 292-299

Currently Teaching

UWRT-150
FYW: Writing Seminar
3 Credits
Writing Seminar is a three-credit course limited to 19 students per section. The course is designed to develop first-year students’ proficiency in analytical and rhetorical reading and writing, and critical thinking. Students will read, understand, and interpret a variety of non-fiction texts representing different cultural perspectives and/or academic disciplines. These texts are designed to challenge students intellectually and to stimulate their writing for a variety of contexts and purposes. Through inquiry-based assignment sequences, students will develop academic research and literacy practices that will be further strengthened throughout their academic careers. Particular attention will be given to the writing process, including an emphasis on teacher-student conferencing, critical self-assessment, class discussion, peer review, formal and informal writing, research, and revision. Small class size promotes frequent student-instructor and student-student interaction. The course also emphasizes the principles of intellectual property and academic integrity for both current academic and future professional writing.
UWRT-365
Writing, Public Speaking and Civic Engagement
3 Credits
Civic engagement describes the different ways individuals and collectives work to identify public concerns, defend or redefine public values, seek to correct historical injustices, and make positive change for the common good or a specific community. In this course, students will gain an understanding of key concepts and vocabulary within interdisciplinary civic engagement and social justice literature, engage a variety of contemporary issues of public concern and the groups that seek to address these issues through different forms of civic engagement, and learn about the role rhetoric plays within these diverse and situated civic contexts. Students will identify a public concern (i.e. homelessness, voting restrictions, health care disparities, environmental racism, economic inequality, the school-to-prison pipeline) they want to learn more about; identify a group or groups seeking to address that issue through practices of civic engagement; and analyze, research, and present on that issue and group through formal and informal writing and public speaking/presentation assignments. Students will learn tools and perspectives in rhetorical analysis and genre awareness, effective writing practices for a college-level humanities course, effective public speaking/presentation skills, and revision and workshopping strategies for both writing and presentation contexts.

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