Alta Proceedings: Local Theories of Argument, 2021
Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" episode on Charleston, South Carolina opens with chef Sean Bro... more Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" episode on Charleston, South Carolina opens with chef Sean Brock and Bourdain, clearly drunk, sitting at the counter of a Waffl e House. Bourdain is skeptical; after all, this is a Waffl e House. How special could this be? But Brock persuades him not only that he needs to eat at a Waffl e House to have an authentic Charleston experience, but also that the experience of the meal at the Waffl e House will be as good or better than any at even the chicest fi ne dining establishment. By the end of the scene, Bourdain is converted by Brock's evangelizing, and they are digging into grilled porkchops and pecan waffl es with a delighted abandon. While I, too, love the Waffl e House, and particularly at 2 a.m., that is not the focus of this paper. Instead, I investigate how Brock uses both dissociation and multimodal arguments through food to explore the signifi cance of local histories, practices, and cultures. Through my experience dining in his restaurants, and my rhetorical analysis of his cookbook Heritage and his media appearances on programs like "The Mind of a Chef " and this current season of "Chef 's Table," I contend Brock's argument strategies contextualize local food and food culture as temporally and spatially signifi cant topoi that challenge and disrupt this country's destructive industrialized food model. Perhaps it seems unusual to turn to a chef as a case study on dissociation and multimodal argument. And yet, gustatory choices have always had broader political meanings from John Anderson's 1980 supporters being characterized as eff ete brie and Chardonnay consumers (Brummett, 1981) to Barack Obama putting spicy mustard on a hotdog and being branded a communist. Chefs are guides to such choices, and as such, are political infl uencers. But more signifi cantly, chefs are well-placed agents in our era's aestheticized political ecology in which we can tag ourselves at the farmers' market, "check in" to Instagram at a hip restaurant, and post a photo to Snapchat of you and the chef. In this kind of sensory landscape, chefs have particular sway on how people source their food, how they prepare it, how they talk about it, and how they might advocate for good and better food. Sean Brock is what Eckstein and Young (2015) call a Public Chef Intellectual (PCI). PCIs use a variety of strategies, from how they design and deliver their restaurant or menu, to the cookbooks they author, to their various media appearances to educate and guide the public on what and how to eat. In contrast to celebrity chefs, Public Chef Intellectuals are recognized as
Sixteen years ago, Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter argued in the Quarterly Jou... more Sixteen years ago, Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter argued in the Quarterly Journal of Speech that disciplinary territoriality grants legitimacy to specialists while denying it to out-of-the-mainstream scholars who challenge disciplinary norms. 1 Demonstrating how the practices of writing, publication, and reward defining what ''counts'' as scholarly discourse systematically disadvantage women, ''Disciplining the Feminine'' called on scholars ''to scrutinize and evaluate their own rules for engagement and practice.'' 2 Political activism among scholars likewise calls into question unspoken collective rules, often meeting with a hostile response not unlike those lobbed at women scholars. Despite a rich and storied tradition of public intellectualism in our field, we are most rewarded for attending ''annual conferences to compare notes. .. constitut[ing our] own universe.'' 3 As activists, we understand ''engagement'' to entail working toward positive social change in a sometimes uncivil, aggressive manner. As scholars, however, our enthusiasm for engagement is often policed by our affiliate institutions via various forms of depoliticization and/or apoliticization inside the academy. Put differently: Agency as ''publicly engaged'' scholars becomes subject to depoliticizing norms when we transgress the border between scholarship and politics. So, we might ask: What are these norms? How do communication scholars negotiate this boundary and with what consequences? What do these consequences reveal about the norms and values of scholarly associations, particularly our own? Here, we argue that policing the border between activism and scholarship impedes most significantly the activist scholar who understands ''engagement'' as unavoidably and inherently political, who recognizes objectivity and apoliticization as institutional smokescreen. Honoring the interdisciplinary history of communication studies, we
Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us about Donald J. Trump, 2018
When I agreed to be on the conference panel that led to this chapter and this book, I had thought... more When I agreed to be on the conference panel that led to this chapter and this book, I had thought it would be an opportunity to reflect on what has to be the most turbulent and exhausting political experience of any presidential campaign in my lifetime, at least to date. I thought we would be looking back, in other words. Having to reckon with the subject of Donald Trump as president on a minute by minute basis across a spectrum of media has been difficult. But, rhetorical scholars have been and will be very busy with this-this is not the moment for disciplinary modesty. So I am grateful, in a very real way, to be forced to grapple with these ideas and to be in conversation with very smart others about them. I invite all of us to continue that work.
Putting the "Public" in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2021
We argue that part of Rhetoric & Public Affairs' future should center public-facing scholarship i... more We argue that part of Rhetoric & Public Affairs' future should center public-facing scholarship in rhetorical studies. We begin by chronicling some of the work colleagues are doing to bridge expert and lay publics: podcasts, popular and trade press interviews, social media content development and management, and activist engagements. Centering public-facing scholarship creates several notable shifts: (1) it changes the "so what?" for traditional scholarship by inviting scholars to think about audiences outside of journal readership; (2) it opens space for different stylistic conventions in scholarly writing; and (3) it indicates that nonexpert audiences are valuable as readers. We note the considerable barriers to entry to public scholarship including gatekeeping, framing public scholarship for tenure, and training. We contend that Rhetoric & Public Affairs could lead other journals through an updated definition of impact that takes into account contemporary modes ANNA M. (AMY) YOUNG is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Pacific Lutheran University. Her work examines the ways in which public intellectuals and experts can intervene in public problems from democratic participation to food and foodways.
In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic spac... more In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic space, a space in which students may "engage in the praxis of rhetoric, an art whose telos is krisis, or judgment." 1 In other words, the purpose of rhetoric is to critique and to judge, and a protopublic space creates a dynamic laboratory in which students engage in this sort of meaning-making. We argue in this essay that the same can be said of the meal-it offers a space where "private people can come together in public" to "manifest a public-oriented subjectivity, that is, a self that is more or less able to turn private reactions" about a dish, a cultural tradition, a dinner party, the source of the food on the table and so on, into "discourses that address some shared concerns." 2 As Alice Waters articulates, "eating is a political act, but in the way the ancient Greeks used the word "political"-not just having to do with voting in an election, but to mean "of, or pertaining to, all our interactions with other people." 3 Seeing eating as political and the meal/table as a protopublic space invites reflection on the epistemic contours of food culture-how do we come to "know" food culture, how are our politics shaped by the meal, and how can experts like chef intellectuals guide our understanding toward a more productive politics of food and food culture? Cooking is a "technique of relation," or a bringing together, that transduces disparate ingredients, methods, instruments, customs, and people together into an ephemeral event, the meal. 4 From this perspective, the meal is less a noun than a verb, an active becoming, an occasion, circumscribed to a specific time and place. There is nothing intrinsic about pork shoulder, liquid, heat, knives, and spices that create a meal. It is only once these things enter relation-as cooking-that it becomes something bigger than the sum total of its parts. This event not only involves the transformation of raw food into a cooked dish but also brings people together at a
When there are so many challenges to women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy, it is difficult to... more When there are so many challenges to women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy, it is difficult to select a case that serves as a metonym for the ongoing, everyday war on women that is waged in what we are calling the ‘‘pubic sphere.’’ The pubic sphere is distinct from the public sphere in that it is a rhetorical and material space in which foregrounding gender functions as a structuring principle of civic life. The gender politics of the pubic sphere are evident in the highly public 2011 divorce between the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure (SGK) and Planned Parenthood (PP), a messy split with widespread implications. The ramifications of their political differences, the impacts of their public comments, and the innuendo of their private asides not only resonate with the messiest battles associated with divorce but also symbolize larger sociopolitical impacts on women, illustrating how women’s bodies can serve as material tools for various political groups. In this essay, we interrogate the anatomy of the worst of all possible divorces—a process of dismembering a body (whether that body is material, rhetorical, or both) that is bloody and leaves nobody in the vicinity clean or unaffected. The divorce of these two powerful feminist forces took place in a patriarchal sociopolitical structure positioned to read the split through misogynist logics that reason the following: first, women can’t be friends; second, divorce is always a woman’s fault; and third, there is nothing more dangerous than a woman scorned, so a woman scorned by a woman is doubly lethal. We begin with three negative characterizations associated with an ugly divorce: internal divisions, material and symbolic consequences, and messy confrontations. Considering these relational themes in the public spectacle of the SGK and PP divorce, we argue that this split highlights the fraught nature of women’s bodies in political and public life. Starting with division and blame, we consider how questions about fault follow a divorce and serve as outward expressions of internal divisions. That is, fractures precede rhetorics of blame and, later, responsibility and apologia. Due to the logistics of SGK and PP’s split, the rhetoric in this pubic sphere’s division clusters around jurisdiction of bodily autonomy, resources, and narratives. First, in April 2011, SGK hired Karen Handel, former Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate, as vice president of public policy. Handel’s anti-choice
In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic spac... more In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic space, a space in which students may “engage in the praxis of rhetoric, an art whose telos is krisis, or judgment.” In other words, the purpose of rhetoric is to critique and to judge, and a protopublic space creates a dynamic laboratory in which students engage in this sort of meaning-making. We argue in this essay that the same can be said of the meal—it offers a space where “private people can come together in public” to “manifest a public-oriented subjectivity, that is, a self that is more or less able to turn private reactions” about a dish, a cultural tradition, a dinner party, the source of the food on the table and so on, into “discourses that address some shared concerns.” As Alice Waters articulates, “eating is a political act, but in the way the ancient Greeks used the word “political”—not just having to do with voting in an election, but to mean “of, or pertaining to, all our interactions with other people.” Seeing eating as political and the meal/table as a protopublic space invites reflection on the epistemic contours of food culture—how do we come to “know” food culture, how are our politics shaped by the meal, and how can experts like chef intellectuals guide our understanding toward a more productive politics of food and food culture? Cooking is a “technique of relation,” or a bringing together, that transduces disparate ingredients, methods, instruments, customs, and people together into an ephemeral event, the meal. From this perspective, the meal is less a noun than a verb, an active becoming, an occasion, circumscribed to a specific time and place. There is nothing intrinsic about pork shoulder, liquid, heat, knives, and spices that create a meal. It is only once these things enter relation—as cooking—that it becomes something bigger than the sum total of its parts. This event not only involves the transformation of raw food into a cooked dish but also brings people together at a
When there are so many challenges to women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy,it is difficult to ... more When there are so many challenges to women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy,it is difficult to select a case that serves as a metonym for the ongoing, everyday war on women that is waged in what we are calling the ‘‘pubic sphere.’’ The pubic sphere is distinct from the public sphere in that it is a rhetorical and material space in which foregrounding gender functions as a structuring principle of civic life. The genderpolitics of the pubic sphere are evident in the highly public 2011 divorce between the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure (SGK) and Planned Parenthood(PP), a messy split with widespread implications.
A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tea... more A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tease out its various meanings and implications.
Alta Proceedings: Local Theories of Argument, 2021
Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" episode on Charleston, South Carolina opens with chef Sean Bro... more Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" episode on Charleston, South Carolina opens with chef Sean Brock and Bourdain, clearly drunk, sitting at the counter of a Waffl e House. Bourdain is skeptical; after all, this is a Waffl e House. How special could this be? But Brock persuades him not only that he needs to eat at a Waffl e House to have an authentic Charleston experience, but also that the experience of the meal at the Waffl e House will be as good or better than any at even the chicest fi ne dining establishment. By the end of the scene, Bourdain is converted by Brock's evangelizing, and they are digging into grilled porkchops and pecan waffl es with a delighted abandon. While I, too, love the Waffl e House, and particularly at 2 a.m., that is not the focus of this paper. Instead, I investigate how Brock uses both dissociation and multimodal arguments through food to explore the signifi cance of local histories, practices, and cultures. Through my experience dining in his restaurants, and my rhetorical analysis of his cookbook Heritage and his media appearances on programs like "The Mind of a Chef " and this current season of "Chef 's Table," I contend Brock's argument strategies contextualize local food and food culture as temporally and spatially signifi cant topoi that challenge and disrupt this country's destructive industrialized food model. Perhaps it seems unusual to turn to a chef as a case study on dissociation and multimodal argument. And yet, gustatory choices have always had broader political meanings from John Anderson's 1980 supporters being characterized as eff ete brie and Chardonnay consumers (Brummett, 1981) to Barack Obama putting spicy mustard on a hotdog and being branded a communist. Chefs are guides to such choices, and as such, are political infl uencers. But more signifi cantly, chefs are well-placed agents in our era's aestheticized political ecology in which we can tag ourselves at the farmers' market, "check in" to Instagram at a hip restaurant, and post a photo to Snapchat of you and the chef. In this kind of sensory landscape, chefs have particular sway on how people source their food, how they prepare it, how they talk about it, and how they might advocate for good and better food. Sean Brock is what Eckstein and Young (2015) call a Public Chef Intellectual (PCI). PCIs use a variety of strategies, from how they design and deliver their restaurant or menu, to the cookbooks they author, to their various media appearances to educate and guide the public on what and how to eat. In contrast to celebrity chefs, Public Chef Intellectuals are recognized as
Sixteen years ago, Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter argued in the Quarterly Jou... more Sixteen years ago, Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter argued in the Quarterly Journal of Speech that disciplinary territoriality grants legitimacy to specialists while denying it to out-of-the-mainstream scholars who challenge disciplinary norms. 1 Demonstrating how the practices of writing, publication, and reward defining what ''counts'' as scholarly discourse systematically disadvantage women, ''Disciplining the Feminine'' called on scholars ''to scrutinize and evaluate their own rules for engagement and practice.'' 2 Political activism among scholars likewise calls into question unspoken collective rules, often meeting with a hostile response not unlike those lobbed at women scholars. Despite a rich and storied tradition of public intellectualism in our field, we are most rewarded for attending ''annual conferences to compare notes. .. constitut[ing our] own universe.'' 3 As activists, we understand ''engagement'' to entail working toward positive social change in a sometimes uncivil, aggressive manner. As scholars, however, our enthusiasm for engagement is often policed by our affiliate institutions via various forms of depoliticization and/or apoliticization inside the academy. Put differently: Agency as ''publicly engaged'' scholars becomes subject to depoliticizing norms when we transgress the border between scholarship and politics. So, we might ask: What are these norms? How do communication scholars negotiate this boundary and with what consequences? What do these consequences reveal about the norms and values of scholarly associations, particularly our own? Here, we argue that policing the border between activism and scholarship impedes most significantly the activist scholar who understands ''engagement'' as unavoidably and inherently political, who recognizes objectivity and apoliticization as institutional smokescreen. Honoring the interdisciplinary history of communication studies, we
Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us about Donald J. Trump, 2018
When I agreed to be on the conference panel that led to this chapter and this book, I had thought... more When I agreed to be on the conference panel that led to this chapter and this book, I had thought it would be an opportunity to reflect on what has to be the most turbulent and exhausting political experience of any presidential campaign in my lifetime, at least to date. I thought we would be looking back, in other words. Having to reckon with the subject of Donald Trump as president on a minute by minute basis across a spectrum of media has been difficult. But, rhetorical scholars have been and will be very busy with this-this is not the moment for disciplinary modesty. So I am grateful, in a very real way, to be forced to grapple with these ideas and to be in conversation with very smart others about them. I invite all of us to continue that work.
Putting the "Public" in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2021
We argue that part of Rhetoric & Public Affairs' future should center public-facing scholarship i... more We argue that part of Rhetoric & Public Affairs' future should center public-facing scholarship in rhetorical studies. We begin by chronicling some of the work colleagues are doing to bridge expert and lay publics: podcasts, popular and trade press interviews, social media content development and management, and activist engagements. Centering public-facing scholarship creates several notable shifts: (1) it changes the "so what?" for traditional scholarship by inviting scholars to think about audiences outside of journal readership; (2) it opens space for different stylistic conventions in scholarly writing; and (3) it indicates that nonexpert audiences are valuable as readers. We note the considerable barriers to entry to public scholarship including gatekeeping, framing public scholarship for tenure, and training. We contend that Rhetoric & Public Affairs could lead other journals through an updated definition of impact that takes into account contemporary modes ANNA M. (AMY) YOUNG is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Pacific Lutheran University. Her work examines the ways in which public intellectuals and experts can intervene in public problems from democratic participation to food and foodways.
In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic spac... more In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic space, a space in which students may "engage in the praxis of rhetoric, an art whose telos is krisis, or judgment." 1 In other words, the purpose of rhetoric is to critique and to judge, and a protopublic space creates a dynamic laboratory in which students engage in this sort of meaning-making. We argue in this essay that the same can be said of the meal-it offers a space where "private people can come together in public" to "manifest a public-oriented subjectivity, that is, a self that is more or less able to turn private reactions" about a dish, a cultural tradition, a dinner party, the source of the food on the table and so on, into "discourses that address some shared concerns." 2 As Alice Waters articulates, "eating is a political act, but in the way the ancient Greeks used the word "political"-not just having to do with voting in an election, but to mean "of, or pertaining to, all our interactions with other people." 3 Seeing eating as political and the meal/table as a protopublic space invites reflection on the epistemic contours of food culture-how do we come to "know" food culture, how are our politics shaped by the meal, and how can experts like chef intellectuals guide our understanding toward a more productive politics of food and food culture? Cooking is a "technique of relation," or a bringing together, that transduces disparate ingredients, methods, instruments, customs, and people together into an ephemeral event, the meal. 4 From this perspective, the meal is less a noun than a verb, an active becoming, an occasion, circumscribed to a specific time and place. There is nothing intrinsic about pork shoulder, liquid, heat, knives, and spices that create a meal. It is only once these things enter relation-as cooking-that it becomes something bigger than the sum total of its parts. This event not only involves the transformation of raw food into a cooked dish but also brings people together at a
When there are so many challenges to women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy, it is difficult to... more When there are so many challenges to women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy, it is difficult to select a case that serves as a metonym for the ongoing, everyday war on women that is waged in what we are calling the ‘‘pubic sphere.’’ The pubic sphere is distinct from the public sphere in that it is a rhetorical and material space in which foregrounding gender functions as a structuring principle of civic life. The gender politics of the pubic sphere are evident in the highly public 2011 divorce between the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure (SGK) and Planned Parenthood (PP), a messy split with widespread implications. The ramifications of their political differences, the impacts of their public comments, and the innuendo of their private asides not only resonate with the messiest battles associated with divorce but also symbolize larger sociopolitical impacts on women, illustrating how women’s bodies can serve as material tools for various political groups. In this essay, we interrogate the anatomy of the worst of all possible divorces—a process of dismembering a body (whether that body is material, rhetorical, or both) that is bloody and leaves nobody in the vicinity clean or unaffected. The divorce of these two powerful feminist forces took place in a patriarchal sociopolitical structure positioned to read the split through misogynist logics that reason the following: first, women can’t be friends; second, divorce is always a woman’s fault; and third, there is nothing more dangerous than a woman scorned, so a woman scorned by a woman is doubly lethal. We begin with three negative characterizations associated with an ugly divorce: internal divisions, material and symbolic consequences, and messy confrontations. Considering these relational themes in the public spectacle of the SGK and PP divorce, we argue that this split highlights the fraught nature of women’s bodies in political and public life. Starting with division and blame, we consider how questions about fault follow a divorce and serve as outward expressions of internal divisions. That is, fractures precede rhetorics of blame and, later, responsibility and apologia. Due to the logistics of SGK and PP’s split, the rhetoric in this pubic sphere’s division clusters around jurisdiction of bodily autonomy, resources, and narratives. First, in April 2011, SGK hired Karen Handel, former Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate, as vice president of public policy. Handel’s anti-choice
In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic spac... more In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic space, a space in which students may “engage in the praxis of rhetoric, an art whose telos is krisis, or judgment.” In other words, the purpose of rhetoric is to critique and to judge, and a protopublic space creates a dynamic laboratory in which students engage in this sort of meaning-making. We argue in this essay that the same can be said of the meal—it offers a space where “private people can come together in public” to “manifest a public-oriented subjectivity, that is, a self that is more or less able to turn private reactions” about a dish, a cultural tradition, a dinner party, the source of the food on the table and so on, into “discourses that address some shared concerns.” As Alice Waters articulates, “eating is a political act, but in the way the ancient Greeks used the word “political”—not just having to do with voting in an election, but to mean “of, or pertaining to, all our interactions with other people.” Seeing eating as political and the meal/table as a protopublic space invites reflection on the epistemic contours of food culture—how do we come to “know” food culture, how are our politics shaped by the meal, and how can experts like chef intellectuals guide our understanding toward a more productive politics of food and food culture? Cooking is a “technique of relation,” or a bringing together, that transduces disparate ingredients, methods, instruments, customs, and people together into an ephemeral event, the meal. From this perspective, the meal is less a noun than a verb, an active becoming, an occasion, circumscribed to a specific time and place. There is nothing intrinsic about pork shoulder, liquid, heat, knives, and spices that create a meal. It is only once these things enter relation—as cooking—that it becomes something bigger than the sum total of its parts. This event not only involves the transformation of raw food into a cooked dish but also brings people together at a
When there are so many challenges to women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy,it is difficult to ... more When there are so many challenges to women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy,it is difficult to select a case that serves as a metonym for the ongoing, everyday war on women that is waged in what we are calling the ‘‘pubic sphere.’’ The pubic sphere is distinct from the public sphere in that it is a rhetorical and material space in which foregrounding gender functions as a structuring principle of civic life. The genderpolitics of the pubic sphere are evident in the highly public 2011 divorce between the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure (SGK) and Planned Parenthood(PP), a messy split with widespread implications.
A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tea... more A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tease out its various meanings and implications.
A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tea... more A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tease out its various meanings and implications.
A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tea... more A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tease out its various meanings and implications.
A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tea... more A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tease out its various meanings and implications.
A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tea... more A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, on social media, and on campus and tease out its various meanings and implications.
A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, in social media, and on campus, and te... more A podcast where we take a word common in public discourse, in social media, and on campus, and tease out its various meanings and implications.
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