Matthew Houdek
Senior Lecturer
Matthew Houdek
Senior Lecturer
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.
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