Rhetoric and Public Culture

This book illuminates the rhetorical work performed by contemporary representations of a specific type of postfeminist hero who has garnered a lot of cultural capital: women who are smart, capable, physically agile and fit, and proficient with weaponry and technology. Employing critical/cultural and feminist approaches, Heather Hundley, Roberta Chevrette, and Hillary Jones engage with a range of theories including intersectionality, critical race theory, postmodernism, and posthumanism to examine a range of contemporary texts, including Kill Bill, Volumes I and II; The Hunger Games films; Wonder Woman; Atomic Blonde; Proud Mary; The Bionic Woman; Deus Ex; Dark Matter; and Caprica. Contributing to a robust existing conversation about postfeminist media as well as tracing how representation has changed in recent years, Hundley, Chevrette, and Jones contend that portrayals of dangerous dames offer limitations and opportunities for audiences. Specifically, should audiences read these characters as evidence of a postfeminist apocalypse, they may heed warnings of the limited interpretations offered. Yet as more women serve as role models and gain public attention, particularly regarding their assets and abilities, they provide important equipment for living for navigating around patriarchal constraints raised by postfeminism, neoliberalism, and humanism.

Available at:
-Peter Lang
https://www.peterlang.com/document/1057643
-Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Dames-Representing-Female-Bodied-Postfeminist/dp/1433163012

The Media Ethics Initiative (www.mediaethicsinitiative.org) aims to publicize and promote cutting-edge research on the ethical and moral dimensions of media use in democratic society. By bringing together experts on a variety of communication arenas and from a range of Moody College departments, the Initiative will create a community of scholars dedicated to rigorous and creative approaches to tough decisions and ethical issues in communication and media. The Initiative also aims to promote respectful and reflective discussion over these difficult issues in media ethics in our graduate and undergraduate student communities. By uniting academic researchers whose work engages normative issues in communication, the Initiative will serve as a sustained presentation of expertise on media and communication ethics to the University of Texas community and beyond.

It is my intention to present a rhetorical analysis of John Henrys Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, focusing principally upon Newman’s framing and response to the charges raised against him by Mr Kingsley in the section of APVS Mr Kingsley’s method of disputation. Such a task will take into consideration Newman’s representation of the correspondence between these two men, which I described as forensic autobiography, a method whereby Newman, rather than adding much original commentary or over arching value judgments on Kingsley, instead attempts to let the correspondence speak for itself, and so unmasking the basic assumptions, hidden agendas and facile conceits which fuel much of the polemic directed against Newman.

Everybody has philosophies governing even distinct areas of life, including communication. In establishing these philosophies, individuals often turn to a variety of sources, including media such as film. Using Ronald C. Arnett’s (2010) characterization of philosophy of communication as “scholarly story,” I argue for serious consideration of film texts in the communication discipline. This perspective differs from traditional rhetorical treatment of films, and allows the cinematic text to be a source of philosophical knowledge. Regarding film texts in this way can benefit the discipline by providing insight into the philosophies governing communication practices and beliefs amongst the general public.

This Foreword, about robots, written in both poetry as well as prose, introduces the edited collection _Androids, Cyborgs, and Robots in Contemporary Culture and Society_, edited by Steven J. Thompson (IGI Global, 2018). The link on the thumbnail cover at
https://www.igi-global.com/book/_/179222 will take you directly to the published Foreword, which is open access. The attached PDF, sent directly to me from IGI-Global to use here, is presented with written permission of the publisher.

We first revisit, resituate, and extend the notion of rhetorical velocity and discuss its relationship to delivery and circulation through the lens of cultural mobility studies. Next we introduce a specific case study we can read through rhetorical velocity, delivery, mobilization, and circulation: a moment of civic disobedience in Lansing, Michigan. We situate graffiti as rhetorical action anchored by velocity and circulation by addressing an instance of tagging that frames graffiti art as a rhetorical tactic and community catalyst. We conclude by considering not only the reception and recomposition of texts but how the circulation and motion of texts leave impressions in and around places and spaces.

The United States has long grappled with the question of how to maintain an appropriate combination of religion and politics in the public sphere. The current electoral cycle is no different, as Presidential candidates attempt to negotiate both the political and religious landscapes. This essay introduces a special forum on rhetoric and religion in contemporary politics and touches on some recent instances of how religious differences have played out in the current political environment. Some of the issues discussed include the separation of church and state, Mitt Romney’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), Rick Santorum’s conception of the “war on religion,” and the controversy over contraceptives at religious institutions and Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on a Georgetown law student.

In Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka creates just what he pleases, and doesn’t particularly care what others think. In like manner, director Tim Burton creates films to please himself.  He lurches merrily forward creating worlds populated by deviant and atypical bodies, and apparently never worries about the “point.” He has said that he abhors political correctness, and his films certainly seem to underscore that belief.  Yet in his very denial of what is acceptable and non-acceptable, Burton offers us a glimpse into a world where atypicality is neither forbidden nor patronized. It is a world where the outward form may offer little clue as to the soul within. The atypical body in Burton’s films may, then, be both celebrated and pitied — and often at the same time. It depends upon the story, the setting, and the characters themselves — and in this, films such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) may be seen to present what is called a social model of disability.

Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate in online back-and-forth exchanges that infuence their rhetorical literacy. Because of the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical, and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public deliberation effective and how we can teach students to deliberate.

Situated within a contemporary context of U.S. immigration politics, this essay seeks to track the term illegal as utilized in public discourse to understand how the public has codified
and employed it; more specifically, the essay investigates the social implications of the grammatical shift of the term illegal from an adjective to a noun. I track the plural use of the
word<illegal>in public discourse before, during, and after the 2006 protests and argue that a clear and solidified ideograph of <illegal> has emerged in the public discourse fraught
with negative associations and maintain that the grammatical shift from an adjective to a noun further demeans and dehumanizes undocumented immigrants.

This narrative on pedagogy presents language as a tool for resistance and rhetoric as a means for interrupting social oppressions. In particular, I draw attention to one approach I have used in the Professional Writing classroom to teach gender-neutral and oppression-conscious language practices.

There has been a continuous attack on education, particularly alternative, progressive, democratic and liberatory forms of education that seek social justice and an equality of opportunity for all to develop.  In the UK this has led to an attack on educators as 'the enemies of promise' by the Secretary of State for Education.  However, what is being proposed by policy makers are the old 'know your station in life' strategies of managing inequality.  These have always resulted in a violation of the intelligence of people.

Cultural heritage is often seen as a tool for managing social change, as a mirror that society holds up to itself to make sense of change. In this paper I examine how heritage also mobilizes social change, framing cultural heritage as a persuasive tool in a public sphere of competing interests and claims. Rather than taking the circulation of heritage in the public sphere—across media outlets, social media, and expert networks—as epiphenomenal to its value, I suggest deliberation composes a critical function of cultural heritage, especially under social conditions of deep pluralism, divisive politics, and mass democracy that mark our contemporary era. The public discussions about Confederate commemorations that erupted following the events in Charlottesville in 2017 demonstrate the contests over meaning and proposed actions that reveal the persuasive character of heritage.

This poem was written for a collection of expressions for and memories of Art Young, put together by the staff of the Pearce Center for Professional Communication for Art Young, Campbell Chair of Technical Communication and Professor of English at Clemson University. Art retired emeritus at the end of 2008, but has recently come back to share his wisdom in a few projects, including my new Writing in the Disciplines (WID) Initiative at Clemson University. I reproduce this poem here to honor him and his career of teaching students (and faculty) to think and write critically and creatively--"across and (using poetry) against the curriculum." Art, this one is for you.

Nous publions ici la préface et des extraits de la seconde édition : De la Rhétorique, ou De la composition oratoire et littéraire par Auguste Baron, deuxième édition, Bruxelles — Librairie Polytechnique d’Aug. Decq, 1853 [1re éd. 1849, publiée sans préface].

One of many developments in mainstream rap over the nearly three and half decades since its inception is the transition from the outlaw/gangsta ethos to the mogul ethos of today. This essay explores some of the factors that have influenced this shift in commercialized rap music over the last two decades, namely in its portrayal of the good life as associated with the American Dream. This shift has taken the mainstream manifestations of the genre from criticizing the impact of the good life on the working class to venerating symbols of the good life as a product of the American dream. I also consider the impact this has had on “radio” rap’s main audience and its members’ perceptions of success.  The argument is supported by three theoretical frameworks.

To begin, using Charles Bazerman’s theory of genre systems, I suggest that the networked interactions among artist, audience, and all the entities that essentially own the artist’s persona continue to perpetuate the mogul ethos.  Namely, the project examines how these networks cause the mogul ethos to disseminate through socioeconomic rhetoric prevalent in the hip hop music genre. As my second framework, I look at how such rhetorics of socioeconomic insecurity and esteem have shaped discourses of social mobility throughout the history of the genre. One of the most recognized materializations of this rhetoric is rapper Jay-Z’s biography Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office. With a forward by Steve Forbes, my third framework examines why this narrative has greatly influenced the idea of what it means to be successful as a hip hop artist. I demonstrate the discursive role of Jay-Z’s narrative in social mobility discourses within hip hop.

Ultimately, I critique what the modification of ethos from outlaw to mogul signifies about the relative attainability of American Dream, the ultimate embodiment of the good life, for the segment of the American population to whom the hip hop industry original claimed to represent.

Utilizing examples from fieldwork in the museum, this essay engages Pueblo Grande as a site where colonial identities are re/enacted through symbolic, material, and social encounters. At the same time, I seek to also address decolonizing possibilities residing within, and beyond, the museum site. I argue that approaching rhetoric as holographic enables attention to contested memories as they unfold within the imaginative and material geographies of U.S. settler colonialism. The holographic analytic productively connects rhetorical inquiry in specific places to larger symbolic, material, and social landscapes to attend to multiplicity and difference without attempting to flatten it into a “definite image- repertoire.” Such a perspective engages rhetorical fragments taken from multiple places and perspectives while also calling attention to critics’ positionalities in relation to their object(s) of study. In particular I draw attention to how public memory scholars have approached their objects of analysis and how recent expansions in both our sites and methods of inquiry present opportunities as well as new challenges for decolonizing our approaches.

This Impact Report identifies and summarises the diverse impacts, resulting from the £500m of UK funding of Science and Technology in 2013, using numerous quantitative metrics and short case study extracts.  It shows how the varied impacts of a national science and technology organization and its many funded programmes can be annually identified, captured, tracked, and summarised in a public document.

The report was produced for, and by, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) -  the UK Research Council responsible for funding: (1) all UK astronomy, particle and nuclear physics research, (2) related UK science and technology facilities (e.g. as Harwell and Daresbury), (3) the UK contribution to international science (e.g. CERN, international telescopes and space missions), (4) innovation and business spin-off programmes, and (5) UK public engagement activities.

The Report was co-researched and co-authored by the STFC Impact Team, including myself while Impact Evaluation Manager in 2013, with Dr. Claire Dougan-McCallie (lead author/Head of Impact) and Jenny Beard, with additional input from senior managers, and many data and case study contributions from other key managers across STFC.

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

• Research amongst the best (by citation impact) in astronomy, nuclear and particle physics.
• Supported research of 226 Principal Investigators in 70 universities, led to 1,100 peer-reviewed papers in 2012.
• Facilities (the Diamond Light Source, ISIS and CLF) were used in 2012/13 by over 4,200 unique users , in over 2,400 experiments, producing over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Technology from CERN benefited the UK economy by over £100 billion every year.
• Funding the development of the UK’s space, internet and computer animation industries, returned over £500 billion to the UK economy per annum.
• Funded Innovation Campuses hosted over 230 enterprises and supported over 5,000 jobs.
• UK industry won £43 million in contracts from the international subscriptions funded, and had accumulated a total of £150 million since 2005.

• Funded research inspired future generations to study STEM subjects, attracting 90% of UK undergraduates to study physics, funded 782 PhD students  and 16,800 student training days.
• Between 2009 to 2012 public engagement programmes engaged people on 58 million occasions, with 2 million people engaged in face-to-face activities in 2013 alone.

Singapore climate change adaptation planning for water infrastructure is assessed against the concept of 'vital security systems.' Cast against the historicity of water planning and postcolonial urbanism, water supply, coastal protection and flood control are understood in terms of vigilance, emergency, prediction and control. It is argued that climate adaptation planning  relies on a naturalistic understanding of predictable, linear transformations in base climatic variables, and thus fails to take into consideration the 'pluripotency' of climate futures - that is, the inherent unpredictability of nonlinear transformations that arise in the conjunction of human and nonhuman systems.

Set atop the highest point in the nation's capital, The Washington National Cathedral is the sixth largest cathedral in the world. It has become a central site for the high holy rituals of American civil religion, hosting presidential funerals, National Day of Prayer services, and the tombs of national luminaries. Drawing on archival research, this essay situates the cathedral within a history of religious competition and national tension. The essay concludes that the cathedral's roots lie largely in the fecund rhetorical soil of nineteenth-century nativism, the cultural prejudice that emerged in reaction to Roman Catholicism's remarkable growth during that period. The essay further argues that nativism is an oft-overlooked yet defining type of civil-religious rhetoric.

The current definition of demagogy provided by rhetorical theory is neither preventing nor adequately explaining the abuse of rhetoric so prevalent in contemporary political dialogue, and while it might not be the job of rhetoricians to do the former, rhetorical scholarship should certainly engage more thoroughly in the latter. I suggest that we need to reexamine demagogy in the context of the digital age due to the unique rhetorical dynamics of the online political landscape. Demagogues have a new and dangerous power online that has not yet been explored in rhetorical scholarship. I begin exploring this new power by tracing the scholarship on demagogy, proposing a new focus for demagogy studies based on deliberation and Edwin Black's idea of “second persona,” examining the digital exigence for this focus, and finally presenting case studies of both traditional and digital rhetoric to test this view of demagogy.

Dana Cloud's marvelous new book provides just the sort of deep understanding and practical guidance needed for thoughtful and effective political engagement in the Trump era. In three fascinating case studies, Cloud demonstrates the impotence of naked facts and the power of mediation. First, she compares the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, both of whom leaked classified information in acts of patriotic resistance. Second, in a chapter on the 2014 television series Cosmos, Cloud seeks to explain the show's enormous rhetorical power. Third, Cloud compares the revolutionary rhetoric of Thomas Paine's Common Sense to that of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements. As we live through the devastation wrought by a Trump presidency, as we seek to make sense of it all in our scholarship and our classrooms, as we resist his attempt to reengineer of reality and search for ways to reassert our own reality, the reality of the people, Reality Bites comes not a moment too soon.

This paper analyses the effects of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Zambia. It focuses on two main areas of FDI: This first area looks at the competition effect of Foreign Direct Investment FDI to domestic businesses in the host country, Zambia. The second area looks at how people in general perceive Foreign Direct Investment FDI in Zambia. In order to understand the competition effect of FDI in Zambia, this research study conducted a survey on local business houses to get an understanding of how FDI with respect to foreign businesses has created competition to the detriment of local businesses.

In addition, this research study conducted interviews with various people in Zambia to get their perception of FDI with respect to foreign businesses established in Zambia. The research found that people's perceptions over FDI were more negative than positive.

This research study found that Foreign Direct Investment FDI had both positives and negatives externalities in Zambia. On positive externalities, FDI was found to have helped create employment for local people, facilitated the transfer of technology and innovation as FDI spill-overs to the host country.

However, on negative externalities, the research found that FDI had brought more competition to local businesses in the host country, throwing many out of business. In addition, some local businesses found it difficult to compete due to unfairness created by foreign governments that intervened and supported businesses that came from their countries.

The article traces a kind of collaboration that begins with a Situationist-styled appropriation and then approaches what the Situationists called unitary urbanism, or the detourned use of public spaces to engender the fusion of aesthetic experience with critical consciousness. Topics discussed include aim of detournement, explanation on the conceptualization of unitary urbanism, and description on the works Kurdish artist Zehra Dogan and street artist Banksy.

To those who wish to keep their "cultural operating systems", like the Korean or Russian or Thai or French, "pure", closed, proprietary, without outside influence, I say you are in great danger. Maybe your closed cultural system was elegant and refined. Maybe it has a glorious past history. But it ultimately comes from an earlier human civilization of small, savage tribal groups. Now we humans are many, crowded on a small planet, and communicating with everyone instantly. We need a different design, and that has to be an Open System.

Research concerning computer hackers generally focuses on how to stop them; far less attention is given to the texts they create. Phrack, an online hacker journal that has run almost continuously since 1985, is an important touchstone in hacker literature, widely read by both hackers and telephone and network security professionals. But beyond its instantiation as a compendium of illicit technical knowledge, Phrack was, above all, a rhetorical publication. The files in each issue of Phrack created a shared rhetorical vision concerning the place of the hacker underground within society and in relation to law enforcement officials, as well as what it means to be a hacker. This essay examines two important events in the evolution of the hacker movement through the lens of Phrack—Operation Sundevil and the arrest of Kevin Mitnick. How these events were framed in Phrack both shaped and reflected emerging shifts in hacker collective identity.

This essay focuses on the movement to free Leonard Peltier to better understand the relationship between the rhetoric of American Indian activism and non–American Indian audiences. A rhetorical analysis of Peltier's response to denial of clemency in 2001 reveals how Peltier appealed to non–American Indian supporters to join in a broader struggle for American Indian social justice revealing a rhetorical strategy of transference from individual to collective. The essay challenges assumptions of previous research and adds more complexity to our understanding of the rhetoric of American Indian activism.

This paper lays out the terms of inquiry for my Spring 2016 seminar at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, “Embodied Writing and Rhetoric.” It grows out of release time granted by UPRM for “A Comparative Inquiry on the Role of University GE Courses.” While giving grad students an overview of rhet-comp debates, I want to facilitate embodied learning, and integration of non-academic genres into their FYW courses. I also aspire to move with students towards a more philosophical overview, a la Lyotard’s “report on knowledge.” The turn towards the body, and embodied knowledge, is a dominant feature of current-day scholarship (and its epistemic crisis), I argue, as “incredibility towards metanarratives” was in Lyotard’s era.

Frederick Douglass spoke to a multiracial public sphere by engaging in "antagonistic cooperation" with white and black abolitionists. He served as an "integrative ancestor" for all those trying to help build a multiracial democracy. Douglass'  interracial rhetoric was developed to engage the different constituents of his multiracial audiences. I examine some rhetorical strategies Douglass employed in his "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” speech order to communicate with the different constituents of his multiracial audience. Since many of these strategies were derived from Bible stories and
Enlightenment/ "natural rights" philosophy, I  focus on the  streams of Christian and political egalitarianism which fed Douglass' vision, with three main goals:
1) to give a sense of Douglass' stature in his own time;
2) to deepen our understanding of Douglass' biracial identity and political philosophy, and of how this makes him an "integrative ancestor"; and
3) to illustrate the continuing timeliness of Douglass' critique of American racialism.

In this article, I examine Barack Obama’s use of collective memory during his 2007 campaign speech in Selma, Alabama. Specifically, I argue that Obama appeals to collective memory to challenge the Black community’s relationship to the past. He reframed the memory of the Civil Rights Movement in a manner favorable to his political aspirations. While this frame was politically expedient, it weakened Black political agency. It robbed the Black community of crucial rhetorical resources used to challenge structural inequalities in society. This article offers insight into the complex relationship between metaphor and collective memory. Specifically, I interrogate the role of metaphor as a crucial site where public memory is formed, disrupted, and rearticulated. Furthermore, I consider the implications of his use of memory for the future of the Black freedom struggle.