Jack Wood

Jack Wood is a Ph.D. student in Rhetorical Studies specializing in cities, planning, and development. Using post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theories, Wood focuses on the city as a rhetorical artifact in two aspects. First, Wood aims to understand how metaphors of "development," and more recently "resilience," facilitate renewed circuits of capital accumulation within urban landscapes. Second, his investigations into "urban rhetoric" join communication to political economy by studying how urban form evolves throughout history to accommodate new flows of investment capital and labor in a specifically rhetorical manner.

Wood has taught at Texas Tech University where he earned a Master’s Degree in Communication Studies—working under Dr. Catherine L. Langford. Wood served as the editorial assistant for Rhetoric & Public Affairs. In the fields of rhetoric, urban studies, and semiotics, Wood has presented various papers at regional, national, and international conferences. In 2023, Wood was invited to the International Semiotics Institute in Prague, Czechia, where he presented his work on the power of visual metaphors in urban space. Serving in the U.S. Marine Corps infantry, Wood became interested in the proxemics and rhetorics in the built environment after training in urban warfare.