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To The Humanities: What Does Communication Studies Give?, Mari Lee Mifsud May 2019

To The Humanities: What Does Communication Studies Give?, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This special issue of Review of Communication presents new offerings of the study of communication, forging present and future humanities. This Introduction engages the six essays in this special issue—which extend and intersect across categories of the humanistic study of communication: communication philosophy and ethics, rhetorical theory, history, pedagogy, criticism, and digital humanities—to explore their contributions in defense of the humanities. Taken together, these essays explore the study of communication as (1) a resource for inquiring and exchanging with concepts, practices, and embodiments of difference, the other, and the posthuman; (2) a means of examining the ontological, epistemological, technological, existential, …


The Digital Public Humanities: Giving New Arguments And New Ways To Argue, Jordana Cox, Lauren Tilton May 2019

The Digital Public Humanities: Giving New Arguments And New Ways To Argue, Jordana Cox, Lauren Tilton

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In response to the latest “crisis” in the humanities, advocates have marched, rallied, fundraised, and—especially—argued. This essay contends that communication scholars can support the growing “case for the humanities” by analyzing argumentative strategies, and more specifically, by offering ethical argumentative strategies that avoid replicating structures of domination. In particular, we look to Mari Lee Mifsud's theorization of rhetoric as gift, which follows Henry W. Johnstone in conceptualizing argument as something other than winning over an adversary. We place Mifsud's theorization of the gift in conversation with the methods of the digital public humanities (DPH), which acknowledge and offer abundant resources …


The Sight And Site Of North Korea: Citizen Cartography's Rhetoric Of Resolution In The Satellite Imagery Of Labor Camps, Timothy Barney Jan 2019

The Sight And Site Of North Korea: Citizen Cartography's Rhetoric Of Resolution In The Satellite Imagery Of Labor Camps, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In recent years, satellite mapping of North Korea, especially of its labor camps, has become important forms of evidence of human rights violations, used by transnational advocacy groups to lobby to Western governments for change. A phenomenon of “citizen cartography” has emerged where non-expert humanitarian actors use commercially available software like Google Earth to “infiltrate” the borders of North Korea. This essay interrogates the politics of seeing that takes place in creating the site and sight of North Korea by citizen cartographers, and historicizes these processes of seeing in Cold War and post-Cold War visual culture. Specifically, citizen cartography of …


To The Humanities: What Does Communication Studies Give?, Mari Lee Mifsud Jan 2019

To The Humanities: What Does Communication Studies Give?, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This special issue of Review of Communication presents new offerings of the study of communication, forging present and future humanities. This Introduction engages the six essays in this special issue—which extend and intersect across categories of the humanistic study of communication: communication philosophy and ethics, rhetorical theory, history, pedagogy, criticism, and digital humanities—to explore their contributions in defense of the humanities. Taken together, these essays explore the study of communication as 1) a resource for inquiring and exchanging with concepts, practices, and embodiments of difference, the other, and the posthuman; 2) a means of examining the ontological, epistemological, technological, existential, …


On Network, Mari Lee Mifsud Jan 2018

On Network, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

From Homeric to Hellenistic cultures, we are given a robust vocabulary of networking. We have terms for "nets;' for "work;' and for "network:' Each term gives rise to yet another nuance of the role network plays in being human. In this section on lexical network, I present these terms in a catalog form as an homage to archaic Homeric rhetoric. Homer's catalogs are plentiful in the epics, his catalog of ships being particularly well known. Homeric catalogs call attention to their items. Catalogs circulate well and are an aid to remembering the past, as ever-present. The catalog of "network" I …


Criticism On The Map, Timothy Barney Jun 2016

Criticism On The Map, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

On the evening of November 9, 1989, thousands stormed the entry points of the wall marking the historic split between West Berlin and East Berlin, the archetypal symbol of the bipolar Cold War. Meanwhile, President George H.W. Bush sat with Secretary of State James Baker, fielding questions from reporters in the Oval Office. On his desk, a binder of briefing information was opened to a standard State Department map of Cold War Germany. Throughout the hastily arranged press conference, the president often gestured toward the map, even tapping on it to emphasize his points about a "whole and free Europe" …


A More Perfect European Union?: The Transnational Networks Of The European Union’S Embassy Open House In Washington, D.C., Timothy Barney Nov 2015

A More Perfect European Union?: The Transnational Networks Of The European Union’S Embassy Open House In Washington, D.C., Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Annually, the Delegation of the European Union (EU) in Washington, D.C., holds an embassy open house day for its 27 member nations to celebrate European culture and educate tourists on the functions of EU politics and international relations. Amidst an ongoing debt crisis and a continuing exploration of its identity as a supranational entity, “Embassy Day” affords an opportunity to see the EU as a spatial network uneasily caught in the tensions between the often nostalgic nationalism of its constituent countries and the future-oriented technocratic transnationalism of its composite alliance. By analyzing the cultural artifacts of Embassy Day from its …


The Peters Projection And The Latitude And Longitude Of Recolonization, Timothy Barney Apr 2014

The Peters Projection And The Latitude And Longitude Of Recolonization, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In 1973, German historian Arno Peters unveiled the “Peters projection,” a map that challenged the Eurocentric Mercator style by redrawing the so-called “Third World” to appear more prominent on the global landscape. The projection sparked intense debate among cartographers about the overt use of ideology in mapping, while simultaneously championed by international groups (from the UN to church organizations) as a corrective against the marginalization of developing nations. This essay addresses how the Peters map became a rhetorical emblem for an internationalist identity within the contentious spatial conceptions constraining the Cold War. Ultimately, the Peters projection, despite its radicalism, constituted …


Diagnosing The Third World: The “Map Doctor” And The Spatialized Discourses Of Disease And Development In The Cold War, Timothy Barney Jan 2014

Diagnosing The Third World: The “Map Doctor” And The Spatialized Discourses Of Disease And Development In The Cold War, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In the early 1950s, the American Geographical Society, in collaboration with the United States Armed Forces and international pharmaceutical corporations, instituted a Medical Geography program whose main initiative was the Atlas of Disease, a map series that documented the global spread of various afflictions such as polio, malaria, even starvation. The Atlas of Disease, through the stewardship of its director, Jacques May, a French-American physician trained in colonial Hanoi, evidenced the ways in which cartography was rhetorically appropriated in the Cold War as a powerful visual discourse of development and modernization, wherein both the data content of the maps and …


Spirits Of The Cold War: Contesting Worldviews In The Classical Age Of American Security Strategy. By Ned O’Gorman, Timothy Barney Jan 2013

Spirits Of The Cold War: Contesting Worldviews In The Classical Age Of American Security Strategy. By Ned O’Gorman, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In February 1952, Congressman O. K. Armstrong of Missouri was invited to give a keynote speech at a convention called the Conference on Psychological Strategy in the Cold War, where he declared a maxim that, by that time, likely did not raise many eyebrows: “Our primary weapons will not be guns, but ideas . . . and truth itself.” Rep. Armstrong spoke from experience—a few months before, he had made national headlines at a peace treaty signing in San Francisco by blindsiding Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko with a map locating every secret Gulag prison camp. Calling the Soviet …


Review Of Digital Detroit: Rhetoric And Space In The Age Of The Network, Timothy Barney Jan 2013

Review Of Digital Detroit: Rhetoric And Space In The Age Of The Network, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In 1971, rogue Wayne State geographer William Bunge (placed on a federal list of dangerous intellectuals) published Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution, a radical polemic about how everyday citizens of a Detroit ghetto could challenge oppression and become geographers of their own neighborhoods. Forty years later, Jeff Rice (formerly a Wayne State professor himself) revisits Detroit geography, but this time largely from his laptop (and without, I hope, the same kind of federal harassment). For while Bunge’s Fitzgerald and Jeff Rice’s Digital Detroit share similar terrain, as well as a love for the city in all its contradictions, …


Richard Edes Harrison And The Cartographic Perspective Of Modern Internationalism, Timothy Barney Jan 2012

Richard Edes Harrison And The Cartographic Perspective Of Modern Internationalism, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Air-age globalism was a discursive phenomenon throughout the development of World War II that accounted for the rapid “shrinking” of the world through air technologies and the internationalization of American interests. Cartography became air-age globalism’s primary popular expression, and journalistic cartographers such as Richard Edes Harrison at Fortune magazine introduced new mapping projections and perspectives in response to these global changes. This essay argues that Harrison’s mapping innovations mediate a geopolitical shift in America toward a modern, image-based internationalism. Through recastings of “vision” and “strategy,” Harrison’s work offers an opportunity to assess the rhetorical tensions between idealism and realism in …


Jane Addams: Spirit In Action By Louise W. Knight, Mari Boor Tonn Jan 2011

Jane Addams: Spirit In Action By Louise W. Knight, Mari Boor Tonn

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

The common temptation to perceive greatness as imprinted at birth, however, is skillfully disabused in Louise Knight’s meticulous, insightful,and often poignant biography, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action, which traces the complicated odyssey of a well-heeled idealist—initially conflicted by her material privilege, disappointed by gender-codes confining her ambitions, and haunted by familial ghosts and duties—into the pantheon of U.S. political idols. Of particular interest to rhetorical scholars, Knight weaves into Addams’s arresting tale her early baptism into public speaking, writings that shaped her expression in public forums, rhetorical strategies she employed, and platform failures as well as successes. A prolific speaker, …


“Weekend Update” And The Tradition Of New Journalism, Paul Achter Jan 2009

“Weekend Update” And The Tradition Of New Journalism, Paul Achter

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

“Weekend Update,” like much of SNL, saw itself as a show talking back to the media, as “television’s antidote to television, to all the bad things–corrupt, artificial, plastic, facile–that TV entertainment had become.”3 The show sought this influence in a period of heavily publicized official corruption: it’s not a coincidence that the segment, which Chevy Chase hosted on SNL’s first show, debuted on the heels of Nixon’s resignation over Watergate and Johnson’s lies about Vietnam. These abuses of power led not only to widespread disappointment with Washington politics and politicians, but to a kind of skepticism about journalism and …


The Slave, The Fetus, The Body: Articulating Biopower And The Pregnant Woman, Kevin Kuswa, Paul Achter, Elizabeth Lauzon Jan 2008

The Slave, The Fetus, The Body: Articulating Biopower And The Pregnant Woman, Kevin Kuswa, Paul Achter, Elizabeth Lauzon

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Many slaveholders attempted to justify the institution of slavery in the United States by claiming that the practice of slavery was actually in the interests of the slaves themselves. Not only are these arguments invalid because they justify inhumane treatment and the imprisonment of innocent human beings, they also contain a dangerous paternalism (a “speaking for”) that has not vacated the social sphere. Indeed, this same logic—the notion that bodies can be regulated and controlled for their own protection—is presently being used to speak for the fetus in order to justify fetal rights. Borrowing from Berlant (1997), these fetal rights …


Radical Labor In A Feminine Voice: The Rhetoric Of Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones And Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mari Boor Tonn Jan 2008

Radical Labor In A Feminine Voice: The Rhetoric Of Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones And Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mari Boor Tonn

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Two women in particular, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, earned stature as labor movement legends. Jones persists as an icon for contemporary champions of progressive causes. Separated in age by nearly six decades, both gained reputations for their “leather-lunged” and militant oratory, their disarming fearlessness, and their uncanny talent for captivating the minds and hearts of audiences regardless of sex or ethnicity. Some observers have linked the pair through what Marx termed “the feminine ferment” of the movement. “The fiery example of Mother Jones had one conspicuous follower,” note Lloyd Morris, “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.”


Mccarthy Hearings, Paul Achter Jan 2007

Mccarthy Hearings, Paul Achter

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

What have become known as the “McCarthy hearings” refer to 36 days of televised investigative hearings led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954. After first calling hearings to investigate possible espionage at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the junior senator turned his communist-chasing committee’s attention to an altogether different matter, the question of whether the Army had promoted a dentist who had refused to answer questions for the Loyalty and Security Board. The hearings reached their climax when McCarthy suggested that the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch, had employed a man who at one time …


A Certain Comfort: Betty Ford As First Lady, Nichola D. Gutgold, Linda B. Hobgood Jan 2004

A Certain Comfort: Betty Ford As First Lady, Nichola D. Gutgold, Linda B. Hobgood

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Her White House stay was short-lived, but the lessons of Betty Ford's experience remain vividly instructive. By accident of a national political crisis which catapulted her to the rank of the first lady in 1974, Mrs. Ford's tenure lasted a brief two years until her husband, Gerald R. Ford lost his bid for reelection. During that time, she developed a relationship of candor with the press and public. She spoke her mind on social and moral issues that were at the forefront of public debate. The positions she took were not always popular with the majority of Americans, many of …


Wisdom To Know The Difference: The Rhetoric Of Pat Nixon, Linda B. Hobgood Jan 2004

Wisdom To Know The Difference: The Rhetoric Of Pat Nixon, Linda B. Hobgood

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Henriette Wyeth Hurd painted the official portrait of Patricia Nixon. The woman depicted is serene, almost sad. She appears fragile, yet brave. Above all, the face that gazes from the canvas understands--the wisdom in her eyes reflects that sense of tribulation bequeathed by experience. Both the painting and the subject reflect "calm at the center." It is an insightful portrayal of the American first lady known to the world as "Pat."


Miss America Contesters And Contestants: Discourse About Social “Also-Rans”, Mari Boor Tonn Jan 2003

Miss America Contesters And Contestants: Discourse About Social “Also-Rans”, Mari Boor Tonn

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Although feminism, of course, emerged out of the actual personal experiences of discrimination and other forms of subordination, ameliorating such obstacles required and requires a collective politics, most identifiable in liberal feminism’s focus on equality of opportunity in the public domain, such as Title IX or the push for the ERA I described. Whatever Debra Barnes’s individual achievements, those obviously neither did have nor could have had bearing on the eventual opportunity of young women to participate in intercollegiate athletics, as I did, or to make the legal reproductive decisions occasioned by Roe v.Wade. As Dow argues, the mobility or …


Intrapersonal Perceptions And Epistemic Rhetoric: Playing Ball With The Neglected Umpire, Scott D. Johnson, Russell F. Proctor Ii Jan 1995

Intrapersonal Perceptions And Epistemic Rhetoric: Playing Ball With The Neglected Umpire, Scott D. Johnson, Russell F. Proctor Ii

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Positions in the ongoing debate regarding rhetorical epistemology can be typified by a continuum with objectivists at one end and intersubjectivists at the other. This essay suggests that a middle position may better serve the communication discipline. The authors provide an overview of the debate, then present three common uses of the term “reality” (objective reality, social reality, and intrapersonal reality) as guides for understanding the positions of the debaters. New labels for these uses of “reality,” combined with a discussion of the vital role of intrapersonal processes in epistemology, provide a position that emphasizes the significance of both symbols …


Feature Films For Communication Courses: A Bibliography, Russell F. Proctor Ii, Scott D. Johnson Jan 1994

Feature Films For Communication Courses: A Bibliography, Russell F. Proctor Ii, Scott D. Johnson

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Once upon a time, the only way to answer the question was informally; that is, by offering an opinion or directing the inquirer to someone who had experience in the area. Recently, however, the process has been formalized and expanded through various written materials. Rather than keeping lists of films in our heads, we can now refer people to articles, textbooks, and documents. The new trick is remembering the references for these works in circulation. This article is an attempt to remedy that problem. We offer here a list of resources for those who want ideas for using feature films …