A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY23 start with C start with C
To attract readers, journalists have long trafficked in the causes of trauma--crime, violence, warfare--as well as psychological profiling of deviance and aberrational personalities. Novelists, in turn, have explored these same subjects in developing their characters and by borrowing from their own traumatic life stories to shape the themes and psychological terrain of their fiction. In this book, Doug Underwood offers a conceptual and historical framework for comprehending the impact of trauma and violence in the careers and the writings of important journalist-literary figures in the United States and British Isles from the early 1700s to today.
Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work.
The most extensive scholarly examination of the role that trauma has played in the shaping of our journalistic and literary heritage, Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss discusses more than a hundred writers whose works have won them fame, even at the price of their health, their families, and their lives.
James Wynn’s timely investigation highlights scientific studies grounded in publicly gathered data and probes the rhetoric these studies employ. Many of these endeavors, such as the widely used SETI@home project, simply draw on the processing power of participants’ home computers; others, like the protein-folding game FoldIt, ask users to take a more active role in solving scientific problems. In Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement, Wynn analyzes the discourse that enables these scientific ventures, as well as the difficulties that arise in communication between scientists and lay people and the potential for misuse of publicly gathered data.
Wynn puzzles out the intricacies of these exciting new research developments by focusing on various case studies. He explores the Safecast project, which originated from crowd-sourced mapping for Fukushima radiation dispersal, arguing that evolving technologies enable public volunteers to make concrete, sound, science-based arguments. Additionally, he considers the potential use of citizen science as a method of increasing the public’s identification with the scientific community, and contemplates how more collaborative rhetoric might deepen these opportunities for interaction and alignment. Furthermore, he examines ways in which the lived experience of volunteers may be integrated with expert scientific knowledge, and also how this same personal involvement can be used to further policy agendas.
Precious few texts explore the intersection of rhetoric, science, and the Internet. Citizen Science in the Digital Age fills this gap, offering a clear, intelligent overview of the topic intended for rhetoric and communication scholars as well as practitioners and administrators in a number of science-based disciplines. With the expanded availability of once inaccessible technologies and computing power to laypeople, the practice of citizen science will only continue to grow. This study offers insight into how—given prudent application and the clear articulation of common goals—citizen science might strengthen the relationships between scientists and laypeople.
As a borderland city with generations of slow violence and extreme weather events like flash flooding and intense heat waves, San Antonio, Texas, speaks directly to global issues in climate politics. In Climate Politics on the Border: Environmental Justice Rhetorics, Kenneth Walker takes a place-based approach to his study of San Antonio to explore how extreme weather events and responses to them shape local places, publics, and politics, with an eye toward a future characterized by severe climate breakdown.
Attending to the local histories and micropolitics of San Antonio, Walker examines the effects of extreme weather events as they are experienced across radically inequitable social categories. These local histories serve as a guide, not just for future climates, which stand to be unprecedented, but for the necessary public and political responses to them. He shows how extreme weather events in the past have reinforced colonial social orders that weaken democratic goals of pluralism and equity. Conversely, he also shows how diverse coalitions have resisted and responded to these forces.
Walker examines the ethics of Latinx and Anglo relations within state-sponsored productions of racial inequity and environmental degradation, the coalitional capacities of environmental activists and second-wave Chicana/o organizations to protect clean water and transform local political representation, the obligations of place-keeping in Latinx urban design and ecological restoration, and the need to foster pluriversal worlds in city-level climate action and adaptation plans. Collectively these chapters rethink tropes of adaptation, resilience, and coalition as rhetorical and ecological capacities for public and political responses to extractivism.
Based on years of archival work and fieldwork, Climate Politics on the Border demonstrates vividly why ecological and anticolonial approaches to rhetoric are essential for grappling with climate politics. Overall, this is a timely study of how environmental degradation, pollution, and climate change are disputed and negotiated at the local political level in a borderland community.
The chapters in this volume demonstrate that teaching effective communication skills to all students in ways that recognize the needs of multiple language users requires a shift in perspective that approaches multilingualism as an opportunity that is enhanced by the internationalization of higher education because it makes transparent the problems of current structures and disciplinary approaches in accessing those opportunities. A goal of this collection is to address the economic, structural, disciplinary, and pedagogical challenges of making this type of shift in bold and compassionate ways.
Chapters are organized into these four parts--Program-Level Challenges and Opportunities, Opportunities for Enhancing Teacher Training, Multilingualism and the Revision of First-Year Writing, and Integrating Writing Center Insights—and reflect the perspectives of a variety of university language settings. The contributions feature collaborative models and illustrate the need to rethink structures, pedagogies, assessment/evaluation processes, and teacher training for graduate and undergraduate students who will teach writing and other forms of communication.
Communicating Nature explores and explains the multiple levels of everyday communication that come together to form our perceptions of the natural world. Author Julia Corbett considers all levels of communication, from communication at the individual level, to environmental messages transmitted by popular culture, to communication generated by social institutions including political and regulatory agencies, business and corporations, media outlets, and educational organizations.
The book offers a fresh and engaging introductory look at a topic of broad interest, and is an important work for students of the environment, activists and environmental professionals interested in understanding the cultural context of human-nature interactions.
Communicating the Other across Cultures uses examples from the United States, Western Europe, and Russia to demonstrate historical patterns of Othering people, as well as how marginalized people fight back against dominant powers that seek to silence or erase them. Deeply ingrained in our society, cultural Othering affects information in history books, children’s education, and the values upheld in our society. By taking a closer look at historical and modern instances of Othering, Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager shows examples of how different societies created ideas of social and cultural superiority or inferiority, and how deeply they are ingrained in our current society. In everyday life—the cash in your pocket, the movies shown at your local theater, museum exhibits, or politician's speeches—certain cultural ideologies are consistently upheld, while others are silenced. By exposing the communicative patterns of those in power, Khrebtan-Hörhager then suggests alternative ways of thinking, communicating, and eventually being, that offer transformative solutions for global problems.
Martin Buber’s work suggests that real life begins with two individuals engaged in dialogue, not just taking care of one’s own needs as described in social Darwinism.
Arnett argues that the end of the age of abundance demands that we give up the communicative strategies of the past and seek to work together in the midst of limited resources and an uncertain future. Today’s situation calls for an unwavering commitment to Buber’s “narrow ridge” concern for both self and community.
Arnett illustrates the narrow ridge definition of interpersonal communication with rich examples. His vignettes demonstrate effective and ineffective approaches to human community. An effective approach, he makes clear, incorporates not only openness to others’ points of view but also a willingness to be persuaded.
Examination of seven famous trials, each concluding with an evaluation of the trial by a lawyer, judge, law professor, or communication scholar.
The Washington Post coverage of the John Hinckley case preceding the trial demonstrates the effects media may have on a trial. The Haymarket riot trial serves as an example of opening statements in a storytelling form.
By analyzing the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, Schuetz and Snedaker explain direct examination according to its purpose, legal rules, ordering of witnesses, verbal and nonverbal techniques of interrogation, and tactics for introducing evidence.
The cross-examination in the Sacco-Vanzetti case shows how advocates enhance or decrease their persuasiveness by adopting communication maneuvers. Closing arguments in the Rosenberg trial took the form of a refutative story with a dual persuasive and instructional content.
The Supreme Court appeal in the Sam Sheppard case demonstrates the procedures, form, content, and style of arguments of appellate briefs. The Chicago Eight trial is an example of trial as theatre.
Starting with the premise that we live in communication (rather than standing outside communication and using it for secondary purposes), Pearce claims that people who live in various cultures and historical epochs not only communicate differently but experience different ways of being human because they communicate differently.
This century, he notes, ushered in the "communication revolution," the discovery that communication is far more important and central to the human condition than ever before realized. Essential to the communication revolution is the recognition that multiple forms of discourse exist in contemporary human society. Further, these forms of discourse are not benign; they comprise alternative ways of being human.
Thus communication theory must encompass all that it "means to live a life, the shape of social institutions and cultural traditions, the pragmatics of social action, and the poetics of social order."
Tenacious hope, the heart of a just and free society
During the Enlightenment, Scottish intellectuals and administrators met the demands of profit and progress while shepherding concerns for self and other, individual and community, and family and work. Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope captures the “unity of contraries,” offering the Scottish Enlightenment as an exemplar of tenacious hope countering the excesses of individualism. Ronald C. Arnett reveals two stories: the struggle between optimism and tenacious hope, and optimism’s ultimate triumph in the exclusion of difference and the reification of progress as an ultimate good.
In chapters that detail the legacies of Lord Provost George Drummond, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid, George Campbell, Adam Ferguson, and Sir Walter Scott, Arnett highlights the problematic nature of optimism and the ethical agency of tenacious hope. Arnett illustrates the creative union of education and administration, the ability to accept doubt within systems of knowledge and imagination, and an abiding connection to local soil. As principles of progress, free will, and capitalism swept Europe, proponents of optimism envisioned a world of consumerism and absolutes. In contrast, practitioners of tenacious hope embraced uncertainty and compassion as pragmatic necessities.
This work continues Arnett’s scholarship, articulating the vital importance of communication ethics. Those seeking to discern and support a temporal sense of the good in this historical moment will find in this timely work the means to pursue, hold, and nourish tenacious hope. This insightful theorization of the Scottish Enlightenment distills the substance of a just and free society for meeting dangerous and uncertain times.
Renowned in the disciplines of political theory and philosophy, Hannah Arendt’s searing critiques of modernity continue to resonate in other fields of thought decades after she wrote them. In Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warning and Hope, author Ronald C. Arnett offers a groundbreaking examination of fifteen of Arendt’s major scholarly works, considering the German writer’s contributions to the areas of rhetoric and communication ethics for the first time.
Arnett focuses on Arendt’s use of the phrase “dark times” to describe the mistakes of modernity, defined by Arendt as the post-Enlightenment social conditions, discourses, and processes ruled by principles of efficiency, progress, and individual autonomy. These principles, Arendt argues, have led humanity down a path of folly, banality, and hubris. Throughout his interpretive evaluation, Arnett illuminates the implications of Arendt’s persistent metaphor of “dark times” and engages the question, How might communication ethics counter the tenets of dark times and their consequences? A compelling study of Hannah Arendt’s most noteworthy works and their connections to the fields of rhetoric and communication ethics, Communication Ethics in Dark Times provides an illuminating introduction for students and scholars of communication ethics and rhetoric, and a tool with which experts may discover new insights, connections, and applications to these fields.
Top Book Award for Philosophy of Communication Ethics by Communication Ethics Division of the National Communication Association, 2013
Gerald M. Phillips draws on his twenty-five-year, five-thousand-client experience with the Pennsylvania State University Reticence Program to present a new theory of modification of “inept” communication behavior.
That experience has convinced Phillips that communication is arbitrary and rulebound rather than a process of inspiration. He demonstrates that communication problems can be described as errors that can be detected and classified in order to fit a remediation pattern. Regardless of the source of error, the remedy is to train the individual to avoid or eliminate errors—thus, orderly procedure will result in competent performance.
Inept communicators must be made aware of the obligations and constraints imposed by deep structures that require us to achieve a degree of formal order in our language, without which our discourse becomes incomprehensible.
Brenton D. Faber’s spirited account of an academic consultant’s journey through banks, ghost towns, cemeteries, schools, and political campaigns explores the tenuous relationships between cultural narratives and organizational change.
Blending Faber’s firsthand experiences in the study and implementation of change with theoretical discussions of identity, agency, structure, and resistance within contexts of change, this innovative bookis among the first such communications studies to profile a scholar who is also a full participant in the projects. Drawing on theories of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu, Faber notes that change takes place in the realm of narrative, in the stories people tell.
Faber argues that an organization’s identity is created through internal stories. When the organization’s internal stories are consistent with its external stories, the organization’s identity is consistent and productive. When internal stories contradict the external stories, however, the organization’s identity becomes discordant. Change is the process of realigning an organization’s discordant narratives.
Faber discusses the case studies of a change management plan he wrote for a city-owned cemetery, a cultural change project he created for a downtown trade school, and a political campaign he assisted that focused on creating social change. He also includes detailed reflections on practical ways academics can become more involved in their communities as agents of progressive social change. Featuring six illustrations, Faber’s unique study demonstrates in both style and substance how stories work as agents of change.
This ecology of ethics seeks to balance the needs of the individual and those of the various levels of community.
As James A. Mackin, Jr., shows, both modernism and postmodernism have undermined the traditional foundations for ethics. Using an ecological model, however, Community over Chaos develops a common ground for ethical judgments about communication, thus countering the current theoretical climate of pessimistic cynicism toward the very possibility of ethics.
This theoretical pessimism is not merely an academic problem. The general public is becoming more and more disillusioned about the possibility of ethical communication. We are unable to teach principles of communicative ethics in our primary and secondary schools because we cannot agree on a common ground for those principles. Instead, we teach a narrow form of competence that is concerned primarily with short-term, individual success. Because our communities are built on our communicative practices, our inability to justify communicative ethics must ultimately lead to the disintegration of our communities.
Mackin's ecological model assumes that each of us is a communicative system operating within larger communicative systems that together form our communicative ecosystem. Virtues of the ecological approach are practical wisdom, based in fuzzy logic, and communicative openness and honesty.
Mackin recognizes the importance of both chaos and community in our communicative ecosystems. Chaos, as the source of originality and creativity, can contribute to growth and development; community provides the source of regularity and nurture that makes chaos endurable.
Based on extensive archival research conducted at six American universities and using the specific cases of institutional mission, regional accreditation, and federal funding, this study demonstrates that administrators and faculty have introduced, reformed, maintained, threatened, or eliminated composition as part of negotiations related to nondisciplinary institutional exigencies. Viewing composition from this perspective, author Ryan Skinnell raises new questions about why composition exists in the university, how it exists, and how teachers and scholars might productively reconceive first-year composition in light of its institutional functions.
The book considers the rhetorical, political, organizational, institutional, and promotional options conceding composition opened up for institutions of higher education and considers what the first-year course and the discipline might look like with composition’s transience reimagined not as a barrier but as a consummate institutional value.
Rice weaves together theories of writing, narrative, new media, and rhetoric with a personal story of his passion for craft beer. He identifies six key elements of social media rhetoric—anecdotes, repetition, aggregation, delivery, sharing, and imagery—and examines how each helps to transform small, personal experiences with craft into a more widespread movement. When shared via social media, craft anecdotes—such as the first time one had a beer—interrupt and repeat one another, building a sense of familiarity and identity among otherwise unconnected people. Aggregation, the practice of joining unlike items into one space, builds on this network identity, establishing a connection to particular brands or locations, both real and virtual. The public releases of craft beers are used to explore the concept of craft delivery, which involves multiple actors across multiple spaces and results in multiple meanings. Finally, Rice highlights how personal sharing operates within the community of craft beer enthusiasts, who share online images of acquiring, trading for, and consuming a wide variety of beers. These shared stories and images, while personal for each individual, reflect the dependence of craft on systems of involvement. Throughout, Rice relates and reflects on his own experience as a craft beer enthusiast and his participation via social media in these systems.
Both an objective scholarly study and an engaging personal narrative about craft beer, Craft Obsession provides valuable insights into digital writing, storytelling, and social media.
Recent pieces by NPR, the BBC, and Forbes have called attention to the power of voice—positing that “your voice is the secret to getting hired” and that “voice can accelerate or hold back a career.” While it has become clearer that such things as pitch and intonation can be tied to assumptions about one’s gender, race/ethnicity, and class, studying voice as a socially constructed artifact carries with it unique challenges. In response, Culturally Speaking: The Rhetoric of Voice and Identity in a Mediated Culture presents an innovative approach to studying the spoken voice in media, showing how racial and gendered oppression bubble beneath the surface of American culture’s most recognized speaking voices, spreading invisible messages about which kinds of vocal identities are privileged and which kinds should be silenced.
Through her analysis of prominent voices in American culture—including Morgan Freeman, Tina Fey, Barack Obama, Adele, Dave Chappelle, Richard Pryor, and George Lopez—Amanda Nell Edgar argues that voices carry a residue of the particular cultural environments in which they are formed, and that these environments can be traced and analyzed to add a sonic dimension to our understanding of race and gender as rhetorically situated identities—pushing back against the often-unnoticed systems of sound-based discrimination.
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