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Kyle Boggs, PhD

Dr. Kyle Boggs specializes in rhetoric, community and advocacy writing, environmental humanities, and place-based pedagogies, and he is advisor and publisher of the Writing for Change Journal. He is a trained professional communicator, whose effectiveness as a writer, editor, public speaker, and researcher is punctuated by a confluence of experience in nonprofit writing, journalism, and grassroots community education.

His forthcoming book, Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors (Ohio State University Press, May 2025), invites scholars, teachers, and outdoors enthusiasts to recognize how “the outdoors” has been narrated through colonial myths of the west, the frontier, and how these narrations show up in outdoor recreation in simple and complex ways. This project is motivated by an issue he covered extensively as a journalist involving expansions by a ski resort on the San Francisco Peaks in northern Arizona, and Indigenous resistance to development on the mountain held sacred by at least 13 tribes. The concept developed and deployed in this book, “recreational colonialism,” attends to the ways in which place-based belongings are constituted by settlers through outdoor recreation. “Public lands” and “the outdoors” are euphemisms for stolen Indigenous land, and the outdoor recreation industry and its advocates too often avoid confronting this fact. From skiing to rock climbing, to trail running, to mountain biking, this book emphasizes the importance of the kind of stories we tell about the landscapes we love, and teaches us to be critical of those stories, to examine our own assumptions about belonging and ownership, and the book maps out the possibilities of outdoor recreation that is more inclusive and culturally responsive.

Education

  • Ph.D., Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
  • MA., Rhetoric and Composition, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ
  • Graduate Certificate, Gender Studies, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ
  • BA., English, Professional Writing, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

Selected Publications

  • “Mountain Biking, Writing, and Reckoning.” In Writers’ Stories in Motion: Healing, Joy, and Triumph. Edited by Laura Gray-Rosendale. Peter Lang Publishing. 2020.
  • “The Rhetorical Landscapes of the Alt-Right and the Patriot Movements: Settler Entitlement to Native Land.” In The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse, and Communication. Edited by Bernhard Forchtner. Routledge. 293-309. 2019.
  • “The Material-Discursive Spaces of Outdoor Recreation: Rhetorical Exclusion and Settler Colonialism at the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort.” Ecocosmologies and “Western” Epistemologies, special issue of Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, vol. 11, no 2, 175-196. 2017.

Selected Public Writing

Courses

HCS 115: Rhetoric and Popular Culture

Previous section topic: Wilderness, Rhetoric, and Popular Culture

HCS 310: Writing, Advocacy, and Leadership

ENGL 545: Place-based Pedagogies and Rhetorical Ecologies

Prior to joining HCS, Boggs taught upper division English courses like argument, nonfiction writing, and graduate courses in rhetorical theory. At previous institutions, he has taught a variety of courses in English, writing studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, and the humanities.