The work of Ernesto Laclau (both with and without his occasional collaborator, Chantal Mouffe) has exerted considerable influence in rhetorical studies over the past two decades. Emerging alongside the so-called epistemic and cultural turns, the project of "critical rhetoric" and cognate endeavors have found in Laclau a revision of Gramsci's hegemony thesis that places discursive—and thus, evidently, rhetorical—operations at the center of politics, culture, and social processes generally. While Raymie McKerrow's seminal essay (1989) drew on Laclau and Mouffe to outline (...) a set of tasks for rhetoric that clearly remained within the ambit of ideology critique, subsequent appropriations of what is variously called .. (shrink)

Although undoubtedly it will be incomplete by the time it is published, the target article by Daiger et al. organizes mutations in genes that produce retinal degenerations in humans into categories of clinically relevant phenotypes. Such classifications should help us understand the link between altered photoreceptor cell proteins and subsequent cell death, and they may yield insight into methods for preventing consequent blindness.