About

Kristy Maddux is a Professor of Communication and the Executive Director of the Honors College at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching focus on Rhetoric and Political Culture, particularly how democratic citizenship is expressed through rhetorical practices and how these practices are influenced by identity markers such as gender, (dis)ability, religion, and race. She investigates how ordinary citizens engage in democracy through habits like deliberation, public advocacy, protest, listening, empathy, and stranger sociability, as well as the structures that support or hinder these habits. Her recent projects explore how the built environment—streets, sidewalks, parks, and lighting—facilitates democratic interactions, analyzing contexts such as Frederick Law Olmsted's landscape work, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and the 1960s freeway revolt in Washington, D.C. Maddux is also working on a book titled 'Holding our Breath: Rett Syndrome and the Search for What Makes us Human,' which examines the experiences of individuals with Rett Syndrome, alongside scientists and advocates, to address questions of disability justice, bioethics, and human identity. Her previous publications include books on religious media and feminist citizenship practices, and her work has appeared in numerous academic journals. As the Executive Director of the Honors College, she oversees multiple programs enrolling around 2000 students, managing departmental and college honors initiatives across campus.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Art
• History
• Archaeology
• Gender studies
• Media studies
• Psychology
• Pedagogy
• Aesthetics
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• “White man's road through Black man's home”: decolonial organizing in the metropole

  Quarterly Journal of Speech · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Between 1965 and 1973, a coalition of local Washington, D.C., activists, organized as the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC), prevented construction of two freeways that would have destroyed neighborhoods and reshaped local communities. This essay reads their rhetorical practices as an example of decolonial delinking. To do so, I first re-tell the story of Washington, D.C., as an ongoing project of coloniality characterized by three dominant colonial habits: fostering division between local residents, articulating technocratic reasoning, and denying a local sense of place. Then I show activists overcoming those colonial logics by (1) building a multi-racial, cross-class coalition that modeled self-governance; (2) reclaiming the city as an organic being; and (3) engaging in rhetorical placemaking to imagine D.C. as home. This example of the ECTC orients our attention to de/coloniality as layered, ongoing processes, as well as the way that coloniality has facilitated our democratic imaginary symbolized by the nation's capital.

  PublisherDOI

• Pedestrian Citizenship: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Democratic Landscape Architecture

  Journal for the History of Rhetoric · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Law

  Abstract Amid the massive project of national reconstruction—characterized by urbanization and social upheaval—that followed the American Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted reenvisioned built environments across the nation. This article claims that, for Olmsted and his contemporaries, who were simultaneously curious about, skeptical of, and fearful of the new cities, his designs attempted to show the democratic potential of urban environments. Reading his speeches and essays alongside his designs, it suggests that Olmsted promised the new cities and their parks and parkways as sites of democratic inclusion and democratic virtue. These built environments, as material rhetorics shaping our everyday, pedestrian habits, cultivated a specific practice of citizenship, one that was, this article argues, characterized by a countercultural temporality, pedestrian mobility, recreation, and civic scopophilia. Today, we inherit the parks and cityscapes that Olmsted designed as well as their aspirations for democratic citizenship.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>View</i>ing deliberation: daytime television’s public pedagogy of inclusion

  Argumentation and Advocacy · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Pedagogy

  Televised deliberation has been celebrated for its accessibility and derided for its tendency toward spectacle. Deliberative theorists and practitioners seek ways to make deliberation more inclusive because widespread participation facilitates deliberative legitimacy. This analysis operates between these two challenges, to consider how the daytime television show The View, drawing upon the televisual logics of spectacle and intimacy, nonetheless offers a public pedagogy of deliberation that provides resources for facilitating inclusive deliberation. I argue that the show models deliberators overcoming typical barriers to deliberation, such as disagreement and discomfort, with five deliberative habits: everyday talk, civility, agreement, friendship, and humor.

  PublisherDOI

• Practicing Citizenship

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2019-05-30 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 2. Deliberative Democracy

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2019-05-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1. Projecting Women at the World’s Columbian Exposition

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2019-05-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 4. Organized Womanhood

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2019-05-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 3. Racial Uplift

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2019-05-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Contents

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2019-05-30

  paratextOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 5. Economic Participation

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2019-05-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• J. Kevin Barge

  1 shared

• Bryan Townsend

  1 shared

• Michael Lee

  1 shared

• Richard Nabring

  1 shared

Labs

• Center for Political Communication & Civic LeadershipPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Georgia

Awards & honors

• 2011 Outstanding Book Award from the Organization for the St…
• 2011 Book of the Year Award from the Religious Communication…