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This exceptional volume examines “image events” as a rhetorical tactic utilized by environmental activists. Author Kevin Michael DeLuca analyzes widely televised environmentalist actions in depth to illustrate how the image event fulfills fundamental rhetorical functions in constructing and transforming identities, discourses, communities, cultures, and world views. Image Politics also exhibits how such events create opportunities for a politics that does not rely on centralized leadership or universal metanarratives. The book presents a rhetoric of the visual for our mediated age as it illuminates new political possibilities currently enacted by radical environmental groups. Chapters in...
Transgression as a Mode of Resistance provides the conceptual mapping for scholars, students, and practitioners to participate in the growing debate between hegemony and transgression. Through a broad perspective on philosophy, communication and cultural studies (primarily rhetorical criticism and social movement rhetoric) and history, this book demonstrates that these two modes of resistance are sometimes conflicting, oftentimes inter-related practices. Through alternative social relationships and political performances, transgressive resistors may reinvent daily life.
From Greenpeace protesters confronting whaling ships to Earth First! activists occupying trees to stop logging, radical environmentalists increasingly rely upon attracting mass media coverage to gain visibility and public support. This book examines the use of "image events" as a rhetorical tactic, one that often supplants written or spoken arguments. Widely televised environmentalist actions are analyzed in depth to illustrate how the image event fulfills fundamental rhetorical functions in constructing and transforming identities, discourses, communities, cultures, and world views. Beyond the rhetorical power of image events, DeLuca also shows how they create opportunities for a politics that does not rely on centralized leadership or universal metanarratives. Illuminating the new political possibilities currently being enacted by radical environmental groups, the book lays out a rhetoric of the visual for our mediated age.
Bringing together the expertise of rhetoricians in English and communication as well as media studies scholars, Arguments about Animal Ethics delves into the rhetorical and discursive practices of participants in controversies over the use of nonhuman animals for meat, entertainment, fur, and vivisection. Both sides of the debate are carefully analyzed, as the contributors examine how stakeholders persuade or fail to persuade audiences about the ethics of animal rights or the value of using animals. The essays in this volume cover a wide range of topics, such as the campaigns waged by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (including the sexy vegetarian and nude campaigns), greyhound activists, the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, food manufacturers, and the biomedical research industry, as well as communication across the human-nonhuman animal boundary and the failure of the animal rights movement to protest research into genetically modifying living beings. Arguments about Animal Ethics' insightful analysis of the animal rights movement will appeal to communication scholars, as well as those interested in social change.
This book examines the post-1990s African American novels, namely the "neo-urban novel," and develops a new urban discourse for the twenty-first century on how the city, as a social formation, impacts black characters through everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in a racial context is important in considering diverse forms of the lived reality of black everyday life in the novelistic representations of the white dominant urban order. African American fictional representations of the city have political significance in that the "neo-urban novel" explores the nature of the American society at large. This book explores the need to understand how whiteness works, what it forecloses, and what it occasionally opens up in everyday life in American society.
In Rhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter explores social documentary photography from the nineteenth century to the present in order to illuminate the political dimensions and consequences of photographs taken and selected to highlight social injustice.
Homeless assistance has frequently adhered to the “three hots and a cot” model, which prioritizes immediate material needs but may fail to address the political and social exclusion of people experiencing homelessness. In this study, Loehwing reconsiders typical characterizations of homelessness, citizenship, and democratic community through unconventional approaches to homeless advocacy and assistance. While conventional homeless advocacy rhetoric establishes the urgency of homeless suffering, it also implicitly invites housed publics to understand homelessness as a state of abnormality that destines the individuals suffering it to life outside the civic body. In contrast, Loehwing focu...
Mass media has become an integral part of the human experience. News travels around the world in a split second affecting people in other countries in untold ways. Although being on top of the news may be good, at least for news junkies, mass media also transmits values or the lack thereof, condenses complex events and thoughts to simplified sound bites and often ignores the essence of an event or story. The selective bibliography gathers the books and magazine literature over the previous ten years while providing access through author, title and subject indexes.
Inviting Understanding: A Portrait of Invitational Rhetoric is an authoritative reference work designed to provide a comprehensive overview of the theory of invitational rhetoric, developed twenty-five years ago by Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin. This theory challenges the conventional conception of rhetoric as persuasion and defines rhetoric as an invitation to understanding as a means to create a relationship rooted in equality, immanent value, and self-determination. Rather than celebrating argumentation, division, and winning, invitational rhetoric encourages rhetors to listen across differences, to engage in dialogue, and to try to understand positions different from their own. Organized into the three categories of foundations, extensions, and applications, Inviting Understanding is a compilation of published articles and new essays that explore and expand the theory. The book provides readers with access to a wide range of resources about this revolutionary theory in areas such as community organizing, social justice activism, social media, film, graffiti, institutional and team decision-making, communication and composition pedagogy, and interview protocols.
Comics and childhood have had a richly intertwined history for nearly a century. From Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie to Hergé’s Tintin (Belgium), José Escobar’s Zipi and Zape (Spain), and Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz (Germany), iconic child characters have given both kids and adults not only hours of entertainment but also an important vehicle for exploring children’s lives and the sometimes challenging realities that surround them. Bringing together comic studies and childhood studies, this pioneering collection of essays provides the first wide-ranging account of how children and childhood, as well as the l...