Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

Evidence-Based Design: Documenting A Research Experiment In A School Environment With Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Julie E. Irish

Julie Elaine Irish

Purpose Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder affecting around 1:59 children. Among other characteristics, children with ASD can be unduly sensitive to elements in the built environment, such as noise or light. Despite this knowledge, to date there has been little evidence-based experimental research investigating how the environment affects them. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an experiment in a school environment with children with ASD and document the process as a model that other researchers could apply to similar studies.

Design/methodology/approach The study focused on whether the application of wayfinding aids (colored doors, colored shapes …

Flag-Waving: Visual Arguments, Verbal Reconstruction, And Speaker Intentions, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

Enhancing The Epistemological Project In The Rhetoric Of Science: Information Infrastructure As Tool For Identifying Epistemological Commitments In Scientific And Technical Communities., Nathan Johnson

Nathan R. Johnson

Enhancing the Epistemological Project in the Rhetoric of Science: Information Infrastructure as Tool for Identifying Epistemological Commitments in Scientific and Technical Communities. Article discusses how the STS concept of infrastructural provides a mesolayer approach to understand global issues in science with rhetorical methodology.

The Public Sphere As Site Of Emancipation And Enlightenment: A Discourse Theoretic Critique Of Digital Communication, David Ingram, Asaf Bar-Tura

David Ingram

Habermas claims that an inclusive public sphere is the only deliberative forum for generating public opinion that satisfies the epistemic and normative conditions underlying legitimate decision-making. He adds that digital technologies and other mass media need not undermine – but can extend – rational deliberation when properly instituted. This paper draws from social epistemology and technology studies to demonstrate the epistemic and normative limitations of this extension. We argue that current online communication structures fall short of satisfying the required epistemic and normative conditions. Furthermore, the extent to which Internet-based communications contribute to legitimate democratic opinion and will formation depends …

'Wait — Something’S Missing!': The Status Of Ethics In Basic Public Speaking Texts, Jon A. Hess

Jonathan A. Hess

The basic course is important to the welfare of the speech communication discipline. According to Seiler and McGukin (1989), the basic course is the mainstay of the discipline. Gibson, Hanna, and Leichty (1990) surveyed 423 institutions of higher education nationwide and found that at 92% of the schools’ enrollment in the basic course was increasing or holding steady (this is up from the figure of 88% reported in 1985). In a survey of college graduates, Pearson, Nelson, and Sorenson (1981) found that 93% believed that the basic speech course should be required for all students. Because of its popularity and …

Of Frogs & Rhetoric: The Atrazine Wars, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

In a scientific dispute over the effects of atrazine on amphibians, chemical industry–funded and publically funded scientists present stunningly contrasting constructions of atrazine's environmental concentrations, persistence, and potential to harm. Considerable scientific uncertainties and variable ranges allow authors to construct preferred versions of the story of atrazine. These incommensurate rhetorical constructions, more the result of competing economic and environmental interests than of any paradigmatic misalignments, have prolonged the dispute not only over atrazine's effects but also over whether its sales should be banned.

His Final Homily: Pope John Paul Ii's Death As An Affirmation Of His Life's Message, Joesph M. Valenzano

Joseph M. Valenzano III

Every Sunday morning, a member of the Roman Catholic clergy addresses his flock after a reading from one of the Gospels. These homilies ordinarily last between 10 and 20 minutes and allow the priest an opportunity to interpret the Gospel message from that day's reading, as well as discuss how that message relates to contemporary events and issues. During the final two months of his life, Pope John Paul II provided a longer, more powerful symbolic homily to the world. The message summarized his positions on freedom, suffering, and the dignity of human life.

Owning A Virus: The Rhetoric Of Scientific Discovery Accounts, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

No Abstract Available

"I Knew There Was Something Wrong With That Paper": Scientific Rhetorical Styles And Scientific Misunderstandings, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

This selection unpacks scientific prose and claim substantiation for Nobel Prize winner, Stan Prusiner, in the transmissible spongiform encephlopathies field (i.e., mad cow disease). Applying linguistic strategies such as M. A. K. Halliday's "favorite clause type," the author examines argumentative strategies in dense scientific prose both in bold and cautious rhetorical styles and invented lexical changes in new scientific development.

Visual Rhetoric And The Promotion Of Scientific Ideas: The Strange Case Of The Prion, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

In the field that investigates infectious brain diseases such as mad cow disease, the verbal and visual packaging of scientific visuals associated with identifying the agent, prion, its processes, and structure served the community ritual of establishing belief in a highly unorthodox phenomenon. Visual promotion fed into cultural expectations of single agents and simple processes, even though the actual agency and disease process have proven highly complex and perhaps unknowable.

An Orthodox Heresy: Scientific Rhetoric And The Science Of Prions., Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

A significant theoretical shift in the research community examining a class of terminal, infectious neurological disorders that includes Mad Cow Disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and Kuru was assisted by rhetorical production. The local rhetoric of one laboratory, that of Professor Stanley B. Prusiner, involved first situating an heretical hypothesis within the framework of the orthodox narrative and then audaciously promoting that heresy. Another aspect of rhetorical production in this case involved situating a new language associated with the heretical hypothesis. To promote their new lexicon, the Prusiner team evoked orthodox values of consistency, efficiency, and collective ratification. Eventually, what was once …

Rhetoric And The Aids Virus Hunt, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

By comparing the papers produced by the laboratory teams of Robert Gallo and Jean Luc Montagnier during the AIDS virus hunt, we have an opportunity to discern the fine line between a bold, explicit rhetoric that may convince as well as offend and a bald, reserved rhetoric that may actually conceal important implications. Going too far in either direction may create misunderstandings and ethical dilemmas as will be demonstrated in a textual analysis deepened by an exploration of historical context and interviews with key participants. Since a public health crisis calls upon communication that thwarts misunderstandings, scientists should understand the …

The Language Of Science, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

With more and more scientific language being applied -and misapplied- in our daily lives, this title from the Intertext series explores the use of scientific terms through hot topics from the MMR vaccine to AIDS and biological weapons.

Establishing The Phenomenon: The Rhetoric Of Early Research Reports On Aids, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

In the first three medical reports on AIDS which were published in 1981 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the writers' primary rhetorical agenda was to argue that a new medical discovery had been made. A secondary agenda was to offer etiological explanations for the new problem. To establish the new disease entity as deserving serious attention, the writers built a sense of mystery by confronting established medical knowledge about immunodeficiency and emphasizing the inability of modern medicine to diagnose and treat the problem. When they explained the phenomenon in etiological terms, rather than confronting the disciplinary matrix, the …

Intersectional Rhetorics: A Case Study In The 2013 Supreme Court Decisions On Doma, Proposition 8, And The Voting Rights Act., Michelle Kearl

Michelle Kelsey Kearl

The summer of 2013 saw a troubling social justice whiplash. On June 26th, in two separate decisions the Supreme Court repealed the Defense of Marriage Act and found no standing in the Perry case, also known as the Proposition 8 case, effectively opening the way for gay marriages to resume in California. Just one day before these decisions, a clear victory for mainstream gay rights movements, the same court ruled that the federal government must create a new standard for evaluating how states meet or violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While the court did not gut the Act …

Show Me Your Desire: Critical Discourses Of Legislating Voter Identification, Right To Work, And Sb 1070., Michelle Kearl

Michelle Kelsey Kearl

While popular and political discourses seeking to shore up the mobility of bodies ‘to be’ in public is nothing new, the recent convergence of a host of legislating is worth noting. The rhetoric surrounding voter identification and right to work laws, as well as Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 underscore xenophobic compulsions to reconstitute the appropriate public body. In this manuscript I am specifically interested in the intersection of race and class as they emerge in the political discourses of these cultural and legislative debates. In these three cases several tropes emerge including traditional arguments to preserve the American Dream for …

Towards A Critical Intersectional Rhetoric: Critical Rhetoric Meets Intersectionality, Michelle Kearl

Michelle Kelsey Kearl

The most recent treatments of critical rhetoric have attempted to expand its appropriate methodological focus (Hess, 2011; Hess & Herbig, 2011; Middleton, Senda-Cook, & Endres, 2011). It is within this expansion that I pitch this theoretical interrogation and building of critical rhetoric. While the newest research argues for a variety of in situ, ethnographic, and other considerations of ‘live’ rhetorics, my investments are more directly in the responsibility of critical interpretation of texts. McKerrow (1989) establishes a series of obligations for critical rhetoricians as they analyze rhetorical artifacts; two critiques, eight praxes, and a perpetual criticism is no small endeavor. …

The Politics Media Equation:Exposing Two Faces Of Old Nexus Through Study Of General Elections,Wikileaks And Radia Tapes, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

The important identity of a responsible media is playing an unbiased role in reporting a matter without giving unnecessary hype to attract the attention of the gullible public with the object of making money and money only.After reporting properly the media can educate the public to form their own opinion in the matters of public interest. Throughout the centuries, the world has never existed without information and communication, hence the inexhaustible essence of mass media. The government has the power to either make or reject whatever that will exist within its environment. It also determines how free the mass media …

Corporate Historical Responsibility (Chr): Addressing A Past Of Forced Labor At Volkswagen, Claudia Janssen Danyi

Claudia I. Janssen Danyi, PhD

This article introduces corporate historical responsibility (CHR), a concept that can guide organizations when addressing dark corporate histories. CHR holds that organizations have responsibilities toward victims of past corporate practices and toward present reconciliatory discourse. Volkswagen’s discourse about its history of forced labor during WW II serves as an example of CHR. The rhetorical analysis illustrates that CHR hinges on the recognition of the past as a moral issue and on the organization’s ability to create historical accountability, take responsibility, make public acknowledgements, and remember its past. It further illustrates that CHR creates sustainable policies that can strengthen corporate citizenship …

Recapturing Our Minds, Reclaiming Higher Learning: A Review Of R. P. Keeling’S And R. H. Hersh’S “We’Re Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education”, Brandon Hensley

Brandon O. Hensley

Situating their conversation within a growing weltanschauung that the world is becoming “flat" and intellectual capital is integral to a changing globalized marketplace with emerging superpowers, Keeling and Hersh (2012) lay forth a bold claim in We’re Losing Our Minds: undergraduate education in the U.S. is sapping minds because learning is no longer the primary focus or essence of colleges and universities. “Intoxicated by magazine and college guide rankings, most colleges and universities have lost track of learning as the only educational outcome that really matters” (p. 13). The authors advance that this systemic crisis, though well documented (even before …

Webs Of Faith As A Source Of Reasonable Disagreement, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

Contemporary political theorists and philosophers of epistemology and religion have often drawn attention to the problem of reasonable disagreement. The idea that deliberators may reasonably persist in a disagreement even under ideal deliberative conditions and even over the long term poses a challenge to the common assumption that rationality should lead to consensus. This essay proposes a previously unrecognized source of reasonable disagreement, based on the notion that an individual's beliefs are rationally related to one another in a fabric of sentences or web of beliefs. The essay argues that an individual's beliefs may not form a single, seamless web, …

The Truths Of Chenglish: Logical Imperfection, Natural Language, And Philosophical Disagreement, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

Why is it that philosophy seems unable to obtain the kinds of agreement regularly achieved by mathematics and the natural sciences? The experimental philosophy movement emphasizes conflicting intuitions as a potential source of philosophical disagreement. This essay draws attention to another, complementary source: the logical imperfection of natural languages. Unlike logic as it is formalized in symbolic notation, the rules governing the correct use of terms in a natural language can be indeterminate, underdetermined, and inconsistent. Though most philosophers recognize the logical imperfection of natural languages in the abstract, everyday philosophical discussion is often conducted as though the argumentative moves …

The Conservative Canon And Its Uses, Michael J. Lee

Michael J Lee

In this essay, I aim to locate the scriptural force of American conservatism's secular canon. My basic claim is that the canon created and managed the potential for symbolic fusion and fracture among conservatives. The canon provided the tools to weather the rocky marriage between various conservative sects: traditionalists, libertarians, neoconservatives, and others; the canon afforded resources for each faction to establish their bona fides and to protect their version of authentic conservatism from impostors and apostates. I conclude by analyzing the link between the principles of classical conservatism and canonical politics.

Kuehl 2012 Scj Published Article On The Rhetorical Presidency And Education Reform.Pdf, Rebecca A. Kuehl

Rebecca A. Kuehl

No abstract provided.

Wiki Leaks Revelations In Global Context—The War Between ‘Right To Publish’ And ‘Ethical Code Of Conduct, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. WikiLeaks describes its founders as a mix of Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its director. The site was originally launched as a user-editable wiki, but has progressively moved towards …

A Critical Study Of Organizational Communication And Organizational Communication Theories- A Historical Perspective, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

Organizational Communication is the study that looks at human communication within and outside the organization. Conrad and Poole (1998) break the definition of organizational communication in parts, by first defining communication and then analyses the organization. These researchers define communication as “a process through which people, acting together, create, sustain, and manage meanings through the use of verbal and nonverbal signs and symbols within a particular context” (Conrad and Poole, 1998, p. 5). In the context of this book, Kenyans and their leaders are communicating their views and final decision through the ballot box to elect their third president, during …

Public Accountability And Media : Its Success And Failure In Performing The Role As A Force For Public Accountability, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

Media accountability is a phrase that refers to the general (especially western) belief that mass media has to be accountable in the public’s interest - that is, they are expected to behave in certain ways that contribute to the public good. The concept is not clearly defined, and often collides with commercial interests of media owners; legal issues, such as the constitutional right to the freedom of the press in the U.S.; and governmental concerns about public security and order. Several international organizations, like International Freedom of Expression Exchange, Freedom House, International Press Institute, World Press Freedom Committee and the …

The Penetration Of Social Media In Governance,Political Reforms And Building Public Perception, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques. Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue. While we know that social media can play an important role in publicizing political activities such as protests, do we have evidence that such actions have led to substantive political change? Is it possible to develop a set of indicators to more effectively gauge the impact of new technologies and media on questions of political change? That social media can help coordinate large and discrete activities, such as protests and …

Two Faces Of Media While Covering Human Right Activities In India, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

The situation of human rights in India is a complex one, as a result of the country's large size and tremendous diversity, its status as a developing country and a sovereign, secular, democratic republic, and its history as a former colonial territory. The Constitution of India provides for Fundamental rights, which include freedom of religion. Clauses also provide for Freedom of Speech, as well as separation of executive and judiciary and freedom of movement within the country and abroad. In its report on human rights in India during 2010, Human Rights Watch stated India had "significant human rights problems". They …

Language Discourse- A Critical Analysis Of Michel Focault's Work On Language Discourse With Special Reference To His Masterpiece "The Archeology Of Knowledge", Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication or debate". The following are three more specific definitions: (1) In semantics and discourse analysis: A generalization of the concept of conversation to all modalities and contexts. (2) "The totality of codified linguistic usages attached to a given type of social practice. (E.g.: legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse.)" (3) In the work of Michel Foucault, and social theorists inspired by him: "an entity of sequences of signs in that they are enouncements (enoncés)" (Foucault 1969: 141). An enouncement (often translated as "statement") is not a unity of signs, but an abstract …