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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 will be published in May 2025 by the Ohio State University Press.

“Kyle Boggs chronicles the struggle between Indigenous peoples who have rooted religious and cultural ties to outdoor sites across the US and elsewhere and the settlers who claim the right to freely recreate in those same places. Synthesizing theories of rhetoric, environmental studies, and settler colonialism, Boggs confronts the ways that settler colonial experiences and expectations have been narrated through rhetorical practices on these so-called public lands. Fusing journalism and personal narrative with scholarly research, Boggs’s argument comes to bear on his central case study of a northern Arizona ski development on a mountain held sacred by at least thirteen Indigenous tribes. In illuminating the striking ways that settler imaginaries are accommodated, performed, and sustained in the everyday, Boggs offers a powerful reminder that even during leisure activities (in this case, sports such as ultrarunning, rock climbing, and skiing), complex webs of power control who can access resources and land and who has the right to protect histories and cultures.”

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

  • “The Public Art of Listening: Relational Accountability and the Painted Desert Project.” In Community Listening: Stories, Hauntings, Possibilities. Edited by Jenn Fishman, Romeo Garcia, and Lauren Rosenberg. Denver: The WAC Clearninghouse, University Press of Colorado. 93-116. 2025.
  • “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

HCS 380: Environmental Journalism

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, WID courses (Writing in Disciplines), gender studies, ethnic studies, and the humanities.