Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

Abstinence Cinema: Virginity And The Rhetoric Of Sexual Purity In Contemporary Film, Casey R. Kelly

Casey R. Kelly

Lifestyle Drugs And The Neoliberal Family, Kristin Swenson

Kristin Swenson

Since 1997, advertisements for lifestyle drugs have saturated the U.S. airwaves, print media, and the Internet. Viewers are asked to see their children’s difficulty in school as attention deficit disorder, their worry as anxiety, and their flagging sex life as dysfunction. And for each disorder, there is a corresponding pharmaceutical solution. Through the lens of these advertisements, Lifestyle Drugs and the Neoliberal Family unpacks our contemporary obsession with obtaining easy solutions for difficult problems. The ads’ discourse illuminates the experience of living within a society increasingly affected by the policies of neoliberalism, one that requires us to invest and manage …

Habermas In The African E-Village: Deliberative Practices Of Diasporan Nigerians On The Internet, Farooq A. Kperogi

Farooq A. Kperogi

This chapter examines a many-to-many, collaborative, transnational, diasporic sphere of public discourse called the Nigerian Village Square, which over the years has functioned as an arena for the vigorous exchange of ideas among Nigerians both at home and in the diaspora and as a veritable locus for the initiation of online petition drives to change or influence state policies in the homeland. It is the reinvention, in an electronic form, of the deliberative content of the “village square” in the pre-colonial African social formation where “people from all corners [met] at the Village Square after a hard day's work to …