Stephen Kwame Dadugblor is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He earned a PhD in English, with a concentration in Rhetoric and Writing, at the University of Texas at Austin.

His research focuses on rhetoric, democratic deliberation, postcolonial/decolonial rhetorics, rhetorical genre studies, and digital media, with specific interest in the ways that African societies draw upon cultural deliberative resources to refashion and decolonize their social and political worlds in the aftermath of colonialism. In this endeavor, his scholarship draws liberally from a range of fields, engaging conversations across Rhetoric and Writing Studies, Communication, and African Studies.

His forthcoming book, Deliberating Ghana: Postcolonial Rhetorics, Culture, and Democracy (Michigan State University Press, 2025) makes a case for a cultural imaginaries approach to rhetorical studies and democratic deliberation. It rethinks key rhetorical concepts associated with deliberation from the vantage point of the (African) postcolony, offering reimaginations of ideas surrounding speech, genre, digital political participation, and memory, all toward decolonial possibilities.

His other publications have appeared in several venues, including College Composition and Communication, on the utility of stories for civic pedagogical purposes, and on digital archival methods for historiographies in Rhetoric and Writing Studies; Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, on how public genres invite response and responsibility; The Routledge Handbook on Comparative/World Rhetorics, on postcolonial comparative rhetoric methodologies.

Dadugblor’s ongoing work examines the use of digital media for socio-political resistance, rhetorical constructions of civic virtues for national belonging amid ethno-linguistic, religious, and other pluralisms, and an inquiry into the very category of the nation/nation-state.

Dadugblor, Stephen Kwame, et al. “Archiving Our Own: The Digital Archive of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin, 1975-1995.” College Composition and Communication (forthcoming 2022).

Dadugblor, Stephen Kwame. “Collaboration and Conflict in Writing Center Session Notes.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, 2021, pp. 74-83.

Dadugblor, Stephen Kwame. “Usable Presents: Hybridity in/for Postcolonial African Rhetorics.” Routledge Handbook on Comparative/World Rhetorics, edited by Keith Lloyd, Routledge, 2020, pp. 250-258.

Coker, Wincharles, and Stephen Kwame Dadugblor. “A Rhetoric of Visual Humor on Facebook.” Analyzing Language and Humor in Online Communication, edited by Rotimi Taiwo, Akinola Odebunmi, and Akin Adetunji. IGI Global, 2016, pp. 101-113.

WRDS 150A: Digital Technologies and Political Participation

The proliferation of digital technologies has enabled the generation, storage, and processing of data on unprecedented scales, with implications for our social and political lives. In this course, we will focus on social networking sites as an example of such technologies to examine how they shape citizens’ participation in politics and democratic processes. We will discuss key concerns regarding the practice of politics and democracy today: digital activism, fake news, misinformation/disinformation, and demagoguery, among others. We will read research by scholars across multiple disciplines who study the connection between social networking sites and political participation across cultures. As we discuss these scholarly articles, we will gain familiarity with knowledge-making in the disciplines, learn scholarly conventions of academic discourse communities, and participate effectively as apprentice members.