re:verb: Recent Episodes
Calvin Pollak and Alex Helberg
re:verb is a podcast about politics, culture, and language in action, featuring interviews and segments from scholars, writers, critics, and activists in the humanities, social sciences, and outside the academy.
In this episode, Alex and Calvin return to a favorite hobby horse: the University of Austin (UATX). First discussed back in episode 62, this ultra-conservative "university concept" is still not accredited and has no undergraduate degrees planned until at least 2028-2031. In that previous episode, we described UATX variously as right-wing academia’s answer to the Fyre Festival and a pitch deck/PowerPoint scam masquerading as an education; this time, we call it a fast-casual university concept (Chipotle for higher ed). We catch up with the myriad ways that UATX continues to struggle under the weight of its own internal contradictions, while occasionally benefitting from being confused for UT Austin (home of some of our favorite previous guests, like Scott Graham and Karma Chávez).
After taking stock of US free speech generally in the age of seemingly intractable US-led conflicts in the Middle East and the criminalization of student peace activism, we examine a Quillette article from Ellie Avishai asking if UATX is betraying its founding principles. As Avishai explains, her UATX research center was terminated in response to her posting a rather benign (and ideologically nuanced) LinkedIn post about DEI. We discuss how UATX's claims of championing academic freedom and viewpoint diversity necessarily conflict with its increasingly extreme anti-woke conservative agenda. Given that it is bankrolled by dark money funders and figures connected to corporate interests and political power like Harlan Crow and Joe Lonsdale, the institution appears more dedicated to fortifying right-wing ideas and providing a filter bubble than fostering genuine free inquiry. This makes it particularly ironic that its corporate doublespeak response to Avishai's termination was to use language like "wind up Mill" and "restructure." In these ways, UATX seems to combine the worst of mainstream academia (neoliberal austerity measures justified through corporate doublespeak) with new heights of conservative radicalism.
Drawing on Noah Rawlings' piece in The New Inquiry, we peek into the "Forbidden Courses" summer program held at Harlan Crow's Old Parkland office complex in Dallas, where figures like Peter Boghossian and Katie Roiphe hold court. What does it mean for a university to exist primarily as a "safe space" isolating students from opposition, or worse, a "money and influence laundering operation for some of the most abhorrent ideas" (as Alex calls it)? We conclude that despite the real structural flaws in mainstream academia, the pursuit of knowledge and evidence-based argumentation is still vital in higher ed, but it’s something that UATX seems fundamentally opposed to.
Articles Analyzed in this Episode
“Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?” by Ellie Avishai (in Quillette)
“An American Education: Notes from UATX” - Noah Rawlings (in The New Inquiry)
Previous Episodes Referenced
E62: re:joinder - The University of the Cancelled
Works and Concepts Cited
Van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & society, 4(2), 249-283.
On today’s show, Alex and Calvin – briefly rebranded as Kenneth Jerke and Mikhail Shocktin, co-hosts of "Shock Docs" – explore the state of rhetorical manipulation in the context of the second Trump presidency. We discuss the general ineptitude of the conservative movement occupying the White House and the unsettling lack of a powerful counter-rhetoric in the Democratic opposition, before turning to analyze Trump's tariff policy. We discuss how the tariff conversation is a particularly baffling current example in which raw power seems to be operating without legitimation through traditional rhetorical norms.
Applying a Critical Discourse Studies lens to understand this moment, we revisit concepts like dialogicality from Mikhail Bakhtin, explaining how discourse can be evaluated based on whether it opens up difference (ie. to what extent it is dialogical) or suppresses difference. We introduce assumptions analysis from Norman Fairclough, which examines what a writer/speaker takes for granted as truth (existential, propositional, and values assumptions) and assumptions can reduce dialogical space for manipulative purposes. As a case study, we analyze an article by left-punching journalist Batya Ungar Sargon titled "Liberation Day puts Main Street ahead of Wall Street" (published in Commonplace). We analyze the ways that Ungar Sargon’s manipulative assumptions reframe Trump's tariffs as beneficial for the American worker by ignoring corporate interests and tax policy, misrepresenting political history, and erasing important debates over national security and border policy issues. We conclude with a reminder that it’s always better to be a Mikhail Shocktin than a Kenneth Jerke.
Texts Analyzed in this Episode
Batya Ungar Sargon - “Liberation Day puts main street ahead of Wall Street” (published in Commonplace)
Works Referenced in this Episode
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse (Vol. 270). London: Routledge.
Relevant Past Episodes
Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 3
Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 2
Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 1
re:blurb - Conceptual Metaphor
re:blurb - Dialogicality
re:blurb - Ideographs
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)
Episode Image Description:
Top text: "re:verb"; Left-center image includes a picture of Critical Discourse scholar Norman Fairclough with a laser beam shooting out of his left eye towards right center image; Right-center image is offset, includes a screenshot of an article titled "Liberation Day Puts Main Street Ahead of Wall Street"; Bottom text: "Discourse & Manipulation pt. 4 - The Economic Assumptions of "Liberation Day""
Today’s episode features our rich conversation with Dr. Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University, about her compelling new book, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans. On the show, Alex and Calvin are joined by guest co-host Dr. Sarah Hae-In Idzik to talk with Corinne about her multifaceted analyses of the role of Asian American racialization in the construction of the concept of the human. We delve into Corinne’s concept of "racial allegory," which illuminates how media and institutional narratives mobilize categories of difference, including Asian Americans, to stabilize the idea of "Western man".
Our discussion touches upon the significance of the title Making the Human, unpacking how Asian American racialization and gendering contribute to the social formulation of the human. We explore key concepts such as the understanding of "Western man" drawn from Black Studies scholarship, while also examining the crucial relationship that Corinne charts between anti-Asian racism and anti-Blackness within communication and rhetoric studies. Corinne also explains how she applies the notion of racial allegory to a case study on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, revealing how anti-racist discourse can be used to uphold racial hierarchies, and the strategic role of the victimized Asian student trope in this context. Furthermore, we analyze Corinne’s intercontextual reading of the film Crazy Rich Asians alongside Daniel Patrick Moynihan's “The Negro Family” report, exploring allegories of family and mothering and the underlying racial narratives at play. Our discussion also considers the significance of animacy and the inhuman in relation to the boundaries of the human, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racialization of Asian Americans as potential disease carriers. Finally, we reflect upon Corinne’s nuanced perspective on the term "Asian American" itself, considering its complexities and its potential as a resource for undoing categories and fostering coalition.
Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is available now from Rutgers University Press.
Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode:
Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press.
Jackson, Z. I. (2020). Becoming human: Matter and meaning in an antiblack world. New York University Press.
Johnson, J. (2016). “A man’s mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.1135506
Maraj, L. M. (2020). Anti-racist campus rhetorics. Utah State Press.
Molina, N. (2014). How race is made in America: Immigration, citizenship, and the historical power of racial scripts. Univ of California Press.
Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro family, a case for national action. United States Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research.
Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book. diacritics, 17(2), 65-81.
Wynter, S. (1994). “ ‘No humans involved’: An open letter to my colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, 1(1), 1–17.
Wynter, S. (2003). “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.
Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). “Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations.” In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 9–89). Duke University Press.
da Silva, D. F. (2007). Toward a global idea of race. University of Minnesota Press.
An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here (via Descript)
Today’s episode features a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Charles Athanasopoulos, Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University, about his groundbreaking new book, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America. On the show, Alex and Calvin talk with Charles about the intricate relationship he charts between Black freedom struggles, the power of icons (and their destruction), and the complex liminalities of social change in contemporary America. We explore Charles’s fresh analysis using his concept of "Black iconoclasm" as a guide - a process of Black radical discernment, which beckons us to constantly questioning established norms and the received wisdom of black liberation and social change more broadly.
Our discussion touches upon the personal backdrop that informed Athanasopoulos's work, particularly his religious upbringing, the emergence and mainstreaming of the Black Lives Matter movement during his time as an undergraduate, and some of his observations of the 2020 BLM protests as a graduate student in Pittsburgh. We unpack key concepts from Black Iconoclasm, such as the "twilight of the icons," where the lines between image-making and image-breaking blur. We also explore his insightful application of the work of Frantz Fanon in communication studies, exploring the idea of "Fanonian slips" as accidental rhetorical slippages that reveal deeper investments in racial iconography, using examples like comments from political figures like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, as well as Charles’s own experiences. We also examine the visual rhetoric of a BLM mural in Pittsburgh through the lens of Édouard Glissant's "poetics of visual relation," considering the transformations and defacements the mural underwent, and its broader symbolic underpinnings. We conclude by hearing the inspiration behind Charles’s creative story of “Black Icarus” that interweaves his chapters, reflecting upon his choice to include an innovative mythopoetic narrative as part of his scholarly work.
Charles Athanasopolous’s Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America is available now as a free E-Book from Palgrave Macmillan (via SpringerLink)
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode
Burke, Kenneth. 1970. The rhetoric of religion. City: University of California Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 2018. Alienation and freedom. Ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London and New York: Penguin Books.
Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of relation. Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection : terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press.
Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2), 1-14.
Maraj, Louis M. 2020. Black or right: Anti/racist campus rhetorics. Logan: Utah State Press.
Matheson, C. L. (2019). The instance of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud. In Reading Lacan's Écrits: From ‘The Freudian Thing’to'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (pp. 131-162). Routledge.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Twilight of the idols. Trans. Richard Polt. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Spillers, H. J. (2003). Black, white, and in color: Essays on American literature and culture. University of Chicago Press..
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)
On today’s show, Alex and Calvin continue their series on Discourse and Manipulation by examining the role of manipulative silence in various post-mortems to the 2024 Presidential Election.
As a second-term President Donald Trump looms, many have been debating: what went wrong in the Democrats’ campaign? What policy positions, rhetorical strategies and slip-ups, or other contextual factors led Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be so soundly defeated? However, amidst all of the post-mortem analysis by institutional Democrats and their surrogates in the media, some salient concerns seem to be missing: namely, the various causes and effects of economic and political precarity that many communities in the US are actively experiencing, and the Democrats’ seeming unwillingness to address these issues head-on. Instead, many are using this epideictic moment to blame scores of abstract, ill-defined terms for the election loss: “wokeness,” “inflation,” “misogyny,” “political headwinds,” and “anti-incumbent sentiment,” among others.
When we apply a Critical Discourse Studies lens, we can see that all of these concepts share a common grammatical category: each one is a nominalization, or a noun that has been made out of a verb or adjective. These nominalizations serve the useful purpose of obscuring or silencing important information, such as who is responsible for an action (or who/what is being affected by it), as well as the scale of the issue.
In this episode, we examine a series of texts that use manipulative nominalizations and other discourse structures to erase the specific ways that Democratic leaders, campaign staff, and consultancy firms have acted ineffectively and destructively both in this failed run and in the recent past (e.g. Biden’s and Obama’s presidencies and Clinton’s losing bid in 2016). Instead of taking real stock of this history, these texts are mainly platforms for powerful actors to attack broad, abstract concepts, or worse, to victim-blame the voters themselves. We conclude by reflecting upon how these manipulative silences betray the Democratic establishment’s inability or unwillingness to reckon with how its own economic and material interests might be at odds with policies and platforms that could help uplift the most vulnerable in our society.
Texts Analyzed in this Episode:
Maureen Dowd - “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics”
National Organization for Women President Christian F. Nunes: “Racism, Sexism, Misogyny and Hate Won This Election, But We Won’t Let Our Democracy Be Destroyed”
David Plouffe dialogue on Pod Save America podcast episode: “Exclusive: The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong”
Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse (Vol. 270). London: Routledge.
Huckin, T. (2002). Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness. Discourse & Society, 13(3), 347-372.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage.
Cameron Mozafari's Twitter thread summarizing his work with Michael Israel on the changing meaning of “woke”
re:verb episode 71: re:pronouns
re:verb episode 14: re:blurb - Ideographs
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)
On today’s show, we once again fire up our rhetorical stovetop to roast some dubious public argumentation: Oprah Winfrey’s recent ABC special, “AI and the Future of Us.” In this re:joinder episode, Alex and Calvin listen through and discuss audio clips from the show featuring a wide array of guests - from corporate leaders like Sam Altman and Bill Gates to technologists like Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris, and even FBI Director Christopher Wray - and dismantle some of the mystifying rhetorical hype tropes that they (and Oprah) circulate about the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and other “AI” technologies into our lives. Along the way, we use rhetorical tools from previous episodes, such as the stasis framework, to show which components of the debate around AI are glossed over, and which are given center-stage. We also bring our own sociopolitical and media analysis to the table to help contextualize (and correct) the presenters’ claims about the speed of large language model development, the nature of its operation, and the threats - both real and imagined - that this new technological apparatus might present to the world.
We conclude with a reflection on the words of novelist Marilynne Robinson, the show’s final guest, who prompts us to think about the many ways in which “difficulty is the point” when it comes to human work and developing autonomy. Meanwhile, the slick and tempting narratives promoting “ease” and “efficiency” with AI technology might actually belie a much darker vision of “the future of us.”
Join us as we critique and rejoin some of the most common tropes of AI hype, all compacted into one primetime special. In the spirit of automating consumptive labor, we watched it so you don’t have to!
Works & Concepts cited in this episode:
Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021, March). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?🦜. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623).
Rather, S. (2024, 25 Apr.). How is one of America's biggest spy agencies using AI? We're suing to find out. ACLU. [On the potential harms of the US NSA implementing AI into existing dragnet surveillance programs domestically & internationally]
Robins-Early, N. (2024, 3 Apr.). George Carlin’s estate settles lawsuit over comedian’s AI doppelganger. The Guardian.
re:verb Episode 12: re:blurb - Stasis Theory
re:verb Episode 17: re:blurb - Dialogicality
re:verb Episode 75: A.I. Writing and Academic Integrity (w/ Dr. S. Scott Graham)
re:verb Episode 91: Thinking Rhetorically (w/ Robin Reames) [Episode referencing the importance of following the stasis categories in public debates]
On today’s show, we bring back one of our all-time favorite guests (and emeritus co-Producer / co-Founder of re:verb) Dr. Derek G. Handley to talk about his newly-published book, Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement. This episode is a spiritual successor to our first episode with Derek (all the way back in Episode 6!), which focused on the rhetoric of 20th-century urban renewal policies in Pittsburgh, and African American citizens’ resistance to those policies and practices that threatened their homes and businesses.
Derek has now expanded his analysis of urban renewal rhetorics - and the modes of citizenship and resistance practiced by African American community members in response to them. His new book, Struggle for the City, focuses on urban renewal policy struggles that played out across three Northern cities in the 1950s and ‘60s: St. Paul Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In each of these case studies, Derek deftly traces the rhetorical contours of the master narrative (such as the use of the “blight” metaphor) that shaped how urban renewal policies, including highway and infrastructure development, ultimately uprooted and destabilized African American communities. In turn, his case studies center on the voices of these communities, showing how they responded using a framework he calls “Black Rhetorical Citizenship.” The rhetorical practices inherent within this mode of citizenship - which include deliberation and community decision-making, the circulation of multi-modal counterstories, and a forward-looking focus on public memory - are not only essential touchstones in the less-publicized history of Civil Rights struggles in Northern cities during the 20th century; they also provide an important scaffold for current rhetorical strategies in ongoing Black freedom and justice struggles in the US writ large.
In this conversation, Derek also shares some details of his ongoing public scholarship project (co-directed with UW-M Geography Professor Dr. Anne Bonds) Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County, which seeks to document restrictive and racist housing covenants in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and its surrounding suburbs, as well as community resistance to these and related practices.
Derek’s book, Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement, is available via Penn State University Press on September 24, 2024
More information on the Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County project can be found here
Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode
Handley, D. G. (2019). “The Line Drawn”: Freedom Corner and Rhetorics of Place in Pittsburgh, 1960s-2000s. Rhetoric Review, 38(2), 173-189.
Houdek, M., & Phillips, K. R. (2017). Public memory. In Oxford research encyclopedia of communication.
Kock, C., & Villadsen, L. (Eds.). (2015). Rhetorical citizenship and public deliberation. Penn State Press.
Loyd, J. M., & Bonds, A. (2018). Where do Black lives matter? Race, stigma, and place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Sociological Review, 66(4), 898-918.
Mapping Prejudice [University of Minnesota Project on restrictive housing covenants]
Musolff, A. (2012). Immigrants and parasites: The history of a bio-social metaphor. In Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (pp. 249-258). Vienna: Springer Vienna. [on the use of “disease” metaphors in immigration discourse]
Nelson, H. L. (2001). Damaged identities, narrative repair. Fordham University. [on the concepts of “master narrative” and “counterstories”]
Pittsburgh Courier Archive (from Newspapers.com)
Wilson, A. (2007). The August Wilson Century Cycle. Theatre Communications Group.
An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here
On today’s show, Calvin and Alex analyze the rhetoric and politics of the 2024 presidential election in terms of a particularly significant job this cycle: the vice president, or veep! We begin by discussing Vice President Kamala Harris’s meteoric rise to the Democratic nomination following President Biden’s departure from the race, as well as Harris’s conspicuous similarities to HBO’s fictional Veep, Selena Meyer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus). We then compare and contrast the aesthetics, rhetorical styles, and political stances of Harris’s vice presidential nominee and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and Republican veep nominee and Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance.
Along the way, we discuss how the Democratic Party under Harris and Walz is embracing a rhetoric of normalcy vs. “weirdness” that is genuinely novel and effective as a strategy for delegitimizing GOP policy, and how this approach may help to expand the Democratic voting base in response to state-level crises over reproductive justice and public education. We theorize the Dems’ normalizing discourse as a way of forthrightly indexing liberal values and connecting to core American ideographs while also positioning themselves as outsiders fighting a noble cause against entrenched GOP power in state governments and the national judiciary. Nevertheless, we conclude on a cautionary note about the dangers of normalization rhetoric, particularly in a country with an ongoing legacy of structural racism and imperialist foreign policy – including the brutal and unresolved conflict in the Gaza Strip.
Textual Artifacts Analyzed
Harris-Meyer comparison text:
https://youtu.be/72vUngNA9RM?si=izGYEEFsBRjQrlXj
Walz artifacts:
https://www.msnbc.com/inside-with-jen-psaki/watch/-these-guys-are-weird-gov-walz-blasts-trump-vance-obsession-with-anti-freedom-agenda-215711813835
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ajzMgbGsY
Vance artifacts:
https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913476514279744
https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913478808342571
https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913483606901062
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/read-the-transcript-of-jd-vances-convention-speech.html
Vance RNC speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8TlBHRtrvM
Vance’s TED Talk, “America’s Forgotten Working Class”
Scholarly Works and Concepts Referenced
Kiossev, A. (2008). The oxymoron of normality. Eurozine http://www.eurozine. com/the-oxymoron-of-normality/
Pollak, C. (2021). Legitimation and Textual Evidence: How the Snowden Leaks Reshaped the ACLU’s Online Writing About NSA Surveillance. Written Communication, 38(3), 380-416.
van Dijk, T. A. (2000). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446217856
Kairos:
https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/28358
Ethos:
https://www.reverbcast.com/podcasts/2024/6/28/e94-reblurb-ethos
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here
Have you ever wondered why you immediately gravitate towards some speakers and writers? How they form a connection with you and make you want to pay closer attention? Or why you react with disgust and revulsion to other kinds of communicators? What is it about strategic discourse that fosters and nurtures deep connections with some audiences while (intentionally or unintentionally) turning other kinds of people off right away?
On today's re:blurb episode, we address these questions through a wide-ranging discussion of the classical rhetorical concept of ethos, one of the three classical appeals (along with logos and pathos). We begin by overviewing the origins of ethos in ancient Athenian courts of law, recounting debates between Plato and Aristotle about whether ethos is core to the corrupting (or liberating) influence of rhetoric in society. We then explain modern theories such as Kenneth Burke’s identification and Michael J. Hyde and Calvin Schrag’s notion of ethos as a “dwelling place” shared by speakers and audiences. Ultimately, we argue that the history of ethos theory is defined by attention to how credibility, trust, and persuasion are not accomplished unilaterally or unidirectionally, but rather occur in the dynamic, situated, dialogic interplay between communicators and their audiences.
This particular understanding of ethos enlivens our sample analysis, which shows the concept’s enduring utility as a critical tool. We introduce and critique the pro-Biden X account @BidensWins, which has been strategically constructing Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign ethos. We describe how the posts’ recurring language patterns constitute an identity grounded in “win”-quantification and newsworthiness, and how their hyper-patriotism and policy stances seem to be targeting specific voter constituencies for persuasion (while ignoring or disavowing others). We question both the pragmatic wisdom of this ethos strategy and the moral consequences of it for various core Democratic voter blocs that Biden will need in order to defeat Donald Trump.
@BidensWins X Posts Analyzed:
https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1802423240876331122
https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1803251566356426859
https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1803451317098074344
https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1778407786302341419
https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1797668724008489005
https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1798060384487948536
https://x.com/POTUS/status/1803176039603957883
Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode
Baumlin, J.S. (2001) Ethos. In T. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (pp. 209-217). Oxford University Press.
Burke, K. (1969). A rhetoric of motives. University of California Press.
Hyde, M. J. & C.O. Schrag (Eds.). (2004). The ethos of rhetoric. University of South Carolina Press.
Ridolfo, J., & DeVoss, D. N. (2009). Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 13(2), n2.
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here
On today’s show, Alex and Calvin are thrilled to be joined by Dr. Patricia Fancher, a Continuing Lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In her fabulous new book Queer Techné: Bodies, Rhetorics, and Desire in the History of Computing, Dr. Fancher offers a groundbreaking history of how the Manchester University Computer and discourses about it were shaped by queerness, embodied gender performativity, and invisibilized gendered labor in the early 1950s. Some of the figures that Fancher’s book offers new understandings of include Alan Turing, Christopher Strachey, Audrey Bates, and Cicely Popplewell, with each case study capturing how technical communication and technology development are about more than just usability, efficiency, and innovation.
A recurring theme in Dr. Fancher’s rhetorical reading of Turing and his colleagues is that there is something queer, performative, and playful about intelligence, and that these dimensions are mostly ignored by the hype around so-called “artificial intelligence” tools like large language models. To explore this theme, we chat about Christopher Strachey’s rudimentary love letter generation program, comparing its output to ChatGPT’s for similar prompts. We ultimately explore what Turing might have thought of LLMs, and how we can begin to ask queerer questions of our digital tools to produce more interesting and intelligent discourses and technologies.
Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode
Edenfield, A. C., Holmes, S., & Colton, J. S. (2019). Queering tactical technical communication: DIY HRT. Technical Communication Quarterly, 28(3), 177-191.
Fancher, P. (2024). Queer Techné: Bodies, Rhetorics, and Desire in the History of Computing. NCTE.
Fancher, P. (2016). Composing artificial intelligence: Performing Whiteness and masculinity. Present Tense, 6(1).
Haas, A. M. (2012). Race, rhetoric, and technology: A case study of decolonial technical communication theory, methodology, and pedagogy. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(3), 277-310.
Henrik Oleson exhibition about Turing.
Matt Sefton and David Link’s web version of Strachey’s love letter program
Rhodes, J., & Alexander, J. (2015). Techne: Queer meditations on writing the self. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press.
On today’s show, Alex is joined by Olivia Wood, a lecturer in the English Department at City College of New York (CCNY) to discuss the recent escalations of force by the NYPD and campus administrators against student protesters in solidarity with Palestine over the past several weeks. In particular, we touch on the flashpoint raids by police - at the behest of campus administrators - at Columbia and CCNY on Tuesday, April 30th, the rhetorical strategies used by student organizers at the encampments to advocate for their causes of disclosure and divestment, and the problematic discourse that mainstream journalists have been circulating when discussing these movements. We conclude by reflecting on the ways that academic worker collectivities (including but not limited to unions) can help show critical support to student demonstrators exercising free speech on campus and advocating for justice in Palestine.
References
Remembering Dr. Refaat Alareer (1979-2023)
The Killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab
‘This machine bonks fascists’: US student protester’s water jug becomes symbol of resistance
Doctor in Gaza refuses to evacuate, pleads for Israel-Hamas war to stop
Links to some of Olivia’s reporting on academic and student organizing in solidarity with Palestine:
Faculty, Staff, and Students Must Unite Against Repression of the Palestine Movement (4/23/24)
Faculty at University of Texas Austin Strike in Solidarity with Student Protesters (4/25/24)
CUNY Students Occupy Campus in Solidarity with Palestine, Building on the University’s Legacy of Radical Organizing (4/27/24)
CUNY Rank-and-File Workers Stand With the Student Encampment (4/30/24)
An accessible transcript for this episode is available upon request - please send us an email at reverbcontent[at]gmail.com or DM us on Twitter / X
On today’s show, Calvin and Alex sit down with Dr. Robin Reames - Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago - to discuss her new book The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times.
In this book, Robin synthesizes rhetorical theories and concepts from Greek antiquity to the 20th century to deliver some of the most practical lessons that rhetorical knowledge can offer. In our conversation, we discuss what it means to be a rhetorical thinker, some of the key characters from ancient Greek rhetorical history who hold important lessons for our current era, and illustrate some examples of how thinking like a rhetorician can help us reason more critically in our day-to-day lives. We conclude with a meditation on how rhetorical knowledge can help us better understand disagreements - from those in our interpersonal relationships to the larger divides that seem to define and constrict our current political reality.
Robin Reames’s The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself is available now from Basic Books
Listen to our episode on Stasis Theory here
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here
Spoiler Alert: This episode contains numerous plot spoilers for Civil War.
On today’s show, we inaugurate a new episode series called reel:verb, in which we rate, review, and analyze a recent movie from the perspective of politics, culture, and language in action. In the first installment, Alex, Olivia, and Calvin tackle the 2024 dystopian thriller Civil War, directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation). Civil War depicts a near-future US torn apart by domestic warfare, as seen from the perspectives of a small group of journalists (played by Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, respectively) who are documenting the fighting and plotting to photograph and interview the besieged US president (Nick Offerman).
We begin by providing our individual ratings of the film (out of 5 verbs), and then we recap the major plot points and set pieces that take place along Dunst et. al’s roadtrip from hell. We conclude with a wide-ranging analysis of the film’s politics and rhetoric, in which we unpack how it depicts journalism (and journalists) and consider its social significance in the midst of ongoing US-backed conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. Ultimately, we argue, this film’s vision of civil war is too far-fetched, abstracted, and underdeveloped to serve as a true cautionary tale for US audiences – perhaps because Garland, like his cast of photojournalists, is apparently more invested in aestheticizing violence than cogently critiquing it.
Works and Concepts Referenced In this Episode
Chouliaraki, L. (2005). Spectacular ethics: on the television footage of the Iraq war. Journal of language and politics, 4(1), 143-159.
Cloud, D. L. (2018). Reality bites: Rhetoric and the circulation of truth claims in US political culture. The Ohio State University Press.
Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault reader. Vintage.
Our previous episode with Dr. Roger Stahl on US military cooperation in entertainment products
Reuters photographer [Mohammed Salem] wins World Press Photo of the Year with poignant shot from Gaza
Transcript of Pod Save America episode featuring Alex Garland (interview begins at 38:50)
An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent[AT]gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.
On today’s show, Calvin and Alex sit down with the co-authors of a hot-off-the-presses article in Discourse & Society about journalistic reporting on US drone strikes in the Middle East: Dr. John Oddo (Carnegie Mellon University), Dr. Cameron Mozafari (Cornell University), and Alex Kirsch (MA Professional Writing graduate, CMU). In their article, entitled “Sustaining or overcoming distance in representations of US drone strikes,” they examine deictic language - words and phrases that “point” to contextual elements construed as “close” or “far away.” Specifically, they analyze how this type of language is used to make US audiences feel sympathetic or apathetic toward the US drone war and the suffering it caused to ordinary civilians in the 2000s and 2010s.
In our conversation, we talk with the authors about how deictic language can position a reader audience as “near” or far” from descriptions of suffering in terms of space, time, veracity, sense perception, emotion, and perspective. They take us through the major findings in their article’s comparison between how the Associated Press and The American Prospect used this language - to different extremes - in order to render people suffering from US military violence as immediate, worthy of attention and sympathy, or distant, opaque, and foreign. We also discuss the implications for how this language is used in reporting on other policy issues both foreign and domestic, and the affordances of this model for helping us understand how language in news reporting creates mental images.
John, Cameron, and Alex’s co-authored article:
Oddo, J., Mozafari, C., & Kirsch, A. (2024). Sustaining or overcoming distance in representations of US drone strikes. Discourse & Society.
Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode:
Bloom, P. (2017). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. Random House.
Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics. Cambridge University Press.
Cap, P. (2008). Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40(1), 17-41.
Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. Routledge.
————. (2014). Language, space and mind: The conceptual geometry of linguistic meaning. Cambridge University Press.
Chouliaraki, L. (2013). The ironic spectator: Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism. John Wiley & Sons.
Kopytowska, M. (2015a). Covering conflict: Between universality and cultural specificity in news discourse, genre and journalistic style. International Review of Pragmatics, 7(2), 308-339.
————. (2015b) Ideology of ‘here’ and ‘now’: Mediating distance in television news. Critical Discourse Studies 12(3): 347-365.
Do you consider yourself to be a rational person? If so, Scott Adams (a.k.a. “The Dilbert Guy”), has some bad news for you.
On today’s show, we attempt to surmount our various cognitive dissonances and confirmation biases to better understand “How to See Reality in a More Useful Way,” according to the third chapter of Scott Adams’s 2017 pseudo-rhetorical quasi-treatise, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. This chapter takes us headlong into Scott’s psychology, charting his journey through various “filters” he developed to help him “predict the future” at various stages in his life: among them, the “Santa Claus filter,” the “Alien Experiment filter,” and most ridiculous of all, his self-proclaimed current “Moist Robot filter.” This one has to be heard to be believed, trust us.
Among other topics covered in this chapter are Scott’s “two movie” theory of reality, and his assertion that beliefs are really just “mass delusions” that determine how we react to new events and information. As usual, this chapter uncovers yet another layer of Scott’s solipsistic nihilism toward the world and its social dynamics. It also contains a whole section on how to become a trained hypnotist. He’s a man of many talents, folks.
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here
Disclaimer: This episode covers sensitive issues related to suicide and self-harm. If this topic makes you uncomfortable, we recommend skipping this episode. If you or someone you know is in crisis, in the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor.
On the morning of February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US Air Force service member, posted a link to his Twitch channel on Facebook, commenting: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” Several hours later, around 1pm Eastern, Bushnell live-streamed himself walking toward the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. carrying a metal bottle without a lid. Bushnell recorded himself saying: “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” After setting up his camera several feet away, still live-streaming, he poured the liquid from his bottle over his head, and lit himself on fire from his feet, shouting “Free Palestine,” over and over, with increasing agony.
Bushnell’s is the second nationally documented instance of self immolation in response to the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza. In December, a protester - whom the media has refused to name - set themselves on fire outside of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta while holding a Palestinian flag.
How can we best understand these cases: as noble and heroic protests? Or irrational acts of self-harm and self-destruction? To help us think through these questions, we are joined by Dr. James Chase Sanchez, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Middlebury College and eminent scholar of racism, white supremacy, and social movements. James has published two relevant books: the co-authored collection Race, Rhetoric, and Research Methods, and Salt of the Earth: Rhetoric, Preservation, and White Supremacy, both published in 2021. He also produced the 2018 documentary film Man on Fire, which tells the story of Charles Moore, a 79-year-old minister who self-immolated in protest against racism in his hometown of Grand Saline, Texas. We discuss Moore’s and Bushnell’s acts in the context of the history of social movement rhetorics, and consider how to reframe current conversations away from Bushnell the individual and towards issues of collective and internationalist solidarity.
You can find more information on James’s documentary Man on Fire at this link
James’s 2021 book Salt of the Earth can be purchased at this link
On today’s show, Alex and Calvin continue to break down the concept of “Manipulation” in rhetoric and political discourse, recapping part one of this series, demonstrating strategies for identifying and critiquing manipulation, and discussing how this kind of large-scale “mind control” is affecting contemporary foreign policy discourse in the US.
The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people’s thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation.
This time, to put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding US foreign policy, specifically as it relates to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza: President Joe Biden’s November 18 opinion article in the Washington Post, entitled “The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas.” We closely analyze how President Biden uses manipulation strategies straight out of Van Dijk to persuade WaPo-reading liberals to ignore both the US’s constant and substantial material support for Israel’s war and its own military’s history of bloody and destructive imperialism throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere in the world. We also note various tactics that the president deploys to naturalize inequality and normalize bigotry, all while touting the US’s role as the “essential” peace-loving, freedom-spreading nation.
“The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas” - Joe Biden
Link to Part One of this Series
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Azoulay, A., & Ophir, A. (2012). The one-state condition: occupation and democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford University Press.
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.
Fifield, A. (19 March 2013). “Contractors reap $138B from Iraq war.” CNN.com.
McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here.]
Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State University Press. [Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here.]
Perelman, C. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. University of Notre Dame Press.
Schneider, T. (8 Oct 2023). “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces.” The Times of Israel.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.
An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent[AT]gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.
On today’s show, Alex and Calvin break down the concept of “Manipulation” in rhetoric and political discourse. We outline some key strategies for identifying and critiquing manipulation, and discuss its social and political implications as a form of large-scale “mind control.”
The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people’s thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation.
To put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding student protests against the most recent flare-up in Israel’s war on Gaza: Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian’s email to university students and faculty in response to a recent student vigil where the phrase “from the river to the sea” was chanted. We closely analyze the careful manipulations of emphasis and value that Jahanian creates in his discourse, which subtly demonizes student demonstrators advocating for peace and the cessation of violence between Israel and Hamas, while reaffirming the supposedly apolitical “commitments” of the institution he represents.
Full Text Version of Farnam Jahanian Email
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.
McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here.]
Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State University Press. [Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here.]
van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.
An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent@gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.
On today’s show, Ben sits down with Dr. Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss his research at the intersections of border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American and Latinx diasporic media.
We begin by discussing Juan’s approaches to media studies and challenges in the field, then dive into his new book, Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.-Mexico Underground (University of Minnesota Press). Together, we reflect on the role of media representing border tunnels–underground networks of built and excavated spaces circumventing the above-ground border. As Juan notes, these tunnels are “nearly inaccessible” to the general public, so through their representation, we see media’s capacity to give meaning to “spaces and structures in excess of their real referent.” Importantly, Juan shows us how the “figure of the border tunnel” relates to the escalating efforts to violently fortify and police the U.S.-Mexico border.
Juan helps us understand the affordances and limitations of border tunnels’ depictions in reality television, newscasts, action films, video games, and speculative design projects. We reflect on the role of popular films that appear in the book, such as the Fast and Furious franchise, video games like Call of Juarez: The Cartel, and the reality television series Border Wars in constructing what Juan calls the “racial infrastructures of the border.” This timely conversation helps us rethink our relationship with popular media and culture, drawing out the seemingly invisible role of border tunnels in shaping our understanding of the borderlands.
Works referenced in this episode
Agudelo, E. (2008). A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales. Borderwall as Architecture.
Fojas, C. (2021). Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures of the US-Mexico Frontier. New York University Press.
Fickle, T. (2019). The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities. New York University Press.
Howarth, D. (2016). Beautifying the Border Proposal Replaces US–Mexico Fence with Landscaping. Dezeen.
Hernández, K. (2010). Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. University of California Press.
Knight, K. & Llamas-Rodriguez, J. Migrant Steps Project.
Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2023). Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.–Mexico Underground. University of Minnesota Press.
Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2017). The Datalogical Drug Mule. Feminist Media Histories, 3 (3), 9-29.
Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2021). First-Person Shooters, Tunnel Warfare, and the Racial Infrastructures of the US–Mexico Border. Lateral, 10 (2).
Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2022). Ruinous Speculation, Tunnel Environments, and the Sustainable Infrastructures of the Border. Social Text, 40 (4), 97-123.
Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2021). “The Sewer Transnationalists.” One Shot: A Journal of Critical Games and Play, 2.
Mattern, S. (2018). Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Media Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures. The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers. Routledge.
Parks, L. (2015). “Stuff You Can Kick”: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures. Between Humanities and the Digital, edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg. The MIT Press.
Patterson, C. (2020). Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games. New York University Press.
An accessible transcript of this episode can be viewed here:
https://otter.ai/u/xK1Y3uUOPeEXGBnErGd6_8eszXM
Ever since its announcement in 2021, the Atlanta police training facility project known as “Cop City” has been the subject of much criticism from activists concerned with police violence and environmental justice. The proposal included razing 85 acres of forest in DeKalb County, Georgia (just South of the city of Atlanta) to build, among other things, a mock “city” in which police would conduct training exercises. In response, members of the surrounding community and beyond have engaged in swift, voluminous, and continuous protest.
But in September 2023, in a severe escalation against the protest movement, Georgia Attorney General Michael Carr indicted 61 protestors under the Georgia RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act. Given that this act has historically been used to charge members of organized criminal syndicates (and of recent note, Donald Trump and his campaign staff for seeking to overturn the state-level presidential election results), its use to indict political protesters as part of a criminal conspiracy is a worrisome landmark in Georgia’s prosecutorial history. More broadly, it represents a critical abrogation of speech and association freedoms, and it sets a terrifying precedent for the suppression of political movements.
On today’s show, Alex, Calvin, and Sophie dive into the actual language of the 109-page indictment document to analyze its rhetorical conflation of political protest and free association with a “criminal conspiracy.” In addition to critiquing the document’s numerous typographical errors and sloppy, imprecise prose, we assess how its language of threat-construction renders advocates of racial and environmental justice “violent anarchists,” whose expressions and practices of “mutual aid” and “solidarity” allegedly constitute illegal associations in a broader “conspiracy.” We also discuss the dark implications of this case for free speech and free association, the chilling effects the indictment could have on political movements nationwide, and some of its particular significance for scholars and teachers of rhetoric and technical communication.
You can read the full indictment document against the Defend the Atlanta Forest organizers here:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23940338-cop-city-rico-indictment
You can donate to the Legal Defense Fund for Stop Cop City organizers here:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/atllegalfund
For a full list of mutual aid funds, including payments to individual defendants, see the following LinkTree:
https://linktr.ee/weelauneearresteefundraisers
Are you a writing instructor or student who’s prepared to turn over all present and future communication practices to the magic of ChatGPT? Not so fast! On today’s show, we are joined by Dr. Emily M. Bender, Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington and a pre-eminent academic critic of so-called “generative AI” technologies. Dr. Bender’s expertise involves not only how these technologies work computationally, but also how language is used in popular media to hype, normalize, and even obfuscate AI and its potential to affect our lives.
Dr. Bender’s most well-known scholarly work related to this topic is a co-authored conference paper from 2021 entitled, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” In our conversation, Emily explains why she and her co-authors chose the “stochastic parrot” metaphor – how this helps us to understand large language models and other related technologies more accurately than many competing metaphors. We go on to discuss several actual high-stakes, significant issues related to these technologies, before Dr. Bender provides a helpful index of some the most troublesome ways they are talked about in the media: synthetic text “gotcha”s, infancy metaphors, linear models of progress, inevitability framings, and many other troublesome tropes.
We conclude with a close reading of a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about using synthetic text generators in writing classrooms: “Why I’m Excited About Chat GPT” by Jenny Young. Young’s article exemplifies many of the tropes Emily discussed earlier, as well as capturing lots of strange prevailing ideas about writing pedagogy, genre, and rhetoric in general. We hope that you enjoy this podcast tour through the world of AI hype media, and we ask that you please remain non-synthetic ‘til next time – no shade to parrots! 🦜
Check out the podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, hosted by Dr. Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna:
Audio Podcast
Video Podcast
Works & Concepts Cited in this episode:
Baria, A. T., & Cross, K. (2021). The brain is a computer is a brain: neuroscience's internal debate and the social significance of the Computational Metaphor. arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.14042.
Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021, March). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?🦜. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623).
Bender, E. M., & Koller, A. (2020, July). Climbing towards NLU: On meaning, form, and understanding in the age of data. In Proceedings of the 58th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics (pp. 5185-5198).
Birhane, A., Kalluri, P., Card, D., Agnew, W., Dotan, R., & Bao, M. (2022, June). The values encoded in machine learning research. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 173-184).
Birhane, A. (2021). Algorithmic injustice: a relational ethics approach. Patterns, 2(2).
Doyle-Burke, D. & Smith, J. (Hosts).(2020, 8 Jul.). Episode 17: Science Fiction, Science Fact, and AI Consciousness with Beth Singler. [Audio Podcast Episode]. The Radical AI Podcast. Radical AI.
Dubal, V. (2023). On algorithmic wage discrimination. Washington Center for Equitable Growth Working Papers Series.
Fahnestock, J. (1986). Accommodating science: The rhetorical life of scientific facts. Written communication, 3(3), 275-296.
Greene, D., Hoffmann, A. L., & Stark, L. (2019). Better, nicer, clearer, fairer: A critical assessment of the movement for ethical artificial intelligence and machine learning. Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
Li, H. (2022). Language models: past, present, and future. Communications of the ACM, 65(7), 56-63. [Provides overview and context of Claude Shannon and Andrey Markov’s work on language modeling].
McDermott, D. (1976). Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity. Acm Sigart Bulletin, (57), 4-9. [on the concept of A.I. as a “wishful mnemonic”]
Mitchell, M. (2021). Why AI is harder than we think. arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.12871. [More on A.I. as “wishful mnemonic”]
Quintarelli, S. (2019, 4 Nov.). Let’s forget the term AI. Let’s call them Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI). Quinta’s weblog.
Strubell, E., Ganesh, A., & McCallum, A. (2019). Energy and policy considerations for deep learning in NLP. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.02243.
Torres, É.P. (2023, 15 Jun.). The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares. TruthDig. [Émile Torres on the background behind the TESCREAL ideologies].
An accessible transcript of this episode is available here
On today’s episode, we’re thrilled to be joined once again by friend-of-the-show Dr. Jim Brown, Jr., Associate Professor of English and Director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden. While Jim is mainly known to us as an expert in digital rhetorical studies, today we speak to him about his experience as outgoing president of the Camden chapter of Rutgers’ faculty union, the AAUP-AFT, amid its recent historic labor strike and contract negotiations. The Rutgers faculty strike was a massive success, earning pay increases and structural bargaining changes that will redound not only to the benefit of Rutgers’ precarious faculty but also to colleagues at peer institutions–including, perhaps, at your own university, listener!
In a wide-ranging conversation, Calvin picks Jim’s brain about the general duties of serving as a union chapter president, the events leading up to the April strike (including the university president’s threat of a legal injunction), the details of the union’s victories, the broader issue of neoliberalism in academic labor, and the challenges of forging solidarity across so many different job categories (e.g. tenure-track faculty, non-tenure track teaching faculty, adjunct faculty, graduate faculty, and graduate researchers–all across many different disciplines). Finally, Jim explains how he applied his rhetorical training to the strike and negotiations, and how the strike and negotiations continue to influence his digital rhetoric research.
Works and Concepts Referenced in this episode:
Brown, J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software. University of Michigan Press.
Chronicle of Higher Ed: Rutgers’ President Threatened to Take Striking Instructors to Court. Then He Walked It Back.
DuFord, R. (2022). Solidarity in conflict: A democratic theory. Stanford University Press.
Eric Blanc on Twitter: Rutgers workers sing “Hey Holloway”
Murch, D. J. (2010). Living for the city: Migration, education, and the rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. UNC Press Books.
NBC News: Rutgers University reaches deal with faculty unions to end historic strike
The Progressive: The Rutgers Strike is a Turning Point for Higher Ed
Rutgers Office of the President: Regarding the Faculty Unions’ Strike
Rutgers historian Dr. Donna Murch on Democracy Now!
State of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s Office: Governor Murphy Announces Framework Agreement Between Rutgers University Administration and Labor Union Representatives
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Otter.ai)
The cognitive scientists at re:verb couldn't get enough of Win Bigly, Scott Adams' bizarre treatise on persuasion in a supposedly post-fact era. After tackling the introduction in December (listen to the first installment here!), we bring you our reading and re:joinder critique the first full chapter, which discusses why ordinary people like us fail to grasp reality for what it is: a mere plaything of the mastermind behind Dilbert. From Adams' ramblings, Alex, Calvin, and Sophie unearth top-secret persuasion techniques, such as lying, making speling errors, and incorrectly citing facts.
Disclaimer: These techniques are not proven to convince anyone of anything, only to garner attention and “distort reality.” And according to Adams, manipulations of “reality” and “truth” should not be used by we ordinary folk - only Master Persuaders™ like Trump can handle their raw power. In this episode, we tackle the big question at the heart of this chapter: is it ethical to intentionally mislead an audience while trying to persuade them?
Since our December episode, Dilbert is no longer in print in any newspaper after Scott Adams referred to Black people as a "hate group" on his "Real Coffee with Scott Adams" livestream. He now posts "Dilbert Reborn" comics on Locals, a right-wing subscription site, where Dogbert et al can wax cynical on "wokeness" to their hearts' content.
Join Calvin, Alex, and Sophie in their Chipmunks-inspired squeakquel to Win Bigly, because a mere sequel wouldn't do it justice.
An accessible transcript of this episode can be accessed here
On February 3, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying vinyl chloride and other hazardous chemicals derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio. Fearing an explosion, emergency crews conducted a controlled burn of several of the cars, releasing toxic chemicals into the air and forcing the evacuation of local residents. In the ensuing weeks, pictures and videos were shared across social media of dead fish in local waterways and other sick animals throughout the region, followed by official reports of soil, air, and water contamination posing health risks to wildlife and human beings. In spite of conflicting safety information coming from the EPA, Norfolk Southern, and other government officials, residents have continued to express concerns over the long-term environmental and health consequences for Eastern Ohio.
On today’s show, we explore the perspectives of East Palestine residents with our co-host, co-producer (and reporter!) Sophie Wodzak, who traveled to the area and interviewed local residents in the aftermath of the derailment. Her co-authored article in the New York Times explores conflicts between East Palestine residents and the local, state, and federal officials who shaped its mainstream media narrative in the wake of the disaster.
Joining us in this conversation is Dr. Erin Brock Carlson, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University, whose research focuses on the ways that rural communities organize to self-advocate on issues of environmental justice. Together, we explore the importance of legitimizing the local residents’ situated knowledge - a type of knowledge grounded in a person’s direct experience of an issue’s consequences - in environmental policy conversations and media framing.
Sophie’s co-authored article in the New York Times: “Federal Officials Send Help After Ohio Derailment, but Residents’ Frustrations Persist”
Dr. Erin Brock Carlson’s relevant research on situated knowledge and environmental organizing:
Carlson, E. B., & Caretta, M. A. (2021). Legitimizing situated knowledge in rural communities through storytelling around gas pipelines and environmental risk. Technical Communication, 68(4), 40-55.
Caretta, M. A., & Carlson, E. B. (2023). Coercion via eminent domain and legal fees: The acceptance of gas extraction in West Virginia. Environmental Justice, 16(1), 36-42.
Carlson, E. B., & Gouge, C. (2021). Rural health and contextualizing data. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 35(1), 41-49.
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here
Trigger warning: if you are offended by evidence-based arguments against moral panics surrounding higher education, listen with discretion!
Light kidding aside, this episode addresses a very serious issue: restrictions on free speech in higher education. And no, we’re not talking about the exaggerated culture war invocations: “angry mobs” of “coddled students” yelling about “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” to shut down speakers they don’t like. Rather, we’re talking about real, top-down legislative attempts to restrict free speech on college campuses, such as Florida’s HB 999 bill – and the long-running rhetorical strategies and tropes that have reappeared in the language of anti-speech laws like Florida’s.
On today’s show, Alex speaks with Dr. Brad Vivian, Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences, and Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State University, about his new book Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. We work to rhetorically dissect some of the most common campus culture war tropes that developed over the 2010s, such as the rallying cries for increased “viewpoint diversity” (read: more speakers with bigoted, discredited, or easily discreditable viewpoints), the pseudoscientific myth of the “coddled” student popularized by writers such as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathon Haidt, and the incessant fear-mongering over the so-called “indoctrination campaign” of Critical Race Theory. In examining the rhetorical history of these tropes, we chart their strange evolution from somewhat disingenuous calls for “more speech” in higher education spaces to our current moment: in which 44 states (so far) have introduced legislation to ban the teaching of a number of subjects ranging from Gender Studies to “Critical Theory.”
Why have these ostensibly pro-free speech arguments redounded to authoritarian attempts to crack down on academic freedom, and how might speech restrictions in US higher education serve as a kind of “trial balloon” for further governmental restrictions in the broader public sphere? As we grapple with these questions, we consider how colleges and universities might recommit to a more just and genuine vision of intellectual freedom.
Dr. Brad Vivian’s book, Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education is available now from Oxford University Press
Draft text of Florida’s HB 999
Was your favorite film approved by Uncle Sam? And just how much of your streaming watchlist did the CIA curate? On today’s episode, Calvin and Alex are joined by Dr. Roger Stahl, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia, to discuss the widespread problem of US information operations in the motion picture industry–including, most recently, the 2022 box office smash Top Gun: Maverick.
Thanks to Roger’s research team on his recent documentary Theaters of War (2022), we now know much more about the curious scripting and production relationships between entertainment studios and the US security state than we did until very recently. Their work has uncovered thousands of screen properties whose content was directly altered to serve US propaganda goals – as well as many hundreds of shows and movies that never saw the light of day due to lack of official support.
So, with Roger’s help, we analyze the recent history of major military- and intelligence-approved cinema and TV hits, working our way backwards from Maverick to the original Top Gun (1986), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Rules of Engagement (2000), and even – huh??? – the comedy Meet the Parents (2000), among others. We also discuss the recent Amazon streaming success Jack Ryan (2018-present)and how its second season manufactured consent in real time for US coup-mongering in Venezuela.
As we work through these examples, we also consider the overarching rhetorical ideologies in the military documents Roger’s research team has been studying: from the military’s curious appeals to the value of “accuracy” to patterns in types of content they deem to be “showstoppers” (leading to withdrawal of official support). We also ask whether this gigantic domestic influence operation can be properly termed “information warfare,” and what kinds of policy changes are needed to address it. For example, should there be a disclaimer included with trailers and posters for movies co-produced by the US military? Or, more radically, should these aspects of military policy be simply abolished?
We hope you enjoy our deep-dive into an extremely fascinating and timely topic with a rhetorical studies expert doing valuable investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking. If you have a Kanopy subscription, check out Roger Stahl’s 2022 documentary Theaters of War to learn much, much more.
Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode
Jenkins, T. (2016). The CIA in Hollywood: How the agency shapes film and television. University of Texas Press.
Tom Secker’s investigative journalism website Spy Culture.
Stahl, R. (2022, May 30). Why does the Pentagon give a helping hand to films like ‘Top Gun’?. LA Times.
Stahl, R. (2009). Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. Routledge.
Stahl, R. (2022). Theaters of War. Media Education Foundation. Available on Kanopy.
Stahl, R. (2018). Through the crosshairs: War, visual culture, and the weaponized gaze. Rutgers University Press.
Stahl, R. (2016). Weaponizing speech. Quarterly journal of speech, 102(4), 376-395.
Are you winning bigly?
No?
Neither is Scott Adams, the infamous cartoonist, blogger, and self-proclaimed “expert predictor”, whose formerly ubiquitous comic strip Dilbert was recently pulled from national syndication. In September, Dilbert featured “anti-woke” content caricaturing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the corporate world, and it was promptly “cancelled” by Lee Enterprises, owner of about 100 newspapers that had formerly carried the strip. Nevertheless, back in 2017, Adams claimed to be an expert on the subject of winning–as well as communication and “political reality”–in his book / political manifesto Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. Adams famously predicted that Trump would win the 2016 election, and he grounds most of the book’s arguments in the ostensible ethos he has garnered from this single successful prediction.
Win Bigly is the subject of our latest re:joinder episode, in which Alex reads some of its most head-scratching passages for Sophie and Calvin, and all three co-hosts learn far less than they expected to about what makes Donald Trump a “master persuader.” We do our best to make sense of Adams’ arguments before picking apart their most spurious assumptions: Adams’ questionable narrative of the 2016 election, his bizarre heuristic / coding scheme for “persuaders” (from “weapons-grade”, to “cognitive scientist”, down to “commercial grade”... ?), as well as his overall epistemology and ethics, featuring the claims that Trump’s victory “blew a hole in the fabric of reality,” and that this is a good thing -- not politically, but because it proved Scott Adams right. All told, Adams draws on his questionable credentials as a business person, communication expert, and philosopher to provide one of the most bizarre analyses of Donald Trump’s rhetoric ever written.
This is (probably) part one in a series, since we were only able to get through the introduction. Please join us for future installments! As cognitive scientists – rather than weapons-grade persuaders – we need all the support we can get.
Works and Concepts Referenced
Beasley, V. B. (2010). The rhetorical presidency meets the unitary executive: Implications for presidential rhetoric on public policy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 13(1), 7-35.
Bitzer, L. F. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy & rhetoric, 1-14.
Our re:blurb ep on rhetorical situation.
Hume, D. (2003). A treatise of human nature. Courier Corporation.
Hume, D. (2016). An enquiry concerning human understanding. In Seven masterpieces of philosophy (pp. 191-284). Routledge.
Tulis, J. K. (1987). The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton University Press.
Our re:blurb episode on Dialogicality (featuring Clint Eastwood’s “Empty Chair Obama” speech)
“A.I. Is Making It Easier Than Ever for Students to Cheat,” proclaims Slate. The Chronicle of Higher Education asks, rhetorically: “Will Artificial Intelligence Kill College Writing?” And the New York Times warns: “A.I. is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” Judging by media coverage of A.I. writing algorithms, you would think they’re on the verge of becoming the easiest and most effective cheating option for writing students. But is the situation really that simple?
To help us answer this question, we’re joined on the show this week by Dr. S. Scott Graham, associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Scott uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to study communication in bioscience and health policy, with special attention to bioethics, conflicts of interest, and health AI. Most recently, he published an Inside Higher Ed piece about A.I. and college student writing entitled “AI-Generated Essays Are Nothing to Worry About.”
In our wide-ranging conversation, Scott explains why he describes himself as a “A.I. cautiously optimistic” despite the many well-documented problems with A.I. in areas such as policing and healthcare. He also helps us understand the limits of A.I. as a cheating tool as well as its affordances for teaching genre in college writing. We go on to discuss some potentially concerning non-academic applications of algorithmic writing, before concluding that (as with A.I. policing and healthcare), the problems we might attribute to A.I. tend to be better understood as problems endemic to our structurally unequal society. Scott also points out that writing algorithms are certain to create conflicts between different people’s (and disciplines’) ideas about language and “authentic” subjectivity, and that rhetorical scholars have an important role to play in helping people outside our discipline understand why we tend to express skepticism at notions of “authenticity” in writing.
Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode:
Scott’s great article in Inside Higher Ed: “AI-Generated Essays Are Nothing to Worry About”
Graham, S. S. (2015). The politics of pain medicine. In The Politics of Pain Medicine. University of Chicago Press.
Graham, S. S. (2020). Where's the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. The Ohio State University Press.
Graham, S. S. (2022). The Doctor and the Algorithm: Promise, Peril, and the Future of Health AI.
For this year’s Halloween special, we wanted to take a journey through the filmography of one of our favorite film directors, Jordan Peele. From the breakout success of his 2017 thriller Get Out, to 2019’s creepy and horrifying tour-de-force Us, to this year’s action-packed monster movie Nope, Jordan Peele is becoming arguably one of the most important American directors working today. His films not only bend and play with the ostensible genre conventions he works within, they also deliver substantial, semiotically rich critiques of racial politics, class struggle, and media in American society and culture. Not to mention, his films are just immensely entertaining - equal parts deeply cerebral, outrageously funny, and heart-stoppingly terrifying.
To help us discuss this topic, we’re very excited to be joined by Dr. andré m. carrington, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. carrington is a scholar of race, gender, and genre in Black and American cultural production. His first book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minnesota, 2016) interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres through studies of science fiction fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts.
We use concepts from Dr. carrington’s (and other scholars’) work to discuss all three of Peele’s films, charting the salience of “paraspaces” and “Otherhoods” in each as spaces where speculative imaginaries of trauma and alterity can become bone-chillingly real (such as “the sunken place” in Get Out, or the subterranean tunnel dwellings of the tethered in Us). In addition, we cover the various ways Peele incorporates “fanservice” into his films, tipping a cap to fans of horror and sci-fi and providing moments of cathartic release amidst the deluge of dread, and playing with the various conventions of speculative fiction genres to create unique and cerebral insights against a tableau of terror.
Follow Dr. andré m. carrington on Twitter, find links to more of his work on his UC-Riverside faculty profile, and check out his book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction.
Be sure to follow UC-Riverside’s Mellon Sawyer Seminar (which Dr. carrington is participating in this year), entitled “Unarchiving Blackness: Why the Primacy of African and African Diaspora Studies Necessitates a Creative Reconsideration of Archives.”
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Dash, J., & Baker, H. A. (1992). Not without my daughters. Transition, (57), 150-166.
Delany, S. R. (2012). Shorter views: Queer thoughts & the politics of the paraliterary. Wesleyan University Press.
Tananarive Due’s course on The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and Black Horror
Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. U of Minnesota Press.
Lavender, I. (2011). Race in American science fiction. Indiana University Press.
We at re:verb can neither confirm nor deny whether the truth will set you free - but it certainly provides good fodder for rhetorical criticism! On today’s show, Alex and Calvin present a re:joinder episode with a unique rhetorical artifact: an “unclassified” podcast recently released by one of the most secretive intelligence agencies in the world, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The first episode of The Langley Files: A CIA Podcast features hosts “Dee” and “Walter” interviewing current CIA Director Bill Burns about the history and current state of the agency, in their own words. But, of course, there’s more to it than that! We examine this podcast as a rhetorical genre with a specific social action in mind: gaining the assent and trust of the center-left-aligned American public, and recruiting educated liberals to work for the agency.
From their straight-out-of-true-crime theme music to the hosts’ vocal performances echoing the likes of Sarah Koenig and Roman Mars, we note the eerie formal parallels between The Langley Files and some of the most popular informative/investigative podcasts currently running. In addition, we talk about some of the new (and some old) propaganda tropes that the CIA uses to describe its work, from its essentially “apolitical” function, “working in secrecy to protect the American people”, “organizing assets to do hard work in hard places,” all the way to the now-vaunted “competition” amongst “great powers” (a.k.a. the U.S. and China). We also critique and contexualize the strange virtue-signaling at play in how the CIA describes two of its recent “successes”: their prediction that Russia was going to invade Ukraine earlier this year, and their targeted assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
What emerges from our analysis is a clearer picture of why the CIA might produce a podcast like this. For one, they outline a need to recuperate the agency’s image in the face of what they call “a short supply” of “trust in institutions” from the American public. But more troublingly, we theorize that this podcast is designed as an avenue for humanizing the labor of the people who work in the agency, and as a way of recruiting educated liberals who face slim job prospects and harbor revulsion for the reactionary, anti-“deep state” American right-wing.
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode
CIA's own journal on what the Intelligence Community means by "customers"
"Humans of CIA" Recruiting Video
Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi's thread on the US role in propping up recently elected far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni
Lee, M. A. (2001, 1 May). The CIA’s worst-kept secret: Newly declassified files confirm United States collaboration with nazis. Foreign Policy in Focus.
Mitchell, G. R. (2006). Team B intelligence coups. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 92(2), 144-173.
New Yorker report on CIA's targeting of military-age males in Pakistan for drone strikes.
Rosenberg, C. (2019). What the CIA’s torture program looked like to the tortured. The New York Times.
Weiner, T. (2008). Legacy of ashes: The history of the CIA. Anchor.
Wikipedia article for “Limited Hangout”
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here
What’s a tenant union, and why does it matter? On today’s show, Alex and Calvin get some fascinating answers to this question from Luke Melonakos-Harrison, a Masters student in Yale University’s Divinity School, tenant union organizer with the Connecticut Tenants Union and the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America, and aspiring Methodist pastor.
In the course of our conversation, we learn about the kinds of unresolved housing issues, often exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, that led Luke and other tenants to begin organizing. We discuss these issues’ intersectional dimensions: how they most severely affect individuals marginalized by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status, as well as how housing issues intersect with other political problems such as the prison-industrial complex and gender-based violence and discrimination. A crucial concept Luke introduces to us is “the cult of property values,” which captures how landlords, real estate developers, and dominant media and political classes attach almost religious significance to the value of property, while neglecting other, competing sets of values like human rights and economic justice. Along with these stinging critiques, Luke shares some amazing gains that he and his fellow organizers have been able to make at a local policy level in Connecticut, and explains some of their inside-outside strategies in response to the quirks of state law.
We close by seeking Luke’s tips for anyone listening who may be interested in forming a tenant union of their own. Luke’s main suggestion is rather simple, but inspiring: get to know your neighbors! It’s a welcome reminder – and the whole conversation is a bit of a salve – in a time when it’s quite easy to surrender to alienation and despair. We hope you enjoy it!
Follow Luke, the CT Tenants Union, and Connecticut DSA on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/l_melo_h
https://twitter.com/cttenantsunion
https://twitter.com/centralctdsa
News coverage of recent tenant organizing efforts in Connecticut:
https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/tenants_union_bill_heads_to_full_board_of_alders
https://www.ctinsider.com/hartford/article/Mayor-No-excuse-for-conditions-at-17361141.php
https://www.ctinsider.com/hartford/article/A-week-after-hearing-cries-for-help-from-17370301.php
https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/quinnipiac_gardens_tenant_union_
https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2022-06-30/new-haven-could-be-among-the-first-in-ct-to-recognize-tenant-unions-under-local-law
At the recent 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), right-wing movement leaders couldn’t stop whining about “pronouns.” For example, Texas Senator Ted Cruz said that his preferred pronouns are “kiss my ass,” and former Trump official Matt Schlapp complained that instead of carrying out his “duties” like dealing with the “open border,” President Biden is “talking about pronouns.” However, 2022 was not the first CPAC in which this particular part of speech caught heat; back in 2019, Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin began her remarks, “my pronouns are ‘U-S-A’!”
Why do some conservatives attack and mock “pronouns”, and what exactly do they mean when they use the term? As our entry in the Big Rhetorical 2022 Podcast Carnival on “Spaces and Place In and Beyond the Academy”, this episode unpacks the history and politics of gendered personal pronouns such as “he” and “she,” genderless and non-binary pronouns (e.g. “they”), and various discourse practices in academic and activist circles that relate to personal pronoun usage. After analyzing some recent and relevant policy documents, Alex and Calvin explain the epistemic and ideological bases for “pronouns” as a negative ideograph–a one-word slogan encapsulating everything scary and “un-American” about the increasing tolerance of LGBTQ+ people in public life. “Pronouns,” we find, doesn’t only index a debate over present-day gender expression; it also draws from the legacies of settler-colonialism and hyper-nationalism, which have always co-constituted hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality in US society. However, we also note the ironic fact that strict use of gendered pronouns such as “he” and “she,” especially to refer to a generic person or non-human objects and entities, is historically recent and linguistically arbitrary.
We conclude by shifting from history and theory to a question of action: what is the pragmatic case for putting your preferred pronouns in your social media bios and email signature lines, and giving students the opportunity to “share your name and pronouns” in classroom introductions? How do these practices make everyday learning and social action more feasible and manageable? We break down some practical benefits for teaching, political organizing, and ordinary personal interaction.
Overall, we hope this episode helps demystify and defang the issue of “pronouns”, which are really not as confusing or threatening as some make them out to be. From Connecticut to Utah, in academia and beyond, we all use them, and they haven’t caused the sky to fall (so far!).
Works and Concepts Referenced
Allen, J. M., & Faigley, L. (1995). Discursive strategies for social change: An alternative rhetoric of argument. Rhetoric Review, 14(1), 142-172.
Baron, D. (2018). A brief history of singular ‘they.’ Oxford English Dictionary blog.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.
Conrod, K. (2018). Pronouns and gender in language. In K. Hall & R. Barrett (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. Oxford UP.
Hinchy, J. (2019). Governing gender and sexuality in colonial India: the Hijra, c. 1850–1900. Cambridge University Press.
McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16.
Miranda, D. A. (2010). Extermination of the joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16(1-2), 253-284.
Swyers, H., & Thomas, E. (2018). Murderbot pronouns: A snapshot of changing gender conventions in the United States. Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, 3(3), 271-298.
“Wisconsin District Bans Pride Flags From Classrooms, Pronouns in Emails” - Education Week
Tennessee bill on pronouns
Biden-Harris Executive Order that mentions pronouns twice
Transcript of this episode’s audio from Otter.ai
On June 28, 2022, explosive public testimony was delivered by a former Trump Administration aide named Cassidy Hutchinson in front of the United States House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attacks. Hutchinson’s testimony corroborated and deepened the Committee’s case that President Trump had led the attacks. In addition, Hutchinson divulged an extraordinary anecdote in which, after learning that his attorney general, William Barr, had refused to back Trump’s claims of election fraud, Trump purportedly slammed a plate against a wall; according to Hutchinson, the wall was dripping with ketchup.
The 45th president himself seems to have been watching Hutchinson’s testimony in real-time, because immediately after it aired, he dashed off a flurry of enraged posts on an obscure social media site, Truth Social, which he founded in late 2021 after Twitter and Facebook banned his accounts following January 6th. Trump’s comments about Hutchinson quickly circulated on the more popular and mainstream social media platforms, but their users could not directly interact with Trump’s incendiary content unless they also had accounts on the strangely named (and uncannily designed) Truth Social.
On this episode, Calvin and Alex dig into Truth Social in real-time–so you don’t have to. What is it? How does it work? Which accounts (other than Trump’s) are most popular there? How does its glossary define “Truth”? Is all of the content shared on TS overtly right-wing propaganda, or is there more benign stuff as well? (And if there is, what does it look like?) We answer all of these questions and more, in addition to providing context about Trump’s recent legal maneuvering in relation to the site, as well as complaints from some of its users that censorship and “shadow banning” are just as much problems there as on Facebook and Twitter. We close by breaking down the strange philosophical notions of “truth” promulgated both within the conservative movement and in more liberal approaches to “fact-checking”, and we argue that for all of its flaws, at least in its terminology Twitter doesn’t claim to be offering anything other than what it is: a collection of random bird sounds that may or may not mean anything.
Works and Concepts Referenced
Brown, J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software. University of Michigan Press.
Burke, K. (1966). Chapter Three—Terministic Screens. Language as symbolic action. University of California Press.
Ellul, J., Merton, R. K., Kellen, K., & Lerner, J. (1973). Propaganda: The formation of men's attitudes. New York: Vintage books. [Introduces concept of horizontal propaganda.]
Gruwell, L. (2018). Constructing research, constructing the platform: Algorithms and the rhetoricity of social media research. Present Tense, 6(3), 1-9.
Trump left social media company board before federal subpoenas, filing shows–CNBC
Trump Throws New Tantrum After Former Aide Exposes Jan. 6 Tantrum–Rolling Stone
Truth Social Users Are Fuming Over “Censorship” on Trump’s Platform–The Daily Beast
In the wake of shooting massacres in Uvalde, TX and Buffalo, NY, public outcry has been sustained and vociferous, recalling similarly intense reactions to previous mass shootings over the past 10 years. But in the US, public policy responses to such events are rarely as swift or sweeping as most of us would prefer. Just two days after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, in which 19 children between the ages of 9 and 11 were shot and killed in their classroom, the US Senate recessed for its annual Memorial Day holiday, delaying any possibility of legislative action to address mass shootings by nearly two weeks. Yet, while the Senate's flaws as a democratic institution have received lots of attention from scholars, journalists, and activists, less often critiqued in terms of public accountability for resolving ongoing crises is the office of the presidency.
On today's show, we attempt to fill this gap by examining President Biden's public statements about the massacres in Uvalde and Buffalo, the impending Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Across these issues, we've noticed a common discursive trope that demands closer scrutiny, which we've dubbed, "we're all trying to find the guy who can do something about this!" In President Biden's rhetorical style, this strategy connects to his cultivated identity as “Eulogizer-in-Chief.” Under our Eulogizer-in-Chief, we are constantly reminded of how sad and unjust ongoing events are, and we are often told how much these events "are not who we are as Americans", but we are rarely if ever informed about what our MOTUS (Mourner of the United States) plans to do about them. In terms of classical speech genres, epideictic (ceremonial) rhetoric has crowded out deliberative (policy) and forensic (legal) rhetoric. The result is a public discourse of despair, in which the only actions that leaders frame as feasible are individual citizen actions -- "vote harder!" or "organize harder!" -- rather than concrete government plans and policies. Politics becomes increasingly marketized and commodified, with engagement by grassroots activists compared in terms of pure numerical value to that of astroturfed corporate lobbying efforts, and the "winner" of such contests (invariably the side with more money) granted the executive or legislative action of their choice. Leaders, for their parts, dispassionately analyze these market dynamics in their public messaging, creating a feedback loop of demobilization that comes to affect even their own perceptions of their power to act.
However, we hasten to point out, many significant executive actions have been taken over the past 20+ years to combat terrorism and other security threats, often without formal approval of the other branches of government. This suggests that Biden has the capacity to do much more than he is currently doing. Overall, we argue that it is crucial to demand something other than hollow words of grief and virtue-signaling tweets from the most powerful people in the world.
Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode
Beasley, V. B. (2010). The rhetorical presidency meets the unitary executive: Implications for presidential rhetoric on public policy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 13(1), 7-35.
Blanchfield, P. (2018). The market can’t solve a massacre. Splinter News.
NBC News - Alex Seitz-Wald & Mike Memoli: “‘Grief must be witnessed’: Joe Biden’s first 100 days as consoler-in-chief” (28 April, 2021)
NYT - Katie Glueck & Matt Flegenheimer: “Joe Biden, Emissary of Grief” (11 June 2020)
Ore, E. J. (2019). Lynching: Violence, rhetoric, and American identity. Univ. Press of Mississippi.
Rood, C. (2018). “Our tears are not enough”: The warrant of the dead in the rhetoric of gun control. Quarterly journal of speech, 104(1), 47-70.
Too, Y. L. (2001). Epideictic genre. Encyclopedia of rhetoric, 251-57.
See also the Wikipedia entry for epideictic.
WaPo - Jennifer Rubin: “With Joe Biden, we finally have a mourner in chief again” (23 Feb 2021)
Zarefsky, D. (2004). Presidential rhetoric and the power of definition. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 34(3), 607-619.
Speech w/ Biden defining Buffalo shooting as “domestic terrorism” https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1527064065314627584?s=20&t=ehy5LY4DwBd_zfF_sfHYXQ
Speech w/ Biden calling Buffalo shooting a “racially motivated act of white supremacy”:
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1525946642519793666
This episode was produced as a virtual panel presentation for the 2022 Computers and Writing Conference. It has been 2 years in the making, and we’re so pleased to finally present it to you!
Academics have been increasingly using podcasts as rhetorically rich tools for achieving pedagogical goals and re-theorizing the power and potential of sonic rhetorics. While academic podcasts can serve as a useful medium for scholarly conversations among insiders, less explored has been the potential for such podcasts to accommodate critical knowledge practices and disciplinary concepts for broader audiences. Our podcast, re:verb, attempts to bridge the divide between intellectual knowledge and activist practice, showcase movements and causes, and discuss activist practice through rhetorical lenses. Through these discussions, we attempt to synthesize knowledges inside and outside the academy, and demystify activism by rhetorically analyzing the thought processes that go into planning and executing it.
For this panel presentation and special episode of re:verb, three of our co-producers - Calvin Pollak, Alex Helberg, and Sophie Wodzak - reached out to individuals working on social justice projects in our own local communities. Alex presents his conversation with Dani Singerman, a food justice advocate in Hartford, CT, who has been working on a project to mobilize resources for constructing a grocery store in the North End neighborhood of the city. Sophie Wodzak reconnects with previous guest and friend of the show Crystal Grabowski, who has been advocating for reproductive justice and abortion access in Western Pennsylvania for years. And finally, Calvin Pollak shares a conversation with his colleague Avery Edenfield, a faculty member in the English Department at Utah State University, about his work advocating for LGBTQ+ issues in a variety of different contexts. For the “Q&A” portion of our panel, the three co-producers reconvene to discuss our major take-aways from our conversations, and reflect on the rhetorical dimensions of contemporary activist practice, including: how to break down a “big” issue into smaller, more actionable “chunks”; the need to account for the “slow” work of activism, and how seemingly small actions it can still have a massive impact on others’ well-being; and finally, the importance of ethical collaborations between scholars and activists, celebrating the different situated expertise(s) that everyone can bring to the table.
We would prefer not to write a description for this episode… but here’s one anyway!
Today’s episode is a re:vival of our re:read series, where we create dramatic interpretive readings of short fiction with contemporary political and cultural relevance. In this installment, inspired by our recent conversation with Dr. Kendall Phillips on “rhetorics of refusal,” Calvin, Ben, and Alex bring to life the classic Herman Melville story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” originally published in Putnam’s Monthly magazine in 1853. This story documents the tribulations of a Wall Street lawyer who hires a morose figure named Bartleby to work for him as a scrivener. Bartleby quickly turns from an industrious copy-writer to a passively resisting automaton, whose only response to any request is simply: “I would prefer not to.” As the fallout from Bartleby’s absurdly principled behavior continues to unfold, the narrator finds himself questioning everything he thought he knew about social life, language, and labor.
Join our crew of voice actors - Calvin as the narrator, Ben taking the role of the eponymous Bartleby, and Alex playing various minor characters - as we traverse this darkly comic tale of 19th-century alienation and absurdism, scored with period-specific music to accentuate the drama. Our dramatic reading is followed by a reflection on some of the story’s themes and implications: the literary works and political actors that “Bartleby” presaged, its critique of alienated (and alienating) labor, the co-optation of refusal rhetorics under neoliberal capitalism, and the affordances of individual vs. collective resistance in social and political movements.
Accessible transcript of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” from Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11231/11231-h/11231-h.htm
Music featured in this episode
On today’s show, Ben and Alex have the privilege to dish with Dr. Anita Mannur, Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Miami University, about her research on the intersections that food has with culture, race, and gender.
We begin the conversation by reflecting on how discourses around food and consumption practices, especially in postcolonial contexts, reflect our ideas of national identity and “authenticity” - for instance, the debate over whether Chicken Tikka Masala is an “authentic” Indian dish, despite its origins as an accommodation of traditional Indian cuisine to Anglo-European sensibilities. As Anita notes in her work, cultural conversations around food, and reactions to those foods’ smells, tastes, and appearance are often tied to various social identities that we carry in other aspects of our lives, and can tell us a great deal about what happens as we negotiate those identities through various sensory experiences.
Throughout our discussion, we trace the transformative (often homosocial and even queer) practices that emerge in intimate spaces of food production like the kitchen - exchanging knowledge, gossip, and other affective sensations. We also examine some sites that constitute of what Anita calls “intimate eating publics,” such as the now-defunct Conflict Kitchen in Pittsburgh, PA (RIP). Between talking about Anita’s analyses of some of these eating publics from her new book Intimate Eating (such as The Great British Baking Show), we share intimate stories from our own culinary lives, and make a few delicious food puns along the way. It’s a delightful conversation that we hope you’ll find comestible and digestible!
Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode
Ku, R.J-S., Manalansan, M.F., Mannur, A. (Eds.). (2013). Eating Asian America: A food studies reader. New York University Press.
Mannur, A. (2009). Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture. Temple University Press.
Mannur, A. (2017). Un-homing Asian American studies: Refusals and the politics of commitment. In Schlund-Vials, C. (Ed.), Flashpoints for Asian American studies (pp. 82-98). Fordham University Press.
Mannur, A. (2022). Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures. Duke University Press.
Trinh, L., Wong, K.S., Schlund-Vials, C.J. (Eds.). (2015). Keywords for Asian American Studies. NYU Press.
Although “populism” is a term that has been rigorously discussed and theorized in political science and communication studies, the term has received special attention ever since the political rise and presidency of Donald Trump. But what does populism actually mean, and how can we trace the lineage of populist conservative discourses that prefigured the Trump presidency?
To guide us through the rhetorical history of this fraught concept, we are joined on the show today by Dr. Paul Elliott Johnson, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. His recently published book, I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States, tells a captivating story of how conservative politicians and rhetors from the mid-20th-century to the present have appealed to the values of “the people.” Johnson elucidates how the conservative variant of populism has reduced the category of “the American people” through its focus on a possessive individualism constantly under threat by new ways of being and modes of organization. This sense of “the people under siege” has been undergirded by a reactionary response to blackness, which is ultimately traceable to the US’s foundation in settler-colonialism and chattel slavery. In our discussion, we talk through several of the rhetorical case studies in Johnson’s book, including the political ascendency and presidency of Ronald Reagan, the 1994 midterm elections and the year of the “angry white male,” the astroturfed revanchist “Tea Party” surge during the Obama presidency, and the rise of Donald Trump and the contemporary right-wing. Finally, we discuss some alternative methods of articulating “the people” that might help to expand, rather than reduce, the meaning of US popular democracy.
References:
Beasley, V. B. (2011). You, the people: American national identity in presidential rhetoric (Vol. 10). Texas A&M University Press.
Cooper, M. (2017). Family values: Between neoliberalism and the new social conservatism. MIT Press.
Corrigan, L. M. (2020). Black feelings: Race and affect in the long sixties. Univ. Press of Mississippi.
DiPiero, T. (2002). White men aren't. Duke University Press.
Goldberg, J. (2009). Liberal fascism: The secret history of the American left, from Mussolini to the politics of change. Crown Forum.
Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard law review, 1707-1791.
Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press on Demand.
Honig, B. (2017). Public things: Democracy in disrepair. Fordham Univ Press.
Kelsie, A. E. (2019). Blackened Debate at the End of the World. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 52(1), 63-70.
King Watts, E. (2017). Postracial fantasies, blackness, and zombies. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 14(4), 317-333.
Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. Verso.
Lee, M. J. (2006). The populist chameleon: The people's party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the populist argumentative frame. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 92(4), 355-378.
Lee, M. J. (2014). Creating conservatism: Postwar words that made an American movement. MSU Press.
Matheson, C. (2016). “What does Obama want of me?” Anxiety and Jade Helm 15. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(2), 133-149.
Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
Moffitt, B. (2020). Populism. John Wiley & Sons.
Moten, F. (2013). Blackness and nothingness (mysticism in the flesh). South Atlantic Quarterly, 112(4), 737-780.
Mudde, C. (2004). The populist zeitgeist. Government and opposition, 39(4), 541-563.
Nash, G. H. (2014). The conservative intellectual movement in America since 1945. Open Road Media.
Ore, E. J. (2019). Lynching: Violence, rhetoric, and American identity. Univ. Press of Mississippi.
Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book. diacritics, 17(2), 65-81.
Vats, A. (2014). Racechange is the new Black: Racial accessorizing and racial tourism in high fashion as constraints on rhetorical agency. Communication, Culture & Critique, 7(1), 112-135.
White, K. C. (2018). The branding of right-wing activism: The news media and the Tea Party. Oxford University Press.
Wright, M. M. (2015). Physics of blackness: Beyond the middle passage epistemology. U of Minnesota Press.
In his most recent book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Harvard University cognitive psychologist and noted Jeffrey Epstein associate Steven Pinker argues that “rationality” is what distinguishes good thinkers from bad, that societies which encourage rationality are superior to those that do not, and that making the world a better place requires that we all think more rationally about our past, present, and future. Sounds plausible, right? In making these sweeping claims, though, Pinker wholly ignores relevant research and writing in disciplines such as history, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies, which have already provided crucial insights into the very questions he claims to be answering for the first time.
Pinker’s “disciplinary drift” is the focus of today’s show, in which Calvin and Alex are joined by Dr. Nathan Pensky, a literary scholar and critic who reviewed Pinker’s latest for the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the review, Nathan explains why Pinker’s wanton disregard for existing humanities scholarship is so galling, and he contrasts this with the approaches of more generative and thoughtful interdisciplinary scholars such as Anil Seth, a cognitive and computational neuroscientist and author of Being You: A new science of consciousness. Unlike Pinker, Seth engages deeply with existing scholarly debates in the humanities–in particular, the field of philosophy of mind–before introducing a STEM innovation that bears directly on philosophers’ existing questions. Nathan goes on to argue that Pinker’s work is simply more rude than Seth’s, reminding us of the value of basic respect and dignity in scholarly writing.
To conclude this episode, Alex introduces Nathan and Calvin to a fun new game: “Pinker or Stinker?” He introduces three quotations: two of them are real excerpts from Pinker’s latest work of discipline-drifting drivel, and one is a stinker–a fake quote written by Alex in his best imitation of Pinker’s trademark style. Will Nathan & Calvin be able to tell the difference? Can you? Play along while you listen, and if you get them all correct, shoot us an email or a Twitter DM to receive your complimentary re:verb t-shirt!
References
Dwyer, P., & Micale, M. (Eds.). (2021). The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Pensky, N. (2021, Oct. 29). Steven Pinker’s Disciplinary Drift. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Pensky, N. (2021, Dec. 2) Finding the poet of ‘Paradise Lost’. The Boston Globe.
Pinker, S. (2021). Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Viking.
Pinker, S. (2019). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin.
Pinker, S. (2012). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Penguin.
Seth, A. (2021). Being you: A new science of consciousness. Penguin.
One year ago this week, a large crowd of Trump supporters disrupted what ought to have been boring and bureaucratic work: Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory over then-President Trump. Instead, a massive melee ensued, resulting in five people dead and over a hundred wounded–mostly Capitol and Metropolitan Police Officers. Loyal re:verb listeners will recall our episode from shortly thereafter, in which we provided our initial spit-takes on the events themselves as well as Twitter’s related banning of Trump’s official account.
On today’s show, Calvin, Alex, and Sophie return with our most up-to-date thoughts on the meaning and significance of the Jan. 6 attack. We consider questions like: How much emotional energy did and does this incident warrant? Aren’t there more systemic issues that dwarf this by comparison? Or, is it actually misguided to dissociate Jan. 6 from larger problems plaguing the U.S. political system and the world? Meanwhile, one year into Joe Biden’s neoliberal presidency, how can we draw clear lines between the governance offered by the two parties? If we can’t, is it rational to be concerned about one party attempting (and failing) to subvert a victory by the other? And if they are distinguishable, what areas of policy reveal the sharpest distinctions? We air our nuanced disagreements on these topics, as well as our much clearer agreement on the horror of far-right violence and bipartisan failures to address climate change.
One twist on last year’s discussion, though, is that we offer a close reading this time – specifically, we analyze Tucker Carlson’s recent Patriot Purge documentary for FOX Nation, which provided the definitive far-right revisionist narrative of what happened on Jan 6. We unpack the documentary’s many bizarre arguments by analogy, such as Carlson’s comparison of the post-Jan 6 plight of Trump supporters to the post-9/11 plights of Muslim and Arab Americans. Carlson also equates one faulty media story about the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick with the many, many examples of world-historically harmful propaganda disseminated by the mainstream media in the run-up to the Iraq War, and he later analogizes the “movement” that protested on Jan. 6 to the Black Lives Matter movement. The documentary culminates in a direct assertion that Jan. 6 was an inside job by the FBI, which we debunk from multiple angles before elaborating on the broader significance of Carlson’s rhetorical strategies: the coalitions that they may or may not promise between right and left, and the tactical and theoretical value of analyzing propaganda in terms of political imaginaries and aesthetics.
Last month, former New York Times columnist and current Substacker Bari Weiss took to Twitter to announce “a new university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth”: the University of Austin (UATX). Not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, UATX is thus far only a university concept–a pitch for a “new” kind of higher education institution–but the details are murky, it is not accredited, and by its own website’s admission, there are no concrete plans for undergraduate degrees until 2024 at the earliest. More than anything, this “University” appears to be an ideological project of social media and op-ed columns, in which its conservative culture warrior backers rail vaguely and haphazardly at existing universities for various tangled, often contradictory sins. Even more oddly, they are proposing a fairly standard liberal arts education, with few obvious “fixes” to traditional models beyond a vague insinuation that their discourses will be “freer” and their students will not be “coddled.”
On today’s show, Alex and Calvin are joined for the first time by co-producer Mike Laudenbach. Together we unpack two key texts from the University of Austin’s public announcement: “We Can't Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One.” by Pano Kanelos (a UATX founding trustee) and “I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken” by Niall Ferguson (another trustee and a legendary cheerleader for the British and American empires). As is typical of our re:joinder episodes, we have lots of laughs taking apart these articles’ unsupported, illogical, and downright bizarre claims about the industry we all know so well: academia. But we also do our best to earnestly and fairly engage with key questions that these writers raise (but don’t really address), such as:
To what extent is higher ed broken, how is it broken, and–perhaps most importantly–who or what broke it?
Are there social and intellectual taboos within universities, and if so, which ones bear most significantly on academics’ lives and livelihoods?
What is the current state of free speech on campuses, and how does it fit into a historical context dating back to the red scares of the Cold War, student protest movements that began in the 1960s and ‘70s, and political correctness debates of the ‘80s-90’s?
Along the way, we draw on our experiences and knowledge as students, researchers, and faculty, and we propose an innovative institution of our own: re:verb University (RVU). GO VERBIES! Stay tuned, as applications for our august academy will open soon–once we succeed in getting cancelled for truth.
Texts Analyzed in this Episode
Ferguson, N. (2021, Nov. 8). I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken. Bloomberg.
Kanelos, P. (2021, Nov. 8). We Can't Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One. Common Sense (Bari Weiss’s Substack).
Works and Concepts Cited
Mishra, P. (2011, Nov. 3). Watch this man. London Review of Books. [Article critiquing Niall Ferguson’s apologetic writing about imperialism. Below the article, its author Pankaj Mishra and its subject Niall Ferguson exchange a series of letters debating Ferguson’s scholarship.]
Nichols, A. (2018, Apr. 2). So-called ‘intellectuals’ can’t let go of “The Bell Curve.” The Outline. [Article explaining how Andrew Sullivan and other conservative intellectuals continue to circulate modern race science ideas originally espoused in Charles Murray’s 1994 The Bell Curve.]
Sohege, D. (2021, Apr. 25). In fairness @epkaufm's resistance to academic institutions maintaining their right of academic freedom to call out poor work, and his views on "political minorities", are understandable when placed In the context of his own apparent lack of academic rigor. Twitter. [Tweet highlighting shoddy scholarship in the CSPI study “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.”]
Look upon these films, ye mighty, and despair!
In this episode, we’re thrilled to welcome back Dr. Kendall R. Phillips, Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University - this time, to discuss his hot-off-the-presses book, A Cinema of Hopelessness: The Rhetoric of Rage in 21st Century Popular Culture. In it, Kendall examines how some of the most emotionally-charged moments of 21st century U.S. public memory - from 9/11 to Occupy Wall Street to the presidential election of Donald Trump - have resonated in the biggest box office hits of popular cinema.
Within each of these conjunctures of hit movies and widely-felt cultural sentiments, Kendall incisively traces a common theme: “the rhetoric of refusal,” in which characters shout “no!” in the face of the powerful and seek societal destruction rather than reform. We discuss some of the topics and films covered in the book, from the influence of the Occupy movement on films like Snowpiercer, Cabin in the Woods, and The Purge, to Kendall’s unique reading of 2017’s Joker as a musical, to the themes of betrayal, loss, and nostalgic longing that have permeated both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and post-2016 U.S. national politics. We conclude with some thoughts on the collective, affective power of “movie magic,” as well as how nostalgia might be productively re:imagined to move our political culture forward.
Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode
Ahmed, S. (2013). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
Biesecker, B. A. (2002). Remembering World War II: The rhetoric and politics of national commemoration at the turn of the 21st century. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88(4), 393-409.
Biesecker, B.A. (2004). Renovating the national imaginary: A prolegomenon on contemporary paregoric
rhetoric. In K. R. Phillips (ed.), Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press): pp. 212–247.
Deleuze, G. (1997). Bartleby; or, the Formula. Essays critical and clinical, 86.
Gunn, J. (2008). Father trouble: Staging sovereignty in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(1), 1-27.
Keeling, K. (2019). Queer times, Black futures. New York University Press.
LeMesurier, J. L. (2020). Winking at Excess: Racist Kinesiologies in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 50(2), 139-151.
Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural critique, (31), 83-109.
Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. John Wiley & Sons.
Mitchell, W. T. (2013). Iconology: image, text, ideology. University of Chicago Press.
Muensterberg, W. (1985). De gustibus: Notes on the genetics of taste. In Visible religion: Annals of religious iconography (Leiden, NL: E. J. Brill).
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling. Duke University Press.
Spinoza, B. (2009). The Ethics (R.H.M. Elwes, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm (Original work published 1677).
Villadsen, L. (2017). “Bartleby the Scrivener”: Affect, agency, and the rhetorical trickster.” Presented at Rhetoric Society of Europe conference, Norwich, UK.
Williams, C. (2007). Thinking the political in the wake of Spinoza: Power, affect and imagination in the ethics. Contemporary Political Theory, 6(3), 349-369.
Have you ever wondered why some issues are treated as private and personal, while others are self-evidently public concerns? Meanwhile, certain topics are discussed freely and openly, but only among niche subcultures: local interest groups, expert practitioners, hardcore enthusiasts, and even marginalized communities. How can we better understand these kinds of diverse audience groupings, which are so critical to the circulation of political text and talk?
On today's re:blurb episode, we address these questions through a deep-dive into the rhetoric of publicity and counterpublicity. In so doing, we overview the landmark public sphere theories of Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt, as well as later feminist, anti-racist, and queer theory contributions from scholars such as Nancy Fraser, Catherine Squires, Michael Warner, and Daniel Brouwer. Finally, we highlight the importance of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony for unpacking our inherited ideas about “civil society.” To illustrate this point, we offer an analysis of a recent controversy involving Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema, in which activists pursued her into a public restroom to protest her obstruction of immigration reform. Considering the incident and its broader reverberations in media discourses about privacy and civility, we argue that these ideas are contested because hegemony itself is contested. In a deeply unequal society like ours, publicity and counterpublicity are contingent upon groups' positions within hierarchies of power.
An early draft of this episode was prepared as a submission for the 2021 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute workshop on “The Trouble with Publics and Counterpublics.” That workshop unfortunately did not take place, due to the unexpected passing of workshop co-leader Dr. Daniel Brouwer. Dan Brouwer was a critical force in rhetorical studies, public sphere theory, and queer studies - a strong mentor, friend, and crucial voice across academic fields. It is in this spirit that we humbly dedicate this episode to the memory of Dr. Daniel Brouwer.
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode
Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press.
Aronoff, K. (2021, 21 Sept.). Joe Manchin’s vote isn’t that mysterious. Look to the fossil fuel money. The New Republic. Retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/163723/joe-manchin-vote-fossil-fuel
Asen, R. (2000). Seeking the “counter” in counterpublics. Communication theory, 10(4), 424-446.
Boguslaw, D. (2021, 26 Sept.). Kyrsten Sinema used the winery where she interned to fundraise with private equity. The Intercept. Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2021/09/26/kyrsten-sinema-private-equity-tax-loophole/
Brouwer, D.C. (2001). ACT-ing UP in congressional hearings. In R. Asen and D.C. Brouwer (Eds.) Counterpublics and the State (pp. 87-110). SUNY Press.
Cloud, D. L. (2018). Reality bites: Rhetoric and the circulation of truth claims in US political culture. The Ohio State University Press.
Cloud, D.L. (2015). “Civility” as a threat to academic freedom. First Amendment Studies, 49(1), 13-17.
Davenport, C. (2021, 19 Sept.). Joe Manchin will craft the U.S. climate plan. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/climate/manchin-climate-biden.html
Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), 56-80.
Gramsci, A. (2011). Prison Notebooks (Vol. 2) (J.A. Buttigieg, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press. (Originally published in 1962).
Hauser, G. A. (1999). Vernacular voices: The rhetoric of publics and public spheres. Univ of South Carolina Press.
Klippenstein, K. (2021, 8 Oct.). Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is literally teaching a course on fundraising. The Intercept. Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2021/10/08/kyrsten-sinema-fundraising-course-asu/
Luchetta, J. (2021, Oct. 4). Activists ambush Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in public bathroom over immigration, infrastructure. USA Today. Retrieved from: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/04/sen-kyrsten-sinema-bathroom-arizona-immigration-infrastructure/5990516001/
Squires, C. R. (2002). Rethinking the black public sphere: An alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. Communication theory, 12(4), 446-468.
Treene, A. (2021, 7 Oct.). Scoop: Sanders’ Sinema spat. Axios. Retrieved from: https://www.axios.com/sanders-sinema-spat-harrassment-a8c9f7a2-6579-4800-aa28-43a71fe2639b.html
Walsh, K. N. (2021, 5 Oct.). Protesters following Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom undermined their efforts. The Independent. Retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/kyrsten-sinema-bathroom-protest-privacy-b1932844.html
Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books.
It’s spooky season, and you know what that means: time for another thrilling and chilling re:verb Halloween Special! This year, Alex and Calvin are honored to be joined on the mic by Dr. Bernadette Marie Calafell, Professor and Department Chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at Gonzaga University, and the recent recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Critical Cultural Studies division of the National Communication Association. Dr. Calafell’s research explores the concept of monstrosity in academia, popular culture, and politics: both how marginalized and minoritized peoples are deemed “monstrous” by dominant cultural imaginaries, and how oppressed groups often reclaim monster status as a means of empowerment. In addition, Dr. Calafell’s more recent invited talks have addressed how horror films and TV in the (post-) Trump era have been influenced by monstrous policies such as child separation at the border.
In explaining her rich and insightful readings of these diverse cultural works, Dr. Calafell helps us to understand how horror is a contested genre in which racialized, queer, and otherwise-marginalized subjects are both written out of and into our broader imaginaries -- from the underdeveloped queer possibilities of Get Out to the expansive queer utopia imagined by A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. In the course of our conversation, we reference a whole slew of recent monster movies and TV (listed in full below), and we nerd out with Dr. Calafell over our shared, undying love for the multimedia work of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. We hope you enjoy - Happy Halloween, everyone!
Films, TV Shows, and Music Referenced in this Episode
Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories (2014-2017)
On Cinema (2012-present)
“Monster” by Kanye West feat. Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Jay-Z, and Bon Iver
Get Out (2017)
The Curse of La Llorona (2019)
The Lords of Salem (2013)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
It (2017)
Us (2019)
C.H.U.D. (1984)
Check out the production company Luchagore at this link
Academic Citations:
Anzaldúa, G. E. (2007). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
Brooks, Kinitra. Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018.
Calafell, B. & Fajardo, S. (2019, 6 Nov.). The curse of La Llorona. Esthesis. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
Cohen, J. J. (2018). Monster culture (seven theses). In Classic Readings on Monster Theory (pp. 43-54). ARC, Amsterdam University Press.
Johnson, E. Patrick.“‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned From
My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 1–25.
Keeling, Kara.“‘Ghetto Heaven’: Set It Off and the Valorization of Black Femme-Butch Sociality.” The Black
Scholar 33, no. 1 (2003): 33–46.
Levina, M., & Bui, D. M. T. (Eds.). (2013). Monster culture in the 21st century: A reader. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia:The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Peterson, L. (2011). Black monster/White corpses: Kanye’s racialized gender politics. Racialicious. Retrieved from http://www.racialicious.com/2011/01/18/black-monsterswhite-corpses-kanyes-racialized-gender-politics/
Phillips, K. R. (2005). Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture: Horror Films and American Culture. ABC-CLIO.
Zaytoun, K. D. (2015). “Now Let Us Shift” the Subject: Tracing the Path and Posthumanist Implications of La Naguala/The Shapeshifter in the Works of Gloria Anzaldúa. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 40(4), 69-88.
On today’s show, we are joined once again by Dr. John Oddo, Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, for a retrospective discussion of “War on Terror” rhetoric 20 years after September 11th, 2001. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and national news media have consistently used Us and Them categories of enemy- and threat-construction, drawing on a conceptual metaphor of terrorism as an act of war (as opposed to a criminal act) to justify preventative military action. There have also been some notable shifts in U.S. war rhetoric in recent years: for one thing, references to September 11th as an inciting event have become scarcer as leaders have reframed the fight against global terrorism as an end in itself. And whereas earlier in the war, media and political figures tended to conflate specific terrorist organizations and so-called “state sponsors of terrorism”, they are now more likely to advocate a “targeted” approach: opposing large-scale troop deployments while nevertheless supporting missile attacks, special forces operations, cyberwarfare, and other forms of state violence.
After John walks us through the material and social reasons for these continuities and shifts, we analyze specific examples of post-9/11 war propaganda, comparing Larry P. Goodson’s November 2001 op-ed “U.S. Troops Must Go In” with Ryan Crocker’s August 2021 “Why Biden’s Lack of Strategic Patience Led to Disaster.” We examine their rhetorical strategies and discuss the greater implications of how some key tropes have evolved across texts and time: framing the war as a “clash of civilizations,” using the oppression of women and children as justificatory narratives, employing euphemisms like “patience” in foreign policy strategies, and zooming in on U.S. enemies’ violence while eliding the violence done by our military and its allies.
Lastly, we turn to a discussion of the ongoing drone war in the Middle East and Africa, in which we highlight John’s new research project on media construals of drone strike victims. John concludes with a blistering critique of an enduring problem in U.S. political rhetoric: the metaphor of war deaths as “payments” for which we deserve some return, which obscures how inflicting suffering and killing is always an irrevocable moral act.
Texts Analyzed in this Episode:
Biden, J. (2021, 31 Aug.). Address to the nation on the end of the war in Afghanistan [Speech audio recording]. Transcript, video, and audio available from American Rhetoric: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/joebidenendofafghanistanwar.htm
Crocker, R. (2021, 21 Aug.). Why Biden’s lack of strategic patience led to disaster. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/opinion/us-afghanistan-pakistan-taliban.html
Dowd, M. (2001, 18 Nov.). Liberties; Cleopatra and Osama. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/opinion/liberties-cleopatra-and-osama.html
Goodson, L. P. (2001, 14 Nov.). U.S. troops must go in. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/opinion/us-troops-must-go-in.html
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. S. (1994). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. London: Vintage Books.
Cloud, D. L. (2004). “To veil the threat of terror”: Afghan women and the ⟨clash of civilizations⟩ in the imagery of the US war on terrorism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90(3), 285-306.
Goodby, J.E. & Gross, D. (2010, 22 Dec.). Strategic patience has become strategic passivity. The Brookings Institution. Retrieved from: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/strategic-patience-has-become-strategic-passivity/
Gopal, A. (2021, 6 Sept.). The other Afghan women: In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them. The New Yorker. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women
Hodges, A. (2011). The" War on terror" narrative: discourse and intertextuality in the construction and contestation of sociopolitical reality. OUP USA.
Oddo, J. (2011). War legitimation discourse: Representing ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in four US presidential addresses. Discourse & Society, 22(3), 287-314.
Oddo, J. (2014). Intertextuality and the 24-hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell's UN Address. Michigan State University Press.
Oddo, J. (2018). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State Press.
Safire, W. (1999, 3 Jan.). On language; Not so fast! The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/03/magazine/on-language-not-so-fast.html [Contextual analysis on the evolution of the term “strategic patience” and Strobe Talbott’s original usage]
re:blurb episode on Conceptual Metaphor
Our first episode with Dr. Oddo, in which he articulates his theory of war propaganda
The Watson Institute at Brown University’s “Costs of War” Project
It’s common to see tech journalists make proclamations about how the internet has fundamentally changed the ways that we think, interact, and most importantly, argue with one another. It’s also common to see them herald the arrival of a “new science” that promises to provide technical answers to all questions and solve all problems that come with the “disruptive” technologies that have “revolutionized” our world.
But has the internet really caused such a drastic divergence from how we operate offline? And do we really need a “new science” for studying things like argument and disagreement, especially when already-established disciplines like rhetoric, philosophy, and the conspicuously named argumentation theory have been studying these topics for millenia?
On today’s episode, we offer a re:joinder to an infamous 2019 article in The Atlantic by Jesse Singal, entitled “The New Science of How to Argue--Constructively.” In the article, Singal profiles a man who claims to have invented a “new science of disagreement” - the Swedish blogger John Nerst, a self-proclaimed polymath who cut his teeth in the “Intellectual Dark Web”-adjacent, hyper-rationalist online blogosphere. Nerst’s “new discipline,” which he calls “Erisology,” claims to have invented a series of tools to help people better navigate arguments and disagreements online. In reality, as we point out, Nerst has merely stumbled into concepts and theories that have been debated by theorists of logic and argumentation for centuries, such as stasis theory, ideographs, and “bracketing” social difference in public deliberations. The distinction, we find, is that Nerst’s and Singal’s vision of a new culture of disagreement is reliant on rationalist rules that belie an authoritarian social and political agenda. We also discuss how privileged men react when their ideas are challenged for the first time, Jesse Singal’s beleaguered Twitter mentions, and what this article truly reveals about the nature of the internet: its power to elevate bloggers to the status of credentialed, peer-reviewed academics, as long as their ideas are laundered through online op-ed columnists.
In the spirit of generosity, here is Nerst’s follow-up blog explaining & defending his ideas: “A Defense of Erisology”
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
re:blurb on Stasis Theory
re:blurb on Ideographs
Fahnestock, J., & Secor, M. (1988). The stases in scientific and literary argument. Written communication, 5(4), 427-443.
Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), 56-80.
Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press.
Hohmann, H. (2001). Stasis. In T. O. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (741-745). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Hemington, G. (2019, 9 April). A guide for (the) perplexed philosophers: Jesse Singal and the rationalist subculture. Irrationally Speaking. https://irrationallyspeaking.home.blog/2019/04/09/a-guide-for-the-perplexed-philosophers-jesse-singal-and-the-rationalist-subculture/
Mack, P. (2016). Ramus and Ramism: rhetoric and dialectic. In Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts (pp. 23-40). Routledge.
On today’s show, Ben and Calvin have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Richard Purcell, Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. We begin by discussing Rich’s current research on conceptions of work in Black artistic labor, and how that led him back to considering the discursive formations of a Nixon-era economic initiative/slogan known as “Black Capitalism.” We discuss Nixon’s policy efforts to revitalize Black economic citizenship as a way of pacifying radical resistance, as well as the ensuing debates among Black intellectuals over labor and capital in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, Rich connects this historical context to his analysis of contemporary rap artists like Oddisee, helping us to think through how aesthetic production reflects the costs and tolls of neoliberal capitalism.
Finally, we close by addressing “toothless” administrative responses to the conservative movement against Critical Race Theory (CRT). We unpack the legal studies origins of CRT as an academic field and theory, its theoretical utility, and the material connections between the conservative interests that developed “broken windows” policing and the ongoing anti-CRT campaign. We invite Rich to “get on his soapbox”, and he articulates a critique of university policies on issues such as this one that disproportionately affect students and faculty of color, including at Carnegie Mellon University.
Works and concepts cited in this episode
Joint Statement from AAUP, AHA, AACU, and Pen America re: Legislative Attacks on CRT
Ansfield, B. (2020) The Broken Windows of the Bronx: Putting the Theory in Its Place. American Quarterly, (72) 1, 103-127.
Ayo, D. (2005). How to Rent a Negro. Lawrence Hill Books.
Brimmer, A. (1969). The Economic Potential of Black Capitalism. American Economic Association.
Bell, D. (1995) Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?
Boggs, J. (1970). The Myth and Irrationality of Black Capitalism. The Review of Black Political Economy, 27-35.
Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., Thomas, K. (Eds.). (1996). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. The New Press.
Cross, T. (1969). Black Capitalism: Strategy for Business in the Ghetto. Atheneum Press.
Everett, P. (2001) Erasure. Graywolf Press.
England, J. & Purcell, R. (2020). Higher Ed’s toothless response to the killing of George Floyd. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Robinson, C. (1983). Black Marxism: The making of the black radical tradition. Zed Books.
Rufo, C. (2021). Battle Over Critical Race Theory. Wall Street Journal.
Speri, A. (2019, March 23). The Strange Tale of the FBI's Fictional "Black Identity Extremism" Movement. The Intercept.
Wacquant, L. J. (2009). Prisons of Poverty. U of Minnesota Press.
We live in a world of unbridled technological and argumentative advancement. A.I. has learned to debate Thanksgiving-table politics against humans. People may soon be using “argument checks” as well as “grammar checks” on their smartphones. Cats and dogs have finally put aside their differences and learned to live in peace by forming a coalition against postal workers. Welcome to the future.
Whether this sounds like an irenic utopian ideal or an Orwellian dystopia to you, it is the subject of today’s episode! In the first installment of our newest re:joinder series, Disciplining Disciplinary Boundaries, we take aim at an article that feels designed to make humanists pull their hair out: Benjamin Wallace-Wells’s “The Limits of Political Debate,” published in The New Yorker. This article tells the story of Project Debater, an artificial intelligence designed to compete in political debate competitions against humans using mountains of empirical evidence and “fifty to seventy” prefabricated argument structures. As we read through the dramatic tale of P.D.’s inception to it’s first high-profile defeat in public debate by Harish Natarajan in 2019, we discuss the way that science journalists (and scientists themselves) make strange and fascinating assumptions about the humanities.
We also frame our reading of the article with two critical pieces of rhetoric scholarship that help illuminate its various rhetorical pitfalls and spurious assumptions. Jeanne Fahnestock’s 1986 classic “Accommodating Science” lays the groundwork for studying science journalism by taxonomizing some typical rhetorical appeals and information transformations journalists use to make hard science more appealing for public audiences (e.g. sacrificing technical details at the expense of telling a dramatic narrative of “discovery”). Finally, we end with Carolyn Miller’s 2007 article “What can automation teach us about agency,” and reflect upon the ways that A.I. can only have rhetorical agency if an audience attributes it. This article helps us better understand why Project Debater suffered defeat at the hands of a human, and why this article tells us more about the limits of artificial intelligence rather than “rhetorical persuasion.”
Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Fahnestock, J. (1986). Accommodating science: The rhetorical life of scientific facts. Written communication, 3(3), 330-350.
Miller, C. R. (2007). What can automation tell us about agency?. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37(2), 137-157.
Plato. (2008). Gorgias (B. Jowett, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. (Original published c. 380 BCE). Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1672/1672-h/1672-h.htm
Slonim, N., Bilu, Y., Alzate, C., Bar-Haim, R., Bogin, B., Bonin, F., ... & Aharonov, R. (2021). An autonomous debating system. Nature, 591(7850), 379-384.
Wallace-Wells, B. (2021, Apr. 11). The limits of political debate. The New Yorker. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-populism/the-limits-of-political-debate
On today’s show, the re:verb team gets “meta” - metaPHORICAL, that is! On this re:blurb episode, we discuss the rhetorical and linguistic features of conceptual metaphors, which provide us with a way to make connections between two (often very different) processes. To put it more simply: have you ever heard the phrase “time is money”? Have you ever scolded someone for wasting their time, telling them that they could spend it doing something more worthy? If so, you’ve been using a very common conceptual metaphor!
Listen in as we break down a vast array of conceptual metaphors, from cultural metaphors that mediate our cognition and everyday social life to political metaphors wielded by the powerful to frame tendentious policies and practices in ways beneficial to them. As an example of the latter, we provide an analysis of the mixed political metaphor “sowing discord,” often used in the context of U.S. foreign policy rhetoric about Russia. Despite what the latter metaphor implies, we hope that this episode takes root in your mind and provides music to your ears!
Metaphor Theory References:
Chilton, P. A. (1996). Security metaphors: Cold war discourse from containment to common house (Vol. 2). Peter Lang Pub Incorporated.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Conceptual metaphor in everyday language. The journal of philosophy, 77(8), 453-486.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
Reddy, M. (1979). The conduit metaphor. Metaphor and thought, 2, 285-324.
Analysis References:
Countering Russian Disinformation. (2020, September 23). Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Holycross, Jordan & Riggio, Olivia. (2018, September 18). Morning Edition’s Think Tank Sources Lean to the Right. FAIR.org.
Johnson, Adam. (2016, October 1). NYT Exposes a Favorite Source as War Industry Flack. FAIR.org.
Johnson, Adam. (2017, May 8). Lockheed Martin–Funded Experts Agree: South Korea Needs More Lockheed Martin Missiles. FAIR.org.
Lipton, Eric & Williams, Brooke. (2016, August 7). How Think Tanks Amplify Corporate America’s Influence. The New York Times.
Shupak, Gregory. (2018, July 26). The Sanctification of NATO. FAIR.org.
Further Reading on Conceptual Metaphors:
Charteris-Black, J. (2006). Britain as a container: Immigration metaphors in the 2005 election campaign. Discourse & Society, 17(5): 563-581.
Grady, J. (1997). Foundations of meaning: Primary metaphors and primary scenes.
Grady, J., Oakley, T., & Coulson, S. (1999). Blending and metaphor. Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science (Series 4), 101-124.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. (2013). The relationship between conceptual metaphor and culture. Intercultural pragmatics, 10(2), 315-339.
On this episode, the re:verb editorial team -- Alex Helberg, Calvin Pollak, Sophie Wodzak, and Ben Williams -- kicks back, relaxes, and reflects on three years of podcasting about politics, culture, and language in action. Last Friday, to celebrate re:verb’s three-year anniversary, we held our first-ever livestream via Zoom / YouTube, complete with special guests, new segments, and a hilarious sound-board controlled by Alex. Note: since this was our first time streaming, we had some occasional technical flubs and sound issues, so please bear with us. Along with us on the stream were some of our favorite past guests and collaborators, who joined us to talk about current conversations in politics and culture as well as more recent research they have worked on since we last spoke. In addition, each guest got into the batter’s box and faced off against Calvin’s Curveball, a trivia question related to their research.
We talked to Dr. John Oddo about the foreign policy discourses of Biden vs. Trump; Dr. James J. Brown, Jr. about Clubhouse, Zoom, and other currently-popular digital platforms; Dr. Derek Handley, a re:verb co-founder, about his work on mid-20th-century African-American rhetorics of resistance in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and about the pre-history of re:verb; Dr. Asao B. Inoue about developments in anti-racist writing pedagogy over the last year; Dr. Kendall Phillips about his new project analyzing rhetorics of refusal in contemporary films from Joker to Snowpiercer and the Marvel Cinematic Universe; Dr. Cameron Mozafari about right-wing rhetoric and “cancel culture”; and Dr. Ana Cooke, another of re:verb’s co-founders, about her new project on knowledge-making communities online, as well as the past, present, and future of re:verb.
We hope you enjoy this anniversary celebration replay! Stay tuned to our Twitter (@reverb_cast) for future livestream announcements, and join us in raising a glass to toast to three great years of podcasting!
It’s 2021, science is back in charge in America, and we’re on a clear path to ending the COVID-19 pandemic. But is it really that simple?
On today’s show, we talk with Dr. Abby Cartus, a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh, about her thoughts on pandemic rhetoric and policy in the transition from president Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Abby lays out for us the way that the new Biden administration’s technocratic rhetoric has sought to reframe debates over COVID policy as purely “technical” and “empirical,” rather than “moral” and “political.” As a result, the administration’s approach to managing the virus and keeping citizens safe has amounted to continuing investment in the vaccination deployment that began under Trump. At the same time, ordinary citizens are being told that reducing transmission is a matter of their own personal responsibility, even if they are forced to go to work in unsafe conditions. This rhetorical idiom cultivates the sense that even though scientific experts hold power, they are severely limited in what they can do, and the responsibility for controlling the pandemic rests solely in the hands of individual citizens themselves.
This controversy has recently reached a flashpoint in the debate over whether or not public schools in the U.S. can safely reopen at this stage in the pandemic. Abby leads us through the ways that certain scientific rhetorics - particularly claims that COVID transmission rates are lower among children and in schools - are being marshalled against teacher unions advocating for safer work environments. In fact, much of the research promoting these claims (often based on selective sample sizes and questionable data-collection practices) is funded by proponents of school privatization, such as the Walton and Gates foundations, who have an economic incentive to demonize and dismantle education workers’ collective power.
To conclude, Abby summarizes what a more humane policy strategy might look like, in the form of a “paid shutdown” - a short-term closure of nonessential businesses, supplemented by paying furloughed workers to stay home and quarantine. We sign off with a reminder that even when the status quo feels intractable in situations like this, “the way things are” should never be taken as the final word on the way things could/should be!
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Cartus, A. (2020). Education privatization advocates find an opportunity in the school reopening debate. Medium.
Feldman, J. (2021). Coronavirus Is an Occupational Disease That Spreads at Work. Jacobin.
Feldman, J., Cartus, A., & Prins, S. (2021). Biden’s Coronavirus Plan Will Not Prevent Death and Devastation. The Nation.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press.
Prins, S., Feldman, J., & Cartus, A. (2021). Teachers and Their Unions Are Demanding Truly Safe Schools Reopening — Not “Ignoring Science.” Jacobin.
Since our last re:verb episode, the US House and Senate certified Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, paving the way for Biden’s inauguration -- but not before a large crowd of disgruntled Trump supporters descended on the US Capitol building, in a violent conflict that left five people dead and many wounded. Days later, President Trump’s Twitter account had been banned and he was impeached by the House, making him history’s first multiply-deplatformed, multiply-impeached president.
On today’s show, Calvin, Alex, and Sophie react to the events of January 6th and their aftermath. We debate to what extent it is accurate and politically useful to call the 1/6 violence a “coup” or an act of “terrorism,” as well as whether our choices of modifiers to describe the event (such as “right-wing”, “GOP”, and/or “fascist”) are even more important. We also consider the apparent hamfistedness of the attackers’ planning and goofiness of their presentation, and how these elements relate to the long legacy of white supremacist rhetoric in the US.
Lastly, we discuss Twitter’s decision to apply its term of service prohibiting “Glorification of Violence” to President Trump’s account, ostensibly banning him from the platform for life. Is this an issue of free speech, propaganda, tech-sector labor organizing, hypermediated capitalism, or some combination of all of these? What exactly was the role of social media in the violence that occurred on Jan 6? And if, as seems to be the case, the Internet is undeniably bad now, what broad policy approaches might make it even marginally less bad?
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode
Brown, J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software (p. 231). University of Michigan Press.
Conger, K., & Isaac, M. (2021, 12 January). Twitter Permanently Bans Trump, Capping Online Revolt. The New York Times.
Fretwell, E. (2021, 13 January). From lynchings to the Capitol: Racism and the violence of revelry. Al Jazeera.
Levy, A. (2020, 2 July). The most liberal and conservative tech companies, ranked by employees’ political donations. CNBC.
McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16.
Ridolfo, J., & DeVoss, D. N. (2009). Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 13(2), n2.
Silverman, C., & Mac, R. (2020, 3 November). Facebook Cut Traffic To Leading Liberal Pages Just Before The Election. Buzzfeed News.
Twitter. (2021, 8 January). Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump.
Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Public culture, 14(1), 49-90.
Wong, J.C. (2017, 10 February). Meet the rightwing power players lurking beneath Silicon Valley's liberal facade. The Guardian.
In December of 2005 - 4 years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and just over 2 years after the U.S. launched troops to fight its “War on Terror” in Iraq - journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a bombshell report in the New York Times detailing the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens taking place at the behest of the George W. Bush administration as part of its intelligence-gathering operations. This expose was the first of many reports to emerge in the early years of the 21st century that outlined the continually expanding surveillance powers that the U.S. government and its various intelligence agencies put to use against its own citizen population, as well as against foreign governments and civilians.
That very same year, a holiday-themed children’s book titled The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition was published by mother-daughter author duo Carol Aebersold and Chanda Bell. The book tells the story of a “scout elf” from the North Pole whose job is to observe children’s behavior during the Christmas season, and report back to Santa Claus whether they have been “naughty” or “nice” - thus, whether they deserve to have their Christmas wishes fulfilled.
Both of these artifacts tell a story about the growing presence and awareness of surveillance in American culture, and about our continuing acquiescence to being watched by powerful entities with mysterious motives. While the reports of journalists like Risen & Lichtblau, as well as whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, tell of a government wielding dystopian technology to spy on its citizenry, The Elf on the Shelf presents a seemingly more anodyne, innocent form of total panoptic surveillance - one that surely promises to take some stress off the backs of busy parents and teachers during the holiday season. But at what cost? What happens when we put a patently creepy, always-watching children’s toy in charge of teaching our children lessons about morality and self-discipline?
On today’s show, we explore just some of the many cultural artifacts that form the assemblage of The Elf on the Shelf as a new holiday tradition that celebrates surveillance culture. In doing so, we contextualize Elf by analyzing the forces that give rise to the tradition: from Jeremy Bentham’s & Michel Foucault’s exploration of the “panopticon,” to the ever-watching “eye of God” in Christian religious traditions, to the ravaging culture of consumer capitalism that seems to drain the genuine substance from every tradition by replacing it with a constant yearning for new products. We lay bare our trenchant critiques of Elf’s place in American holiday culture, and attempt to imagine new types of holiday traditions that focus on mutual aid, ethics of care, teaching children consequences (both good and bad) for their actions, and resisting the culture of surveillance perpetuated by both Big Brother and Big Santa.
Special thanks for research assistance on this episode to Dr. Laura Pinto, who co-authored research examining The Elf on the Shelf and surveillance in 2014, and was kind enough to correspond with us and point us to some useful background reading in preparation for this show!
Elf on the Shelf videos featured:
Inside Look at Scout Elf Training Camp
Scout Elves Take Flight for Scout Elf Return Week
The Elf on the Shelf's Night Before Christmas Song & Music Video
Works and concepts referenced:
Bentham, J., & Božovič, M. (1995). The panopticon writings. Verso Trade.
Curtis, Adam. The century of the self. London: BBC Four, 2002.
Foucault, M. (2012). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage.
Hertsgaard, M. (2016). Bravehearts: Whistle blowing in the age of Snowden. Skyhorse.
Lyon, D. (2014). Surveillance and the Eye of God. Studies in Christian Ethics, 27(1), 21-32.
Pinto, L. E., & Nemorim, S. (2015). Normalizing panoptic surveillance among children: ‘The Elf on the Shelf’. Our Schools/Our Selves, 24(2), 53.
Risen, J., & Lichtblau, E. (2005, December 16). Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts. The New York Times, A1.
Additional reading on surveillance discourse, power, privacy, and consumerism:
Barnard-Wills, D. (2011). UK news media discourses of surveillance. The Sociological Quarterly, 52(4), 548-567.
Cohen, J. E. (2012). What privacy is for. Harv. L. Rev., 126, 1904.
Lacan, J. (1991). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955. W. W. Norton & Company. [Describes Lacan’s concept of “the Big Other”, a useful tool for understanding surveillance power.]
Papacharissi, Z. (2010). Privacy as a luxury commodity. First Monday. [Explains how privacy is distributed unequally based on economic class.]
The inferno rages on as the re:verb team takes on more “hot texts” - arguments and opinions with questionable premises - that have emerged in the wake of the 2020 election. In this episode, we continue to examine the backlash against movements to “defund the police” via some anti-abolitionist rhetoric from the comedy podcast Chapo Trap House, which ironically echoes the Obama critique we discussed on our last show. In responding to CTH’s critiques of abolitionism, we touch on why it’s better to stay connected with organizers in your own community than Brooklyn podcasters making 6-figure salaries.
Then, Sophie leads us through a Washington Post article that tries to “have its cake and eat it, too” on the issue of whether or not Joe Biden’s White House communications team will be “more female” than Donald Trump’s. The team discusses the nuances of representation in politics, offering a critique of “bean-counting” feminism that reproduces the logics of Trumpist rhetoric (“we have the most women - folks, you’ve never seen so many women!”). Finally, Ben brings us a hack-job of pseudo-conspiracy from the pages of The Federalist. In this article, the “voice of (Tristan) Justice” brings forth the very novel and not-tired argument that regardless of whether there was actual voter fraud in the 2020 Election, it was still an unfair contest because of (drumroll please) ~liberal media bias~.
We hope that our re:sponses to these hot texts provide you with a bit of catharsis coming out of a very anxiety-inducing election cycle. We (like you) can’t wait for the 2024 election cycle to begin on January 21, 2021, and look forward to the hot texts that will inevitably emerge from it!
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Berger, D., Kaba, M., & Stein, D. (2017, 29 August). What abolitionists do. Jacobin Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/prison-abolition-reform-mass-incarceration
Kelley, R. D. G. (2017). What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial capitalism?. Boston Review, 12.
Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Univ of North Carolina Press. [Original articulation of “racial capitalism”]
Kaba, M. (2020, 12 June). Yes, we mean literally abolish the police: Because reform won’t happen. The New York Times. Retrieved from: nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html
Gilmore, R. W. & Kilgore, J. (2019, 19 June). The case for abolition. The Marshall Project. Retrieved from: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/06/19/the-case-for-abolition
Do you smell something burning? It must be all these Election 2020 ~Hot Texts~! Here at re:verb we try to practice "addition, not subtraction" (to quote former President Obama), so we don’t engage with "takes" anymore. As true postmodernist podcasters, we analyze texts.
On this two-part show, Sophie, Ben, Calvin, and Alex analyze a collection of Hot Texts responding to the 2020 presidential election results. In part one, Calvin shares how presidential candidates have used the word "rhetoric" on Twitter recently, usages which we analyze as attempting to tacitly circumscribe US political ideology and stigmatize dissent. Then, Alex brings in former President Obama's critiques of the slogan "defund the police", as well as Obama's own preferred wording: "reform the police department so that everybody's being treated fairly, divert young people from getting into crime, and if there's a homeless guy, can we maybe send a mental health worker there instead of an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy?" We discuss how, just like the candidates' ideological usages of "rhetoric", Obama's hamfisted rhetorical criticism here serves a disciplinary function, both erasing the history of past failed police "reform" efforts and denouncing abolitionist organizing.
If you liked this re:joinder, tune into next episode, when we’ll engage with more Hot Texts: on gender representation in the incoming Biden Administration vs. the outgoing Trump Administration, and purported Liberal Media "rigging" of the 2020 contest.
Hot Texts corpus
Joe Biden on “rhetoric”
Donald Trump on “rhetoric”
Bernie Sanders on “rhetoric”
Barack Obama critiques “defund the police” slogan
References
Previous re:verb episodes:
Interview with Dr. Cameron Mozafari
Interview with Dr. Karma Chávez
re:blurb on ideographs
re:blurb on dialogicality
Episode of our sibling podcast, The Blurst of Times, on “defund the police”
Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago press. [Canonical study of the rhetoric of science.]
McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16.
Perelman, C., Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., Wilkinson, J., & Weaver, P. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. University of Notre Dame Press.
On today’s show, Alex and Calvin have the distinct privilege of speaking with Dr. Karma R. Chávez, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Karma is a scholar whose work runs the gamut from border rhetorics and pandemic discourses, to coalition-building and intersectionality. We begin by discussing Karma’s 2013 book Queer Migration Politics, considering how the issues of immigration and queer liberation have intersected rhetorically, in particular as a coalitional response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Then, Karma explains her critical views on how scholars engage with embodiment, and we brainstorm new possibilities for studying the nuances and particularities of hegemonic bodies. Finally, Karma shares her experiences visiting the West Bank of Palestine, as well as her time recording interviews about the Palestine/Israel conflict for her public radio show in Madison, Wisconsin, all of which is documented in her 2019 book Palestine on the Air. We unpack how academic freedom functions as a problematic ideograph in conversations about this issue, and close by considering intersections between struggles for Palestinians’ and immigrants’ rights.
Karma Chávez publications referenced in this episode:
Chávez, K. R. (2013). Queer migration politics: Activist rhetoric and coalitional possibilities. University of Illinois Press.
Chávez, K. R. (2018). The Body: An Abstract and Actual Rhetorical Concept. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 48(3), 242-250.
Chavez, K. R., & Ezra, M. (2019). Palestine on the Air. University of Illinois Press.
Luibheid, E., Chavez, K.R., Brown, A.J., Capo, J., Carastathis, A., & Caraves, J. (2020). Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation. (1 ed.). Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Additional references:
American Studies Association Resolution Endorsing BDS
Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso books.
Brooks, M. P., & Houck, D. W. (Eds.). (2011). The speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To tell it like it is. Univ. Press of Mississippi.
Chávez, K. R. (2015). The precariousness of homonationalism: The queer agency of terrorism in post-9/11 rhetoric. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2(3), 32-58. [Discusses “Barney Frank’s role as congressman, his position as only the second openly gay person to serve in the U.S. Congress, and I offer some history of the 1990 Immigration Act and Frank’s role in both its construction and in its passing,” p. 35.]
Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Duke University Press.
Habermas, J.. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press. [Canonical work of public sphere theory.]
Kaplan, S. (2015). “University of Illinois censured after professor loses job over tweets critical of Israel.” Washington Post. [Discusses the academic freedom case of Steven Salaita.]
King, T. L. (2019). The Black shoals: Offshore formations of Black and Native studies. Duke University Press.
Luibhéid, E. (2002). Entry denied: Controlling sexuality at the border. U of Minnesota Press.
Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics (Vol. 2). U of Minnesota Press.
Palestinian American Research Center
Young, I. M. (1996). Communication and the other: beyond deliberative democracy. In Benhabib, S. (Ed.). Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, 125–143. Princeton University Press.
This episode presents another installment in our “re:read” series, in which we take short works of literature and develop them into audio dramas featuring music, sound effects, and dynamic vocal performances.
This re:read selection is an ever-timely tale of a post-apocalyptic dystopia: Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950). Taking its title from Sara Teasdale’s 1918 poem of the same name, Bradbury’s story tells the tale of an autonomous, mechanized house that continues to operate despite the fact that its inhabitants (and the city surrounding it), have been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. Obsessed with its own self-protection, the house plays out the routines of domestic American life as if nothing has changed… until the forces of nature find a way to breach its walls.
Work read for this episode:
Bradbury, R. (1950). There will come soft rains. The Martian Chronicles. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Accessible pdf version can be found here: https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf
Music sampled in this episode:
Penguin Cafe Orchestra - “Perpetuum Mobile”
Change Taq - “Trancefer"
Change Taq - “Iridescent Creeper”
Duke Ellington - “Satin Doll”
How to Disappear Completely - “Seraph 1”
All content used in this episode is either licensed under Creative Commons, or sampled under the conditions of Fair Use: namely, the use of work for noncommercial, nonprofit educational purposes. re:verb’s co-producers receive no financial profits from the works featured in our show, and its produced content has always been intended solely for public educational purposes.
On today’s show, we sit down with Dr. Britt Paris, an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, and an affiliate with the nonprofit research institute Data & Society. Dr. Paris studies how groups build, use and understand information systems according to their values, and how these systems influence evidentiary standards and policy actions.
This conversation focuses on a wide range of topics covered by scholars in critical data studies, an approach that interrogates how powerful institutions influence the ways that data is collected, stored, and used for various purposes in society. We begin by discussing Dr. Paris’s recent co-authored report for Data & Society, Deepfakes and Cheap Fakes, which historicizes the use of manipulated visual and audio evidence and explores the current uses of technologies that allow for the use of these techniques by the broader population. We also discuss her scholarly and activist work with “counter-data actions,” which encompass data-collection and presentation strategies used to challenge powerful institutions such as law enforcement and governmental administrations. We conclude with a discussion of how we as internet users should think critically about how mass data-collection and surveillance practices are incentivized for online platforms, and what we can do in order to opt out, or even log off.
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Britt Paris’s Website: https://www.britt-paris.net/
Britt Paris on Twitter: @drbrittparis
Bowker, G.C. (2006). Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dalton, C. & Thatcher, J. (2014) What does a critical data studies look like, and why do we care? Seven points for a critical approach to “big data.” Society & Space. Retrieved from: http://societyandspace.com/material/commentaries/craig-dalton-and-jim-thatcher-what-does-a-critical-data-studies-look-like-and-why-do-we-care-seven-points-for-a-critical-approach-to-big-data/
Kitchin, R. (2014). The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & Their Consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Generative Adverserial Network (GAD) - Wikipedia
Suwajanakorn, S., Seitz, S.M., & Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, I [Supasorn Suwajanakorn]. (2017, Jul 11). Synthesizing Obama: Learning lip sync from audio [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/9Yq67CjDqvw
Youth Justice Coalition in Los Angeles
Stop LAPD Spying Coalition
On today’s show, Alex and Ben speak with Dr. Bret Vukoder about his recently defended dissertation, an investigation into the United States Information Agency’s (USIA) filmic and televisual propaganda output during the Cold War. Due to a domestic production ban, the massive archive of over 20,000 films has been relatively unknown in media scholarship, until now.
To investigate this rich but little known archive, we begin our conversation discussing a sub-genre of USIA propaganda, which Bret refers to as “thesis films” - in short, films that are explicitly about the USIA’s film-making and information-dissemination processes. We turn our attention to clips from some of these original films to examine how they use a meta-textual attention to “process” as a propaganda strategy for showcasing the “transparency” and “ethics” of the U.S.’s foreign information apparatus. In talking through these examples and others that Bret has analyzed, we critically interrogate the ways that aesthetic and stylistic elements impact the USIA’s political messages being communicated to foreign audiences. Finally, we apply some of Bret’s heuristic tools to examine an example of interventionist foreign policy propaganda from New York Times - Joanna Hausmann’s “Venezuela’s Crisis: What My Fellow Liberals Don’t Understand.”
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode
Resources from / about the Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth
Information on the MEP’s USIA Pilot Study
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. International Publishers.
Gharabaghi, H. (2018) “American mice grow big”: The Syracuse audiovisual mission in Iran and the rise of documentary diplomacy.Dissertation for New York University, Department of Cinema Studies.
Kim, H. S. (2019). Who Views Whom through Whose Lenses?: The Gazes in USIS Film Propaganda in South Korea. In The Cold War and Asian Cinemas (pp. 284-304). Routledge.
Luce, H. (1941, 17 Feb.). The American century. Life Magazine. (Digital version available at: https://news.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/luce.pdf)
Hausman, J. (2019). “What my fellow liberals don’t get about Venezuela.” The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/vKVakhcm5ko
Williams, M. & Vukoder, B. (forthcoming). The great war at scale: New opportunities for provenance in World War I collections at the National Archives (NARA). In Provenance and Early Cinema: Preservation, Circulation, and Repurposing (P. Cherchi Usai, J. Bernardi, T. Williams, & J. Yumibe, eds.). Indiana University Press.
Williams, M. & Vukoder, B. (2020). Local insights, global networked scholarship: The Media Ecology Project USIA pilot. In Nuevas aproximaciones al cine documental. Un estado de la cuestión contemporáneo (J. Campo, T. Crowder-Taraborrelli, C. Garavelli, P. Piedras, & K. Wilson, eds.). Prometeo Press.
Watch this space! Forthcoming special issue in the Journal of E-Media Studies, co-edited by Dr. Vukoder and Dr. Hadi Gharabaghi:
https://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/xmlpage/4/issue
On today’s episode, Sophie speaks with author and artist Frank Santoro about his recently published graphic memoir, Pittsburgh. Santoro gives us a tour of how growing up in the city of Pittsburgh and experiencing its art scene from a young age influenced his unique comic style, as well as how he interprets the ascendency of comics as a form of mass pop culture. As an arts educator, he also offers his thoughts on visual literacy, the relationship between word and image in graphic works, and what we think about when we read and write comics. Santoro also gives some insights into his “musical” philosophy of art, drawing connections between the two along the lines of rhythm and timing, emotional evocativeness, and place-creation.
Find out more about Frank Santoro’s work:
Pittsburgh (Copacetic Comics; White Whale Books)
Pompeii (Copacetic Comics)
My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea (Film by Dash Shaw, with illustration contributions by Frank Santoro) (Trailer)
Storeyville (Copacetic Comics)
Real Fun (Photographs by Ashod Simonian, Illustrations by Frank Santoro) (Copacetic Comics)
Cold Heat (Comic series co-authored with Ben Jones) (Copacetic Comics)
This week’s episode of re:verb is presented as part of The 2020 Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival, a weeklong podcast series centered on a common theme: “the digital future of rhetoric and composition.” Other featured podcasts include the Global Rhetorics Podcast, Kairoticast, Rhetorically Yours, Rhetoricity, RhetoricLee Speaking, Writing Remix Podcast, and The Big Rhetorical Podcast itself. We encourage everyone to check out these other fantastic shows and their contributions to the Carnival.
In this episode, Calvin and Alex analyze and contextualize three recent Trump Administration Executive Orders targeting information communication technology (ICT) platforms from “foreign adversary” countries (in the EO’s words). In particular, we examine the highly publicized orders banning TikTok and WeChat, both owned by Chinese tech companies. We discuss these orders as part of a broader pattern of international brinksmanship between the U.S. and China over the ownership of ICT supply chains, and the power struggle for economic dominance between the two nations more broadly.
Then, we zoom in on the practical, day-to-day consequences of these policy issues. For this part of the episode, we reached out to a source - a Chinese international student living in the U.S. - to ask what it’s like to experience both sides of the U.S.-China digital divide. To protect their anonymity, we use a text-to-speech program (approved by the source) to read aloud their responses to various questions related to these issues: how they communicate with family and friends across the globe, their views of the WeChat and TikTok bans in terms of U.S.-China relations, and their experiences navigating both top-down and bottom-up digital censorship and surveillance practices. We also discuss our source’s request to remain anonymous, and how the necessity of this choice reflects the fraught power dynamics of contemporary digital rhetoric.
Overall, these executive orders (and the first-hand accounts of someone experiencing their consequences) illustrate that values like “free expression,” especially in digital spaces, are always contingent upon who owns the technological infrastructure that facilitates their use. As scholars and teachers, we must keep in mind that not everyone experiences digital tools and platforms in the same ways. By acknowledging the economic and political realities of the digital divide, we stand on firmer ground for re:imagining what a "free world" might look like on the global Internet.
Texts analyzed in this episode
Executive Order on Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain (May 15, 2019)
Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok (August 6, 2020)
Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by WeChat (August 6, 2020)
Works and concepts referenced in this episode
Bauman, R. & Briggs, C. L. (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19(1), 59–88. [Discusses the role of social power in recontextualization on pp. 76-77.]
Chen, S. Y. (2014). From OMG to TMD–Internet and Pinyin acronyms in Mandarin Chinese. Language@Internet, 11(3).
China and the U.S Are Fighting a Major Battle Over Killer Robots and the Future of AI
Chinese student sorry after uproar at US 'fresh air' speech
Daiya, K. (2020, Jun. 6). The current plight of international students. Inside Higher Ed.
Egypt blocks social media websites in attempted clampdown on unrest
Hartnett, S. J. (2011). Google and the “twisted cyber spy” affair: US–Chinese communication in an age of globalization. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 97(4), 411-434.
Hauser, G. A. (1998). Civil society and the principle of the public sphere. Philosophy & rhetoric, 31(1), 19-40.
ICE bans new international students enrolled in online-only classes from entering U.S.
McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [See also re:verb episode 14.]
Naughton, J. (2016). The evolution of the Internet: from military experiment to General Purpose Technology. Journal of Cyber Policy, 1(1), 5-28.
Neil Young Sues Donald Trump Campaign Over Use of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’
NSA accused of spying on Brazilian oil company Petrobras
Oddo, J. (2018). The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State Press.
Reeves, J. (2012). If you see something, say something: Lateral surveillance and the uses of responsibility. Surveillance & Society, 10(3/4), 235-248.
Shaheen, M. (2020, Jul. 3). Supporting international students in the time of Coronavirus: Looking beyond immigration concerns. Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
Snowden: The NSA planted backdoors in Cisco products
Van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.
On June 19, Rutgers University's English Department announced a slew of actions it would be taking in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, including incorporating critical grammar into its pedagogy. As department chair Rebecca L. Walkowitz explained, this new approach seeks to foster "a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to [students] w/ regard to micro-level [grammatical] issues." In response, the conservative Twittersphere swiftly attempted to CANCEL Rutgers English, with everyone from Andrew Sullivan to Thomas Chatterton Williams anointing themselves writing pedagogy experts and declaring Rutgers’ approach substandard. But what exactly is critical grammar, and why might writing teachers want to deploy it? Further, what specific aspects of these conservative arguments makes them so misinformed, out-of-touch, and morally indefensible?
To help answer these questions, Alex and Calvin are honored to be joined by Asao B. Inoue, professor and associate dean for Academic Affairs, Equity, and Inclusion in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. Drawing heavily upon Professor Inoue’s knowledge of critical language instruction, we address two conservative media responses to Rutgers English's announcement. The first piece we discuss, from Jeff Jacoby at The Patriot Post (yes, this is a real website), argues that writing instruction should be less concerned with social justice and more like Winston Churchill’s grade school grammar classes. The second piece, from Fox News' The Ingraham Angle, directly samples an interview with Professor Inoue from last year, both fixating on his use of the term “languaging” and missing his point entirely, which he clarifies and contextualizes for us.
After closely reading these texts, we conclude by noting an irony that may be familiar to listeners of past re:joinder episodes: these arguments fail even on their own terms, lacking logical rigor, empirical evidence, and rhetorical elegance. By contrast, we attempt to back up our arguments with credible research, anti-racist principles, and lived experiences of teaching and studying writing more recently than the 1990s.
Relevant works by Asao B. Inoue:
Inoue, A. B., & Poe, M. (2012). Race and Writing Assessment. Studies in Composition and Rhetoric. Volume 7. Peter Lang.
Inoue, A. B. (2015). Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future. WAC Clearinghouse.
Inoue, A. B. (2019). Labor-based grading contracts: Building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom. WAC Clearinghouse.
Inoue, A. B. (2019). How do we language so people stop killing each other, or what do we do about white language supremacy? College Composition and Communication, 71(2), 352-369.
Works referenced in this episode:
CCCC Demands for Black Linguistic Justice
Pedagogue Podcast featuring Dr. Asao B. Inoue
Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. Routledge.Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. Basic Books.
Faigley, L. (1979). The influence of generative rhetoric on the syntactic maturity and writing effectiveness of college freshmen. Research in the Teaching of English, 13(3), 197-206.
Jencks, C., & Phillips, M. (Eds.). (1998). The Black–White test score gap. Brookings Institution Press.
Smitherman, G., & Smitherman-Donaldson, G. (1986). Talkin and testifyin: The language of Black America. Wayne State University Press.
Sublette, J. R. (1973). The Dartmouth conference: Its reports and results. College English, 35(3), 348-357.
Zancanella, D., Franzak, J., & Sheahan, A. (2016). Dartmouth revisited: Three English educators from different generations reflect on the Dartmouth Conference. English Education, 49(1), 13-27.
The president and his administration use rhetoric every day in speeches, press conferences, and written texts like executive orders and proclamations, but the material effects of this discourse can sometimes be difficult to observe. Today, however, the United States is the epicenter both for the COVID-19 pandemic and an unprecedented wave of civil resistance against local police departments and federal enforcement actions authorized by the president. So, how is the current administration's rhetoric implicated in the pandemic, policing, and protest?
To help us navigate these questions, our guest today is Dr. Cameron Mozafari, who uses methods from corpus linguistics to analyze emotional appeals and other rhetorical patterns in presidential speeches. First, Cameron walks us through his recent Trump-COVID 19 Corpus project, in which he has collected and organized all of the Trump Administration's public statements about the Coronavirus crisis. Based on initial analyses of this data, we discuss Trump's treatment of the virus as a war (as opposed to more typical framings of pandemics as water or natural disasters); the differences in register and epistemic certainty between the language employed by Trump and that of Drs. Fauci and Birx; as well as how (in)frequently Trump and Pence use the words "mask" and "social distancing" vs. words related to war.
Next, we analyze a related instance of problematic presidential rhetoric: the recent “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence." We talk through how the order constructs a dichotomy between US national identity & "property" vs. Marxism / Anarchism & "crime" / "violence." This dissociation, we argue, is an attempt to shore up the administration's and local police departments' legitimacy at a time of unpopularity and unrest. It also serves to mask the state violence that has incited recent popular unrest and been wielded in response to it. Finally, Cameron tells us about a violent incident earlier this summer at a protest in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we consider how clashes like this one are revelatory of the material effects of presidential rhetoric.
Works referenced in this episode
Blaire, C. (1999). Contemporary U.S. memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric's materiality. In J. Selzer & S. Crowley (Eds.), Rhetorical bodies (pp. 16-57). Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P.
Fairclough, N. (2003). Intertextuality and assumptions. Analysing discourse:Textual analysis for social research (pp. 39-62). New York, NY: Routledge.
Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think. New York: Perseus Book Group.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P.
Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. (J. Wilkinson & P. Weaver, Trans.). London, UK: U of Notre Dame P.
Roberts-Miller, P. (2019). Rhetoric and Demagoguery. SIU Press.
Skinnell, R. & Murphy, J. (2019). Rhetoric’s Demagogue | Demagoguery’s Rhetoric: An Introduction. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49:3, 225-232.
Stefanowitsch, A. (2007). Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy. In A. Stefanowitsch & S. Th. Gries (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy (pp. 1-16). Boston, MA: de Gruyter.
Sweetser, E. (2006). Negative spaces: Levels of negation and kinds of spaces. In S. Bonnefille & S. Salbayre (Eds.), Proceedings of the conference "Negation: Form, figure of speech, conceptualization" (pp. 313-332). Tours, France: Publications universitaires François Rabelais.
Thibodeau, P., & Boroditsky, L. (2011, February). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PLOS One, 6(2), 1-11.
Links & resources related to Albuquerque, NM protests
News coverage of the Albuquerque statue protest shooting perpetrated by Steven Baca
Donation page for Fight For Our Lives (FFOL), an Albuquerque-based Mutual Aid organization
National list of local bail funds and other related resources
Today marks the inauguration of a new style of episode we’re trying out called re:read, in which we bring you sonic re-imaginings of literary works, featuring dramatic vocal performances, sound effects, and music. Each of the works we re:read will include themes related to current political and cultural events, and will be bookended by brief reflections on its implications for contemporary audiences.
For our first re:read, we bring to life a timely tale from horror master Edgar Allan Poe: “The Masque of the Red Death.” This story narrates a gala-turned-nightmare in the abbey of Prince Prospero, a rich despot presiding over a nation ravaged by a horrific plague known as the Red Death. To spite the threat of contagion, Prospero throws a magnificent masquerade ball, inviting his courtiers and friends to gather in a gratuitous, hedonistic celebration of life. The convivial spirit of the party, however, soon unravels as the guests’ creeping sense of their own mortality grows stronger, until they realize -- far too late -- that an unwanted guest is in their midst.
We hope you enjoy this reading, and that you’ll remember its key lesson. No amount of hubris -- be it derived from health, wealth, or power -- can protect you from the inevitable. With that in mind, please stay safe and healthy!
Work read for this episode
Allan Poe, E. "The Masque of the Red Death."
Music sampled in this episode
Change Taq - “Double Summits”
Change Taq - “Adolescent Nitez (Sketch)”
How to Disappear Completely - “Void Vision”
Michael Ghelfi - “D&D Ambience | Baroque Noble Party | Baroque Music, People Speaking, Glasses Clinging”
Current protests fueled by the murder of George Floyd represent a reckoning with the US’s long history of racism, settler colonialism, and oppression as codified in institutions of policing and governance.
In today’s episode, Calvin and Ben explore this fraught history as a way of contextualizing recent protests against anti-Black police violence in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. We begin by referencing academic conversations about the meaning of state power, as well as some useful genealogies of the US’s race-making institutions and their relation to systems of surveillance and visibility, before ultimately turning to present questions about police and prison abolition. In looking to the past, we discuss the connections between slavery, Jim and Jane Crow segregation, urban ghettoization of Black people through redlining and other public policies, and the current epoch of mass incarceration. Finally, we think through the work of scholars and organizers who have been reimagining systems of public safety, discuss the key differences between abolition and reform, and begin to consider how those of us in higher education are positioned to work toward actual, material change, rather than mere virtue-signaling.
Works referenced in this episode
Alexander, M. (2020). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2008). State of exception. University of Chicago Press.
Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. Duke University Press.
Clément, P. (2018). Prisons and class warfare: an interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Verso blog.
Davis, A. Y. (2011). Abolition democracy: Beyond empire, prisons, and torture. Seven Stories Press.
England, J. & Purcell, R. (2020). Higher Ed’s toothless response to the killing of George Floyd. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Fassin, D. (2019). The Police Are the Punishment. Public Culture, 31(3), 539–561.
Mbembé, J. A., & Meintjes, L. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40.
Lowe, L. (2015). The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press.
Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. University of Chicago Press.
Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: on blackness and being. Duke University Press.
Vitale, A. (2017). The end of policing. Verso.
Wacquant, L. (2002). From Slavery to Mass Incarceration. New Left Review, 13, 41–60.
Further resources and reading
Petition to sign: CMU, Confront Racist Policing in Our Community
Pittsburgh’s Bukit Bail Fund
Duke University Press:
Police Violence Syllabus
Prison and the Carceral State Syllabus
NYC DSA SFWG Prison Abolition Reading Group Syllabus
Resource Guide: Prisons, Policing, and Punishment by Micah Herskind
“Yes, We Literally Mean Abolish the Police” by Mariame Kaba
On today's show, Calvin and Ben speak to our friend, colleague, and former re:verb producer Dr. Ryan Mitchell. Recently, Ryan defended his dissertation, a rhetorical history of the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and he will join Lafayette College as an Assistant Professor in the fall. Ryan’s dissertation traces the rhetorical strategies employed by urban gay men in the early 1980s to push back against totalizing, dehumanizing discourses of HIV/AIDS prevention. According to Ryan's analysis of texts like Callen and Berkowitz’s 1983 manual How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, the success of these texts’ rhetorical strategies depended heavily on their viscerality -- their illumination of subjects' lived, bodily experiences of porousness and permeability -- to both illustrate and justify various intersubjectively-oriented safe sex protocols. Ultimately, Ryan argues, texts like Callen and Berkowitz’s served to protect urban gay men from the worst ravages of the disease while also, crucially, affirming their communal identities and agency.
After talking through the major rhetorical concepts Ryan employs in his work, we shift into a discussion of how this all might relate to current discourses surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. As Ryan wisely reminds us, no two disease crises are identical, and there are many mismatches between the early years of HIV/AIDS and where we are currently. Even still, as we discuss, the rhetorics that Ryan has studied emphasize the visceral embodied experiences of those most victimized by public health crises while also promoting social practices, norms, and policies to foster intersubjective ethics of care -- all of which may be worthy of consideration as we navigate the social and political upheaval of our present moment.
Works Referenced in this Episode
Cazdyn, E. (2012). The already dead: the new time of politics, culture, and illness. Duke University Press.
Hauser, G. (2012). Prisoners of conscience : moral vernaculars of political agency. University of South Carolina Press.
Hawhee, D. (2011). Looking into Aristotle's eyes: Toward a theory of rhetorical vision. Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 14(2), 139-165.
Johnson, J. (2016). “A man’s mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(1), 1–20.
Kennerly, M. (2010). Getting Carried Away: How Rhetorical Transport Gets Judgment Going. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40(3), 269–291.
Larson, S. R. (2018). “Everything inside me was silenced”:(Re) defining rape through visceral counterpublicity. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 104(2), 123-144.
Mitchell, R. (2019). Decoupling sex and intimacy: the role of dissociation in early AIDS prevention campaigns. Argumentation and Advocacy, 55(3), 211-229.
Rice, J. (2017). The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More: On Archival Magnitude. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 50(1), 26-49.
Rowland, A. L. (2020). Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood. Ohio State University Press.
In this timely re:joinder episode, Sophie, Calvin, and Alex gather over Zoom to engage with some truly vile COVID-19 takes -- so you don't have to!
Calvin shares "The Media Are Embarrassing Themselves Over Trump's Use of 'Chinese Virus'", written by a guy named John at the conservative Federalist magazine, which apologizes for President Trump's strategic framing of the virus as inherently Chinese. In denying and obfuscating Trump's racist language, John makes some mind-bogglingly context-stripped and hypocritical claims, such as accusing "the media" (reminder: The Federalist is a media outlet) of doing performative outrage. Yet, as we point out, The Federalist is only able to publish many of these arguments because the corporate media has generally done a terrible job of frame-checking (Cloud, 2018) the administration and its rhetorical allies. Nevertheless, reporters are asking valid questions about Trump's language in this case, we argue.
Then, Alex brings in "Freedom Means Letting People Make Risk Calculations About Coronavirus" by Chuck Devore, a piece ALSO published in The Federalist, which makes a circuitous, scattershot argument for science denialism out of fealty to "the free market." Devore decries social distancing, emphasizes the effects of "the Wuhan flu" on the restaurant industry, and endorses some of Trump's favorite questionable treatment options (e.g. hydrochloroquine) and the far-right Internet's favorite anti-Chinese conspiracy theories. Concluding on a ceremonial note, he invokes the classic Patrick Henry quote "give me liberty or give me death!" as he predicts that our "competition"-oriented healthcare system will ultimately save us from this crisis, while simultaneously implying that re-opening Applebee’s should be our national priority.
Lastly, Sophie shares some awful tweets from Matthew John Dowd and Buck Sexton, both of whom argue that social distancing is doing more harm than the mass death which would surely follow abandoning social distancing. A few days later, Sexton tweets a friend's report of devastation in a New York hospital, demanding that his followers "pray" for the victims. Across all of these takes, we notice a consistent theme of moral vanity, nihilism, and sacrificial devotion to the capitalist economy. In response, we propose that after COVID-19, the economy might just need to change a little!
Texts Analyzed in this Episode
J. (Mar. 19, 2020). The Media Are Embarrassing Themselves Over Trump’s Use Of ‘Chinese Virus’. The Federalist.
Devore, C. (Apr 6, 2020). Freedom Means Letting People Make Risk Calculations About Coronavirus. The Federalist.
https://twitter.com/matthewjdowd/status/1242197861170847744
https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3861001
https://twitter.com/BuckSexton/status/1243656276997033985
With COVID-19 necessarily reducing our face-to-face interaction, we are increasingly reliant on digital tools -- from conferencing software like Zoom to social networks like Twitter -- to mediate our social, political, and cultural lives. Yet each digital tool brings along specific rhetorical affordances and constraints, a topic that few scholars have studied more closely in recent years than our guest this week, James J. Brown, Jr. (@jamesjbrownjr), Associate Professor of English and Director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers University.
In remote conversation, Calvin and James discuss the continuing relevance of notions of digital hospitality and ethos from James's 2015 book Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software, as well as new research James is conducting on the problem of harassment on communication platforms -- from early-20th-century phone network subscribers to today's Twitter trolls. As part of this work, James's new piece in Amodern, "Epicrisis for an Epic Crisis", analyzes rhetorical strategies used by women and people of color to comment on and catalogue instances of bad communicative behavior on platforms and networks. Along the way, we touch upon the value of records, fantasy baseball, and videogames at times like these, as well as why Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is the undisputed master of the quote-tweet.
@tressiemcphd’s quote-tweet-thread in response to James’s article
References
Brock Jr, A. (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (Vol. 9). NYU Press.
Brown, J. J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software. University of Michigan Press.
Brown, J. J. (2020). Epicrisis for an epic crisis. Amodern, 9.
Campbell, K. K. (2005). Agency: Promiscuous and protean. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2(1), 1-19.
Derrida, J., & Dufourmantelle, A. (2000). Of hospitality. Stanford University Press.
Hyde, M. J. (Ed.). (2004). The ethos of rhetoric. University of South Carolina Press.
Lanham, R. A. (1991). A handlist of rhetorical terms. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rollins, B. (2005). The ethics of epideictic rhetoric: Addressing the problem of presence through Derrida's funeral orations. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(1), 5-23.
Rosenfield, L. W. (1980). The practical celebration of epideictic. Rhetoric in transition: Studies in the nature and uses of rhetoric, 131-55.
Walker, J. (2000). Rhetoric and poetics in antiquity. Oxford University Press.
The spread of COVID-19 has changed the way we see our own relationship to space and mobility. Within this state of emergency, disparities in access are made more stark: as certain sectors of workers are able to continue their jobs under quarantine and observing social distancing guidelines while other sectors are forced into dangerous forms of mobility, borders old and new are being inscribed and reinscribed through austerity measures. The present crisis has exposed not only the existence but the extremity of this precarity, and has the paradoxical effect of making it seem like a shockwave momentarily fissuring our otherwise justsystem.
To explore some of these increasingly-relevant issues, we focus today’s episode around two discussions of the concept of “mobility” and how it functions in culture. The first is a free-roaming conversation between Alex and (newly-minted on the mic) co-producer Ben Williams about their shared experiences and reflections living in self-isolated “stasis,” as well as how the language of crisis in the era of COVID-19 belies structural inequalities already experienced by certain groups in our society. The second is an interview with Dr. Marian Aguiar, a professor of literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Aguiar has focused on issues in globalization, postcolonial studies, and feminism, and her recent work on refugee mobilities explores transnationalism through the ways we represent and imagine movement.
During this latter conversation with Dr. Aguiar, we examine what it means to be displaced, and how various accounts of migration stabilize and destabilize representations of refugeehood through narratives, visual documentation, and art installations. Finally, we focus on the systemic currentsthat subject those who’ve been displaced to drifts as they cross national borders and seek asylum, as well as the affective currents that both help and hinder advocacy struggles over immigration policy and expanding the freedom of movement.
Dr. Marian Aguiar’s work on space, place, and mobility
Aguiar, M. (2011). Tracking Modernity India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility. University of Minnesota Press.
Aguiar, M. (2018). Arranging Marriage Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora. University of Minnesota Press.
Aguiar, M., Mathieson, C., & Pearce, L. (2019). Mobilities, literature, culture. Palgrave Macmillan.
Works and Concepts cited in this Episode
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
Bissell, D. (2007). Animating suspension: waiting for mobilities. Mobilities, 2(2), 277-298.
Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Harvard University Press.
Coetzee, J. M. (1980). Waiting for the barbarians. Penguin Books.
Cresswell, T. (2006). On the move: Mobility in the modern western world. Taylor & Francis.
Cresswell, T. (2014). Place: an introduction. John Wiley & Sons.
Debord, G. (2012). Theory of the derive [originally published 1958]. Situationist International Anthology, 50-54.
Lancione, M. & Simone, A. (2020). Bio-austerity and solidarity in the Covid-19 space of emergency - episode one. Society and Space. Retrieved from: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/bio-austerity-and-solidarity-in-the-covid-19-space-of-emergency
Lautor, B. (2020). Is this a dress rehearsal? Critical Inquiry. Retrieved from:
https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/
Malkki, L. (1996). Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology, 11(3), 377–404.
Nguyen, L., & McCallum, K. (2016). Drowning in our own home: a metaphor-led discourse analysis of Australian news media reporting on maritime asylum seekers. Communication Research and Practice, 2(2), 159-176.
Santa Ana, O. (2002). Brown tide rising: Metaphors of Latinos in contemporary American public discourse. University of Texas Press.
Steinberg, P., & Peters, K. (2015). Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: Giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking. Society and Space, 33(2), 247-264.
Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: on blackness and being. Duke University Press.
Cover image: Ai Weiwei’s art installation: covering the Berlin Konzerthaus with life jackets used by refugees crossing the Mediterranean.
For the inaugural episode in our new series on Space, Place, and Mobility, re:verb co-producer Sophie Wodzak sits down with Alisha B. Wormsley, a Pittsburgh-based interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Wormsley’s work bridges public art, social engagement, science fiction, and political activism to reveal forgotten histories and imagine alternative futures. Through innovative public works like the There Are Black People in the Future billboard (which we discussed back in Episode 6), The People are the Light, and her current project, the Sibyls Shrine Residency Program, Wormsley uses her art to engage a diverse array of audiences in exploring the beauty and rich history of black communities in Pittsburgh.
In this interview, Sophie talks with Alisha about her past and present work and the ways that it plays with concepts of space and place to help us critically interrogate our notions of belonging and community. They also discuss the self-transformative power of traditionally-marginalized knowledges such as black witchcraft, and how such practices are being revived in contemporary art and culture as modes of empowerment.
Links to Alisha Wormsley’s Work:
https://alishabwormsley.com/projects
https://alishabwormsley.com/public-works
https://alishabwormsley.com/film
https://alishabwormsley.com/exhibitions
https://alishabwormsley.com/buy-art
https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/alisha-b-wormsley-and-ricardo-iamuuri-robinson-take-multimedia-installation-streaming-space-to-market-square/Content?oid=14709509
https://www.wesa.fm/post/there-are-black-people-future-resident-artists-present-their-projects#stream/0
Recently, millions of potential US voters heard newly-unearthed comments made in 2015 by Michael Bloomberg -- the billionaire, former New York City Mayor, and current Democratic presidential primary candidate. In his remarks, Bloomberg vociferously defended stop-and-frisk, an NYPD policy directive that disproportionately targeted poor people and minorities for warrantless searches. The controversy over Bloomberg’s remarks raise questions about how the former Republican has risen to near the top of the polls despite having a policy record and political ideology largely out of step with the current Democratic Party.
On today’s episode, we speak to Benjamin Dixon, the independent journalist, commentator, and activist who publicized the 2015 Bloomberg stop-and-frisk comments via his Twitter and YouTube accounts on February 10. Since then, Dixon has continued to use his platform to publicize and problematize Bloomberg’s record and rhetoric. We ask Ben about Bloomberg’s history and governing philosophy, the corporate media’s coverage of the Democratic primary, and the overwhelming role of economic power in electoral politics. We conclude by discussing the best practices for political advocacy that Ben has developed based on this and his other work.
Reference Material:
Dixon’s un-earthed audio of Bloomberg’s comments on "Stop and Frisk"
Dixon’s unearthed audio of Bloomberg’s comments on “Black and Latino Males”
Dixon’s original tweet publicizing the Bloomberg audio
Dixon’s recent article on Bloomberg’s comments in The Guardian: “Bloomberg is avoiding all scrutiny. It’s time to take a long, hard look at his views”
Aspen Times: “Michael Bloomberg blocks footage of Aspen Institute appearance”
Bloomberg’s response to questions about his stop & frisk comments
Interview with Benjamin Dixon in Jacobin: “Michael Bloomberg’s Campaign Is an Insult to Democracy”
In this re:joinder episode, Calvin presents Alex and Sophie with a set of op-eds -- all published in ostensibly liberal magazines -- that retroactively justify President Trump’s Jan. 3, 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, major general of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. In our analysis, we expose the presuppositions latent in these articles’ narratives of post-9/11 US foreign policy, filling in some missing context about US ground and proxy wars in the Middle East since the second-half of the 20th century. We break down the tactics used in these articles to construct Soleimani as an enemy figure for US & European audiences, part of a broader US strategy of demonizing the government of Iran. We also compare these pieces to discourses about prior US assassination targets such as ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Finally, we consider how American war discourse is shaped by our (lack of) proximity to its material consequences, and consider how this constrains political possibilities in the US.
Texts Analyzed in this Episode
Aarabi, K. (Jan. 7, 2020). Suleimani’s Killing Could Change the Middle East for the Better. Foreign Policy.
Bergen, P. (Jan 3, 2020). The killing of Iran's General Soleimani is hugely significant (opinion). CNN.com.
Sadjapour, K. (Jan 9, 2020). “Why the U.S. Assassination of Soleimani Is a Windfall for Iran's Mullahs.” Time.
Relevant Works of Rhetorical Scholarship
Cap, P. (2013). Legitimisation in Political Discourse: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective on the Modern US War Rhetoric. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Cloud, D. L. (2004). “To veil the threat of terror”: Afghan women and the
Engels, J., & Saas, W. O. (2013). On acquiescence and ends-less war: An inquiry into the new war rhetoric. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 99(2), 225-232.
Flanagan, J. C. (2004). Woodrow Wilson's" Rhetorical Restructuring": The Transformation of the American Self and the Construction of the German Enemy. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 7(2), 115-148.
Ivie, R. L. (1980). Images of savagery in American justifications for war. Communications Monographs, 47(4), 279-294.
Lakoff, G. (1991). Metaphor and war: The metaphor system used to justify war in the Gulf. Peace Research, 25-32.
Oddo, J. (2011). War legitimation discourse: Representing ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in four US presidential addresses. Discourse & Society, 22(3), 287-314.
Oddo, J. (2014). Intertextuality and the 24-hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell's UN Address. Michigan State University Press.
Oddo, J. (2018). The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State Press.
Vicaro, M. P. (2016). Deconstitutive rhetoric: The destruction of legal personhood in the Global War on Terrorism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(4), 333-352.
Wander, P. (1984). The rhetoric of American foreign policy. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(4), 339-361.
In this re:blurb episode, producers and co-hosts Alex and Calvin are re-joined by contributor and co-producer Sophie to discuss the many kinds of Irony, and the unique ways in which this form of humor manifests itself on our favorite website, twitter dot com.
First, we review the three main kinds of irony most often taught in schools--verbal, situational, and dramatic--all of which ask us to hold understandings of multiple, sometimes contradictory “realities” against one another. While the irony we encounter in literature tends to be “stable,” with one clear interpretation, in everyday discourse we are more often met with “unstable” irony, which invites a multitude of possible interpretations.
Or discussion of unstable irony leads us to “irony poisoning,” an emerging trend in online discourse in which people become so accustomed to edgy humor they adopt the premise of unstable irony as a worldview. But we also consider whether Irony might have the potential to open us up to new ways of viewing the world, turning to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Rorty to discuss “Ironism,” a philosophy that holds all truths as partial truths, so that no one way of seeing the world can be considered absolute. We point out that this ironist worldview can be instructive when using rhetoric to articulate our views of reality and our place within it.
Finally, for a more practical discussion of these different conceptions of irony, we turn to several examples plucked from twitter, and consider the various ways we see irony being deployed in online discourse.
A partial transcript for this episode can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oELsrsu7lzQxZJPYxvdFz5-I8u5xUphSzA17Qyz1D7c/edit?usp=sharing
Tweets Referenced in Analysis:
Alex’s Example: The “Hot Take” / Plausible Deniability Combo
https://twitter.com/mattzeitlin/status/1178701629060722688
https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1178739225312800775
Sophie’s Examples
Baby Yoda Tattoo Hoax: https://twitter.com/boring_as_heck/status/1202395122064904193
Wealthy Boomer “Claps Back” at Millenials: https://twitter.com/Swarthyface/status/1194461368709074945
Calvin’s Examples
“Extremely normal”: https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/942836994257891328
“You Hate to See It”: https://twitter.com/MalaikaJabali/status/1195552337651257344
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Booth, W. C. (1974). A rhetoric of irony. University of Chicago Press.
Nietzsche, F. (originally published 1896) On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense. Retrieved from: http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_7421.pdf
Rorty, R. M. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge University Press.
Tobin, V., & Israel, M. (2012). Irony as a viewpoint phenomenon. Viewpoint in language: A multimodal perspective, 25-46.
Further Reading on Irony:
Carston, R., & Wearing, C. (2015). Hyperbolic language and its relation to metaphor and irony. Journal of Pragmatics, 79, 79-92.
Gibbs, R. W., & Colston, H. L. (Eds.). (2007). Irony in language and thought: A cognitive science reader. Lawrence Erlbaum.
Renegar, V. R., & Sowards, S. K. (2003). Liberal irony, rhetoric, and feminist thought: A unifying third wave feminist theory. Philosophy & rhetoric, 36(4), 330-352.
Tobin, V. (2016). Performance, irony, and viewpoint in language. In Blair, R. & Cook, A. (eds.), Theatre, performance and cognition: Language, bodies, and ecologies (pp. 54-67). Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.
Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1992). On verbal irony. Lingua, 87(1), 53-76.
Today we have the distinct privilege of discussing horror cinema, culture, and politics with Kendall Phillips, professor in the department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. Kendall’s work focuses on the ways popular culture intersects with discursive and affective tensions within society, with a focus on public memory, controversy, and popular cinema. Among his other work, Kendall is the author of three books on the rhetoric of horror films, the most recent of which is entitled A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema.
Our conversation touches on the ways that horror films have historically reflected the fears of the societies that produce them, pushing at the sensitive edges of controversial and dark topics. We discuss some early iterations of the horror film genre before taking an in-depth look at the cultural themes contained in the films of George Romero, John Carpenter, and Wes Craven (all directors studied in Kendall's 2012 book, Dark Directions). Finally, we ruminate on whether we are currently experiencing a "third golden age" of horror cinema, and what kinds of contemporary cultural fears could be driving the commercial success of horror films in the past decade.
Films Referenced in this Episode
Le Manoir du Diable released in U.S. as The Haunted Castle
The James Boys in Missouri (1908)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Dracula (1931)
Frankenstein (1931)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Day of the Dead (1985)
Land of the Dead (2005)
The Thing (1982)
Halloween (1978)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
The Last House on the Left (1972)
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Scream (1996)
Paranormal Activity (2007)
Insidious (2010)
The Conjuring (2013)
The Babadook (2014)
Get Out (2017)
Hereditary (2018)
Us (2019)
Midsommar (2019)
The Witch (2015)
The Lighthouse (2019)
Gwen (2018)
The Ritual (2017)
Ready or Not (2019)
Annabelle (2014)
Joker (2019)
Works Cited in this Episode
Calafell, B. M. (2016). Monstrosity, performance, and race in contemporary culture. Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers.
Phillips, K. R. (1999). A rhetoric of controversy. Western Journal of Communication, 63(4), 488-510.
Phillips, K. (2005). Projected fears: Horror films and American culture. Praeger.
Phillips, K. R. (2012). Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film. Southern Illinois University Press.
Phillips, K. R. (2018). A place of darkness: The rhetoric of horror in early American cinema. University of Texas Press.
Williams, L. (1991). Body Genres. Film Quarterly, 44(4), 2-13.
Wood, R. (1984). An introduction to the American horror film. Movies and methods, 2, 195-220.
This week, we’re keeping the laughs going with the second installment in our Rhetorics of Comedy series! In this episode, Calvin speaks with two comedians he met doing stand-up in Beijing, who are now performing comedy in other international locales: Greg Hutt (in Sofia, Bulgaria) and Paul Creasy (in London, UK). In each of these conversations, Calvin and our guests discuss their experiences performing comedy for a diverse array of different audiences around the world, exploring how ideas about place and cultural norms affect their processes of writing and performing comedy.
Comedians, Works, and Concepts Referenced in This Episode:
John Mulaney
Shortform vs. longform improv
Zwarte Piet (blackface character associated with the Christmas season in the Netherlands)
The President Show (feat. Trump impressionist Anthony Atamanuik)
Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Tim Vine (UK pun comedian)
Anti-comedy
Neil Hamburger
Zach Galifianakis
James Adomian (US impressionist)
“Knock Yourselves Out”, an article by Ben Schwartz that explains the distinction between “punching down” and “punching up”
Plugs:
Greg Hutt Comedy on Facebook
Paul Creasy (@spanielapplause) on Twitter
Paul Creasy’s YouTube channel
Who says rhetoric can’t make you laugh? And who says making people laugh isn’t rhetorical? Today’s show is the first in a series on Rhetorics of Comedy, in which we interrogate the connections between humor, discourse, and contemporary life.
In Part 1, we bring you a discussion with three local standup comics working in Pittsburgh, PA: Jared Helfer, Tom Higgins, and Lorenzo DiSilvio. We explore the rhetorical dimensions of what they do, ranging from how they define funny (and not funny), their strategies for developing and editing new material, how they negotiate their relationships with audiences and their own “personas” on stage, and their metacognitive processes as writers and performers. We even manage to work in a few jokes!
Jared Helfer on Instagram: @mysticalhoot
Tom Higgins on Twitter: @homtiggins
Check out Lorenzo DiSilvio’s monthly comedy show in Pittsburgh, “A Good Night Out”, which takes place the last Saturday of every month at the Steel City Improv Theater. Tickets for the upcoming Oct. 26 show are available here.
In this re:joinder episode, producers and co-hosts Alex and Calvin are re-joined by contributor and co-producer Sophie to roast two op-eds that criticize proposed plans to lower the price of college tuition and eliminate student loan debt.
In the first article, Who Will Take a Paycut for Free College, published in the august and impartial Wallstreet Journal, author Joseph Epstein argues that we while the promise of free college might sound appealing, when it comes to higher education, “you get what you pay for.” Taking for granted that tuition funding would need to come out of the budgets of higher education institutions themselves, Epstein suggests that universities might do well to eliminate courses in ‘victimology,’ pay professors by the hour, and turn over profits from university sports programs to the federal government to foot the bill of free college for all. Parsing the many cynical assumptions that underpin this argument, Alex, Calvin, and Sophie note that Epstein has handily overlooked the fact that the costs of these proposals would be shouldered by taxes on the wealthy and on Wall Street transactions (a plan that many economists have determined would be sound fiscal policy). Our co-hosts push back on Epstein’s attempt to coerce his audience into believing that free higher education would be bad through a series of “hypotheticals” about what this kind of change would require, and criticize the author’s failure to try and understand the price of attending a modern university.
In the second article, published in Human Events, Mary Claire Amselem argues “no. Period. Your student loan debt should not be forgiven. Period.” Amselem invokes the grim specters of senators Sanders and Warren to blast the notion that we could forgive student loan debt and provide free university education. In a flurry of nominalizations, the author concedes that student loan debt is undesirable and burdensome, but nevertheless maintains that loan forgiveness would create more problems than it solves. Citing imaginary consensus that eliminating student loan debt would be bad policy because it would promote fiscal irresponsibility, Anselem makes the bogus claim that student loan debt is only incurred by those too irresponsible to manage their finances and make smart decisions, and that student loan forgiveness plans would burden the American taxpayer. Our hosts point out that Anselem’s argument relies not only on stark a lack of data about the cost of higher education, but also on the false dichotomies she draws in order to pit the middle class against itself (namely, students vs. taxpayers, and low-wage earners vs. the college educated). Though Amselem would have us believe that low earners will be forced to subsidize other people’s debt under these plans, our hosts once again point out that in fact, the funding for these programs would come from progressive taxation on the wealthy and targeted taxing of Wall Street speculation. Like Epstein, Amselem invokes cynical rhetoric to encourage her readers to see the enemy next them rather than the enemy up above, in an effort to manipulate the audience into seeing things her way.
We round out the episode pointing out that both authors arguments are based not on factual support, but instead on cruel assumptions and an unwillingness to examine the facts and data about the cost of education today, as well as the economic forces that have brought about the student loan crisis in the first place. Both authors seem to overlook the structural inequalities that have worked to create the well-educated but low earning college graduates lambasted in the articles. We conclude that both athour’s arguments attempt to confirm people’s worst suspicions about higher education, and we question the material interests working behind the scenes at both publications that are invested in promoting these cynical perspectives.
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode
Amselem, M. C. (2019, 28 June). No, your student loans should not be forgiven. Human Events. Retrieved from: https://humanevents.com/2019/06/28/no-your-student-loans-should-not-be-forgiven/
Epstein, J. (2019, 17 July). Who’ll take a pay cut for free college? The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/wholl-take-a-pay-cut-for-free-college-11563404022?mod=rsswn
Grewal, D. (2012, 10 Apr.). How wealth reduces compassion: As riches grow, empathy for others seems to decline. Scientific American. Retrieved from: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces-compassion/
Piff, P. K., Stancato, D.M., Côté, S., Mendoza-Denton, R., Keltner, D. (2012). Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Mar. 2012, 109(11), pp. 4086-4091. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1118373109
Stiglitz, J. E. (2014). Reforming taxation to promote growth and equity. Roosevelt Institute. Retrieved from: https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Stiglitz_Reforming_Taxation_White_Paper_Roosevelt_Institute.pdf [White paper from Nobel Laureate and economist Joseph Stiglitz advocating for the utility of progressive taxation policies and financial transaction taxes]
On today’s show, Alex and Calvin discuss demagoguery and far-right rhetoric with CV Vitolo-Haddad, a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Director of Debate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In particular, we discuss CV’s recent publication in Rhetoric Society Quarterly - “The Blood of Patriots: Symbolic Violence and “The West” - which focuses on the rhetoric of the far-right group known as the “Proud Boys.”
This article explores how the Proud Boys are motivated by an imagined, at-risk spatial terrain of whiteness known as “the West” (or “Western civilization”). In our discussion, CV explains what such groups’ demagogic rhetoric can teach us about the paradoxes of demagoguery more broadly: from their vacillation between a rhetoric of strength and violence to one of victimization and precarity, to their attachment to “a libertarian aesthetic of freedom” which often occludes their truly authoritarian politics. We also discuss the pros and cons of publicly debating the far-right, with CV sharing some best practices from direct experience.
Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode
Roberts-Miller, P. (2017). Demagoguery and democracy. The Experiment.
Roberts-Miller, P. (2019). Rhetoric and demagoguery. SIU Press.
Vitolo-Haddad, C. V. (2019). The blood of patriots: Symbolic violence and “the west”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49(3), 280-296.
Walden, D. (2018, 28 June). Dismantling the “west.” Current Affairs. Retrieved from: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/06/dismantling-the-west
CV’s Twitter
CV’s Medium
In this re:blurb episode, we explore the history and theory of the rhetorical concept of genre. First, we take a tour through the classical genres of forensic, deliberative, and epideictic speech, before moving on to contemporary theories about genres’ profound and complex social functions. In doing so, we describe how genres mediate everyday social interactions through communicative rules and norms, as well as how political power dynamics affect gatekeepers’ decisions about what kinds of practices are allowable within particular genres.
Then, we’re joined by Martha Sue Karnes, a PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Austin, to discuss the genre-based controversy surrounding the hit song “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X. OTR was notoriously removed from Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart because, according to Billboard, it did not adhere to the genre norms of country music. Through this analysis, we take a closer look at the kinds of social actions that Lil Nas X has accomplished through “Old Town Road” over the course of its viral popularity — actions which may help explain why the song has maintained its place at the top of the charts for 17 weeks running.
“Old Town Road” Videos Referenced:
Original version
Remix feat. Billy Ray Cyrus
Remix feat. Billy Ray Cyrus, Young Thug, & Mason Ramsey
OTR Area 51 Video
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Alvarez, S. (2017). Latinx and Latin American Community Literacy Practices en Confianza. Composition Studies, 45(2), 219-269.
Bawarshi, A. (2016). Beyond the genre fixation: A translingual perspective on genre. College English, 78(3), 243-249.
Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. N. (1993). Rethinking genre from a sociocognitive perspective. Written communication, 10(4), 475-509.
Bhatia, V. K. (1997). The power and politics of genre. World Englishes, 16(3), 359-371.
Caramanica, Jon. (2019, 17 Apr.). “A History of Country-Rap in 29 Songs.” The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/arts/music/country-rap-playlist.html
DeNatale, Dave “Dino”. (2019, 29 May.) “WATCH I Lil Nas X gives performance of 'Old Town Road' for students at Lander Elementary School in Mayfield Heights.” WKYC 3. Retrieved from: https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/watch-lil-nas-x-gives-performance-of-old-town-road-for-students-at-lander-elementary-school-in-mayfield-heights/95-c04e8cdb-41b2-48f5-bb05-b112126a9cf9
Gonzales, L. (2015). Multimodality, translingualism, and rhetorical genre studies. Composition Forum, 31.
Hart, R. P., & Dillard, C.L. (2001) Deliberative genre. In T. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (pp. 209-217). Oxford University Press.
Leight, E. (2019, 26 Mar.). How Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” was a country hit. Then country changed its mind. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/lil-nas-x-old-town-road-810844/
Lihua, L. (2010). Interpersonal rhetoric in the editorials of China Daily: A generic perspective. Peter Lang.
Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly journal of speech, 70(2), 151-167.
Morrow, T. S. (2001) Forensic genre. In T. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (pp. 314-321). Oxford University Press.
Rounsaville, A. (2017). Genre repertoires from below: How one writer built and moved a writing life across generations, borders, and communities. Research in the Teaching of English, 51(3), 317-340.
Sisario, Ben. (2019, 5 Apr.). “Lil Nas X Added Billy Ray Cyrus to ‘Old Town Road.’ Is It Country Enough for Billboard Now?” The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/business/media/lil-nas-x-billy-ray-cyrus-billboard.html
Too, Y. L. (2001). Epideictic genre. In T. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (pp. 251-257). Oxford University Press.
On today’s show, we’re getting in the summer spirit by firing up the grill and roasting some more scorching hot bad takes with another installment in our re:joinder series. In this episode, Alex and Calvin dish over two articles that make a similar specious presumption: universities are suppressing freedom of speech, and thus need to be stripped of their funding altogether. Or, at least the humanities disciplines do.
The first article comes to us from Quillette, entitled “Federal Funding, the First Amendment, and Free Speech on Campus” by Lauren Cooley. In it, Cooley makes the argument that universities which receive federal research dollars become extensions of the federal government, and are thus bound by the same first amendment laws laid out in the U.S. constitution - if true, this would essentially make it unconstitutional for such a university to deny or cancel invited speakers to college campuses. Calvin and Alex parse through some of the genuine free speech concerns laid out by the argument, while also acknowledging its flaws and contradictions - primarily, that the only examples given of “stifled” speech are already-famous people with large platforms who are bankrolled by major interest groups, as well as the stated caveat that private universities (such as religious institutions) should be conveniently exempted from adherence to first amendment principles. The fatal contradiction, however, comes from the author’s primary suggestion that President Trump can (and should) use his executive authority to cut off research funding for universities who refuse to provide a platform for the likes of Milo Yiannopolous or Peter Thiel - or, in other words, use government power to stifle and coerce speech practices on college campuses.
The second, slightly more extreme article comes from Roger Kimball via the New York Post, entitled “PC Insanity May Mean the End of American Universities.” Here, Kimball delivers a salvo of garbled metaphors and inflammatory rantings about the “violence” being committed by politically correct leftists, who Kimball claims are chilling the speech of conservative voices on college campuses. In addition to pointing out how the author over-states the “free speech problem” to an extreme degree, Calvin and Alex question his incredible assumption that this “crisis” represents “a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization.” Additionally, and perhaps most frighteningly, Kimball more explicitly calls for universities - and humanities disciplines in particular - to be called to heel through “starving” them of their funding.
We conclude our roast of these terrible takes with a meditation on the politics of “free speech” on campuses and attempts to stifle and undermine humanities research, tracing the roots of “anti-PC” reactionary conservatism in the self-contradicting ideologies of logical positivism and “Western civilization” fetishism.
Cover image source
This week’s show features a discussion about collective action, solidarity, and labor organizing with Penn State English PhD Student and organizer Doug Kulchar. In this conversation, Calvin and Alex talk with Doug about methods of leveraging employee power in workplaces, why bosses and other people in positions of power are often opposed to unions, and Doug’s own experience organizing a graduate student union campaign at Penn State. Through these discussions, we touch on the ways in which concepts such as literacy, translation, and rhetorical listening can help us understand the skills necessary to build effective social movements around shared problems.
Connect with Doug on Twitter: @dkulchar
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode
Burke, K. (1965). Terministic screens. In Proceedings of the American Catholic philosophical association, 39, pp. 87-102.
Burke, K. (1969). A rhetoric of motives. University of California Press.
[Contains an articulation of the concept “identification”]
Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Herder.
Glenn, C., & Ratcliffe, K. (2011). Introduction: Why silence and listening are important rhetorical arts. In Silence and listening as rhetorical arts (pp. 1-19). Southern Illinois University Press.
Schaeffer, J. D. (2004). Sensus communis. Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, 278.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1970). The german ideology (Vol. 1). International Publishers Co.
Ratcliffe, K. (1999). Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a" Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct". College Composition and Communication, 51(2), 195-224.
Ratcliffe, K. (2005). Rhetorical listening: Identification, gender, whiteness. SIU Press.
Schneider, S.A. (2014). You can’t padlock an idea: Rhetorical education at the Highlander Folk School, 1932-1961. Univ of South Carolina Press, 2014.
Wikipedia article on the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryn_Mawr_Summer_School_for_Women_Workers_in_Industry
Further Reading
Brandt, Deborah. (2001). Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge University Press.
Castells, Manuel. (2013) Communication Power. Oxford University Press.
Cushman, E. (1996). The rhetorician as an agent of social change. College Composition and Communication, 47(1), pp. 7–28.
Gee, J.P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Taylor & Francis.
Gere, A.R. (1994). Kitchen tables and rented rooms: The extracurriculum of composition. College Composition and Communication, 45(1), pp. 75–92.
Hampton, F. (1969). Power anywhere where there’s people. Speech delivered at Olivet Church. Retrieved from: https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fhamptonspeech.html
Heath, S.B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge University Press.
Kelley, R.D.G. (2015). Hammer and hoe: Alabama communists during the great depression. UNC Press Books.
Latour, Bruno. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.
Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern.” Critical Inquiry, 30(2), pp. 225–48.
May, M.S. (2013). Soapbox rebellion: The Hobo Orator Union and the free speech fights of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1909-1916. University of Alabama Press.
Polletta, F. (2019). It was like a fever. University of Chicago Press.
Rai, C. (2016). Democracy’s lot: Rhetoric, publics, and the places of invention. University of Alabama Press.
Scott, T. (2009). Dangerous writing: Understanding the political economy of composition. Utah State University Press.
Selber, S. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age. SIU Press.
Spinuzzi, C. (2015). All edge: Inside the new workplace networks. University of Chicago Press.
Wan, A.J. (2014). Producing good citizens: Literacy training in anxious times. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Wenger, E. (1999) Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.
Content Warning The article referenced in today’s episode includes vague to explicit misogyny and transphobic discourse, as well as references to sexual violence and assault.
Irony Warning The producers of this podcast disagree with and strongly condemn the argument set forth in the article referenced in this episode. Any intimations to the contrary are entirely a performance for the sake of comedic irony or parody.
Today, we introduce a new style of episode called re:joinder, in which we read an article of ~questionable~ merit dealing with academia, rhetoric, and/or politics and give you our real-time reactions to its problematic content. For our first re:joinder, Alex reads an article he picked out for Calvin and our special guest, Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric Maggie Goss. The article in question: “Why Traditional Masculinity is Good for Academia” by Samuel Veissière.
Published in Areo - an online magazine from the progenitors of the “Sokal Squared” hoax - Veissière’s argument begins from the premise that it is men, not women, who are structurally disadvantaged in society in general, and academia in particular. The author (who is, ironically, a tenure-track faculty member at McGill University) also argues that “traditional masculinity” is not only unfairly maligned in contemporary academia, but also an untapped resource for reform of academia’s worst aspects — from the purported closing and coddling of young minds, all the way up to the very real problems of widespread sexual harassment and assault on campuses. Yes, Veissière actually argues that more masculinity could help reduce sexual violence against women. In response, Calvin, Maggie, and Alex discuss the article’s spurious reasoning, lack of evidence, and oddball assumptions before presenting their own ideas for how to address the downsides of hegemonic masculinity.
Works and Concepts Cited In This Episode
Burmila, E. (2018, 6 April). Scientific racism isn’t ‘back’--it never went away. The Nation. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/scientific-racism-isnt-back-it-never-went-away/ [On the concept of “scientific racism” theories put forth by Charles Murray and others]
Crenshaw, K. (1990). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stan. L. Rev., 43, 1241.
Ruti, M. (2015). The age of scientific sexism: How evolutionary psychology promotes gender profiling and fans the battle of the sexes. Bloomsbury Academic. [This book analyzes and provides a strong critique for the worldview that Veissière is basing his argument upon]
Read these two works by Edward Said for more on why placing “Israel” and “Islam” in a dichotomous relationship is reductive and harmful:
Said, E. W. (1992). The question of Palestine. Vintage.
Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. Vintage.
On this week’s episode, Alex, Calvin, and Caitlan seek a formal definition of True Crime, identifying the strategies, rhetorical and otherwise, that have elevated the genre and its diverse sub-genres to the realm of cultural obsession. Our hosts discuss what distinguishes True Crime from “untrue” crime shows or other types of “true” content related to crime. They then explore how medium structure, genre features, and various narrative techniques are employed to captivate and motivate consumers of True Crime—particularly in new media that draw on audience participation to push their reporting forward.
Our hosts go on to analyze how “new” True Crime - like the podcast Serial or the docu-series Making a Murderer - takes its audience behind the curtain of the criminal justice system, and how these media combine a creative approach to storytelling with a journalistic search for truth when presenting cases of public interest. How does a sharp focus on evidence gathering raise public consciousness around the miscarriage of justice? Our hosts also begin to untangle the ethical implications for those producing and consuming True Crime. When popular series cash in on the public’s morbid fascination for sensational stories, does this decision serve to unethically commodify our consumption of tragic events?
As our hosts discuss their favorite True Crime productions—as well as those that they find more problematic—they probe the critical potential of the genre. Can rigorous reporting open up the dialogic space for alternative narratives in unsolved cases? Can certain genre tropes, like exposing coerced confessions, work in the service of social justice? Ultimately, what can True Crime do, and what is it currently doing, to affect our politics and public culture?
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode
Boudet, M. (Host). (2013). Sword and Scale [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from http://swordandscale.com/.
Buozis, M. (2017). Giving Voice to the Accused: Serial and the Critical Potential of True Crime. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 14(3), 254-270.
Dittrich, S. (Writer). (2018). Murder Mountain. [Television series]. Toronto, CA: Lightbox.
Kilgariff , K and Hardstark, G (Hosts). My Favorite Murder. [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.myfavoritemurder.com/about.
Koenig, S. (Host). (2014). Serial [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://serialpodcast.org/.
Mahdawi, A. (16 Oct. 2018). As Making a Murderer returns, is the obsession with true crime turning nasty? The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/oct/16/making-a-murderer-is-our-obsession-with-true-crime-turning-nasty-serial
Seltzer, M. (2008). Murder/media/modernity. Canadian Review of American Studies, 38(1), 11-41.
Zaillian, S. and Marsh, J.(Directors). (2016). The Night Of [Television Series.] New York, NY: HBO.
Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like you just had to say something -- where the words came to you so naturally, they almost felt like they were being dictated by your circumstances? Or, have you ever struggled over how to respond when people around you don’t quite see things the same way you do? In each of these instances, you might’ve been reckoning with a rhetorical situation.
In our latest re:blurb mini-episode, Colleen, Calvin, Alex, and Caitlan break down this core concept from rhetorical scholarship. We begin by discussing Lloyd Bitzer’s original framework, in which he lays out the three key components of a rhetorical situation: exigence, audience, and constraints. Then, we chart the ways in which Richard Vatz’s rejoinder to Bitzer’s model challenges its assumptions about the origin point of meaning, introducing the idea that speakers and their rhetorics control how we understand situations, and not the other way around. Then, we discuss two attempts to reconcile the Bitzer-Vatz disjunct: Barbara Biesecker’s integration of Derrida’s concept of différance and Jenny Rice’s “rhetorical ecologies” framework, both of which are designed to further problematize our assumptions about rhetoric, language, and communicative responses to exigent circumstances.
Finally, we put the concepts we’ve discussed into practice through an analysis of three different responses to the recent attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand: from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Australian Senator Fraser Anning. We show how each of these public figures frame the situation facing New Zealand (and the world) differently. In the case of the latter two speakers, we examine how an “affective ecology” of white nationalist and Islamophobic sentiments emboldened them to circulate discourse purporting to mourn the loss of life in Muslim and immigrant communities while also blaming them for other problems -- including, absurdly, the attack itself.
Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Biesecker, B. A. (1989). Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of 'Différance'. Philosophy & rhetoric, 22(2), 110-130.
Bitzer, L. F. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy & rhetoric, 1(1), 1-14.
Edbauer, J. [now Rice, J.] (2005). Unframing models of public distribution: From rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(4), 5-24.
Vatz, R. E. (1973). The myth of the rhetorical situation. Philosophy & rhetoric, 6(3), 154-161.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s initial statement on the Christchurch attack: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/one-of-new-zealands-darkest-days-jacinda-ardern-responds-to-christchurch-shooting
U.S. President Donald Trump’s comments on the Christchurch attack (both his tweets and his press conference) can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2019/mar/15/christchurch-shooting-injuries-reported-as-police-respond-to-critical-incident-live?page=with:block-5c8c218fe4b016d23425cef2
Fraser Anning’s official statement on the Christchurch attack can be found here: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/new-zealand-mosque-shooting-outrage-as-farright-australian-senator-fraser-anning-links-massacre-to-a4092421.html
Transcript of this episode
If you follow the news, you might have noticed a word coming up more and more frequently: “socialism.” Not only was it name-dropped by the president in his 2019 State of the Union address, but politicians aligning themselves with Democratic Socialism have been winning elections and making headlines, and grassroots socialist organizing has been experiencing a renaissance all over the country. As with many concepts that circulate in news discourse, socialism isn’t something that the media is great at defining in a concrete or unified way - conservative sources often use it as as a term roughly synonymous with pure evil, while more centrist or liberal-leaning outlets tend to portray its policies and purveyors as impractical and idealistic.
In this episode, Sophie Wodzak - re:verb co-producer and and co-chair of the Pittsburgh Democratic Socialists of America’s Socialist Feminism Committee - sits down with her DSA SocFem co-chair Crystal Grabowski to demystify the concept of socialism and link it to the battles for intersectional social and economic justice that encompass Socialist Feminism. Sophie and Crystal begin by breaking down the distinctions between Socialist Feminism and Liberal Feminism, before launching into conversation about the rhetorical know-how they draw upon when engaging other people in political dialogues about topics ranging from reproductive justice to economic and gender equality. Some of these efforts include the ongoing local campaign to #ExposeFakeClinics (https://www.exposefakeclinicspgh.com/) that work to obfuscate women’s healthcare options, as well as building a broad social movement through solidarity with women’s movements across the country and around the world during the International Women’s Strike (see links below).
Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode
Dishman, L. (2015, Dec. 10). What Marissa Mayer’s maternity leave decision means for working parents at Yahoo. Fast Company. Retrieved from: https://www.fastcompany.com/3054512/what-marissa-mayers-maternity-leave-decision-means-for-working-parents-at-yahoo
Guynn, J. (2013, Feb. 26). Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer causes uproar with telecommuting ban. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/26/business/la-fi-yahoo-telecommuting-20130226
Pierson, C. (2018, May 26). Ireland votes to repeal the 8th amendment in historic abortion referendum - and marks a huge cultural shift. The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/ireland-votes-to-repeal-the-8th-amendment-in-historic-abortion-referendum-and-marks-a-huge-cultural-shift-97297
Roberts, D. (2015). Reproductive justice, not just rights. Dissent. Retrieved from: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/reproductive-justice-not-just-rights
Smith, A. (2005). Beyond pro-choice versus pro-life: Women of color and reproductive justice. NWSA Journal, 17(1), pp. 119-140. [Available at: https://www.law.berkeley.edu/php-programs/centers/crrj/zotero/loadfile.php?entity_key=RD3G3I35]
Whalen, A. (2019, Feb. 5). Medicare For All costs too much, Pelosi adviser assures health insurance executives. Newsweek. Retrieved from: https://www.newsweek.com/nancy-pelosi-medicare-all-single-payer-health-insurance-affordable-care-act-1318788
Bibliography of Useful Socialist Feminist Theory & Scholarship
Combahee River Collective (1983). The Combahee river collective statement. Home girls: A Black feminist anthology, 264-74. [Available at: http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html]
Davis, A. Y. (2011). Women, race, & class. Vintage.
Federici, S. (2012). Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM Press.
Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia.
Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. Verso Books.
Garland-Thomson, R. (2002). Integrating disability, transforming feminist theory. NWSA journal, 1-32.
Hennessy, R. (2012). Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. Routledge.
Hennessy, R. (2017). Profit and pleasure: Sexual identities in late capitalism. Routledge.
Malachi, L.W. (2016). Police violence is a reproductive justice issue. Cosmopolitan. Retrieved from: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/news/a61507/police-violence-reproductive-justice/
Taylor, K. Y. (Ed.). (2017). How we get free: Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books.
Weeks, K. (2011). The problem with work: Feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. Duke University Press.
Links & Resources Mentioned in this Episode
Sister Song Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective
ROSA (Reproductive rights, against Oppression, Sexism, & Austerity)
Expose Fake Clinics PGH
Expose Fake Clinics Resource from Lady Parts Justice League
National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) Abortion Access Bowl-A-Thon
International Women’s Strike (Pittsburgh)
International Women’s Strike (USA)
On our last episode, Professor John Oddo cited Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in asserting: “When you speak you do not break the eternal silence of the universe. You are not the biblical Adam who is naming and categorizing reality in the virgin world. You are always taking words that taste of prior contexts.”
This approach to language as dialogical is the subject of today’s re:blurb. We break down what dialogicality means, how it’s distinct from other theories of language, and how we can use it to productively analyze texts for their incorporation and reshaping of other voices, as well as the confidence of their claims.
We offer an analysis of a strikingly dialogical political event: legendary actor-director (and proud conservative) Clint Eastwood’s speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention. In the speech, Eastwood constructs a dialogue with an empty chair intended to represent then-President Barack Obama. Eastwood’s usage of quotes, references, modality, bare assertions, and assumptions all suggest that he was supremely confident in his definition of the problem in America in 2012 -- Obama-style liberalism -- but remarkably reluctant about Mitt Romney as a particular solution. As we argue, this may have influenced conservative rhetoric up to the present day.
Text Analyzed:
Transcript: Clint Eastwood's Convention Remarks
Works / Concepts Referenced in This Episode:
De Saussure, F. (1989). Cours de linguistique générale: Édition critique (Vol. 1). Otto Harrassowitz Verlag.
Bakhtin, M. (1934). Discourse in the Novel. Literary theory: An anthology, 2, 674-685.
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.
Eastwood, C. (1983). Sudden Impact. Warner Bros. [“Make My Day” scene.]
On this week’s episode, Alex and Calvin chat with Carnegie Mellon Associate Professor of English Dr. John Oddo about his most recent work, The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. In the book, Dr. Oddo uses discourse analysis techniques to study U.S. war propaganda. Today’s discussion centers around what makes Oddo’s definition of propaganda unique. He argues that propaganda can best be understood as an intertextual process, and that everyone in U.S. society is a potential propagandist -- not just “evil dictators” in totalitarian societies.
Dr. Oddo walks Alex and Calvin through one case study he conducts in his book: a historically-contextualized analysis of the U.S. military slogan “Support Our Troops.” In this analysis, Dr. Oddo discusses the genesis of the phrase as a reaction to anti-war sentiments in the U.S. during the war in Vietnam. He then dissects the linguistic aspects that make the phrase “detachable,” repeatable, and easily digestible, such as how personal pronouns like ‘our’ are used to forge common ground between the message and the audience. In doing so, Oddo suggests that propaganda slogans like “Support Our Troops” simultaneously make an argument justifying war, shape allowable identities for citizens, and become entrenched as “cultural presuppositions.” The conversation comes to a close with Dr. Oddo suggesting productive ways in which we can respond to propaganda critically, as well as the affordances and limitations of using propagandistic tactics for more just ends.
Check out John Oddo’s book, The Discourse of Propaganda, available now from Penn State University Press:
https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08116-8.html
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Bakhtin, M. M. (2010). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (Vol. 1). Trans. Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press.
Chomsky, N. (1992, January). On Propaganda (interview on WBAI). Retrieved from: https://chomsky.info/199201__/
Ellul, J. (1973). Propaganda: the formation of men's attitudes. New York: Vintage Books.
Hodges, A. (2011). The "War on terror" narrative: Discourse and intertextuality in the construction and contestation of sociopolitical reality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lembcke, J. (1998). The spitting image: Myth, memory, and the legacy of Vietnam. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Linell, P. (1998). Discourse across boundaries: On recontextualizations and the blending of voices in professional discourse. Text-Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 18(2), 143-158.
Oddo, J. (2018). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. University Park, PA, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Stahl, R. (2009). Why We “Support the Troops”: Rhetorical Evolutions. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 12(4), 533-570.
What is reality? According to whose version of reality does society function? This week, Alex and Calvin sit down to discuss these and other questions with Dr. Dana L. Cloud, Professor of Rhetoric & Communication and Director of Graduate Studies at Syracuse University, and author of Reality Bites: Assessing Truth Claims in the Time of Trump. In her book, Cloud argues that fact-checking and rational argumentation are not effective persuasion strategies, and she suggests other ways of responding to the rise of white nationalism in the Trump era. As a critic, Cloud adopts an approach called rhetorical realism: examining discourse from marginalized groups’ perspectives and experiences in order to introduce new realities and truths, legitimize them, and position them strategically in the public sphere.
The episode opens with a discussion of academic freedom, as we analyze a timely address given by conservative activist Ben Shapiro at the University of Pittsburgh the night prior to our recording. Shapiro’s speech exemplifies how the ideograph of
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Brennan, T. (2014). The Transmission of Affect. Cornell University Press.
Butler, J. (2002). Gender Trouble. Routledge.
Cloud, D. L. (1996). Hegemony or concordance? The rhetoric of tokenism in “Oprah” Oprah rags‐to‐riches biography. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 13(2), 115-137.
Cloud, D. L., Macek, S., & Aune, J. A. (2006). "The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra": A Reply to Ron Greene. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 39(1), 72-84.
Cloud, D. L., & Thomas, R. K. (2011). We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Cloud, D. L., & Feyh, K. E. (2015). Reason in Revolt: Emotional Fidelity and Working Class Standpoint in the “Internationale”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 45(4), 300-323.
Cloud, D. L. (2018). Reality bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Edelman, M. (1988). Constructing the Political Spectacle. University of Chicago Press.
Fisher, W. R. (1985). The narrative paradigm: In the beginning. Journal of communication, 35(4), 74-89.
Fisher, W. R. (1986). Judging the Quality of Audiences and Narrative Rationality. Practical Reasoning in Human Affairs, 85-103.
Foucault, M. (2013). Archaeology of Knowledge. Routledge.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
Gramsci, A., & Hoare, Q. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Vol. 294). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Greene, R. W. (1998). Another materialist rhetoric. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 15(1), 21-40.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Harvard University Press.
Hedges, C. (2009). Empire of illusion: The end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle. Knopf Canada.
Kelly, C. R., & Hoerl, K. E. (2012). Genesis in Hyperreality: Legitimizing Disingenuous Controversy at the Creation Museum. Argumentation and Advocacy,48(3), 123-141.
McNally, M., & Schwarzmantel, J. J. (2009). Gramsci and Global Politics: Hegemony and Resistance. London: Routledge.
Paine, T. (1792). Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America. Philadelphia: W. & T. Bradford. [Full text available online at: https://www.bartleby.com/133/]
What comes to mind when you hear words like “freedom,” “justice,” or “liberty”? Whether they conjure feelings of patriotism and pride or just sound like overused, empty buzzwords, rhetoricians call terms like these ideographs – words and phrases that serve as the building blocks of our ideologies and identities.
On today’s re:blurb mini-episode, Colleen, Alex, and Calvin break down the history of the ideograph in rhetorical scholarship and demonstrate how it can be a useful concept for analyzing buzzwords and slogans in political discourse.
Text Analyzed in this Episode
Bruni, F. (December 19, 2017). Democrats are the new Republicans. The New York Times.
Works Referenced
Cloud, D. L. (1998). The rhetoric of
Cloud, D. L. (2004). “To veil the threat of terror”: Afghan women and the⟨ clash of civilizations⟩ in the imagery of the US war on terrorism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90(3), 285-306.
McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16.
McGee, M. C. (2001). Ideograph. In T. O. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (378-381). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Winkler, C. (2012). In the name of terrorism: Presidents on political violence in the post-World War II era. SUNY Press.
Recommended Readings
Condit, C. M., & Lucaites, J. L. (1993). Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word. University of Chicago Press.
Edwards, J. L., & Winkler, C. K. (1997). Representative form and the visual ideograph: The Iwo Jima image in editorial cartoons. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 83(3), 289-310.
Farrell, T. B. (1995). Norms of rhetorical culture. Yale University Press. [Chapter 1 includes a discussion of the Joseph N. Welch / Joseph McCarthy interaction that Calvin references in his analysis of the ideograph
CONTENT WARNING
This episode contains graphic language depicting instances of rape and verbal imagery illustrating acts of sexual violence.
On today’s episode, Calvin and Ryan sit down with Dr. Stephanie Larson, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon, to discuss her recent publication in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (QJS), “‘Everything inside me was silenced’: (Re)defining rape through visceral counterpublicity.”
This article is part of Professor Larson’s larger body of work on contemporary rhetorics of rape culture. We discuss two of her case studies: a publicly delivered letter by Emily Doe and a multimodal art piece employed by Emma Sulkowicz, both crafted to call attention to the actions of the men who raped them. In her analysis, Stephanie aims to answer questions such as: How do women discuss acts of sexual violence committed against them after legal discourse fails to recognize these acts as criminal? She theorizes that victims use visceral language to call attention to their physical bodies, specifically their points of violation, thus inciting empathetic and emotional responses from the audience. She goes on to argue that this type of public performativity has the potential to shift public standards of judgment in cases of sexual violence.
The episode closes with Stephanie’s thoughts on feminist magnitude and how it has shaped the #MeToo movement in online discourse. She also offers her take on why Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh did not capture audiences in the same way, suggesting that the use of online platforms and collective sharing of personal testimonies facilitates more affective and effective engagement with audiences.
Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode:
Emily Doe’s publicly-read letter to Brock Turner
Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) Overview
Wikipedia page for Emma Sulkowicz’s Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol (“This is not a rape”) performance
Content Warning: This performance contains an explicit, performative depiction of a rape.
Ahmed, S. (2013). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge.
Aristotle. (1898). Poetics. Trans. S.H. Butcher. Macmillan.
(discussion of megethos or “magnitude” can be found in Sec. 1, Part VII)
Berlant, L. (1999). “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, eds. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns. University of Michigan Press.
Butler, J. (2006). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.
Gilmore, L. (2017). Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives. Columbia University Press.
Hawhee, D. (2015). Rhetoric’s Sensorium. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 101(1), 2–17.
Johnson, J. (2016). “A man’s mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(1), 1–20.
Larson, S. R. (2018). “Everything inside me was silenced”:(Re) defining rape through visceral counterpublicity. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 104(2), 123-144.
Larson, S. R. (2018). Survivors, Liars, and Unfit Minds: Rhetorical Impossibility and Rape Trauma Disclosure. Hypatia.
Scarry, E. (1987). The body in pain : the making and unmaking of the world (Oxford University Press pbk.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Weheliye, A. (2014). Habeas Viscus : Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.
On this week’s show, we change things up a bit and bring you the first in a new series of mini-episodes entitled re:blurb, where we break down concepts from rhetorical theory and history in practical terms and use contemporary examples to illustrate their usefulness in examining language in action.
For this first installment, Alex takes the mic to explain stasis theory: a set of concepts reiterated throughout rhetorical history that help speakers and writers both analyze and invent arguments. This theory holds that all arguments contain “stasis claims” about the facts at hand in an issue, the definition of key terms and elements in the debate, the evaluation of those elements, and prescriptions of action. Using the stases, we can see how arguers try to “get ahead of” different potential points of disagreement and address specific audiences. In addition, we can think about how we can make better arguments by predicting how others might view each stasis category of a particular issue. This is especially useful when analyzing why arguers choose to stay at a particular stasis level to reach a specific audience.
To illustrate how stasis theory can widen our understanding of an arguments and their audiences, Alex uses the stases to analyze Brett Kavanaugh’s Wall Street Journal op-ed “I Am an Independent, Impartial Judge,” published in the wake of his and Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, prior to his confirmation and appointment to the Supreme Court.
Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode:
Fahnestock, J., & Secor, M. (1988). The stases in scientific and literary argument. Written communication, 5(4), 427-443.
Hohmann, H. (2001). Stasis. In T. O. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (741-745). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Kavanaugh, B. (2018, Oct. 4). I am an independent, impartial judge. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-am-an-independent-impartial-judge-1538695822
Further Reading on Stasis Theory:
Braet, A. (1987). The classical doctrine of status and the rhetorical theory of argumentation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 20, 79-93.
Heath, M. (1994). The substructure of stasis-theory from Hermagoras to Hermogenes. The Classical Quarterly, 44(1), 114-129.
Jasinski, J. Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2001.
Liu, Y. (1991). Aristotle and the stasis theory: A reexamination. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 21(1), 53-59.
Nadeau, R. (1959). “Classical Systems of Stases in Greek: Hermagoras to Hermogenes.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 2(1), 51–70.
Pullman, G. L. (1995). Deliberative rhetoric and forensic stasis: Reconsidering the scope and function of an ancient rhetorical heuristic in the aftermath of the Thomas/Hill controversy. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 25(1-4), 223-230.
Thompson, W. N. (1972). Stasis in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 58(2), 134-141.
This week’s episode is the second, concluding part of our series reviewing concepts and topics from last season. (If you haven’t yet listened to part 1, you can find it here.)
In part 2 of our re:verb “re:cap,” we rekindle the critical ideas brought up in episodes 6 through 9. First, we build upon our discussion of urban renewal and gentrification from episodes 6 & 7, talking through the ongoing transparency controversy at the heart of Pittsburgh’s “bid” for Amazon HQ2, the economistic frames used by both proponents and opponents of the bid, and the difficulty of staging place-based resistance to massive corporate entities like Amazon. Then, we examine two cases that exemplify people’s affective & emotional attachments to evidence (a call-back to Jenny Rice’s work, discussed in episode 8): the liberal-left split over #Russiagate and the cryptic, all-encompassing, extremely-online #QAnon conspiracy. We go on to discuss the brilliant treatment of language ideology (a concept previously covered in episode 9) in the film Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018), particularly its depiction of code-switching and “white voice.”
Finally, we reflect on some of the unresolved tensions across all of our conversations on the show so far: rhetorics of “the future,” certainty vs. uncertainty, the role of aesthetics in rhetoric, and the relationship between language and power.
Previous episodes discussed:
Episode 6: How do spaces and places function in resistance movements? (Rhetorics of Place: Part 1) (w/ Derek Handley & Liana Maneese)
Episode 7: What are the economic, social, and political forces fueling gentrification? (Rhetorics of Place: Part 2) (w/ Scott Riess)
Episode 8: What can conspiracy theories teach us about how we use "evidence"? (w/ Jenny Rice)
Episode 9: How does language influence our identity (and vice-versa)? (w/ Barbara Johnstone)
Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode:
Creswell, J. (2018, Aug. 5). Cities’ offers for Amazon base are secrets even to many city leaders. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/technology/amazon-headquarters-hq2.html
Hart, R., & Dillard, C. (2001). Deliberative genre. In Sloane, Thomas O. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from: http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195125955.001.0001/acref-9780195125955-e-64.
Kroskrity, P. V. (2004). Language ideologies. A companion to linguistic anthropology, 496-517.
Org Chart of the QAnon Conspiracy compiled by “The Infomaniac”: https://throughthelookingglassnews.wordpress.com/2017/11/24/q-anon-learn-to-read-the-map/
Rice, J. (2017). The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More: On Archival Magnitude. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 50(1), 26-49.
Rihl, J. (2018, Feb. 8). How Amazon’s HQ2 may both bring growth and imperil Pittsburgh’s talent pool. Public Source. Retrieved from: https://www.publicsource.org/how-amazons-hq2-may-both-bring-growth-and-imperil-pittsburghs-talent-pool/
Scahill, J. (2018, Feb. 21). RussiaMania: Glenn Greenwald vs. James Risen. Intercepted Podcast. Podcast retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/21/intercepted-podcast-russiamania-glenn-greenwald-vs-james-risen/
Shoemaker, J.D. (2018, April 11). Activists call on Pittsburgh officials to release Amazon bid, include residents in economic development decisions. Public Source. Retrieved from: https://www.publicsource.org/activists-call-on-pittsburgh-officials-to-release-amazon-bid-include-residents-in-economic-development-decisions/
Shoemaker, J.D. (2018, July 5). Amazon’s ripple effects: Six things that might happen if Pittsburgh gets HQ2. Public Source. Retrieved from: https://www.publicsource.org/amazons-ripple-effects-six-things-that-might-happen-if-pittsburgh-gets-hq2/
Shoemaer, J.D., & Davidson, M. (2018, June 21). Advocacy groups file court brief supporting media efforts to make Pittsburgh’s Amazon HQ2 bid public. Public Source. Retrieved from: https://www.publicsource.org/advocacy-groups-file-court-brief-supporting-media-efforts-to-make-pittsburghs-amazon-hq2-bid-public/
VanDerWerff, T. (2018, July 27). 100 years of the American left in 5 minutes, with Sorry to Bother You director Boots Riley. Vox. Retrieved from: https://www.vox.com/2018/7/27/17620246/boots-riley-sorry-to-bother-you-history-of-the-left-interview
It’s a new academic year, and the beginning of a new season of re:verb! In our 2-part season premiere, we take a retrospective look at topics in political and cultural rhetoric that we’ve covered over the past year, taking note of the critical concepts and questions still pertinent to our thinking. It’s a re:verb “re:cap,” for long-time fans as well as newcomers to the show who want to get a taste of our perspective on language-in-action.
In part 1 of our retrospective, Calvin and Alex discuss interviews and analyses fromepisodes 1-5, bringing in contemporary examples to illustrate how the issues and ideas discussed in those shows remain relevant today. We analyze metaphors and assumptions in the Trump administration’s national security strategy, discuss the embodied, material nature of trauma and memory in Vietnam, and reflect on the battle over facticity and dialogicality vis-à-vis Hurricane Maria’s death toll.
Tune in for part 2 - where we’ll be discussing episodes 6 through 9 – coming soon!
Previous episodes discussed:
Episode 1: Why listen to a podcast about rhetoric and the humanities (w/ Doug Cloud)
Episode 2: Why do we look toward ‘the future’ when we talk about national security? (w/ Patricia Dunmire)
Episode 3: How can we make room for a different kind of security discourse?
Episode 4: What is the relationship between trauma and memory? (w/ Taylor Rugg)
Episode 5: How is science represented on Wikipedia, and why does it matter? (w/ Ana Cooke)
Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode:
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. [on the concept of “dialogicality”]
Chilton, P. A. (1996). Security metaphors: Cold war discourse from containment to common house (Vol. 2). Peter Lang Pub Incorporated.
Chilton, P. A. (1996). The meaning of security. In R. Hariman (Ed), Post-realism: The rhetorical turn in international relations, 193-216. East, Lansing, MI: MSU Press.
Coto, D. (2017, November 8). Puerto Rico reports increase in overall deaths after storm. Associated Press. Retrieved from: https://apnews.com/a64526dd9e314f3aa9de8de6ebd4117a
Dunmire, P. L. (2015). Beyond space and time: Temporal and geographical configurations in US national security discourse. Critical Discourse Studies, 12(3), 297-312.
Milken Institute of Public Health (The George Washington University). Project report: Ascertainment of the estimated excess mortality from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Retrieved from: https://prstudy.publichealth.gwu.edu/sites/prstudy.publichealth.gwu.edu/files/reports/Acertainment%20of%20the%20Estimated%20Excess%20Mortality%20from%20Hurricane%20Maria%20in%20Puerto%20Rico.pdf
Robles, F. (2018, August 9). Puerto Rican government acknowledges hurricane death toll of 1,427. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/us/puerto-rico-death-toll-maria.html
—————
Website for the Vietnam War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, VN: http://warremnantsmuseum.com/
Alex’s tweet thread on visiting the Vietnam War Remnants Museum: https://twitter.com/ajhelberg/status/1030054961957072897
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy document (Dec. 2017): https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf
Yinz ready for another episode of re:verb? On today’s show, we interview Dr. Barbara Johnstone, professor of English and Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the foremost scholars of an American English dialect known as Pittsburghese.
Our conversation touches on the history and features of Pittsburghese, how it has helped to forge various local identities in the city and beyond, and more broadly, how the ways that we talk about language influences our use of language. We discuss Professor Johnstone’s career, how she became interested in place-based registers, and to what extent her own work may have influenced public perceptions of Pittsburgh speech. Finally, we end with a light-hearted discussion of human-animal communication, and Alex develops his folk theory about regional dialects of cat-speak.
Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Hawhee, Debra. "Toward a bestial rhetoric." Philosophy and Rhetoric 44.1 (2011): 81-87.
Johnstone, B. (2013). Speaking Pittsburghese: The story of a dialect. Oxford University Press.
Johnstone, B. (2018). Discourse analysis. John Wiley & Sons.
Johnstone, B., & Pollak, C. (2016). Mobilities, Materialities, and the Changing Meanings of Pittsburgh Speech. Journal of English Linguistics, 44(3), 254-275.
Johnstone, B., & Baumgardt, D. (2004). " Pittsburghese" Online: Vernacular Norming in Conversation. American speech, 79(2), 115-145.
McCool, S. (1982). Sam McCool's new Pittsburghese: How to speak like a Pittsburgher. Renaissance News Inc.
Pittsburgh Dad: Going to Gram’s
“Bringing the Word Straight to You” Podcasts (from Dr. Johnstone’s Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project): http://pittsburghspeech.pitt.edu/PittsburghSpeech_Podcasts.html
Jim Krenn’s “Pants N’at” sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX2QQZ9ZHuY
A good YouTube playlist of Rick Sebak documentaries based in Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review, “Hey, jagoff! Keep Pittsburghese out of politics”, 5/22/2018, Tribune-Review.
This week, Alex and Ryan sit down with Dr. Jenny Rice (Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky) and discuss the rhetoric of “alternative researchers” (i.e. conspiracy theorists), particularly how their practices mirror our own as we construct knowledge in our academic and personal lives. In Dr. Rice’s forthcoming book (tentatively titled Awful Archives) she outlines how “archival” practices – broadly defined as the accumulation, organization/categorization, and referencing of information – are often shaped by our sense of what is “beautiful” or “repulsive,” and argues that we can better understand collective knowledge-making processes if we examine “evidence” for its aesthetic dimensions. In essence, the constant accumulation of evidence into an archive of knowledge can give us a sense of satisfaction, in that it feels like we are “making sense” of a chaotic and complex world – continuously forming it into a coherent narrative that helps explain events occurring around us.
In exploring this idea through examples ranging from 9/11 “truthers,” the Sandy Hook “crisis actor” conspiracy theory, and the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, we try to work toward a better understanding about how our social & cultural practices shape the kinds of evidence we consider beautiful or ugly, and discuss how to use this understanding for productive ends when communicating among people with whom we disagree.
Works & concepts cited in this episode:
Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Stanford, N. R. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.
Aristotle. Poetics (trans. S.H. Butcher). The Internet Classics Archive. Retrieved from: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.html [where Dr. Rice draws on the concept of Megethos or “magnitude” – n.b. Section 1, part VII]
Bitzer, L. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 1(1), 1-14.
Edbauer, J. (2005). Unframing models of public distribution: From rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(4), 5-24.
Grassi, E. (1980). Rhetoric as philosophy: The humanist tradition. State College, PA: Penn State University Press.
Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303-330. [Study on the “backfire effect” re: political beliefs]
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf
Rice, J. (2012). Distant publics: Development rhetoric and the subject of crisis. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Rice, J. (2017). The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More: On Archival Magnitude. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 50(1), 26-49.
Schrag, C. O. (1992). The resources of rationality: A response to the postmodern challenge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
In part two of our series on Rhetorics of Place, Alex and Calvin squeeze into a 5x5 sound booth (reminiscent of a $1,000/month+ studio apartment, or perhaps one floor of a Tiny Home, in a gentrifying Pittsburgh neighborhood) with CMU Master’s Candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies Scott Reiss to talk about the politics of urban development. We map out some of the different social, economic, and political factors in gentrification, and how these are specifically playing out in the city of Pittsburgh. We also discuss how the frontier metaphor is used by developers and in the news as a way of justifying the influx of "urban pioneers" to impoverished neighborhoods. Finally, we conclude with some thoughts on different actions that can be taken at a local level to resist gentrification and/or make redevelopment policies that bring wealth to impoverished communities without displacing their residents.
Cover image: A “tiny home” designed and sold in the neighborhood of Garfield by Eve Picker, developer and landlord of the East Liberty “Last Billboard” space discussed on our previous episode. Post image: “Keep Pittsburgh Shitty” bumper sticker spotted by a user on the r/pittsburgh subreddit (t-shirt here).
Works, Concepts, and News Items Cited in this Episode:
Dionne Jr, E. J., Ornstein, N. J., & Mann, T. E. (2017). One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-yet Deported. St. Martin's Press.
Edbauer, J. (2005). Unframing models of public distribution: From rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(4), 5-24. [Discusses how the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” was appropriated by developers in Austin.]
“Future of Manufacturing To Rise Within Abandoned Steel Mill.” [CMU website article describing the university’s new development in Hazelwood.]
Glass, R. L. (1964). London: aspects of change (Vol. 3). MacGibbon & Kee. [Coins the term “gentrification.”]
Harvey, D. (2008). “The right to the city.” The City Reader, 6, 23-40.
Kelly, M. & McKinley, S. (2015). “7 Paths to Development That Bring Neighborhoods Wealth, Not Gentrification.” yes! Magazine.
Moore, D. (5/8/2018) “Secrecy surrounding Amazon HQ2 bid will help Pittsburgh win, Allegheny Conference CEO says.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Smith, N. (1996). “‘Class struggle on Avenue B’: The lower east side as wild wild west.” The New Urban Frontier. New York, NY: Routledge, 3-27.
St-Esprit, M. (5/8/2018). “As Bloomfield weighs new development, residents seek to prioritize affordable housing.” Public Source. [Note for Pittsburghers: “The BDC will hold another public meeting regarding affordable housing options in the community at 6:30 p.m. May 24 in the West Penn School of Nursing auditorium.”]
On this week’s episode, our guests speak with us about how two distinct locations – featuring two billboards – in the city of Pittsburgh played remarkable roles in social movements and controversies over urban spaces. In our first conversation, we speak with Derek Handley (recent Carnegie Mellon Rhetoric PhD. graduate and soon-to-be faculty at Lehigh University) about his study of “Freedom Corner” in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, and how it functioned as a location and a resource for arguments against urban renewal practices in that neighborhood. Then, we talk to Liana Maneese, a social practice artist and entrepreneur with The Good Peoples Group, about a recent controversy in the neighborhood of East Liberty over a billboard whose text read: “There are black people in the future.”
Through these conversations, we explore how contestations over places play out in urban communities, as well as the linkages between African American social movements, language, and the ownership of space.
Cover image: The original billboard located at Freedom Corner, circa 1960 (Image source), and Alisha Wormsley's "There will be black people in the future" installment at "The Last Billboard."
Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Endres, D., & Senda-Cook, S. (2011). Location matters: The rhetoric of place in protest. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 97(3), 257-282.
https://nca.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00335630.2011.585167
Handley, Derek G. (forthcoming). “The line drawn”: Freedom corner and rhetorics of place in Pittsburgh, 1960s-2000s. Rhetoric Review.
Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture, in which she states “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence”:
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html
Whitaker, Mark. (2018). Smoketown: The untold story of the other great black renaissance. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Smoketown/Mark-Whitaker/9781501122392
Wilson, Kirt. (2002). The reconstruction desegregation debate: The politics of equality and the rhetoric of place. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.
Alisha B. Wormsley’s “There Are Black People in the Future” Project:
http://www.alishabwormsley.com/there-are-black-people-in-the-future/
Young, Vershawn A. (2007). Your average nigga: Performing race, literacy, and masculinity. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Check out Liana Maneese’s company The Good Peoples Group here: http://thegoodpeoplesgroup.com/
Also, check out some of the details about her Adopting Identity project here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/adopting-identity-lies-luck-and-legitimacy#/
It’s a real scorcher of an episode this week as Calvin and Alex sit down with re:verb web editor and Carnegie Mellon PhD candidate Ana Cooke to discuss her research on the arguments taking place within Wikipedia articles about global warming. We talk about why Wikipedia is an important space for public knowledge-curation, how certain kinds of language can color our perceptions of the certainty surrounding scientific facts, and how Wikipedia editors found a working solution to manage the ways both the scientific consensus and dissenting opinions on global warming are represented online. We also get down into the trenches of online polemics with Wikipedia editor and CMU Rhetoric alumnus Daniel Dickson-Laprade, who gives us a first-hand look at how arguments on Wikipedia talk pages play out, tells us how he successfully argued for the deletion of a scientifically faulty Wikipedia article, and reminds a certain popular author that just because you wrote Jurassic Park, it doesn’t mean you get to dictate how science works.
Cover Photo: Former Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe brings a snowball onto the U.S. Senate floor as “evidence” that global warming isn’t real. (image source)
Sources and Concepts Cited in this Episode
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. (on the concept of “dialogism”)
Michael Crichton’s “Aliens Cause Global Warming” speech (in which he coins the spurious term “consensus science”):
https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf
Ceccarelli, L. (2011). “Manufactured scientific controversy: Science, rhetoric, and public debate.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 14(2), 195-228.
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) on Climate Change:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assessment_report_synthesis_report.htm
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (2013). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. (2003). The language of evaluation (Vol. 2). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (on the concepts of “dialogic expansion” and “dialogic contraction”)
McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 66(1), 1-16.
Oreskes, N., & Conway, E.M. (2010). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. London, UK: Bloomsbury.
Pew Research Center. (14 Jan. 2016). “Wikipedia at 15: Millions of readers in scores of languages.” Retrieved from: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/14/wikipedia-at-15/
Safran, N. (20 Mar. 2012). “Wikipedia in the SERPs: Appears on page 1 for 60% of informational, 34% transactional queries.” Conductor. Retrieved from: https://www.conductor.com/blog/2012/03/wikipedia-in-the-serps-appears-on-page-1-for-60-of-informational-34-transactional-queries/
Xia, R. (20 Sep. 2016). “College students take to Wikipedia to rewrite the wrongs of internet science.” Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-wikipedia-science-classes-adv-snap-story.html
Wikipedia page on “Global warming”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
Wikipedia page on “Global warming controversy”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy
Wikipedia page on the spurious “Oregon Petition” (famously “signed” by “Dr. Geri Halliwell,” a.k.a. “Ginger Spice” of the Spice Girls):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition
In this episode, we explore some dimensions of the concept of memory through conversations with two people whose work deals directly with how we remember people, places, time periods, and events. Audrey Strohm hops on the mic with Alex to talk with Taylor Rugg, an M.A. student in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon, who has authored both academic and creative work on how people remember traumatic events. We specifically discuss the ways that trauma is experienced by members of the military, and how this can sometimes be at odds with how the public perceives and remembers their trauma, after which Taylor delivers a live reading of a lyric essay she wrote about her own personal trauma. Alex and Ryan also speak with Emily Ruby - a curator at the Heinz History Center museum in Pittsburgh, PA - about her work collecting and preserving the memories and stories of people in the Pittsburgh community.
Trigger warning This episode contains brief descriptions of traumatic events such as torture and the death of family members.
Works and concepts cited in this episode:
Butler, J. (2010). Frames of war: When is life grievable? Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books.
Delillo, D. (2007). Falling man. New York, NY: Scribner.
Fair, E. (2007, Feb. 9). An Iraq interregator’s nightmare. Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020801680.html
Fair, E. (2014, Dec. 9). I can’t be forgiven for Abu Ghraib. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/opinion/the-torture-report-reminds-us-of-what-america-was.html
Fair, E. (2016). Consequence: A memoir. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Co.
Phillips, K. (2010). The failure of memory: Reflections on rhetoric and public remembrance. Western Journal of Communication, 74(2), 208-223.
Plato. (1992). Theaetetus. (M. J. Levett, Rev., Myles F. Burnyet, Trans., B. Williams, Ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett.
Rugg, T. (2017). As a star moves among stars in the night’s darkening. The Journal, 41(4). http://thejournalmag.org/archives/12542
Donald Trump stating that torture “absolutely” works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUtAUu_3Yks
In part two of our series on the politics of security, Calvin and Alex analyze two recent “artifacts” of national security discourse – General John Kelly’s October 2017 press conference addressing why the U.S. has troops in Niger (and elsewhere), and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Office’s January 2017 report on Russian “activities and intentions” in U.S. elections. The ensuing conversation explores how national security figures establish an authoritative, dominating narrative and close off the possibility of dissent through their language, and ends with a meditation on a radically different way of thinking about “security.” Plus, Ryan Mitchell solicits people’s associations with the term “national security” in a new edition of re:verberations.
Works and concepts mentioned in this episode:
Chilton, P. A. (1996). Security metaphors: Cold war discourse from containment to common house (Vol. 2). Peter Lang Pub Incorporated.
Chilton, P. A. (1996). The meaning of security. In R. Hariman (Ed), Post-realism: The rhetorical turn in international relations, 193-216. East, Lansing, MI: MSU Press.
The DNI report on “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”:
Full report: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
John Kelly’s press conference:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BxsCyS6Y8U (question on Niger comes @ 11:53)
Further reading on security discourse, particularly the "container" metaphor:
Brown, W. (2017). Walled states, waning sovereignty. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Campbell, D. (1992). Writing security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press.
Prior to World War II, American political leaders tended to talk about national security by framing the U.S. as a “sanctuary” for democratic ideals that needed to be protected. After the war, this dominant framing shifted to focus on the U.S. as a “powerhouse” for democracy, in which the nation’s responsibility was to go on the offensive and spread American ideals throughout the world. In this week’s episode, Calvin and Alex speak with Kent State English Professor Patricia Dunmire about the ways that U.S. politicians and others in government have made arguments about national security throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – what “security” means, who should have it, and what actions are deemed necessary to “maintain” and “promote” that security in the future.
We also introduce a new segment called "re:verbrations," in which Ryan Mitchell speaks with guests at re:verb's launch party to get their thoughts on the power of language in society and politics.
Cover Image: Commemorative "challenge coin" bearing the US National Security Agency (NSA) slogan: "Defending our nation, securing the future." (image source)
Publications by Dr. Patricia Dunmire on national security and the rhetoric of futurity:
Dunmire, P. L. (2005). Preempting the future: rhetoric and ideology of the future in political discourse. Discourse & Society, 16(4), 481-513.
Dunmire, P. L. (2010). Knowing and controlling the future: A review of futurology. Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 32(3), 240-263.
Dunmire, P.L. (2011). Projecting the future through political discourse: The case of the Bush doctrine. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dunmire, P. L. (2015). Beyond space and time: Temporal and geographical configurations in US national security discourse. Critical Discourse Studies, 12(3), 297-312.
Other works & concepts mentioned in this episode:
Fairclough, N. (2003). Representations of social events [chapter mentioning “space-time”]. Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London/New York: Routledge, 134-155.
John Kelly’s response to questioning about US troops in Niger:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/us/politics/statement-kelly-gold-star.html
George Kennan’s “long telegram”
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan#The_%22Long_Telegram%22
Document: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm
Luce, H. (1999/1941). The American century. Diplomatic History, 23(2), 159-171.
NSC Resolution 68
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSC_68
Document: https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/pdf/10-1.pdf
Teleology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology
Further Reading:
Engels, J., & Saas, W. O. (2013). On acquiescence and ends-less war: An inquiry into the new war rhetoric.
Goode, L. & Godhe, M. (2017). Beyond capitalist realism – why we need critical future studies. Culture Unbound, 9, 1-22.
On the Nov. 2017 special election results: https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/07/politics/5-takeaways-election-virginia-governor-trump/index.html
We introduce the re:verb podcast, its hosts (Calvin Pollak and Alex Helberg), and we explain the project's genealogy as a descendant of The Silver Tongue, a rhetorical criticism blog founded by Doug Cloud, Hilary Franklin, Alexis Teagarden and Matt Zebrowski in 2010. We talk to Silver Tongue co-founder Doug Cloud -- now an Assistant Professor of English at Colorado State University -- about rhetoric, public engagement, and the benefits of topical eclecticism in humanities research. Then, co-hosts Calvin and Alex have a free-wheeling conversation with re:verb Web Editor Ana Cooke and PR & Social Media Editor Ryan Mitchell about the humanities and STEM, enacting the kinds of lenses/approaches we hope to bring to public issues on the show going forward.
Works and concepts cited in this episode:
Carr, Nicholas. The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. WW Norton & Company, 2011.
Cloud, Doug. "The Social Consequences of Dissociation: Lessons from the Same-Sex Marriage Debate." Argumentation and Advocacy, vol. 50, no. 3, 2014, pp. 157.
Cloud, Doug. "Rewriting a Discursive Practice: Atheist Adaptation of Coming Out Discourse." Written Communication, vol. 34, no. 2, 2017, pp. 165-188.
Davisson, Amber. "Beyond the borders of red and blue states: Google Maps as a site of rhetorical invention in the 2008 presidential election." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14.1 (2011): 101-123.
Hart, Roderick P. "An unquiet desperation: Rhetorical aspects of “popular” atheism in the United States." Quarterly Journal of Speech 64.1 (1978): 33-46.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/business/nobel-economics-richard-thaler.html
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone, 2002.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes