Download or read book Media Representations of Gender and Torture Post 9 11 written by Marita Gronnvoll and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this timely book, Gronnvoll offers a feminist rhetorical examination of gender and torture, looking at the media coverage of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, as well as recent popular entertainment television serials where torture appears as a plot device (including 24). In exposing news media coverage to such scrutiny, she finds that cases of American personnel engaging in torture achieved notoriety chiefly because of the fact that women were perpetrators. The language of commentators suggests at least as much social outrage over the gender performance of the women as over the fact of torture being committed by Americans. At the same time, political and social discourses sketch a portrait of an intractable enemy in the form of the Muslim "Other" and betray a longing for a savior warrior hero who is capable of prevailing over this perceived "evil." Yet, news coverage of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay suggests women warriors are socially perceived as lacking the necessary qualifications to be such saviors. This finding provides a transition into an examination of popular entertainment television programs that feature male and female heroes as government agents engaged in fighting the war on terrorism. Ultimately, Gronnvoll's analysis suggests that a Western cultural longing for a savior is partially fulfilled through fictional programming portrayals of masculine warriors who engage in torture and remain heroic.

Download or read book Environmental Rhetoric and Ecologies of Place written by Peter N. Goggin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding how rhetoric, and environmental rhetoric in particular, informs and is informed by local and global ecologies contributes to our conversations about sustainability and resilience — the preservation and conservation of the earth and the future of human society. This book explores some of the complex relationships, collaborations, compromises, and contradictions between human endeavor and situated discourses, identities and landscapes, social justice and natural resources, movement and geographies, unpacking and grappling with the complexities of rhetoric of presence. Making a significant contribution to exploring the complex discursive constructions of environmental rhetorics and place-based rhetorics, this collection considers discourses, actions, and adaptations concerning environmental regulations and development, sustainability, exploitation, and conservation of energy resources. Essays visit arguments on cultural values, social justice, environmental advocacy, and identity as political constructions of rhetorical place and space. Rural and urban case studies contribute to discussions of the ethics and identities of environment, and the rhetorics of environmental cartography and glocalization. Contributors represent a range of specialization across a variety of scholarly research in such fields as communication studies, rhetorical theory, social/cultural geography, technical/professional communication, cartography, anthropology, linguistics, comparative literature/ecocriticism, literacy studies, digital rhetoric/media studies, and discourse analysis. Thus, this book goes beyond the assumption that rhetorics are situated, and challenges us to consider not only how and why they are situated, but what we mean when we theorize notions of situated, place-based rhetorics.

Download or read book Communication Public Discourse and Road Safety Campaigns written by Nurit Guttman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the use of communication campaigns to promote road safety, arguing that they need to elicit public discourse on issues pertaining to culture, equity, gender, workplace norms, environmental issues, and social solidarity. Increasingly, new media channels and formats are employed in the dissemination process, making road safety-related messages ubiquitous, and often controversial. Policy makers, educators, researchers, and the public continue to debate the utility and morality of some of the influence tactics employed in these messages, such as the use of graphic images of injury or death, stigmatization (or "blame and shame"), and the use of "black humor." Guttman argues that influencing road safety requires making changes in normative and cultural conceptions of broader issues in society, yet the typical discourse on road safety tends to focus on individual attitudes and practices. The book highlights the importance of social and behavioral theory in communication campaigns on road safety, and critiques the tendency to focus on individual cognition, affect, and risk conceptions rather than on normative, structural, and cultural factors. The volume positions the discourse on road safety as a social issue, and treats road safety behavior as a social activity that directly relates to other public issues, social values, and social policy, while discussing potential uses of social media and participatory approaches. The discussion turns to the role of road safety communication campaigns as part of a democratic process of eliciting public discourse, including how contemporary society could address broader issues of risk and safety.

Download or read book Rhetorics of Names and Naming written by Star Medzerian Vanguri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume takes up rhetorical approaches to our primarily linguistic understanding of how names work, considering how theories of materiality in rhetoric enrich conceptions of the name as word or symbol and help explain the processes of name bestowal, accumulation, loss, and theft. Contributors theorize the formation, modification, and recontexualization of names as a result of technological and cultural change, and consider the ways in which naming influences identity and affects/grants power.

Download or read book Authorship Contested written by Amy E. Robillard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores a dimension of authorship not given its due in the critical discourse to this point—authorship contested. Much of the existing critical literature begins with a text and the proposition that the text has an author. The debates move from here to questions about who the author is, whether or not the author’s identity is even relevant, and what relationship she or he does and does not have to the text. The authors contributing to this collection, however, ask about circumstances surrounding efforts to prevent authors from even being allowed to have these questions asked of them, from even being identified as authors. They ask about the political, cultural, economic and social circumstances that motivate a prospective audience to resist an author’s efforts to have a text published, read, and discussed. Particularly noteworthy is the range of everyday rhetorical situations in which contesting authorship occurs—from the production of a corporate document to the publication of fan fiction. Each chapter also focuses on particular instances in which authorship has been contested, demonstrating how theories about various forms of contested authorship play out in a range of events, from the complex issues surrounding peer review to authorship in the age of intelligent machines.

Download or read book Cultivating Cosmopolitanism for Intercultural Communication written by Miriam Sobré-Denton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-19 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Communication Association's International and Intercultural Communication Division's 2014 Outstanding Authored Book of the Year award This book engages the notion of cosmopolitanism as it applies to intercultural communication, which itself is undergoing a turn in its focus from post-positivistic research towards critical/interpretive and postcolonial perspectives, particularly as globalization informs more of the current and future research in the area. It emphasizes the postcolonial perspective in order to raise critical consciousness about the complexities of intercultural communication in a globalizing world, situating cosmopolitanism—the notion of global citizenship—as a multilayered lens for research. Cosmopolitanism as a theoretical repertoire provides nuanced descriptions of what it means to be and communicate as a global citizen, how to critically study interconnectedness within and across cultures, and how to embrace differences without glossing over them. Moving intercultural communication studies towards the global in complex and nuanced ways, this book highlights crucial links between globalization, transnationalism, postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, social injustice and intercultural communication, and will help in the creation of classroom spaces devoted to exploring these links. It also engages the links between theory and praxis in order to move towards intercultural communication pedagogy and research that simultaneously celebrates and interrogates issues of cultural difference with the aim of creating continuity rather than chasms. In sum, this book orients intercultural communication scholarship firmly towards the critical and postcolonial, while still allowing the incorporation of traditional intercultural communication concepts, thereby preparing students, scholars, educators and interculturalists to communicate ethically in a world that is simultaneously global and local.

Download or read book Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age written by Jeff Pruchnic and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has become increasingly difficult to ignore the ways that the centrality of new media and technologies — from the global networking of information systems and social media to new possibilities for altering human genetics — seem to make obsolete our traditional ways of thinking about ethics and persuasive communication inherited from earlier humanist paradigms. This book argues that rather than devoting our critical energies towards critiquing humanist touchstones, we should instead examine the ways in which media and technologies have always worked as crucial cultural forces in shaping ethics and rhetoric. Pruchnic combines this historical itinerary with critical interrogations of diverse cultural and technological sites — the logic of video games and artificial intelligence, the ethics of life extension in contemporary medicine, the transition to computer-automated trading in world stock markets, the state of critical theory in the contemporary humanities — along with innovative analyses of the works of such figures as the Greek Sophists, Kenneth Burke, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gilles Deleuze. This book argues that our best strategies for crafting persuasive communication and producing ethical relations between individuals will be those that creatively replicate and appropriate, rather than resist, the logics of dominant forms of media and technology.

Download or read book Communication Public Opinion and Globalization in Urban China written by Francis L.F. Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China is increasingly integrated into the processes of economic, political, social, and cultural globalization, important questions arise about how Chinese people perceive and evaluate such processes. At the same time, international communication scholars have long been interested in how local, national, and transnational media communications shape people’s attitudes and values. Combining these two concerns, this book examines a range of questions pertinent to public opinion toward globalization in urban China: To what degree are the urban residents in China exposed to the influences from the outside world? How many transnational social connections does a typical urban Chinese citizen have? How often do they consume foreign media? To what extent are they aware of the notion of globalization, and what do they think about it? Do they believe that globalization is beneficial to China, to the city where they live, and to them personally? How do people’s social connections and communication activities shape their views toward globalization and the outside world? This book tackles these and other questions systematically by analyzing a four-city comparative survey of urban Chinese residents, demonstrating the complexities of public opinion in China. Media consumption does relate, though by no means straightforwardly, to people’s attitudes and beliefs, and this book provides much needed information and insights about Chinese public opinion on globalization. It also develops fresh conceptual and empirical insights on issues such as public opinion toward US-China relations, Chinese people’s nationalistic sentiments, and approaches to analyze attitudes toward globalization.

Download or read book Pedagogies of Public Memory written by Jane Greer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pedagogies of Public Memory explores opportunities for writing and rhetorical education at museums, archives, and memorials. Readers will follow students working and writing at well-known sites of international interest (e.g., the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), at local sites (e.g., vernacular memorials in and around Muncie, Indiana and the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania), and in digital spaces (e.g., Florida State University’s Postcard Archive and The Women’s Archive Project at the University of Nebraska Omaha). From composing and delivering museum tours, to designing online memorials that challenge traditional practices of public grief, to producing and publishing a magazine containing the photographs and stories of individuals who lived through historic moments in the Freedom Struggle, to expanding and creating new public archives – the pedagogical projects described in this volume create richly textured learning opportunities for students at all levels – from first-year writers to graduate students. The students and faculty whose work is represented in this volume undertake to reposition the past in the present and to imagine possible new futures for themselves and their communities. By exploring the production of public memory, this volume raises important new questions about the intersection of rhetoric and remembrance.

Download or read book Identity and Power in Narratives of Displacement written by Katrina M. Powell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Powell examines the ways that identities are constructed in displacement narratives based on cases of eminent domain, natural disaster, and civil unrest, attending specifically to the rhetorical strategies employed as barriers and boundaries intersect with individual lives. She provides a unique method to understand how the displaced move within accepted and subversive discourses, and how representation is a crucial component of that movement. In addition, Powell shows how notions of human rights and the "public good" are often at odds with individual well-being and result in intriguing intersections between discourses of power and discourses of identity. Given the ever-increasing numbers of displaced persons across the globe, and the "layers of displacement" experienced by many, this study sheds light on the resources of rhetoric as means of survival and resistance during the globally common experience of displacement.

Download or read book Adaptive Rhetoric written by Alex C. Parrish and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rhetorical scholarship has for decades relied solely on culture to explain persuasive behavior. While this focus allows for deep explorations of historical circumstance, it neglects the powerful effects of biology on rhetorical behavior – how our bodies and brains help shape and constrain rhetorical acts. Not only is the cultural model incomplete, but it tacitly endorses the fallacy of human exceptionalism. By introducing evolutionary biology into the study of rhetoric, this book serves as a model of a biocultural paradigm. Being mindful of biological and cultural influences allows for a deeper view of rhetoric, one that is aware of the ubiquity of persuasive behavior in nature. Human and nonhuman animals, and even some plants, persuade to survive - to live, love, and cooperate. That this broad spectrum of rhetorical behavior exists in the animal world demonstrates how much we can learn from evolutionary biology. By incorporating scholarship on animal signaling into the study of rhetoric, the author explores how communication has evolved, and how numerous different species of animals employ similar persuasive tactics in order to overcome similar problems. This cross-species study of rhetoric allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing us with a deeper history of rhetoric that transcends the written and the televised, and reveals the artifacts of our communicative past.

Download or read book Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse written by Jeffrey M. Ringer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse seeks to address the current gap in American public discourse between secular liberals and religiously committed citizens by focusing on the academic and public writing of millennial evangelical Christian students. Analysis of such writing reveals that the evangelical Christian faith of contemporary college students—and the rhetorical practice motivated by it—is marked by an openness to social context and pluralism that offers possibilities for civil discourse. Based on case studies of evangelical Christian student writers, contextualized within nationally-representative trends as reported by the National Study of Youth and Religion, and grounded in scholarship from rhetorical theory, composition studies, folklore studies, and sociology of religion, this book offers rhetorical educators a new terministic screen that reveals the complex processes at work within our students’ vernacular constructions of religious faith.

Download or read book Software Evangelism and the Rhetoric of Morality written by Jennifer Helene Maher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the layers of meaning encoded in software and the rhetoric surrounding it, this book offers a much-needed perspective on the intersections between software, morality, and politics. In software development culture, evangelism typically denotes a rhetorical practice that aims to convert software developers, as well as non-technical lay users, from one platform to another (e.g., from the operating system Microsoft Windows to Linux). This book argues that software evangelism, like its religious counterpart, must also be understood as constructing moral and political values that extend well beyond the boundaries of the development culture. Unlike previous studies that locate such values in the effects of code in-use or in certain types of code like free and open source (FOSS) software, Maher argues that all code is meaningful beyond its technical, executable functions. To facilitate this analysis, this study builds a theory of evangelism and illustrates this theory at work in the proprietary software industry and FOSS communities. As an example of political liberalism at work at the level of code, these evangelical rhetorics of software construct competing conceptions of what is good that fall within a shared belief in what is just. Maher illustrates how these beliefs in goodness and justice do not always execute in replicable ways, as the different ways of decoding software evangelisms in the contexts of Brazil and China reveal. Demonstrating how software evangelisms exert a transformative force on the world, one comparable in significance to code itself, this book highlights the importance of rhetoric in even the most seemingly a-rhetorical of technical endeavors and foregrounds the crucial need for rhetorical literacy in the digital age.

Download or read book Rhetorical Delivery and Digital Technologies written by Sean Morey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book theorizes digital logics and applications for the rhetorical canon of delivery. Digital writing technologies invite a re-evaluation about what delivery can offer to rhetorical studies and writing practices. Sean Morey argues that what delivery provides is access to the unspeakable, unconscious elements of rhetoric, not primarily through emotion or feeling as is usually offered by previous studies, but affect, a domain of sensation implicit in the (overlooked) original Greek term for delivery, hypokrisis. Moreover, the primary means for delivering affect is both the logic and technology of a network, construed as modern, digital networks, but also networks of associations between humans and nonhuman objects. Casting delivery in this light offers new rhetorical trajectories that promote its incorporation into digital networked-bodies. Given its provocative and broad reframing of delivery, this book provides original, robust ways to understand rhetorical delivery not only through a lens of digital writing technologies, but all historical means of enacting delivery, offering implications that will ultimately affect how scholars of rhetoric will come to view not only the other canons of rhetoric, but rhetoric as a whole.

Download or read book Communicating Marginalized Masculinities written by Ronald L. Jackson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years, research concerning masculinities has explored the way that men have dominated, exploited, and dismantled societies, asking how we might make sense of marginalized masculinities in the context of male privilege. This volume asks not only how terms such as men and masculinity are socially defined and culturally instantiated, but also how the media has constructed notions of masculinity that have kept minority masculinities on the margins. Essays explore marginalized masculinities as communicated through film, television, and new media, visiting representations and marginalized identity politics while also discussing the dangers and pitfalls of a media pedagogy that has taught audiences to ignore, sidestep, and stereotype marginalized group realities. While dominant portrayals of masculine versus feminine characters pervade numerous television and film examples, this collection examines heterosexual and queer, military and civilian, as well as Black, Japanese, Indian, White, and Latino masculinities, offering a variance in masculinities and confronting male privilege as represented on screen, appealing to a range of disciplines and a wide scope of readers.

Download or read book Conflict Zone Literatures written by Debamitra Kar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-12 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the metanarratives promoted by the state that determine the ideological framework and how these respond under extraneous circumstances like conflicts. The volume shows how individuals in such geo-politically aggrieved zones re-organise, re-structure and re-interpret their memory and identity and negotiate with violence in the literary space. Focusing on Kashmir and Northern Ireland in the decades of 1980s and 1990s, and post 9/11 America, the author maps the changing contours of the state and its powers in the late capitalist phase. It investigates complex themes such as the changing nature of governance and warfare, citizenship and resistance, inclusivity and xenophobia, and statecraft as a linguistic discourse in the post-global scenario. Interdisciplinary in approach, the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and aesthetics, peace and conflict studies, politics and international relations.

Download or read book Sexual Rhetorics written by Jonathan Alexander and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sexual rhetoric is the self-conscious and critical engagement with discourses of sexuality that exposes both their naturalization and their queering, their torquing to create different or counter-discourses, giving voice and agency to multiple and complex sexual experiences. This volume explores the intersection of rhetoric and sexuality through the varieties of methods available in the fields of rhetoric and writing studies, including case studies, theoretical questioning, ethnographies, or close (and distant) readings of "texts" that help us think through the rhetorical force of sexuality and the sexual force of rhetoric.